Thursday, August 15, 2019

Craig Keener on Ancient Sources that are no Longer Extant


In his very informative new book, Christobiography, Craig Keener wrote the following about the thousands of lost manuscripts in the first century:

The limited extant first-century sources available today should not be used to judge what sources ancient writers typically had available. Ancient authors obviously had access to many sources that are no longer extant (cf. the many contemporary histories of Nero noted in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.154; the forty-four volumes of Pompeius Trogus extant only in epitomized form [see Justin, Epitome pref. 4]. C. 700 volumes of Chrysippus [Suetonius, Life of Aulus Persius Flaccuus 7]). For example, Pliny the Elder, while explaining that he could not survey everything (Pliny, Natural History pref. 18), notes that he surveyed about two thousand volumes and supplemented them with other data. He complains that many of these sources plagiarized others without crediting them (Pliny, Natural History, pref. 17). Other cases were not plagiarism but deliberate literary referents to classic works. Other cases were not plagiarism but deliberate literary referents to classic works, for those ingenious enough to catch them. Seneca’s secretaries recorded the philosopher’s dying words, which Tacitus decides not to report because, he claims, they remained too well-known in hi day to merit repetition in his work (Tacitus, Annals 15.63). Tactius normally follows annals and earlier histories (sometimes specified only when they became notorious) (E.g., Tacius, Annals 4.34-35), but also consulted personal memoirs perhaps half a century earlier (Tacitus, Annals 4.53). (Craig S. Keener, Christobiography: Memory, History, and Reliability of the Gospels [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2019], 215-16)

This should caution LDS critics, as it shows that, just because a text is, at least at this moment, in time lost (e.g., the writings of Zenos and Zenock, two prophets mentioned in the volume) does not mean, ipso facto, such texts never existed.