Is Biblical Scholarship Crawling with "Unscientific" Piety?

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No amount of belief or believers will make something a fact.

In that imaginary world of speculation, we see Jesus as many different things. There’s whole cottage industry for authors to cast Jesus any way they want to. Bart Ehrman and others make a lot of money portraying their toy Jesus however they wish: he was a political revolutionary, a faith healer, a rabbi, a wandering wonder worker, a hippie peace nick, a teacher - Jesus can be portrayed any way a writer wants and nobody can dispute them because there isn’t a shred of evidence at all for any kind of historical Jesus. You can’t do that with people that we have solid evidence for. We have a real world of religious texts and ancient literature. These do not express contemporary ideas about the world or the end of the world. In that world of ancient texts, a prophet who speaks of a cosmic judgment that will soon bring about God’s kingdom is a figure in a literary world. The myth of the kingdom of God belongs to a long tradition of literature.

Well dating should include the first mention of the texts in question. That comes in the mid Second Century.

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Do they?

But my curiosity is about facts.

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It wasn’t your error, you believed Meyer’s lie and completely ignored my (and @Art’s) spoonfeeding the truth to you more than once.

It wasn’t limited to that. You even parroted another of Meyer’s lies:

Slipping the conditional in there is dishonest, because it was a gross misrepresentation of the hypothesis and its predictions that RNA still does, not merely can in the lab, perform essential biological functions. Nowhere in Meyer’s vile chapter was that mentioned. Meyer’s lies are interlocking and fooled you completely.

And you still haven’t withdrawn that false claim.

Not the other falsehoods you based on it.

You haven’t withdrawn your recommendation of Meyer as a summary of abiogenesis research.

Just as dishonestly, you based repeated claims that I was “caviling” on the same falsehood. You did not withdraw them.

Why hasn’t Meyer, whom you shamelessly tout as a scholar, corrected his false claims published in 2009?

Why haven’t Dembski and Wells corrected the same false claim?

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That gives only a terminus ad quem. (If you really know historical scholarship, you’ll know the meaning of the term without having to look it up.) It does not rule out the possibility that the texts were written years, decades, or even a century before their first mention. And sometimes there is internal evidence suggesting an earlier date.

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Hello Alan. Long time. That’s not how these religions we have, came to be. Judaism, Christianity evolved from sun worshiping cults and Islam from Arabic moon worship. Once the religion became popular people wondered how they came about. Nobody knew because it happened so gradually. So, the leaders just made stuff up and invented founders like Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. These religions were all reverse engineered that way.

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Impossible, since Christianity grew out of a mushroom cult…

More fact-free speculation from Boris. The scholarly world should be glad to have him around, to set them straight. We should just close down all religion departments at Harvard, Oxford, etc. and refer everyone to Boris’s Facebook page.

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A Christian accusing someone else of being fact-free! Well, if that doesn’t beat all. Where’s that irony meter? People have known these things about religion for a long time. People inside of a cult can’t see the fallacies and untruths. It’s only those of us on the outside who can see these things. “The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally paid to the sun.” ― Thomas Paine

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There is a plethora of information on the relationship between early Christianity and sun worship. Articles and books. Look 'em up. And Ed read 'em and weep.

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Thomas Paine knew nothing of history of religion, anthropology of religion, etc. He just repeated, in popular form, common anti-Christian tropes of his day. No trained historian of religion today would take Paine’s remarks on the subject seriously. But you wouldn’t know that, because you don’t read the serious academic literature, only the fringe stuff like Gerald Massey and Tom Harpur.

Yes, and you’ve given us a long list of your sources of “information,” and I’ll treat them with the respect they deserve – the same respect I give to Erich von Daniken and Velikovsky.

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Ah, a John Allegro joke! That’s getting to be obscure stuff…

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You mean people who repeat, in supposedly academic form, common Christian tropes of their day. Sitting in a classroon getting told what they must believe. Your “scholars” are fearful of people who do their own work independently because they/you have not been trained on how to do that. Christians always hate it when people think for themselves. As Abe Lincoln once said, "“It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.”

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No, I said “trained historian of religion” – which does not imply “Christian”.

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Apparently obscure to Boris, anyway, since he doesn’t appear to have got the joke…

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Yes, but anybody who writes or says anything disputing the doctrines, dogma or made-up history of Christianity is on the fringe and not a real scholar! Like Massey and Tom Harpur. What criticism do you have of them other than they’re not in your rapidly shrinking cult?

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This kind of childishness is boring. Chiasm is hardly an exotic term. I’ve seen it explained in study Bible footnotes as well as those old timey Sunday School quarterlies. Perhaps you are proud of yourself for knowing the word. Fine. Pat yourself on the back. But don’t pretend that Eddie didn’t know the term without looking it up.

You’ve told us many times that you don’t believe Eddie ever taught Greek and blah blah blah. We heard you. Move on. (I could send you a warning as a moderator but I’m lazy—and this warning should be enough.)

Again, focus on topical ideas, not your contempt for the knowledge of others.

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My contempt is for the presumption to knowledge which has always done more harm than ignorance.

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No. You’re still not listening, no matter how loudly or how many times I say it. I’ll try one more time, with capital letters for emphasis, and then, if you still don’t get it, I’ll give up:

NOT ALL BIBLE SCHOLARS ARE CHRISTIANS.

NOT ALL RELIGION SCHOLARS ARE CHRISTIANS.

MANY BIBLE SCHOLARS AND RELIGION SCHOLARS ARE JEWS.

MANY BIBLE SCHOLARS AND RELIGION SCHOLARS ARE ATHEISTS OR AGNOSTICS.

MANY HISTORIANS OF RELIGION ARE JEWS, ATHEISTS, OR AGNOSTICS.

Do you understand all of that, Boris? If so, you should now be able to process this:

NO TRAINED HISTORIAN OF RELIGION – WHETHER CHRISTIAN, JEW, AGNOSTIC, OR ATHEIST – WOULD TAKE THOMAS PAINE’S SPECULATION ABOUT CHRISTIANITY AND SUN-GODS SERIOUSLY.

Do you get it? This has NOTHING TO DO with pro-Christian prejudice. It has EVERYTHING TO DO with professional competence in a well-established academic field. Paine was an INCOMPETENT historian of religion. Any faculty member in any secular Religious Studies department would tell you that. Any faculty member at the Divinity schools of Yale, Princeton, Harvard, etc. would also tell you that.

The problem is that YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT GOES ON IN SERIOUS DEPARTMENTS OF RELIGION. You have never BEEN in a serious department of Religion, not even as an undergrad student, let alone a graduate student. Your picture of what goes on in them is a warped construct of your own imagination, fueled by your desire to carry on a culture war against Christianity. And you won’t let me – someone who HAS studied in such a setting – correct your erroneous impressions. By an act of sheer will, you deny or block out everything that I tell you. So there is no point in carrying on this conversation.

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What information does an historian of religion have that could refute what Paine and other scholars have discovered about sun worship and the astrological basis of Christianity? Name it and claim it™.
“The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion. Not anything can be studied as a science, without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.” ― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason. I have never seen a more accurate description of Christian theology. Neither have you.

I have never denied that my problem is mostly with Christian Bible scholars. Religious studies departments and divinity schools are a joke. No person of sense takes those people seriously. You keep touting these people as if they are productive members of society and not the intellectually lazy unmotivated, unproductive, losers who haven’t got the guts to compete with other people in the real world they really are.

A “serious” department of religion? That’s an oxymoron. Why is a department of religion even necessary? What could possibly be learned from the study of religion that could advance human knowledge even a little bit? Religions were invented by men who had no idea where the sun went at night and hadn’t yet figured out how to build an outhouse (Deuteronomy 23:13-14). What useful new findings has any department of religion come up with in the last 200 years? Name it and claim it™.
I’ve seen the results of the so-called “training” that goes on in departments of religion. That’s all anyone has to see. I’ve read and watched lots of the religion "scholars’ talk about religion. Bart Ehrman is a good example of this. He’s no longer a Christian. When asked how Christianity spread, he went right to the party line and said the disciples witnessed Jesus’ teaching and his crucifixion and then spread the religion and then they were martyred. Same faith-based nonsense that is taught in Christian churches every Sunday. There’s not a shred of evidence that any of that might be true. We have no evidence at all that Jesus and the disciples even existed. That belief is faith not fact. Where did Ehrman get these ideas? He certainly couldn’t have come to those conclusions from anything in the historical record. Any real historian will tell you that Christianity did not become a major religion by the quality of its truths, but by the quantity of its violence.

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I don’t think I am. Your point was that if Jesus existed and the gospels are accurate, he would have been mentioned in Philo’s accounts of local events. This is undermined significantly by (i) Philo living elsewhere, and (ii) the gospels being exaggerated.

Meanwhile, you are missing an important point yourself. Your misuse of Philo’s ‘Embassy 281’ has reduced your credibility to the point that your claims about history should not be accepted without independent verification.

So claims such as this one:

cannot be relied on. This particular one fails, since (i) we don’t know who the gospel writers were, so can’t know whether they had ever visited Palestine; and (ii) Mark is usually dated c70, so could well have been written by someone who was contemporaneous with Jesus.

Credibility, once lost, is difficult to regain.

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Boris’s reply to my final effort to make my point goes completely off the rails. It’s well into “rant” territory.