(May 23, 2015 at 12:19 pm)robvalue Wrote: You're going back to the same example you used before, and I called you out for false equivocation. You're trying to make out supernatural claims are the same as natural ones and require the same evidence. No. A courtroom would not accept supernatural claims full stop. It's a flawed comparison, and I'm surprised you're using the same one again.
You're just using the same excuse again.
Were the authors of the NT reliable? Evidence suggests they were.
Were they knowledgeable? Evidence suggests they were.
Should we be willing to listen to people who are reliable and knowledgeable about things they have seen?
Quote:Scholars sometimes talk about a hermeneutic of suspicion. Hermeneutics is just a fancy word for an approach to interpretation, and so a hermeneutic of suspicion would mean that one begins, in the case of the Bible or in the case of some other ancient document, suspecting that what one has in front of one is likely not to be accurate until one finds enough reasons to reverse one’s position.
Hermeneutic of suspicion is not appropriate for ancient historical works in general. If it were followed, our world civilization textbooks would be blank until we reached very recent centuries. One has to develop a global perspective on the likely reliability of a given author, of a given work, and then if there are repeated places where they can be discredited, yes, move to a hermeneutic of suspicion. But otherwise, one begins with a hermeneutic of trust or one would not have ancient history to write at all. In fact, that’s what historians regularly do…except that some, when they come to the gospels, change the ground rules which is not fair and is not going to lead to the most reliable historical results, either. We want to have a level playing field. - Craig Blomberg, PhD
