It depends on the sociological situation regarding the specialists. In times past, when scientists and scholars prided themselves on their a-political character, and strove to stringently separate scholarship/science from social and political advocacy, it was likely that most (certainly not all) of the time, it was safer to bet with the majority, especially when it was an overwhelming majority. In our day, however, in many academic fields, the practitioners are heavily politicized, so one always has to take that into account whenever one is inclined to reason that “the majority of specialists can’t be wrong”.
For example, in fields where a certain sort of conclusion is far more likely to induce the government to put out research grant money than another sort of conclusion, there is an impure potential motivation that is likely to guide at least some scientists or scholars to favor (or pretend they favor) the more lucrative conclusion, and denounce other scientists or scholars who disagree, and there is likely to be self-censorship among those who hold to the less lucrative conclusion. And the same sort of political pressures can exist regarding hiring, tenure, and promotion. In fields with which I am familiar, I have certainly observed such political pressures.
However, in the case of Biblical scholarship on the language of Jesus, it’s unclear to me what “political” considerations would cause the vast majority of scholars to conclude that the everyday language of Jesus and his followers was likely Aramaic. The arguments appear to me to be philologically sound, and methodologically neutral in character.
I’m of course open to evidence that there is some conspiracy to suppress the view that Jesus spoke, say, Latin, or pure Biblical Hebrew, but I see no evidence for such a conspiracy, and no reason why any individuals or groups should have anything to gain by putting over such a conspiracy. For example, it might be thought that orthodox Jews would have a motivation to represent Jesus as speaking Aramaic rather than Hebrew, out of a prejudice (a desire to represent the heretic as an uneducated fellow from the sticks who could speak only the tongue of the vulgar), whereas Christians would have a desire to represent Jesus as speaking Hebrew rather than Aramaic (to stress that he was every bit as much steeped in Hebrew learning as the top authorities in Jerusalem); yet we find that both Jewish and Christian scholars agree that Jesus likely spoke Aramaic. Such agreement between two groups which in the past have shown pronounced theological and cultural biases suggests that the scholarship on this point is methodologically neutral, and honest.
If Boris is convinced that the conclusion that Jesus spoke Aramaic is a politically driven conclusion put over on the world by Christian scholars, he should be able to produce all kinds of dissenting opinions by Jewish scholars, and other scholars, to demonstrate that the ruling hypothesis is religiously biased toward Christianity. But as usual, Boris asserts, rather than demonstrates.
I’m actually much more sympathetic than most modern academics with minority or maverick opinions, provided they have some evidential basis. But Boris seems to make maverickness an end in itself, rather than a position arrived at due to the evidence. He thus appears always to be tilting at windmills.
