The November 18 post, 5 posts below this one, "Is the New Testament True?" received the following comment. With the writer's permission, I am copying it here, together with my response. The reason is that there are probably thousands of seminarians all over the country, especially those of the mainline churches, who would echo the frustration of this one. If my response, below, was helpful to him, it might also be to other seminarians. He commented:
"In seminary, I'm hearing a lot of stuff about the NT authorship being fraudulent. But even secular scholarship, I think, would dismiss most of the arguments that I've encountered so far."
I responded as follows:
Dear John,
Do you mean the seminary I think you do? I'm astonished! How can that be? But I take your word for it. (I really doubt, though, that the leaders of your seminary are aware of the situation.)
In my very liberal seminary, I was assisted by my skepticism (which I treasure) and my scientific training. The basics of that training were:
1. Check the basic, underlying assumptions of every argument or case. (If these are shaky, the whole superstructure of proofs and argumentation built on it is also shaky.) If these underlying assumptions are not openly stated, then you must figure out what they are.
2. Check the scholarship used in that superstructure.
Using these tools, I found that their case that the Bible is not true was in fact a weak case. (Actually, the case that the Bible is true, even in its plain surface meaning, is a somewhat stronger case.)
1. First, their basic, underlying assumption is "there is no supernatural."
Based on that, there can therefore be no true prophecies. So if some prophecy came true, it had to be fradulent in some way. (Thus the rationale for the claim that Isaiah was written by Christians after the prophecies came true, then falsely "backdated" to make them seem credible. Of course, finding that the pre-Christian Dead Sea Scrolls had an Isaiah identical to ours messed up their "backdating" theory pretty badly. Etc, etc.)
If everything considered to be supernatural is automatically ruled to be impossible, then there is also no virgin birth, no incarnation, no healings and no resurrection. Which means the authors of the Gospel had to be wrong.
So you can see what difference their basic assumption that "no supernatural exists" makes. They automatically rule out anything as true that is supernatural.
But assuming there is no supernatural proves nothing about the supernatural. In fact, it puts them in an almost indefensible position. Their chances of ever proving it are almost zero, as you can almost never prove a negative.
And this case is vulnerable to being flatly disproved by the existence of even ONE verifiably supernatural event. (The "white crow" argument - all it takes to disprove the argument that there are no white crows is just one. Not a majority being white, just one.)
2. Then as to their scholarship, compared to my own field of economics, I found the scholarship, in the superstructure built on that basic assumption, to be dismayingly sloppy. (And economics is not even as rigorous as, say, the physical sciences.)
Here is the worst device I found, over and over, even in the basic works of their best scholars. At first, I marked in blue pencil each paragraph where I found it. But soon I stopped, because I was marking up so much of so many of their library books!
The device was this: in one paragraph, things would be conditional, then in the next paragraph, what was tentative and conditional before suddenly became a certainty!
I was so stunned that at first I spent a lot of time re-reading, going back and forth between the two, not able to believe that they had really done that. But they did.
For instance, the first paragraph would state, "so-and-so, which SUGGESTS thus-and-so." Then not long after, suddenly it was "so and-so, THEREFORE thus-and-so," with what had merely been suggested before suddenly becoming a firm conclusion.
This kind of overstated conclusion based on what is merely tentative is just not permissible. Neither are conclusions to be based on evidence too slender to support them.
Just keep your eyes and ears open. You don't have to announce to your prof any disagreements you may have with him or her. That is your business.
They can rightfully expect you to learn what they want you to learn. You don't have to believe it.
They also have a right to ask you to regurgitate it, to prove you learned it. But you can do that in a way that does not make a statement about your beliefs, simply by citing the sources in which their arguments are found.
Be critical. Cultivate your scholarly skills and skepticism. Make them prove their case to you (not by challenging their authority openly in class, but rather by paying careful attention.)
And make those "A's". You may need them someday!
Your beliefs are in a much stronger position than you may realize.
Try Roberts. I think it will be very helpful.
Blessings,
Gerry