Camio

Thanks Toto. I've found some additional info in older threads of this forum. Incidentally, according to the English Wikipedia, Theissen would appear to be Protestant, not surprisingly.

lukeprog

Toto asked my to clarify my original question.

I'm just trying to find out if anyone has counted up the theological conclusions of new testament scholars/historians. If anyone has done it, it's probably Gary Habermas, but I haven't found such data yet.

Most of this thread has been discussing the popular demographics of Christian belief, not the beliefs of New Testament scholars.

Obviously I'm not saying that the majority opinion of New Testament scholars can't be trusted if they are mostly Christian, just like the majority opinion of biologists about evolution can't be rejected because they are evolutionists.

What would be great is if somebody has counted up the beliefs of the members of the Society of Biblical Literature or something like that.

Toto

This is not at all comparable, you realize. Biologists' opinion of evolution is based on evidence. NT scholars almost always base their religious beliefs on their family, their upbringing, or other personal factors.

I expect that at least some of the members of the SBL would regard that as an intrusion into their private lives.

lukeprog

Of course I agree. But Christian apologists at least CLAIM to base their religious beliefs on the evidence.

spamandham

If you were not an evolutionist, you would no doubt be suspicious of the conclusions of evolutionist biologists in regard to evolution. In the same way, I think it's fair to be suspicious of New Testament scholars who are trained at Bible colleges. A presumption of objectivity needs to be demonstrated in a case like that, rather than assumed.

Even for scholars trained at more traditional institutions, I would expect their religion to bias their research and conclusions if that research has the potential to directly undermine their religion.

Orion_Man

I would say most are Christians but I'd like to ask a different question.

We all have heard the minimal facts approach,where Christians usually say "the majority of scholars including critics accept these five facts".I have yet to see one Christian not use this argument.

My question is,what qualifies as a critic to the person counting heads? To guys like Habermas liberal Christians are critics,most non-theists are counted as radicals.Guys like Ehrman and Price are said to be outside of mainstream scholar ship.Where are all the non-theists that are counted as critics? Or does only a liberal Christian/Jew count as a critic? What non-theists accept the empty tomb and such?

You never hear from those skeptics do you?

I think that the reason this thread was started was because of this question.You always hear the same old recycled scholarly consensuses argument when the N.T is under fire.

I myself think that the scholars that are counted in those surveys are Christians conservatives with liberals being counted as skeptics and critics.

Jeffrey Gibson

Leaving aside the fact that this is irrelevant to the question in the OP (are most NT scholars "Christians"?), could you tell me how you know this to actually be the case? And what kind of factor lying at the base of one's religious beliefs wouldn't be "personal"?

Jeffrey

lukeprog

I can't speak for Toto, but I wouldn't say I "know" this, but it's my best guess, based on a kind of triangulation from what I know of sociology of religion and psychology. It's hard to test this kind of thing for causal effects, but it's clear to sociologists of religion that religious beliefs correlate very highly with the religious beliefs of one's parents. Also, whenever I hear people's stories about why they believe what they believe today, it is almost never a matter of rationally weighing the options - not even in the case of William Lane Craig!

But yeah, how theists or atheists come to their beliefs has no bearing on which belief is true.

Toto

This is how Christian apologists are trained to argue. It is a fairly recent argument, and eventually will fall away as it is debunked.

In fact, a big problem with the argument is that the idea that "most experts agree that there was an empty tomb" is used to prove that there was an empty tomb. And there was no actual survey of experts, only Habermas who counted sources, most of which were Christian.

Toto

It was a response to the attempted comparison of "evolutionism" with Christianity.

As lukeprog said, sociologists of religion have determined that this is the basis for almost all religious identification - not objective evidence or proof, but social or personal factors.