Category: Biblical Studies

From time to time someone – lay person or New Testament scholar – publicly insists that there is no more bias among the professional scholars of the Bible than there is among any other academic guild. The question arose recently on the Bible Criticism and History forum and I found myself scrambling quotations from members of the guild themselves to point out what surely is obvious to most outsiders. There are individuals who recognize in greater or lesser degrees just how bound in hidden bias on the question of the historical Jesus are the majority of their peers.

Of course most scholars will openly confess to acknowledging bias to some extent but in practice few appear to truly grasp the extent to which the historical Jesus question is grounded in interests that are not fully scholarly.

Here is the list that came most readily to hand.

Hal Childs, “Myth of the Historical Jesus”

If interest in Jesus, whether historical or theological, has a strong, if not predominant, emotional dimension, this is usually not acknowledged, nor named as such. Emotion has a bad name in scholarship, and both methods and literary style have been designed to apparently exclude it from scholarly pursuits and results. If scholarship can be said to have repressed emotion, then, as Freud said, it returns in other forms, perhaps as ideology or dogmatism. It is always present as an invisible hand guiding interest, commitment, choice, judgement, and the framing of meaning. (p. 15)

Scot McKnight, “Jesus and His Death”

Since I have placed Carr and Elton in the same category of modernist historiographer, I must add that many if not most historical Jesus scholars tend to make a presentation of Jesus that fits with what they think the future of Christianity holds, as E.H. Carr so clearly argued. While each may make the claim that they are simply after the facts and simply trying to figure out what Jesus was really like—and while most don’t quite say this, most do think this is what they are doing— nearly every one of them presents what they would like the church, or others with faith, to think about Jesus. Clear examples of this can be found in the studies of Marcus Borg, N.T. Wright, E.P. Sanders, and B.D. Chilton—in fact, we would not be far short of the mark if we claimed that this pertains to each scholar—always and forever. And each claims that his or her presentation of Jesus is rooted in the evidence, and only in the evidence. (p. 36)

From James Crossley: To date the study has been approached too narrowly, “being dominated by Christians”.

As it stands presently, NT scholarship will always get largely Christian results, be they the nineteenth-century liberal lives of Jesus, the Bultmannian dominated neo-Lutheranism, or the results of smaller subgroups, such as the social reformer/critic Cynic Jesus associated with the Jesus Seminar: all different but all recognizably Christian. (p. 23)

Crossley quoting Maurice Casey:

But when 90 percent of the applicants [to New Testament studies] are Protestant Christians, a vast majority of Christian academics is a natural result. Moreover, the figure of Jesus is of central importance in colleges and universities which are overtly Protestant or Catholic, and which produce a mass of books and articles of sufficient technical proficiency to be taken seriously. The overall result of such bias is to make the description of New Testament Studies as an academic field a dubious one. (p. 23) Continue reading “Unrecognized Bias in New Testament Scholarship over Christian Origins”

Following are some general thoughts about a negative side of biblical scholarship. Each point needs unpacking in order to justify itself. But for now I’m just having a bit of a lament concerning the overview.

In the midst of an abundance of solid scholarship that I thoroughly enjoy and that I like to share when I can on this blog there is sadly also a fair amount of poorly reasoned and ill informed writing by even some of the prominent names among scholars of early Christianity. I have in mind not only writings that relate to popular misconceptions about noncanonical texts and the view that Jesus did not exist but also a more general adherence to assumptions that are in reality apologetic in origin and that are the foundation of “historical methods” unique to the world of “Biblical history“.

It’s disappointing and frustrating when one encounters scholarly essays, presentations, blog posts dripping with smugness, defensiveness and fear exactly at those junctures where the public is most interested. This is not what one expects from professionals of any kind, least of all from those in the business of education. Wider public education seems irrelevant to those who appear to have no interest in audiences beyond their peers and fell0w-Christians. Some scholars even convey the sense that they distrust the interests of anyone who is neither a peer nor a committed Christian.

If this sounds as though there is something of a defensive wall surrounding the declining field of biblical studies then the scene within that wall might be described as “softly” dictatorial. Peter Kirby has compiled “a short list” of some twenty-five scholars who “have resigned or were dismissed from their positions in awkward circumstances, typically arising in connection to some kind of statement of faith issue (or otherwise controversial circumstances).” Continue reading “Defensive Postures of Biblical Scholarship”