Posted: May 06, 2012 11:27 pm
Blood wrote:This has just been published. The downside is that it costs $110, so nobody will read it, and it will have zero impact.
The co-editor is Thomas Verenna, described as an "amateur historian," so once again the orthodox brigade will get to dismiss this out of hand as more Archaya S styled nonsense.
Biography (Amazon.com)
T.S. Verenna is an amateur historian who has been researching the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman Periods for seven years and the ancient Near East for five years. He is the author of the book Of Men and Muses: Essays on History, Literature, and Religion (2009) and his second book, 'Is This Not the Carpenter', co-edited with Th. L. Thompson, is in press and due out in 2011.
In addition to these collections, T.S. is also writing a monograph on the intertextuality of the Gospels and working on a new book project about the unreliability of ancient textual sources. T.S. is currently working on an undergraduate degree with a focus in history.
It doesn't seem to me the orthodox really care about 'credentials' - that's only a red herring anyway.
What university was Einstein teaching at when he published his world-shaking papers? No, he wasn't part of 'the academy' - he was merely an amateur.
The key thing is whether the unasked questions about if there ever was such a person as this Jesus will effect young people entering the field. I doubt many of the generation that's already emotionally and professionally committed to assuming the existence of Jesus will ever change their minds no matter what. Hence the vicious and personal attacks on the scholars whose hypotheses they fear will make their own 'contributions' seem a mere dead end in history.