On Dan Barker: Its one thing to hold an opinion, its another to says it represents the consensus of scholars.

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Just got introduced to the name Dan Barker in the past couple of weeks. I'd actually thumbed through his books at the bookstore on one occasion or other, but seeing that he was very careless and in the few instances where he actually cited sources for his claims they tuned out mainly to be worthless rubbish, I had quickly decided they didn't really warrant attention. To quote Richard Carrier, one of Barker's brothers in arms: "No serious scholar wants to waste his time reading something that’s full of claims he can’t even check because they won’t even properly source them." Almost everything Barker says about history is flawed if for no other reason than his being unable to even adequately describe the ancient sources whose contents he claims he is describing

Since my friend mentioned him, I have been looking at him a little more closely. Many, many times what he says is simply false, and the only thing that one can say in response is, "I'm sorry, but that's just false. Not true, period."  In some of these cases where he describes his own opinions, he claims to speak on behalf of scholars as a whole. However, its one thing to hold an opinion, but quite another to describe your quirky opinion as the consensus of scholars when it is not.

A case in point is his treatment of statement about Jesus in Josephus. He writes of the famous Testimonium Flavianum:

"That passage from Josephus has been shown conclusively to be a forgery, and even conservative scholars admit it has been tampered with....

The Associated Press chose to omit the fact that scholars have largely discounted the Josephus paragraph as a later interpolation."
'
Couple of false statements here:

"has been shown conclusively to be a forgery" Nope, the vast majority of scholars do not agree.

"scholars have largely discounted the Josephus paragraph as a later interpolation." Again, sorry, the consensus of scholars, Jewish and Christian and whatever, believing and non-believing, accepts a substantial part of it as authentic. Only a handful of scholars, mostly those with the same agenda to promote as Barker, think otherwise. Richard Carrier, quoted earlier, would be one example.

Here is the Josephus passage itself with the doubtful portions blocked in in gray:



Or referring to the James who is mentioned as Jesus's brother in Josephus:

"Most scholars agree that Josephus is referring to another James [besides the brother of Jesus] here."

What can I say, that simply isn't true.  Here for example Louis H. Feldman, recently deceased, but one of the most prominent Josephus scholars of his generation.  Feldman makes a comment in a work more recent than Barker's:

"Moreover, the word Christos (Messiah) also occurs in Antiquities 20.200 (a passage which almost all scholars agree is genuinely Josephan) in connection with James, the brother of the so-called Christos." (Louis H. Feldman, “On the Authenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum Attributed to Josephus,” New Perspectives on Jewish Christian Relations In Honor of David Berger [eds. Elisheva Carlebach & Jacob J. Schacter Leiden & Booston: Brill, 2011], 23.

In regard to the passage in question here, Ant. 20.9.1 (200), John P. Meier remarks are relevant and consistent with the current scholarly consensus: “unlike the text about Jesus from the Slavonic Josephus, this narrative is found in the main Greek-manuscript tradition of The Antiquities without any notable variation. The early 4th-century Church historian Eusebius also quotes this passage from Josephus in his Ecclesiastical History (2.23.22).” (John P. Meier, A Marginal Jesus: Rethinking the Historical Jesus: Volume One: The Roots of the Problem and the Person [ABRL; New York: Doubleday, 1991], 57).

Barker makes these claims but provides no support for his assertions, and while their inadequacy is conspicuously evident to those who, like myself, have studied and pursued careers as scholars, it may not be so to listeners whose ignorance of what is or is not the consensus of scholars relating to any of the assertions he makes, makes it easier for him to get away with.

Mythicists like Barker are necessarily conspiracy theorists, due to the fact that they can never find support for their ideas in current scholarship.  Instead they have to travel over land and sea to find old books and current conspiracy mongers to build their arguments on.   The reasons this is so is because they need an answer to the question: "Why won't any the majority of scholars in any given discipline you engage in agree with your opinions?"  One answer is to say it is because they are all involved in a cover up.  The other is to pretend that the consensus of scholars agree with the indefensible idiosyncratic opinions you are putting out there.  In the case of the present post we see Barker doing both.  On the one hand he claims that he represents the scholarly take on Josephus, which he does not, and on the other he accuses the associated press of suppressing what most scholars believe!





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