ABSTRACT
Critical biblical research began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when scholars decided to disregard the sacred, canonical context in which the Bible was transmitted. According to Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752-1827), ‘it would have been preferable if one had never even used the term canon’, for it carried a theological baggage that tends to obstruct historical inquiry.1 Scholars looked at the individual books in the collection and sought to elucidate their date, to determine their authorship and the message an individual biblical book, or part of a book, had for its original ancient readers. By concentrating on individual texts that originated with authors or compilers living in different times and circumstances, scholars generally paid little attention to the fact that the canon, like its component parts, emerged from a historical process that can be studied. Accordingly, studies of the development of the biblical canon are rare when compared to the large body of exegetical scholarship.
