ChristMyth

There have been a few times when someone will bring up the fact that a few authors (such as Achyra S) rely heavily on 19th century scholarship for their references to back up their ideas. This brings me to ask, "How far out of date exactly are 19th century scholars when it comes to Biblical studies?"

And please don't say, "Well, about two centuries out of date." What I mean, is, within the scope of comparative religion, how much have we learned that they didn't know that makes relying on them questionable?

avi

Hort and Westcott were 19th century scholars whose conclusion has been, in my opinion, entirely vindicated by 20th century discoveries of ancient papyrus, even older than the two primary texts of Hort and Westcott: The codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus.

GakuseiDon

I don't think that being 19th C is necessarily the problem. Obviously if modern scholarship has moved on, then that is an issue, but that isn't the only issue that gets associated with those questionable 19th C authors.

The main issue is that the 19th C writers weren't 'scholarly', in that they didn't cite their sources and so are useless as secondary sources. As Richard Carrier puts it in his review of Kersey Graves' "The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors":
http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...er/graves.html

All this is not to say Graves didn't have some things right. But you will never be able to tell what he has right from what he has wrong without totally redoing all his research and beyond, which makes him utterly useless to historians as a source. For example, almost all his sources on Krishna long postdate Christian-Nestorian influence on India. No pre-Christian texts on Krishna contain the details crucial to his case, apart from those few that were common among many gods everywhere. Can you tell from Graves which details are attested by early evidence, and which by late? That's a problem.

So this has nothing to do with the 19th C per se, and btw the same issue affects books written today, on many subjects.

Dave31

That is simply not true about Acharya S but it gets repeated on the net by people who've usually never actually studied her work. The '19th century' card is often played when someone wants to do the old 'hand-waving dismissal' of Acharya's work. In her five books to date, Acharya has drawn from the writings from ancient to modern writers, covering the whole spectrum. She cites writers from the 19th century because they did a lot of the work - and some of the best - on this subject. So, often, the 19th c. source is simply a starting point. Then she digs up the original, primary sources and provides them in her book in the original languages, with sometimes more than one translations. So, she doesn't rely heavily on 19c sources.

Actually, there's nothing at all wrong with the 19th century writers - in fact, they're often better than modern sources. Just like they do today, people get things wrong, and nobody's writing is perfect. Religion isn't like the hard physical sciences, where things change over a short period of time. There are new finds that add to our knowledge of the ancient world, including its religions. But theology, comparative religion and mythology are very slow moving subjects. Plus, some of these writers were better educated than most of our best scholars today.

These older scholars actually had a broader education that covered a wide range of subjects appropriate to this topic. For example, there were the theologians who knew Christianity very well, but they also studied Egyptology and Assyriology, so they could see the comparisons between their religions. Today's scholars are often more specialized, so they don't cross disciplines as well.

Acharya's latest book Christ in Egypt alone has nearly 2,400 footnotes/citations to primary sources and expert commentary on them from over 900 bibliographical references from a very wide spectrum of ancient to modern sources from a large variety of backgrounds.

Jeffrey Gibson

Quite a bit as far as knowledge of original languages and primary texts goes. Think not only the discovery of the DSS (breaking down the notion of Normative Judaism), the Oxyrynchus Papyri (destroying the notion of Holy Spirit GReek), and the Nag Hammadi corpus (illuminating Gnosticism), but of the Ras Shamra tablets (and its revelations of Ugaritic land Cannanite life and literature), the Hittite texts uncovered by Winkler, the Ebla texts, the Pseudepigrapha, the discoveries of new Hermetical texts, the publication and translation of the Targums, and hosts of other discoveries and re-examinations of Egyptian, Asian, and Greco Roman religious documents.

There's also the destruction of the ideas of an isolated (and pure) Palestinian as opposed to a Hellenistic Judaism, the translation of Linear B which destroyed the old idea of a Minoan hegemony over Mycenae and mainland Greece, the discoveries in the Valley of the Kings, etc.

Furthermore, the earliest translation efforts of Egyptian literature during the 19th century were undertaken (often by amateurs in Egyptian) in an effort not to understand Egyptian religion, but to attempts to confirm biblical events.

Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

Exactly which modern writers who are acknowledged experts in the fields of Egyptology, Greco Roman religions, and Near Eastern studies does she cite?

And what are the 12 languages that you claim she reads?

Jeffrey

Dave31

Read the book Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

It was your claim that she has used the best of modern scholarship and your claim that AS reads 12 languages that I am asking about.

Can you back your claim or not?

Jeffrey

Celsus

I don't think there's any field of social science, in which 19th century scholars are taken without a heavy dose of qualification, modification or downright rejection of their work today.

Weber may be influential, but his methodology and any of his 'facts' are easily dismissable. Same with Freud or Durkheim or Saussure. More so with JG Frazer, Wellhausen, Renan, etc. In fact, early archaeology was characterised by the manner in which hasty conclusions and modern preconceptions seeped into any study of the ancient world. Today, nearly all biblical archaeological theories of the 19th century are rejected.

Anyone who would go to a 19th century scholar as a source in the 21st century is just undertaking shoddy scholarship. Either go to the originals in their original languages, or admit your work is seriously flawed. And ffs don't rely on a 19th century sociologist relying on Plutarch for studying an Egyptian cult.

DCHindley

Personally, I find late 19th century (1850-1900) critics fascinating. It was in that period that critics really began to drill down on questions that had been brushed under the rug for some time previously. Critics were entering uncharted waters. They made a lot of speculative proposals and frequently misinterpreted the facts they did know.

Yes, in those days scholars generally had a broader background, but don't forget that the facts we knew about those subjects was far less comprehensive than today. Many theories were put forward and ultimately rejected as successive critics identified errors of interpretation and logical method of their predecessors and re-framed the questions. Over time, critics engage in Hegel's dialectic: Old Thesis comes into conflict with new Thesis, resulting in a Synthesis that in turn, becomes the next wave's old Thesis.

The human brain has finite bandwidth, though, and once the number of individual facts grew to a certain point, critics had to begin to specialize. Even specialists need to propose general theories at times, just to explain how their specialties fit into the big picture of things. Ideally, specialists can contribute to each other's general theories, although this would require unlimited resources spent on each specialty. That is plain impractical, and so resources are unevenly distributed. As a result, the field of knowledge about biblical criticism and study of early Christian development still can not overcome the syndrome of imperfect hypotheses and misinterpretation of facts.

That being said, sometimes scholars of the past, especially those of the late 19th century, made some surprisingly original observations that can still enlighten the modern observer. Sure they held views that today are considered short sighted and prejudicial, but we today also hold opinions that will be similarly considered by future critics.

The other issue you seem to have is related to the amateur historian, sometimes called the well-informed layperson. But that has to wait for another day, as I am tired as heck and need my sleep.

DCH