Truth Unites - Did Cameron Bertuzzi Just Refute Me?

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

Gavin Ortlund explains when arguments from silence are persuasive or weak, showing how context determines whether silence in historical sources actually counts as meaningful evidence.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

So Cameron Bertuzzi put out a two-minute video of me called Good Gavin versus Bad Gavin. You can go watch it. I'll put a link to it in the video description. And he's got some lighthearted music playing in the background. And he's plucked out these tiny little snippets, five second or ten or twenty-second little clips of me, trying to make it seem like I'm contradicting myself about arguments from silence. Like sometimes I'm in favor of them and sometimes I'm against them. But I thought it'd be a good chance just to address this issue of, you know, when are arguments from silence, valid, actually an extremely difficult question, but even just seeing the difficulty is valid here.

So the basic point is simple. Arguments from silence can be either good or bad depending on the context and depending upon the details. It depends basically on whether you expect the sources in question to be silent or not. And this is something I've always said about this more than five years ago. When I was first getting into these kinds of conversations, I made this point in a dialogue. First, I think arguments from silence actually can have plausible. value, depending upon how much you expect the sources in question not to be silent.

Here's how I put it in a more recent video, giving a metaphor to try to make this point. Suppose that you're driving in your car and on the radio, there's a reference to a school shooting. And the radio doesn't specify which school. So you're worried about your kids. You drive to the school your kids go to. And you walk around campus and just ask people, have you heard anything about a shooting here? Now, if the school has 2,000 students, and is on a 10-acre campus and you interviewed 10 people and none of them have heard of such a thing, this will probably relieve you a little bit. You know, that'll help you a little bit.

It will reduce the plausibility to a certain degree. But if the school has only 500 students and is on a three-acre campus and you interview 50 different people from different parts of the campus, including several teachers and staff, and none of them have heard of a school shooting happening, your confidence and your relief will be much further. In neither case, is it a logical deduction? You can always say it's logically possible that somehow does nobody heard of it.

But the point is that the more you expect particular sources not to be silent about a particular event, the more relevant that is to the plausibility of that event. So, for example, to address some of the clips that Cameron played, when Bart Ehrman gives an argument from silence about Joseph of Arimathea not being mentioned, in 1 Corinthians 15, this is a weak argument from silence because we wouldn't expect a reference to Joseph there in light of who he is and in light of what 1st Corinthians 15 is. So when I point that out, and I'm making that kind of argument, I draw attention to the nature of 1st Corinthians 15 and other factors like that. This is an extremely compact creedal formula that Paul is citing in 1st

Corinthians 15. In verses 3 to 5 here, I count 30 Greek words. Okay, it doesn't have to go into who all is involved. Of course, that additional context gets clipped if you're just plucking out a little five or 10 second little snippet. Now, this is very different from arguments from silence about the papacy in early sources of Christianity like the New Testament. So this is much more surprising, because unlike Joseph of Arimathea, who's not one of the eyewitnesses to the resurrection that would have been more relevant to Paul's purposes in 1 Corinthians 15. We're dealing with what is purported to be the head of the church on earth and the source of the unity of the church. And unlike a compact creedal formula like 1st Corinthians 15,

we're dealing with a huge array of different texts. The entire New Testament, various extra-biblical literature. So the fact that in the first century, when this office was supposedly established, we don't have any mention of a Petrine office of any kind, let alone one that has supreme jurisdiction over the church and capable of infallibility and things like this, this is much more surprising. Cameron plays clips about me talking about Ignatius. Well, I was fine, you know, you could explain that one. You know, it's not a conclusive argument when you got one text.

But the point that I raised with in Ignatius is I'm always saying, even him who puts so much emphasis on the bishop, doesn't. But just, in other words, put Ignatius with every other source from that time and earlier. and the idea of any kind of petrine ministry is just not there. And that is surprising, given its alleged importance and the quantity of the text in question and so forth. So point is, silence is much more problematic in that case. You have to look at the context to evaluate different arguments from silence. You can't just have a generic posture on arguments from silence. In the academic literature on arguments from silence, that's why I thought it would be helpful to address this to kind of help

people just be alert to this. You've got to take them on a case-by-case basis. The discussion in the literature on this argument is generally about when they have some degree of value, they're very rarely going to be conclusive, but sometimes they can be suggestive based upon factors, but you've got to look at the particulars. There's an older article by John Lang. I'll give you his concluding paragraph here. Specific instances of the argument from silence have to be evaluated on their individual merits. There can be no wholesale conclusion from the foregoing, except perhaps that the argument from silence cannot be logically conclusive, and secondly, that it can seldom be rationally conclusive, at least in interesting cases. On the other hand, some instances of the

argument are more persuasive than others, and persuasiveness often depends on a subtle assessment of factors. And he goes on a little bit there. You can read the end of the article. So you can make the point obvious here with a metaphor. Suppose somebody said, the apostle Matthias is nowhere mentioned in the epistle of Philippians. Therefore, he did not exist. Well, that's a pretty obvious example of a bad argument from silence, because you can see, it's not really that surprising that he wouldn't be mentioned there.

Okay, in the other direction, suppose someone said the Apostle Matthias was the chief apostle. He ruled the church in Jerusalem after James' death. He eventually traveled to Australia and preached the gospel in Australia. And if you said, there's no evidence for that. then no one should respond by saying, ah, that's an argument from silence. You're appealing to the lack of evidence

because in that particular case, the silence across all historical data for such exalted and specific claims is much more problematic. So hopefully the point is clear when we're dealing with arguments from silence, you need to look at the context and take them on a case-by-case basis.

And that, of course, requires more than just plucking out little five or ten-second snippets that precisely serve to remove context.