This is the formal printing and public distribution of the Doctor of Philosophy dissertation written by Theodore P. Letis, Sr., at the University of Edinburgh in 1995.

Coming Soon

As an Amazon affilaite, we may earn on qualifying purchases

Description

A religious belief in verbal inspiration gave the Christian Bible its sacred text status within the matrix of the Church. The lower, or textual criticism, first practiced outside the sanction of the Church by Erasmus and developed further by non-Trinitarians initially, offered the first significant direct challenge to this belief in the early modern period. This, the dissertation argues, was the proper beginning, phenomenologically speaking, of the process of desacralization.

Moreover, it is argued that the desacralizing role of the lower criticism was further manifested when it was discovered that certain theologically significant passages, perceived by those in the Erasmian school to have resulted from later interpolation into the text of Scripture, illegitimately lent support to dogmas such as the Trinity, the deity of Christ and the virgin birth. The practice of lower criticism set in motion, well before the arrival of the higher criticism, a rather significant awakening of a historical consciousness about the developmental stages of the NT text, which in later recensions reflected a more full-blown orthodox expression of Christological themes. The role that the lower criticism played in introducing this historical consciousness has not been readily acknowledged by either historians or practitioners of the discipline of lower criticism.

The dissertation argues that this is because of an ideological framing of the historical details of the discipline in development. This ideological component and the historical circumstances prompting it are brought into relief revealing why two schools arose during the English Enlightenment and carried on into the Victorian era, responding to the data of text criticism in two directions: one interpreting the data as affecting dogma, the other interpreting the data as not affecting dogma. In answering why this came about the dissertation helps to explain how the quest for the historical text culminated in the quest for the historical Jesus.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations, ix

Preface, xiii

Collaborations, xvii

Lacunae, xix

Introduction, 21

Part One: Prolegomena

Chapter 1: Erasmus and the Revival of the Academy
The Genesis of Restorationism, 51

Chapter 2: The Tridentine Response to Erasmianism
The Vulgata Latina as Sacred Text, 87

Chapter 3: Response to Trent
The Greek Vulgate as Sacred Text, 101

Chapter 4: The Progress of Erasmianism
in the Quest for the Historical Text, 117

Part Two: The Specific Use of Textual Variants by
Eighteenth Century Antitrinitarians

Chapter 5: Jean Le Clerc, Lower Criticism and a Shift in the
Dogmatic Paradigm of Biblical Inspiration, 163

Chapter 6: Lower Criticism and Dogma Among thee Newtonians
A Crisis for Orthodoxy and a Plea for Religious Tolerance, 177

Chapter 7: In the Erasmian Tradition—
Communicating Textual Variants ad populum
Erasmus, Newton and the English Paraphrases, 207

Chapter 8: From Lower Criticism to Higher Criticism
Joseph Priestly and the Use of Conjectural Emendation
in an Early Quest for the Historical Jesus, 231

Part Three: The Contribution of the Lower Criticism to the
Victorian Crisis of Faith

Chapter 9: Samuel P. Tregelles, Constantine Tischendorf and Samuel Davidson
Mid-Century, Non-Conformist Adjustments and the Dismantling of the
Second Phase of the Ideology of Harmless Engagement, 249

Conclusion, 291

Bibliography, 297