Fishermen Writing Like Theologians

From the Mailbag:

[Bart Ehrman] argues that the disciples couldn’t have written the books attributed to them because of lack of basic knowledge  (ie. - uneducated fisherman don’t write complex theological treatises in Greek, etc).  If the evangelical response to this is, “Well, of course they could because God inspired them and literally whispered very word in their ears, and they didn’t have to understand what they were writing,” is the conversation basically over?  Have you found any way to continue a discussion at that point?

Well, I’m a little skeptical of that argument, though I agree broadly with Ehrman’s conclusions.  Some pretty fantastic art comes out of some really bad neighborhoods.

And then too the Gospel of Mark (my favorite) is pretty rough in its Greek, but it has a brilliantly simple artistic integrity partly derived from the rabbinic tradition and partly from the bluesy narrative art that a fisherman might well have understood better than Bart Ehrman: it rewrites the Hebrew Bible.  Nice work.  Hardly beyond the scope of a fisherman-poet.

But I am inclined to agree with Ehrman’s larger point, which is that the New Testament is a socially collaborative effort.  That just means it involves a lot of different hands responding to different needs.  Most of the time it doesn’t even pretend to have been written by fishermen.  The epistles of Peter (almost certainly not written by Peter in my view) and James are the big exceptions.  “John” in the epistles is not necessarily the disciple John, brother of James.   The gospel of John makes no pretense to being written by someone called John.

So how to handle that inspiration-makes-a-fisherman-into-a-Shakespeare argument.

Obviously, if people are entrenched on inspiration as a way of simplifying the discussion so they can get to what they really want to talk to, then it’s pointless to bother them with details.  Many people are more interested in pushing a theological agenda that such questions slow down.

That is, they find such questions to be beside the point.  They aren’t merely afraid of them.

I’ve sometimes gotten somewhere by making very explicit (through Socratic questioning) what such a view entails:

“So you’re saying that such a fisherman, inspired by God, who had not read Philo in all likelihood, suddenly wrote as though he had read Philo?”

I think that if the answer (once you strip away the rhetoric) is simply, “Yes,” then the conversation is pretty much closed.

God can do anything, dontcha know.

Yeah.

Okay.

So there really is no point in asking serious questions.  The deck is already stacked against you.

Comments

[Brian Sullivan]

When we first meet them, they are fishermen. Then 3 years with Jesus, Pentecost, building the Church, rabbinic tradition, perhaps reading/meeting St. Paul, Apollos, et al, years spent reflecting on what they had been eye-witnesses to; it adds up to quite an education! If grace builds on nature and their nature was to follow Christ even to the point of martyrdom, maybe we shouldn't be surprised by what is written in the Gospels and epistles.

[Otter]

I 'm sure your right they'd have done some growing up.... but I don't know if that's a very persuasive argument, Brian... Not much in the actual words of Jesus indicate that he got too deeply into Greek philosophy or rhetoric. And his dismissal of the Sadducees tends to make me think he might not have been all that into Hellenistic Judaism.