LegionOnomaMoi

The big question is, then, what kind of data were you dealing with? Sure, I can do all sorts of things with Bayesian networks using monte carlo methods, or testing/finding explanatory (latent or no) variables using structural equation modeling and path analysis, but if I'm pulling numbers out of the air (whether when assigning weights or probabilities of events or both) then all my sophisticated applications are still worthless. And when it comes to historical questions, that's where the numbers come from: the air. When/if numbers can be used at all, it's only in a very "fuzzy" way, and this makes the kind of statistical analysis you're talking about questionable at best. So if you've used such methods for historical analysis (of the type which would be useful here) I'd love some references.

spin

I would have thought my first post, #17 of this thread, introduced what you seem to be requesting here. I gave a specific example of such a value, the necessary existence of Jesus, that hegemony promotes and provided an institution responsible for maintaining it.

LegionOnomaMoi

It certainly introduced a common refuge for the academic fringe: cultural, intellectual, and/or academic hegemony: "I'm not wrong: you're all brainwashed." If only the intelligent design proponents had the political acumen to invoke such a plea. After all, it worked so well for the radical feminist critiques of the scientific method, not to mention for post-colonial, marxist (and neo-marxist), and structuralist critiques of scholarship in general and historiography specifically. The fact that the entire historical Jesus enterprise began with an attempt to radically undermine the "hegemony" and succeeded in doing so need not be a barrier to such rhetoric.


You provided an "example" yes. What you didn't do is offer any evidence that your example is what you claim it to be. But the great thing about hiding behind "hegemony" defenses is the ability to write off criticisms as nothing more than the product of victims to that hegemony.

aa5874

What a load of BS. Please, the "entire historical Jesus enterprise" could NOT have undermined "hegemony".

"the entire historical Jesus enterprise" is a product of "hegmony".

Adam

To which I replied with my Post #36, quoting first the end of your Post #17:

I suggest that a truly non-hegemonic position would work independently from all these following: Church Tradition, biblical infallibility, dogmatic mythicism, and academic Consensus where based merely upon taking a middle position that offends only the two extremes. Use all available scholarship, but without any predisposition to any BJ, HJ, or MJ conclusion. I suggest that I have presented such an alternative in my two main threads. A current response to Vorkosigan remains unanswered in
Significance of John Post #102
soon to be followed by another answer to Vork's #7 that I forgot to answer explicitly. (The further serialization of my article implicitly answered him where I showed that the Signs Gospel and the Editor in gJohn inserted items into the Discourses, thus reversing the usual scholarship that the Discourses represented later reflection by the Evangelist.) This thread of mine is more generally accessed at Post #266 Falling Dominoes?

See Post #208 there for some lead-ins to my main thread, Gospel eyewitnesses.

spin

You certainly raise a smile with the Luddite defense.

You misunderstand the process. Hegemony is not a fixed monolith. You're stuck in the 2001: mentality with the apes. Hegemony is by necessity adaptive. The "entire historical Jesus enterprise began with an attempt to radically" reflect hegemony in the face of more enlighten^mented approaches to all fields of study which had left the bible in shreds from all sciences. History was bursting out of its facile-narrative shell. The rational guise of historical Jesus is pure hegemony.

And that is...?

You need to know there are actually two sides of that fence.

LegionOnomaMoi

Here you are trying to force historical Jesus scholarship into your "hegemony"
theory and you can't even get the history of historiographic and academic development correct. Comparative linguistics, historiography, philology, and other fields borrowed from and built upon methods and cognitive values which began with biblical studies. When Newton was still spending most of his time on biblical exegesis, Reimarus was seeking to overthrow the foundations of Christianity, and setting it in the context of historiography before the founder of modern historiography (Ranke) was even born.

While Gibbon was composing his monumental Decline and Fall "historical" Jesus studies were still quite comfortable living within the sweeping narrative of historiography founded by Herodotus so long ago. The first break from this mold was a sweeping and devastating work by Reimarus. More importantly, the defense from the "hegemony", rather than simply dismiss his work, sought to fight him on his own ground: rationalism and modern historiography. And they failed, as Strauss so aptly demonstrated. Your claims of hegemony are belied by the actual history of historical Jesus study, which from the begininning undermined, attacked, critiqued, weakened, etc., the "hegemony". A historical Jesus is of necessary antithetical to the Christ of faith, and pitiful attempts to paint historical Jesus studies as products of academic hegemony are just that. Some of the most ardent critcs of the whole historical Jesus enterprise are ardent Christians, and for that very reason.

spin

I do appreciate the butterfly approach to the history of historiography, really. But you're not coming to grips with the necessity of a historical Jesus to the hand of cards held by hegemony. The historical Jesus construct is not for ardent believers. Confessional and gospel Jesus fill that role. You're still stuck in the monolith approach. Historical Jesus is for the "intellectual" end of the market and the gropey groupie dependents, who talk the talk (it's a bit like the intellectual end of the game boy market). Institutions that fail to take on the historical Jesus fall into the confessional category. You can kid yourself that the historical Jesus rhetoric is not a part of hegemony, but all the respectable institutions are running with it. The values of hegemony are not necessarily "wrong"--though you'd have to evaluate on a one-by-one basis--, but they are restrictive, in that they exclude the validity of other possibilities within its sphere of applicability. When that exclusivity is lost--which doesn't happen at the voices crying in the wilderness stage--, hegemony has to adapt, as is seen with the acceptance of the historical Jesus in the academy.

LegionOnomaMoi

That's because your "hegemony" card is as intellectually bankrupt and sterile as it is pitiful. It's so much easier to claim that two centuries of revolutionary, wide-ranging, discordant, and divergent scholarship is somehow simply a product of some ill-defined, nebulous "hegemony" than it is to actually produce a historical reconstruction of your own. You're quite happy to simply pick at this or that perceived flaw while you which enables you to don the veneer of historical analysis without actually engaging in historiography at all. There are plenty of philosophies of history and historiography you could appeal to which have the benefit of contributing to valid historical reconstructions, but instead your critique is nothing other than an appeal to a hypothetical and unfalsifiable "hegemony".

spin

Your defense of hegemony ("hegemony? what hegemony?") is only to be expected. Your willful denialism is no comfort to you. And your bait and switch is vain.