Saturday, December 24, 2022

Daniel B. Glover on the Importance of Overlooking Character/Moral Flaws of Scholars when Interacting with their Scholarship

  

Having just cited Pervo, I should note at the outset that his work is occasionally cited and engaged in this study (especially in Chapters 4 and 5) because several arguments he made are relevant to our subject matter, and failure to attribute the origination of such information would, of course, be plagiarism—or at least misleading. The guild of New Testament scholarship of an earlier period, too, was rife with anti-Semites (e.g., Kittel); nevertheless, the work of such figures is occasionally relevant to the task at hand. Engagement with the work of arguments of Pervo and other persons of low moral standing should in no way be understood as an endorsement of their lives or characters, which would be both flawed and disturbing; neither should citation of any scholar here be so regarded. (Daniel B. Glover, Patters of Deification in the Acts of the Apostles [Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament 2. Reihe 576; TÅ«bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2022], 13 n. 34)