Friday, July 26, 2019
GOOD HISTORICAL REASONING
Keeping up a blog is a lot like
being stuck on a deserted island, writing notes, sticking them in a bottle, and
tossing them out to sea. God knows if they will land somewhere where conscious,
intelligent forms of life dwell. This is especially true if you are devoted to
solving longstanding historical problems in a rational way. In human affairs,
reason is still the most feared quality.
The point I made in last month’s
blogpost is very simple. Good scientific reasoning, which is often applied in
legal cases, requires that we carefully distinguish between facts, or bits of
data, and the conclusions (or accusations or theories) that we draw from those
facts.
Thus, as in the example I gave
from a Judge Judy case in my last
post, when a witness in court testifies that some people were approaching in a
hostile manner, that is not a valid piece of evidence. That is the witness’s
conclusion. Hostility is not observable. What can be observed are the details
that make up the so-called hostile action, but you cannot actually observe
hostility. You can observe someone shaking their fists or empty beer bottles at
you, you can observe (hear) certain words being shouted at you, and more
besides. These are the things that may or may not add up to hostility, but a
judge or a jury will have to determine that. It is not for the witness to say.
The same sort of reasoning
applies to history. We have to separate the facts or data, what is potentially
observable (had we been on the scene) from the conclusions or accusations that
we find in historical documents. The Gospels call Judas a traitor only once, at
Luke 6:16. It is a fact that this is recorded in Luke. But betrayal itself is
not a fact. It is a conclusion that someone drew once upon a time. The question
that has to be asked, for the sake of pure, clear thinking, is: What gave rise
to this conclusion? Or, were any facts recorded to support this? It is a
question that has always been avoided because most scholars have falsely
assumed that betrayal is an observable piece of data.
The truth is rather like the Judge Judy case where the witness
testified about hostility. You cannot observe hostility. The same is true of
betrayal. You cannot see someone betraying. You can only see the facts that
make up a betrayal (sneaking around, whispering in someone’s ear, making deals,
promising to do something for a favor or money, etc.). If these facts are not
clearly presented, that raises the possibility that Judas was an innocent
person falsely accused of being a traitor.
In a court of law, someone
claiming “he is a traitor” or “he betrayed this person” would not be admissible
evidence. The judge would strike it, dismissing it as a conclusion and ordering
the witness to confine him- or herself to what they saw and heard.
So what did anyone see or hear to
justify the conclusion that Judas was a traitor? Luke never says. He just
reports the bold conclusion without any supporting evidence. That means we have
to think about the facts that may or may not lie behind the conclusion of
betrayal. There are roughly three broad possibilities here: 1) there were a
series of facts, actions by Judas and perhaps others, that add up to a
betrayal, or 2) there were a series of actions that were misperceived as
betrayal, or 3) there were no actions to justify the label of betrayal, and so
it was offered as a false accusation. And, of course, what happened in history
could be a combination of (2) and (3).
There are facts concerning Judas
reported in the Gospels, but almost all of it is ambiguous—which means, by the
way, that misperceiving facts that contributed to a wrong conclusion of
betrayal is a distinct possibility. Judas leaving the table is a potentially
observable fact, if we traveled back in time. Returning with soldiers in tow is
another one. But these are highly ambiguous. By a fact, I am not saying they
are true (though I believe they are). I only mean they are observable
phenomena, if they did happen. Traitor is a conclusion later tradition stamped
on this data. Other conclusions are logically possible, when you have ambiguous
data. If Jesus was surrendering to the Romans and sent Judas as his agent to
them so they could arrest him, that would also explain these facts. Or, if
Judas went out to get more food for the seder and he was followed by spies,
that is another possibility. The ultimate question is whether the Gospels
recorded enough facts, not conclusions, that could help us decide among all the
logical possibilities.
Clarity of thinking, which includes
separating facts and conclusions, will reveal just how much ambiguous evidence
is in the Gospels (concerning Jewish leaders as well). And why is all that
ambiguity there? The full story is in my books, with True Jew being the more recent and shorter one.
© 2019 Leon Zitzer
