Resident Theologian
About the Blog
Second naivete
A personal scholarly trajectory regarding the historicity of ancient scriptural narrative.
The metaphysics of historical criticism
Fifty metaphysical propositions that underwrite the practice of “historical-critical” biblical scholarship.
“The latest scholarship”
One often hears folks in biblical studies refer to “the latest scholarship” on such-and-such topic. Or they will refer to author X or book Y being “out of date.” Or when writing a scholar will refer to “the latest studies” or “the most recent research.” I’ve poked fun at this tendency before. A few years back I penned “An honest preface to contemporary academic interpretation of the New Testament.”
Subjunctive scholarship
If you read enough biblical scholarship, you come to realize that one of the guild’s endemic features—for at least a century, probably two—is an overweening confidence in its claims. Such claims usually partake of a rhetoric of calm certainty; all too often what are contestable judgments based on slim evidence are instead asserted as facts, or at least as bearing a supreme likelihood of being true.