The Honest Scholar's Fear of Accidental Plagiarism

On my commute into work this morning, I listened to a fascinating programme that was on Radio 4 about three weeks ago, The Honest Musician's Fear of Accidental Plagiarism (sadly no longer on iPlayer) [Edit: Available again on iPlayer from that link!, 29 October 2015]. It discussed the question of musicians inadvertently plagiarizing others' material. It began with a great story told by Guy Garvey from Elbow about how he accidentally stole one of his best lines, "Oh, kiss me like the final meal", from another song, and about how he confessed to the artist who charged him "one beer" for the offense.

I began to wonder how far this is a problem in our area. Are we ever involved in "accidental plagiarism"? On one occasion I used the line "that with a sharp enough scalpel, everything is unique" in what I thought was an echo of a thought of Michael Goulder's. I later found the practically identical line in his work -- "With a fine enough scalpel, everything is unique". In cases like this, I think it's a bit closer to homage than plagiarism, but it is a fine line. And I bet I've done it on other occasions without noticing.

I have noticed a large number of occasions where scholars have borrowed actual phrasing from James Robinson's brilliantly told stories of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi tractates. One of the lines he uses, "the ultimate act of blood vengeance", is found in many retellings of the story, sometimes with minor variations like "quintessential act of blood vengeance" (Meyer) or "extreme act of blood vengeance" (Ehrman), but more often just as it is in Robinson. The difficulty is that the influential telling of the story is so powerful that the wording can stick.

Michael Goulder Bibliography

I have updated the bibliography of Michael Goulder's works and have converted the whole to PDF, which is much more pleasing to the eye than the previous web version.  Thanks to Mogens Müller for filling in some gaps. I have also added the memoir and have tidied the whole thing up:

Michael Goulder Bibliography

Michael Goulder Memorial

I returned briefly to England last week to attend and take part in a celebration of the life of Michael Goulder, who died in January. The event itself was on Thursday 25 February, at St Francis Hall at the University of Birmingham.  Birmingham was, of course, the only place for it to take place since it was Michael's home for 44 years, from 1966 onwards, where he was staff tutor in the Extramural Department, and later Professor of Biblical Studies.  (Read The Times obituary here).

The room was packed with people, with standing room only.  People had travelled from far and wide.  I think I had come the furthest, but there were family, friends, and scholars from all over the country, and many Birmingham folk too.  It was a wonderful occasion, with some laughter at the memory of Michael's humorous stories and sayings, and some quiet tears.  Apparently the planning had been done by Michael himself, in discussion with the family, before his death. The occasion was led by friend of the family Anne Waugh, who began by reflecting on Michael's life with Krister Stendahl's tribute to Michael as a "baroque pearl".   She pointed out that Michael had been keen that there would be no fudge about his non-belief, and noted that on his death bed, when asked about his religion, he took off his oxygen mask and stated "None".

Michael's son Nicholas then read from the introduction to Michael's book, The Prayers of David, which situates Michael at Eton in his youth.  The congregation then said Psalm 15, "Domine, quis habitat", and Sir Christopher Slade, who had known Michael since he was a boy, read Michael's poem, "The Rowan Tree":

Rowans are finest when their year is ended,
October reddens them to richest rust:
So be our autumn days our time most splendid
Rich with contentment, love and trust
Before we go to dust
For so we must.

Do we deceive ourselves and spite our reason
Sensing a future that we cannot know?
Trees make their growth not for a single season:
Shall our great endeavour here to grow
Be in an hour laid low?
Have we not too a spring beyond the snow?

Michael's daughter Cathy then read from Horace's Ode 4.7, in Latin, and then we had the hymn "Fight the good fight", which had been sung at Michael's father's funeral; he died in the Second World War.  Michael's grandson Alex ably accompanied on the piano.  Michael's daughter Lizzie than read from Milton, Paradise Lost Book 3.

Michael's son  Philip had been asked to offer "a few words about The Old Man" and he spoke movingly for ten minutes or so, offering a warm and affectionate picture of his dad and how he spun dramatic tales from the classics to his children at bed time, or told them the goriest stories from the Bible, with full midrashic expansions, just like the evangelists.  There followed a reading by Cathy, from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and music from Brahms' German Requiem, part IV, "How lovely are they dwellings".  I then gave an address which offered my reflections on Michael Goulder's academic career.  I have recorded this here should you wish to listen to it:



Michael Goulder Memorial Address (mp3)

It is also available to read here (PDF).

Anne Waugh then read Arthur Hugh Clough's poem Say not the struggle nought availeth.  Music from Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutti, "Soave sia il vento" played as the ceremony concluded.


The celebration of Michael's life offered a most fitting tribute to the life of a great man.  We will miss him.

Donations in memory of Michael are made to Sight Savers.

Michael Goulder: Times Higher obituary

The Times Higher has an obituary of Michael Goulder:

Michael Goulder, 1927-2010
4 March 2010
By Matthew Reisz

It is a good tribute and it is nice to see quoted reflections from Marius Felderhof, and a mention of the Open End. There are some errors. His first degree was at Trinity College, Cambridge and not Oxford. And he read Classics and Economics there. I am not sure that it is correct to say that he "abandoned a promising career in the church"; he was in an academic position when he gave up his orders and was able to do so with relatively little fuss, at least in the formal sense. I may be wrong but I don't think he ever described himself as an "unaggressive atheist", though others have used this expression to describe him.

Thanks to John Lyons for pointing me to this obituary.

Michael Goulder obituary in Birmingham's Buzz

David Parker has written a fine obituary of our former colleague Michael Goulder in Birmingham University's Buzz news service:

Buzz Obituaries

. . . . He had one of the most original and powerful minds of his generation, and spanned the very separate fields of Hebrew Bible and New Testament studies in a way unique in the second half of the twentieth century. His most important contributions to New Testament scholarship included arguing long and forcibly for a fresh view of the relationship between the Gospels that overthrew a long consensus and led to a new generation of scholarship. He was also a noted authority on the Psalms.

Michael was incisive in debate, with a brilliant wit . . .

The entry also mentions the memorial service at St Francis Hall on 25 February at 2.30pm.

Michael Goulder on the Resurrection, Bibliography

I posted an audio clip yesterday of Michael Goulder being interviewed about the resurrection of Jesus. There have been several interesting comments on this, including on The Busybody. I should perhaps have added that the brevity of the interview (just four minutes) means that it gives one just a little flavour of Michael's thinking on the topic. My main reason for posting was to get a chance to listen to his voice again. I hope to publish more in due course. But for those who are interested in investigating his views on this subject further, he published several articles:

“Did Jesus of Nazareth Rise from the Dead?”. In J. Barton and G. N. Stanton (eds.), Resurrection. Festschrift Leslie Houlden (London: SPCK, 1994): 58-68

“The Baseless Fabric of a Vision”. In Gavin D'Costa (ed.), Resurrection Reconsidered (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1996): 48-61

“The Explanatory Power of Conversion-Visions”. In Paul Copan, and Ronald K. Tacelli (eds.), Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment? : a Debate between William Lane Craig & Gerd Lüdemann (Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 2000): 86-103

“Jesus' Resurrection and Christian Origins: A Response to N.T. Wright.” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 3 (2005): 187-195

Michael Goulder on the Resurrection and Losing Faith

This is a short clip from an episode of the BBC Radio 4 series Beyond Belief (25 March 2002) in which Michael Goulder was asked by Ernie Rea about his coming to doubt the resurrection of Jesus, and his giving up his Anglican orders:

Update (10 October 2018): If you can't see the audio player above, try this direct link to the audio file.

Michael Goulder: The Times obituary

Tomorrow's Times carries its obituary of Michael Goulder who died on 6th January:

Professor Michael Goulder: Biblical Scholar [dead link; see below]

Michael Goulder was Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Birmingham, well known for his creative approach to the Gospels and the Psalms and for resigning his orders as an Anglican priest not long after contributing to The Myth of God Incarnate, a celebrated collection of essays that questioned the traditional Christian doctrine of the Incarnation . . .

Update (20 July 2010): The Times has now placed a lot of its content behind a paywall.  The obituary is still available to view at no cost at the link above, but now in a no-frills version and without the picture that originally appeared, and which I have reproduced here (left).

Update (23 February 2014): the obituary is now available at the following URL:

Professor Michael Goulder: Biblical Scholar

--

Michael Goulder

I am sorry to be sharing the sad news that Michael Goulder passed away yesterday. He was 82. Michael was a brilliant scholar and he was greatly loved. He will me remembered with great affection, and his scholarly legacy will be felt, I think, for generations to come.

I saw Michael last a couple of weeks ago, when I was over in England for Christmas. He was unwell, but I had the chance to say a last goodbye. I will write about Michael's life at greater length in due course when I have composed my thoughts. It's a very sad day.

Michael Goulder Memoir announced

I am delighted to see the following appearing on the Sheffield Phoenix Press website. I have read the book in manuscript and loved every page. It is a real treat. I hear that publication should be in time for the SBL Annual Meeting in New Orleans in November.

Five Stones and a Sling
Memoirs of a Biblical Scholar
Michael Goulder

Michael Goulder is a scholar who has always taken an original approach to the Bible and biblical criticism. He has developed five major theories, which challenged received opinion among the learned; and the book tells the story of how these ‘stones’ fared when confronting the biblical establishment. He wryly admits that his slinging has been rather less successful than David's against Goliath.

Among his five theories a special place must be given to his demonstration of how much of the teaching ascribed to Jesus actually derived from the evangelists—the Lord's Prayer for example being composed by Matthew out of Jesus' prayers in Gethsemane. The parables too are the composition of the evangelists, Matthew characteristically writing of kings and rich merchants, while Luke speaks of women, stewards, a beggar and a Samaritan. A long-rooted error Michael Goulder has valiantly opposed has been the belief that Matthew and Luke were both dependent on a lost source, Q; in fact, he argues, Luke was familiar with Matthew's Gospel and copied or developed its teaching as he thought best.

Goulder has worked at the Old Testament as well as the New. He concludes that the Psalms were not the individual prayers of pious Israelites, as Gunkel and others supposed, but the compositions of kings or their poets, deploring national disasters and praying for blessing at the great autumn festival.

This account of Goulder's scholarly work is fascinatingly interwoven with that of his life and ministry; and there are many anecdotes and vignettes of other people that are both amusing and interesting. He was ordained a priest in the Anglican Church, and though he resigned his Orders in 1981, he never lost his love of the Bible.

Michael Goulder was Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Birmingham prior to his retirement in 1994.

978-1-906055-84-4 paperback
Publication November 2009 (not yet published)

The Scholar's Scalpel

With a fine enough scalpel, everything is unique

Michael Goulder, Luke: A New Paradigm (JSNTSup. 20; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989), 280.

I have been looking for this quotation for ages, and finally came across it today. I had remembered using it myself (e.g. in my review of Kim Paffenroth's Story of Jesus according to L, "In the search for 'un-Lukan' features, one cannot help thinking that with a sharp enough scalpel, everything is unique"), and I had always attributed it to Michael Goulder, but I was beginning to think that I had invented it myself. It turns out that my memory was correct and that it does come in Goulder. It's a nice line. In context, Goulder is criticizing the fine distinctions made by Schürmann on Luke 3.15, "Schürmann denies the verse to Luke by fastidious distinctions . . . "

Bibliography of Michael Goulder's works

Back in 1996, I published a book called Goulder and the Gospels: An Examination of a New Paradigm (JSNTSup. 133; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), a slightly revised version of my Oxford DPhil thesis of 1994. At the end of the book I included a comprehensive bibliography of Michael Goulder's works. I have long been meaning to update that bibliography to include the several books and many articles that Michael has published since then. Having recently been lucky enough to have read Michael's memoir in manuscript, this gave me the opportunity I had been looking for to get that bibliography updated. I have uploaded it to the web for those interested, in PDF format. Please let me know if you spot any errors or omissions:

Michael Goulder Bibliography (PDF)

Update: Revised 12 May, with thanks to Ken Olson for two missing items.
Update: Revised 8 March 2010.

Appeals to "the majority of scholars"

I am just finishing work on a comprehensive bibliography of Michael Goulder and came across this enjoyable footnote in an essay on the resurrection (“The Explanatory Power of Conversion-Visions”. In Paul Copan, and Ronald K. Tacelli (eds.), Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment? : a Debate between William Lane Craig & Gerd Lüdemann (Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity, 2000): 102).  where, in context, he is discussing the views of William Craig, who appeals to "the majority of scholars":

One should always be wary when appeal is made to "the majority of scholars," for it tends to exclude any new idea.  Where would Galileo or Darwin have got to if they had bowed to it?

And I suppose too that the point should be extended to the reception of new ideas, not just the instigation of those new ideas.  Lots of new ideas turn out to be horribly wrong, but it is rarely a good argument against them to appeal to what the majority thinks.

I wonder if it is one of those areas where we allow ourselves to be unduly influenced in our research and writing by the constraints of pedagogy.  When we teach, we naturally have to paint a picture of the majority view, even where we disagree with that view.  Perhaps our attempts to understand where the majority view is can inadvertently cause us to give value to that view and so to argue as if good scholarship is about counting heads.

New Testament Scholars on Wikipedia

One way of testing claims about the intrinsic and insurmountable problems with Wikipedia is to ask how good it tends to be in its entries on individual scholars. Ben Witherington recently commented on the problems he saw with Wikipedia, with a strong "keep away" message. It made me wonder what the Wikipedia article on Ben Witherington looked like and in fact, it is not bad. The only problem with it is that it is a little on the terse side; it needs someone with some knowledge and expertise to add some more detail. Indeed, it is one of those articles that has been tagged: "This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources."

That reminds me that I have only ever created one new Wikipedia page myself, and that is on Michael Goulder. I wanted to do this in part to test the claims about the unreliability of Wikipedia. Would people come in and deface what I outlined on Michael Goulder? On the contrary. There is simply a welcome invitation, to me or someone else, to improve the article:

This article or section needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications. Alone, primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of this article are not sufficient for an accurate encyclopedia article. Please include more appropriate citations from reliable sources.

This is something that seldom gets mentioned by those who prefer not to engage critically with Wikipedia, that it actually encourages authors and editors to provide proper citations for the claims that are being made, a very useful encouragement to students who are learning about academic writing.

The only other one I've contributed to has been the entry on E. P. Sanders, where I made one or two minor edits to improve accuracy, and added a couple of references. That was over a year ago, and they have not been changed or edited away in the interim.

In this category, my feeling tends to be more sympathetic to those who wish to engage critically with Wikipedia than with those who wish to turn their backs on it, but perhaps that will change in time as the site continues to grow.

In Defence of Wikipedia III

Back in March, I wrote In Defence of Wikipedia and followed it with In Defence of Wikipedia Response, specifically to criticize the trendiness of academic sneering at a resource that students are using more and more. I offered a range of reasons to suggest that our reaction to Wikipedia should be more nuanced. Putting our fingers in our ears and closing our eyes is not a realistic option. As always, the academic's best option is critical engagement. Inevitably, some misread the posts; others disagreed. It is encouraging to see John Hobbins writing intelligently about Wikipedia, Bible Study and the SBL, from which this is an excerpt:

How might Wikipedia’s presentation of biblical and related literature be improved? Let me count the ways. Coverage is spotty and sometimes amateurish. Links are not always top-notch. Bibliographies often seem slanted.

But, as I said before, improvement over time is noticeable.

Wikipedia does not adhere to the shameful practice of much scholarship in the humanities, whereby essays published decades ago are republished unchanged with nary a nod to developments in the field since original publication.

Wikipedia is a community effort. It is up to scholars to stop griping, roll up their electronic sleeves, and improve it themselves.

The ever reasonable and always interesting Doug Chaplin has a nice follow-up on Metacatholic headed Wikipedia or Wickedpedia? with the message "Wikipedia is here. Deal with it." One of the most important ways of embracing this challenge is the one suggested by John, echoing my own earlier suggestions of getting involved. If one is serious about rigorous academic life, then one should be serious about being a critical participant rather than a critical outsider.

Jim West criticized my earlier piece and he now does the same again. As Doug mentions, I earlier suggested that a way out of the impasse would be to test Jim's claims by means of the Wikipedia article on Zwingli. I would be interested to know if Jim has taken up that challenge and how he feels about the resulting product. Jim suggested that I too test things by working on the Wikipedia article on the Q document, which I have been doing, just every now and then. So far, I've been pleased with what I have seen. The article is looking OK, though with some work still necessary, but when I make changes, they usually stay. To be honest, the real challenge would have been the Synoptic Problem article, which is a bit of a mess and needs some serious work. But I've recently written a lengthy encyclopaedia article for a print volume (which therefore will get far less exposure than Wikipedia) on that topic, so I am loathe to end up duplicating my work there, all the more so as I already have something of a web presence on this topic. So perhaps others would enjoy taking up this challenge?

One last thing: I was shocked to see that there was no Wikipedia article on Michael Goulder, so I have added one. At the moment it's just a skeleton, but I hope to add to it in due course, or perhaps you would like to?