Solitary Man

As I remember it, Doherty requested a debate. He did not send in a journal article. It was very unprofessional of him.

GakuseiDon

No, Doherty can't be blamed for this one. Someone offered money to the "Fourth R" journal to print an article from Earl, but it was turned down. Earl started a thread on it here:
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=147064

Solitary Man

I see. I misremembered. It was unprofessional for that person to offer money for a "debate". Doherty still has the options of going through the proper academic channels, which others here, like Chris Zeichmann and yourself, have urged him to do.

GakuseiDon

I don't know if it was unprofessional to offer money, but it may have been unprofessional of the journal to accept money. Imagine a scientific journal accepting $5000 to publish an article by a creationist -- I doubt it would go down too well.

Yes, I just don't see why they don't. As I said in that thread, they don't have to unload everything at one go. Why not start by showing that there were Second Century Christians who didn't believe in a historical Jesus, as per Doherty's claims? That would be a huge tick in favor of his theory. I hope mythicists strongly urge Doherty to take up the challenge.

Toto

The person, not a professional, offered money to to a non-profit organization to support the exploration of an issue. It's a perfectly legitimate way of financing intellectual endeavors. Foundations issue grants for that purpose all the time.

Blackwell Publishing puts out books that will sell. There appears to be a market for textbooks on theology, probably aimed at students at Christian colleges, even if many of us here think that most theology is "pseudo-academic sophistry" or even "obfuscatory, epistemological special pleading."

Steven Carr

Doherty would very probably have been paid to write an article if he had been professional enough to start off with this assumption :-

'..that the gospels were written, if not by the authors whose names they now bear, at least by disciples of Jesus or people who knew those disciples – people who knew at first hand the details of his life and teaching or people who spoke with those eyewitnesses...'

Steven Carr

Can you imagine a creationist paying 5000 dollars to a scientific journal for an article '....accompanied in the same issue by an equal counter-article by any scholar of their choosing'?

Have you tried writing to creationist organisations asking them to make such offers to scientific journals?

They would laugh in your face at the idea.

Diogenes the Cynic

Natural Theology is a subset of both philosophy and theology but not of critical NT studies. This is essentially being published as a philosophical treatise, not as historical or textual, or even literary NT criticism. I can assure you that mainstream NT scholarship does not just "assume" that the Gospels have any primary or even secondary relationship to disciples of Jesus.

Toto

I think the McGrews are presenting this as an exercise in logic When you do that, you do make assumptions.

Malachi151

I would say that these people are not presenting views and assumptions of mainstream New Testament scholarship, but they are presenting mainstream views of the New Testament.

The other question is, why is it that there is such a huge gap between even mainstream NT studies and the mainstream view of the New Testament.

This is again an area that is vastly different than any other field. You don't find this same gap in other areas of interest, such as Biology, Physics, History, etc.

Obviously there is a large gap in the knowledge between the scholars and the lay people in all fields, but its not the same type of gap. In other fields its simply a lack of information, whereas in this field it is holding views that have been roundly rejected by scholars.

There was an interesting thread here some time back that discussed the differences in views between Bible scholars, Christian priests and preachers, and the laity showing that the more higher up the chain you go the more critical view they take of the scriptures, but yet they never transmit this view to the laity.

This is again one of the only areas of study where this is the case.