Are the teachings of Jesus tailored to audience?

[hedrick]

What is critical scholarship? Is that the theories about the Q gospel, etc? I read a non-academic book about the documentary hypothesis, and that made sense to me. (Of course I know the documentary hypothesis is from the 1800s and modern scholars have better theories.)

In practical terms what I mean by critical scholarship is the approach to Scripture that is commonly called "liberal", i.e that tries to put aside specific theological commitments and uses scientific, historical and literary methods. As a broader term the Wikipedia article on critical thinking, Critical thinking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, is a reasonable definition. Historically, the Protestant Reformation is to a large extent the result of 16th Cent critical thought, since exposing the shaky foundations of certain Catholic theology was an important basis for the Reformation.

You're right that the documentary hypothesis is not the most recent in scholarship. I wouldn't say it's been abandoned, but more recent work has tended to be in other areas, such as integrating recent understanding of 1st Cent Judaism into understanding of the NT. Again, Wikipedia has a reasonable summary of the types of analysis that are being done: Biblical criticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. However that article seems to concentrate on literary methods. I think the most interesting work involves external historical evidence. In my view, pure literary criticism tends to get pretty speculative. I prefer to use methods that have some kind of external control. In retrospect, some of the work from the 19th and early 20th Cent lacked controls. While the danger of pre-critical methods is pretty obvious, critical methods have their own dangers, of tending to succumb to "group-think".

It seems pretty clear that there are multiple sources behind the Bible. Starting with the time of the Kings, the OT even refers to some of them, and of course the preface to Luke also does. However I'm not quite as sure as some scholars that we can really classify the final text into things taken from various sources at quite the level of detail that some scholars have done. In some cases it's pretty obvious, e.g. the Gen 1 vs Gen 2 - 3. But at the peak of the documentary hypothesis, commentaries were distributing the whole Pentateuch among sources at the level of fractions of verses.

 

[cloudyday2]

In practical terms what I mean by critical scholarship is the approach to Scripture that is commonly called "liberal", i.e that tries to put aside specific theological commitments and uses scientific, historical and literary methods. As a broader term the Wikipedia article on critical thinking, Critical thinking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, is a reasonable definition. Historically, the Protestant Reformation is to a large extent the result of 16th Cent critical thought, since exposing the shaky foundations of certain Catholic theology was an important basis for the Reformation.

You're right that the documentary hypothesis is not the most recent in scholarship. I wouldn't say it's been abandoned, but more recent work has tended to be in other areas, such as integrating recent understanding of 1st Cent Judaism into understanding of the NT. Again, Wikipedia has a reasonable summary of the types of analysis that are being done: Biblical criticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. However that article seems to concentrate on literary methods. I think the most interesting work involves external historical evidence. In my view, pure literary criticism tends to get pretty speculative. I prefer to use methods that have some kind of external control. In retrospect, some of the work from the 19th and early 20th Cent lacked controls. While the danger of pre-critical methods is pretty obvious, critical methods have their own dangers, of tending to succumb to "group-think".

It seems pretty clear that there are multiple sources behind the Bible. Starting with the time of the Kings, the OT even refers to some of them, and of course the preface to Luke also does. However I'm not quite as sure as some scholars that we can really classify the final text into things taken from various sources at quite the level of detail that some scholars have done. In some cases it's pretty obvious, e.g. the Gen 1 vs Gen 2 - 3. But at the peak of the documentary hypothesis, commentaries were distributing the whole Pentateuch among sources at the level of fractions of verses.

Another of my nuttie theories: maybe the verses that Jesus quoted gives more legitimacy to one source of the OT over the others?