Proofs and Refutations in Historical Jesus Research – Part 2
When we map Imre Lakatos’s four strategies onto the high-stakes battlefield of Gospel scholarship, we can see exactly why NT scholars and historical-Jesus researchers rarely change their minds.
Because the text of the Gospels is ancient, complex, and open to interpretation, it provides the perfect raw material for academics to build a "Protective Belt" around their core theories.
In these posts, I will illustrate how historians deploy the four basic Lakatosian strategies to defend their views against troublesome textual data:
Because the text of the Gospels is ancient, complex, and open to interpretation, it provides the perfect raw material for academics to build a "Protective Belt" around their core theories.
The Ultra-Literary Camp: Robyn Faith Walsh and Ian Mills
• The Hard Core: The Gospels are not folk products born out of oral tradition or religious "communities"; they are deliberate, highly sophisticated Greco-Roman literary compositions crafted by educated elite desk-editors.
• The Anomaly: The clunky, unpolished, non-literary Aramaic linguistic "gems" embedded in the Greek text of Mark (e.g., Talitha koum, Ephphatha, Abba), alongside seemingly raw, disjointed narrative segments (pericopes). These look exactly like fragments of oral storytelling caught mid-stream.
The Lakatosian Defence (Monster-Adjusting / Exception-Barring):
Robyn Faith Walsh utilizes monster-adjusting. She argues that these Aramaic phrases are not passive carryovers from an oral community. Instead, they are highly intentional literary devices called mimesis or "local colour". Elite Roman authors frequently dropped foreign, exotic words into their text to make the setting feel authentic to the reader.
Ian Mills handles the disjointed narrative variations by framing them through the Hellenistic concept of a "hypothesis"—arguing that ancient readers and writers expected stories to be multi-layered riffs on a common plot core, completely detaching the variations from any alleged oral folk tradition.
An example:
When an outsider reads a Gospel text and encounters a raw Aramaic phrase like Talitha koum ("Little girl, get up") or Abba, or notices that a story reads like a choppy, disjointed anecdote, our natural intuition screams oral history. It looks exactly like a fragment of spoken memory that was caught mid-stream and awkwardly translated into Greek.
When Walsh and Mills counter this by arguing that these phrases are actually highly sophisticated literary devices (mimesis) designed by elite desk editors to create "local colour," it feels like an academic parlour trick. It sounds like they are saying: "Yes, it looks exactly like oral tradition, but that's just because the elite writers were so brilliant at faking it." To an outsider, that feels like a classic, un-falsifiable case of special pleading.
Over-Reliance on Ad-Hoc Adjustments
A Lakatosian critic would point out that Walsh and Mills have chosen a "Hard Core" thesis that is incredibly rigid: The Gospels are purely the products of elite literary culture, completely detached from communal oral folk memory.
Because that hard core is so absolute, any trace of oral texture becomes a lethal threat. To save their theory, they are forced to use "Monster-Adjusting" on a massive scale. They have to redefine raw, clumsy, bilingual blunders as high-brow literary art. A Lakatosian critic would warn that when your protective belt requires you to constantly explain away the most obvious, natural reading of the data by inventing hyper-intellectualized, invisible motives for the authors, your research program is losing its explanatory power.
Lakatos argued that a good theory should possess "heuristic power"—it should naturally explain the data without straining.
To a Lakatosian critic, the oral-memory model (championed by James D.G. Dunn) has a much more highly progressive heuristic: it easily explains why the Gospels are messy, why they contradict each other on minor details, and why they contain raw Aramaic. The data fits the model like a glove. Although as we will see, that also has its problems.
By contrast, the Walsh/Mills model requires an immense amount of intellectual heavy lifting just to get back to the starting line. It fails to elegantly predict the raw, unpolished nature of the text. If the authors were truly elite Greco-Roman literary masters operating at the level of Plutarch or Virgil, why is their Greek often so clunky and stylistically mediocre? Having to argue that elite writers deliberately wrote in awkward, localized styles to trick their audience is a classic sign of a Lakatosian protective belt that has grown too bloated to be believable.
A Lakatosian critic wouldn't necessarily say Walsh and Mills are wrong, after all, Lakatos proved that even degenerating theories can sometimes experience a sudden breakthrough and become progressive again.
However, the critic would say that their current defences feel like poor special pleading because the burden of proof has crushed them. By refusing to allow even a fraction of oral folk memory into their model, they have trapped themselves in a corner where they must continually claim that what looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck is actually a highly sophisticated mechanical robot built by an elite classical engineer to simulate a duck.
Next blog on the subject – N.T. Wright
When we map Imre Lakatos’s four strategies onto the high-stakes battlefield of Gospel scholarship, we can see exactly why NT scholars and historical-Jesus researchers rarely change their minds.
Because the text of the Gospels is ancient, complex, and open to interpretation, it provides the perfect raw material for academics to build a "Protective Belt" around their core theories.
In these posts, I will illustrate how historians deploy the four basic Lakatosian strategies to defend their views against troublesome textual data:
Because the text of the Gospels is ancient, complex, and open to interpretation, it provides the perfect raw material for academics to build a "Protective Belt" around their core theories.
The Ultra-Literary Camp: Robyn Faith Walsh and Ian Mills
• The Hard Core: The Gospels are not folk products born out of oral tradition or religious "communities"; they are deliberate, highly sophisticated Greco-Roman literary compositions crafted by educated elite desk-editors.
• The Anomaly: The clunky, unpolished, non-literary Aramaic linguistic "gems" embedded in the Greek text of Mark (e.g., Talitha koum, Ephphatha, Abba), alongside seemingly raw, disjointed narrative segments (pericopes). These look exactly like fragments of oral storytelling caught mid-stream.
The Lakatosian Defence (Monster-Adjusting / Exception-Barring):
Robyn Faith Walsh utilizes monster-adjusting. She argues that these Aramaic phrases are not passive carryovers from an oral community. Instead, they are highly intentional literary devices called mimesis or "local colour". Elite Roman authors frequently dropped foreign, exotic words into their text to make the setting feel authentic to the reader.
Ian Mills handles the disjointed narrative variations by framing them through the Hellenistic concept of a "hypothesis"—arguing that ancient readers and writers expected stories to be multi-layered riffs on a common plot core, completely detaching the variations from any alleged oral folk tradition.
An example:
When an outsider reads a Gospel text and encounters a raw Aramaic phrase like Talitha koum ("Little girl, get up") or Abba, or notices that a story reads like a choppy, disjointed anecdote, our natural intuition screams oral history. It looks exactly like a fragment of spoken memory that was caught mid-stream and awkwardly translated into Greek.
When Walsh and Mills counter this by arguing that these phrases are actually highly sophisticated literary devices (mimesis) designed by elite desk editors to create "local colour," it feels like an academic parlour trick. It sounds like they are saying: "Yes, it looks exactly like oral tradition, but that's just because the elite writers were so brilliant at faking it." To an outsider, that feels like a classic, un-falsifiable case of special pleading.
Over-Reliance on Ad-Hoc Adjustments
A Lakatosian critic would point out that Walsh and Mills have chosen a "Hard Core" thesis that is incredibly rigid: The Gospels are purely the products of elite literary culture, completely detached from communal oral folk memory.
Because that hard core is so absolute, any trace of oral texture becomes a lethal threat. To save their theory, they are forced to use "Monster-Adjusting" on a massive scale. They have to redefine raw, clumsy, bilingual blunders as high-brow literary art. A Lakatosian critic would warn that when your protective belt requires you to constantly explain away the most obvious, natural reading of the data by inventing hyper-intellectualized, invisible motives for the authors, your research program is losing its explanatory power.
Lakatos argued that a good theory should possess "heuristic power"—it should naturally explain the data without straining.
To a Lakatosian critic, the oral-memory model (championed by James D.G. Dunn) has a much more highly progressive heuristic: it easily explains why the Gospels are messy, why they contradict each other on minor details, and why they contain raw Aramaic. The data fits the model like a glove. Although as we will see, that also has its problems.
By contrast, the Walsh/Mills model requires an immense amount of intellectual heavy lifting just to get back to the starting line. It fails to elegantly predict the raw, unpolished nature of the text. If the authors were truly elite Greco-Roman literary masters operating at the level of Plutarch or Virgil, why is their Greek often so clunky and stylistically mediocre? Having to argue that elite writers deliberately wrote in awkward, localized styles to trick their audience is a classic sign of a Lakatosian protective belt that has grown too bloated to be believable.
A Lakatosian critic wouldn't necessarily say Walsh and Mills are wrong, after all, Lakatos proved that even degenerating theories can sometimes experience a sudden breakthrough and become progressive again.
However, the critic would say that their current defences feel like poor special pleading because the burden of proof has crushed them. By refusing to allow even a fraction of oral folk memory into their model, they have trapped themselves in a corner where they must continually claim that what looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck is actually a highly sophisticated mechanical robot built by an elite classical engineer to simulate a duck.
Next blog on the subject – N.T. Wright
This will be published next Monday
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