He is very much stuck between a rock and a hard place. This actually reminds me of a story that is relevant to the subject...Doctor Scratch wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 11:59 pmThese are all excellent points. In some ways, I think that Boylan is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It's unlikely that he'll succeed as a "content creator," but if he *were* to find success (and I'm happy to wish him all kinds of luck at that), how much wrath would the old-school Mopologists rain down upon him?
Some years ago now, I spent time at Harvard working on ancient languages (Hebrew in particular) and at the time NELC had advanced PhD students conducting these “break out sessions” after regular classes where students like myself could go and basically get extra instruction. They were primarily for the benefit of people attending the Divinity program, but non-degree-seeking people that were enrolled in the same coursework were welcome to utilize them, which I did.
So I made a habit of going to one in particular because the gentleman was good at drilling me on grammatical mechanics and elocution (them verbs ain’t gonna parse themselves). One day I showed up and he asked me, “How do you know David Bokovoy?”. Turns out, my tutor was friends of the Bokovoy family and basically fell in love with Biblical Studies due to David’s influence. He discovered we had a mutual friend because he recognized me arguing with David on his Facebook page. The guy thought the world of David and to be honest, he ranks pretty high on my list of mensches too.
This marks one of the only two times I have ever discussed someone associated with Mormon apologetics outside social media or here. Since before that time or after it, I have never encountered someone who was even aware of who the old Mopologists were. Be they Mormon or otherwise. The only reason the subject was even broached was because we both admired David.
Now if I was Boylan, I’d have been looking at David’s departure from the Apologetic scene with some dismay. Here you have a guy who is fiercely intelligent, absolutely fun to be around, makes friends wherever he goes, and commands a great deal of respect from those outside Mormonism. He is the exact opposite of John Gee in nearly every respect, yet even this gentle soul ran afoul of the Mopologists because he believed in the documentary hypothesis concerning the composition and editing of the Tanakh.
Mopologists have a wolfpack type hierarchy; you need to be subservient to it and put in your time before being given a choice cut of meat. While putting in that time, you need to navigate a shifting landscape where you can end up on the wrong side of someone’s personality disorder for simply having an educated opinion on a subject you’ve spent years mastering.
Even if you want nothing to do with Mopologists, they can still exert their influence to damage you or harass you if it suits whatever dysregulated emotion they happen to be dealing with. How do you peacefully coexist with that? I honestly don’t know. I mean crap, look what Ritner had to put up with from them because Gee fell into his orbit for a brief time.