Tuesday, May 23, 2023

Absence of Evidence and Evidence of Absence

“As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.”

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

BUT …

The End of (Certain) Spiritual Gifts

Most scholars believe Paul wrote the words quoted above somewhere between AD54 and 55. All Christians can agree he is saying that certain spiritual gifts will cease to exist at some then-future date. The questions much disputed among believers boil down to when and why. Some people say tongues, prophecy and other gifts like them have already ceased. Others argue Paul is saying they will cease at the end of the church era when Christ returns. Perhaps, but if so, why not mention the cessation of teaching, service, hospitality, administration and the other gifts we still see on display in our churches?

If we know the “why”, the “when” becomes a whole lot easier to figure out. I believe certain spiritual gifts became redundant and the Holy Spirit therefore stopped giving them.

We may credit two major events for this redundancy: (1) the faith was committed to writing by the apostles and other writers of the New Testament and these documents circulated in the churches, just as the Lord anticipated when he gave his word to them; and (2) Jerusalem fell to the Romans in AD70, just as the Lord prophesied when he walked this earth, and Jews were distributed all over the world.

When those two events occurred, more than half the spiritual gifts listed in 1 Corinthians 12 became functionally obsolete. And they happened right around the same time.

Sign Gifts and Insight Gifts

The sign gifts (tongues, interpretation of tongues, healing, miracles) existed to warn Israel of coming judgment and to point Jews to the Messiah they had rejected. In AD70, Israel was judged and its people dispersed among the nations until the Lord calls them back together. Israel has been sidelined, and God is doing his work in this era through his church. Signs of imminent judgment for Jews are therefore pointless; they have already been judged. Nobody need speak in tongues or interpret them in the present era; nobody need heal the sick in answer to the word of the Old Testament prophets. Those prophecies are already fulfilled.

Moreover, the “insight” gifts that enabled churches to function until the written word of God was circulated (prophecy, word of wisdom, word of knowledge, discerning of spirits) are now superfluous. The faith has been delivered to the saints. We don’t need them. They serve no purpose today, and nobody who claims to have those gifts today can produce anything that remotely corresponds to the real New Testament spiritual gifts.

This being the case, perhaps Paul meant that tongues and prophecy would be rendered obsolete sooner rather than later.

Sooner Than Later?

That’s an interesting theory, but let’s see if the New Testament bears it out.

First, we ought to make ourselves a list of all the English and Greek words used in the books of the New Testament to describe the sign and insight gifts of the Holy Spirit. My best attempt is as follows:

  1. Tongues [glōssa]
  2. Sign(s) [sēmeion]
  3. Miracles [dynamis]
  4. Word of wisdom [logos + sophia]
  5. Word of knowledge [logos + gnōsis]
  6. Healing [iama, therapeuō]
  7. Wonders [teras]
  8. Prophecy [prophēteia, prophēteuō, prophētēs, prophētikos]
  9. Discerning of spirits [diakrisis]
  10. Interpretation [hermēneia, diermēneuō, diermēneutēs]

If our readers can come up with any more, I’m happy to add them to this data set. Now that we have at least some kind of metric we can work with, let’s search these words in the New Testament to see where they occur. Recognizing that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, we must still acknowledge the obvious: if certain gifts really were becoming irrelevant in the latter part of the first century as the importance of the written word of God grew, those gifts would be mentioned less and less as time went by, except perhaps as a matter of historical commentary.

The Preliminary Results

I have not included the gospels for the obvious reason. They may be full of healings and prophecy, but we can’t reasonably discuss gifts of the Spirit prior to Pentecost. Whatever was going on before Pentecost was not that. So then, here are the preliminary results:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Total
Acts 4 11 7 2 8 3 35
Romans 1 1 1 3
1 Corinthians 21 2 5 1 1 3 25 1 7 66
2 Corinthians 2 1 1 4
Galatians 1 1
Ephesians 3 3
Philippians
Colossians
1 Thessalonians 1 1 2
2 Thessalonians
1 Timothy 2 2
2 Timothy
Titus
Philemon
Hebrews 1 1 1 3
James
1 Peter
2 Peter
1 John
2 John
3 John
Jude
Revelation
Total 25 17 16 1 1 5 11 35 1 7 119

We can already see the gift-mentions tend to cluster toward the beginning of the New Testament, and the references to spiritual gifts in the books towards the end of the NT are few and far between.

Adding Chronology In

But is our New Testament ordered chronologically? Not really. So let’s try this again, with the books ordered as close to chronologically as we can manage.

Number of mentions of spiritual gifts by book, in order by date of writing (Frank Viola’s chronology):

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Total
Galatians 1 1
James
1 Thessalonians 1 1 2
2 Thessalonians
1 Corinthians 21 2 5 1 1 3 25 1 7 66
2 Corinthians 2 1 1 4
Romans 1 1 1 3
Colossians
Philemon
Ephesians 3 3
Philippians
1 Timothy 2 2
Acts 4 11 7 2 8 3 35
Hebrews 1 1 1 3
Titus
1 John
2 John
3 John
1 Peter
2 Timothy
2 Peter
Jude
Revelation
Total 25 17 16 1 1 5 11 35 1 7 119

Again, we are clustered toward the earlier books. But we are also running into a problem with the book of Acts, which records events from the two decades after Christ’s ascension. Most of these historical references to the use of spiritual gifts occurred prior to the writing of the epistles, and certainly prior to their more general circulation and acceptance by the churches as authoritative for faith and practice.

Chronology Plus History

Number of mentions of spiritual gifts by book, in order by date of writing, but with the references from Acts as close as possible to where they belong chronologically:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Total
Acts 4 11 7 2 8 3 35
Galatians 1 1
James
1 Thessalonians 1 1 2
2 Thessalonians
1 Corinthians 21 2 5 1 1 3 25 1 7 66
2 Corinthians 2 1 1 4
Romans 1 1 1 3
Colossians
Philemon
Ephesians 3 3
Philippians
1 Timothy 2 2
Hebrews 1 1 1 3
Titus
1 John
2 John
3 John
1 Peter
2 Timothy
2 Peter
Jude
Revelation
Total 25 17 16 1 1 5 11 35 1 7 119

Okay, now we’re starting to see the trend becoming obvious. To make it worse for those who believe gifts like prophecy and tongues were just as necessary to the church in the late first century as in the mid first century, most of the eight references to spiritual gifts in Ephesians, 1 Timothy and Hebrews are historical; that is to say, they do not speak of sign gifts or insight gifts being given in the present tense, but rather as being given in the past.

For example, Hebrews says this about spiritual gifts: “It [great salvation] was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.” He is not saying God is doing signs, wonders and miracles at the present time. It was attested, he says, and God bore witness also; this is a matter of historical record. Again, in Ephesians, Paul mentions the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets. They are not the visible part of the house, but rather the house is built on what they did and said. This is one reason we refer to apostles and prophets as gifts to the church, not just gifts to individual members of the body.

A careful look shows all but one of these last eight references to sign and insight gifts are in the past tense. I will leave them in their present locations because we don’t know exactly where they should be placed in our timeline, but they show an even stronger downward trend in the importance of sign and insight gifts.

Decade By Decade

To really make the pattern evident, let’s look at the gift references decade by decade.

Number of mentions of spiritual gifts by decade (Viola):

AD30-40 25 Apostles in Acts
AD40-50 11 Apostles in Acts
AD50-60 75 Teaching about spiritual gifts
AD60-70 8 References mostly in the past tense
Total 119

But Frank Viola’s chronology is an outlier. It ends with the fall of Jerusalem in AD70 and assumes with minimal evidence that all the books of the New Testament were written by then. The basis for this is probably systematic theology rather than internal or external historical indications. The need for this particular system is to have Revelation written before the fall of Jerusalem in order to be able to say that most of the events it predicts have already been historically fulfilled. For this reason, I don’t find Viola’s chronology terribly compelling, but I’m including it for those who hold his prophetic view. It still shows a huge dropoff in biblical references to the spiritual gifts between AD55 and AD70 (80% of the references in the AD50-60 decade were in the first five years).

Let’s Try Something Better

Number of mentions of spiritual gifts by decade (Bible Gateway):

AD30-40 25 Apostles in Acts
AD40-50 11 Apostles in Acts
AD50-60 75 Teaching about spiritual gifts
AD60-70 8 References mostly in the past tense
AD70-80 0 No mention
AD80-90 0 No mention
AD90-96 0 No mention
Total 119

The difference between Viola’s chronology and Bible Gateway’s is mostly to do with the dates assigned to the books rather than to their order. Viola’s chronology is necessarily more compact; he is trying to squeeze all the books of the Bible into 26 fewer years. Bible Gateway’s is more traditional in that it assigns post-AD70 dates to five books, in agreement with other respectable biblical scholars. Its latest possible date allowed for Revelation is AD96. Including these 26 years really emphasizes the difference between the flurry of gift-mentions in the period from AD30-55 and the almost complete absence thereof from AD55 on.

Graph this data, and it looks like this:

Of course, it should be clear that number of references to spiritual gifts between AD30 and 50 does not fairly represent actual gift usage during that period. To accurately represent those twenty years, the book of Acts would probably have to be ten times its present length. We may be sure scripture records only a representative sample of the gift usage that actually occurred.

But not a single reference after AD70 to any manifestation of spiritual gifts in the “sign” or “insight” categories? That’s very, very interesting. The closest we come to a late-period reference to a sign or insight gift is in Revelation, where the Lord mentions “that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess”. Evidently she wasn’t, and if the gift of prophecy had been as common in AD90+ as in AD55, Jezebel would surely not have bothered giving herself the phony title; it would not have distinguished her sufficiently in the days of the Corinthian chaos to even be considered a mark of leadership. In those days, Philip had four daughters who prophesied in his family alone, and there is no indication they led the church in any way. When Peter writes about the gifts in those later years, he makes no specific mention of sign or insight gifts, referring only to the broad categories of speaking and service.

Paul said tongues would cease and prophecies would pass away. There is significant evidence it happened sooner rather than later, not from what scripture says, but from what it doesn’t.

2 comments :

  1. Hi,

    I read your article on your blog and it seems you're not aware that Frank Viola is completely rewriting and expanding his very old book from 2005, The Untold Story of the NT Church. He's written about this on his blog and his podcast (Christ is All) more than once.

    Therefore, I would ask that you don't cite him as a source. Just replace his dates on the book of Revelation with John A.T. Robinson and more recently Jonathan Bernier, they are his sources. They aren't unique to Viola.

    In the new edition of the book, he will also reference scholars who believe the date is much later.

    The new version of the book should come out in 2024 or 2025. It will contain dissenting debates with the scholars in the footnotes. On his blog Frank has said it's up to over 1,800 footnotes.

    Regards,

    frankviola.org

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the info. I will be greatly interested to see what he has come up with.

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