Category: Biblical Scholars

Someone emailed me part of a recent post by Bart Ehrman with a suggestion that I comment. The key paragraph by Ehrman:

I am not saying I have no agendas and no biases. Let me be emphatic. I DO have an agenda and I DO have biases. My agenda is to propagate a scholarly understanding and appreciation of the Bible. And my bias is that a scholarly understanding can NOT be determined by theological dogmas. Scholarship may affect what you choose to believe, theologically. But what you choose to believe, theologically, should not determine the results of your scholarship. That’s my very strong bias. Your historical or literary views should not be pre-determined by your religious beliefs.

I have no doubt that Ehrman’s words are sincere and I believe him. I would suggest, though, that there is something unstated but implied in his words that he also believes and that is part of his professional agenda. His fourth sentence could be rewritten as

My agenda is to propagate a scholarly understanding and appreciation of the Bible — meaning that I wish to propagate a respect for the fundamental methods and assumptions of the mainstream institutional critical scholarly study of the Bible. 

The reason I believe the added words are implied in Ehrman’s statement is that he does not afford the same respect for the declaration of the motives of those who question the most fundamental assumptions from which critical biblical studies operates.

I should add that there is nothing wrong with wishing to propagate respect for one’s standard methods and assumptions, but respect is professionally attained with one allows them to be addressed in open critical inquiry without resort to personal attacks and character denigration. We have a right to expect scholars in fields most clearly associated with ideologies — the arts and humanities, and theology — would be the more humble with the realization of how entrenched ideologies have unwittingly led their fields into unscholarly agendas in the past.

(It would be unfair for anyone opposed to critical scholarship of the Bible to latch on to an extreme or ignorant remark by a fundamentalist critic who was also opposed to some point made by serious scholars in order to add ammunition to his critical case. Yet we find some biblical scholars, including Ehrman, pointing to some of the more nonsensical claims of some few outlier mythicists and painting the entire mythicist enterprise with that brush.)

We return once more the unscholarly treatment of critical scholars  (how much worse are those outside the fold treated) who question the foundations of a project:

• If They Treat Their Own This Way, What Hope for Us Outsiders?

and

• comment by Niels Peter Lemche on The Great Divide in Biblical Studies

I’m back to blogging again after being seconded to actually do certain household maintenance jobs I had been promising and giving much on-and-off thought to for some weeks now. (I’m a firm believer in not rushing into certain tasks without careful and protracted thought beforehand.)

When I returned to the online world I found that a kind emailer had sent me a chapter from a certain book I am surprised I have not read yet. Even better, I noticed that the local library only a few blocks away has a copy of the whole book. Here is a section of it that addresses a certain theme relating to the world of biblical scholars that I’ve posted about before:

Some critics take a dim view of the [Jesus] Seminar’s practice of voting on the authenticity of the sayings and deeds attributed to Jesus. For example, Ben Witherington complains that only in a country where majority views are assumed to be right and where “truth” is decided by voting could this idea of voting on Jesus have arisen. However, as The Five Gospels explains, the Jesus Seminar got the idea, not from American democracy, but from the practice of various biblical translation committees and from the United Bible Society committees that vote on the critical edition of the Greek text of the New Testament.

Luke Johnson has no objection to translation committees voting because “these votes are carried out privately.” Johnson’s remark is revealing: it shows that for him the real offense of the Jesus Seminar is not that it votes, but that it does its work in public. Numerous snide comments about the Seminar being hungry for publicity show that other critics also resent the public face of the Seminar.

In an attempt to estimate the depth of this resentment, let me pose a hypothetical scenario. What if the same people in the Jesus Seminar had carried out the same project and had come up with the same results, but had done so in a Society of Biblical Literature seminar and published the results in Semeia, the Society’s journal for experimental scholarship? Certainly the public would not have paid any attention, but my question is: how much attention would this project have received from scholars? I suspect, but obviously cannot prove, that the quantity of the critical response would be much less and its quality much better. I suspect also that the sheer nastiness of the insulting rhetoric directed against the Seminar would be much reduced.

The acerbic response of the Seminar’s critics to its commitment to work in public seems to rest on the assumption that academics who speak publicly about religion should keep their views to themselves if they might be unsettling to the beliefs of mainstream Christians. (This assumption explains why biblical scholars have largely left it up to scientists to battle creationism in the public forum.) The fact that journalists who cover religion could register such shock when scholars use words like “non-historical” (or, worse yet, “fiction”) to characterize some gospel passages shows what a good job biblical scholars have done keeping their secrets to themselves.

Miller, Robert J. 1999. The Jesus Seminar and Its Critics. Santa Rosa, Calif: Polebridge Press. pp. 65f

Then we come to the end of the chapter,

The Conduct of Scholars

Continue reading “If They Treat Their Own This Way, What Hope for Us Outsiders?”

There is much I disagree with in Donald Akenson’s book, Surpassing Wonder. The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds (2001), and Akenson would certainly find himself objecting to some of my posts here on Vridar. But Akenson is a serious figure in the field of historical studies and do find his following statements interesting:

During the twentieth century (and to a lesser degree, before that) thousands of biblical scholars have beavered away at the life of Yeshua. In my reading, they appear to break into two camps: those who accept the rules of the historian’s craft (however arbitrary those may be) and those who do not. The second group is impossible for an historian to deal with, because they claim (either explicitly or implicitly as evidenced by the methods they employ) that the rules of proof which apply in secular historical scholarship are all very well, but that there are special evidentiary by-passes when it comes to Jesus-the-Christ. Such works, even when wrapped in historical terminology, really are parts of the history of theology. The first group, the scholars who endeavour to be as rigorous in historical method as possible and who consciously try to avoid special pleading, are much more interesting, not least because they are often first-rate minds and in a very difficult situation. This is particularly true of those who have written on aspects of the historical Yeshua within the last two or three decades. Their position is difficult because (1) in the last quarter of the twentieth century the historical profession generally has become increasingly aware of something that good historians always had known: that there is no such thing as objective historical truth; instead historians deal with the perpetual transience of pale imitation of a final reality that can never be known, a forever-escaping past. Biblical historians, as much as their individual personalities have permitted them, have acted according to the canons of historical investigation, which assert that even if one cannot ever get anything perfectly right it is possible to prove that some ideas about the past are dead wrong. Yet, at the same time, many of the same scholars seem to yearn so deeply for theological-ideological-denominational certainties, that all their efforts at being as objective-as-possible are thwarted. One is frequently reminded of the commonplace assessment of Immanuel Kant, that he spent his entire adult life proving what he had known with certainty when he was five years of age. And (2) the overwhelming majority of biblical scholars are employed by institutions that have a theological or denominational or political ideology (however vestigial) which is based on certain assertions about the nature of the historical Yeshua, the man behind Jesus-the-Christ. These institutional affiliations inevitably involve pressures upon the scholars, or limits on what they can think. It is a hard business to be in.

Given the intellectual and social pressures upon them, it is natural that scholars who specialize in trying to find “the real historical Jesus” become co-dependents. However much they differ from each other on matters of interpretation. evidence, and in their individual unconscious assumptions, they need each other and depend upon each other for confirmation that their quest for the historical Yeshua is a valid enterprise. (538-539)

Two pages later:

the overwhelming majority of scholars who do “New Testament” history are employed by institutions or organizations whose roots are in religious belief. Which means: more than any other group in the present day academy, biblical historians are under immense pressure – sometimes overt, sometimes subliminal, but virtually omnipresent – to adjusl their scholarship, to theologize their historical work. The maintenance of scholarly integrity by so many of the biblical historians is the product of considerable individual heroism. The pressure they frequently experience helps to explain why one encounters so often in the literature appeals to consensus. (541)

Akenson, Donald Harman. 2001. Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Thanks to “Ignorant Amos” from whom I learned of Akenson‘s Surpassing Wonder.