Thread by @JoshHochschild

I am now personally convinced that Rosica plagiarized his licentiate thesis.

I will present new and strong evidence here. But it is not conclusive.

We won’t know for sure until we have access to the thesis. 1/

For background, we’ve suspected for a while that the 1990 thesis is plagiarized: work published around the same time, on the same topic (the Emmaus story in Luke), has already been shown to be plagiarized. 2/

https://twitter.com/JoshHochschild/status/1102931853617610752

For instance, an article from Worship analyzed by Michael Dougherty and now retracted (linked in previous tweet), and article from Church analyzed by Mathew Block (linked here), among others 3/

https://twitter.com/mathewablock/status/1099924135449260032

So far each of Rosica’s Emmaus pubs around 1990 turn out to depend on plagiarism. Natural assumption: some of these publications were based on his thesis. Together with his proven writing habits, there’s strong circumstantial evidence that the thesis contained plagiarism. 4/

Some of us have tried to get a copy of the thesis, but it doesn’t seem to be in any research or other academic library. (This isn’t uncommon for non-doctoral theses.) I’m aware of efforts to seek a copy directly from the Biblicum, not yet successful. 5/

Now for the new evidence. In my hunting for sources of Rosica’s published texts, I came across a 3 page pdf about the literary structure of the Emmaus story. 6/

rcav.org/files/06_Emmau…

At first, this was only interesting to me because it gives the title of Rosica’s thesis, not elsewhere available online. 7/

https://twitter.com/JoshHochschild/status/1099438067067293696

But not only does this handout give the thesis title, it actually claims to be “taken from chapter 3” of Rosica’s thesis. 8/

Who made that claim? Who made the handout?

According to document properties, Thomas Rosica did. 9/

(It seems he prepared it for a November, 2009 priest’s retreat in Vancouver, where he also distributed a copy of the 1992 Church article that Mathew Block recently revealed to be plagiarized.) 10/

rcav.org/files/05_Luke_…

So according to Thomas Rosica (per document properties), the contents of the handout are taken from the licentiate thesis of Thomas Rosica. 11/

Let’s look at the first paragraph of main text in the handout (with a little highlighting from me). 12/

What’s all that yellow? Oh, those are phrases and sentences taken from a book we’ve seen Rosica relying on elsewhere: Neyrey’s Resurrection Stories, published in 1988. 13/

To be fair, it’s possible that the actual thesis properly attributes all the borrowed phrases. In fact, an unpaired quotation mark suggests that what looks plagiarized here might be properly documented as a quotation in the thesis. 14/

On the other hand, the handout says “taken from,” not “based on” or “derived from”. And why would Rosica go through the trouble of turning an honest and careful original text into a sloppy and dishonest handout – even if he was in a hurry to prep for the retreat? 15/

That is why I call this new, strong, but not conclusive evidence that Rosica’s thesis is plagiarized. It is based on Rosica’s own testimony. All Rosica has to do to show he didn’t plagiarize is produce a copy of his licentiate thesis. 16/

If Rosica is innocent, he should want to release not just the relevant parts of chapter 3, but the whole thesis. The questions raised about the thesis are obvious and real. If the thesis is legitimately his work, without academic fraud, he should be eager to show it. 17/

For context, note that now that we know Rosica didn’t get any higher degree from EBAF, the Roman licentiate is his highest degree. It is his certification of ecclesiastical academic authority. If that degree is based on plagiarized work, that is devastating. 18/

The Biblicum may have internal policies about sharing theses, and legitimate reasons not to release it. But now they have strong incentive to review it internally, if they haven’t already. If the thesis is properly documented, they should want that to be known. 19/

Anyway, that’s why I say: I am now personally convinced that Rosica plagiarized his licentiate thesis. But the evidence is not conclusive. We won’t know for sure until we have access to the thesis. 20/

That’s all for now. I’ve archived the links to the .pdf, in it disappears.

I’ve got to get off Twitter for most of the day. I'm giving a lecture tomorrow, and I write my own material. 21/21