50 Key Concepts in Theology
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50 Key Concepts in Theology - Rayment-Pickard
Biblical Criticism
The application of various textual and historical methods to the books of the Bible. The critical examination of Scripture is a product of the modern period and has its roots in the development of a new historical consciousness in the late eighteenth century. Thinkers started to become more aware that religions have a history, and that even religious texts are produced within distinct cultural settings. And so biblical scholars (almost all of them German) started to ask about the history of the production of the biblical texts: who wrote them, why they were written, and who were they written for. The impulse of the first modern biblical critics was not essentially religious but historical. Their goal was to elicit the historical truth of Scripture rather than any divine meaning or message. David Strauss (one of the first modern biblical critics) suggested that the miraculous parts of the Gospels might just be myths. Before this time ‘rationalist’ critics had tied themselves in knots trying to devise ordinary explanations for the miracles. Strauss reached the more audacious conclusion that many parts of Jesus’ life were simply made up by the early Church. Strauss used biblical criticism to deconstruct the historical truth of Jesus. But most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars used the tools of criticism to construct a ‘true’ factual story of Jesus: the so-called ‘historical Jesus’. The historical life of Jesus became a cultural obsession: between 1800 and 1900 no less than 60,000 ‘lives of Jesus’ were published in Europe. Inevitably, each generation tended to produce a Jesus in its own image. The eighteenth-century rationalists produced a rational Jesus who came to enlighten his people. The nineteenth-century liberal Protestants produced an ethical Jesus who came to show us how to live. The magisterial figure in biblical criticism – even to this day – is Albert Schweitzer. In The Quest for the Historical Jesus he crowned and surpassed his predecessors by offering a convincing portrait of Jesus as a Jewish eschatological prophet from an age quite unlike our own. Schweitzer’s book begged the question of the relevance of an eschatological Jesus to the modern world, and Schweitzer concluded that the historical Jesus is ‘a stranger to our time’ but that his spiritual message is as relevant now as it was to the first disciples. In exposing the strangeness of Jesus, Schweitzer set the tone for twentieth-century biblical scholarship, which focused upon Jesus’ Jewish identity and painted a picture of him that was often starkly at odds with the Church’s view. Critics questioned whether Jesus ever believed himself to be the Messiah, the truth of the miracles and even the historical existence of Jesus. THINKERS Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) argued that ‘we can know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus since the Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary; and other sources about Jesus do not exist.’ The significant fact about Jesus, argued Bultmann, is his existentialist teaching (or kerygma), not the story of his life, which is a mere legend. Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827), a German biblical scholar, wrote introductions to both the Old and the New Testaments questioning the authenticity of particular biblical texts and developing theory about the sources of the Gospels. Hermann Reimarus (1694–1758), a Deist, published the first modern historical study of Jesus’ life, The Aim of Jesus and His Disciples (1778). Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) wrote The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), which was both the culmination of nineteenth-century historical criticism and the beginning of new historical–critical study in the twentieth century. D. F. Strauss (1808–74) published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835). Strauss argued that ‘it was time to substitute a new mode of considering the life of Jesus, in the place of the antiquated systems of supranaturalism and naturalism … every part of [the history of Jesus] is to be subjected to a critical examination, to ascertain whether it have not some admixture of the mythical.’ One reviewer called The Life ‘the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell’. The book was translated into English by the novelist George Eliot. IDEAS Allegory: allegories are stories in which the events and characters have a higher symbolic significance. Demythologisation: an approach pioneered by Rudolf Bultmann which attempted to show (1) that most of the New Testament and its thought-world is mythical; and (2) that the biblical myths must be reinterpreted if we are to apply them to our modern existence. Double dissimilarity: the idea, put forward by Bultmann, that if any given saying of Jesus bore similarity to any other Jewish or Christian sources, it should be disregarded as inauthentic. Only those sayings dissimilar both to Jewish and early Christian culture should be regarded as Jesus’ own words. Download 0.85 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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