The Development of Rational Theology in Germany since Kant by Pfleiderer Otto;

Author:Pfleiderer, Otto;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1656274
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

1 Seligkeit.

1 Selbstzweck Gottes.

1 I do not give his exposition of these doctrines in the words of the text of the above work, but according to the author’s most recent personal explanations.

BOOK III.

BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY.

CHAPTER I.

NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.

THE year 1835 marked an era in our scientific knowledge of the Biblical foundations of Christianity. In it appeared David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus, Christian Ferdinand Baur’s work on the Pastoral Epistles, and Wilhelm Vatke’s history of the religion of the Old Testament, three works containing the germs of the researches of our own day into the Old and New Testament writings. These works did not of course come down from heaven, but were to a certain extent the result of the labours of older critics. Still, the difference between them and earlier works is so fundamental, the new element in them is so predominant and of such moment, that we are justified in dating from them the special character of the Biblical criticism of to-day. We shall first take a brief glance at the state of New Testament criticism in the first three decades of this century.

The principle enunciated by Semler, Lessing, and Herder, that the books of the Bible must be read and criticised as human productions, was systematically applied by Eichhorn. He saw that the New Testament epistles were not all written by the apostles whose names they bear, that 2 Peter and Jude are not genuine, and that the Epistles to Timothy and Titus do not come direct from Paul. Of special importance was his hypothesis as to the synoptic Gospels. The problem as to how their frequent verbal agreement in conjunction with their discrepancies can be explained, he believed himself able to solve by the hypothesis of a primary Aramaic Gospel, of which various translations and editions were at first current, and from which at a later time sprang our canonical Gospels. Instead of this primitive written Gospel, Gieseler regarded oral tradition as the common source, an hypothesis which explained the differences between the Gospels more easily but made their agreement in details more difficult. Schleiermacher combined both hypotheses, by assuming along with the oral tradition a number of small written accounts (“Diegeseis”), by the collection and combination of which our synoptic Gospels were formed. The Gospel of Matthew even does not, in his view, come directly from the Apostle Matthew as its author, but is only based upon a collection of speeches made by him (the λόγια of Papias). The Gospel according to Mark is derived from Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels, both of them being used alternately. The Johannine Gospel only is the authentic production of one author, and was composed by John the apostle and eye-witness; and as the earliest authority for the life of Jesus it is always to be preferred to the synoptists. The authority of the great theologian Schleiermacher secured for this theory for a long time wide acceptance. It must however be remarked, that of all conceivable combinations

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