LOL. I’ve just happened upon the suggestion, offered pseudonymously online (natch!), that the changes at the Maxwell Institute in 2012 may have been motivated by a desire to persuade the extraordinarily interesting British biblical scholar Margaret Barker to publish with the Institute. It seems that, until my brand of apologetic pseudo-scholarship was surgically removed from the organization, she and other serious non-Mormon scholars would have nothing to do with it.
Well, ummm . . .
http://publications.maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/people/margaret-barker/
Heck, I believe — though I’m not going to take the time to look for it right now — that she’s even cited me. In any case, I and others once involved with The Bad Old FARMS have continued to interact with Dr. Barker, and to share the speaker’s rostrum with her, through the Academy for Temple Studies. And here’s her jacket endorsement for Samuel Zinner’s Textual and Comparative Explorations in 1 & 2 Enoch, which was just published by The Interpreter Foundation (of which I’m the chairman of the board and president):
“This is a glimpse of the future of Enoch studies. I could not put the book down. Zinner scrutinises the work of several scholars in the field and also draws on his own vast knowledge to set the Enoch texts in their wider context. He finds traces of them not only in the Bible, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, but also in Mandaean texts, the Qur’an, the Zohar and the Scriptures of the Latter-day Saints. Each essay is a gem.” Margaret Barker, former President of the Society for Old Testament Study
There are genuine perils to speculation that’s totally untethered to actual facts.
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