If you’re not interested in the textual history of the Christian Bible, then the details of this story about the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” papyrus will probably not thrill you. Let me give you the thumbnail version.
- A Harvard professor came up with an apparently ancient papyrus that has Jesus talking about his wife.
- Some authorities immediately offered the opinion that this papyrus was fake.
- Others argued based on different factors that it was genuine.
- Eventually, a clever fellow from Cambridge pretty well proved that since the papyrus was in the same handwriting as a known forgery that it had to be a forgery.
- Then Ariel Sabar, a journalist from The Atlantic declared that it was a forgery because the source of the item was a shady character.
Hershel Shanks offers this comment:
What disturbs me about Sabar’s piece is not his conclusion—I do believe the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife is a forgery—but that he reached his “probable” conclusion without even considering scholarship on the subject. For him it is apparently irrelevant; the only relevant question is Walter Fritz’s character. That scholarship had already declared the text a forgery on substantive grounds seems irrelevant.
Shanks did not explain it this way, but he’s reacting to the journalist’s careless use of the ad hominem fallacy. Walter Fritz provided the papyrus. Walter Fritz was a well known shady character. Therefore, the papyrus is a fake.
My father used to buy pricy antiques–items that could have been fakes–from a guy who had been in prison. Did my dad carefully check that the antiques were genuine? Yes. Did he give this seller keys to the house? No. But my father did not immediately assume that this man who had been incarcerated must be a crook.
Ariel Sabar should have known better than to employ the ad hominem. Now I’ll never trust anything he says in the future. Oh, but that would be my own version of the ad hominem.
A few weeks ago, the JCCC English Department elected to collect food for the school’s food pantry. Being the cheapskate that I am, I figured I should dump the responsibility over to my students. Here’s how it worked. I have six groups in each Comp II class. These groups will be making presentations over the course of six weeks coming up. Groups were invited to bring food with the biggest donating group allowed to choose their week. Nobody had to bring anything and academic standards were not compromised. I love it. I even got them to lug most of the stuff from the classroom to my office.
I should have written this something like nine months ago, but given how cluttered life is, it has gotten lost under a pile of other pressing matters. Last spring, I was opining at a conference lunch table about my feelings toward the 
Is This Our Best Rhetoric?
What value does rhetoric have in the United States of 2016? When the Oxford dictionaries name “post-truth” as the word of the year, rhetoric’s place in the world should be obvious.
It was by a very skillful use of the “available means of persuasion” that Donald Trump gained himself the role as 45th president of this nation. Eight years ago, although those on the left will chafe at this suggestion, Barack Obama surely leaned more heavily on his skills in rhetoric than on his incredibly thin list of accomplishments to take that office.
But is this the sort of rhetoric that we seek to deploy, regardless of our political, social, moral, ethical, religious, aesthetic, or other predilections? Might we not try to achieve something more?
With a history, at least in the Western tradition, ranging back to the Athenian law courts, rhetoric has always been about making the stronger case. Socrates was criticized for making the weaker argument seem the stronger. That, Socrates, Aristotle, and we should agree is not true rhetoric but sophistry.
Rhetoric, however, will be devalued when it is allowed to descend into sophistry, a movement that has been allowed to flourish, unfortunately, across much of the academic and media landscape.
An article at The Federalist makes a strong argument for rhetoric (without naming the discipline) over sophistry. In that piece, author D.C. McAlister suggests that
McAlister lays the bulk of the blame for this move at the feet of those on the left. Here, I think, she oversimplifies. Far too many people in our culture, liberal and conservative, have become averse to any facts that do not fit with their preconceptions.
Take a simple example. Over the past couple of years we have heard a segment of the population take to the streets and chant “Black lives matter.” Another group, often sympathetic to the first, said “All lives matter,” and were held up as closeted Klansmen. Rather than listening to each other through disagreement and grievance, we saw “BLM” advocates dismissed as a rabble exploiting perpetual victimhood while ignoring the violence within their community. At the same time, “ALM” advocates were pilloried as white privileged maintainers of a patriarchal system ignoring centuries of abuse. Who was right? Unfortunately, the animus flew too fiercely for anyone to learn much of anything in the exchange.
Civil discourse is not like mathematics. Truth will always be a contested value, leaving some to feel that rhetoric has “made the weaker argument the stronger,” but the alternatives to it–everyone shouting and no one listening, rule by might, or cultural disintegration–make the messiness of true rhetoric far more appealing.
Rhetoric has an essential place in our society as it calls people who believe that there is such a thing as truth to work out what that truth is, despite their enormous differences. As we have seen in the past, rhetoric will not cause differences to melt into nonexistence, but when people of good will, though they disagree, actually talk with and listen to each other, there is hope for progress.
St. Augustine of Hippo (in book 4 of his On Christian Doctrine) said it best: