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Let Ancient People Speak for Themselves

As I've noted before, New Testament scholarship seems to give rise to sweeping statements about "ancient people" and how vastly differently they thought about the matter of truth than do "modern people." The implication is usually that "ancient people" thought nothing of an author's changing boring, literal facts, even in the case of authors of putatively historical works, because the ancients thought that "higher truth" was more important.

In an earlier post I quoted several explicit statements in the New Testament that have as their prima facie meaning that the apostles and the Gospel authors were very concerned about literal truthfulness. These include 1 John 1:1-3, Acts 4:19-20, 2 Peter 1:16, and John 21:24, and John 19:35.

John 19:35 is particularly striking since it refers to something specific that the speaker saw--namely, the piercing of Jesus' side with a spear and the issue of blood and water. The concept of truth in the claim that "he that saw it bare record, and his record is true" is not non-literal, theological truth but specific, empirical fact.

In contrast, those who wish to downplay the importance of literal truth in the Gospels are prone to extremely strong statements like this:

We must not transfer these modern concepts to ancient texts without considering their understandings of truth and myth, lies and fiction. To modern minds, 'myth' means something untrue, a 'fairy-story'; in the ancient world, myth was the medium whereby profound truth, more truly true than mere facts could ever be, was communicated. The opposite of truth is not fiction, but lies and deception; yet even history can be used to deceive, while stories can bring truth. This issue of truth and fiction in the ancient world is too complex to cover in detail here. However, the most important point to remember is that the ancients were more interested in the moral worth and philosophical value of statements than their logical status, in truth more than facts....Unfortunately, the debate between so-called 'conservatives' and 'liberals' about authenticity is often conducted in twenty-first-century terms. As one student asked me, 'Why does John keep fabricating material about Jesus despite his expressed concern for the "truth"?' However, the negative connotation of 'fabrication' is modern. Richard Burridge, Four Gospels, One Jesus? A Symbolic Reading, pp. 169-170

Michael Licona, who has been much influenced by Richard Burridge on this subject, says this about John:


John often chose to sacrifice accuracy on the ground level of precise reporting, preferring to provide his readers with an accurate, higher-level view of the person and mission of Jesus. Why Are There Differences in the Gospels, p. 115

Licona goes so far as to imply that the prima facie assumption that a Gospel author was not making up an entire incident or series of incidents, such as the Doubting Thomas sequence in the Gospel of John, betrays a "nineteenth century" concept of truthfulness.

I hypothesized that John invented the Doubting Thomas episode as one possibility to account for the differences between the versions of the story offered by Luke and John. However, I go on to give a reason why the solution that Luke conflated two appearances is to be preferred. But Lydia is angered that I would even consider the former option. For her, John could not have done this. Why not? Apparently, because God would not have allowed it in the process of divine inspiration. But how would she know that apart from hearing it from God Himself? And why require the Gospels to have been written using literary conventions for historical reporting that were not generally accepted until the nineteenth century while eschewing attempts to understand them within the cultural and literary context of their own day?

I quote the context here to make it clear that Licona is apparently attributing a "nineteenth century" approach to history to me on the grounds that I think it overwhelmingly improbable that John invented the entire Doubting Thomas sequence.

I have already dealt elsewhere with Licona's uninformed attribution of theological motives to me. As I have explained, the problem here is epistemological: Licona gives the theory that John made up the entire Doubting Thomas sequence far too high a degree of plausibility in his analysis--too high, that is, from a reasonable historical point of view. He treats it as only one of two finalist options, dismisses or ignores other, simpler options, and in the end merely narrowly decides instead that Luke deliberately "conflated" two appearances of Jesus. Let me add that the "reason" he gives for preferring to attribute fictionalization to Luke than to John is emphatically not that our evidence shows that John was not prone to invent entire incidents because John was more historically reliable than that! Indeed, in the context (pp. 177-178) one finds it a bit difficult to figure out why Licona "prefers" one of his two finalist solutions. The flow of the discussion seems merely to show that he dislikes a harmonization involving Luke's usage of the term "the eleven" (to mean the group as a whole rather than a literal number of people), and he mentions his dislike of that harmonization just before stating that "therefore" it seems "more probable" that Luke has conflated than that John made up the whole sequence. The logic of the argument is obscure, since the insistence that Luke was using the term "the eleven" in a literal sense to mean precisely eleven disciples is what creates the alleged discrepancy in the first place; it does not actually do any work to help one decide that John did not make up the Doubting Thomas sequence, if one treats that as one of only two plausible options.

In any event, what I am drawing attention to here is the rather eyebrow-raising implication that one is using anachronistic, nineteenth-century standards if one considers it incompatible with John's historical purpose for him to make up Doubting Thomas. One might well conclude from these statements that, if we're sincerely attempting to understand the real literary and cultural context of the evangelist's "own day," we'll think that it was a completely live option for John to make up Doubting Thomas while thinking of himself as telling the truth about the life of Jesus.

This is very much the view of "ancient people" being pushed by Richard Burridge.

Besides the fact that this view is already highly dubious in light of the many Scriptural indications to the contrary (see the earlier post), there is additional evidence to the contrary. I will give only some of it in this post.

First, note the emphasis of Papias of Hierapolis (c. AD 60-130) on coming into the closest contact possible with those who actually knew Jesus and heard what Jesus taught. Papias is quite emphatic that this was because he wanted to know the truth about Jesus:

I shall not hesitate also to put into ordered form for you, along with the interpretations, everything I learned carefully in the past from the elders and noted down carefully, for the truth of which I vouch. For unlike most people I took no pleasure in those who told many different stories, but only in those who taught the truth. Nor did I take pleasure in those who reported their memory of someone else’s commandments, but only in those who reported their memory of the commandments given by the Lord to the faith and proceeding from the Truth itself. And if by chance anyone who had been in attendance on the elders arrived, I made enquiries about the words of the elders—what Andrew or Peter had said, or Philip or Thomas or James or John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s disciples, and whatever Aristion and John the Elder, the Lord’s disciples, were saying. For I did not think that information from the books would profit me as much as information from a living and surviving voice. (emphasis added)

Papias wanted to get as close as he could to the eyewitnesses of Jesus for purposes of knowing the truth about what Jesus taught. Again, there is a strong prima facie concern here (as in the New Testament itself) upon literal truth, contra Burridge and Licona.

There is a similar emphasis in Papias's words about Mark:

Consequently Mark did nothing wrong when he wrote down some individual items just as he related them from memory. For he made it his one concern not to omit anything he had heard or to falsify anything. (emphasis added)

Several of Licona's theories involve the serious possibility, left completely up in the air, that Mark did deliberately falsify things: For example, that Mark deliberately changed the day on which Jesus' feet were anointed in Passion Week (p. 150) or that Mark deliberately changed the words of the angel at the tomb to direct attention to a meeting in Galilee, if Jesus really first appeared to his disciples in Jerusalem. (p. 180)

Papias, who can hardly be working with "nineteenth century" concepts of history, would not have approved. You might choose to disagree with Papias and think that Mark made things up anyway, but you can hardly deny that Papias (a contemporary of Plutarch!) counts as a representative "ancient" man who can give us more direct information about the historical standards of the time than, say, Richard Burridge.

I have saved the most explicit quotation on the subject for the last in this post.

Sextus Julius Africanus, c. AD 160-240, was a Christian historian, a convert from paganism, whose works are chiefly known through fragments preserved by Eusebius, upon whom he was an influence.

In his Letter to Aristides, Julius Africanus proposes a solution to the alleged discrepancies between Matthew's and Luke's genealogies of Jesus, based upon the OT practice of Levirate marriage. One doesn't have to accept his harmonization to note the importance of his letter to the point of this post.

First, the very fact that Africanus is attempting a harmonization on so dry and dusty a matter as Jesus' literal genealogy already calls into question the entire "Burridge-style" dismissal of the importance of "mere facts" to the ancients, their preference for "profound truth, more truly true than mere facts could ever be," and their willingness to fabricate literal facts in the service of this alleged profound truth.

But second, Africanus leaves us in no doubt about what he thought on the matter. Apparently in Africanus's time there were theorists suggesting that perhaps the evangelists invented some of the names in their genealogies in order to make the theological point that Jesus is prophet, priest, and king. In condemning their views, Africanus explicitly and emphatically states the principle that I have articulated elsewhere--Fake Points Don't Make Points.

Some indeed incorrectly allege that this discrepant enumeration and mixing of the names both of priestly men, as they think, and royal, was made properly, in order that Christ might be shown rightfully to be both Priest and King; as if any one disbelieved this, or had any other hope than this, that Christ is the High Priest of His Father, who presents our prayers to Him, and a supramundane King, who rules by the Spirit those whom He has delivered, a cooperator in the government of all things. And this is announced to us not by the catalogue of the tribes, nor by the mixing of the registered generations, but by the patriarchs and prophets. Let us not therefore descend to such religious trifling as to establish the kingship and priesthood of Christ by the interchanges of the names....The evangelists, therefore, would thus have spoken falsely, affirming what was not truth, but a fictitious commendation. And for this reason the one traced the pedigree of Jacob the father of Joseph from David through Solomon; the other traced that of Heli also, though in a different way, the father of Joseph, from Nathan the son of David....To no purpose, then, is this fabrication of theirs. Nor shall an assertion of this kind prevail in the Church of Christ against the exact truth, so as that a lie should be contrived for the praise and glory of Christ. For who does not know that most holy word of the apostle also, who, when he was preaching and proclaiming the resurrection of our Saviour, and confidently affirming the truth, said with great fear, If any say that Christ is not risen, and we assert and have believed this, and both hope for and preach that very thing, we are false witnesses of God, in alleging that He raised up Christ, whom He raised not up? And if he who glorifies God the Father is thus afraid lest he should seem a false witness in narrating a marvellous fact, how should not he be justly afraid, who tries to establish the truth by a false statement, preparing an untrue opinion? For if the generations are different, and trace down no genuine seed to Joseph, and if all has been stated only with the view of establishing the position of Him who was to be born—to confirm the truth, namely, that He who was to be would be king and priest, there being at the same time no proof given, but the dignity of the words being brought down to a feeble hymn,—it is evident that no praise accrues to God from that, since it is a falsehood, but rather judgment returns on him who asserts it, because he vaunts an unreality as though it were reality. (emphasis added)

Any questions?

I wrote my post arguing that fake points don't make points before I had ever heard of Julius Africanus. Paul's words concerning being "false witnesses about God" constitute (as Africanus says) another Scriptural counter to the view that literal truth was not important to ancient Christians. Moreover, Africanus himself, like Papias, is an ancient man and is capable of telling us, in no uncertain terms, whether those "ancient people," including the evangelists and their original audience, thought it was just fine deliberately to make up or alter literal facts to serve some higher truth.

His unequivocal answer is "no."

Let ancient people speak for themselves.

Comments (21)

Another excellent and much-needed article! Thanks once again for your excellent work, Lydia.

Thanks, Brad! Appreciate it.

Great find, Julius Africanus. Since it is MLK day, I will add: can you imagine, after MLK's assassination, his close followers making up all kinds of stories about what he said and did? Is that how people honor their revered leads? Seems so implausible.

Perhaps one of the intended outcomes of the apparent discrepancy between the two accounts is to get us discussing it at this level of detail and to draw our attention to the fact that Thomas was the only disciple that needed to see and touch Jesus' hands and side because of intellectual doubt due to lack of empirical evidence. There were at least 10 times more disciples that needed to see and touch in order to overcome their heartfelt fear of man in a turbulent political, social, and religious climate.
Just sayin'.
I agree with Brad and appreciate your work.

It's such a trivial discrepancy, I must say. Luke uses the term "the eleven" about which main disciples were present at that meeting, and John says that Thomas wasn't there, which would mean (at most) ten. That's it. The whole shebang. It's not even a biggie. The idea that maybe "the eleven" was used in a "group" sense (as "the twelve" undeniably is) is quite sensible. So is the idea that Luke simply wasn't told that Thomas wasn't there and was told that "the disciples" or "the apostles" were there.

Even to *bring up* the idea that John *made up* the entire Doubting Thomas sequence when there are a couple of other much more reasonable historical options on offer, or for that matter even to *consider* (much less conclude) that Luke deliberately mashed up two meetings, shows a *severe* lack of good historical judgement. But it seems that NT studies really "does a number" on historical judgement, sadly. And then these poorly judged conclusions are touted as the results of unbiased scholarship over against the benighted "conservatives" who think John never made up whole incidents. Gee, people who think that must be motivated by their "theory of inspiration" and of "what God wouldn't do" and by their "conservative discomfort." Yeah, that must be it.

(I think the other disciples also needed to see and be able to Jesus. He invites the others to touch him in the first meeting as recounted in Luke 24:39.)

the medium whereby profound truth, more truly true than mere facts could ever be, was communicated

"More truly true" is a beguiling phrase, but here the work it does is encouraging us to think a falsehood is true.

In contrast, we have from these fantastic quotations Lydia found the true early church answer to that notion:

And if he who glorifies God the Father is thus afraid lest he should seem a false witness in narrating a marvellous fact, how should not he be justly afraid, who tries to establish the truth by a false statement, preparing an untrue opinion?

It's most unfortunate that educated Christian folks would recommend that we accuse the Apostles of "preparing an untrue opinion"; thankfully, by Lydia's work they are absolved of this charge.

Let us have no denigration of "mere facts."

I think it is instructive that the high-minded claims of non-bias come from some extremely rigid individuals whose minds appear to be closed shut to other possible, dare I say more reasonable and therefore more probable, explanations. Some might say there seems to be an agenda, a *bias* even, in operation here.

Outstanding work on all of this, Lydia.

Put that in your pipe and smoke It!

Seriously though, great blog post. I can't remember if it was Erhman or Licona who said that they had read all Christian literature in the relevant time periods in order to get as good an understanding as possible of the religion (I think it was Erhman I'm specifically recalling but both may have said something of the sort).

Why is this never mentioned by the "higher truth" people? You even cite a contemporary of Plutarch.

Fantastic sources, Lydia. Thank you for bringing them to our attention.

I have said it before, but it bears saying again: If God is God, and capable of creating the world, capable of saving the world from sin in Jesus Christ, capable of inspiring the gospel writers to write so worthily about what is importantly True - then He is capable of generating events whose TRUE AND FACTUAL recounting will successfully make the Truths manifest that those gospel writers were so intent on manifesting to us. God has no need of myth and fiction to declare the Truth, He has HIS-story at His beck and call to do so. Burridge makes God out to be a second-rate wizard of oz character in order to convey those Truths to us.

Such an account further impugns the humility of the gospel writers (and the apostles generally), in supposing that they COULD think that their own myth-making not only might "make the point better" than literal truth could, but that they would have the audaciousness of supposing that their myth-making and other fictionalizing would not disguise some other Truth that God wanted made. For, every time they assert X of Jesus that was not literally the way it happened, they would necessarily be drawing the minds of their hearers AWAY from some facet of the way it really happened, which facet might be just exactly what God intended to be noted, said, and understood as having really happened. E.G. Thomas was really there on the first Sunday? Maybe God intended that people realize Thomas was really there - maybe he said something significant?, in which case putting him as NOT there in the story would lose that fact that God wanted said. Burridge makes the gospel writers out to have the towering pride of deciding for themselves which things God MEANT to have happen, and which ones He DID NOT mean to have happen.

Lydia,


Thank you for writing this.

What do you think of your husband's remarks in 2012 on the genre of the Gospels and his comments about Richard Burridge's work found at the link below starting about the 1:10:15ish mark during a QA session?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJizWvoGCIg

Thank you,

Jonathan Hanna

Jonathan,

I appreciate your interest in my remarks from over 5 years ago. My views have undergone something of a sea-change since that time. I welcome the opportunity to make an explicit statement on the matter, lest anyone should be led into confusion, rather as I was led into confusion myself, by uncritically following my lead.

Since the time that I made those comments and endorsed Burridge’s book, I have re-evaluated Burridge’s arguments. At the time I had not read and evaluated Burridge’s argument carefully enough. I have now concluded that the argument is relatively weak for the strong metaphysical categorization of the Gospels as being “in” the genre of Greco-Roman bioi. For example, Burridge does relatively little work in arguing that the gospel authors were actually influenced by such works; instead, he uses “family resemblance” comparisons based on features such as length, subject of verbs, and broad internal structure. That sort of analysis is of very limited value in telling us the level of fidelity we should expect from the Evangelists in their handling of factual data. Colin Hemer has some trenchant remarks on this point in The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History.

At the time of those remarks, and for a number of years thereafter, I had not realized that Burridge himself, in other works, actually dehistoricizes the Gospels (especially John) in a much stronger sense. Therefore, I did not realize that Licona, when he followed Burridge in using words and phrases like “flexibility” and “applying standards of the time,” was denying historicity in a sense that I never intended to endorse and never would have endorsed, including inventing whole scenes, changing facts without cluing in the reader, and so forth. I used such language without realizing what it would be taken to mean and what Mike and others meant by it.

Like many people, I believed at the time that the thesis that the Gospels are Greco-Roman bioi was strengthening their historicity. But in reading other works by Burridge -- and also seeing the use that Licona makes both in his 2010 book (some portions of which I had also not read at the time) and even more in this 2017 book (which was not available then) and in his lectures -- one discovers that the bioi thesis is actually being used to downgrade historicity. At the time I was unaware of the claims that Burridge and Pelling have made regarding Plutarch, both what they are (that he deliberately wrote contrary to fact) and how weak the argument is for those claims.

When I spoke of standards of the time, rigidity, and the like in that lecture, I meant merely to assert the Evangelists' freedom to engage in recognizable paraphrase and to group material together by topic without intending to give the impression that it was all spoken at a given time. This is far different from the use of so-called broad ipsissima vox now being advocated by Craig Evans, Dan Wallace, and Mike Licona. Indeed, I have only recently discovered that Wallace has been advocating this approach in unpublished work (which I now have, and have read) since 1999.

My present view is that several of Licona’s literary devices are in an important sense anachronistic themselves, for they involve the idea that the author did intend to give (for instance) a chronological impression that he knows is false. This intention can be seen in Licona’s discussion of Luke’s alleged “editorial fatigue” when he was supposedly attempting to move Jesus’ saying about the little children and millstones but, according to Licona, “forgot” to take out the phrase “one of these little ones.” What some evangelicals (such as myself in that talk) intend to be saying when they talk about non-chronological grouping of material by topic is precisely the opposite, namely, that there was no chronology being given by such a topical grouping of subject matter. Hence, “editorial fatigue” wouldn’t even be a relevant category.

It’s easy to get confused over benign and non-benign ideas of such things as topical arrangement, paraphrase, telescoping, etc., if one doesn’t know about the increasingly widespread use of the non-benign senses. At the time I literally did not know that these fictional, non-benign senses were being used, and I therefore did not realize that they would be mixed up with what I intended.

Now, because of the new information that has come to my attention since then, I would rather refer to the Gospels’ genre using Justin Martyr’s term “memoirs,” instead of bioi, much less “Greco-Roman bioi.”

If you are posting that link elsewhere, I would appreciate it if you would point people to this explicit public response. That will assist me in my goal of repudiating those earlier comments (especially my endorsement of Burridge's book), clarifying how I came to make them, and explaining what I now believe to be the truth regarding those works.

It's been posted.

Tim,

What do you think of Colin Hemer's comment in a footnote (12 in the Logo's edition) on page 419 about the speeches that Paul made and that Luke recorded. He says:

We may instance such variations as the summary or paraphrase of an actual speech (in varying degrees of fidelity or accuracy); the independent writing up of traditions about what was actually said; the presentation of Luke’s conception of what was appropriate to the occasion; Luke’s presentation of a piece of authentic primitive kerygma, not necessarily tailored to the occasion; or Luke’s presentation of what he mistakenly conceived to have been the primitive kerygma. In any of these cases he could have been in greater or lesser degree concerned with needs of his own time which differed from those of the dramatic date, and such concerns may then have influenced his content or wording, have stimulated him to creative alteration of the tradition, or, for that matter, have merely impressed on him the pointed relevance of Paul’s words and the importance of reproducing them as faithfully as possible. The differing members of this series, and their like, and the differing possible degrees of redactional adaptation of any of them are then open to an equally complex variety of judgment from the point of view of their historicity.

Source:

Colin J. Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, ed. Conrad H. Gempf (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 419 footnote 12; Logos edition

Jonathan,

Hemer is here presenting the spectrum of scholarly positions on the speeches and not stating which of them is, in his judgment, the correct one.

If you're interested in where I would fall, it would be here: Luke is offering us the summary or paraphrase of an actual speech (with a rather high degree of fidelity or accuracy), and Luke's situational or theological concerns impressed on him the pointed relevance of Paul’s words and the importance of reproducing them as faithfully as possible.

I find John Saul Howson's discussion of the variations in the three accounts of Paul's conversion in Acts to be fairly convincing evidence for this position.

https://books.google.com/books?id=qnsXAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA104

Tim,

Ok, thank you. It seems that Hemer concludes (about Luke and use of sources), in short:

So far as our specific evidence goes, we have to reckon with the demonstrable factor that Luke used sources for the spoken word, and used them rather conservatively, with whatever verbal and selective redaction.


Source:

Colin J. Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, ed. Conrad H. Gempf (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 427.

Jonathan, if you are trying to locate the trenchant comments of Hemer concerning the genre of Luke, Tim was (I believe) thinking of these:

http://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2017/06/colin-hemer-on-genre-of-lukes-writings.html

It's incredibly important not to extrapolate in any event the way that any ancient author treated "set speeches" from the way that he treated historical events generally. This is not to say that I am agreeing (I am not) that the Gospel authors or Acts simply made up speeches! I think the evidence is strongly against that.

But Tacitus is an interesting case: It looks like sometimes he did make up speeches, yet on specific facts such as dates, times, etc., he was quite scrupulous. Licona's attempt to say that Tacitus changed the date of a trial (in Why Are There Differences) is a dismal failure, to such an extent that the very classicist he cites for that claim (Ronald Mellor), who had carelessly stated that Tacitus changed a date deliberately and who had even gone into an irresponsible and ridiculous little "riff" on the supposed preference for "moral truth" (though Tacitus makes *no* moral point concerning the date of the trial!), then *changed his mind* concerning the historicity of Tacitus on this very issue.

There is also an important distinction to be made between set speeches and "speech" in the sense of dialogue, short sayings, etc. An author may paraphrase the former to a greater extent than he would ever alter the latter, for reasons of length, etc.

In any event, the extent to which, say, Craig A. Evans thinks that John literally made up whole sayings of Jesus, which never occurred in any historically recognizable form, and that Licona tries to call this "paraphrase" is a positively misleading use of the term "paraphrase." If all that Jesus said was the kind of thing that we find in the synoptic Gospels and John then "crafted" entire scenes in which Jesus has dialogues with the Jews and ends by saying "I and the Father are one" or "Before Abraham was, I am," and the Jews then try to stone him, this sort of wholesale invention is not paraphrase in any sense of the word. The term "paraphrase" should not be used, and to use it in such a context is simple obfuscation.

Yes, I read that in the commentary. However, the Appendix comments I offer above elucidate what you initially posted about Hemer's views about recorded speeches.

Yes, overall, I agree. I think Konstenberger, Carson, and some other NT scholars, overall, would affirm what you have said with maybe some different nuances.

For example, Andreas Kostenberger concludes about the Gospel of John:

In summary, John’s gospel most closely resembles historical narrative as found in Jewish works, particularly in the Hebrew Scriptures. At the same time, the gospel also displays a considerable amount of surface affinities with Greco-Roman literature, both on the macro- and on the micro-level.
However, there are several important differences that suggest that rather than reflect the wholesale adoption of a particular Greco-Roman literary genre, these affinities, which relate to both internal and external features, represent John’s attempt to contextualize the gospel message for a Greco-Roman audience.
As mentioned at the outset of this volume, John wrote a theo-drama, or even more accurately, a Christo- or doxa-drama, consisting of a sēmeio- and a cruci-drama. The gospel’s beginning, middle, and end all focus on Jesus, the Word, the Messiah, the Son of God, presenting him as the incarnate, crucified, and glorified Word-made-flesh given for the life of the world.

Source:

Andreas J. Köstenberger, A Theology of John’s Gospel and Letters: The Word, the Christ, the Son of God, Biblical Theology of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), 124.

I'd have to read more examples from Kostenberger to see where he is going with all of that. By itself it doesn't tell me a whole lot about what he thinks concerning the historicity of particular incidents, words of Jesus, etc., in John. At this point I rarely or never assume, one way or another, what an author means by broad statements, especially not concerning literary activities. I always want to see particular examples. Would a "theo-drama" or "cruci-drama" mean that John thought it was hunky-dory to make up and change dates, times, details, scenes, etc.? I'm not trying to cast aspersions on Kostenberger at all. It's just that one cannot make assumptions anymore about what someone means by such statements, and a label like "evangelical scholar" is not informative on that matter either.

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