NTBF: NT Authorship Verdicts: Ancient v Modern

NTBF Index

  1. Historiographical principle
  2. External and Internal Evidence
  3. Ancient people had better access to internal evidence
  4. Historical criticism is excessively skeptical
  5. Historical Criticism ignores ancient sources that validate traditional authorship
  6. Historical criticism can barely affirm; mainly disproves
  7. The ancients had no motive to to get authorship wrong and strong motive to get it right.
  8. Ancient sources were organizationally-independent and geographically dispersed with no central controlling authority. (Same is true of modern scholars.)
  9. Ancient Christians should be trusted with provenance, just as ancient Jews were entrusted with provenance of the OT.
  10. Ancient verdict is singular while modern verdicts are plural
  11. The myth of neutrality in historical criticism
  12. Given the rule given in 1 Cor 15:12-19 and the defining principles of historical criticism, the latter can never provide the history the former requires for faith. For 1 Cor 15:12-19 requires that history must precede faith. Historical criticism won’t allow history that involves a supernatural event.
  13. The problem with historical criticism is not only methodological bias, but institutional drift and fragmentation, which allowed different disciplines to develop uneven standards for evaluating similar kinds of evidence.

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