May PSU and UA both be victorious Saturday. We await 2010.

I appreciate your position on “myth.” I am not a scholar as you, so I may be ridiculed by your peers, but, on principle, I adamantly avoid using BCE and CE when the opportunity presents itself to do so. I always use BC and AD, knowing full well it is not cool or “enlightened.” Perhaps BCE and CE are crusts thrown to those who do not believe in Jesus, but it just seems to me that, if I use those abbreviations I am giving tacit approval of what I perceive as a not so slightly veiled denial of the divinity of Christ and perhaps even His historicity.

Roll Tide!

John

Consider your use of “theology” with regard to rabbinic texts. It would be suspicious if you called rabbinic ideas about the deity “superstition” and reserved “theology” for only Christian texts. Rabbinic notions of the divine are theology for you, even if you don’t believe it all, because that is the label you use to mark out certain notions. And by doing so, you implicitly align your findings with and thereby participate in a broad, inter-cultural conversation about human thoughts through history of super-human entities. Likewise when I talk about the theology of enuma elish or whatever. If we reserved “theology” for only Christian theology (i.e., “true theology”), then we have failed as scholars to deal even-handedly with the data.

Do you consider “myth” as in some fundamental sense untrue?

First, it is commendable to write for a broader audience. We need people to make scholarly views accessible. But why not use that venue as a teaching opportunity, expanding the audience’s understanding of the way we approach religious texts as scholars. “Myth” is a widely-used term among anthropologists, folklorists, and RS scholars. Gen 1-2, whatever else it may be, is quite similar, broadly speaking, to a number of other cultures’ myths. So why perpetuate a false dichotomy between the Bible and everything else by refusing to employ the term? Why allow your audience’s ignorance in this matter to dictate your approach to the genre of the literature you are teaching? The same people who recoil at the word myth are the same people who could use a little more sophistication in their hermeneutics. So why not be the challenging educator they so desperately need?

Second, it may be impolite to suggest that some believing scholars’ refusal to use the M-word is intellectually dishonest. But it is important for scholars to call one another on problems in their thinking, like when someone’s theological framework insulates them from dealing with historical evidence in an even-handed manner or when their religious beliefs or concern for a religious community keeps them from treating literary texts as they would any other text. This harks back to the old problem from the early days of religious studies in which people thought THEY (savages) have magic while WE (Europeans) have religion. That was a case where a theological framework unduly influenced an entire field of human investigation. It was wrong and needed to change; thankfully it did. Likewise the issue of myth and certain kinds of biblical scholarship. Now, perhaps you don’t deserve the label of “dishonesty” because you are forthright about your bias. When I wrote what I did, I was thinking about John Walton’s lip service to the word myth in his book on ANE Thought and then his inability in the rest of the book to use it with regard to anything Israelite. But one could argue that even if one acknowledges one’s “bias” about myth or Genesis or whatever up front, the charge of intellectual dishonesty might still apply because one’s up-front admission may simply be the product of stubbornness or denial or something else, based in emotion or whatever, to deal with the evidence in as even-handed a manner as possible. In other words, perhaps one is blinded by an ideology and cannot deal honestly though one tries or thinks one is trying. I’m not saying this is you. I’m saying it is possible that some might be unduly influenced by non-rational things to privilege the Bible. And that’s a problem if we’re talking about scholarship here. Consider the flat-earth society. If they say up front, “we believe the earth to be a flat disk because that’s what the Bible teaches and nothing can shake us from this,” is this admission the foundation of intellectual honesty? Is there not a more basic problem that needs addressed? This is where I’m coming from. I’m not saying we should all try to be neutral. I’m saying that we should all, no matter what our ultimate allegiance, try to deal with the evidence in an even-handed manner. Just because I’m an agnostic doesn’t mean I can trash the Bible. I should try to deal with the textual evidence from the ancient world fairly, including what I see in the Bible. I expect the same kind of thing from believing scholars, whoever they are writing for.

Third, I do accept Lincoln’s ideas about myth. My expansion was not contra his position, briefly laid out by Hobbins. It was simply spelling it out along with issues that it raises. See Lincoln’s book Discourse and the Construction of Society.

Fourth, I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say this: “To criticize me for doing so [unduly privileging the Bible] would be the same as to criticize an atheist scholar by asserting that they must first accept that God exists before they can do research on the Bible.” I don’t understand the homology at all.

Finally, I didn’t use your name in my post. I wasn’t calling you out personally. I linked to one of your comments as an example of what I saw going around the blogosphere. That’s all.