John Milbank claims that the Wellhausen documentary hypothesis is shaped by what he calls the “liberal Protestant metanarrative,” the view that Christianity moved from a religion of inner simplicity to a religion of complex external ritual (JEDP traces this story). In his SBL presentation, Nick Perrin of Wheaton showed how a form of this same metanarrative shapes New testament scholarship. The assumption of 19th and 20th century historical criticism is the “criterion of antiquity,” the notion that earlier texts are necessarily more accurate. Perrin saw the source of this criterion in the Romantic linking of primitivism, antiquity, and authenticity, a linkage he traced from Vico through Herder, Goethe and into the biblical scholarship of Holzmann, Westcott, and Harnack. Romantic conceptions thus shaped some of the fundamental methodological assumptions of modern NT scholarship.
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