February 03, 2023

Twenty Years After “Paradigms Regained,” Part 2: Responding to Margaret Barker’s Critics and Why Her Work Should Matter to Latter-day Saints

2 hours 25 minutes

Abstract: Here I address specific criticisms of Margaret Barker’s work. First, I set the stage by discussing Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a map and compass for navigating this kind of controversy. I show how his observations cast light on debates about Jesus in the Gospel of John, which in turn resemble present debates. In this context, I then consider some notable criticisms of Barker’s work as “not mainstream” and consider an instructive appreciation of Barker by Father John McDade in his “Life of Jesus Research.” I then respond in detail to a recent BYU Studies essay that was critical of Barker’s work.

But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved. No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better. (Luke 5:38–39)

By p[r]oving contrarieties, truth is made manifest. — Joseph Smith1

A 2012 interviewer asked Margaret Barker, “What do [you] say to independent scholars?” In reply, she wrote:

First, read Thomas S. Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published 50 years ago, and see how changes come about. Although written about a world very different [Page 32]from biblical studies, it shows how establishments resist changes until in the end the next generation [us!] forces a paradigm shift. The current paradigm is going towards a non-faith-based study, which has no future. By this I do not mean simply that the study is not faith-based; it is based on non-faith, and so criticism does not mean close study; it so often means destructive study. New paradigms emerge from those aware of the crisis, who recognize that the situation is not likely to be remedied by the methods that caused it.2

Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a careful study of how and why the background frameworks in which science is done changes, for example when going from the earth-centered Ptolemaic astronomy to the sun-centered Copernican astronomy. Kuhn has observed that in science “novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong. Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm.”3

While some readers may wish to ignore Kuhn and simply jump into a discussion of Barker and her critics, I have found Kuhn as an essential way to follow the advice of Jesus to first “cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5). We ought not start out by supposing we have no beams in our eye to remove, that we could never see more clearly than we do now. A person who is not conscious of the existence and implications of their own paradigm cannot be self-critical of that paradigm but will be unconsciously subject to it for good or ill. A good example of that is the father of the scientific method, Bacon himself:

Bacon, the philosopher of science, was, quite consistently, an enemy of the Copernican hypothesis. Don’t theorize, he said, but open your eyes and observe without prejudice,

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