The admissibility of evidence
A lady named Mariam left a comment on the Knox post – the full comment can be found there. I’m playing the Knox aspect down because that issue is all argued out but something Mariam wrote struck a chord with me:
I have been in the legal profession for 15 years and what surprises me is the comments by … supporters . For instance they state that there was no evidence that placed her at the crime scene.
There is a saying that if you repeat a lie for long enough it becomes truth.
Instead of wasting time by listing the considerable evidence that was presented during the trial, which places her at the apartment, I’ll assume that it is the logical and intelligent who will read this and move on.
Evidence has to be looked at as a whole. The selective analysis of bits of disputed evidence which takes place on various websites … is a far cry from what takes place in a court of law. The jury hears all the evidence and must deliberate on it.
I’d say the success of the well orchestrated … campaign has been that in selecting some pieces of disputed evidence and ignoring others, they gave an incomplete picture of went on in the trial and convinced media outlets & the public there was no evidence. Thankfully , this had no bearing on the jury , the trial and will have none on the appeal. It merely stoke[s] up anger.
I deliberately chose Christianity in a series of articles because I was aware that it sends atheists apoplectic, chose some of the better analysts on the “pro-divinity” side and let rip. Now, for a start, I’m no creationist, in the sense of making it into a science and feel that that has done great harm, for the simple reason that the whole veracity of the faith can ony be known by those who “sign on”. The proof is not available for the “refuseniks”. Hence John 3:16.
However, if one is arguing the efficacy of the faith, then that’s another matter because that relies on testimony and evidence. If one is partly arguing divinity by the dating of Mark, which the majority of scholars, from ancient times until the revisionist moderns put at well before 70AD, then there are two problems – firstly, whether the majority in any era is necessarily right and secondly, the Mariam principle:
Evidence has to be looked at as a whole. The selective analysis of bits of disputed evidence which takes place on various websites … is a far cry from what takes place in a court of law. The jury hears all the evidence and must deliberate on it.
When one lists much of the evidence in a series of articles, one is bemused by the insistence of an atheist: “That’s not evidence.” When that atheist goes through the articles, to say he’s given it fair consideration and concludes: “There’s not a scrap of evidence in there, it’s all hearsay,” then the historian in me asks: “What is evidence?”
“Tacitus is evidence.”
“Then why is Mark’s testimony not evidence? Because it is hearsay? But Mariam says that all the evidence has to be considered as a whole and so if all the gospels are considered together, they make a certain case.”
“No, no,” says the atheist, “none of that is evidence. The authorship is not estabished.”
“Oh really? Then why do historians generally ascribe to Luke the authorship of Luke and why are cave paintings generally ascribed to cavemen?”
“There are discrepancies between the authors.”
“And what? Were there not discrepancies between the eyewitnesses at the Kennedy coverup and yet we know from film that it actually occurred and the footage itself appears to establish at least one other gunman.”
Wiki says:
Admissible evidence, in a court of law, is any testimonial, documentary, or tangible evidence that may be introduced to a factfinder–usually a judge or jury–in order to establish or to bolster a point put forth by a party to the proceeding. In order for evidence to be admissible, it must be relevant, without being prejudicial, and it must have some indicia of reliability.
Further:
If the evidence is in the form of witness testimony, the party introducing the evidence must lay the groundwork for the credibility of the witness, and his knowledge of the things to which he attests.
Who decides on this admissibility? The judge, of course. But who is deciding on the admissibility of the evidence of Luke or Mark? Why, the two sides in the debate; there is no judge, except for Him Above. Is there anything else to rely on? Yes – a gathering of all the documentary evidence of the time as a whole.
The most the atheist can hope for is that the gospels are not “admissible” evidence but to call them “not evidence at all” is belied by the legal definition above and can be charged as being prejudicial. Of course they’re evidence. The legal case is now only to decide how relevant and reliable they are and that decision is neither up to the prosecution nor the defence.
This is why the revisionist enlightenment “historians’ have so altered the debate and have stacked the google page rankings that if one googles the subject, all one can read is articles saying that “modern historians have estabished” that Mark was written in the late 1st century.
As I showed in the series of articles, that’s just rubbish – they have shown nothing of the kind, let alone definitively. In fact, I charge that their evidence is inadmissible on the grounds of “likeihood to prejudice”. Robinson’s assertion of a pre-70 dating is based on both evidence and appeal to august scholarship in others.
Whether it proves or disproves his case, it is still a valid argument.
Again, I chose Christianity here because of its divisiveness, with one side trying to do an “Arab World”, to stamp out the faith by whatever means possible, fair or foul, just as the Arab World is trying to do with Israel and the Jews as a whole … and the other side arguing a case.
I chose this topic to bring out the way open hostiity can cloud the rules of debate, with one side crying that something is not evidence when all indicators which form the basis of our legal system say it is. By the same token, the gnostic tracts are also evidence if they are of that time and the job of the apologist is to break down the credibiity of the gnostics by illustrating prejudice against the accused.
Who decides this? The great court in the sky, of course, not by us.
Filed under: Politics & economics, Society & human issues
Mrs Knox is on R5 now. Not terribly convincing.
She batters the circumstantial but can’t explain the lies and dismisses the jury as having been influenced by the newspapers.
Going to run and run.
Well, the mother’s doing what mothers do but her grasp of the case is, let’s say, a bit one-sided. Still, the appeals coming up and the issue won’t settle till then.
There’s far more evidence for the historical Jesus than say Julius Caesar yet you don’t hear of many doubting his existence, I suspect most of the carping at the Gospels is just atheists trying to justify their position, rather than a rational analysis of the situation.
The book of Enoch the prophet.
“In the year 1773, after a period of almost total obscurity lasting 1500 years, the Scottish explorer, James Bruce discovered, in what is now Ethiopia, The Book of Enoch.
He writes,Amongst the articles I consigned to the library at Paris, was a very beautiful and magnificant copy of the prophecies of Enoch, in large quarto: another is amongst the books of scripture that I brought home, standing immediately before the book of Job, which is its proper place in the Abyssinian Cannon: and a thirs copy I presented to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, by the hands of Dr Douglas, the Bishop of Carlisle”
It rested there, forgotten, until 1821, when Lawrence issued his first translation, of which there were many editions, culminating in the revised edition of 1883, compiled from notes in his estate.
As a former professor of Hebrew at Oxford, Lawrences familiarity with Kabbalah and Zohar (as shown in the earkier editions) gave him unique qualifications that were especially useful in translating a work of this type.
The very profound and encyclopedic work on comparative religion and hermetic philosophy, “The Secret Doctrine” by H. P. Blavatsky, refers to this 1883 edition on 37 occasions.
I have a copy of the 1883 edition. The above is a quotation.
This, and literally hundreds of other documents were deliberately excluded from both the old and new testaments that are in common use today. Incomplete as the testaments undoubtedly are, (old and new), they had/have been deliberately contrived to show a one-sided view of events. The semetic tribes in captivity never properly understood the religious/social/historical record of their captors, and in any event, chose to skew their interpretation of this ill understood civilisation towards an aggrandisement of their own tribes/religious, history. When the semitic tribes finally returned to their homeland, they were, to say the least, profoundly unimpressed with the level of civilisation of the society they were returning to.
Additional to the hundreds of missing documents excluded, down the centuries, what we have now is also repleat with hundreds of miss-translations, deliberate, or otherwise.(many of them the former).
The result is a hodge-podge, that can only be understood by an equal reference, in the case of the Old Test., by reference to cylinder seals and clay tablets, and Greek and Roman, Egyptian, and many other “national” histories.
Christian powers have so far managed to totally avoid the presentation/consideration of the entire historical record. Their power should not be underestimated. Considerable evidence, at odds with the Christian view of events, has been trashed, destroyed, in recent centuries. Considerable evidence currently sits in museums, that would be absolutely revolutionary, were it not for its deliberate miss-classification into “other” subjects. So called professionals bow to the power structure, to preserve peace and their careers, ….others are just plain ignorant.
Christianity is a matter of faith, and faith only. Faith in prefabricated/partial, evidence. Certainly nothing more.
And when the total evidence is considered…, well!
Western power structures will only allow a gradual re appraisal. The problem is that the destruction now being undertaken is creating ultimately unworkable structures. A rethink is needed, but certain attributes, claimed by Christians to be “Christian”, but are not really so, but are highly beneficial to society, are being thrown out, instead of being retained.
You should read the Book of Enoch, some time, James…. and realise why it was excluded.
If you want to speak about evidence, James, beware that which you wish for!
The moment you mention Blavatsky, Xxxl, you pass me the baton to run with. Now I’m in a bind. On the one hand, I highly esteem your comments on this site and it’s an association I don’t wish to sever. There are three points immediately in your case to address but I certainly don’t wish to do this because the fallout would be worse than the advantage and I don’t value being right above friendship.
I’m sitting here thinking which of the three Blavatsky quotes to use but better I don’t use any. It’s an esoteric argument which would only be relevant to us and would benefit neither.
I have mentioned H. P. Blavatsky months ago, and said that she waffled endlessly.
But hidden amongst many errors is the germ of knowledge contained on clay tablets unearthed after her death.
Adding in other facts, some of them , many of them, contained in Jules Verne novels, (the more original the copies, the better, – - later translations avoided the pertinent details) says to me that there was an underground area of knowledge in that society that must have travelled through other vectors than accepted academic routes.
I find that amazing.
H P B got things wrong, mainly, but in areas, she was more correct than authorities, if they are aware of recent discoveries, would care to admit.
Absent knowledge of those discoveries, condemnation may be wrong.
In any event, H P B is a side issue to the main one of your blog. – - The totality of evidence.
Now I will remain silent too.
James legal evidence is not the same as historical evidence. I am not charged as a historian to find out things beyond reasonable doubt as a jury is. (Incidentally I’m not sure that there is a science which can tell you how a jury reasons about fact- judges only reason about the law but not about the fact of the case).
On the historiography of the gospels- I think it is probably much more complicated than one small article or comment can attest. Firstly the gospels are not even if you accept your date of 70 the earliest writings about Christ that we have, those are the letters from Paul. Secondly the gospels contain material that most Christians including I would guess though I do not know yourself do not believe in but believe is theological and not historical. Thirdly they refer to events that did not happen- like for example the census of Caesar Augustus. Fourthly some parts of the gospels were added after the event and the earliest texts of the gospels do not include those parts so you have to separate the old from the new if your aim is an accurate historical account. Of course that may not have been what the gospel writers were interested in. Fifthly some of our concepts may not fit with the concepts used by the gospel writers- so for example there is no word for resurrection in the Greek bible (the language the bible was written in)- the word is awakening.
All I’m saying before my words say more than I want them to say is that the gospels historicity and which parts are historical will take more than 1, 2 or 3 blogposts, however good, to decide. You have not proved that on this blog because the questions are so emmense and involve issues like the type of Greek used, quotations etc. You might be right but you’d need to write a book, learn Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and use the earliest texts to establish your argument.
I have never tried to prove, merely to disprove those who say it is not possible and that there is no evidence. If you’d read those six pieces, you’d know that that’s all I did. Even in this post I said that I’m not a creationist and gave the reason why. I’ve consistently maintained this position.
There is evidence. A considerable amount, despite the attempts of revisionists to bury it. Robinson, for one, deserves a medal.
With all due respect – rubbish. That is a modern humanist nicety to try to separate theological from historical – it’s the same old argument of attempting to choose certain writings they don’t like and make out their unreliability and take other ones and favour them as “historical”. They all bear on the same topic and as Robinson showed, there’s no good case for claiming a late Mark – it does not accord with the cumulative weight of scholarship.
It’s the Bultmann school of exegesis which turns completely for its acceptance on the denial of historicity by attempting to redefine historicity. Thisis what happens with socialism – recosntruct fundamental notions and assign to them faux academic standing which becomes, in a generation or two the accepted academic dogma.
This is the spin which the postmodern atheist and the enlightenment humanist constantly try to peddle and must establish first in order to tear down the gospels because in the gospels are some dangerous ideas.
Read Robinson.
Nelson Glueck, Jewish archeologist wrote, “It may be stated categorically that no archeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference.” He continues to assert “the almost incredibly accurate historical memory of the Bible, and particularly so when it is fortified by archeological fact.” Almost all of the major cities and major places named in the gospels have been confirmed through archeological finds. Jerusalem and parts of the temple can be visited today. Also, specific places like the Pool of Bethesda (John 5:2) and the Pool of Siloam (John 9:7) have been found.
Furthermore, circumstances and details of events like the census mentioned in Luke 2 can be validated using archeological findings. Parchments found in Egypt show that the ceasars did require census taking through-out their empire. Also, just as Luke records Mary and Joseph returning to Joseph’s hometown of Bethlehem, there is explicit evidence of the practice of requiring each householder to return to their original home. And there are records that show that around the time of Jesus’ birth there was a census and governor named Quirinius, as Luke says.
The arguments detractors use incude objecting that the Gospel authors nowhere name themselves in their texts — and this is a very common point to be made, even among traditionalists — then this applies equally to numerous other ancient documents, such as Tacitus’ Annals. Authorial attributions are found not in the text proper, but in titles, just like the Gospels.
Critics may claim that these were added later to the Gospels, but they need to provide textual evidence of this (i.e., an obvious copy of Matthew with no title attribution to Matthew, and dated earlier or early enough to suggest that it was not simply a late, accidental ommission), and at any rate, why is it not supposed that the titles were added later to the secular works as well?
The Annals were probably “published” in 116, the last of the works of Tacitus to appear. Only Pliny of Tacitus’ contemporaries mentions him, and his writings and the evidence of subsequent use up to the time of Boccaccio is slight. It is not true, however, that Tacitus and his writings were practically unknown. They were neglected possibly, in part at least, because of his strong republican bias on the one hand and because, on the other, the church fathers felt him to be unfair to Christianity.
Vopiscus in his life of the emperor Tacitus (chapter 10) indicates the state of affairs in the third century: “Cornelium Tacitum, scriptorem historiae Augustae, quod parentem suum eundem diceret, in omnibus bibliothecis conlocari iussit neve lectorum incuria deperiret, librum per an-nos singulos decies scribi publicitus evicos archiis iussit et in bibliothecis poni” (the text is obviously corrupt in the reading evicos archiis).
Nevertheless, Tacitus is mentioned or quoted in each century down to and including the sixth. In fact, the seventh and eighth are the only centuries that have as yet furnished no evidence of knowing him. The following are the known references to Tacitus or use of Tacitean material after the day of Tacitus and Pliny until the time of Boccaccio. The material was well collected in 1888 and published at Wetzler by Emmerich Cornelius, but a considerable amount of new material has turned up from time to time since.
About the middle of the second century Ptolemy published his Gewgrafikh& ‘Ufh&ghsij. In 2. 11. 12 (ed. C. Muller, Paris, 1883) he lists in succession along the northern shore of Germany the towns of Flhou&m, and Siatouta&nda. The latter name occurs nowhere else and has a dubious sound. The explanation is to be found in Tacitus, Ann. 4. 72, 73: “Rapti qui tributo aderant milites et patibulo adfixi; Olennius infensos fuga prae-venit, receptus castello, cui nomen Flevum; et haud spernenda illic civium sociorumque manus litora Oceani praesidebat.” The governor of lower Germany takes prompt action, the account of which winds up: “utrumque exercitum Rheno devectum Frisiis intulit, soluto iam castelli obsidio et ad sua tutanda degressis rebellibus.”
The source of Ptolemy’s mistake is obvious.
Note here that Ptolemy’s obvious use of Tacitus is taken as a signal of the Annals existing. This is in stark contrast to how quotes in patristic writers from the Gospels are excused asway as “floating, independent tradition” rather than evidence of the Gospels. Note as well that Ptolemy does not name Tacitus. We still do not have an attribution of authorship to work with some 40-50 years after the writing.
It is hard to believe that Cassius Dio (who published shortly after A.D. 200) did not know at least the Agricola. In 38. 50 and 66. 20 he mentions Gnaeus Julius Agricola as having proved Britain to be an island and in the later instance tells the story of the fugitive Usipi. If we make allowance for the method of Tacitus, which leaves his account far from clear, and for the use of a different language by Dio, there can be little if any doubt that Tacitus is the source for Dio. We know also of no other possible source today. The last part of the section, dealing with Agricola’s return and death, confirms the conclusion that Dio drew from Tacitus, and it sounds as though Tacitus had left the impression he desired.
Notice we still do not have an attribution, and we are now 80 and more years past the publication of these works by Tacitus. We are already at or past the number of years Papias was from the Gospels.
One could go on and on. The simple fact of the matter is that one is a feted source [read officially approved by the status quo of the day] and the other is the work of a burgeoning movement which the Romans were having trouble controlling, labeled a sect and persecuted. Therefore, like Richard III’s version of events not addressed until Josephine Tey, the detested “sect’s” writings were not granted the status of “historicity”.
This is ony a blog and we can’t fully address this matter here – it would take a one week symposium to get through all the evidence.
And there’s that words again – evidence.
[...] the post on admissibility, in comments, I presented an analysis of Tacitus and how the very things the humanists accuse the [...]