I'm the one who started the thread, but I went into this one respecting a certain idea but finding it untenable and without precedent:I'm interested in doing a history of these forums. I'd like participants to rank their Top 10 Threads that they think might appeal to non-participants/laypeople. Which are the best threads at this forum or BC&H? Please tell me. What's changed your life? What information here ought people know about? What's enriching?
https://bcharchive.org/3/thearchives/sh ... ml?t=57742
This was the idea that this feature of the text can be well-understood merely as a literary device for sea voyages that didn't have any implicit concept of participation in the events.
I came out of this with an understanding that some ideas are held because mostly because they are useful, not because they are true. It's nicer to say that this was a common literary device, than it is to say that the text is (for example) a forgery affecting a certain relationship to the events that is false. While not commenting on how Robbins originally advanced his ideas (because he expressed a kind of befuddlement about the way the whole topic was discussed), the way they were employed was as a convenient tool to support an idea that didn't really follow from a critical analysis of the text, to support a view of the text that had greater appeal.
I also found out quickly that analysis has values attached to it. What I wrote was quickly appealed to as support from someone non-Christian who could be cited as support for argument to defeat other non-Christians in a project of historical apologetics, a concern that was foreign from my own, at least as much as counter-apologetic concerns were foreign to Robbins.
Just as quickly, I found that everyone's happy to invoke authority when it suits them. One of us had a PhD, one of us didn't. All these scholarly citations employing this "just a stylistic device" falsehood felt more real than their own eyes reading the texts and analyzing the other texts drawn upon elsewhere.
This made me question the methods of many people who quote only the authorities that support their viewpoints, running up a series of branches to some very particularized understanding of the sources that just so happens to be arranged to prove a point. So frequently we find that "but it's a scholar! they're even a Christian or whatever!" invoked as support of an argument, as if every Christian scholar were unable to write something with some counter-apologetic appeal unless they were right about it.
That was the thread when the argumentum ad 'just credit the scholarly judgments that run against the more-conservative views' died for me. Everybody was cheering for a view because it fit better what their preferences were, and that's what mattered when it came to the selection of what points they would choose to defend or not to defend.
Statistics: Posted by Peter Kirby — Sun Jun 16, 2024 5:25 pm