I tried but, in the end, I couldnt resist writing a response to that silly piece last week about Jesus never existing. And the ABC was happy to publish. ab.co/1GVkjD7 You can almost set your clock by it. Another article appears arguing Jesus never lived - so Christmas must be upon us. This time, however, I was particularly interested, not because Raphael Latasters piece in The Conversation had anything new to say but because it was written by a young man who just three years ago sat in my Sydney University class on Historical Jesus to Written Gospels. I baulked at writing a reply until, amazingly, his article was picked up by the Washington Post of all places. Such is the appetite for the extraordinary! Lataster has also written a book entitled There Was No Jesus, There is No God, a rather unsubtle contribution to the growing new atheist genre. And he is on his way to completing his PhD at Sydney University - notably in religious philosophy, not in history. His thesis, I understand, critiques the American philosopher and Christian apologist William Lane Craig. But my concern is not with atheism, religious philosophy, or even Christian apologetics. It is with history. As his former lecturer, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that Raphaels 1000 words on Jesus would not receive a pass mark in any history class I can imagine, even if it were meant to be a mere personal reflection on contemporary Jesus scholarship. Lataster is a better student than his piece suggests. But the rigours of academia in general - and the discipline of history, in particular - demand that his numerous misrepresentations of scholarship would leave a marker little choice but to fail him ...
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 01:01:25 +0000
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