50 Key Concepts in Theology

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

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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.

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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.