What We Look For in the New Testament

and industrious scholars, chiefly in Germany, undertook to show just how human the Bible was. They looked at statements which had previously been treated as items of historical fact and proceeded to prove that the biblical writers were not usually historians and that what they wrote was not usually history; they looked at various moral ideas, especially in the Old Testament, and showed that these ideas were not in harmony with the Sermon on the Mount or, for that matter, with the views of the Enlightenment or of the nineteenth century itself. In other words, the Bible was not an infallible guide either in matters of faith, where faith was related to history, or in matters of morals. The negative effect of this kind of criticism was so great that its positive results are often overlooked. On the