The bottom line though is that biblical studies focuses on the Bible as a book. [159] Still others believed that biblical criticism, "shorn of its unwarranted arrogance," could be a reliable source of interpretation. These changes would both "complement and reconfigure conventional African American religious life". Frequent political revolutions, bitter opposition of "liberalism" to the Church, and the expulsion of religious orders from France and Germany, made the church understandably suspicious of the new intellectual currents. Jonathan Sheehan has argued that critical study meant the Bible had to become a primarily cultural instrument. Each of these methods was primarily historical and focused on what went on before the texts were in their present form. [81]:205 Sorting out the wealth of source material is complex, so textual families were sorted into categories tied to geographical areas. Arlington, Virginia. [157]:121 For many, biblical criticism "released a host of threats" to the Christian faith. [81]:207,208 The multiple generations of texts that follow, containing the error, are referred to as a "family" of texts. [32]:38,39 Alexander Geddes and Johann Vater proposed that some of these fragments were quite ancient, perhaps from the time of Moses, and were brought together only at a later time. It critiqued the quest's methodology, with a reminder of the limits of historical inquiry, saying it is impossible to separate the historical Jesus from the Jesus of faith, since Jesus is only known through documents about him as Christ the Messiah. It remained the dominant theory until Wilhelm Schmidt produced a study on "native monotheism" in 1912 titled. This and similar evidence led Astruc to hypothesize that the sources of Genesis were originally separate materials that were later fused into a single unit that became the book of Genesis. [4]:20 Karl Barth (18861968), Rudolf Bultmann (18841976), and others moved away from concern over the historical Jesus and concentrated instead on the kerygma: the message of the New Testament. [54]:69[97]:5 These sources are supposed to have been edited together by a late final Redactor (R) who is only imprecisely understood. ", continues to be debated by theologians and historians such as Wolfgang Stegemann[de], Gerd Theissen and Craig S. [152]:3 The New Critics, (whose views were absorbed by narrative criticism), rejected the idea that background information holds the key to the meaning of the text, and asserted that meaning and value reside within the text itself.
