Biblical Views: Biblical Scholarship at Risk

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Biblical scholarship can be tedious and exacting work, like accounting or taxidermy. Unlike these fields, Biblical scholarship is often controversial, attracting charges of heresy, treason and even insanity. I explore some of these controversies in my recent book about textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, showing how textual critics over the last several centuries have often encountered resistance to their scholarship.1 For instance, in 1516 when Erasmus published the first critical edition of the New Testament and argued for the need to learn Biblical languages (Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic) to understand the Bible, he was called everything from arch-heretic […]

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Footnotes

1. See Richard Elliott Friedman, “Taking the Biblical Text Apart,” Bible Review, Fall 2005; Richard Elliott Friedman, “Ancient Biblical Interpreters vs. Archaeology & Modern Scholars,” BAR, 34:01.

Endnotes

1. Ronald Hendel, Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2016).

2. Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? 2nd ed. (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 21.

3. This is the original wording of the website. It has recently been changed to “advanc[ing] a radical agenda in lecture halls.”