I gave you excellent reasons for this denial. 1. Religion is bound up in personal identity. 2. People don't want to offend their God by doubting their faith and end up in hell. I can add 3. People don't like to admit they are wrong on big issues. And 4. A lot of believers may actually have huge doubts, and perhaps even know that their religious faith is BS, and aggressively contest challenges to their faith as a form of denial. And 5. People are biased about everything else they believe, and those biases seep into their judgments and their work. Why would religion be any different?

But in any event, and more generally, we have lots of evidence that indeed religiously motivated scholars produce biased work. The intelligent design people produce biased work. Theocon Catholics' works on human sexuality, which develops huge and involved theories around absolutely crazy and unrealistic conceptions of how human beings function and relate to each other. Heck, the early history of science is, in part, the history of people who tried to fit their observations into a bunch of preexisting religious conceptions as to how the world worked. How many astronomers stuck with geocentrism and circular orbits over the centuries because they were trying to fit their observations into their model of the perfect orderly universe created by God?

Finally, I want to say something about this:

One of these is not like the other. Philosophy doesn't make factual claims. Literature and art don't make factual claims.

Religion, on the other hand, does. And when you claim that the world was created in 6 days, or that Adam and Eve were the first humans, or that an incorporeal God ejaculated his spirit-semen into a virgin who gave birth to a son who wasn't actually a separate being but who was and who complained that his actually the same being father forsake him on the cross, and then was resurrected three days later, you are making factual, historical claims. These things either did happen or they didn't.

And if those claims cannot be verified or evidenced by factual, historical, scientific observation, they are merely axiomatic. They are taken as a given. You might even say they are taken on faith.

So yeah, religion is full of preconceived notions. Anything that makes factual claims that are not based on observation and verifiable testing is in the realm of the preconceived notion.

And that's fine. But I don't expect people who have preconceived notions to produce scholarship that challenges them. I'll wait for the Discovery Institute to publish a paper supporting the theory of evolution before I expect that.

I noted how this same dynamic exists (some important feature of our personal identity that is implicated in our scholarship) with race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality or ethnicity, class, and other aspects of our self-conception, but yet we still think that the work produced by these scholars is worthwhile.

This is an inaccurate statement of the view of most Christian scholars. Certainly it is inaccurate as a statement of the views of Christian philosophers, which is the field with which I am most familiar.

Agreed. This is true for everyone though, not just Christians.

This may be true. Do you have any reason to think this is characteristic of Christian scholars?
I agree with this claim. We should certainly be aware that Christian scholars might be biased by their personal religious beliefs. However, this should not prevent us from taking them seriously as scholars.

I'm going to just list a few Christian scholars, and you show me evidence that they are so biased that we should ignore their scholarly work on Christianity: John P. Meier, Raymond Brown, N.T. Wright, Marcus Borg, and John Dominic Crossan.

I'm not denying that Christian scholars are biased. No doubt all scholars have biases. What I'm denying is that the bias that comes from being a Christian is significant enough that we should ignore historical scholarship done by Christian scholars on Christian subjects.

The problem with intelligent design is that it relies on bad philosophy and an unworkable conception of science, not that the people behind it are biased or Christians.
Well, I'm not familiar with Catholic scientists' work on human sexuality, so I can't comment on this. Of course, I don't really care what amateur Catholic theologians say about human sexuality--the issue at hand is how we should treat religious people who are experts on the subjects we are interested in.

You aren't describing anything special about religion here; this is just how science works in general. Once you have your basic paradigm, you try to explain the phenomena in a way consistent with that paradigm unless there develop so many unresolved problems that someone comes up with a new paradigm. Also, the leaders of the scientific revolution were just as convinced as those before them that the universe was completely orderly.

This is just not true at all. Here's a few philosophers: Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, Frege, Russell, Rawls, Kripke. Every single one of these philosophers made factual claims.

Fair enough. If you want to limit it to disciplines that make factual claims, then I'll include history, which is also not scientific. Anyway, since I still don't know what you mean by preconceived, I'm not sure what we're supposed to be discussing here.

Of course, it is a matter of some controversy whether religion makes factual claims. But assuming that it does, then I don't see why a scholar cannot separate his religion from his scholarly work. Your claim is that religious beliefs are based on faith--which you define as belief without evidence. Fine. Let's suppose that Christian scholars are self-aware enough to realize that their religious beliefs, such as those you list above, are based on faith, i.e. believed without evidence. Now, the issue is whether that scholar when writing in a context where this kind of faith is inappropriate, i.e. in a scholarly context where evidence is required, is able to identify which of his religious beliefs have evidence and which do not.

I think they can. Part of the reason why is that I've worked with Christian scholars and seen them do this. Part of the reason why is that I've read articles and books by Christian scholars where they clearly identify which beliefs are evidence-based and which are not. There are certainly some Christians who in my opinion allow their religious beliefs and presuppositions to overrule their critical intelligence (as I've said in other threads, I think William Lane Craig is an example of a Christian philosopher who has fallen prey to this). But there are other Christians who are, in my view, the epitome of rigorous, careful scholars.

Right. And this has implications for the scholar's religion, but not necessarily her scholarship.
This is an overly narrow view of knowledge. Mathematics is often considered the paradigm of rigor and objectivity, yet its claims are not based on observation and verifiable testing.

Of course, as has already been pointed out, this is not what I claimed. What I said is that among professional historians and Bible scholars (by which I mean, people who teach at university and/or regularly contribute to the relevant journals, go to the relevant conferences, and get published by the relevant presses) there are very few that accept the Jesus Myth Hypothesis. I have provided sufficient evidence of this claim. Your claim that I am somehow acting trollish is completely risible. You were the one that claimed that I was "quite wrong," yet you have provided zero evidence of your claim beyond an admonition to use google. I've used google. It says that I'm correct, that there are only a couple of professional historians or Bible Scholars that accept this view (e.g. Robert Price, maybe G.A. Wells, Thomas Thompson). Beyond that, it is easy to find numerous statements from other scholars (one of which I quoted) about how contemporary Bible scholars and historians don't take this view seriously.

I'll end by saying that I hope you think a bit more about your first statement. You really think that it is sophistical to ask someone to provide evidence for their claims?

OP:

In both your posts, you are letting a very narrow definition of who qualifies as a scholar do your work for you. If historians, who are supposed to use a method of testing hypotheses against evidence, are not scientists, and the myriad of authors who have advanced the Jesus Myth Hypothesis are not scholars and the Catholic authors who espouse a very narrow conception of bioethics are not scholars, then sure, you've operationally defined your argument as correct.

But it's your definitions that are doing all the work.

Historians are certainly scholars. They're just not scientists. Don't see what the problem is here, unless you assume that only scientists are scholars (which certainly seems false). Anyway, this is completely irrelevant to the main issue.

Nothing wrong with this claim. My claim here is empirical, not definitional. It is just a matter of fact that most supporters of this thesis are outside the professional historian club. Also, since I don't think that only professional historians are scholars, strictly speaking I haven't advanced the above claim. The relevance of saying that they are professional is just that it is the socialization, peer review, etc that is characteristic of the group I identified that allows us to describe a reliable consensus.

I didn't say that these Catholic writers are not scholars. Also, not sure where bioethics entered the conversation.

This is false. I'm using these words in a completely ordinary sense. It just so happens that most proponents of the Jesus Myth Hypothesis are marginal figures (except for Robert Price) by the standards of professional historians and Bible scholars. I've not used a special definition of "professional historian or Bible scholar" to make this judgement, but rather used the ordinary ways we determine a person's academic credentials in any field.

I did?

Not you. Unfortunately the guy who I was talking to has the initials "OP".

Sorry, maybe I'll call him "OPP" from now on or something.

What evidence is there for the thesis that Jesus was a historical person?

http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/10211

None of these are contemporary accounts. All of those were written at the earliest 50 years after the alleged events they describe.