Scholars Overreacting To Mistakes

People often overreact to mistakes, whether their own or somebody else's. Children raised by parents who were too strict grow up to raise their own children too leniently. The same tendency to overcompensate often occurs in religious contexts, such as New Testament scholarship.

Conservative Christians often think that scholars who disagree with them are motivated by something like naturalism or a desire to reject accountability to the Christian God or avoid Christian standards on matters like sex and money. There's some merit to that line of reasoning. Some scholars do seem to have such motives. But what about, say, a liberal scholar who's open to things like the supernatural and Christian ethical standards, yet disagrees with many of the conclusions of conservative Christian scholarship? What would be motivating him?

There could be many explanations. But I think one of the most significant explanations is a form of the tendency to overreact to mistakes. Scholars don't want to be associated with Christians of the past who were credulous (e.g., Christians of the medieval era who believed in dubious miracle claims or who accepted Biblical accounts without giving much thought to the subject). And if they're living in a part of the world where most people identify themselves as Christians, there's even more of a tendency for some scholars to want to distance themselves from past Christians and correct the misconceptions of modern believers. A scholar will often react to past pro-Christian credulity and the danger of pro-Christian credulity in the modern world by going too far in the opposite direction. He's not as critical of the anti-Christian position as he ought to be. In an effort to avoid pro-Christian credulity, he's credulously anti-Christian.

The same occurs in many other contexts in life. People are often overly critical of human testimony in general. Or they're too distrusting of human memory due to bad experiences with memory in some contexts.

Often, what people are overreacting to doesn't even exist as they imagine it. For instance, most people in a society will claim to be Christian, so a lot of scholars in that culture will be more critical of Christianity than they otherwise would have been. They think they have some sort of responsibility to be more critical of majorities than minorities. But if you look more closely at the society, through polling and other means, you find that most of the individuals in that society are immature Christians at best. The culture claims to be Christian, but is largely non-Christian below the surface. By being so critical of Christianity, scholars are actually aiming their critical efforts at a belief system held by a minority, not a majority. The same occurs in other contexts, like media coverage of politics. Journalists have a mindset in which conservatives represent what's traditional, the establishment, etc., so they're more critical of conservatives than liberals. Yet, in a context like the twenty-first-century United States, liberals are often in the majority. When the media side with liberals, they're siding with the mainstream.

Near the end of Jesus And The Eyewitnesses (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006), Richard Bauckham writes:

Particularly in Gospels scholarship there is an attitude abroad that approaches the sources with a fundamental skepticism, rather than trust, and therefore requires that anything the sources claim be accepted only if historians can independently verify it. This is probably a combination of, on the one hand, the exclusively individualist epistemological attitude thought by Collingwood to be necessary if history is to be scientific with, on the other hand, the special features of Gospels scholarship that make many scholars anxious above all to avoid dogmatically influenced credulity. Most scholars in this field [gospels scholarship] have little or no experience of working as historians in other areas of history. So it is easy for Gospels scholarship itself to develop its own conventions for gauging the reliability of sources. These do not necessarily correspond well to the way evidence is treated in other historical fields. Young scholars, learning their historical method from Gospels scholars, often treat it as self-evident that the more skeptical they are toward their sources, the more rigorous will be their historical method. It has to be said, over and over, that historical rigor does not consist in fundamental skepticism toward historical testimony but in fundamental trust along with testing by critical questioning. Testimony may be mistaken and may mislead, but this is not to be generally presumed but must be established in each case. Testimony should be treated as reliable until proved otherwise. "First, trust the word of others, then doubt if there are good reasons for doing so." This general rule for everyday life applies also to the historian in relation to her sources. (486-487)