Chris Heard is continuing his smackdown of Shanks in what is proving to be a very fine, engaging, and essential series- especially in light of the fact that Shanks has attacked Chris Rollston to no good end. Heard concludes

Hershel Shanks’s May/June “Queries & Comments” response to Chris Rollston seems to me just as misguided as Shanks’s original sidebar attacking Rollston. It’s not just that both are mean-spirited—it’s more that they don’t make good sense. Shanks harps on Rollston for “condescension” that’s not there, “condescension” that seems to exist only in Shanks’s idiosyncratic response to the word “tenable.” Shanks ignores entire portions of Rollston’s essay, and then criticizes Rollston for not addressing the issues that are, in fact, addressed in those portions. Shanks criticizes Rollston’s essay but praises Ryan Byrne’s on the same topic, even though Byrne’s essay praises Rollston’s, and comes rather closer to “condescension” than Rollston’s—but, then, Byrne’s was published by Shanks, and Rollston’s appeared on the ASOR web site. And Shanks now says that his March/April sidebar would not have been necessary if Rollston’s essay had used certain language that does in fact appear in the essay. I don’t know whether the facts got twisted going into Shanks’s eyes or coming out of his pen (or word processor), but the whole effect is like looking into a very un-funny funhouse mirror.

For my part I need simply say regarding the way that Shanks has treated Rollston two things: first, it seems that Shanks reads here and doesn’t cite or attribute what he finds- which I find extremely unfortunate and not a little disingenuous. One would expect a careful editor to cite his sources. Second, that Rollston is a scholar and Shanks is not. For me, evaluating what Shanks says when he denigrates Rollston’s work is quite simple: a person without expertise is criticizing someone with both expertise and experience and hence such denigration of Rollston by Shanks is tragically laughable. Shanks reminds me of the critics that Kierkegaard derided: “Critics are like eunuchs; they know what’s supposed to happen, they just can’t manage it themselves.’