Historical criticism in the dock

Abstract

"In Germany the intensity and fervor of the ongoing debate over the historical- critical method rises and falls with the emergence and disappearance of powerful, articulate spokesmen on one side or the other. In the NT discipline (to which I am restricting myself in this paper) Rudolf Bultmann brought the discussion to a fever pitch in the 1940s and 1950s, especially with his essay entitled "New Testa- ment and Mythology." At the beginning of the 1980s Peter Stuhlmacher, 48-year- old Lutheran professor of NT at Tfibingen, has emerged as the leading figure in the ongoing debate over the value and limits of historical criticism. Since 1971 a stream of essays relating to this problem has come from his pen. The first batch was gathered in 1975 into the volume Schriftauslegung: Auf dem Wege zur bib- lischen Theologie. One of these five essays was translated by Roy Harrisville and published as Historical Criticism and Theological Interpretation of Scripture (1977). The essays continued after 1975. On the basis of his work in this area Stuhlmacher attained the privilege of writing the sixth Supplement to Neues Testament Deutsch on hermeneutics and the NT. This appeared in 1979 under the title Vom Verstehen des Neuen Testaments: Eine Hermeneutik. Thus here we have the ripest fruit of Stuhlmacher's reflection and a statement worthy of our consideration on this side of the Atlantic. My main concern here will be with this book"