In preparing for yesterday’s sermon on Jesus’ visit with
Martha and Mary in Luke 10:38-42, I continued my concurrent reading of
Frederick Godet’s Luke commentary (English ed. 1881). In his summation on the pericope, Godet offers
the following negative assessment of the interpretation given the passage by
the so-called “Tübingen School” of
interpretation, which postulated hidden references to Jewish Christian
(Petrine)/Gentile Christian (Pauline) tension, in good Hegelian fashion, lurking
underneath every NT rock. This school, with
its rabid skepticism towards the historicity of the NT, would have been at the
height of its popularity when the orthodox Swiss exegete wrote. His final sentence offers an accurate
prophecy of the ultimate demise of this approach, as indeed it has largely been
abandoned even by the most skeptical contemporary academic scholars:
The Tübingen School has
discovered depths in this narrative unknown till it appeared. In the person of Martha, Luke seeks to
stigmatize Judaizing Christianity, that of legal works; in the person of Mary
he has exalted the Christianity of Paul, that of justification without works
and by faith alone. What extraordinary
prejudice must prevail in a mind which can to such a degree mistake the
exquisite simplicity of this story!
Supposing that it really had such an origin, would not this dogmatic
importation have infallibly discolored both the matter and form of the
narrative? A time will come when those
judgments of modern criticism will appear like the wanderings of a diseased
imagination (p. 311).
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