Not everyone was happy with my post The Great Divide in Biblical Studies. Admittedly the words “great divide” carried connotations for many readers that I had not intended. By “great divide” I was thinking of the intellectual gulf between those scholars who follow methods of historical research that would fit seamlessly into any other historical research in other history departments, whether ancient or modern, on the one hand, and those scholars who resort to various psychologically grounded yet fallacious “criteria of authenticity” as their primary tools of historical research on the other.
If I had been keeping up with various discussion groups I would have known at the time that another highly regarded biblical scholar, Niels Peter Lemche, had only weeks previously made the same point about too many of his peers. In the Yahoo Biblical Studies list he posted the following:
The question about historical information in the OT is a classical historical-critical issue. Here the only demand is that any investigation must be complete and take into consideration every piece of evidence, and there is no question that should not be asked (such as the alleged historicity of David and Solomon).
This should be rather evident, and it is remarkable that is to many people is not, and then begins another project: to find out why it is so difficult for many biblical scholars to go all the way with their critical studies which in this way turn out to be not critical at all but faith based.
Lemche, Niels Peter, 2019. “28392SV: [biblical-studies] What is Minimalism?” Biblical Studies – Yahoo Groups.
It’s not just me. Voices from among the tribes in the wilderness are themselves crying out.
Neil Godfrey
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OP: “Voices from among the tribes in the wilderness are themselves crying out.”
Shaw, Brent D. (2015). “The Myth of the Neronian Persecution”. Journal of Roman Studies. 105: 73–100. doi:10.1017/S0075435815000982.
Cf. Godfrey, Neil (17 December 2015). “The Myth of Nero’s Persecution of Christians“.
Shaw, Brent D. (8 March 2018). “Response to Christopher Jones: The Historicity of the Neronian Persecution”. New Testament Studies. 64 (02): 231–242. doi:10.1017/S0028688517000352.
db, Thanks for the Shaw reply!
• One side of the divide:
Wallach, Efraim (2018). “Historiographic narratives and empirical evidence: a case study”. Synthese. doi:10.1007/s11229-018-02065-w.
Wallach, Efraim (2016). “Bayesian representation of a prolonged archaeological debate”. Synthese. 195 (1): 401–431. doi:10.1007/s11229-016-1224-8.
Carrier (29 May 2018). “A Test of Bayesian History: Efraim Wallach on Old Testament Studies”. Richard Carrier Blogs.