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| Textual Criticism of the New Testament |
| Johann Salomo Semler (1725-1791) |
| In order to understand the approach of modern Biblical and Textual Critics is is necesary to understand the approach instigated by Johann Salomo Semler. His influence in rejecting the inspiration of the Scriptures, and disbelief of miracles, echoes through the centuries. His influence is seen in basic principles which have been used in modern Textual Criticism. This excerpt from the article in the 1902 Encyclopedia Britannica is interesting. It was in the application of its principles and method (thus brought into vogue) to Biblical studies that rational-ism won its greatest triumphs, and really accomplished its greatest measure of good work. Johann Salomo Semler (1725-1791), the father of modern Biblical criticism, as the Germans call him, was the greatest representative of the school in this department. A pietist by education, with something of Gottfried Arnold's liking for heretics and all his dislike of ecclesiasticism, but with none of Arnold's mysticism, a man of immense learning, without any clear and systematic management of it, he was the first German to apply the strict principles of historical criticism, in conjunction with the rationalistic truths and errors of his day, to the study of the Scriptures and ecclesiastical history, particularly the history of doctrines. He assailed with all the wealth of his learning the traditional view of the limits and authority of the Biblical canon especially, and having, as he held, demonstrated its human origin and fallibility, he proceeded to deal freely with the books composing it, as sharing the failings common to everything human. He found the Scriptures pervaded with " local ideas," and his Christianity was really limited to the "natural religion" of the deists and the moral truths taught by Christ. As a man who had been under a pietistic training, he was, it is true, unwilling to refer to the understanding alone for evidence of the truths of Christianity, but his enlargement of the test is confined to the admission of an appeal to the measure of virtue and happiness produced. By this extended test he tries the matter of the Scriptures, assigning to his category of local ideas " whatever is not adapted to make men wise unto their true advantage." The supernatural origin of the Scriptures as writings and most of the miracles recorded in them he rejected; but, on the other hand, he was a vigorous opponent of the adversaries of Christianity and of the naturalists who denied revelation altogether,—Beim-arus, for instance, the author of the Wolfenbüttel Frag-mente. Other decided rationalists contemporaneous with Semler were Teller (1734-1804), Eberhard (1739-1809), and Steinbart (1738-1809), who all agreed in confounding religion with morality, and in reducing Christianity to a popularization of utilitarian morals. |