Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60083. Bultmann’s demythologisation is one of those pieces of academic vocabulary that sounds harmless and turns out to be anything but. Rudolf Bultmann, who lived from 1884 to 1976 and taught New Testament at Marburg, argued that the message of the New Testament is wrapped in a picture of the world that no modern…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60081. Higher criticism is the working assumption of almost every university theology and religious studies department in this country, and if you are a believing student walking into that lecture theatre for the first time, it can feel as though the floor has tilted. Isaiah arrives as the work of two or three hands….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3052. The historical Jesus is a phrase you will meet in television documentaries, paperback bestsellers and undergraduate courses, usually delivered with a knowing tone: behind the Christ of the church’s faith, we are told, stands a rather different figure, the real Jesus of Nazareth, whom scholarship must excavate from beneath layers of legend. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01065. The Jesus Seminar is the name given to a group of scholars who, through the 1980s and 1990s, made headlines by literally voting on which sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels they considered authentic, using coloured beads, red for certainly authentic down to black for certainly not, and concluding that only around…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1064. The Q source theory proposes that Matthew and Luke, in addition to using Mark’s Gospel as a source, also drew on a second, now-lost document consisting mainly of Jesus’s sayings, a document scholars have never found and have simply labelled Q, from the German Quelle, meaning source, related to the Greek concept of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1063. The JEDP theory, also called the documentary hypothesis, is the most influential and, in my judgement, the most damaging conclusion that source criticism has ever produced. It proposes that the five books of Moses were not written by Moses at all, but were assembled centuries later from four originally separate, anonymous documents, labelled…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1062. Redaction criticism studies carefully how each Gospel writer selected, arranged, and shaped his received material to bring out a particular theological emphasis, and and of all the various higher critical methods I have addressed on this site so far, it is the one I find least troubling in itself, even though it grew…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1061. Source criticism asks a question that is, on the surface, entirely reasonable: did the authors of biblical books draw on earlier written documents, and if so, can we identify them? Luke himself tells us plainly that many had undertaken to compile a narrative before he wrote his own Gospel, having followed all things…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1060. Form criticism is not a phrase you will hear from the pulpit very often, yet its fingerprints are all over the seminary training that shaped a great many ministers now standing in British and American pulpits. I want to explain plainly what it is, where it came from, and why I regard it…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1019. Higher criticism has generated strong reactions in the church for more than two centuries, and having watched its effects on ordinary congregations over the years, I think those reactions are largely warranted. It is worth understanding precisely what this discipline is, where it came from, what conclusions it has reached, and why those…