Tuesday, March 5, 2024

A plea to Fundamentalist Christians

Danusha Goska offers a sprawling post: in part a eulogy for late folklorist Alan Dundes, in part a summary of Quranic scholarship as typical by some first-time reader of 1990s-era Ibn Warraq (hey, I used to be one of those too... in 1999). I here request of Goska only the following: if you are taking Joslin McDowell's tack on the two volumes of Luke, then you should not opine upon the Quran. At all. Please. (h/t Sefton, who should know better.)

Goska quotes Merrill Unger on Luke's accuracy in the second volume; and then links... someone else. She didn't tell us so I must: it's Kyle Campbell... among the McDowell plagiarists. I suspect someone in Goska's editorial chain knows that McDowell is a disaster and that's why her post's giving him the Elias treatment. I pin more of this on FrontPage, which failed her as editors but, well... FrontPage. Was it they who suggested, to her, laundering McDowell through Campbell?

As to Luke's "incredible accuracy", indeed I give Luke little credence - as do more-or-less serious scholars like Richard Carrier or philosophers like James Still. The more serious scholars know that his Acts is no guide to Paul's thought - like any good historical-fiction author, Luke takes pains on the saecular background to get that correct and... different pains, on the ecclesiastic side.

Goska for bête-noire, instead, has fixed upon Bart Ehrman. I concede to McDowell's party: Ehrman sometimes fails, and where he fails sometimes the Dispensational side has the better argument, like on Rapture. But if anything Ehrman is experiencing more trouble on his Left flank, such as by Carrier and by the Morton Smith mystics.

As for Israel Finkelstein versus Kenneth Kitchen, back in the Old Testament: Finkelstein's side has been winning this one. If Goska was keeping up, she'd know to read Yonatan Adler (hey, when's Yom Kippur first noted?). If Kitchen hasn't backtracked yet it's because he is committed to the bit. Sadly. Tragically.

I worry about Goska's tendency to take names, often obsolete and/or controversial names. There exist Creationists who can't into biology so complain about "Darwinism", personalising a dispute. A few years ago I had to read an enormous tome purporting to explicate the history of Biblical text-criticism which was structured as a series of biographies about heretics. I suppose committed Communists might complain if you call their sect "Marxist" rather than "the dialectic" or "the material causes of history" or something like that; Objectivists dislike being called Randians. This personalisation is a tactic: not everyone can be right about everything, as witness Ehrman or indeed Marx or Darwin or Rand or even Carrier or McDowell, and we can always point to a (wo)man's mistakes whilst ignoring the overall point. The effect is to tar everything the original person said, thereby to discredit any succeeding argument, even if it came from one of the correct statements.

I rate that tactic as bad. If you suspect a serial liar, prove the pattern: like for Marx, or for McDowell (or for Luke or the final Quran for that matter).

But I'll give Goska more credit. I don't think she's a bad person. Anyway I should be a hypocrite if I proposed here to refute the whole of goskaïsme.

Goska is simply... credulous, as is her right as a human. She's certainly got motive; she owns a soul and she hopes to protect it (which I suspect otherwise for the McDowells). But, inasmuch Goska remains a naïf on the texts of religion A, wilful or not: Goska has little standing to critique the texts of religions B, C... or of Islam. I think I may be permitted to narrow my focus, thus.

Maybe Goska could do morals or philosophy. Gell-Mann Amnesia has existed since Socrates was pointing it out; but Socrates himself was wrong on occasion, such as on the Creation dispute.

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