Citing "years of research" in sensationalist writing

Back in 2005, I noted that citing "years of research" on a given topic can be a worrying sign, as for example in the statement that "In more than fifteen years of investigation Carotta has found the traces which lead to the Julian origin of Christianity".

The same claim about the number of years spent researching a topic occurs in some recent sensationalist writing.  This time, Jesus is not Caesar but King of Edessa:

Following 25 years of research, Ralph Ellis has discovered that Jesus was a prince of Edessa in northern Syria . . . .

It's a rule of thumb that if an author is appealing to the number of years spent researching a topic, the claim may well be suspect.

How should scholars react when ludicrous claims are made?

Jim West draws attention to some extraordinary comments made by Simcha Jacobovici in the Jewish Chronicle Online, My Nails Were From Jesus' Cross, in which he responds to the derision with which his claim has been met:

Mr Jacobovici reacted by telling the JC: "The minute someone says anything significant about the New Testament, the immediate response is to scoff, not to study it." He believes experts prefer to avoid making bold claims relating to the New Testament because it brings them under such intense scrutiny - and they resent it when others do so.

Perhaps, then, I should illustrate our difficulty. In 2007, Jacobovici made a documentary in which he claimed to have located the lost tomb of Jesus, in Talpiot, Jerusalem. Many of us spent a great deal of time patiently, carefully and calmly researching the claims and explaining why they were found wanting. As one element in that enterprise, I perhaps stupidly took it on myself to try expose a series of errors, inaccuracies, false statements, sensationalist claims and nonsense on the Jesus Family Tomb Website.  I labelled the post Jesus Family Tomb Website: Errors and Inaccuracies and listed seventeen of these, with explanations of where the problems lay.  There was no scoffing, no ridicule, no derision, just a calm and patient explanation of errors and inaccuracies.

It is now over four years since that post appeared and to this day every single one of those errors and inaccuracies remains on the Jesus Family tomb website.  Two years ago, I again drew attention to the post and the errors, with some reflection on our failure to make an impact.

What I think this illustrates is that it is outrageous for Simcha Jacobovici to suggest that scholars immediately scoff at his ideas without examining them.  On the contrary.  If anything, our mistake is that we spend far too much of our valuable time attempting to react in a scholarly fashion to material that would be lucky to get a passing grade if it were submitted to us by one of our students.

Since the careful, detailed and patient attempts at engaging appear to make no impact whatsoever, I think it is entirely reasonable that this time we react with the ridicule that the claims deserve.

Years of research as a worrying sign

In Biblical Theology, Jim West notes an odd new thesis aligning Jesus with Caesar (and when you see that the evidence consists of claims like "Both die on the same respective dates of the year: Caesar on the Ides (15th) of March, Jesus on the 15th of Nisan", then you get some idea of the kind of thing we are talking about here), but what piqued my interest was in the statement:

In more than fifteen years of investigation Carotta has found the traces which lead to the Julian origin of Christianity.

It reminds me of The Real Da Vinci Code the other day on which Tony Robinson presented one of the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail with the evidence that the Priory of Sion material was all a hoax and he responded, if I remember correctly, with the claim that he had researched the material for years. I am sure I've seen this trope before in pseudo-intellectual writing, the claim that the research in question is the result of "x years of research". Do any serious academic works ever have as an element in their publicity that "So and so has been researching x for y years"?