Source-critical Bible methods migrated to classical Greek texts
Evidence
Eichhorn had speculated about a primitive Oriental mentality and suggested that, though the Book of Genesis was not literally true, it mythologized events that had actually happened. The classicist Friedrich August Wolf, who taught at Halle and then Berlin, was in turn inspired by Eichhorn’s Einleitung, whose methodology he applied to Greek texts. In Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) Wolf demonstrated that the textual unity of both the Iliad and the Odyssey was illusory and he set out a methodology for detecting the various strata of their composition by various hands over the centuries. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 275
Categorization
- XREF: This methodological migration of source-criticism from sacred to secular texts parallels the spread of higher criticism, and later Arabic materials as described later in this same chapter.