Pages

Thursday, January 23, 2020

John – The Man Who Saw

https://ratiochristi.org/blog/john-the-man-who-saw/

5 comments:

  1. Recently Mike Licona addressed Lydia McGrew's book in a live discussion with David Wood and (former 5 point Calvinist now Molinist) Tim Stratton.

    https://youtu.be/NeRRzT7YVXw?t=3862. Already cued up. I know Lydia follows Triablogue. But maybe she has already been informed by others.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Not much to respond to there, is there? Just a drive-by smearing. If Licona thinks I am "downright sloppy," he's welcome to show where. Himself, not via proxy. Carefully. If he spins, I think there will be informed readers capable of seeing it for themselves after they look into the issues.

    Interesting that if I do him the courtesy to write and respond to his work in detail, he makes fun of that as writing "ten pages" in response to "one paragraph." But at the same time I'm "downright sloppy." Gotcha.

    The blind partisanship and lack of objectivity are starting to show pretty blatantly on that side. (And yes, I'm sure someone will take a screen cap of this "bad tone" comment. But at this point the lack of serious scholarly engagement is pretty much shameless in that camp.) I have made a scholarly case. Playing the credentialist card over and over and over again and throwing around words like "downright sloppy," etc., is not a reasoned response. TMOM speaks for itself. I footnote and cite everything. I write for fair-minded readers and I positively *invite* them to look up Licona's work and decide for themselves if I have read wrongly. I also invite them to check my work concerning the ancients as well. See who is "cherry picking." I provide full citations, and I carefully consider arguments on the other side and quotations that might seem contrary to my own views.

    Apropos of "cherry picking," here's a possibly relevant post. Btw, there is an entire chapter on ancient speech writing in TMOM.

    http://whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2018/10/let_ancient_people_speak_for_t_1.html

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I dont know. He said there is just no shortcuts - twice! That sounds pretty conclusive. I did think it was odd your book was only 500 pages long, and you're only planning a second book on John. Sounds like one big shortcut to me. I'll have to read your work more skeptically from now on.

      Delete
  4. Heh!

    Dr. Licona and his followers are quite capable of joking about the length of my responses one moment and accusing me of sloppiness the next. Indeed, he does it in this very video. I'm afraid that even the appearance of any fair consideration of the quality of my work has gone by the boards at this point.

    I suspect that one thing Dr. Licona did not like (his reference to being 120 pages in indicates that he had recently read this chapter) was my format in "Let Ancient People Speak For Themselves" in which I put out a lot of quotations from ancient authors with relatively minimal commentary. (Though in one section I show how Licona himself is cherry picking Lucian's work on how to write history.) Perhaps he considers it "sloppy" to do that. *If* that is part of what he has in mind, he is forgetting a paper that he presumably did not consider "sloppy"--a paper on ancient historiography by his friend Darrell Bock. I modeled the format of that chapter on Bock's paper, and I even used many of Bock's citations, though I followed up myself and found the cited sections in context for myself, sometimes mulled over multiple translations, etc. (So much for "sloppy.") I give Bock credit in the footnotes for these helpful citations in his paper. The difference between us is just that Bock, rather surprisingly, believes that Mike's views are compatible with the big emphasis upon historical accuracy that Bock finds in ancient historiographical standards. I disagree with that conclusion, as is, of course, any scholar's prerogative to do, given what the literary device views actually are. Perhaps quoting a lot of ancient authors and emphasizing their strong emphasis upon the importance of truth is not sloppy if one winds up in the last five minutes saying that Licona's work fits with this very well but is "sloppy" if one cites them in a similar manner but comes to a different conclusion about how they fit with Licona's theories about the ancients and the Gospels!

    ReplyDelete