| > I'm saying the feel was dominated by fundamentalist and the universal default assumptions for 1500+ years was that Gospel were historically true. Who was the founder of modern biblical scholarship? Not any "fundamentalist" – many say it was the 17th century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza [0], who was excommunicated by Amsterdam's Jewish community for heresy, because he questioned traditional Jewish doctrines – most significantly in this case, he argued that the Torah contained inaccuracies and historical errors, that most of it was not written by Moses, that its transmission had been imperfect and had allowed the text to become corrupt – all positions which were just as heretical to the Christians of his day as they were to his own Jewish community. And although, as a Jew, his arguments were about the Jewish scriptures only, not the New Testament, it wasn't long before the debate he started about the former grew to include the later. The 18th/19th German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher was no fundamentalist either – he is often called the "Father of Modern Liberal Theology", but he also made major contributions to the development of biblical scholarship – in particular by arguing that the only correct way to interpret the Bible is to start out by treating it like any other text, to seek to find general principles applicable to all texts (even non-religious ones) and then seek to apply those general principles to the Bible in particular. One of the founding figures of the "Quest for the Historical Jesus" was the 19th century German liberal Protestant theologian David Strauss – who rejected the traditional Christian belief that Jesus was divine, and argued that any attempt to discover the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth must begin by rejecting all supernatural explanations. A very long way from Christian fundamentalism. The word "fundamentalism" was coined in 1920 to describe those Christians who were fans of the essay series The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth, published in Chicago between 1910 and 1915 – one of the major themes of those essays was a rejection of the tradition of modern biblical scholarship, as taught in leading academic institutions (especially Princeton.) So, rather than modern biblical scholarship being founded on fundamentalism, fundamentalism arose as a reaction to it. And, claiming there were "universal default assumptions for 1500+ years was that Gospel were historically true" completely ignores the long history of Jewish and Islamic scholarship on the New Testament, none of which ever assumed it was true. The earliest surviving detailed Jewish criticism of the Gospels is the 10th century "Book of Nestor the Priest", which quotes extensively and critically from the Gospel of Matthew; similar mediaeval Jewish works include Jacob ben Reuben's Milhamoth ha-Shem (12th century); the Sefer Yosef ha-Meqanne and Sefer Nizzahon Yashan (both 13th century); and Ibn Shaprut's Touchstone (14th century). Similarly, there was a voluminous mediaeval Islamic literature attacking the credibility of both the Jewish and Christian scriptures, which extensively quoted from them and sought to expose their absurdities and inconsistencies – important authors in that literature included al-Baqillani (d. 1013), 'Abd al-Djabbar (d. 1025), ibn Hazm (d. 1064), al-Djuwayni (d. 1085), Samau'al al-Maghribi (d. 1175), al-Qarafi (d. 1285) and ibn Qayyim al-Djawziyya (d. 1350). [1] [0] https://janes.scholasticahq.com/article/2348-the-father-of-m... [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7ztthw |
Yes, so what does that tell you about all other biblical scholarship? And all the other scholarship that happened since.
Literally since this modern scholarship has existed a larger group has been attacking it. There is a whole field based around that.
And as I pointed out, many who claim to do modern scholarships do it at schools that have a faith requirement for these positions.
There are literally cases where people got removed for advocating the wrong ideas. This is simply a reality.