Theology Today - Vol 43, No.4 - January 1987 - BOOK REVIEW - Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany

605 - Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany

Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany

By John Rogerson

Philadelphia, Fortress, 1985. 320 Pp. $29.95.

"The view that a discipline takes of its past functions like a 'mythology,' commending and justifying the stance that scholarship takes up." With that perceptive observation as his warrant, John Rogerson undertakes to examine the formative period of critical Old Testament scholarship, namely, the nineteenth century. The scope of his investigation is restricted to Germany and England. He purposely omits even Irish, Welsh, and Scottish scholars of the period, with the exception of William Robertson Smith. Its restricted scope will limit the appeal of the book in this country, and that is unfortunate. Rogerson, who is Professor of Old Testament and Head of the Biblical Department at the University of Sheffield, the site of some of England's most creative biblical scholarship, is eminently qualified as a critical historian of Old Testament scholarship, and particularly as a student of biblical scholarship in Germany. He has employed his credentials to good effect in this work, producing a book that is informative and well-written. The topic may be somewhat arcane and academic, but that is not to say it is unimportant, and Rogerson even manages to make it surprisingly interesting.

At points, the book is even amusing, such as when Rogerson summarizes the work of the English scholar, J. W. Colenso, who observed that, according to the Old Testament's own statements, only one of every ten Israelite men could have had a wife during the wilderness period, and

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that Aaron and his two sons would have had to slay lambs for sacrifice at the rate of one thousand every minute! Usually, however, the treatment is more sober and less bloody. It is not bloodless, however, and one of the great strengths of Rogerson's book is the care he takes to treat the polemical contexts in which the critical arguments of Old Testament scholars were carried on. The critical study of the Bible developed amidst theological and ecclesiastical controversy in both Germany and England (and elsewhere!), as is well known. Rogerson provides a vast amount of thoroughly digested information concerning both the critical arguments and the controversies that accompanied them. Furthermore, rather than merely describing various competing, disembodied arguments, as is so often done, he gives us a remarkably full account of the people sponsoring these arguments and their respective constituencies.

Several of these people are not well known, especially in this country, even among scholars. Nineteenth century British scholarship had very little direct impact on Old Testament studies in this country, so it is to be expected that many of those Rogerson names will not be familiar. However, some of the German scholars he treats at length will be equally unfamiliar. C. C. J. von Bunsen, for example, has been all but forgotten; Rogerson devotes nine pages to his revival. Scarcely better known are C. P. W. Gramberg and J. F. L. George, both of whom are amply treated here. Even with more familiar names, such as W. M. L. de Wette and J. C. K. von Hofmann, Rogerson's treatment is fresh and instructive. His work on these two is the best I have read in English.

Rogerson covers these and other giants of the past as evidence for his own argument that critical scholarship in Germany during the nineteenth century developed in many different directions but had de Wette as its seminal influence, and that the century ended with a consensus built around the massive contributions of Wellhausen (chapters one through ten, nineteen, and twenty). Further, Old Testament scholarship in England during the same period was dependent on developments in Germany and resulted, after a long and sometimes bitter struggle (chapters eleven through eighteen), in what Rogerson calls "the triumph of Wellhausen," the title of his final chapter. So broadly stated, none of these conclusions is particularly surprising, but Rogerson's efforts to show why things went as they did, and the breadth of his treatment- relying often on archival and other sources unavailable to most-are impressive and compelling.

England was not the only country where biblical studies were largely derivative of German scholarship. In its case, the problem was in part one of numbers. As Rogerson points out, prior to 1828 Oxford and Cambridge were the only English universities, each with a Hebrew chair but no serious theological faculty. At the same time, any one of the seventeen Protestant faculties in Germany would have had more teachers of theology and biblical studies than were to be found in the two English universities. Rogerson also acknowledges that theological scholarship in Germany was generally more creative than in England, where

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there was no one with the stature of, for example, Schleiermacher. He does not make sufficiently clear, in my view, that the creativity of biblical scholarship in Germany during most of the nineteenth century stemmed in no small part from the intimate connection there between biblical studies and the "creative" tradition of theology. Most German biblical scholars were also, or primarily, theologians. It is perhaps not accidental that it was Wellhausen the Orientalist (by that time) who finally brought the triumph of critical scholarship to England, when, as Rogerson puts it, "the streams converge." Rogerson is content to say that "English scholarship would prefer to say that it does not know, rather than build elaborate theories on slender premises." That is indeed a virtue in anyone's scholarship, but besides perhaps begging the question it seems inadequate as an explanation of the differences between German innovation and English evaluation.

In a book that covers such a wide range of scholars and issues, even one that covers them expertly, there are inevitably points where disagreement or qualification is possible. For example, Rogerson suggests that de Wette's radical criticism and his theological devaluation of Israelite history were both due to his dependence on the philosophical system of J. F. Fries. On the one hand, however, the period of de Wette's radical criticism, from 1805 through 181 1, preceded his first reading of Fries (according to Rudolf Smend) and cannot have been dependent upon it. On the other hand, de Wette did come in his later period to attribute theological importance to Israelite history, as indicated by his book published in 1846, Die biblische Geschichte als Geschichte der Offenbarungen Gottes ("Biblical History as the History of God's Revelations"). Here and in one or two other places, Rogerson tends, perhaps, to see too strict a connection between philosophy (or a philosopher) and the particular arguments of a biblical scholar. Happily, he shows as others have that Wellhausen cannot be understood as a Hegelian, a myth still propogated in this country.

The book is supplied with an ample bibliography and three indexes, which will make it very useful for further research. There is a helpful chart titled "Old Testament Professors in Protestant Faculties in Germany 1800-1900." It should be noted that, contrary to what the chart suggests, Dorpat was in Russia, while Basel, Geneva, and Zurich are in Switzerland. Strasbourg's nationality has been given to fluctuation, but since the last war it has been in France.

BEN C. OLLENBURGER

Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey