C.S. Lewis on Textual Criticism!

[Nazaroo]

The following is an excerpt from "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism", by C.S. Lewis.

It is so typically C. S. Lewis, shining enlightenment where there was previously dullness and depression, we felt compelled to share it with you:

"The undermining of the old orthodoxy has been mainly the work of 'divines' engaged in New Testament criticism. The authority of experts in that discipline is the authority in deference to whom we are asked to give up a huge mass of beliefs shared in common by the early Church, the Fathers, the Middle Ages, the Reformers, and even the 19th century. I want to explain what it is that makes me skeptical about this authority. Ignorantly skeptical, as you will all to easily see. But the skepticism is the father of the ignorance! It is hard to persevere in a close study when you can work up no prima facie confidence in your teachers.

First then, whatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack any literary judgment, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading. It sounds a strange charge to bring against men who have benn steeped in these books all their lives. But that might be just the trouble. A man who has spent his youth and manhood in the minute study of the NT texts and of other people's studies of them, whose literary experiences of those texts lacks any standard of comparison such as can only grow from a wide and deep and genial experience of literature in general, is, I should think, very likely to miss the obvious things about them. If he tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour; no how many years he has spent on that Gospel. But I had better turn to examples.


Example A:

In what is already an old commentary I read that the 4th Gospel is regarded by one school as a 'spiritual romance', 'a poem not a history', to be judged by the same canons as Nathan's parable, the Book of Jonah, Paradist Lost, or, more exactly, Pilgrim's Progress. After a man has said that, why need one attend to anything else he says about any book in the world?

Note that he regards Pilgrim's Progress, a story which professes to be a dream and flaunts its allegorical nature by every single proper name it uses, as the closest parallel. Note that the whole epic panoply of Milton goes for nothing. But even if we leave out the grosser absurdities and keep to Jonah, the insensitiveness is crass - Jonah, a tale with as few even pretended historical attachments as Job, grotesque in incident and surely not without a distinct, though of course edifying, vein of typically Jewish humour. Then turn to John. Read the dialogues: that with the Samaritan woman at the well, or that which follows the healing of the man born blind. Look at its pictures: Jesus (if I may use the word) doodling with his finger in the dust; the unforgettable "And it was Night..." (13:30).

I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage - though it may no doubt contain errors - pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the 2nd century, without known predecessors, or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn't see this has simply not learned to read."

 

[Nazaroo]

To continue with C.S. Lewis' Observations:

"Example B:

From Bultmann: 'The personality of Jesus has no importance for the kerygma either of Paul or of John...Indeed the tradition of the earliest Church did not even unconsciously preserve a picture of his personality. Every attempt to reconstruct one remains a play of subjective imagination.'

So there is no personality of Our Lord presented in the New Testament. Through what strange process has this learned German gone in order to make himself blind to what all men except him see? What evidence have we that he would recognize a personality if it were there? For it is Bultmann contra mundum [against the world!]. If anything whatever is common to all believers, and even to many unbelievers, it is the sense that in the Gospels they have met a personality. There are characters whom we know to be historical but of whom we do not feel that we have any personal knowledge - knowledge by acquaintance; such are Alexander, Attila, or William of Orange. There are others who make no claim to historical reality but whom, none the less, we know as we know real people: Falstaff, Uncle Toby, Mr. Pickwick. But there are only three characters who, claiming the first sort of reality, also actualy have the second. And surely everyone knows who they are: Plato's Socrates, the Jesus of the Gospels, and Boswell's Johnson. Our acquaintance with them shows itself in a dozen ways. When we look into the Apocryphal gospels, we find ourselves constantly saying of this or that logion, 'No. Its a fine saying, but not His. That wasn't how he talked.' - just as we do with all pseudo-Johnsoniana.

So strong is the flavour of the personality that, even while He says things which, on any other assumption than that of Divine Incarnation in the fullest sense, would be appallingly arrogant, yet we - and many unbelievers too - accept Him at His own valuation when He says, 'I am meek and lowly of heart.' Even those passages in the NT which superficially, and in intention, are most concerned with the Divine, and least with the Human nature, bring us face to face with the personality. I am not sure thay they don't do this more than others. 'We beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of graciousness and reality...which we have looked upon and our hands have handled.' What is gained by trying to evade or dissipate this shattering immediacy of personal contact by talk about 'that significance which the early church found that it was impelled to attribute to the Master'? This hits us in the face. Not what they were impelled to do but what impelled them. I begin to fear that by 'personality' Dr. Bultmann means what I should call impersonality: what you'd get in a D.N.B. article or an obituary of a Victorian 'Life and Letters of Yeshua Bar-Yosef' in three volumes with photographs!

That then is my first bleat.
These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight."

 

[Nazaroo]

"Now for my second bleat.

All theology of the liberal type involves at some point - and often involves throughout - the claim that the 'real' behaviour and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by His followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars.

Now long before I became interested in theology I had met this kind of theory elsewhere. The tradition of Jowett still dominated the study of ancient philosophy when I was reading Greats. One was brought up to believe that the real meaning of Plato had been misunderstood by Aristotle and wildly travestied by the neo-Platonists, only to be recovered by the moderns. When recovered, it turned out (most fortunately) that Plato had really all along been an English Hegelian, rather like T. H. Green.

I have met it a third time in my own professional studies; every week a clever undergraduate, every quarter a dull American don, discovers for the first time what some Shakespearian play really meant. But in this third instance I am a priviledged person! The revolution in thought and sentiment which has occurred in my own lifetime is so great that I belong, mentally to Shakespeare's world far more than to that of these recent interpreters. I see - I feel it in my bones - I know beyond argument - that most of their interpretations are merely impossible; they involve a way of looking at things which was not known in 1914, much less in the Jacobean period. This daily confirms my suspicion of the same approach to Plato or the New Testament.

The idea that any man or writer should be opaque to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous. There is an a priori improbability in it which almost no argument and no evidence could counterbalance.

..."

 

[Nazaroo]

"But my fourth bleat - which is also my loudest and longest - is still to come.

All this sort of criticism attempts to reconstruct the genesis of the texts it studies; what vanished documents each author used, when and where he wrote, with what purposes, under what influences - the whole Sitz im Leben of the text. This is done with immense erudition and great ingenuity. And at first sight it is very convincing. I think I should be convinced by it myself, but that I carry about with me a charm - the herb moly - against it. You must excuse me if I now speak for a while of myself. The value of what I say depends on its being first-hand evidence.

What forearms me against all these Reconstructions is the fact that I have seen it all from the other end of the stick. I have watched reviewers reconstructing the genesis of my own books in just this way.

Until you come to be reviewed yourself you would never believe how little of an ordinary review is taken up by criticism in the strict sense: by evaluation, praise, or censure, of the book actually written. Most of it is taken up with imaginary histories of the process by which you wrote it. The very terms which the reviewers use in praising or dispraising often imply such a history. They praise a passage as 'spontaneous' and censure another as 'laboured' ; that is, they think they know that you wrote the one currente calamo and the other invita Minerva.

What the value of such reconstructions is I learned early in my career. I had published a book of essays; and the one into which I had put most of my heart, the one I really cared about and in which I discharged a keen enthusiasm, was on William Morris. And in almost the first review I was told that this was obviously the only one in the book in which I had felt no interest. Now don't mistake. The critic was, I now believe, quite right in thinking it the worst essay in the book; at least everyone agreed with him. Where he was totally wrong was in his imaginary history of the causes which produced its dullness.

Well, this made me prick up my ears. Since then I have watched with some care similar imaginary histories both of my own books and of books by friends whose real history I knew. [J.R.R. Tolkien was also one of Lewis' friends.] Reviewers, both friendly and hostile, will dash you off such histories with great confidence; will tell you what public events had directed the author's mind to this or that, what other authors had influenced him, what his over-all intention was, what sort of audience he principally addressed, why - and when - he did everything.

Now I must first record my impression; then, distinct from it, what I can say with certainty. My impression is that in the whole of my experience not one of these guesses has on any one point been right; that the method shows a record of 100 percent failure. You would expect that by mere chance they would hit as often as they miss. But it is my impression that they do no such thing. I can't remember a single hit. But as I have not kept a careful record my mere impression may be mistaken. What I think I can say with certainty is that they are usually wrong. ...

Now this surely ought to give us pause. The reconstruction of the history of a text, when the text is ancient, sounds very convincing. But one is after all sailing by dead reckoning; the results cannot be checked by fact. In order to decide how reliabel the method is, what more could you ask for than to be shown an instance where the same method is at work and we have facts to check it by?

Well, that is what I have done. And we find,that when this check is available, the results are either always, or else nearly always, wrong. The 'assured results of modern scholarship' as to the way in which an old book was written, are 'assured', we may conclude, only because the men who knew the facts are dead and can't blow the gaff. The huge essays in my own field which reconstruct the history of Piers Plowman or The Faerie Queen are most unlikely to be anything but sheer illusions.

Am I then venturing to compare every whipster who writes a review in a modern weekly with these great scholars who have devoted their whole lives to the detailed study of the New Testament? If the former are always wrong, does it follow that the latter must fare no better?

There are two answers to this.

First, while I respect the learning of the great Biblical critics, I am not yet persuaded that their judgement is equally to be respected.

But secondly, consider with what overwhelming advantages the mere reviewers start. THey reconstruct the history of a book written by someone whose mother-tongue is the same as theirs.; a contemporary, educated like themselves, living in something like the same mental and spiritual climate. They have everthing to help them. The superiority in judgement and diligence which you are going to attribute to the Biblical critics will have to be almost superhuman if it is to offset the fact that they are everywhere faced with customs, language, race-characteristics, a religious background, habits of composition, and basic assumptions, which no scholarship will ever enable any man now alive to know as surely and intimately and instinctively as the reviewer can know mine. And for the very same reason, remember, the Biblical critics, whatever reconstructions they devise, can never be crudely proved wrong. St. Mark is dead. When they meet St. Peter there will be more pressing matters to discuss.

You may say of course, that such reviewers are foolish in so far as they guess how a sort of book they never wrote themselves was written by another. They assume that you wrote a story as they would try to write a story; the fact that they would so try, explains why they have not produced any stories. But are the Biblical critics in this way much better off? Dr. Bultmann never wrote a gospel. Has the experience of his learned, specialized, and no doubt meritorious, life really given him any power of seeing into the minds of those long dead men who were caught up into what, on any view, must be regarded as the central religious experience of the whole human race? It is no incivility to say - he himself would admit - that he must in every way be divided from the evangelists by far more formidable barriers - spiritual as well as intellectual - than any that could exist between my reviewers and me."

(Essay from a published collection of Lewis' lectures and articles, "Christian Reflections" , edited by Walter Hooper. )

 

[justified]

First of all, Lewis had a problem with Germans

Secondly, Lewish had a problem sticking his nose just about everywhere, despite his lack of training in a field. Like someone else I know.

Thirdly, it is CS Lewis. Why do we care?

 

[Nazaroo]

First of all, Lewis had a problem with Germans

Who hasn't?

Secondly, Lewish had a problem sticking his nose just about everywhere, despite his lack of training in a field. Like someone else I know.

Yes, we wouldn't want any independant thinking accidentally occurring without 'training' ...(obediance school?)

Thirdly, it is CS Lewis. Why do we care?

Anyone who is hostile to Narnia must have grown up outside the 'normal' childhood experiences. I'm afraid to guess what someone outside normal childhood may have done as a child with insects, frogs or firecrackers.

 

[WAB]

Have read carefully the quotes from Lewis. From the standpoint of one human appraisal of what another human has come up with on his/her own initiative, what Lewis says has merit.

But to then equivocate the Scriptures with what mere men have dreamed/declared is to deny the verbal inspiration of said Scriptures.

If one does not believe the Scriptures to have been inspired (God-breathed) as is so very clearly declared in 2 Timothy 3:16,17... "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work." then anyone's take is of equal value.

Of course the more "sophisticated" one might be in presenting their "take" the more one might have a dedicated following.

 

[Nazaroo]

Well, to be fair, C.S. Lewis was not an extreme fundamentalist, but a very human and well educated Christian. On the fact that Nathan's parable to David was a fiction, and that the Lord taught in parables, I think even most fundamentalists and extreme literalists would agree.

It may become more of a grey area when both parties come to deal with books like Jonah. Don't forget that according to the Law,

"Whatever comes to pass, that is what the Lord has spoken."

was the standard rule for evaluating prophetic claims.

Jonah is the only prophet with the dubious distinction that his prophecy DIDN'T come to pass! (His prophecy was unconditional, while its power was dependant upon repentance, and hence conditional.)

And when we look at Jonah's pathetic and cowardly and unloving (racist?) behaviour, it is easy to admit he wasn't very 'inspired' by the Holy Spirit, even after God's priviledged use of him to accomplish the repentance of a whole nation.

Given all these considerations, it is understandable that many people in Lewis' time viewed the whole book of Jonah as a kind of parable.

I am sure C.S. Lewis believed the book of Jonah was inspired, whatever interpretation he gave it. And that shows the diversity possible among sincere and intelligent believers.

There are similar problems in the New Testament with for instance the parable of Lazarus. Are we to take it as a literal description of Hell and the Afterlife, or as a warning that Pharisee-like doctrines are self-condemning?

 

[FreezBee]

It is so typically C. S. Lewis, shining enlightenment where there was previously dullness and depression, we felt compelled to share it with you:

"...
I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage - though it may no doubt contain errors - pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the 2nd century, without known predecessors, or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn't see this has simply not learned to read."

Not learned to read in the way C.S. Lewis wants people to read, that is

I have never read anything by C.S. Lewis before arouns a week ago, when I started reading "The Abolition of Man" - and I was very disappointed. From the usual glorification of C.S. Lewis, I had expected something of interest. Of course, judging him on the first ca. 50 page of one book is nor reasonably, but this kind of old school Platonistic conservatism is usual a character trait that transcends a person for lifetime. And of course, having been written in 1943, the book was extremely glorifying nationalism and military.

Autumn 2005 I had been writing a very critical paper on a certain Danish pastor with exactly the same attitudes, which of course made things even worse.

To me C.S. Lewis represents everything negative about Christianity - the Platonistic conservatism


- FreezBee

 

[Nazaroo]

To me C.S. Lewis represents everything negative about Christianity - the Platonistic conservatism

Whatever are you doing reading his non-fiction?
Curl up with 'Lion, a Witch, and a Wardrobe' beside the fire,
and pour yourself some 'oinos'.

 

[Dmckay]

Yes, we wouldn't want any independant thinking accidentally occurring without 'training' ...(obediance school?)

So training is a bad thing? If you are diagnosed as having cancer tomorrow, say a brain tumor. Would you ignore it? Would you set up your own treatment? Or maybe you would seek treatment from that guy down the street who just calls himself a doctor?

While the Word of G-d was given by G-d to reveal Himself to us, it was written to a certain people, at a certain time, under diverse conditions and in several languages. You can't approach the interpretation of Scripture in the same manner that Liberals approach the Constitution—as a living evolving document that is forever changing meaning. It has to be interpreted historically, culturally and linguistically, and the means having at least some training.

As far as your information flaming the idea of Textual criticism, first, there is a great deal of difference between "Form Criticism" which gave us the heresies of JEPD and Graf/Wellhausen, and Textual Criticism which seeks to try to pin down the most correct text for translation. I'm not going to rehash the information I have posted several times already on the significance of the variant readings and how little they effect the translation of Scripture. You may be a devotee to CS Lewis, but he doesn't have the training and background to be taken seriously on this topic.

Going back to my analogy of what you would do if you discovered you had cancer. I have a double doctorate, but just because I have some expertise in a few areas doesn't mean that I would be a good one to cut your skull open and treat you for cancer. You would have a better chance of survival by not seeking care.

 

[Nazaroo]

Risk Factors for Cancer

If I die of 'cancer' it is doubtful that it would have been an 'accident', or a 'random' statistical event. There are several very basic key indicators for 'cancer' as I'm sure you know, beginning with alcohol abuse, smoking or exposure to second-hand smoke, and environmental toxins, including industrial (due to lax environmental laws), in foods (due to both the stupidity of eating habits, lifestyles, and ignorance or carelessness regarding nutrition), and food 'additives' (which give 10 year shelf-lives but poison us), pathogens (as in 'cervical cancer' which appears really to be an STD related to herpes), exposure to dangerous radiation and radio-active agents (like the last 40 years of uranium dust created by strip-mining all over North America and processing and unsafe and illegal dumping practices), and finally the obvious: aging and malfunction of key bodily processes and organs.

All that would be just the normal statistical risk factors assuming everyone was honest (and practical jokes that backfire never happen), there were no wars, (throwing around depleted uranium), people didn't create horrible accidents through negligence, (like dumping atrazine into the water-table on corn farms), and nobody took personal revenge for real or imagined slights (like disgruntled employees putting ethylene glycol in the coffee).

Adding all these extra risks, would naturally account for the bulk of 'cancers', except for one more little factor: The systematic covert genocidal practices going on in the dirtiest race wars this planet has ever seen.

And its all about to get a whole lot worse.

Death Count for Microbiologists: Now over 80 murdered or missing

Current Death Count for International Scientists

What does it mean when a large number of the top international MicroBiologists are all killed? These men were all leading experts in Biological Warfare, Vaccines, AIDS and DNA targeting by racial profile.

Let me spell it out: The Military Industrial Complex through the Big International Drug Corporations and Covert Operations teams are planning to wipe out whole populations of ethnic groups, like Arabs, Chinese, and Blacks.

They'll be using vectors like mandatory vaccination programs for Blacks in Africa, food vectors like poultry and beef products and byproducts, and of course the usual dirty tricks as was done in the Legionaire's Disease breakout.


Targeted Cancers:

Now lets talk about other typical causes of 'cancer', like murder, disguised as a 'random' unfortunate medical condition. It is trivial to murder someone when you have resources for surveilance, access to unusual or difficult to trace and quickly degradable toxins and virus samples. When someone is in a high enough position in any corporation, scientific or military research, or even just politics, it is not mere paranoia to take all the precautions possible to protect oneself from enemies: they are certainly real, armed, and dangerous.


I am as much a scientist as you, being a physicist. And I know just how dangerous the military complex is.

You would have a better chance of survival by not seeking care.

This is a truism. I wholeheartedly agree:
There's no need for Christians to rush into the arms of the enemy.


Here's two more on 'Legal' DRUG DEALERS WHO KILL:

Pharmageddon I

Pharmageddon II

 

[Dmckay]

I had wondered where you were coming from since you began posting a couple of months ago. Now I understand it is from the conspiracy fringe groups. Do you also believe that every Israeli soldier carries a baseball-sized atomic bomb in their backpack?

 

[justified]

dude, I want one.

But I've talked and chatted with Israeli soldiers in Israel. And believe me, there's no room for baseballs in the pants of some of those girls...

 

[Dmckay]

dude, I want one.

But I've talked and chatted with Israeli soldiers in Israel. And believe me, there's no room for baseballs in the pants of some of those girls...

Not to mention that it would be physically impossible to make a Nuke the size of a baseball. The shaped charge to force implosion would have to be bigger than that, much less the necessary shielding to keep the radiation from killing the carrier right away.

 

[Nazaroo]

Not to mention that it would be physically impossible to make a Nuke the size of a baseball. The shaped charge to force implosion would have to be bigger than that, much less the necessary shielding to keep the radiation from killing the carrier right away.

You don't need a large size at all.
You don't need efficient fission or fusion to make a very nasty 'dirty bomb' by the way.

 

[Nazaroo]

I had wondered where you were coming from since you began posting a couple of months ago. Now I understand it is from the conspiracy fringe groups. Do you also believe that every Israeli soldier carries a baseball-sized atomic bomb in their backpack?

By the way, direct ad-hominem attacks like this push the envelope of the forum rules.

You:

(1) Associated me in a negative way with 'fringe-groups' and 'conspiracy nuts'.

(2) Suggested I believe some erroneous straw-dog piece of nonsense, which has nothing to do with my post.

Instead, how about acknowledging I am well aware of the issues surrounding cancer, and you may also admit to the damaging evidence of 'modern medicine' and its link with legal drug pushers while you are at it. The latest horrific scandal over 'AIDS' treatment drugs is a classic example of letting the Africans die to protect markets and make a buck.

Surely as a 'doctor' this upsets even you.

 

[Nazaroo]

You may be a devotee to CS Lewis, but he doesn't have the training and background to be taken seriously on this topic.

I'm no devotee of C.S. Lewis. His soft-core porn version of Christianity is too limp-wristed for me.

The reason I posted his article on Textual Criticism is that his points are valid. You dismiss Lewis as an 'outsider', inexpert in Biblicial Criticism. But more serious heavyweights have taken Lewis' arguments even further.

One respected Biblical Archaeologist, one of the founders of the science, responds this way:

...It may be further suggested that the METHOD of the criticism applied to these sacred Books has actually been as unsound as the assumptions, [which Marston has just finished disproving with 200 pages of hard archaeological evidence] for the following reason:

The so-called textual criticism of the Old Testament is an endeavour to extract internal evidence from the sacred text. Such a method, save in very exceptional cases, cannot (even) be applied to contemporary literature.

The leading articles of the Times are the work of various writers, but are doubtless amended by editors and sub-editors. But in this case no textual critics ever pretend to be able to distinguish one writer from another, nor to identify the emendations of the editorial staff.

If methods of textual criticism are powerless to analyse contemporary composition, how can they correctly analyse documents composed more than two thousand years ago, and written in a dead language?

Yet it is the very fact that the documents are so ancient, and the language so old, that seems to be responsible for the superstition that the critics can do so, and to sustain their supreme confidence.

If textual critics would try their hands on The Times, then verification, or otherwise, would immediately follow their conclusions. But the only check that can be readily applied to this O.T. criticism is the plain common-sense meaning of the text and of tradition. When these differ from the critical interpretation, they are described as 'untrustworthy'; and 'unreliable'; 'the insertion of a later writer'; etc.; slanders which could not be brought against The Times staff. So the process proceeds until archaeological discoveries demonstrate some conclusion to be absurd."

(The New Knowledge of the Old Testament, Sir Charles Marston pg 169-170)

 

[justified]

I'm sure you are aware of how inadequate Marston's objections are...

 

[Nazaroo]

As a man who has spent a lifetime disproving the 'assured results' of biblical criticism using a simple pick and shovel, Marston carries a lot of respect when he weighs in on the side of Lewis.

What is wrong with Marston's challenge? The facts could be sealed in an envelope and left in the custody of the JBS, and any critic who wanted to test his skills could enter the contest by analyzing a selected passage of the Times.

I'm not sure what your objections are, but this is how they quite effectively answered the question of the relative value of 'martial arts' schools recently, with the 'no-holds-barred' fighting tournaments called the Ultimate Fighting Championship', held in the 'Octagon'.

I watched the first 20 matches carefully, and it became quite clear that some techniques were worthless in real combat, while others were plainly practical. The competators also took careful note and modified their training continually in subsequent bouts. I suggest the same here. Textual Criticism could be taken to a whole new plane.