manwithdream

First, I'd like to say that I am not very educated in scholarly things, so this question might sound very ignorant, but I am very ignorant about this subject. In Biblical scholarship is polemics considered a form of Biblical scholarship or is it considered something bad to do? Is there a time or situation where it is considered right for biblical scholars to do polemics, if that is the right way to say it?

Toto

What do you understand by polemics? Do you mean apologetics? (Wikipedia defines polemics as the opposite of apologetics)

I found this definition -- but I have never heard the word used that way.

Biblical scholars in general try to maintain that they are engaged in a neutral, scholarly branch of the humanities (as opposed to theology) and avoid polemics, at least on the job.

mountainman

That job is an ongoing polemic.

It studiously avoids political history from Constantine
onwards, and ancient history altogether before that
time. The polemic is that there is "evidence". The
job is to conjecture how this came to be.

Best wishes,


Pete Brown

Solitary Man

There is an old phrase...odium philologicum. It was considered too proper to engage in what might seem "polemical" in not only Biblical studies, which I don't seem to see as being too polemical early on, but also in Classical and philological studies. Much of it hasn't really disappeared to this day.

DCHindley

In theory, no, professional critics do not engage in polemics, where they intentionally seek to root out error.

Of course, if you have devoted umpteen years to rigorous research and low teaching-assistant pay to land your PhD, I can see how it may irritate you to see armchair know-it-all critics wagging their tongues and making simplistic deductions from uncritical surveys of the available evidence.

"Everyone's a critic!" is the old vaudeville gag, but it's kind of true. To the vaudeville performer, who made his/her living dispensing entertainment at its basic levels (although often very well delivered), it seemed kind of silly to take too seriously the reviews of serious critics of art or performance.

Still, I have seen the professional biblical critics snipe at one another (on the old Orion DSS list, Crosstalk2, and occasionally others), usually over personality differences superficially dressed as critiques of method.

Now I consider myself an "amateur" critic. I had gone through a period of evangelical christian thinking in HS and part of college, and in the process took a couple years of NT/Attic Greek to satisfy the foreign language requirement and improve my understanding of the original language of the NT. Like a lot of people, I noticed things about the bible and christian theology that perplexed me, but honestly thought they would resolve themselves in my mind once I understood early christian origins in context. Boy was I wrong!

I read as much early christian (ep. of Barnabas, 1 Clement, Ignatian epistles, etc) and Jewish pseudepigrapic (1 Enoch, 2 Enoch, 4th Ezra, 2 Baruch, etc) literature as I could find. This wasn't so easy when I had to depend on English translations of most of it, but I was exposed to a world of ideas and facts about early christianity that I had been NOT exposed to in bible studies or Sunday school! I sought out the best critical translations I could find, but sometimes had to settle for old fashioned ones that were available and cheap.

One problem I had with professional critics (this was in the early 70's) was that I felt they had turned Jesus into a Buddhist or New-Age mystic, but I needed to understand how they came up with their ideas. So I learned how to closely read their articles and monographs, and especially how to actually go back to the data and see if what they stated actually seemed to be visible there. Some of it was, and some of it was not.

Over the years I have carefully crafted and nurtured a couple theories to explain what I thought had happened. For years I have tiptoed around the professional critics without getting banned by the lists. While several of the professional critics were open to positive inquiry like I try to do, I am also sure I annoyed some of them with my naiveté.

Personally, I think that some professional critics have overreacted to the amateurs. Some exhibit an Ivory Tower mentality. I don't even monitor the lists that profess to cater to the "professional" critics, and which relegate the amateur or interested outsider to non-posting status so that "philosophers" (as Zeba Crook is calling them) don't bring down the level of discourse.

Right now, on Bill Arnal's & Zeba Crook's "Christian Origins" Yahoo list, they are discussing how lionization of Shakespeare is possibly an example of how great literature has been brought low to the level of the base. Goddamn peacocks! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/christian_origins/

I am absolutely sure I am considered one of those pesky "philosophers" (I wasn't asked to join, even as a "spectator," while the likes of the wag Loren Rosson III are given posting rights, because he loves their books and talks about them with great admiration). Maybe I am not really typical, but if someone like me is binging them down, what chance does the average person who might read widely and likes to think but just doesn't have the time or resources to turn it into an avocation?

Yet they wonder why the modern "layperson" has no respect for them or their labors, and the money is drying up for teaching liberal arts and biblical criticism! If they want to gain our (or my) respect, they should be much more interested in demonstrating the better way to study and research and how it pays off for intellectual satisfaction. Not how we bring them down. What must they think of their students!?!? Are they actually trying to teach them, or looking for the "one out a thousand, two out of ten thousand" that they can turn into one of them?

Well, that is my opinion of them, anyways. Never mind ...

DCH