If you haven’t already seen the news on Mark Goodacre’s blog or somewhere else, R. Joseph Hoffmann of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion has released (via Robert Price’s website) a statement that seems to clarify a good bit of the confusion about the list of Project fellows on the Project’s web site. Read the whole statement for yourself to get the full scoop, but the short version is that the website’s list of fellows and their biographies was posted quite prematurely, as some of us had previously speculated. You may remember that I wrote in an earlier post:

So what we have here is something in the range of:

• a rush to put up a web site before all the ducks (er, fellows) were in a row; or

• a strange definition of “fellow” as “anyone who has been invited to speak at one of our conferences, or whom we would like to have participating in this venture”; or
• a case of para-academic fraud.

It’s hard not to feel the strong pull of the third item in the list, though I’m holding out for one of the other two, or some combination thereof.

Though he doesn’t quite put it in these terms, Hoffmann describes a combination of my first two bullet points above, mostly the first. Here’s the bottom line:

Anticipating a formal launch of its academic work in 2008, the Project floated (I have to stress this word) a website. It is here that an element of confusion enters the picture. While the website was only a model of things to come, a compilation of biographies of the entire list—UCD, listserv, and “under consideration”–was posted to the site together with some sample texts as active information. What was meant as a test has lingered on the site as a done deal. This was done largely because we were being hammered for information and were late in conceptualizing the site itself. The posting was premature; the website was not flagged as under construction. Results ran ahead of planning. Indeed, the website was (is) a work in progress: Even at the time of this writing, only a fraction of the 50 scholars comprising the Project have been chosen and perhaps they will not finally be chosen until January 2008. A fair number of those whose biographies were floated had already been deselected. My own work schedule has kept me—and there is real guilt in this—from surveilling the progress of the site, which I regarded as internet clay and not the pot. The very tentative nature of the site was not made clear on the site itself, and should have been.

Hoffmann seems unable to just leave it at that, however, and there’s a lot more to his diatribe. Click the “continue reading” link below if you want to read my more detailed reactions to Hoffmann’s statement.

As regards the second bullet point, Hoffmann writes:

In substantial ways the Project formed a continuum with the Scripture and Skepticism conference. An email from me in February 2007 (and two subsequent emails) asked those wishing to separate themselves from the work of the Project as it developed or to remove their names from its listserv to do so by a return email to me; I received no indication at this point from any conference participant that s/he wished to be removed from the list.

This “opt-out” method of including people on a list of project “fellows” seems to me quite a poor choice. Given April DeConick’s blog posts on the topic, I suspect that it was not entirely clear to the recipients of those e-mails that they would be listed as project participants if they didn’t opt out. For something like this, opt-in, not opt-out, is the way to go.

Hoffmann expresses puzzlement about the attention given to the Project in July, asking, “What can explain this sudden interest in the Project so many months after the UCD event?” It’s simple: the website launch. When the website became publicly accessible, a lot more people heard about it than ever knew anything about the “Scripture and Skepticism” conference at UC-Davis. This shouldn’t be puzzling at all.

There’s a perhaps-unintended irony in Hoffmann’s response: a kind of “conspiracy theory” undertone to what Hoffmann appears to (defensively) regard as “conspiracy theories.”

Did mysterious opponents of the Project catch us in an oversight—an internet Jesus Squad? Yes, and they will best know their motives for wishing to do so. Was there unfriendly agitation at the beginning of the blog-assault? I’m afraid so. Have the agitators derailed the project? I hope not.

Also from the perhaps-unintended irony department, Hoffman objects to those critics who have suggested that the Project’s list of fellows was slanted toward folk who had already made up their mind on the question of Jesus’s existence. Yet his statement appeared not on the Jesus Project website, nor on the Jesus Project blog (which still has no posts, but only a pitch for donations in the sidebar), nor on the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion website, but on the website of Robert Price—which seems to be a self-defeating move if Hoffmann really wants readers to believe that the Jesus Project is in fact “methodologically agnostic” (browse Price’s website to see what I mean) or, more importantly, that a group of 50 scholars can be assembled that will really be able to approach the question afresh.

Hoffmann’s broadsides at bloggers of course struck a nerve and need comment. The only blogger that Hoffmann mentioned by name was Jim West, so one wonders how much of the blog conversation Hoffmann has personally read. Hoffmann sweeps aside the entire blogosphere in one completely inappropriate and inaccurate remark:

False report, of course, is the culture in which blogging thrives. But even bloggers have a minimal responsibility to fact and to discovering facts.

I agree that anyone who speaks or writes publicly on a topic has a responsibility to discover the facts whereof they speak, but Hoffmann’s “criticism” is too broad and too over-the-top. Not that there wasn’t a good bit of speculation, with little data, about the Jesus Project when the website went up, but again we have a strange irony. Hoffmann complains that bloggers didn’t “discover[ the] facts,” but is it not a fact that the Jesus Project website listed as “fellows” people who had not formally agreed to be Project fellows? Bloggers did in fact “discover[ some] facts,” chiefly by writing to scholars whose names appeared on the list of fellows to get more information. As I mentioned in my first (of what is now three) posts on the topic, I told you that I had written the following e-mail to the contact person listed on the Jesus Project blog:

I wonder if you could clear up some confusion for me about the recently-publicized Jesus Project (http://www.jesus-project.com). The Project’s web site lists a number of Project “fellows” (http://www.jesus-project.com/fellows.htm), but at least one of these scholars, James Tabor, says he’s never heard of The Jesus Project (http://jesusdynasty.com/blog/2007/01/12/the-jesus-project/). What exactly is the status of these “fellows” in relationship to the Project? Is this a list of people who have agreed to be part of the Project, or a list of people the Project management is planning into invite to the December 2007 conference? Many people in the “bibloblog” circle are very interested in this question.

I would count that as an attempt to “discover[ the] facts.” But the fact is that nobody responded to my e-mail. Memo to Dr. Hoffmann: if you’re going to complain about people not “discovering facts,” then you need to be able to provide those facts when people try to discover them.