1) Why did I leave out the Petrine and Johanine epistles?
Because, regardless of their authorship, they say very little
about the life of Jesus, which was the subject of the original question.
2) Why aren't the dates of the manuscript evidence important?
The dates of the mss are very important, if what you're trying
to do is reconstruct exactly what the original text said. They're also
important if you have some reason to think that the contents of the
text has been significantly altered (as opposed to the minor changes
that normally occur in copying mss), which can occur either because
the tranmission was so bad that parts of the text are lost, or because
someone decided to rewrite parts of it. The former is clearly not the
case where Plato and Xenophon are concerned, and there is no internal
evidence (as far as I know -- you'd have to check with a classicist to
get more reliable information) for deliberate changes in their texts
where Socrates' life is concerned (nor can I think of any motivation for
a copyist to have made such changes). By the way, probably the best
place to look for details about the transmission of the NT are the two
books (with the same title) _The Text of the New Testament_, one by
Bruce Metzger and the other by Kurt and [whatever his wife's name is --
Barbara?] Aland.
3) Why did I leave out the gospels?
Good question. The gospels are certainly the main source for
information about the life of Jesus. I wasn't primarily answering the
original question in my previous message, however -- partly because I
don't know how to quantify the comparison (is the Parable of the Sower
worth more in weighing whom we know more about than the fact that
Socrates was ugly and had a nagging wife, or less?), and partly
because I don't know Plato and Xenophon well enough to really do the
comparison. I was primarily trying to address the question of which
figure had closer historical sources available for him. Paul is a
closer identifiable sourece (which does not mean a more detailed
source, and need not mean a more accurate source) than the gospels.
Three of the gospels are anonymous; one of them (Luke) explicitly
claims to have used earlier sources, and none of the three make any
claim to being eye-witness accounts. They may include second-hand
(possibly even first-hand) material, but we simply do not know enough
about their sources to know. John is a more interesting case. The
gospel does claim the authority of an eyewitness, but in the same
breath provides a validation of that claim by the author(s), who seem
not to be the same person. The relationship between the witness and
the final written form of the gospel is simply not clear. We don't
know when the book was written, and only by a chain of inference do
we even know the name of the witness.
Paul, on the other hand, provides plenty of information about who
he was, and when he was writing; he also names (some of) the witnesses
he talked to. And with Plato and Xenophon, we *do* have explicitly
eyewitness accounts (Plato, for example, says he was present for the
trial of Socrates (described in the _Apology_) but not for the death
of Socrates (described in the _Crito_)), and we know independently who
the authors were.
4) Why are we talking about this on the ASA mailing list?
Beats me. I'll be happy to stop doing so, if others think that's
more appropriate.
Steve Schaffner sschaff@slac.stanford.edu
Opinions expressed may be mine, and may not be those of SLAC, Stanford
University, or the DOE.
Pete Rose on Bart Giamatti:
"He's an intellectual from Yale, but he's very intelligent."