Talk:George Albert Wells

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article must adhere to the policy on biographies of living persons. Controversial material of any kind that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous. If such material is repeatedly inserted or there are other concerns relative to this policy, report it on the living persons biographies noticeboard.

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.	Biography Portal
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article. [FAQ]

Does he really go by the full name? Where is he a professor? -- Zoe

(google) The answers to your questions are "Yes, although he's also referred to as G. A. Wells" and "University of London", respectively. And the answer to the question you didn't ask is "Emeritus Professor of German", which explains some of the titles in the bibliography but doesn't actually say anything useful about his qualifications on the subject of Jesus.

--Paul A

[edit] Removed POV and spurious paragraph

I replaced the last paragraph because the a) the subject of the article is not Doherty and b) the name Doherty has not been introduced in the article at all yet. Also, this paragraph is blatently POV. Let's stick with the facts. Well's claims have received little attention and practically no support among historians and theologians. The facts speak for themselves.

"Currently Doherty's arguments have not made a very strong impression on the scholarly consensus [1] and Doherty's position stands in the tradition of historical revisionism. In addition, there are many religiously leaning historians which have been very favourable to the Christian claim of the resurrection, and subsequently do not believe it is plausible that Jesus is a myth (given the cultural conditions, time required for myth formation in the given cultural milieu, etc.). Scholars who have taken this position include: Thomas Arnold [2], A. N. Sherwin-White [3][4], and Michael Grant. [5][6][7]. Wells views, however, have been a major influence on some even more radical proponents of the "Christ is a myth" theory, most notably his former student Earl Doherty."

[edit] Wells is not known as a New Testament scholar. He is a German language scholar

Wells is not known as a New Testament scholar. He is a scholar for the language of German. I altered this sentence: " George Albert Wells (born 1926) is an Emeritus Professor of German at Birkbeck, University of London, but he is more widely known as a New Testament scholar." It now reads: George Albert Wells (born 1926) is an Emeritus Professor of German at Birkbeck, University of London, but he is more widely known for his writings regarding the position that Jesus is a mythical rather than a historical figure. ken 11:42, 17 November 2006 (UTC)kdbuffalo

[edit] Are there any notable people who have criticism of Well's work ?

The only critic mentioned is by James Patrick Holding and he has (what really is more blog) web site. He has a Masters' Degree in Library Science which is fine but what he's published is self-published articles in a very narrow range of sites. He's not notable and reading the "reviews" you can see they are more ad hominem arguments than critique and I think it's inappropriate to use these given we're editing a WP:LIVING bio page in which the criteria for accepting edits is more tightly controlled. I move links to James Patrick Holding are removed. Ttiotsw 02:41, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree with this. Holding doesn't make a very good source here. If criticism of Wells' work is linked to, it should be from someone of the same scholarly status (ie., not someone's weblog).24.84.208.246 08:32, 19 December 2006 (UTC)