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Classics of Criticism, Or the Higher-Critical Hit Parade

 

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Lord, send the old-time critics,
The Pentateuchal critics,
That redactors be discovered,
And sour-ces identified!

(“Pentateuchal Critics” by Robert M. Price,
to be sung to the tune of “Pentecostal Power”)

 

Once, many years ago, I was in a classroom at Drew University and a pal, Joe Iwudzie, turned around in amazement at all the authors and titles the professor was slinging around. He exclaimed, “What do you read?” My answer was not designed to comfort him: “Everything!” Indeed I had been engaged upon that policy for many years already, and I found it served me in good stead. Before I was out of high school I was reading apologetics, then early Christian literature, various Bible translations, etc. I was omnivorous. I understood I would have to familiarize myself with the important authors in the fields that interested me, Bible and Theology, as well as adjacent studies, and the number of these only grew as the years went by, eventually including Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, literary criticism, Deconstruction, and so on. I quickly came to see that I could not rely on second-hand summaries of what the giants had supposedly said, since such summaries are often subtly slanted to make it easier for the scholar describing them to refute them in favor of his own new theory. I am often asked for reading lists, and this one will prove, I fear, overkill. And it does not even cover all the areas I just mentioned. But it ought to get you started. And if you decide you want to read this or that book now, just click on the link, and it will take you to Amazon.com.

Note: Many of the links to Amazon.com are for used copies being sold by third-parties (particularly where a title is out of print) and therefore may become unavailable at any time. If our link is invalid, try a new search.

*Highly Recommended

 

Old Testament

Source Criticism

*Julius Wellhausen, PROLEGOMENA TO THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT ISRAEL

James Robertson Smith, The Old Testament in the Jewish Church - Twelve Lectures on Biblical Criticism
These are the great founding fathers of the Higher Criticism of the Old Testament. They concentrated on documentary sources underlying our biblical books, especially the Pentateuch. The result is the classic JEDP framework, unassailable even today, despite the “bugs-on-the-windshield” attempts of some young whippersnappers to overturn it. It just makes too much sense. (Anything you can find by Heinrich Ewald, Abraham Kuenen, and Bishop Colenso is well worth reading, too.)

 

Introductory

Harry Emerson Fosdick, A GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE - THE DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS WITHIN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS

Otto Eissfeldt, The Old Testament, an Introduction
Who wrote what? Why? Are individual OT writings compilations? How do major themes evolve? Fosdick, though a bit outdated both critically and theologically, still strikes me as enormously comprehensive and compelling. Eissfeldt is all detail, more than you might want, but then that’s just what you need.         

The Pentateuch

*Hermann Gunkel, Genesis (Mercer Library of Biblical Studies)

Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary (Old Testament Library)

Martin Noth, Exodus: A Commentary (Westminster Old Testament Library)

Martin Noth, Leviticus: A Commentary (Westminster Old Testament Library)

Martin Noth, Numbers: A Commentary (Old Testament Library)

Gerhard von Rad, Deuteronomy: A Commentary (Old Testament Library)

Gerhard von Rad, Studies in Biblical Theology

Martin Noth, A History of Pentateuchal Traditions

Martin Noth, The Laws in the Pentateuch, and Other Studies

Gerhard von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch
Once the sources of the Pentateuch became clearly defined and differentiated, these scholars applied form-criticism to each source in order to analyze the origin and history of the many specific pericopes (traditional, narrative, or legal units) in it. Source criticism delineated written documents, while form-criticism separated the oral traditions underlying them. Why was each individual story told? We know. The form critics figured it out for us. See for yourself.

 

Mythical, Not Historical

Hermann Gunkel, The Folktale in the Old Testament (Historic Texts and Interpreters in Biblical Scholarship, No 5)

*Ignaz Goldziher, Mythology Among The Hebrews And Its Historical Development

Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, Hebrew Myths The Book of Genesis

*Robert Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

Robert B. Coote, ed., Elijah and Elisha in Socioliterary Perspective (Society of Biblical Literature Semeia Studies)
What sort of myths, legends, etc., comprise the OT? How are they like or unlike those of adjacent and other cultures? How can we tell we are not dealing with history? And if the point is not to recount the facts, what are the purposes of the myths? Astronomy? Priestcraft? Pre-scientific guesswork? Politics? All of the above.

 

Psalms, Temple & Worship

Hermann Gunkel, Psalms: A Form-Critical Introduction

Sigmund Mowinckel, The Psalms In Israel's Worship (The Biblical Resource Series)

Aubrey R. Johnson, The Cultic Prophet & Israel's Psalmody

*John Eaton, Kingship and the Psalms (Studies in Biblical Theology : 2d series)

Margaret Barker, The Gate of Heaven The History and Symbolism of the Temple in  Jerusalem

Walter Harrelson, From Fertility Cult to Worship
Religious people are highly resistant to young know-it-alls updating their liturgy and hymns. After all, some idiots lacking any understanding of metaphor have tried to censor “Onward Christian Soldiers” from hymnals because they falsely imagine it to be militaristic! It must always have been this way, traditionalists making revisionists fight for every foot of ground. Good thing, too, since the archaic contents of the Psalms give is our best clues as to the very ancient beliefs of Israel and Judah, beliefs subsequently omitted from or ignored in other sources.

 

Old Testament Theology

Gerhard von Rad, OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY VOLUME 1 THE THEOLOGY OF ISRAEL'S HISTORICAL TRADITIONS

Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, Volume II

Gerhard von Rad, Holy War in Ancient Israel

Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament Volume I

Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, Vol. 2 (The Old Testament Library)

Edmond Jacob, Theology of the Old Testament

John L. McKenzie, A Theology of the Old Testament

All these books try to answer the question whether there is a single organizing principle or creed connecting the various OT writings. The whole issue grew up because scholars had come far enough to see that the OT did not simply predict Christ and Christianity; the old books must have had their own theology with its own integrity, one that was recapped and carried further in the NT. On the other hand, the notion that the collection of books should have some unitive center was the product of a theological “bias” (expectation) that, as a canon of scripture, the writings ought to have some basic unity. Maybe not. Eichrodt tried to work everything in under the rubric of “the Covenant,” while for Von Rad it was “the theology of recital of God’s mighty acts in Israel’s history (even if they were myths!).

 

Ancient Israelite Belief

*Hermann Gunkel, Creation And Chaos in the Primeval Era And the Eschaton: A Religio-historical Study of Genesis 1 and Revelation 12 (Biblical Resource)

*Margaret Barker, The Older Testament: The Survival of Themes from the Ancient Royal Cult in Sectarian Judaism and Early Christianity

*Margaret Barker,The Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God

Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (Biblical Resource Series)

Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

Hermann Gunkel, The Influence of the Holy Spirit: The Popular View of the Apostolic Age and the Teaching of the Apostle Paul: A Biblical-Theological Study

Albrecht Alt, Essays on Old Testament History and Religion

Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess
The difference between this and the previous category is that between the “official,” canonical beliefs encouraged by the priests and prophets, evident in the editing of the canon, versus the older beliefs still surviving among the common people (and some “retrograde” kings like Manasseh, the OT counterpart to Julian the Apostate) who never gave them up despite paying lip service to the party line.

.

Prophecy, Prediction and Apocalyptic

Terence Collins, The Mantle of Elijah: The Redaction Criticism of the Prophetical Books (The Biblical Seminar, No 20)

Robert P. Carroll, When Prophecy Failed: Cognitive Dissonance in the Prophetic Traditions of the Old Testament

Paul D. Hanson, THE DAWN OF APOCALYPTIC

Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come, 2nd Edition

*Sigmund Mowinckel, He That Cometh: The Messiah Concept in the Old Testament and Later Judaism (The Biblical Resource Series)

Helmer Ringgren, The Messiah in the Old Testament, Studies in Biblical Theology 18
What is the difference between prophetic predictions and apocalyptic doom-saying? How does each view history: deterministic or open-ended? Where did the apocalyptic worldview come from? Foreign influence (Cohn) or the logical historical development of the royal ideology (Hanson)? What did the prophets and their fans do when their predictions failed to materialize? Whence the notion of the Messiah?

 

Critical OT History

Martin Noth, THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL.

Martin Noth, The Deuteronomistic History (JSOT Supplement)

Martin Noth, The Chronicler's History (Jsot Supplement Series, 50)
Granting that everything before, oh, let’s say, 2 Samuel is legendary and mythical, what facts can we cobble together about ancient Israel and Judah, i.e., after the age of myth and miracle? And what are the agendas of the OT’s historians?

 

Minimalist OT History

Giovanni Garbini, History and Ideology in Ancient Israel

Robert B. Coote, Early Israel: A New Horizon

Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History

Marc Z. Brettler, The Creation of History in Ancient Israel

Philip R. Davies, In Search of Ancient Israel (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Ser Vol 148)

*Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel
Once imagined (largely on the basis of circular reasoning) to vindicate OT history, archaeology has seriously undermined the notion that the OT is historical at all. There is no evidence of an exodus from Israel, a conquest of Canaan, the glorious kingdoms of Israel and Judah, etc. David and Solomon appear to have been as mythic as King Arthur. What if, instead of being compiled in the days of Solomon or Rehoboam, the J source was written during the Persian period? Or the Ptolemaic? Yikes. Even as skeptical as I tend to be, I never saw this one coming.

 

New Testament

 

INTRODUCTORY

Alfred Loisy, The Birth of the Christian Religion (La Naissance Du Christianisme) and the Origins of the New Testament (Les Origines Du Nouveau Testament)

Alfred Loisy, The Origins of the New Testament
            Fresh and astonishing insights, largely neglected.

C.F.D. Moule, The Birth of the new Testament
            Striking ability to reconstruct social history from NT hints. I call it his best book.

Donald Guthrie, New Testament Introduction (Master Reference Collection)
            A “maximal conservative,” but omniscient as to who has said what on every point!

Willi Marxsen, Introduction to the New Testament: An Approach to Its Problems

Norman Perrin, The New Testament, an Introduction: Proclamation and Parenesis, Myth and History
            These gents provide good statements of the (then) Bultmannian mainstream.

*James M. Robinson, and Helmut Koester, Trajectories Through Early Christianity
            Amazing reshuffling of the NT puzzle pieces by following “heretical” currents of Nag Hammadi back through the NT canon.

Burton L. Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth
            Natural heir to Robinson and Koester, adding to the taxonomy of early Christianity by inference from genres.

 

BACKGROUND

      Gnosticism

*Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism
            Able exposition and defense of traditional (correct!) view of Gnosticism as a pre-Christian Jewish-syncretistic baptizing mysticism. Before ludicrous attempts of recent scholars to dismantle Gnosticism.

Ioan Coulianou, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism
            Approaches history of Gnosticism as a series of reinvention, a la structuralism.

Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion
            Bultmann’s student who began demythologizing by inferring a psychology of alienation from the myths of Mandaeanism and Manichaeism.

Geo Widengren, MANI AND MANICHAEISM
            Get anything you can, not easy to do, by this great scholar.

 

      Apocalyptic

R.H. Charles, Eschatology: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, in Judaism, and in Christianity
The classic treatment of themes differentiating types of Intertestamental future expectation in Judaism.

*Walter Schmithals, The Apocalyptic Movement, Introduction & Interpretation
Shows the kinship between Apocalypticism and Gnosticism as two moments along the same conceptual continuum. Thus demonstrates Jewish, pre-Christian character of Gnosticism.
 

John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (The Biblical Resource  Series)
Recent, mainstream updating of Apocalyptic thought and intros to all major texts.
 

Geo Widengren, The Ascension of the Apostle and the Heavenly Book: (King and Saviour III)
A revelation in itself, and just as hard to come by.

*Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism

Gershom G. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality

Gershom G. Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition

Gershom G. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676 (Bollingen series)
            Later mystical-messianic trends, but important for the morphology of messianism.

Abba Hillel Silver, History of Messianic Speculation in Israel, A: From the First Through the Seventeenth Centuries

*Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Galaxy Books)
Medieval Christian apocalyptic, but you’ll see the relevance.

 

      Pharisees

I. Abrahams, Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels

Jacob Neusner, The Pharisees Rabbinic Perspectives (Studies in Ancient Judaism, 1)

Julius Wellhausen, The Pharisees and the Sadducees: An Examination of Internal Jewish History (Mercer Library of Biblical Studies)

Marcel Simon, Jewish Sects at the Time of Jesus

W.D. Davies, Introduction to Pharisaism, (Facet books. Biblical series)

 

      Dead Sea Scrolls

Matthew Black, The Scrolls and Christian Origins: Studies in the Jewish Background of the New Testament (Brown Judaic Studies 48)

Jean Danielou, The Dead Sea Scrolls and Primitive Christianity.
Though these presuppose the DeVeaux/Strugnell Roman Catholic line that the Scrolls are Hasmonean in date, their authors do point out many key features of the Scrolls sect like unto the NT Christians.

Robert Eisenman, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians: Essays and Translations
Eisenman’s initial essays showing even more astonishing connections between Essenes, Zealots, Ebionites, etc., pushing the Scrolls into the first century CE.

Barbara Thiering, Redating the Teacher of Righteousness (Australian and New Zealand Studies in Theology and Religion)

Barbara Thiering, The Qumran Origins of the Christian Church

Barbara Thiering, The Gospels and Qumran: A New Hypothesis
She, like Eisenman, sees the Scrolls sect as a NT entity: the sect of John the Baptist, himself the Teacher of Righteousness.

 

      History

Emil Schürer, The Jewish People in the Time of Jesus

Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus: An Investigation into Economic & Social Conditions During the New Testament Period

 

GOSPEL CRITICISM

      Source Criticism

B.H. Streeter, The Four Gospels a Study in Origins

William Sanday, ed., Studies in the Synoptic Problem: By Members of the University of Oxford
Classic demonstrations of the regnant Q, Mark, M, L hypothesis.

Adolf Harnack, The Sayings of Jesus: The Second Source of St. Matthew and St. Luke

Richard A. Edwards, A Theology of Q: Eschatology, Prophecy, and Wisdom

*Burton L. Mack, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins

James M. Robinson, Jesus: According to the Earliest Witness
Increasingly sophisticated treatments of Q as a document in its own right.

John Dominic Crossan, The Cross That Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative
Did a “Cross Gospel” underlie the canonical four? Did the Gospel of Peter employ all five? Looks like it!

*Randel Helms, Gospel Fictions
The main gospel narrative source is the Septuagint (Greek trans. OT)

Dennis R. MacDonald, Does the New Testament Imitate Homer?: Four Cases from the Acts of the Apostles
A big yes.

 

       Form Criticism

Karl Ludwig Schmidt, The Place of the Gospels in the General History of Literature
Shows artificiality of gospel plot outline. Originally only floating pericopae.

Martin Dibelius, FROM TRADITION TO GOSPEL Translated from the Revised Second Edition of Die Formgeschichte Des Evangeliums

*Rudolf Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition

Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Kundsin, Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research

Vincent Taylor, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition

Klaus Koch, The Growth of the Biblical Tradition;: The Form-Critical Method (Scribner Studies in Biblical Interpretation)

F.C. Burkitt, Gospel History & Its Transmission

Gerhard Lohfink, The Bible: Now I Get It! : A Form-Criticism Handbook
Classify types of oral Gospel units. Bultmann is the best, but all are well worth reading. Lohfink has great cartoons!

Eberhardt Güttgemanns, Candid Questions Concerning Gospel Form Criticism: A Methodological Sketch of the Fundamental Problematics of Form and Redaction Criticism (Pittsburgh Theological Monograph Series)
Major whistle-blowing, but from within scholarship, not from apologists outside. A precursor to redaction, composition, and literary criticism of the gospels.

 

      Redaction Criticism

Joachim Rohde, Rediscovering the Teaching of the Evangelists

Norman Perrin, What is Redaction Criticism?
What subtle changes did each gospel writer make to his oral or written sources? Rohde summarizes much work by redaction critics, while Perrin is more of an illustrative methodological essay (and shorter).

 

SECULAR LITERARY CRITICISM

Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction

Boris Uspensky, The Poetics of Composition: Structure of the Poetic Text and the Typology of Compositional Forms
Both explode criticisms of the one genre for not obeying the conventions of another. Also, techniques for creating the illusion of reality. It’s like hitting “reveal codes” on your computer.

F.K. Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative

Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature
These discuss defining conventions of genres. (See also Booth and Todorov.)

Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text
(esp. “Introduction to the Structural Study of Narratives”)

Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose

*Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method

Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction to Poetics (Theory & History of Literature)

Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose

Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Janua Linguarum Series Maior)

Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film
All these participate to various degrees in Formalist criticism: narratology, narrative structure, etc.

Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature

Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction

Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism
Where lit-crit verges on philosophy. The nature of textuality.

*Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities

Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response
 Reader Response criticism. All these fascinating works are much more impressive than most of the pale, derivative NT books based on their methods.

LITERARY CRITICISM OF THE BIBLE

Stephen D. Moore, Literary Criticism and the Gospels: The Theoretical Challenge
Demonstrates the amateurish bungling of the huge raft of “Mark as Story,”  “Mathew as Story,” “Luke as Semaphore Code” books. I read them all, not listed here, but save yourself the trouble.

Robert W. Funk, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative
A genuine and insightful adaptation of lit-critical theory to the Bible. I never said it couldn’t be done.

Lynn M. Poland, Literary Criticism and Biblical Hermeneutics: A Critique of Formalist Approaches (American Academy of Religion Academy Series).

*Robert M. Fowler, Let the Reader Understand: Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark
The scales will fall from your eyes! Fowler unlocks Mark’s rhetorical technique of talking over the heads of his characters to his readers!

 

JESUS' BEGINNINGS

    Nativity

M.J. Field, Angels and Ministers of Grace;: An Ethno-Psychiatrist's Contribution to Biblical Criticism
A field anthropologist shows how biblical “miracle births” presuppose women with sterile husbands conceiving after sex with wandering holy men or “angels.”

Raymond E. Brown, Birth of the Messiah
Micro-detailed commentary on Matthean and Lukan nativity stories and genealogies. In the Middle Ages, Fr. Brown would have been burnt at the stake!

Jane Schaberg, The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives, Expanded Twentieth Anniversary Edition
She argues that Matthew and Luke do not even try to recount a miraculous birth of Jesus. For Matthew she was raped. Luke half is weak. She had her car filled with buckshot in Texas when the book was published.

John McHugh, The Mother of Jesus in the New Testament
Roman Catholic critical scholarship explaining all viewpoints and exegetical possibilities.

Herman Hendrickx, The Infancy Narratives: Studies in the Synoptic Gospels
Comprehensive and critical, like all his books.

 

    John the Baptist

Walter Wink, John the Baptist in the Gospel Tradition

Carl H. Kraeling, John the Baptist

Charles H.H. Scobie, John the Baptist
Unremarkable but well worth reading.

John Meagher, Five Gospels: An Account of How the Good News Came to Be
Section on John the Baptist is especially interesting.

G.R.S. Meade, Gnostic John the Baptizer: Selections from the Mandæan John-Book
John as a divine hero in Mandaean literature.

 

LIVES OF JESUS

     The Great Higher Critics

Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Fragments (Lives of Jesus series)
This Deist is ruthless and right on target in plucking the gospels like a chicken. Sees Jesus as a failed revolutionist, his disciples as connivers trying to salvage the situation and make a cool buck.

*David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (Lives of Jesus Series)
Shows the purely mythic character of all gospel narratives. The best book on the gospels ever written, even today!

David Friedrich Strauss, The Life Of Jesus For The People  
A later work, supposedly not as critical (though I can’t see it) and more popular.

Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Life of Jesus
More interesting as to Schleiermacher’s thought. He is strictly a Rationalist here. Swoon Theory, etc.

*Charles Guignebert, Jesus, (The History of Civilization [Christianity and the Middle Ages])

Maurice Goguel, The Life of Jesus
These two, along with Loisy, were the French Trinity of radical critics.

 

     Liberal Lives of Jesus

Ernst Renan, The Life of Jesus
Sentimental, novelistic, hardly scholarship, but important to read given its importance in getting historical Jesus studies off the ground. If you like it, go on and read one of my favorites, the admittedly fictional Jesus the Son of Man by Kahlil Gibran.

Adolf Harnack, What is Christianity?
Jesus as a preacher of non-Christological, individual piety and the “higher righteousness.” Harnack was a student of Albrecht Ritschl.

Alfred Loisy, The Gospel and the church (Lives of Jesus series)
Catholic Modernist Loisy, far more radical than Protestant Harnack, challenges his view that Jesus teaching was the kernel, with the Church being the mere husk. No, Jesus’ gospel was the acorn, Catholicism the oak. But Loisy was excommunicated.

Oscar Holtzmann, The Life Of Jesus

William Bousset, Jesus, (Crown Theological Library)
Typical Liberal lives of Jesus such as Schweitzer attacks.

Martin Kähler, So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic-Biblical Christ (Fortress Texts in Modern Theology)
He rejects the whole “historical Jesus” approach. A God-man cannot be adequately “psyched out” by ordinary historical science.

 

     Thoroughgoing Eschatology

*Rudolf Otto, The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man a Study in the History of Religion Revised Edition

*Johannes Weiss, Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God (Lives of Jesus series)

Albert Schweitzer, The Mystery of the Kingdom of God: The Secret of Jesus' Messiahship and Passion

Albert Schweitzer, Problem of the Lord's Supper According to Scholarly Research of the 19th Century and Historical Accounts

*Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (The Albert Schweitzer Library)

Albert Schweitzer, The Kingdom of God and Primitive Christianity

Albert Schweitzer, The Psychiatric Study of Jesus: Exposition and Criticism
These scholars thought Jesus understood himself as the harbinger of the End, the messiah-elect. This belief colored his ethics with an uncompromising absolutism that would be otherwise fanatical, as Tolstoy learned the hard way. But, having divorced Jesus from the modern mindset, Schweitzer then found he had to defend Jesus from charges of insanity! In his famous Quest, Schweitzer showed how previous Jesus scholars had remade him in their own image. Otto suggested that “the Son of Man’ be understood as reflecting Oriental “Primal Man” myths mediated by Zoroastrianism. Out of fashion, but still quite possible!

 

     Pious but Genuine Criticism

Martin Dibelius, Jesus

T.W. Manson, THE SAYINGS OF JESUS: AS RECORDED IN THE GOSPELS ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW AND ST. LUKE WITH INTRODUCTION AND COMMENTARY.

*T.W. Manson, THE TEACHING OF JESUS: STUDIES OF ITS FORM AND CONTENT

T.W. Manson, Servant-Messiah: A Study of the Public Ministry of Jesus.

A.M. Hunter, Work and Words of Jesus

Vincent Taylor, The Life And Ministry Of Jesus

Joachim Jeremias, Jesus and the Message of the New Testament (Fortress Classics in Biblical Studies)
 (compilation of Fortress Facet booklets The Search for the Historical Jesus, The Sermon on the Mount, The Lord's Prayer, plus the book The Central Message of the New Testament)

Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus

Joachim Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus

Joachim Jeremias, Jesus' Promise to the Nations

Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus (Hudson River Editions)
These scholars were not particularly embarrassed by an apocalyptic Jesus, which they accept from Schweitzer. They were reassured by Schweitzer’s vindication of a Jesus who was interested in theology, not merely ethics, as the Liberals liked to think. Their work breathes the atmosphere of Anglican and Reformed piety with its solemn dignity and does not come off as apologetic spin. Jeremias has been debunked at some points (e.g., Pharisees as oppressors), but is still extremely valuable, as is the wise Manson (no relation to Charlie).

 

     The New Quest

Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word

Günther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth

Ernst Fuchs, Studies of the Historical Jesus, Studies in Biblical Theology No. 42

Hans Conzelmann, Jesus: The classic article from RGG Expanded and Updated

Herbert Braun, Jesus of Nazareth - the Man and His Time

Ernst Käsemann, Jesus Means Freedom

Eduard Schweitzer, Jesus

Norman Perrin, The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus

Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus

James M. Robinson, A New Quest of the Historical Jesus: No. 25 (Studies in Biblical Theology)

Reginald H. Fuller, The Mission and Achievement of Jesus, Studies in Biblical Theology No. 12

Werner Georg Kümmel, Promise and Fulfillment: The Eschatological Message of Jesus