The Proverbial Messenger

Reading Is Not Agreement

The tribunal that hunted my forebears kept meticulous records. Citing an enemy’s archive is not the same as trusting his judgement.

The Inquisition kept records.

That is the first thing to understand about it, and the last thing most people expect. The tribunal that hunted my forebears through Spain and Portugal was a bureaucracy before it was a terror, and bureaucracies file. In the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid there survives the governing council’s own paperwork: the authority records, the catalogue of the accused, the names of men and women suspected of continuing the religion and the practices of their fathers. It was assembled as an instrument of destruction. It is now among the better surviving registers of who those people were and where they were living when the doors were broken in.

I have used that archive. I cite it by catalogue reference. And every time I do, I am resting part of an argument on the record-keeping of an institution I regard as one of the great crimes of the Christian centuries.

Someone always asks how I can do both.

The objection, stated properly

The question is fair, and I want to put it at its full strength before I answer it, because the weak version is easy and the strong version is not.

It runs like this. What you read forms you. A man who spends a decade among hostile books does not walk out unchanged; he walks out holding their categories, asking their questions, conceding ground he never noticed conceding. There are people who set out to refute a thing and finished by belonging to it, and they did not experience the change as surrender. They experienced it as growing up. To handle poison daily and expect no effect is not scholarship. It is presumption.

And there is a verse that is used to settle it. When Israel was warned about the nations already in the land, the warning was not merely about their altars. It was about their curiosity.

Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee; and that thou enquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise. — Deuteronomy 12:30

The danger is real, but it is not where the objection places it. I have watched it happen, and not only to strangers. Readers begin by studying an error in order to answer it and end by finding the error more interesting than the answer, the transition so gradual that no single day contains it.

But read that verse again, because it is not saying what it is usually made to say.

The prohibition has a purpose clause attached to it, and the purpose clause is the whole of it. Even so will I do likewise. What is forbidden is not enquiry. What is forbidden is enquiry conducted in order to imitate. The man in that verse is not investigating; he is shopping. He asks how the nations served their gods because he intends to serve his the same way, and the sentence closes on his intention rather than on his reading.

Strip the intention out and the sentence has nothing left to prohibit. That is not a loophole I have prised open. It is the grammar of the verse.

This witness is true

The clearest thing I know on this subject is four words long and sits in a letter from Paul to a younger man he had left behind on Crete.

Paul had a problem with the Cretans. To make the point, he reached for a line that was already proverbial, and he told his reader exactly where he got it.

One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies. This witness is true. — Titus 1:12–13

Consider what is happening in that sentence.

The man being quoted is Epimenides, a Cretan. He is not merely a poet. Paul calls him a prophet of their own — a religious figure of a religion Paul spent his life dismantling, a seer in a tradition Paul held to be false from its foundations. He is a hostile source by every measure that matters. He is quoted anyway, by name and by category, with no apology and no protective throat-clearing.

And then: This witness is true.

Not this man is sound. Not this tradition may be trusted. Not I commend Epimenides to your study. The verdict is passed on the testimony, not on the witness. Paul does not defend the distinction. He treats it as obvious. He assumes his reader will not need it explained that a false prophet can still be right about the moral condition of his own island.

The same instinct runs through the whole of his practice. At Athens, having just announced to a city full of philosophers that he found them too superstitious and having walked past their altar to an unknown god, he built on their own verse: as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring (Acts 17:28). He is standing on Mars’ hill, quoting pagan poetry, in the act of declaring the God of Israel to them.

There is a sharper example still, and it is the one I find hardest to get past. When Paul warned the Corinthians about the company they kept, the warning he chose was this:

Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners. — 1 Corinthians 15:33

That line is not his. It comes from a Greek comedy, from the stage, from precisely the entertainments a careful reader might expect him to condemn. Paul’s warning against corrupting influence is itself an inheritance from a corrupting influence, quoted approvingly, into Scripture.

If the rule were do not take anything from a tainted source, that verse could not exist.

A witness and an authority are not the same thing

Here is the distinction the whole matter turns on, and once it is in hand a great deal of anxiety falls away.

A witness tells you what he saw. An authority tells you what to believe. A man you would not lend money to can still tell you correctly what time the train left. You would check him against the timetable, and you would not hand him your affairs. Both of those are the right response to him at once.

You examine a witness. You do not have to like him, trust his motives, admire his life, or share his religion. You ask what he was in a position to observe, whether he had reason to lie, whether anything he says cuts against his own interest, and whether his account can be checked against something he did not control. His character bears on his credibility. Not his usefulness, nor does it determine the truth of what he happened to see.

An authority is different. An authority you submit to. His conclusions become your starting points, his questions become the questions worth asking, and his sense of what is obvious becomes yours without your ever having agreed to it.

Nearly all the fear I encounter about reading is a fear of the second thing wearing the clothes of the first. People are not really afraid of information. They are afraid of submission, and they have not been given the vocabulary to tell the two apart, so they treat every book as though it were demanding their obedience.

The inquisitor is not my authority. On the question of who those families were and what they were doing, he is the best-placed witness in the room, and he had no motive whatsoever to invent them.

The value of a reluctant mouth

That last clause inverts what most readers assume.

The friendly source is the weak one. A man who already believes what you believe and writes it down has told you nothing you did not have; he has only made you feel less alone. The strong source is the one who gives you something at his own expense, the admission that costs him, the detail that spoils his own case, the aside he did not notice was an aside.

Lawyers have known this for centuries. A statement against interest carries weight precisely because no one makes one carelessly. You know it already in ordinary life. A shopkeeper’s advertisement tells you his goods are excellent and you discount every word of it; the same man telling you one of his lines is poorly made, and you should buy the other, you believe at once, and you believe it because it cost him something to say.

I have written about Philo of Alexandria before, and I cite him for a precise reason: not as an authority over the question, but as a witness to a world he was in a position to observe.

He lived from roughly twenty years before the common era to about fifty years into it, in a city where Israelites lived in enormous numbers among Greeks. He was thoroughly Hellenised. His whole intellectual project was the reconciliation of Greek philosophy with the faith of his fathers, and it shows on every page. He kept a weekly Sabbath himself. That does not diminish the value of what follows; it sharpens it, because the practice he records is not one he is attempting to defend.

And in the course of expounding the fourth commandment he remarks, in passing, that some kept the holy festival only once in the month, counting from the new moon, as a day sacred to God, before turning immediately to say that the nation of the Jews kept every seventh day, after each interval of six days.

Now notice what he has just done, and what he had no reason to do.

He has recorded the existence of a practice he does not follow, does not commend, and does not pause over. He is not building a case for it. He mentions it in passing, without interest, and moves on to the thing he actually cares about. He had no motive to invent it. He had no motive to preserve it. It survives in his text because he was describing a world he could see, and it did not occur to him that anyone would one day be reading him for the half-sentence rather than for the argument.

That is what a witness looks like.

Philo’s value here does not depend upon his agreement with me. Quite the contrary. His significance lies precisely in the fact that he records, incidentally and without advocacy, a monthly sacred observance reckoned from the new moon. He does not need to endorse that practice to establish that such a practice was known in his world.

His sentence does not, by itself, identify the practitioners or settle the larger historical question; it establishes the narrower fact for which I cite him. Anyone who claims he settles more than that has stopped reading him as a witness and started using him as an authority, which is the error I have been describing from the other direction. His reference to some states is somewhat ambiguous; it could be pointing to Israelite observance or another nation’s observance. The material supporting that reading is real: a god honoured on the seventh of every month, with sacrifices recorded at the new moon and on the seventh day. That question must be examined on its evidence. It does not erase the fact that Philo recorded the monthly sacred observance in the first place.

I hold him at exactly his weight: an incidental witness whose usefulness lies in what he records, not in what he endorses.

There is a stronger witness than Philo in this matter, and if I were assembling the case again, I would put him first.

A standard Jewish reference work, setting out the history of the Sabbath, records that the observance was once governed by the lunar cycle, and that the seven-day week only later came loose from its connection to the moon. Consider who is saying that. It is written by people who keep the weekly Sabbath, in a work produced to serve that tradition, and it concedes that the older arrangement answered to the moon. Nobody writes such a sentence carelessly, and nobody writes it because it helps him.

That is the plainest statement against interest in the whole question. It does not require anyone to decide who Philo meant.

Not every source is asked to prove the same thing. A primary historical witness, an encyclopaedia entry, and a later comparative example carry different evidentiary weight because they perform different functions. Scholarship becomes careless when those functions are confused.

A parallel drawn from a religious movement founded in the eighteen-nineties cannot establish what Israelites were doing two thousand years earlier, nor do I cite it for that purpose. Its relevance is comparative: it demonstrates that a sacred day reckoned by the month is a real and recurring pattern of worship among men, not an idea made coherent only by the ancient claim under examination. That is its proper function, and no more is required of it.

What was learned in Egypt

The record settles this three times over.

Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds (Acts 7:22). Not some of it. All of it — the priestly training of the empire that was at that moment holding his people in bondage. Stephen offers this in his defence before the council as a credential, not a confession.

Daniel and the three with him were selected precisely for their capacity to absorb a foreign curriculum. The king wanted children skilful in all wisdom, and cunning in knowledge, and understanding science, whom his officers might teach the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans (Daniel 1:4). They learned it. They learned the language and the literature of Babylonian divination, and then, five verses on: As for these four children, God gave them knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom (Daniel 1:17).

The learning did not disqualify them. It is the same young man who refused the king’s meat and accepted the king’s education, and the book does not treat this as a tension requiring explanation. He drew a line at his table but not at his desk, which tells you where he thought the danger actually lay.

When Israel left Egypt, they did not leave empty-handed. They borrowed from the Egyptians jewels of silver and gold, and raiment, and spoiled the Egyptians (Exodus 12:35–36). The gold came out of the house of bondage and, in time, went into the furnishings of the tabernacle. It also, in the wrong hands, went into a calf. Nothing about the metal determined which.

Where the danger actually lies

There is a danger in reading, but it is not the danger usually alleged. Information does not convert a reader merely by being encountered. The greater danger lies in surrendering the framework through which information is interpreted.

Facts are rarely the most dangerous import. Frameworks are. A hostile source may supply observations worth examining without earning the right to define the enquiry. The danger begins when its assumptions determine which questions may be asked, what counts as evidence, and what kind of answer is permitted. Much of an argument can be decided before the evidence is examined if another man’s framing is accepted without scrutiny.

A salesman who has you weighing which of two models to buy has already narrowed the field by assuming that you are buying. The disciplined reader notices the assumption before answering the question.

So, the discipline is narrower than the fear and much more demanding than the confidence. I take from a hostile witness what he saw, what he counted, what he filed, what he let slip. I do not take what he thought it meant, and I do not let him tell me what the interesting question is. The inquisitor’s register tells me who was there. It does not get to tell me what they were, because that determination is exactly the thing his institution existed to falsify.

There is a second discipline, and it is the one people skip.

The second discipline is a refusal to manufacture evidence for what one already believes.

Reading that cannot test a claim is not reading; it is retrieval. If you enter a source having already decided what it must yield, you will find what you brought, and the exercise proves nothing except your consistency. The value of examining a witness is that he may tell you something you did not want. His testimony is permitted to carry its actual weight, whether it strengthens a claim, limits it, or requires the claim to be stated more precisely. He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him (Proverbs 18:13). The folly is the verdict pronounced before the hearing.

I have watched a man denounce a source as compromised and then rest his own argument on that same source, in the same hour. He was being dishonest. He had defended his own use of secondary sources earlier in the same hour, so he knew the distinction. He would not extend it.

There is a subtler version of the same thing, and it is harder to catch because nothing in it is false.

Three sources set beside one another can establish what none of them establishes alone. That is how background evidence works; the weight is in the convergence. Take the three apart, hold each up on its own, and ask whether it proves the case by itself, and each will fail — not because the case is weak but because you have dismantled the thing that was doing the work. Then leave out the one that would have survived the treatment, and the demolition looks complete.

I have watched that done. Two of the three were read aloud at length and answered. The third was named once, in a closing list, summarised in a phrase, and never opened. It was the encyclopaedia. It was the one that had already conceded the point.

A reference that says a man is never late is true. A reference that says he is never late when the work interests him is also true, and it is a different letter. The law has a rule for this, because courts learned early that a fragment can mislead while every word of it is true. If a man puts part of a document in evidence, the other side may require the rest of it to be put in beside it, so that the part cannot do work the whole would not support. There is no such rule in argument. There is only whether a man will do it when nobody can make him.

Whether those things were so

There is a small congregation in Acts that gets one sentence of praise, and the terms of it are worth attending to.

These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so. — Acts 17:11

Two things are commended together. We keep one.

They received it with all readiness of mind. They did not refuse the hearing, did not shout Paul down, did not decide in advance that a travelling teacher with an unfamiliar doctrine was beneath examination. They let him speak.

And they searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so. They did not take his word for it either. They went and checked, against a standard they held that he did not control, and they did it daily, which suggests it took a while and that they were prepared for it to take a while.

Readiness without checking is credulity. Checking without readiness is not scholarship; it is a hearing scheduled after the verdict. The Bereans are praised for holding both at once. It is uncomfortable, and few people do it.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The instruction has two halves, and the first is the one that is quietly dropped. All things is a wide field. It does not say to prove only the things that come from a trusted quarter, nor does it say to hold fast to whatever you were given first.

The confession inside the fear

The refusal to read is a confession.

If I will not open a book because I am afraid of what it might do to me, I have said something about what I already hold — that it is delicate, that it survives by not being tested, that it stands only while nothing is set beside it. A truth that requires the destruction of every rival account in order to remain persuasive was never resting on its evidence. It was resting on the silence.

It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter (Proverbs 25:2). Something is hidden on purpose, and the searching is not tolerated but honoured. That verse does not restrict the search to friendly ground, and I have never found a way to make it mean that.

So I go on reading the inquisitor’s register, the colonial administrator’s survey, the Hellenised philosopher who was not on my side, the video made to prove me wrong. I read them as witnesses, one at a time, each at his own weight, and I keep hold of the two questions that make the whole thing safe: what was he in a position to see, and what did it cost him to say it.

Reading is not agreement. It never was. The confusion of the two has kept more people from their own history than any inquisitor managed, and it did not require a tribunal — only the suggestion that to look at a thing is halfway to bowing to it.

Look again. The register survived because the men who kept it never imagined we would be the ones reading it.

A note on sources

Look again. Think deeply. Seek understanding.