Chapter 8: good sources, bad sources. To find out what the practices or course of performance was of the New Testament churches, your first inclination may be to grab your trusty commentary or Bible encyclopedia, but that's the wrong place to go. I learned that not from seminary, but from law school and law practice. That might sound strange, but law school and law practice indelibly impressed on me the need to always go to the primary sources when searching for truth about any subject.
Primary sources are the original sources from which other material is derived. To go to the primary sources is to go straight to the horse's mouth. To illustrate, the primary sources for the teachings of John Wesley are the actual writings and sermons of John Wesley. If you want to be absolutely certain about what John Wesley taught, you must go to his actual writings and sermons. Now, if someone were to read those writings and sermons and then write a book about them, his or her book would be a secondary source.
A secondary source is derived from one or more primary sources. At first glance, it might seem that using secondary sources is the best approach. Why go through the trouble of reading all of John Wesley's writings and sermons when someone else has already done the work for you? That's the way I used to reason before law school. First subheading: The Problem with Secondary Sources. All of us beginning law students were required to take a course on legal research.
The class was taught by a young professor named Frank Newton. He was an intellectual giant whose mind was often way ahead of ours. As part of this course, Professor Newton took us to the law school library and helped us become familiar with all of the source material available to attorneys. He showed us the primary sources: statute books and case reporters, that is, collections of court decisions. Then he showed us the secondary sources: legal encyclopedias, textbooks, and treatises.
He emphasized that we should never rely on these secondary sources. "Never stop until you have gone to the primary sources," he told us. He went on to explain that secondary sources are mainly a way to find the actual court decisions and statutes.
For example, if an attorney wants to know what the law is concerning animal pets, he or she will probably begin by looking in the legal encyclopedia under "Animals." The article he or she finds there will explain the law about pets and will cite the pertinent statutes and court decisions. However, the attorney can't stop there. Rather, he or she must then go and read all the actual statutes and court decisions cited.
Finally, the attorney will then find and read all other court cases that have ever cited those statutes or decisions. Well, as a new law student, it seemed to me that this lengthy procedure was simply busy work. After all, the articles written in the legal encyclopedias were written by attorneys and law professors. Surely they knew what the law was, I thought to myself. Why reinvent the wheel? Why duplicate the research that someone else has already done?
It wasn't very long after I graduated from law school that the wisdom of the professor's counsel was poignantly brought home to me. A dispute had arisen over the ownership of some property, and I wasn't sure what the law was in that particular case. It was late Friday afternoon, so I quickly looked through one of the legal encyclopedias to find out what the law was. To my consternation, the information in the encyclopedia indicated that the law was squarely against my client. If we went to court, we would lose.
I started to call my client and tell him the bad news, but as it was late in the day, I decided to wait until the next week. Over the weekend, I thought about Professor Newton's words and decided that I really should read the court decisions cited. So on Monday, I went back and read the actual court cases that the encyclopedia had cited. To my utter amazement and elation, I found that the law was just the opposite of what the legal encyclopedia had said. The law was solidly on our side.
I was quite baffled as to how the attorney who wrote the encyclopedia article could have missed the boat by so much. The key court decision was not at all difficult to understand. I have since learned from other attorneys that my experience was by no means unique. Legal encyclopedias are full of errors. For that reason, probably no judge would even consider a legal brief in which the attorney cited as his only source of authority an article from a legal encyclopedia or other secondary source.
I can assure you that the errors in legal encyclopedias are not there because the lawyers writing the articles were prejudiced or were deliberately trying to mislead their readers. The lawyers writing the articles do not care what the law is on a particular subject. Their only goal is to accurately and objectively report the law as it stands. Yet they still make mistakes because they are human. Next subheading: From Bad to Worse.
Now, if legal secondary sources cannot be relied upon, how much less so can religious secondary sources? Not only is there the same margin for accidental error, but also there is the compounded problem of preconceived theological viewpoints. A person does not get to a position where he is asked to write articles for Bible encyclopedias or commentaries without having gone through an enormous amount of seminary or university indoctrination first.
The Christian reference book writer is not a person with a blank slate who is independently seeking God's truth. Instead, he normally has some type of theological or intellectual orthodoxy that he must adhere to if he expects his work to be accepted. Even if the writer were historically objective and spiritually honest, he still would have an editor and a publishing house over him. And editors and publishing houses have some very definite prior convictions and publishing policies.
They will not normally print something that contradicts their stated positions. The problem is further compounded by the fact that most commentaries, study Bibles, Bible dictionaries, church history books, and other Christian reference works are not, strictly speaking, secondary sources. Remember, our definition of a secondary source is one that is derived from one or more primary sources.
Most books that purport to give historical information about the church in the first and second centuries are based not on primary sources, but on someone else's books. I refer to them as tertiary sources. Tertiary meaning third. In other words, the writer has no firsthand knowledge of what he is discussing. He is simply relying upon the research of others, and he compounds their prejudices and errors.
Brief footnote: In a loose sense, all derivative books are often spoken of as secondary sources, even though technically they may actually only be tertiary or quaternary sources. Tertiary sources are the equivalent of what we refer to as hearsay in the legal world. Basically speaking, hearsay is evidence that does not come from a person's own firsthand knowledge. For example, someone may tell me that her neighbor gets drunk every night.
Now, if I have never personally seen her neighbor drunk, my information is hearsay. It would not normally be admissible in a court of law. When we rely upon tertiary source material, we are essentially relying upon hearsay. And hearsay is never a very good basis for discovering truth. Actually, most Christian source books, commentaries, and reference works do not even qualify in my book as tertiary sources. That's because they are not even based upon secondary sources.
Rather, the writer is relying on other tertiary sources. I refer to them as quaternary sources. Quaternary meaning fourth. In other words, the author himself has never read any primary sources or even secondary sources. Instead, he has only read what other people have said, who themselves have never read any of the original sources. Although the author is very far removed from the actual sources of authority, he writes as though he knows what he is talking about, and people accept his word without question.
Particularly if he is a PhD or a PhD after his name. The sad result is that the sheer conjecture of some seminary professor is repeated in dozens of books by various authors who have no way of evaluating the accuracy of his conjecture. So pretty soon what is nothing more than fanciful speculation or biased invention takes on the ring of truth because so many people are saying it. Let me give you an illustration of what I'm talking about.
I've mentioned that one of the popular understandings today of 1 Corinthians 11 is that this was simply a first-century cultural problem. Paul gave his instruction about head covering because prostitutes didn't wear head coverings. And if the Christian women weren't veiled, they would be thought of as prostitutes. I've heard that explanation dozens of times. Yet it is not based on any historical evidence whatsoever from the writings of the early church. It is someone's sheer conjecture.
Yet it is more readily believed than is the actual light that the primary sources shed on this subject. Principle number six: To find the truth about historic Christianity, you must go to the primary sources. But I think we've talked long enough about unreliable source material. Let's now look at what we can go to to find out what the course of performance was of the New Testament Corinthian congregation and of the other New Testament churches.