Letters | 10 January 2009

A coherent story

Sir: Douglas Murray says (‘Studying Islam made me an atheist’, 3 January) that what killed the Bible was not Darwin but ‘German biblical criticism… the scholarship on lost texts, discoveries of added-to texts and edited texts’. It’s a pity he didn’t pursue his investigation further and discover that those dated theories proposed by the ‘higher critics’ now have no scholarly standing. Over the second half of the 20th century they were steadily demolished. Historical and textual research has changed the picture completely.

The consensus of scholarly opinion (among both historians and textual experts) is that the New Testament is pretty much exactly what the older view said it was: early, authentic and largely the product of eyewitnesses. The omitted texts have all been identified as much later forgeries. The swing back began as long ago as the 1970s with J.A.T. Robinson’s book Redating the New Testament.

And the movement called ‘Biblical theol-ogy’ (founded by Gerhadus Voss in the 1930s) has now demonstrated (fairly convincingly) that the Bible as a whole has a single plot-line, and tells a single, consistent, coherent story — and does so in a document from around hundred hands composed over something like a thousand years.