This is a lament I have as a layman. I enjoy reading lots of sources on Bible scholarship, but I keep running into these three basic phrases:
1. “According to most scholars…”
2. “Scholarly opinion is divided, with some scholars arguing X and others Y…”
3. “Few scholars today argue…”
Most. Some. Few. To my layman ears, when a scholar makes assertions like these, this tells me that the scholar (1) is aware of the total head count of scholars in the field at the time of the assertion, and (2) can source to recent quantification on the opinions of these scholars (such as periodic polls in academic journals?) to defend his or her assertion. But I often find that the assertion is not footnoted or sourced at all, or if it is, it is only to one or two other Bible scholars that just make the same assertion.
These phrases often come up when authors are trying to claim that they have majority opinion in their side. For example, I’ve read Christian apologists who rage that the views of the Jesus Seminar (a scholarly group that actually took votes on which sayings of Jesus are authentic) were way outside the mainstream of Bible scholarship so must be rejected. But when I’m reading opposing scholars battling over who has the most scholars in their camp, where is the layman supposed to go for independent verification?
It would be great if Dr. Ehrman could address this topic in a blog, speaking for all scholars. When he and others use the phrase “According to most scholars,” what is his support for that word “most”? Is there any quantified data on scholarly opinion collected? Are all scholars weighed the same, or is the opinion of one Dr. Ehrman, who has been in the field for decades, worth that of 20 new Phd graduates? Or is the “most” the top 30 or so scholars he respects highly?
Ah the never-ending problem of the scholarly “consensus”.
What distinguishes an appeal to scholarly consensus from an invalid appeal to authority is the presumption that a particular body of scholars knows a field best, has studied it the most carefully, therefore their opinion has determinative value. When I say that the contemporary scholarly consensus is that the gospel of Mark was the earliest gospel written, that is simply a statement of fact. That is what the vast majority of scholars think. But few in academia would leave it at that. You still have to examine the evidence and keep in mind that the consensus has shifted before. I think the consensus, when it exists, should be a guide but not an orthodoxy.
Some examples. It used to be a fairly solid consensus that John was mostly independent from the other gospels, the so-called Synoptics. Now there is a strong movement away from that viewpoint. The consensus hasn’t shifted but it is an area of ongoing vigorous debate. It used to be a fairly solid consensus that Luke/Acts was written sometime in the latter third of the 1st century. Now there is a small but growing body of scholars who locate Luke/Acts in the first third of the 2nd century, detecting an influence from the writings of Josephus. My point is that opinions can change. You still have to examine the evidence. The problem in the field of biblical studies is the dearth of primary texts. Everybody is reading the same material. You probably aren’t going to suddenly find a new text that revolutionizes the field. It does happen of course, Ugarit, Qumran, Nag Hammadi, but only rarely.
In my opinion the “consensus” should be a starting point. Not a show-stopper. No claim is beyond critique.
For the most part, such statements are not the result of careful quantification. (There are exceptions: PhilPapers carries out ** you do not have permission to see this link ** to get gauge of where philosophers are. I’ve seen surveys of physicists asking them their opinion on things like which interpretation of QM they accept).
A big part of being an academic is knowing what other people working in the same space are arguing.
Sometimes such a statement might be based on a review article–in which the author sets out to lay out the state of the question by reviewing the relevant, recent, scholarly literature on some issue, summarizing the various positions (and listing the works that have advanced those positions).
Short of a review article would be a review section within an article, sometimes just a footnote, in which the author tries to quickly lay out the state of the question before making his own contribution to the debate. Similar “review” work is customary in dissertations and books–an author is usually expected to lay out the state of the question before trying to make his own contribution to the discussion.
Outside of an academic publication, such a statement may simply be the speaker speaking from his own expertise as a member of the profession. Based on his familiarity with recent publications, conference papers, and conversations with colleagues he knows what the trends are. As a member of the community of scholars working in a particular field, he knows what positions are mainstream, he knows which positions are contentious, and he knows that he would be aware if someone important made a claim that is surprising and outside of what is normal: sort of like how everyone working in NT knew within days when Dave Wallace claimed there was an extant first century copy of Mark.
Okay, in writing my prior reply I had opportunity to back and review the results the PhilPapers survey. In the first survey (2009) they also conducted a ** you do not have permission to see this link **. The results of that are interesting, for the purpose of this thread, and it is explicitly trying the measure how closely philosophers’ perception of other philosophers’ beliefs match philosophers’ actual beliefs.
Something to bear in mind if you review the survey: the survey is a survey of philosophers in general and covers all areas of philosophy: A philosopher may have opinions on philosophical questions without ever publishing those opinions, indeed he may have opinions that lie entirely outside of his specific professional expertise. Thus for example, it could be that ethicists (who actually publish on ethics) lean one way on an ethical question (and someone guessing what philosophers think, based on their knowledge of the recent, published, scholarly literature would predict one result), while philosophers taken as a whole lean a very different way (and someone predicting what philosophers think based on casual conversations with random philosophers from all specializations might predict a very different result).
For the past year of so Dan McClellan and a colleague have been putting together a survey for bible scholars on a large number of topics related to the Bible. Included are questions such as the dating of the gospels. During a live stream sometime in the past week he mentioned that he has had discussions with SBL about disseminating the survey to its members. It unclear if this will actually happen. If the survey is sent out it will probably be a year or more until the results can be collected, analyzed and published.
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