Bart Ehrman -- another instance of not reading what he cites

[Secret Alias]

And is Ehrman being 'unfair' arguing on behalf of Jesus's existence? Seems to me it's a reasonable position. It's not 'unreasonable.' He didn't 'arrive' at that position by 'manipulating the evidence.' He might have made a 'mistake' here or there. Not sure that you need to manipulate the evidence to the degree that mountainman does on a daily basis to arrive at his conclusions. Jesus exists is the position we all started with. It's like chocolate. Growing up we all thought chocolate was better than vanilla. We used to think vanilla was 'plain' = no flavor. Now the kids prefer vanilla over chocolate it seems. I had to adjust my inherited presupposition that chocolate was 'universally recognized' to be better than vanilla. One of many.

[Chrissy Hansen]

An example of an honest mistake by a scholar is getting a chapter and verse for a text wrong, or confusing the dates of two similar sources, or getting a page reference wrong. Those are the sorts of errors one finds in published works and theses and they are forgivable if not too frequent. But not to attribute an argument to a person who actually argues the virtual opposite, nor especially to attribute such a blatantly false view to a scholar who made significant inroads into the scholarly research on 1 Clement.

I'm not going to defend Ehrman because... he writes entire books where he only cites scholarship from English language writers or translations, which on its own is enough to indict him for being outdated and out of touch with current trends in wider academia.

My only bit here is that, on occasion, it can be the case that someone writes or accidentally obfuscates their own ideas enough that it is more than understandable when someone does not accurately describe their position. Obscurely wording or making one's support of a possible position ambiguous, which then leads others to think they endorse this possible position as their main one or getting their position incorrect because of the obfuscated wording. I think a good case of the latter is actually Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, and its reception in the (complete dogcrap) book Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, where they completely reverse Butler's position on sex and gender (claiming that Butler argues they are separate categories, whereas Butler actually argues they are iterations of each other and both constructed concepts). Butler is just incredibly dense, and requires a background of feminist and philosophical jargon, which Lindsay and Pluckrose are not only unfamiliar with, but incompetent with as well.

This is not one of those cases, this is just Ehrman referencing either errantly from memory, or a very ambiguously worded/constructed conception of citation as Rothschild points out, which is just bad scholarly practice.

I think this is also just something more or less symbolic of DJE? by Ehrman... which is that it is a generally bad, poorly researched, and rather lazy book. I can point to a number of cases where it appears Ehrman was just not reading was talking about:

-He claims that Volney was a mythicist... which is false. Volney did think there was a shadowy founder of Christianity (14-15)
-He claims that Dupuis' work was more influential than Volney's which is... hard to believe. Volney's work was translated in large part by Thomas Jefferson, was used by early English mythicists all over, and sparked numerous rebuttals. Dupuis' work was a massive sprawling series of tomes that I cannot find near the amount of engagement with.
-His claim of a "relative hiatus" after Drews' is just false and a lazy attempt not to document or do any serious research on mythicism's history from between Drews and G. A. Wells. Georges Ory, Prosper Alfaric, P. L. Couchoud, Soviet Mythicists, Chinese mythicists (whom Ehrman never even mentions), the prevalence of mythicism in the growing atheist movements and found in publications like American Atheist Magazine, the Truth Seeker, etc. is just... bad.

His work in just a few pages is often riddled with basic errors which he would know... if he had bothered reading the main literature on the history of mythicism, which there were a number of publications on at the time. He could have consulted Dalibor Papousek and James Thrower on Soviet mythicism, Wang Xiaochao on Chinese mythicism, G. A. Wells did a great article on Dupuis and Volney which would have clarified Ehrman's problems there, etc... and all of this was available at that time.

Ehrman's book is just simply a case of an established scholar, who has become so accustomed to his status that he no longer feels the need to credibly write, cite, or read on his own field. He treats his status as automatic authority, so he only has to cite secondary scholarship a handful of times, rarely carefully, and almost exclusively in the English language. And it is the kind of authority that comes only with him being an old, well-established, white, cis-male scholar (as numerous colleagues of his in the field of NT studies have lately been noting).

Hence why I do not recommend any of his books. I find them more misleading of the current developments in the field.

For those curious, read the following:

Wang Xiaochao, “Marxist Interpretations of Jesus in China (1949-1999),” in The Chinese Face of Jesus, ed. Roman Malek, Vol. 3b (Sankt Augustin: Institut Monumenta Serica and China-Zentrum, 2007), 1353–62

James Thrower, Marxist-Leninist ‘Scientific Atheism’ and the Study of Religion and Atheism in the USSR (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983), 425–30

Dalibor Papoušek, “The Soviet School of Historians of Early Christianity and Its Influence in Former Czechoslovakia: The Question of Jesus’ Historicity,” in The Academic Study of Religion During the Cold War: East and West, ed. Iva Doležalová, Luther H. Martin and Dalibor Papoušek (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 119–135

Alexander P. Kazhdan, “F. Engels on the Origins of Christianity,” Soviet Studies in Philosophy 10, no. 1 (1971): 81–102

Wells, G. A. “Stages of New Testament Criticism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 30.2 (1969) 147–160.

[Chrissy Hansen]

Has Neil ever published anything?

Neil is published in the latest volume edited by Loftus and Price on mythicism... so... yes, he has.

[Secret Alias]

So am I. I am not going to go too deeply into it but it doesn't count ...

[Chrissy Hansen]

What does count then?

And also, why does it matter?

[MrMacSon]

Has Neil ever published anything?

• https://vridar.org/
  
  eg. https://vridar.org/2022/09/15/list-of-v ... evelation/
  
  eg. https://vridar.org/?s=Gullotta

[Secret Alias]

Exactly

[Secret Alias]

This isn't to attack Neil. But I grew up knowing like the best professors. They'd have almost nervous breakdowns at the completion of papers so detailed and exacting was the process. Like this guy Boid, I. R. M., Principles of Samaritan Halachah (Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity, Vol 38), Brill Academic. He really only published one thing. But I remember talking with Schiffman. He was like "I remember that book. It began with thanks to his ex wife." But how was the scholarship? "Top notch." Writing monographs are exhausting and financially unrewarding.

[Secret Alias]

This fucker would read an Arabic newspaper for breakfast while writing academic papers in German or French for Brill while marking papers in Hebrew, Greek or Latin. This is a different species of human being. His footnotes would end up being short stories

[Secret Alias]

But always close to a nervous breakdown while writing academic monographs.