Very, very worthwhile.
Here's an excerpt:
"Mythicists" are the historical equivalent of the
anti-vaccination crowd in medical science. They are controversial enough to get
media attention. They have just enough doctors, or doctors in training, among
them to establish a kind of "plausible deniability." But anyone who
dips into the thousands of secular monographs and journal articles on the
historical Jesus will quickly discover that mythicists are regarded by 99.9% of
the scholarly community as complete "outliers," the fringe of the
fringe. And when mainstream scholars attempt to call their bluff, the
mythicists, just like the anti-vaccinationists, cry "Conspiracy!" This is precisely what
Raphael does when with a wave of his hand he dismisses the apparently
"atrocious methods" of historians of Jesus. It is as if he thinks he
wins the game by declaring all its rules stupid and inventing his own path. No,
that is how you get yourself disqualified.
Secondly, no student - let alone an aspiring scholar - could get
away with suggesting that Christians "ought not to get involved" in
the study of the historical Jesus. This is intellectual bigotry and has no
place in academia, or journalism. I would likewise fail any Christian student who suggested that atheists
should not research Jesus because they have an agenda. Nobody in the vast field
of historical Jesus scholarship operates with such an us-and-them mentality. This is why the methods of
history are so important. They are how we assess each other's work. We don't
fret about other scholars' private beliefs and doubts. We judge their handling
of the acknowledged evidence according to the rules of historical inquiry.
Anything else would be zealotry.
An Préachán
No comments:
Post a Comment