Applying German textual criticism to the Bible cost a Scottish professor his chair

Evidence

In 1881 he was dismissed by the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland from the Chair of Old Testament Studies of the Free College in Aberdeen. He was dismissed because of the tenor of various articles that he had written on the Bible for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in which, and in publications elsewhere, he made use of German source-critical techniques and treated the Bible as a group of historical documents rather than as the unchallengeable word of God. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 323

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s wider theme of German Continental philology versus British amateur tradition; also resonates with scholarly-blasphemy controversies elsewhere in the chapter.