Mundane! Mainstream! Commonplace! Typical!

Authors have little control over how their books for a general audience are marketed. But I wish to offer a few comments on what readers should think when they see publicity materials for a new book that is “explosive,” “earth-shattering,” “thoroughly original,” “unprecedented,” “provocative” and/or “turning everything we thought we knew about X completely upside-down.” If a book’s publicity materials claim these things, then one of two actions would seem to me to be appropriate.

OPTION 1: Put the book back on the shelf and ignore it. If the author is genuinely a scholar in the field, then they will be publishing more rigorously-defended and detailed versions of the material in scholarly venues. There, any ideas which are genuinely new will be rigorously examined, poked, prodded, and sifted. If the ideas and arguments presented stand up to such peer evaluation, they will become commonplaces in the field, and make their way into textbooks. At that point, the author of the original study (as well as many others) will presumably publish the key points in works for a general audience, in a form that has had the opportunity to take feedback and criticism into account, and so will be far more worthy of your time than the earlier volume would have been.

We have seen from some groups (such as proponents of intelligent design) the tendency to bypass peer review and appeal directly to the public, as a way of trying to sway the masses who know less about a subject and want to believe the claims in question, even though those who know much about the topic find themselves unpersuaded. And so putting the book back on the shelf might be good advice for one’s own safety. Presumably the only way to avoid being duped is to be clued in to the state of scholarship in a field – but if you do that, then you probably will be prepared for and inclined towards a second option.

OPTION 2: Ignore the blurbs and sound bites, knowing that, if the work reflects genuine scholarship, then it will indeed make an important contribution to our knowledge, but it will be one that will (1) build on and connect with the broader realm of scholarship in that field, and (2) make a case that is likely to meet with widespread assent from experts in the field, because it is argued and documented in appropriate scholarly ways. For this to be the case, the new insights will be integrated into scholarly consensuses even if challenging them on specific details. And so the reader should approach the book with the expectation that they will learn from it, but also that a significant number of details and points – probably the majority – could likewise be found in other books on the subject written by other scholars.

I am writing this post (perhaps it should be called a rant) because I will soon be reviewing a book (Bart Ehrman’s Forged: Writing in the Name of God–Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are) that does indeed make a contribution to public understanding of New Testament studies, but has been trumpeted with the sort of publicity that I am referring to here. Having begun reading it, I can already say that even though there is a more scholarly monograph on the subject in the works by the author in question, this book can be read and appreciated by scholars and not only a general readership. But that is precisely because it doesn’t turn everything we know on its head, but builds on widely-accepted and well-established views on key matters in order to offer a challenge with regard to one common way of answering a particular question. Those who are well-read in New Testament scholarship have not thought about the identity of the Bible’s authors in a manner differently than Ehrman for a long time. And so whether the title works depends on who “we” are. Certainly there are people out there who do indeed accept claims to authorship in the Bible at face value, and they need Ehrman’s book. But its value consists precisely in that it presents not only Ehrman’s distinctive views, but widely-accepted scholarly commonplaces, in a manner accessible to a general audience.

I wanted to get this out of my system so that when I review the book, I can leave matters of publicity to one side and focus on the content, which (having read about 1/5 of the book) is excellent. Authors, as I said earlier, don’t get free rein when it comes to titles and publicity, and so this post is more about how we interpret book titles and publicity, rather than how we appreciate their content.