Peter Martyn

If you could have any business with any luminaries of ancient times or a tall tale about a person who was dead before he ate a piece of a fish in front of various witnesses in Jerusalem then this Kean book would be a good place to get started on it.

For the most part, Dr. Blomberg has ignored the most outlandish claims of isolated scholars along with the Internet material that is posted without having passed the rigorous process of peer review since he thinks that the peer review is what characterizes true scholarship but if he had asked me about all of this then I would have suggested that a scholar who is going to be that short about it would have done better to say that the kind of it that has the rigorous process of peer review is also the most typical case of it. Not to suggest that it stopped there and quite to the contrary he has understated his case since scholarship that is both creditable and also mainstream has a practical monopoly on the authoritative historical records on everything from Nazi holocaust to Alexander the Great. No one who is less than fifty years old could possibly know about either one of them before he has been under a hallowed halls of learning somewhere and or else the amount that it would seem to be hearsay is enough that you may as well look for his peer group of the sort in a high school for example. At the same time the author is undermining it since the way that anything of the sort could have ever been made known to any hallowed halls of learning to start with is that less reliable but still creditable scholarship has been performed by people who would lead you to think that the registrar’s office never did find out where their peers could be found and if I was going to cite a particularly famous example of that it would be Sigmund Freud and his Moses and Monotheism which is entirely unheard of at Union Theological Seminary in New York notwithstanding much attention paid to Jewish academics such as Klausner and Vermes for examples and as far as I can tell the lot of them of the unacademic kind of it who may as well have included both Eric Hoffer and Edward Gibbon may be known from their relationship with other contributors quite apart from any consideration for guilds. Also experience would lead me to think that those who went far from the madding crowd had hardly been so isolated by comparison with folks who always call it communication skills when they make houses and careers by imitating celebrities and making it sound as if it were there own opinions regardless whether they had ever learned anything from any of them like what academics do for a living. In any case the burr that I would put under the saddle of this little bitty about the peer reviewed territory and its legitimate jurisdiction will not be learned between breakfast and lunch except that I would suggest that any hallowed halls that also make fortunes could be improved on by giving them some reading tests like one that was once done in Professor Morse’s class at UTS New York where what it showed over there was that the people who make the highest grades on their academic papers are the ones who can’t tell one famous theologian from another one if you put some of their writings on the table right in front of them and by the way I graduated up to the level where you drive a school bus for a living but apart from all of that at least my impressions have been that those who will most nearly learn what reason is made of would recognize a creditable scholar when they find the kind who would actually prefer the lowest place at the conference table and you can tell from his rather cogent sounding treatment of those who came before him that Blomberg is one of them. By the same token he is a little bit untypical of the academy which will usually deserve to tote its stuff over to the recycling bin about every twenty years or so.