Demolishing Triablogue: it's still reasonable to balk at Matthew's writing in the third-person

This is my reply to an article by Jason Engwer of Triablogue entitled

Writing About Yourself In The Third Person

Saturday, June 01, 2013

Critics of the Bible are often ignorant of ancient (and sometimes modern) literary practices that undermine their analysis of the Bible.

Ditto for most Christians.

For example, people will sometimes object to a document like the gospel of Matthew or the gospel of John on the basis that those documents shouldn't speak of Matthew and John in the third person if those men wrote the documents.

Because the third-person shows personal detachment, whereas you expect others to believe Matthew was written by some guy who became "amazingly transformed" by seeing the resurrected Jesus.  Writing in the third person is not an issue unless the author is claimed to have been all happy and excited beyond reason to provide the world his own account of some great miraculous thing.

But as Richard Bauckham explains:
"All of these passages [in the gospel of John] refer to him, of course, in third-person language. This is in accordance with the best and regular historiographic practice. When ancient historians referred to themselves within their narratives as participating in or observing the events they recount, they commonly referred to themselves in the third person by name, as Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Julius Caesar, or Josephus." (Jesus And The Eyewitnesses [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006], 393)

But

a) the fact that the gospels represent a new type of genre might justify the skeptic to say the authors didn't feel compelled to imitate standard practice, and

b) many 1st century historians use the first person, Philo, Josephus.  Bauckham doesn't say most 1st century authors used the third person, he merely says "best and regular historigraphic practice".

c) doesn't matter if you are correct: using the third-person is unexpected under your other Christian assumptions that Matthew was "amazingly transformed" by seeing the resurrected Christ and therefore all happy and giddy to go around giving his personal testimony.  You can avoid this criticism by denying you think that way about Matthew, but then you raise the probability that Matthew wasn't quite as happy about his own experience of Christ as some Christians are today.

d) Jesus expanded the need for two or three witnesses to important events beyond the judicial context of its first appearance in the OT, (Matthew 18:16), so did Paul (2nd Cor. 13:1, 1st Timothy 5:19), so we are reasonable to expect that if the testmony in Matthew's gospel actually was written out by Matthew, he would find it important to make clear to the reader that he is the one doing the testifying.

Years ago, a skeptic told me that the phrase "I, Paul" in some of the Pauline letters was clear evidence that the documents are forgeries. Paul wouldn't have written that way. (See my response to that skeptic here.)

Probably because known forgeries before and after Paul use the same phrase to make the alleged author unmistakably clear, when this is nothing but pseudepigrapha.  See Daniel 8:15, Revelation, 1st Enoch, Infancy gospel of Thomas, Holy Constitutions, etc.  It could also mean Paul was gullible and thought such self-designation was the style of legitimately divine authors, so he chose to imitate it.

But I wouldn't push the point since Jesus' resurrection is abundantly steamrolled by my own arguments, which often allow early dating and apostolic authorship of everything in the NT.  Such as rendering Jesus resurrection irrelevant given that the OT gives Gentiles nothing to fear from god but physical death, and the NT doctrine of eternal conscious torment directly contradicts the OT.  Always use the earlier standard to test the newer standard.  I already accept that I will endure "annihilation" at death, so I'm not seeing how attacking the gospel puts me in any "danger".  If I'm not in "danger", then whether Jesus rose from the dead need never be anything mroe important than a mere intellectually curiosity for people who just naturally like to debate matters of ancient history.

A lot of critics don't make much effort to consult Biblical commentaries or other relevant scholarship.

I do.  It's why the draft of my book on justifying denial of Matthew's resurrection testimony is more than 700 pages long, I've written at least 50,000 pages of book draft (lost in a recent computer malfunction) not including 20 years of posting arguments on the internet.  It's why I constantly answer Triablogue posts in point by point fashion.  Clearly Romans 1:20 is true and I just don't like the idea of being accountable to a sky-daddy.  Yeah, that's it.  Sort of like the idiot Mormon who pontificates that the Triablogue boys are without excuse for rejecting the Book of Mormon.  Empty pontification is quite easy to engage in, and Paul apparently developed it into a science.

They make judgments based largely on their own ignorant impressions and poor reasoning as they read the Bible or other sources without much assistance. The results are often disastrous.

You could just as easily have been talking about Christians.  Nothing in your article tips the probability scale the least bit in the direction of Matthean authorship of the gospel now bearing his name.