Transcription
The Bible has absolutely no authority in and of itself. All authority is granted. It is up to us. It has always been up to us.
Dan Mlelen here smuggles in an assumption. All right, let's see it.
"That authority is created by human communities only and enforced by them alone."
Uh, that's not a smuggled assumption. It's literally my thesis statement. It's a conclusion. This is the outcome of years and years of research as a specialist in the cognitive science of religion.
But that is the assumption of an irreligious scholar of the Bible.
No, that has nothing to do with being irreligious. It just has to do with thinking critically and not just endorsing dogmas because they serve my religious identity.
Not from one who takes the historical words of Jesus and his apostles seriously.
So, I've got two main problems here. The first has to do with the notion that you can point to any of the words in the New Testament and say these are the historical words of Jesus and his apostles. As I have pointed out previously, we don't know for sure that any of the words in the New Testament are actually the verbatim words spoken by the historical Jesus or by his apostles. And even if we could say yes, we're sure there are such words in the New Testament, we don't really have a way of demonstrating which they are.
Now, this content creator obviously believes all of them are and cannot demonstrate that any of them are. That's a dogma. That's something that I'm not going to accept just because this content creator thinks I'm supposed to accept.
Additionally, take them seriously. I take them far more seriously than this content creator takes them because if I see something in one part of one gospel and a contradictory thing in another part of another gospel, I take both of them seriously. I don't impose a unifying framework demanding that they be harmonized, that they be reconciled. I don't create a new third idea intended only to harmonize the two contradictory statements. I take the words of the authors seriously, far more so than this content creator does. All this content creator takes seriously is the dogmas that they bring to the Bible that impose upon the Bible specific requirements. This content creator tells the Bible what it is and is not allowed to be doing and to be saying. I take the words in there far more seriously than that. However, I don't just arbitrarily assume that any of them, much less all of them, are the actual historical words of Jesus and of his apostles. I expect a case to be made that can demonstrate that it's most likely that any given word actually came verbatim from the historical Jesus or his apostles. And there is not a single word in all of the New Testament for which such a case can be made.
So all this content creator is doing is saying Dan doesn't accept my dogmas, but because they're speaking to an audience that does accept those dogmas, they know that the audience will accept their rhetoric.
Across all our gospel sources, Jesus treated a certain category of Jewish texts as though divinely inspired, as carrying God's authority, one that didn't stand under religious communities as the judge, but that stood over them with the promise of divine enforcement, when Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead.
So now this content creator is just blindly and obliviously doing precisely what I said people have no other option but to do, which is choose to accept dogmas about authority because this content creator's argument is that, well, Jesus said they're authoritative. No, you have some texts that say Jesus said they were authoritative, and you have decided to accept that those texts represent the verbatim words of Jesus. So you have already granted to the text authority to transmit the verbatim words of the God of the universe. So you're already attributing authority arbitrarily and saying, "See, because that is authoritative, you have to accept it all as authoritative," apparently without even realizing that you're begging the question.
But also, you don't take the words of Jesus seriously. Because if you took the words of Jesus seriously in some of the gospel sources, you would know that Jesus was wrong because Jesus quite clearly says that his return would occur within the lifetimes of some of the people who were standing with him. And that didn't happen. But guess what? The reason you don't think that's what Jesus said is because you don't allow the text to operate on their own terms. If you don't take them seriously, you impose a dogma upon the text to overrule the words of Jesus in the text and to impose your own restrictions and requirements on what the text is and is not allowed to say.
So, I take the words of Jesus far more seriously than this content creator again. But I also don't accept the arbitrary dogmas about these texts that this content creator has imposed upon them precisely so they don't have to take those words seriously.
On five occasions in Matthew's gospel, with parallels in the other synoptics, Jesus corrects the Jewish leaders according to the scriptures, rebuking them with the phrase, "Have you not read?" Likewise, in his showdown with Satan in the wilderness, Jesus appeals to scripture three times as the decisive authority. In John 5:39-40, Jesus then declares all scripture testifies to him as though a divine witness, a prophetic theme he unpacks on the Emmaus road in Luke 24.
So, we're still just saying it's all authoritative as long as you accept that it's authoritative. In other words, on what grounds do you insist these are the verbatim words of the very Son of God himself? Only on the grounds that we just arbitrarily accept that not only are these the verbatim words of the historical Jesus, but also the historical Jesus was God himself. So this is just asserting dogmas over the data.
In John 10:35, Jesus speaks of scripture as binding, an authority that cannot be broken. And you don't take Jesus's words there seriously either because Jesus is citing Psalm 82. "You are gods." And Jesus understands this to be a reference to the Israelites at Sinai. The idea is when the word of God came to them, in other words, when they received the law of Moses, they were freed from the power of the angel of death, as we see in multiple different later rabbinic texts, rendering them immortal, rendering them gods. And then upon sinning with the golden calf, they were consigned back down to mortality as it says in Psalm 82:6. "Yet you will die like men and fall like any prince." Why is Jesus saying this? That the scriptures call humans gods and the scriptures cannot be broken. This certainly doesn't sound like the kind of rhetoric you ever hear from this channel. Well, it's in response to the accusation that he, being a human, makes himself a god.
Now, this content creator doesn't take this seriously because this content creator is imposing the unifying framework of the Trinity upon the text. Everything must be subordinated to that post-biblical philosophical framework. Things that don't seem to agree must be twisted into agreement. So here, this content creator thinks that the accusation is, "You, being a human, make yourself the very God of Israel because you say, 'I and the Father are one.'" That interpretation would render the appeal to Psalm 82 utterly irrelevant. A straw man fallacy. It has absolutely nothing to do with the accusation because in absolutely no sense whatsoever is Psalm 82 saying that the people to whom the word of God came became the very God of Israel. No, it just means they became gods. And Jesus is saying, "Hey, the scriptures say humans can be gods. Why are you accusing me of blasphemy for saying, as a human, I am the Son of God? It's just generic deity that is in reference here."
But this content creator does not take that seriously because again, unwittingly, intuitively, subconsciously, this content creator has brought a dogma to the text and has shellacked it over the text to overrule what's in the text, to harmonize what's in the text with the post-biblical philosophical framework of the Trinity that is nowhere in any syllable of the Trinity. So when it comes to who is taking these words seriously, I am, and this content creator is not.
In Matthew 22:43, Jesus says that David spoke by the Holy Spirit, describing a divine source behind the human author of Psalms. So in addition to the fact that the data absolutely do not support the notion that David was the author of Psalm 110, the author of Matthew has misrepresented what was going on because the one who is saying "the Lord said to my Lord" is absolutely not David in the psalm. It's an unnamed prophetic speaker who is addressing David, and "my Lord" is the reference to David who is Lord over that particular unnamed prophetic speaker. So once again, we're ignoring what's going on in the text. We're not taking them seriously on their own terms. We are imposing the presupposition of univocality and inspiration and historicity and inherency, and we are thereby overruling what's actually in the text so that they can be subordinated to what we demand the text be saying.
And in a famous parable in Luke 16, Jesus refers to scripture, Moses and the prophets, as the ground upon which the rich man in Hades would ultimately be judged. This is still just doing the same thing. This is still just saying, "Hey, as long as you accept this all as authoritative, as inspired, as inherent, as the verbatim words of the historical Jesus, then it turns out it's all authoritative." This is just begging the question. This is just presupposing the conclusion in the premise of the argument because this content creator knows that their audience is already doing that anyway. Nobody's going to question that among the target audience. Certainly, what a critical scholar and the overwhelming scholarly consensus has to say doesn't matter. So this is all just a fallacy, and it is a fallacy that is hurled at me as if it means anything whatsoever to my argument.
Jesus's claims are then echoed in the apostolic texts like 2 Peter 1:20-21 and 2 Timothy 3:16.
Uh, neither of these texts is apostolic. The majority of scholars agree that both of these texts are pseudepigraphic, that they were written probably in the early 2nd century, but maybe the late 1st century, by people pretending to be Peter and Paul, which speak of all scripture, that being the Old Testament at the time, being breathed out by God or penned by human authors who were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Well, that's not taking 2 Timothy 3:16 seriously. It's just imposing a later developed dogma upon the text so that the text can be leveraged as authorization for that dogma despite the actual semantic content of that text having been divested. Because when we take it seriously, when we go look at what the word theopneustos and other derived forms are used to communicate in the first and second centuries CE, we see that it means lifegiving, not inspired. Enthos would have been the word they would have used if they wanted to say that all scripture was inspired. And I've talked about this in a number of videos.
So even without prosecuting whether there is a New Testament, Jesus and the early Christians certainly believed in a category of divinely inspired writings, what Christians now call the Bible, that would still carry divine authority even if every human rejected it. And once again, this is a conclusion that you can only arrive at provided you presuppose that every word of the Bible is divinely inspired and authoritative and true and univocal and historical. So the conclusion is baked into the argument. And because this is just a performance for an audience that doesn't know better, this is just intended to make that audience feel better and make this content creator feel better. It doesn't matter that it does not stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever because this content creator is not beholden to academic scrutiny or the data. This content creator is beholden to the dogma.
Now, religious communities had the important task of discerning which books were inspired or belong in this scripture category. That's the whole canon conversation. But no Christian thinks communities or councils granted authority to the Bible.
Well, the individual texts themselves had already been granted authority by the communities prior to the canonization process. However, yes, the institutions that oversaw and established and enforced those specific canons were the ones who granted authority to those specific canons. And it's simply not true to say no Christian accepts that. There are a lot of Christians that accept that, including me. And if you want to appeal to the no true Scotsman fallacy by suggesting, well, they're not real Christians if they accept that, or I'm not a real Christian because I don't accept the authority of the specific councils and institutions that you accept, then we're just going in fallacious circles here.
But one of the ways we know that Christians do acknowledge that it is those councils that granted those specific biblical canons authority is the fact that they reject the authority of the canons that were instituted by the wrong institutions and the wrong authorities. The authorities that they do not accept. That is a tacit acknowledgment that yes, it is the specific institutions that have endowed this specific canon with this authority. Now they rationalize it away by trying to come up with historical cases to make that, well, this is the way it was always going to be anyway. But that is not taking the text seriously because we can look at the letter of Jude, for instance, which quite explicitly quotes from the book of First Enoch, the book of the Watchers at the beginning of First Enoch, as prophecy from Enoch himself, the seventh from Adam. The author of the letter of Jude very clearly thought, at the very least, the book of the Watchers was inspired scripture. That didn't make it into the canon. Why? Because the council said so. And we can find Christians as late as Tertullian arguing fervently that First Enoch should be considered canonical scripture. They were overruled not by the text of scripture because again, the ostensibly inspired author of the letter of Jude, ostensibly in an inspired way, referred to a passage from First Enoch as prophecy uttered by Enoch the seventh from Adam. So the text of the Bible itself endorses the inspiration, the authority of at very least the book of the Watchers. But the councils overruled that. And whose authority are you relying on here? Not the text of the Bible. You're relying on the authority of the later councils. You are doing precisely what you are saying no Christians do. You just are not being honest with yourself.
So Dan basically assumes a non-Christian worldview where divine authority cannot exist, only to conclude the Bible has no such authority. So much for data over dogma. This argument is literally saying, "Why isn't he putting dogma over data?" Because I'm engaging the data. This content creator has asserted dogma after dogma after dogma and is now saying Dan doesn't presuppose a Christian dogmatic worldview. That's why he does not arrive at the conclusion that the Christian dogmatic worldview is correct. This is literally asserting that we must put dogma over data. It is begging the question by saying, "As long as you presuppose all these dogmas, you arrive at the conclusion that these dogmas are correct." And it is special pleading because it's saying there's something special about interrogating the Christian Bible where if you do not adopt a Christian dogmatic worldview, you're not allowed to arrive at appropriate or legitimate conclusions. This is openly, explicitly advocating for putting dogma over data. And it's such a laughable performance by someone who I would expect to know better. But I honestly cannot tell if they are being dishonest or if they are just profoundly uninformed and incompetent at even pretending to think critically about what's going on with their worldview. I was honestly shocked by this video, but it's becoming clear that I need to be less surprised when people put on display precisely the dogmatism that I highlight in my videos. It's It's just a mess here. And the fit for this video has been Uncanny X-Men number 2011.