I've been very busy for the past week or so, and I managed to miss this, but I was surprised and rather pleased to see Roger Viklund, with Timo Paananen, publish his findings in VC on the mistaken analysis of the Mar Saba handwriting that Carlson undertakes in The Gospel Hoax. Congrats to Roger and Timo.
Viklund's analysis now enters the published, peer-reviewed literature. This is great news for defenders of Smith's honesty.
And I absolutely must add (and IMHO this is a little ground-breaking) that this seems to establish a precedent for scholarly publication of findings originally published on the web. Viklund originally posted these findings on his blog back in late 2009. We now see those findings, or at least a succinct summary of them, published in a scholarly setting.
It would seem, then, that blog material can in fact be re-presented. What it takes to pass peer-review, I guess, is a meaningful revision of that material. The fact that we now have an effective standard for this seems like kind of a big deal to me. I think everyone in the discipline should be paying attention to this--I can't think of another example of this type of blog-to-journal publication (or a better one, at any rate) in the field of biblical studies. However, I would be happy to be proven wrong and pointed to other examples.
