The Rise of Modern Biblical Scholarship and Recent Discussion of the Authority of the Bible

Abstract

The Rise of Modern Biblical Scholarship During the century and a half in which modern methods of study have been applied to the task of biblical research the achievement of scholarship has been positive and immense. Inscriptions and documents contemporaneous with the biblical writings have been discovered; ancient languages can now be read whose existence was unknown or barely suspected by scholars a hundred years ago. It is today possible to compare biblical religious and social ideas and practices with those of other ancient peoples who lived alongside Israel and who influenced and were influenced by the development of Jewish and Christian thought and worship. Modern archaeological, philological and ‘history-of-religion’ methods have resulted in the accumulation of a mass of knowledge which illuminates every page of the Bible, while at the same time the development of the critical, literary and historical study of the biblical books themselves has brought about a complete revision of traditional notions about their relation to one another. It is impossible here to catalogue the results of these researches, but it is necessary to say something about their rise in the nineteenth century and their consequences both for biblical interpretation and for Christian theology in general in the twentieth. One thing has happened as a result of the rise of modern biblical research in the nineteenth century, and it affects every school of biblical interpretation in the western world today: it is no longer possible to ignore the discoveries of the scientific investigators, the archaeologists, philologists and workers in the sphere of the history of religion (loosely called ‘comparative religion’).