Theology, Politics, and Exegesis

Essays on the History of Modern Biblical Criticism

Modern biblical scholars often view the methods they employ as objective and neutral, tracing the history of modern biblical scholarship to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this volume, Jeffrey Morrow examines some earlier, lesser known roots of modern biblical scholarship. He explores biblical scholarship from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries and then discusses its new place in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century where such scholarship would flourish. Far from merely an objective and neutral method, such scholarship was never without philosophical, theological, and political underpinnings. Morrow concludes the volume with a look at the separation of biblical studies from theology, using the example of Catholic moral theology in the twentieth century.