Yes, why would there not be a lot of theologians in Christianity? Thousands I assume. Why would you even ask such a question when you know there are hundreds of Islamic theologians who will memorize every verse in the Quran and affirm all the apologetics and folk tales as definitely true.
Every year dozens of graduating theologians come from
Brigham Young University, a Mormon funded-university, where Mormon theologians will tell you why the Mormon Bible is in fact the correct version. And NONE of these people actually have any good evidence whatsoever, have no idea what previous religions their text may have borrowed from, what archaeology shows that doesn't match up with the text and so on.
Richard Miller went to a week long seminar on Islam and historical studies. The impression is it's a work of stories that was influencing the culture, Persian, Jewish and Arab stories. Going on evidence. Not assumptions about some revelations from an angel. No mention of the ridiculous apologetics about "science miracles" and "how could an illiterate man compose this??". Uh, he didn't, it was a work in progress over a long period of time. How is this a surprise?
Painting with an absurdly broad brush is a technique best reserved for whitewashes and smears.
Maybe it is, but in this case that isn't happening but rather you are painting with an absurdly mis-informed brush.
Yes Theologians do not start out looking for evidence, they are required to sign
'statements of faith" saying they will not even speak against their church and they start out with the assumption they have the true version.
There are just as many Islamic theologians, there are Hindu theologians, Bahai theologians, Mormon theologians. All will start with the premise their text is the true words from god.
One big problem is people don't even know this. We can get you up to speed with any critical-historical scholar explaining this, let's start with Bart Ehrman from Jesus Interrupted:
"Scholars of the Bible have made significant progress in under
standing the Bible over the past two hundred years, building on
archaeological discoveries, advances in our knowledge of the ancient
Hebrew and Greek languages in which the books of Scripture were
originally written, and deep and penetrating historical, literary, and
textual analyses. This is a massive scholarly endeavor. Thousands of
scholars just in North America alone continue to do serious research
in the field, and the results of their study are regularly and routinely
taught, both to graduate students in universities and to prospective
pastors attending seminaries in preparation for the ministry.
Yet such views of the Bible are virtually unknown among the
population at large. In no small measure this is because those of us
who spend our professional lives studying the Bible have not done a
good job communicating this knowledge to the general public and
because many pastors who learned this material in seminary have,
for a variety of reasons, not shared it with their parishioners once they
take up positions in the church. (Churches, of course, are the most
obvious place where the Bible is—or, rather, ought to be—taught and
discussed.) As a result, not only are most Americans (increasingly)
ignorant of the contents of the Bible, but they are also almost completely
in the dark about what scholars have been saying about the Bible for
the past two centuries. This book is meant to help redress that prob¬
lem. It could be seen as my attempt to let the cat out of the bag.
The perspectives that I present in the following chapters are not
my own idiosyncratic views of the Bible. They are the views that
have held sway for many, many years among the majority of serious
critical scholars teaching in the universities and seminaries of North
America and Europe, even if they have not been effectively com¬
municated to the population at large, let alone among people of faith
who revere the Bible and who would be, presumably, the ones most
interested. For all those who aspire to being well educated, knowl¬
edgeable, and informed about our civilization’s most important book,
that has to change.
“historical-
critical” method.
The approach taken to the Bible in almost all Protestant (and
now Catholic) mainline seminaries is what is called the “historical-
critical” method. It is completely different from the “devotional”
approach to the Bible one learns in church. The devotional approach
to the Bible is concerned about what the Bible has to say—especially
what it has to say to me personally or to my society. What does the
Bible tell me about God? Christ? The church? My relation to the
world? What does it tell me about what to believe? About how to act?
About social responsibilities? How can the Bible help make me closer
to God? How does it help me to live?
The historical-critical approach has a different set of concerns and
therefore poses a different set of questions. At the heart of this ap¬
proach is the historical question (hence its name) of what the biblical
writings meant in their original historical context. Who were the
actual authors of the Bible? Is it possible (yes!) that some of the au¬
thors of some of the biblical books were not in fact who they claimed,
or were claimed, to be—say, that 1 Timothy was not actually writ¬
ten by Paul, or that Genesis was not written by Moses? When did
these authors live? What were the circumstances under which they
wrote? What issues were they trying to address in their own day?
How were they affected by the cultural and historical assumptions
of their time? What sources did these authors use? When were these
sources produced? Is it possible that the perspectives of these sources
differed from one another? Is it possible that the authors who used
these sources had different perspectives, both from their sources and
from one another? Is it possible that the books of the Bible, based on
a variety of sources, have internal contradictions? That there are ir¬
reconcilable differences among them? And is it possible that what the
books originally meant in their original context is not what they are
taken to mean today? That our interpretations of Scripture involve
taking its words out of context and thereby distorting its message?
And what if we don’t even have the original words? What if,
during the centuries in which the Bible—both the Old Testament,
in Hebrew, and the New Testament, in Greek—was copied by hand,
the words were changed by well-meaning but careless scribes, or by
fully alert scribes who wanted to alter the texts in order to make
them say what they wanted them to say?
These are among the many, many questions raised by the historical-
critical method. No wonder entering seminarians have to prepare for
“baby Bible” exams even before they could begin a serious study of
the Bible. This kind of study presupposes that you know what you’re
talking about before you start talking about it.
A very large percentage of seminarians are completely blind-sided
by the historical-critical method. They come in with the expecta¬
tion of learning the pious truths of the Bible so that they can pass
them along in their sermons, as their own pastors have done for
them. Nothing prepares them for historical criticism. To their sur¬
prise they learn, instead of material for sermons, all the results of
what historical critics have established on the basis of centuries of
research. The Bible is filled with discrepancies, many of them ir¬
reconcilable contradictions. Moses did not write the Pentateuch (the
first five books of the Old Testament) and Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and lohn did not write the Gospels. There are other books that did
not make it into the Bible that at one time or another were consid¬
ered canonical—other Gospels, for example, allegedly written by
Jesus’ followers Peter, Thomas, and Mary. The Exodus probably did
not happen as described in the Old Testament. The conquest of the
Promised Land is probably based on legend. The Gospels are at odds
on numerous points and contain nonhistorical material. It is hard
to know whether Moses ever existed and what, exactly, the histori¬
cal Jesus taught. The historical narratives of the Old Testament are
filled with legendary fabrications and the book of Acts in the New
Testament contains historically unreliable information about the
life and teachings of Paul. Many of the books of the New Testament
are pseudonymous—written not by the apostles but by later writers
claiming to be apostles. The list goes on.
Some students accept these new views from day one. Others—
especially among the more conservative students—resist for a long
time, secure in their knowledge that God would not allow any false¬
hoods into his sacred book. But before long, as students see more
and more of the evidence, many of them find that their faith in the
inerrancy and absolute historical truthfulness of the Bible begins to
waver. There simply is too much evidence, and to reconcile all of the
hundreds of differences among the biblical sources requires so much
speculation and fancy interpretive footwork that eventually it gets to
be too much for them.