I wasn't advocating the documentary hypothesis. Just using it to make the point that if you are going to cherry-pick texts to suit a theological agenda, what criteria do you use? Was it a scribe who added the parts you dont like? Or supressed the correct ones? Was the text a mosaic pieced together, with one author getting it "right" and the other not? How do you tell the difference?dizerner wrote:The documentary hypothesis has some highly speculative aspects to it, and it's hard to see that as "scholarly." Might as well say the Jesus Seminar was "scholarly." People that deny it don't deny the texts were often edited.
A couple other points. I wasn't contrasting historical and scholastic. I was showing that each have presuppositions they are based on that lend them to one task or another.
The secular scholastic approach *is* speculative. Science is speculative. That's the whole point. Willingness to turn every rock over, including ideological. The best contributors to reddit.com/r/academicbiblical acknowledge the weaknesses of the documentary hypothesis and historical jesus studies. They talk about alternatives.
And historical christianity and secular scholasticism don't have to be mutually exclusive either.