09.07
I listened to the August 19 episode of Stand to Reason yesterday and Greg had Mark D. Roberts on the show talking about the historical reliability of the gospels. Greg asked him a couple of questions specifically about the so-called 70 AD argument for dating the gospels. I’ve blogged on this before and think it’s a pretty convincing argument. Mark didn’t find it as compelling, although he did say that he thought it was generally a good one. His reason for not finding it compelling is that he is leary of arguments based on “authorial intent”. That is, arguments that depend on a knowledge of why the author either omitted or included a certain peice of information.
I am sympathetic to his reservations, but I think it’s almost impossible not to employ authorial intent into textual criticism at some point. He even did it himself later on in the show. When Greg asks him about who wrote the gospels he gives an argument that goes like this: Mark and Luke were not companions of Jesus so if the actual authors, or the later church, were going to forge names onto them they would surely have chosen names that were more closely associated with Jesus like Peter. This is the same type of authorial intent argument that the 70 AD argument relies on and it can be challenged the same way. What if the authors decided that it would be more convincing to use names not associated with Christ because that would make the deception not look so obvious to later critics? This way of refuting intent arguments is just hard to swallow. It’s a “you knew that I knew that you knew” argument that always ends in an infinite regress.
Overall I thouroughly enjoyed his comments and thought his reasoning was spot on. This inconsistency just jumped out though.
