An Argument from Silence
An “argument from silence” is when someone uses the fact that something is not mentioned in a text as evidence that this something didn’t exist, was unknown, or whatever. This is valid in some circumstances – for example, if a writer has expressly set out to make a complete list, something missing is significant – but it is often misused. In general, an argument of the form “if X were the case, so-and-so would have mentioned this” is a weak argument.
What I find worrying is how often bible commentators forget this maxim when interpreting the Bible. The most blatant example I have seen (and I have seen it in more than one place) comes up in Acts chapter 15. This describes an event sometimes called the Council of Jerusalem, at which church leaders met to decide under what terms Gentiles (i.e. anyone not a Jew) could become Christians. (If you want to look up the passage, you can find it at Bible Gateway.)
The story is told as follows:
Verses 1–5: there is a controversy in the church at Antioch about conversion to Judaism, represented by circumcision. Paul and Barnabas travel to Jerusalem to take part in the debate, and find controversy there, too.
Verses 6–11: there is much debate. Peter gives his testimony of preaching to Gentiles, and proposes that non-Jewish converts should not need to take on the Jewish Law, since salvation is through Jesus, not through keeping the Law.
Verse 12: Paul and Barnabas give their testimony of preaching to Gentiles.
Verses 13–18: James sums up the debate and quotes some passages from the Jewish Bible (i.e. the Christian Old Testament) to back up Peter’s position.
Verses 19–21: James puts forward a four-point moral code for Gentile Christians to follow.
Verses 22–29: The church elders put the four-point moral code in a letter and choose delegates to take the letter back to Antioch.
I have seen in commentaries, and heard in preaching, that this passage demonstrates that James (this is usually taken to be James the brother of Jesus; it is not James the Apostle, who had been executed at the beginning of chapter 12) was the “undisputed leader” of the Church in Jerusalem. Why? Apparently, because this passage records no reply after James puts his point.
The language James uses does indicate that he is a leader; but “undisputed” is a blatant argument from silence. Even if you take the passage to be literally true – the people concerned made exactly the statements recorded, just as they are reported here – you cannot legitimately deduce this.
For a start, verse 7 says that Peter made his speech after much debate. So we know already that the author (generally regarded as the same author who wrote Luke’s Gospel, and traditionally identified with Luke the Physician, a companion on Paul’s travels) is providing a brief summary of debates that may have gone on for days.
After Peter’s speech ends in verse 11, verse 12 begins with everyone falling silent to listen to Paul and Barnabas. This not only suggests but positively implies that Peter’s speech had set a lot of people talking. One can imagine (but please remember, this is only imagination!) whoever is in charge hushing them so that their guests can speak.
In verse 13, when Paul and Barnabas have finished (and incidentally, we are not given any of Paul’s or Barnabas’s words here), James speaks up. In some translations, “spoke up” is what it says; but the Greek word used actually means something more like “answered”, and other translations give that reading. Whom is James answering? He isn’t answering Paul and Barnabas. He is addressing the whole council as “brothers”, so this suggests (less clearly than last time, but still detectably) that there was more debate here, and that this was not immediately after the speeches but as soon as he could call order and get a word in.
James’s speech takes us up to verse 21, at which point translators and editors tend to insert a paragraph break, and some insert a section break with a new heading. Verse 22 begins this new section, “Then the Apostles and Elders … decided” or, closer to the original wording, “Then it seemed good to the Apostles and Elders …”. But does “then” mean immediately after James’s speech? Or does it, given the new paragraph, mean “after the debate was over”? We cannot be sure. To argue one way from an editorial division into paragraphs is weak; but to argue the other from no evidence at all is at least as weak. All in all, we cannot be sure how much – or little – further debate it took to get James’s proposal accepted. What we can say for certain is that the author is giving us a very brief summary of a very long debate, probably lasting several days.
My point here is that an attempt to take the Bible literally – something I would not necessarily do, but many Christians do read the Bible this way – can lead to an argument from silence, which reads more into the passage even than a literal interpretation actually allows. A careful analysis of the passage instead shows that it is not a complete record, but a brief summary of a long debate.
So What if it Isn’t a Complete Record?
That’s all very well. The Bible isn’t a complete record. John says as much in the last verse of his Gospel: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” (John 21:25). But surely the Bible is all we have? If it isn’t a complete record, we just work with the bits we’ve got, don’t we?
Well, yes. Provided we don’t try and argue from silence. Except that when we realise it is not a complete record, we discover more about it.
As I write this, last Sunday’s readings included the call of Nathanael from John 1:43–51. (Again, here’s a link to Bible Gateway.) Jesus, having called Andrew and Simon (whom he would later rename Peter), calls Philip to be a follower. Philip goes and tells Nathanael that Jesus of Nazareth is the one who fulfils a lot of Old Testament prophecy, and (in verse 46) Nathanael replies with a rude remark about Nazareth.
Then it gets interesting. Jesus sees Nathanael coming and remarks, “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.” Nathanael not surprisingly wants to know how Jesus even knows him, and Jesus says, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.” Nathanael then calls Jesus “Rabbi”, “Son of God” and “King of Israel”. Jesus deflates this enthusiasm with a remark along the lines of “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”
So what is going on here? We know that the Bible isn’t a complete record, so presumably there are gaps. And it would be useless, even counterproductive, to speculate on what might fill them. The important thing is to recognise the gaps, and then we might learn something from the gaps themselves.
In this case, Jesus refers to an incident under a fig tree. We are told nothing about this, but it seems to have huge significance to Nathanael. Sometimes people do try and speculate on this; but we have nothing to go on. What we can see is that Jesus knew to pick an incident (presumably recent, but before Philip had gone and fetched him) that would convince Nathanael, and it is likely that neither Jesus nor Nathanael felt the need to tell anyone else what it was.
To summarise, we have looked for a gap in what we’re told. We can’t fill the gap, but finding the gap has showed ways in which Jesus related to followers – and prospective followers – in a very insightful and convincing way.
And the Literal Reading?
To me, these gaps are important in another way. They are quite different in character from the sort of gaps a storyteller might leave in a fictitious narrative. For a storyteller, to introduce the fig tree at this point, and then not tell us anything about it, would be quite a blunder. It would have a good chance of distracting us, the listeners, from the story he was trying to tell.
The presence of details like this is, for me anyway, one of the strongest pieces of evidence that someone is reporting true events, not spinning a yarn – and, in particular, not constructing a founding myth for a made-up religion. True events are messier than made-up stories, and looking for the gaps in a heavily condensed account has drawn our attention to some of the messy details that are hallmarks of a true story, as opposed to a fiction.
This is not to say that I believe that it is literally true, word for word – there are too many disagreements between the different Bible-writers’ accounts for that – but it is evidence that there is a true story here that these people are reporting, not a made-up religion for which they are constructing myths.
And we have arrived at that conclusion by reining in a tendency of people to try and take it literally.
Another sort of Gap
Gaps like these appear because the writers are trying to produce a brief summary of a long or complicated series of events. Other gaps appear because of what the writer feels is so well-known as not to need saying. Sometimes there are so many gaps – of both sorts – that we are left with little details whose context has disappeared.
An example of this can be found in John’s description of the Resurrection, John 20:1–10. (Here’s a link to it on Bible Gateway.) The story, as told, has Mary Magdalene finding the tomb empty and going and telling two of the Twelve (verses 1–2); Peter and John running to the tomb, John getting there first but Peter going in (verses 3–6)
Then in verse 7 we get a strange out-of-context detail: they find the sheet in which the body had been wrapped “as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen.”
After this, they puzzle over it all, fail to reach a conclusion, and go home (verses 8–10).
What can we make of this? The care John takes to record who did what first – John reaching the tomb first but Peter going in first – suggests that there was some controversy, possibly even among the Twelve, as to who had seen what when, and who had been first in various matters. But what about the detail of verse 7?
One preacher I heard said that this detail cannot have any theological significance. It is therefore exempt from any accusation that it was added later to make a theological point, and is probably literally true.
This is a neat theory. (It also inspired much of what I was writing about the call of Nathanael above.) Some of the listeners, unfortunately, interpreted it to mean “Only the bits of the Bible that don’t have theological significance are true.” Far from it! If it is literally true that the disciples found the grave clothes in different parts of the tomb, then it must also be true that they found an empty tomb, with all that that implies. Once again, identifying a gap (not in the narrative this time, but in the theology) has led us to evidence of the truth of the story.
However, I don’t think that this is what’s going on here. What I think we have is not an irrelevant detail that has become fossilised in the narrative, but a detail that had great significance to the writer – John, probably the same John who was racing Peter to the tomb – but we lack the background to interpret. This verse comes in a passage where John has here been taking pains to record exactly who did what and in what order. I think it makes far more sense to suppose not that it is an insignificant detail, but that it is one of the things that John felt needed recording in this way.
Nonetheless, this does not detract from the result above: that the presence of a detail like this implies that the empty tomb scene really did happen, with all that this implies. In other words, now we have found a gap: not in the narrative, but in the theology, or in our knowledge of the context. Either way, it points to the truth of an important piece of the story: possibly because it is irrelevant, and therefore exempt from accusations of fabrication; or possibly because it has survived from something that was relevant to the writer and his first readers, but is lost to us. In both cases, we cannot see what the detail itself might have meant, but its position in the narrative tells us something about that narrative.
To Conclude
The wrong approach to literal readings of the Bible can lead to treating it as a complete record of events. In fact this is an argument from silence, which is usually a weak argument, and in the case of the Bible, often not justified even by a literal reading.
Rather, Bible stories (especially in the New Testament) are often highly condensed summaries of events, with numerous gaps in the narrative. Looking for these gaps (but not attempting to plug them) can give us a deeper insight into the events being described, and can often provide evidence of the truth of the story itself.
Further Reading
All bible quotations are from the New International Version, via Bible Gateway, except Acts 15:22 (quotations from both NIV and ESV) and John 1:50 (my own paraphrase).
Once again, I’ve looked through my commentaries, but failed to find a reference for the assertion that James is the “undisputed” leader. The commentary in the ESV Study Bible (ed. by Lane T Dennis et al.; Crossway Bibles, 2008) came close, however. It provided a lot of argument to justify the assertion that James was in charge, and no discussion of the gaps.
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