"...In biblical scholarship and its associated disciplines one finds (with a few wonderful exceptions) little sense of excitement. On the one hand, one encounters the work of fundamentalist Protestants, orthodox Jews, and old-fashioned Catholics, each of whose work is characterized for the most part by compulsive-obsessive behavior. Of course this is a generalization, but I have read tons of the stuff. It consists mostly of asking the same old questions, in slightly new ways, so that the answers turn out to be the good old conclusions. This scholarship, if such it is, has the virtue of keeping its engages from thinking about big issues. Much of it reminds me of the weekend morning television cartoons for children, where one or another cartoon animal runs off the edge of a cliff and manages to keep running on thin air, always provided he does not give in to temptation and look down. There is, in the literature I am describing, a real terror: a fear of looking down, of having received views checked against external reality.
"On the other hand, Christian 'liberal' scholarship--for the most part done by Protestants, but increasingly by Catholics as well--often has a lost, bewildered and gloomy quality to it. Later I shall discuss the famous 'Jesus Seminar' which typifies much of liberal Protestant and Catholic thought. Taken collectively, reading the publications of the Jesus Seminar is like stepping into a church basement where the pastor is conducting a support group for guys whose partners have dumped them."
--from Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds, Donald Harman Akenson