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Scholarship is Not Merely Skepticism

Scholarship is Not Merely Skepticism

Last updated on: July 1, 2025 at 7:53 am by James F. McGrath

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Scholarship is Not Merely Skepticism 2025-06-30T19:56:06-04:00 James F. McGrath

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Being appropriately skeptical is an important tool in the toolbox of the academic, but scholarship is not merely skepticism. I explain this in my latest article in The Bible and Interpretation, and thought that I should share it here so that subscribers to my blog are made aware of it and get a chance to read it.

Skepticism of Scholarship

As I consider my own journey into and through academia, the most fundamental shifts that I have undergone pertain to the embrace of doubt and skepticism. I am confident that I am not alone in this. Especially when it comes to biblical studies, many who pursue degrees in this field are motivated by a faith that holds the Bible as authoritative and trustworthy. Initially, then, our aim is to be skeptical of and doubt scholarship that challenges the Bible’s accuracy.

Eventually, if we are honest, the evidence within the Bible overwhelms our doctrine imposed on the Bible. We come to realize that scholars are not unnecessarily poking holes in the text. On the contrary, scholars are most often trying to make sense of literal holes in manuscripts, and of metaphorical holes in the text’s meaning and coherence.

Skepticism of the Bible

Once the Bible’s infallibility and inerrancy are undermined by the evidence in the Bible, we regularly undergo a pendulum swing in the opposite direction from our previous stance. We were told to take everything on faith, did so, and found we were misled. We resign to not accept anything unless we can prove it. Everything must be doubted. Those few things that can withstand the most rigorous scrutiny are to be accepted. The rest can be discarded.

We see this perspective in the historical critical scholarship that predominated for quite some time. Its roots are in the Enlightenment rationalism that led Thomas Jefferson to excise all miracles from the Bible. Historical criticism came to be synonymous with the stance that Jefferson did not go nearly far enough. Stories and sayings without miraculous elements needed to also be doubted and excised.

There is an appropriate place for this. No figure has been overlaid with dogma in the form of creedal statements, and had metaphysical claims about their nature discussed and debates for centuries, the way that happened with Jesus. Yet we cannot, indeed must not, blame the writings that were eventually compiled into the Christian New Testament for everything that came after them, and judge them in light of them. We need to find ways to treat the earliest Christian texts, so early that most of them do not even use the term, as what they were when they were composed: texts produced in communities that were neither uninterested in preserving traditions about what Jesus actually said and did, nor averse to inventing and elaborating in order to address matters they considered important.

Balancing Skepticism

The next part is crucial.

When one treats denial of science and scholarship as though it were faith, one ends up with views like young-earth creationism. When one treats merely doubting and inverting everything that a biblical text happens to say as though it were scholarship, one ends up with views like Jesus mythicism.

The Gospels contain stories of miracles, things that no historian can legitimately pronounce likely because of their inherent unlikelihood by definition. Unfortunately, in groups that label themselves “skeptics,” this often leads to the stance that therefore everything in the Gospels, including teaching and other mundane information, should be judged a likely fabrication.

To illustrate the problem with this, there is a good chance that you have spoken with a Pentecostal Christian at some point, and you may do so daily without realizing it. Pentecostals will if asked (and sometimes without asking) readily share with you stories of healings and exorcisms that they have witnessed, or at least ones that are famous in their community. Some churches have had crutches on the walls from those who came needing them and left without them.

The point is not to either dismiss the reality of such things, not assert their reality, nor to explain these things in psychosomatic terms. Set such questions aside as historians do with ancient miracle stories as a matter of course. The point is that the many people who are Pentecostals whom you probably know will not, by virtue of being part of that tradition, completely fabricate sermons and attribute them to their pastors, nor be entirely unreliable on mundane matters such as when and where they go to church, where they went for lunch after a service, and so on.

If you interview a Pentecostal, you will get a mix of the verifiably probable and the miraculous. You could not legitimately dismiss all of the former because of the latter. If the person is a coworker, you may already have found them to be reliable, trustworthy, and accurate when it comes to their job.

Those of us who do historical scholarship ought, I believe, approach the Gospels with such modern analogies in mind. Ancient texts often abound with miracles and contain much that is simply unverifiable. We do need to be skeptical. We should not, however, be excessively skeptical. Merely doubting more mundane content in ancient sources does not automatically mean you are a more serious or “better” historian.

Skepticism and Biography

This post was prompted by a negative review of my book Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist. I suppose it is only fair, since the author of the review, Rivka Nir, is the author of a book about John the Baptist which I reviewed very critically. I am grateful for all reviews, and not only positive ones. As you can see from the above, Nir’s review prompted and inspired me to articulate some of the core underpinnings of my approach to history in a way that I believe justifies what I have done in this project, and in earlier ones such as What Jesus Learned from Women, and hopefully what I will do in future projects as well.

I disagree strongly, however, with some of the claims that Nir makes about the book. She says “what the sources do not tell us, McGrath fills in with imaginary assumptions that have no visible foundations in the sources.” That is absolutely untrue. I do engage in a lot of creative filling in around and between data points in the texts, but I do not believe that I ever do so in ways that are completely unrelated to the sources.

Nir claims, “The book’s major problem is how McGrath makes use of the sources in constructing John the Baptist’s biography. For him, every legend, whether early or late, contains some authentic kernel or historical memory alongside inauthentic details and is hence of legitimate use in historical research. He does not differentiate between types of sources in terms of their time, place of composition, tendencies of their writer, or where they appear…He consequently makes indiscriminate use of all possible sources, without discussing their value and problems they raise for the scholar: the Gospels and other New Testament writings, Christian apocryphal works, such as the Protoevangelium of James, the Josephus testimony on John the Baptist, and gnostic texts, suggesting their believers came from among John’s disciples. ”

This might just possibly seem to be the case with Christmaker, since so much of the discussion of sources in the manner academics rightly expect is found in John of History, Baptist of Faith. I make the case there in detail for why long-neglected sources such as those of the Mandaeans need to be used critically. I draw on them, but I never claim that all of them contain historically useful material, nor that any of them contains only reliable information. Nir’s statement seems to me to be simply false. What I do say, and will happily repeat here, is that late sources are not by definition entirely useless merely because they are late. Many late sources can be shown to draw on earlier ones. Lateness justifies caution, not neglect without consideration.

(The fact that she talks about the prevailing view in research on Gnosticism, and then cites two sources from the 1970s, is hopefully indicative that we are not dealing here with a serious criticism of my work in light of actual recent research.)

Nir complains about the deductions that I make from details which are found only in the Gospel of Luke’s infancy narrative. I offer discussion in Christmaker about the fact that infancy narratives are problematic to use extensively for history, but also that they regularly embed mundane details. Luke makes claims that were verifiable or falsifiable to those who had some knowledge of the historical John the Baptist. Had he appeared to be a lifelong Nazirite? Was he known to have a priest for a father? These were the kinds of things that either would have been widely known or not. My deduction from the fact that both are asserted about John in Luke, Mandaean, and later Christian sources is based in those sources.

Nir writes of one of my early statements about methodology, “What he says raises the question of the historian’s role: whether the historian should stick closely to available sources, distinguish between them, privilege as much as possible those that are authentic and closest in time to the events under consideration, and build on their information and interpretation; or fill in the information they yield with imagined assumptions so as to create a whole and coherent picture intended for laypersons. In other words, the question is how far the historian can go in assumptions based on such little and problematic information.”

My answer is there in the book, as well as in John of History, Baptist of Faith. Those who are interested in ancient figures like John the Baptist, Jesus, Hillel, Herod, or anyone else will fill in around the details to make the bare information meaningful and connected. It behooves historians to offer plausible narration rooted in the relevant sources critically examined, rather than to leave it to others to do so (as they inevitably will) in a manner that will be less informed by intimate acquaintance with the sources and with historical methods.

After reading Nir’s review, I found myself pondering serious methodological questions. Why is it supposedly appropriate for a historical or literary scholar to engage in deductive speculation about interpolation, redaction, and sources, yet not about events, motivations, relationships, and influences?

Which involves more or less speculation of these two, and which sticks more closely to the relevant historical data? That John the Baptist looked like a Nazirite and was known to be the son of a priest, or that the Q document underwent multiple redactions? That Herod Antipas wanted John the Baptist dead as Josephus and Matthew agree, or that he admired and protected him as Mark says?

It is noteworthy that when Nir agrees with me, as she does on John’s baptism being an alternative to sacrifice rather than a purity immersion, suddenly my method and conclusions cease to be criticized. Yet this is no less a deduction from the sources using the methods I have articulated than everything else in my biography of John.

There are other assertions that are simply incorrect in Nir’s review. I nowhere “locates the bulk of John’s followers in Galilee.” I do note the fact that the sources mention many Galilean followers of John, while also noting that the sources claim he had followers as far afield as Egypt and Asia Minor. Nir also suggests that I ascribe Gnostic views to John when in fact the question I raise is what John’s views might have been in view of the fact that we have ancient sources indicating that Gnosticism was pioneered by individuals in his movement. Nir concludes by saying that “The book’s concluding chapters come to highlight and substantiate McGrath’s standpoint on John the Baptist’s major importance for the history of religion in general and Christianity in particular.” Yet the negative tone throughout, and the final sentence, stand at odds with this seemingly positive assessment.

I am under no illusion that I am correct about all of my deductions about John the Baptist. What scholar is ever right about everything? When scholars seek to break new ground in a thoroughgoing manner, the odds are even more strongly against them. More often than not, it will be a handful of their specific conclusions that will stand the test of time, rather than their overall synthesis. I was resigned to that from the outset. I do think I may be right about much of what I say about John. It is for the scholarly community to weigh what I have published and reach whatever consensus they collectively may. I do hope that most of them will engage with my books about John the Baptist in a different manner than Nir has. And I hope that this methodological statement that Nir’s review inspired may itself be a useful contribution to the discussion that I trust will continue, not only specifically about John the Baptist, but about ancient history and biography more generally.

For More On This

See my recent discussion of historical methods as they pertain to John the Baptist and Jesus on the History Valley YouTube channel.

Here I am on the TheologyU YouTube channel talking about John the Baptist:

Bill Heroman wrote (among other things) that “The narrative representation of historical events is necessarily an aesthetic undertaking.”

Yung Suk Kim pointed out that our prior knowledge and experience at times helps us perceive, at others keeps us from perceiving

Joe Zias wrote an article about a tomb that some traditions have claimed is that of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist

Faith Tibble shared thoughts on studying sarcophagi

I have a long history of blogging about both young-earth creationism and Jesus mythicism.

The Real Difference Between Creationism and Mythicism

Mythicism, Creationism, and other Conspiracy Theories

Once More On The Resemblance Between Mythicism And Creationism

Also perhaps of related interest: Rogue History

The Acts of Jesus: What Did Jesus Really Do? The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus

How Mobile were the Ancients?

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