New Testament Scholarship: Fifty Years in Retrospect

Abstract

vey I have tried only superficially, and I have not attempted to include periodicals outside America. Undoubtedly Festschriften like Zeitschriften would supply a chronological record of the changing interests and patterns. Some of these changes of fashion are easy to recall. The beginning of this century marked the heyday of source criticism and also of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule. Soon after arose in Germany--too late to be noted by Schweitzer in 1906--exponents of the Christ-myth theory with some colleagues in England, in Holland and America and more recently in France. In America, but not els where, flourished the popular Biblical emphasis known as the Social Gospel. Formcriticism began in Germany about the end of the First World War; demythologizing about the end of the Second. The Chicago school's emphasis on environmental factors was an independent parallel to form-criticism. Biblical theology is perhaps the latest or most conspicuous fashion today in England, Scotland and America. In some ways it is akin in purpose to demythologizing. This brief review is easy to make and grees, I trust, with the course of developme t that others would recognize in this discipline. At places it coincides with the sequence in Old Testament studies, often influenced by them and therefore a little later in date. It is easy to recognize the facors which led to these emerging interests. They are partly the result of or reaction against the patterns which preceded them. They are also reflective of interests outside th merely Biblical field, whether literary or philosophical, ecclesiastical or secular. It might be supposed that changes in patterns were due to new objective materials. That has been only slightly the case. For lexical studies the secular papyri were still new at the beginning of our review. Deissmann's Bible Studies was published in Eng* HENRY J. CADBURY served as Hollis Professor at Harvard Divinity School from 1934 to 1954. He was Chairman of the American Friends Service Committee from 1944 to 1960. He is currently Chairman of the Board of Directors of Bryn Mawr College. He now teaches at Pendle Hill and Haverford College.