On ‘Of Men and Muses’

I know there are questions surrounding my book since I first published it last week. My time is much more limited now due to current commitments to other projects and I have just not had the ability to sit down and organize a post about my book like this. I thought I might now take the time to address some of the questions and I apologize for not predicting these issues early on. The response to my book has been both one of interest and of curiosity. I’m surprised continually by the support I receive; it humbles me.

To start, I will address exactly what the book is. Of Men and Muses is a collection of essays I have written, some were originally for submission to academic journals and series and some appeared on my blog, which, as the subtitle explicitly suggests, deal with history, literature and religion. The book is 210 pages long and about 95% of it is new content. To be clear, only four of the essays in this book were once blog articles and all four have undergone revisions. These revisions included overhauling large chunks of the text in some of the articles in order to beef them up (both in terms of argument and in footnotes). Each one of the four no longer resembles the original blog articles. The other four essays along with the seven page introduction had been rewritten specifically for this book (as I said, some were treatments I was considering submitting to academic series).

The final manuscript was sent to an editor (I thank him in the introduction) and, on top of that, each chapter was sent off to leading scholars in the appropriate fields for their insight. All of them had useful suggestions and offered thoughts on how to expand a point here or there (I thank them also in the intro). This, I feel, is an important point to make because, as my introduction states, this book is not written with the Academy in mind. I compiled this book and wrote these articles for the layman and laywoman. While the book does require some knowledge of the material, I agree with Richard Dawkins that science is something that should not be dumbed-down. To do that would be an insult to my readers. I am aware that some of my readers may get lost in the terms and the application of terms so common to academia (like kerygma, or intertextuality, or form criticism, etc…) so as consequence I have included a select bibliography organized by subject at the end of the book to aide the reader in their own investigations.

There have been some questions raised about the publisher. Yes, it is POD (Print on Demand) and, yes, Richard Carrier’s new book Not the Impossible Faith is what inspired me to consider POD as a possibility. I did have other offers from “real” (in quotes here because Lulu is still a publishing company, regardless of the fact that it is POD) publishers—Prometheus was one of them. But there were reasons I decided to go with POD over Prometheus or even through, perhaps, an academic series like CIS.

Thomas Thompson—who had known I was planning to put a book like this together for some time—had asked if I had considered publishing the book through an academic press when I first explained to him my idea for the book project. I explained to him that the book was not organized for an academic audience and, as I am working with him on a collection of essays that is going to be published through CIS (upon the books completion sometime this year), I did not burden him with the book due to the formatting.

While Prometheus is an excellent publisher with a notable reputation—especially among free-thinkers—there were some reasons I felt publishing this particular book through them would not be the right choice for me (at least, not for this book). Part of the reason was that I didn’t want an advance for the book initially, but to make money off the book each sale (more on royalties below). The advance would be generous, but if my book did happen to make it big (this book probably won’t), I would not be entitled to any more money (this is, as far as I understand it, the way Prometheus’ advances work—this may depend on the author and the book, of course). The advantages to publishing through Prometheus are well-known. It is considered to be a “real” publisher with good editors and a strong following (for lack of a better term); there is also the reputation the publisher has that would bring the book some prestige. However I would also have to wait at least six months before the book would be available (perhaps longer, up to a year) and I just wanted to get the book out there.

Additionally, I wanted something I could springboard other studies off of. Having the book available now means I can cite the book in any other treatment I do (of which I have at least three to do this year) and my monograph (which is, sadly, still far from completion). Also, now that the book is available, I expect to get feedback from reviewers and from academia (those who so choose to read it) and work on strengthening perspectives and arguments now so, when I do work on my monograph, I know my arguments will be (generally) unassailable. I imagine that no author or critic or amateur historian or academic gets it right the first time; undoubtedly I will get criticism for something in my book and not everyone will agree. This is part of the reason I put this book together—to generate a dialogue with others to better my arguments, perhaps even to change an opinion or two that I hold, to become more educated, and, frankly, having a published book is quite a good feeling.

That being said, POD through Lulu was the best option for me. Some may not approve of it (and, at times, this is a valid concern), but as my book was (a) not written for the scholar but the layperson, (b) and formatted differently than most books (not to mention the fact that I wanted to have it available as soon as possible) made POD the best candidate and Lulu was the easiest POD publisher out there to work with. That doesn’t mean Lulu is perfect.

Some questions (although not many) have been raised about the price of the book. Unfortunately, Lulu has a policy that I must charge the same amount (or less) for retail suppliers that I do for Lulu.com. The problem is, retailers mark up the books ridiculously and for both Lulu and retail services, an additional fee is charged (in addition to the production costs) by Lulu. This means that the royalties I (or any other Lulu author) make from retail sales of my book (like from Amazon, B&N, and Borders) will be significantly less than from purchases made on Lulu.com. In fact I make less than half the royalties from purchases on retail sites than from Lulu’s website. In order for me to make any sort of royalty on the book from those retailers (which will probably end up selling my book better than Lulu will) I had to mark the book up to the price it is now. Hopefully Amazon will not mark up the book as much as Lulu predicts, in which case I would recommend picking up the book on Amazon when it becomes available. I’ll make less money for each copy sold, but it will be cheaper overall (hopefully).

I hope this addresses the questions some may have had about my book. There will always be critics to whatever I do (partly because of mistakes I have made in the past and partly because it makes for good net drama) but as long as at least some of it is relevant and critical, I don’t mind. I hope those who choose to pick up a copy enjoy the read and find it thought-provoking and interesting, compelling and even persuasive.

Joe Hoffmann on Jesus, Ellis and Kurtz

Found here:

http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/founders-syndrome-jesus-elllis-and-kurtz/

Joe Hoffmann on Paul Kurtz

Read about it here:

http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/the-lion-in-winter-the-exile-of-paul-kurtz/

Of Men and Muses

Well Book 1 is here!  It’s not my monograph, however.  Two more yet to go this year!

Updates and Such

I know its been about three weeks since I updated last, but some news.

(1) You’ll notice that I have removed some of the blog posts on here. Not to worry, they’ll return. You may have to update your links to them if you’re linking in. They’ll be back around mid-April.

(2) I’ve been very busy lately working on submissions; too busy to contribute anything here. I apologize to my frequent visitors for not updating as frequently or with new content. As mid-year approaches I will be weighed down with other responsibilities, but I’ll try to keep everyone updated as more good things happen.

(3) There is a certain internet apologist who feels it is his duty as a devout Christian to slander my name across the web. At some point in the future, a portion of this blog will be sectioned off to deal with the claims made by this individual, along with documentation and correspondence which has been omitted or ignored by the perpetrator in order to continue his slander campaign. In light of some recent identity theft crimes that this person may have committed, some other colleagues and I may be launching a full legal investigation. In light of similar identity theft and cyberbullying incidents that happened to Dr. Schiffman (so similar, in fact, that its eerie), along with the charges filed against Normal Golb’s son for committing the crimes, there is a good chance authorities will be looking into the matter. Updates to follow.

Note: Its one thing to have opinions. Opinions are like noses, after all; everyone has them (and its their right to).  But engaging in slander and posing as academic individuals to harass somebody else because you feel that it is your god-given duty to destroy that person’s reputation–that is something entirely different. It’s also illegal.

Robert Eisenman Adds His Perspective to the Gerd Luedemann Court Decision

Jesus Project fellow Robert Eisenman writes of the Luedemann case that it has a deep roots in the German educational system, going back to the Enlightenment itself:

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“….Allow me to express a last follow-up example from Gerd’s own homeland and this two centuries earlier in the 1780’s when Moses Mendelssohn was wrestling with similar issues under circumstances relating to his nascent and growing Jewish Community in Germany and his own anomalous position concerning issues of ‘faith’ and ‘faithlessness’ which were on the rise and front-and-center in it — namely, the example he cited in Jerusalem, which might have helped Gerd’s case if his lawyers had been aware of it (though I doubt it), and that was the situation of ‘the mohel’ or circumcisor who had lost his faith and whose position and, therefore, the payment of his salary had come into question.

Mendelssohn’s conclusion after a certain amount of argumentation, brilliant as it was, was so simple in its clarity that picturesquely it might have helped in the staid atmosphere of courtroom Germany; and that was, as Mendelssohn put it in his own inimitable way: “A foreskin was cut” whatever the faith of faithlessness of the individual doing the cutting (Paul might have appreciated this one). For him, that was all of the matter a given Community had a right to concern itself with and no more, which was in this case Mendelssohn standing up for Mendelssohn against similar Communal religious authorities demanding like-minded conformity — certainly not the private beliefs of the individual — in Gerd’s case, this would be as long as the courses were taught to the standard of scholarly excellence for which Gerd is known. An example such as this from such an alien source, but still in the Germany of two centuries ago before the tragic events of more recent history, might have really got the Courtroom’s attention; but as they say hindsight is twenty-twenty and in cases, such as this, when a Court is intent on a given decision, as I have personally had occasion to notice, nothing is going to help.

I don’t know if any of this might prove helpful, but it does at least indicate the fellow-feeling one shares against such shallow parochialism and that these kinds of situations actually are not new in Germany, but even can go back several hundred years to the situation of guest communities desperately trying to deal with the challenges of modern intellectual life there.

With all kind regards, I remain

Robert Eisenman

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Sad News for the Academy: German Courts Limit Theological Inquiry

Dear readers,

The following is written by Joe Hoffmann concerning news we, at the Jesus Project, have just heard this morning. Gerd Luedemann has lost his ten-year-long court battle in Germany. The ruling should surprise every critical mind, but it should be of great concern to those in the academy. Gerd writes (in regards to this piece below);

“As for Küng who is always mentioned when people hear about my case, he never went to court but settled with his university. My case is different because for the first time in history the German Supreme Court has issued a full statement on the role of theology in the university and the statement is anti-enlightenment because it plainy states that at German Universities the confession of a church or of any future religion overrides the academic freedom of a professor. That is an intellectial scandel against which the international intellectual community should protest the more so because the University of Göttingen rightly boast of being an enlightenment university (founded in 1737). And this ruling makes truely critical work at German theological faculties – both protestant and catholic – impossible.”

Where the once proud enlightened scholars brought the academy into a new world of theological inquiry, the courts have rules that such inquiry has limits. This is not the first time a scholar has been quieted in German universities because of dogmatic boundaries. And unfortunately, as this case proves, it will not be the last. All of academia should be in an uproar over this incident.

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Gerd Luedemann: Non sine causa…laudatus

Gerd Luedemann, Professor of History and Literature of Early Christianity in the University of Goettingen, has received word from the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany that his appeal against an earlier ruling excluding him from the teaching of New Testament in the University’s Faculty of Theology has been rejected.

The basis for the Court’s ruling hinges on the fact that Professor Luedemann was “reassigned” to a position outside the Faculty offering essentially the same teaching and research opportunities as his previous position. In addition, the Court decided that the confessional teaching of theology is a unique responsibility of the Theology Faculty and that its interest in retaining a distinctive identity outweighed Professor Luedemann’s claim that the reassignment impinged on his academic (“scientific”) freedom.

The tradition of theological education in many European countries, including Germany, differs substantially from the American situation, where ministerial training is largely the province of private and parochial institutions or, in the case of distinguished private divinity schools such as Harvard, Yale and Chicago, subject to the same guarantees of academic freedom that obtain in the university as a whole.

Professor Luedemann’s distinguished work in the study of early Christianity now serves as a test-case for the entrenched and sometimes unnoticed parochialism of the European model, where—in this case–the open criticism of doctrine and theological axioms such as the resurrection of Jesus has been deemed impermissible, precisely in the interest of maintaining parochial identities. One can imagine no other area of serious study in the modern university where such a rule should be permitted to stand, or be used as the basis of a legal judgment. This case throws into bold relief the archaic nature of the marriage between Christian theology and scholarship as it is still protected by law not only in Germany, but in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Switzerland as well.

Rooted in the political compromises of the Reformation, the structure of European theological education should become a matter of concern and a priority for the educational commissions of the European Union. Cases such as Luedemann’s, and earlier Hans Kueng’s at Tuebingen on the Catholic side, suggest that it is feckless to complain about the regressive nature of scholarship in the Arab world when seminal Christian doctrines can prevail over common sense and free inquiry in some of the most distinguished institutions of higher learning in the world.

We congratulate Gerd Luedemann in bearing the torch in this cause–and “fighting the good fight”

R. Joseph Hoffmann, Chair

Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion;

Co-Chair, The Jesus Project

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Please blog this article. Word of this travesty must get out to all and everyone.

Richard Carrier’s New Book

Richard Carrier recently published a new book! (No, it is not his Jesus book–he is still working on that one) Check out his blog post about it here: http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2009/02/not-impossible-faith.html

Also check out his book (as in ‘pick up a copy’) at Lulu here: http://www.lulu.com/content/4580954

An Amusing Graffito

Pompeii and Herculaneum provide some 11,000 inscriptions for scholars to study, most of them bring in Latin (although there are many still which are Oscan, Greek, Etruscan and at times, combinations of these). These inscriptions give a glimpse of what life was like at Pompeii from around 30 BCE to 79 CE shortly before its destruction, so it is easy for modern scholars to appreciate them. But apparently this wasn’t always the case. Unaware of his city’s impending doom and the usefulness of the writing on the wall, one rather interesting fellow lamented the following:

Ad miror te paries non c[e]cidisse qui tot scriptorum taedia sustineas.

Translation (given by Rex E. Wallace):

O wall, I am amazed that you have not fallen down since you support the loathsome scribblings of so many writers.

As Wallace aptly puts it in his An Introduction to Wall Inscriptions from Pompeii and Herculaneum (2005), “While we can understand the sentiments of the writer, at the same time we are grateful to those who have, by means of their scribblings, provided us with an invaluable means for gaining insight into the affairs and the language of the inhabitants of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the first century AD.” (pp. xxiii-xxiv)

The Jesus Project Website

Updates galore! As some of my readers have already borne witness to, the website has been resurrected (pun intended); from the ashes of the old will come the new. Carol has done a great job with the site so far. These updates include new News segments, the recent online discussions concerning the Project from all over the Blogosphere, and an updated list of Scholars Associates.

More is still to come. Keep an eye on the website and this blog for continued details.