The goal of Biblical Studies Online is to provide both biblical scholars and the interested wider public with ease of access to quality biblical scholarship, as it comes available online.
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Unfortunately, it is often difficult to locate these resources on the internet, and sometimes difficult for those less experienced with biblical scholarship to distinguish worthwhile material from that which is inaccurate or even grossly misleading. And when it comes to the Bible, there is no shortage of the latter to be found. For this reason, Biblical Studies Online offers a gateway for the dissemination and publicizing of worthwhile open-access, online biblical scholarship.
Sounds like a great resource. Professor James Crossley is one of the two scholars listed as a maintainer of the site and given that Crossley has published protests against faith-based scholarship and is a strong advocate of a secular approach to biblical studies I allowed myself hope that “quality biblical scholarship” and “worthwhile material” would mean work free from confessional bias. Crossley, after all, is well aware that the entire field of New Testament studies risks the perception of being described as a “dubious” academic field. He even expresses some dismay that an academic conference should be opened with a prayer!
In September 2000 the annual British New Testament Conference, held in Roehampton, opened with both a glass of wine and a Christian prayer, the perfect symbols of middle-class Christianity, some might say. The glass of wine I can accept, but should an academic meeting that explicitly has no official party line really hold a collective prayer at its opening, particularly when some of the participants are certainly nonreligious and some possibly from non-Christian faiths? Leaving aside the moral issue, the fact that there is an overwhelming Christian presence in British NT scholarship is surely the reason that this could happen. Would other contemporary conferences in the humanities outside theology and biblical studies even contemplate prayer? Would the participants of nontheological conferences even believe that other academic conferences do such things? (Crossley, Why Christianity Happened, p. 23)
The most recent two videos posted by the Biblical Studies Online site are lectures by scholars (Professors Tigay and Gathercole) I recognize from my wider reading; the latter’s works I have posted about here. So given Crossley’s association with the site and the site’s own promotional stress on “quality” and “worthwhile” scholarship, I was not prepared for the latest video presentation by Professor Tigay opening with a PRAYER!
Advance to 3:50
I suppose what follows is a form of “biblical scholarship” but I would have categorized it under theology. The entire lecture is about how Jews and others have attempted to rationalize the biblical commands to exterminate the Canaanites with the sort of God and values worshipers want to believe in. Professor Tigay expressed his own view at the end: the genocidal commands were created by scribes attempting to explain why they saw no Canaanites around in their own day.
I would have expected a secular approach to the Deuteronomic laws to focus upon their origins, and that would have meant that Professor Tigay would have argued in some detail for his view and set his arguments beside alternative hypotheses. Rather, the lecture merely demonstrated the confessional interests of the professor, his audience, and the interests behind the site Biblical Studies Online.
An earlier video lecture [Link (https://biblicalstudiesonline.wordpress.com/2016/08/09/simon-gathercole-on-the-journeys-of-jesus-and-jewish-geography) no longer alive: Neil Godfrey, 24th July 2019] was delivered by Professor Gathercole. He was introduced as “one of the stars in academia of evangelical faith”. Thanks for the warning. I will be more aware of his bias next time I read any of his scholarly work.
Professor Gathercole begins by setting himself and his audience apart from “Jesus sceptics” and “sceptical scholars”. A scholar using “sceptical” as a negative descriptor!
What follows is just what I would expect to find set out in an evangelical tract that purports to prove that the Bible is “true”. Twenty-two of twenty-seven place-names in the Gospels are said to be found in other sources, and that compares with a similar ratio of thirty-five out of forty-four towns in Josephus’s writings being identified independently. Meanwhile the apocryphal gospels get place-names hopelessly mixed up.
Conclusion: no-one doubts Josephus wrote real history (despite his exaggerations), so it is implied that there is no excuse to doubt the reliability of the canonical gospels!
I found the framing the argument interesting. It went something like this: Josephus describes traveling from place A to B just as Jesus went from A to B, etc.
How can a geographical place itself support the historicity of a narrative story that is set there? Obviously it can’t. But this added to a site as a contribution to “quality biblical scholarship” and “worthwhile material”.
One has to assume that the other material posted on that site will only be “worthwhile” and “quality” in the eyes of those who have a devotional or evangelical interest in the Bible.