EarlDoherty

Robert Price. And while I don't the details, I understand that Gerd Ludemann lost his post (and he was not advocating the entire non-existence of Jesus), though I can't say for sure that he was ejected entirely from the university.

In a related field, public school teachers who are too explicit about their support for evolution or even atheism, can lose their jobs. I know of a couple in my own circles who have. And if you think that that sort of pressure does not exist in university religion departments, then you are more naive than I thought.

Are you claiming there is not a single scholar of the NT in established academia who has downplayed or even concealed his true thinking in some radical direction because he fears for his security? Even in commentaries that I have read, I have been able to detect a hedging of bets. Even publishers closely involved with the hegemony can react against too-radical views in a scholar's presentation.

Earl Doherty

aa5874

Where is the hegemony you ask???? Bart Ehrman DISCREDITS his sources for an historical Jesus and then turns around and accepts them as historically accurate SOLELY to support his version of an historical Jesus.

Bart Ehrman wrote a book called "FORGED" and destroys the credibility of the Canon and Apologetic sources but astonishingly and WITHOUT any corroboration from any credible sources states that his Jesus was from Nazareth, baptized by John and crucified under Pilate.

Bart Ehrman is the Flagship of Hegemony.

I think we can put a BIG FAT "H" on the chest of Ehrman.

Grog

The Lost books were useful.


You don't let her respond? ok...well...

I agree wtih you on this point. Any author can then be impugned for wanting to carve out a niche is a particular literary market. So what? That doesn't say much.

However, I do think Ehrman exploits a particularly convenient niche. The conservative Gospel Jesus is well-covered. But there is a need to feed the liberal end of Jesus-belief. Vermes, Fredriksen, Crossan were filling that but the trend has run aground as the latest Jesus Quest faltered for the same reasons it has always faltered. Ehrman is picking up those pieces now, but not nearly as competently as his predecessors. Just for the record, I was hooked by the authors I just named.

Is this just an economic calculation on Ehrman's part? No, I don't really think so. But it is convenient and so probably not a difficult position to take.

Sheshbazzar

Or received an 'invitation' to the Dean's Office to engage in 'consultation', with the 'suggestion' being offered that one would possibly find more happiness and success within a different field of study.

....or else..

LegionOnomaMoi

That is absolutely NOT what hegemony means. Are you serious? Or do you just not know how the term is used in sociological and/or political theory?

You are confusing hegemony with something very, very, different. If Bart Ehrman had stuck to his much more moderate, academic work, very few people outside of NT studies (or similar disciplines) would know his name. One need only compare Studies in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament and Misquoting Jesus to see how his academic works differs from his sensationalist bunk. He made his name through the publication of the very works you claim are evidence of hegemony. He still holds his academic post, and although he hasn't published nearly as much scholarship as many whose names are far less known, thanks to his popular works he semi-famous. That's pratically the opposite of hegemonic control.



No, it isn't, and your "proclaiming to nodding heads" comment is evidence of that. That's like saying we have an atheistic hegemony because guys like Dawkins hold anti-religious rallies, conferences, etc., proclaiming to "nodding heads" that religioun is "empty, void, vapid, and meaningless."

Wrong. That is only true if one is limited to such institutions. Only that is hardly the case. The fact that their are christian universities is no more evidence of hegemony than the fact that their are christian spokespersons. If it were difficult to find universities in which scholars were free to publish works which conflict with christian beliefs, that would be something. That isn't the case. If you aren't catholic, you don't have to apply for a post at the Catholic University of America. And even in some departments which do state that their stance is explicitly christian, they do not censor their professors. J. P. Meier (a catholic priest) began his several volume work on the historical Jesus while he was a faculty member at CUA, and he is now at the dept. of Theology at Notre Dame. However, these volumes are quite explicit in rejecting central beliefs held by the Catholic church: he writes that Jesus was a disciple of John, that (contra church tradition) Jesus' brothers and sisters WERE brothers and sisters, not cousins (thus rejecting the Catholic church's stance on Mary's perpetual virginity), and finds that several teachings of Jesus recorded in the NT to be unhistorical (again, contra church teaching). Yet he retained his post. Crossan, whose views are held to be controversial not just among believers, but also scholars in general (in particular, he has yet to find any takers for his "cross gospel"), is the president of what I believe is THE largest and most respected academic society which deals with biblical scholarship, the Society of Biblical Literature.

What you are describing is not hegemony. You use Ehrman, who basically built his career by writing controversial works for the public, as an example of hegemonic control. There are thousands of people with his academic background, and many of them have published a great deal more, yet he is far better known and makes enough money from his books that he doesn't even need an academic position because of the very publications you cite as examples of hegemony.

LegionOnomaMoi

Yes, I heard this before but couldn't find anything about it. According to his website, he still holds an academic post as well as several fellowships. According to his biography, he left Mount Olive College while he was still a believer to become a pastor at a church, and after receiving his second doctorate resigned from his pastorate position because he was no longer a believer.

He wasn't. His position was changed because he formerly belonged to a department which was explicitly christian, and had joined at a time when his beliefs matched the stated beliefs of the department. After he stopped believing, and published works which were contrary to the position/goals of his department, many objected. As a result, the university changed his title and removed him from his previous post, which was in theology. I already addressed this.


The same is true (depending on where you are) for promoting ID or creationism, and thankfully, in the West there are precious few places where you can get in trouble for teaching evolution compared to places where you can get in trouble for teaching creationism/ID. It's sad that there are any places where students are taught religion instead of science (or teaching religion as science), but that isn't a hegemony. I'm well aware that people who publish or speak about things which conflict with christian views are met with outcry, whether it is J.K. Rowling for Harry Potter or Bart Ehrman. Yet, somehow, both make a living with such works.

The Harvard Divinity School is a short walk from my building. I've talked to grad students and professors there. I did the same when I was (briefly) at Boston University, and as two of my siblings went to the Catholic University of America (I'm the only agnostic in my family, the rest are practicing Catholics), I spoke to professors there as well. I've also had the chance to communicate over the years with professors at various departments, including theology departments, both in the US and Europe. There are absolutely departments in which professors are expected to be believers and they are told this ahead of time. But even in seminaries it is common for hardcore, evangelical scholars to drop out, lose their faith, or become far more liberal (that's what happened to Ehrman) because there are so few seminaries which promote or teach conservative, evangelical scholarship.

There may be among those who joined the faculty at a place where they would get in trouble (like Ludemann). But I've spent years following the various edited series and journals on NT studies, early christian studies, historical Jesus studies, etc. Some of the biggest critics of the quest for the historical Jesus have been strong believers, who argue more or less what Price does, but because (IMO) that way the Jesus of faith is protected from historical inquiry, which is bound to conflict with christian belief or leave the realm of historiography (as Wright does in the last of his three-volume work). Their defense of the Christ of faith is that any historical reconstruction is bound to fail, and thus we have only the Christ of faith (which is actually identical to what Price wrote). I find it hard to believe, given this stance and what I know of believers, that an argument which amounts to "Jesus probably didn't exist" is somehow more controversial than "Jesus is gay" or "his body was eaten by dogs" or "the NT is a deliberate distortion of Jesus' true teachings" or "the christian faith is built on a distorting what the actual Jesus said and did" and so on. Yet such views are published both in popular and academic works all the time. The idea that "Jesus never existed" is rejected because of pressures via christian censorship is laughable. That it is rejected because of something like a Kuhnian paradigm is more plausible, but I doubt this is the case.

Academic hedging is, interestingly enough, now an area of active research, because it occurs in all disciplines all the time. Just as a taste, see e.g., Hedging and Discourse: Approaches to the Analysis of a Pragmatic Phenomenon in Academic Texts and the paper on hedging in Culture and Styles of Academic Discourse.

Such as? Do you know of an example where an academic publisher has done this?

mountainman

Many people may not agree that I have conducted scholarly research, but in response to a submitted article the Referee Report from the Journal of Hellenic Studies makes this concluding comment:

The secular hegemony of these distinguished organs of academic research has historically descended from the INSIDIOUS hegemony of the church. When the Jesus of Faith was rejected by the scholars, the Jesus of History was sought, and is still being sought by some. By others the Jesus of History (and for that matter the Muhammad of History) is now being rejected.

Socrates critical questioning will outlast every hegemon.

LegionOnomaMoi

The question is who would agree (besides you) that you have? From my (albeit limited) time reading threads here, even amongst those whose theories are already either unrepresented in academic circles or are a tiny minority your views are not regarded as tenable. If they are fairly widely rejected here, it hardly seems evidence of anything that they were rejected by an academic journal.

So is all of Western scholarship. The church created the university system. The study of mathematics, biology, philosophy, linguistics, etc., are all descended from christian institutions. Are you suggesting that, for example, Harvard (which was created to train clergy), and it's graduate programs in mathematics and science, are somehow influenced by the fact that at one point the entire university was designed around christian beliefs, views, and purposes?


Not really. Before Reimarus, there weren't many attempts to approach Jesus from a historical standpoint. And Reimarus' work was a blatant and deliberate attempt to undermind Christian belief. What was interesting was that the response to his work (published after his death) was not to rescue Jesus from historical analysis, but an attempt to "modernize" Jesus (by, for example, explaining away the miraculous within the gospels). In other words, rather than do what some christian scholars have done, which is to say that Jesus can't be studied from a historical point of view, only from a theological perspective, the response to Reimarus took place in the battlefield he selected: history. And it failed, thanks to Strauss' monumental work which demonstrated quite convincingly that the miraculous/mythic elements were integral to the gospel narratives. In other words, they can't be "explained away" or otherwise ignored. The response was a retreat to the liberal lives and explorations of the inner psyche of Jesus, only these efforts (like the works before Strauss) also ended with devastating critiques of the methodologies and assumptions employed. The work of Schweitzer was foremost among the responses to the "liberal lives" which ended their production, althought Bultmann too (and Wrede, to some extent) also contributed. And when Die Formgeschichte of Dibelius and Bultmann reigned supreme, the figure of Jesus was largely believed to be utterly distorted by an oral tradition which freely created stories, teachings, etc., and contributed them to Jesus. Doherty refers to Bultmann when discussing Paul, and the teaching Paul appears to attribute to Jesus, yet although he also cites Kelber, he fails to mention that Kelber explicitly stated that virtually every component of the form critical model has been questioned.

The point of the brief outline of the so-called "quest" above is that it did not proceed as you claim. Rather, it pretty much began with an attempt to shake the foundations of christainity, and despite numerous responses proceeded to tear more and more away from the traditional conception of both the nature of the gospels and the figure of Jesus. This included works arguing that this figure had no historical existence. However, while paradigms have shifted, approaches become more diverse, and the backgrounds of those involved in the study of the historical Jesus expand, precious few among academics have ever viewed the argument that Jesus did not exist as convincing. And as far as I know, you are alone in your view about the origins of christianity.

Will Wiley

Well the point is he obviously repudiated his training in a far more serious area. He left his religion, the consequences of which are, in the mind of someone indoctrinated in religion, far more serious. You may have other ways you gained perspective and maybe they are more helpful, but I dont see any evidence based way to decide what "accident" or change of perspective is superior for the purpose of deciding about a historical jesus

spin

You are mixing two separate issues. Training and belief.