- Why have they -- why are colleagues (secular and biblical) -- not engaging with us properly ... about Marcionite studies?
Jason BeDuhn gives the following answer:
24:45
"Intellectual inertia. And just to be very frank very poor quality of graduate programs in this field across the world. It's just laziness .... just let's do another of the same kind of work we've been doing. And behind it I think there's a kind of terror. The kind of .... let's not open the door to reconsidering everything... They're afraid that the whole construct is going to come apart.
I mean even people who work on patristic material are terrified by confronting the fact for example that almost all of our patristic manuscripts are medieval and later.
They don't want to open that door to the fact that we actually don't have you know datable reliable sources of the of a lot of these materials and we don't know what they look like before full well knowing just from biblical studies just from looking at biblical manuscripts full well knowing that scribes were always altering texts. Always altering texts. Every step of transmission is an alteration.
So this so to open the door to all of that is just a terror. A night terror for them and so they would rather hanker down in doing very traditional type of things and as you say it's not premised on having a religious commitment to it. It is premised on them being comfortable in a well-established field with well ingrained ruts in the road that they don't want to have to work to get out of and so it's frustrating to me. It's frustrating to me the low level of scholarship out there and the very repetitive uninterestingly repetitive kinds of studies that are done. Always you know stacked premise upon premise upon premise that all those previous premises are not examined are not questioned. Are not broken into and broken up. So that's my take on it.
https://youtu.be/xWfQEGQeaXU?t=1472
"Intellectual inertia. And just to be very frank very poor quality of graduate programs in this field across the world. It's just laziness .... just let's do another of the same kind of work we've been doing. And behind it I think there's a kind of terror. The kind of .... let's not open the door to reconsidering everything... They're afraid that the whole construct is going to come apart.
I mean even people who work on patristic material are terrified by confronting the fact for example that almost all of our patristic manuscripts are medieval and later.
They don't want to open that door to the fact that we actually don't have you know datable reliable sources of the of a lot of these materials and we don't know what they look like before full well knowing just from biblical studies just from looking at biblical manuscripts full well knowing that scribes were always altering texts. Always altering texts. Every step of transmission is an alteration.
So this so to open the door to all of that is just a terror. A night terror for them and so they would rather hanker down in doing very traditional type of things and as you say it's not premised on having a religious commitment to it. It is premised on them being comfortable in a well-established field with well ingrained ruts in the road that they don't want to have to work to get out of and so it's frustrating to me. It's frustrating to me the low level of scholarship out there and the very repetitive uninterestingly repetitive kinds of studies that are done. Always you know stacked premise upon premise upon premise that all those previous premises are not examined are not questioned. Are not broken into and broken up. So that's my take on it.
https://youtu.be/xWfQEGQeaXU?t=1472
So the question is: Are patristic scholars terrified that almost all patristic manuscripts are medieval and later?
And if they are not then should they be?