WALTKE ON AKENSON:

Mark Goodacre links to a reply to Akenson by Professor Bruce Waltke, a member of the advisory board for the Gospel of John:

"The Gospel of John: Let he who is without sin . . ." (again, in the Globe and Mail)

I don't want to get drawn much further into this one, but I think one thing needs to be pointed out. I don't blame Professor Waltke for being annoyed with Akenson's essay, which seemed to be written with the aim of irritating people, but I do think that if he's going to reply � especially with the same tone Akenson uses - he needs to keep his facts straight. Waltke writes:

In sum, Prof. Akenson's scholarship is poor, his tone is grating and his arguments bogus. Ironically, he piously asks us to redeem the text "by informed, discriminating and gentle scholarship," when his own diatribe amounts to hate literature against Mr. Drabinsky and Christians. I say "hate literature," because among many other charges, he maligns true believers as "lunatics" for believing "that Jesus's blood be shed to complete God's plan for the[ir] salvation."

No he doesn't. This is a serious misrepresentation of what Akenson says, and it amounts to a "dowdificiation." What he actually says is:

Historically, this [John's placing "almost all the blame" for the death of Jesus on the Jews] led to the lunatic charge of deicide (god-killing) against the Jews and their descendants: lunatic because the Christian scheme of things requires that Jesus's blood be shed to complete God's plan for the salvation of true believers, and slagging a rival religious group for its implementation of God's will is simply schizophrenic discourse.

In other words, the charge of deicide against the Jews is "lunatic" (which it is, and horrific besides) because, he says, it is internally inconsistent to say the death of Jesus was central to the plan of God and then turn around and charge the people who are accused of implementing the plan with a grievous sin for doing so. Nowhere does Akenson say that the Christian doctrine of atonement by the shed blood of Jesus is lunacy.

By the way, nearly six months of blogging has taught me that whatever newspaper editors are being paid, it's too much. The Globe and Mail has published a serious error in each of these essays (Akenson's misrepresentation of the Eighteen Benedictions and Waltke's misrepresentation of what Akenson said). Didn't major newspapers used to have fact-checkers? And when they publish a rebuttal to a piece in their own paper, doesn't anyone read both pieces to make sure the rebuttal responds to what the original piece actually said? (I know that I myself didn't catch the error in the first piece but, hey, nobody is paying me to do this, and I published a correction as soon as it was pointed out to me.)

UPDATE: I note that the definition of "dowdification" I linked to above is "deliberately omitting words or phrases to change the meaning of a quote." I would not include "deliberately" in the definition, since it involves trying to read the mind and motivations of the writer. To be perfectly clear, I'm not saying that Professor Waltke deliberately distorted Dr. Akenson's meaning. I don't think that: I assume the mistake was careless, not malicious.