Higher Critics on Late Texts: Reading Biblical Scholarship after the Holocaust

The Holocaust casts an unfathomably dismal shadow across the history of modern thought. When we face it honestly and self-critically, all our old proclamations of progress and the upward March of History lose their bearing. So too when it comes to the history of Christian thought and biblical interpretation. Indeed, the crisis of the Holocaust demands that we reread the Christian Bible and the history of Christianity in ways that acknowledge the future that haunts it. This means not only rereading New Testament texts and interpretations made of it by preachers and theologians. It also means rereading the ostensibly nonChristian and nontheological academic heritage of modern, so-called "Higher" biblical criticism.