Posted: Jul 19, 2013 2:21 am
Blood wrote:lpetrich wrote:Richard Carrier states that "I think this will be the first pro-Jesus myth book of any kind published by a university press in the last fifty years." A press that's in an appropriate specialty, I may add: Sheffield Phoenix Press - Home
Oh, don't worry, the defenders of the faith will come up with clever reasons to dismiss this book.
A friend of an acquaintance has emailed me re what some have said on social media - [paraphrasing] "it'll be the exception that proves the rule".
The "rule" of church authoritarianism?
Blood wrote:I can already think of one excuse: the peer reviewers Carrier recommended were liberals or radicals who were already sympathetic to the Christ Myth theory.
Carrier has addressed this, somewhat
It works the same way in history as in science. An academic press will often even ask you, as standard procedure, whom you think would be best suited to peer review your submission (they will ask for as many names as possible, because being unpaid, most when asked will decline). They might not go with names you recommend, but they will consider them. And the process after that is usually triple-blind (not just the public but even you won’t know who the actual peer reviewers end up being, while the reviewers won’t be told who the author is, either, although in practice that can sometimes be guessed).
"There are almost always revisions required in their reports, and often they will list a lot of non-required suggestions as well. Generally you do your best to satisfy all requirements, even if it requires some sort of compromise. If some requirement is truly unreasonable, you can appeal to your editor, you might consult the other peer reviewer as to the merits of the first reviewers’ demands. If both reviewers say you must do it, you must do it. If one says you must and the other says you don’t, it’s the editor’s call.
"(For example: I had one paper with a peer reviewer saying I must do x but I had a whole paragraph in the article already doing that, which I can only conclude the reviewer didn’t read, and they didn’t respond to the editor’s request for clarification when I pointed this out, so the editor asked the other reviewer if my existing paragraph satisfied the first reviewer’s demand, the answer was yes, and editor agreed I wasn’t required to do anything further.)
"Occasionally (although this happens more often with journal papers than books) you will get a stubborn dogmatic douchebag of a reviewer who fails to understand (or even actually read) half of what you said and is on a tear to defend some pet thesis of his/her own and makes unreasonable demands etc. (once I an editor agreed with me that a reviewer was out of line and should be replaced with someone else, although that didn’t happen in this case). This is one reason there was a brief push to un-blind peer review so people could call out peer reviewers pursuing vendettas (since often a reviewer can tell who wrote the work they are reviewing, and personal grudges enter in; or they have some irrational bias against the thesis that no evidence could ever persuade them out of, and authors often complained of not having been assigned a more reasonable reviewer). But there is a reason that fashion didn’t catch on…
"It is the most common procedure in academic publishing to have peer review be at least single-blind (the public won’t know who peer reviewed a work, the editor will simply ensure they have adequate credentials etc., while the author might know who the peer reviewers are and the peer reviewers might know who the author is). The reason peer review is kept anonymous to the public (and as much as possible to the authors as well) is to ensure academic freedom, since peer reviewers must be free to give honest judgments without fearing attacks on their career or reputation (as for example Ehrman and others have threatened to do, and has actually happened before: see my discussion of this here and here). For that very reason I won’t be naming my reviewers unless they give me permission (and I’m not inclined to put them on the spot by asking).
"My own effort to line up formal peer reviewers (which I started before I got a publisher in order to speed up the pipeline to publication) was to find peers who held diverse opinions of the thesis but whose work in the field is exemplary and whose judgment I highly respected (and who held ranking professorships in the field). Before reading the manuscript, one was sympathetic to the thesis, one was undecided as to its merits, and two others were actively opposed to the thesis (but not irrationally)."
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/4090/comment-page-1#comment-47802
Blood wrote:We can also expect to hear that old chestnut "these arguments were refuted long ago."
Yet they ususally fail to acknowledge previous quests for the alleged-historic-Jesus, or fail to provide refutations to them, or both.