Friday, September 26, 2008

Mentioned on Debunking Christianity

There's a blog dedicated to "Debunking Christianity", and The Burial of Jesus has received a mention there.

Christians reading this should not be surprised that this book would get a favorable mention on what is, in essence, an atheist blog. Historical study, as John P. Meier puts it and others agree, is about using a set of tools and methods that should allow one to treat the same evidence in the same way, regardless of one's religious affiliation or background. This doesn't mean that, as one engages in the more creative task of developing historical theories and filling in the gaps between what we know with relative certainty, or even looks at some particular piece of evidence, there won't be disagreements that reflect differing assumptions. But there are basic ground rules that everyone engaged in historical research should be able to agree on. And while there are fundamentalists on both sides who try to bypass the critical and painstaking evaluation of data and draw a simplistic conclusion, those who embrace an honest and academically rigorous approach to historical investigation should have much to agree on in principle, if not always on the details.

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