Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter, Introduction to the New Testament:
FOR the sake of convenience it is customary to divide the field of New Testament scholarship into various departments in which the critical, historical, exegetical and theological problems presented by the literature are investigated. The division, however, must not blind us to the unity of the field and the close interrelation of its several parts. The conclusion we reach in one section inevitably reacts on our study of another. It might seem as if a passage bore the same interpretation whatever its date and whoever its author. But this is by no means the case, since the same expressions may mean different things on different lips or when addressed to varying conditions. The ultimate aim of the New Testament student is to understand the religious and theological development which is reflected in the documents. But to do this he must reconstruct the movement of external events and within this environment trace the career of the Founder and the growth of the primitive Church. He must, in other words, pursue the study of New Testament history. Then he must minutely examine the documents in detail; that is, he must devote himself to the exegesis of the New Testament. Moreover, he cannot master the various types of doctrine within the literature without confronting the problems of authorship, nor can he trace the chronological development of thought without settling the relative date of his documents. These problems of date and authorship are the special concern of New Testament Introduction. And just as New Testament Theology depends for its results to no little extent on the sister" sconces, so it might be shown that each of these is dependent upon the rest. Nevertheless, while we cannot forget this fact of interdependence and the necessity that all should move forward together, it is essential that we should isolate each for special study, and in this volume we are concerned with the problems of New Testament criticism. This science is divided into general and special introduction. The former of these embraces Textual criticism and the history of the Canon, the latter'-examines each book in turn with a view to the determination of its authorship, its structure, its date, its local destination and kindred problems. In the present volume the limits of space compel us to restrict ourselves special introduction.
In its modern form this science was pre-eminently the creation of F. C. Baur and the Tubingen school. Not of course that several of the topics discussed in it had not already been treated with skill and learning by earlier scholars, but they had dealt with them rather as isolated questions, whereas Baur and the brilliant band of scholars he gathered about him dealt with them as a connected whole, and also brought the literature into most intimate relation to the whole development of the primitive Church. In philosophy Baur was a Hegelian, and he reconstructed the history of primitive Christianity in accordance with the formula that thought moves through thesis and antithesis to synthesis. In other words a position is laid down which calls forth a contradiction. These are gradually drawn together and at last merged in a higher unity. Applying this formula to the history of primitive Christianity, Baur conceived the whole development to exhibit the interplay of two forces, Jewish Christianity on the one side and Paulinism on the other, which ultimately, by the drawing together of the opposing parties, were reconciled in the Catholic Church of the second century, while the representatives of the original tendencies, the Ebionites on the one hand and Marcion on the other, stood outside the compromise and were consequently branded as heretics. Naturally, however much this construction may have been suggested by philosophical principles, it was not defended simply as an intuition....
