Radical criticism is a movement around the late 19th century that, typically, denied authenticauthorship of the Pauline epistles. This went beyond thehigher criticism of theTübingen school which (with the exception ofBruno Bauer) held that a core of at least four epistles had been written byPaul of Tarsus in the 1st century.
The Dutch school of radical criticism started in 1878 with a publication byAllard Pierson, who denied Pauline authorship ofGalatians. He was fiercely attacked by his colleagueAbraham Dirk Loman, but two years later, also Loman abandoned the historicity of Paul. Similarly,Willem Christiaan van Manen, who had written a doctoral thesis defending the authenticity of1 Thessalonians, wrote in 1889 that he had come to the same conclusions as Loman. Also, the philosopherGerardus Johannes Petrus Josephus Bolland was a part of the movement.[1] With the death of Van Manen's studentGustaaf Adolf van den Bergh van Eysinga in 1957, the line of scholarship at Dutch universities came to an end.
The name "Dutch Radicals" was coined by Loman, in an 1887 article reviewingEdwin Johnson ("Antiqua Mater: A Study of Christian Origins", 1887), saying that "the author is a radical like we seldom meet among theologians and hardly ever among English theologians". The RadikalKritik article onvan Manen and the Dutch Radicals adds that "Van Manen later spoke of the 'radical' or the 'Dutch' school (1902). The 'radical' scholars did not want to be impeded by church canons and wanted to be free in their research of the New Testament and of the history of early Christianity. This research led them to the conclusion that we do not have any authentic Pauline epistles."
The Dutch school also influencedRudolf Steck in Switzerland, andArthur Drews in Germany. However, the works ofAdolf Harnack proved more influential, and radical criticism was eventually abandoned and is now a fringe position in current New Testament scholarship.
Attempts to revive Radical criticism has been made byRobert M. Price,Darrell J. Doughty andHermann Detering, who founded in 1994 theJournal of Higher Criticism. These attempts have largely been ignored by mainstream scholarship and have received strong criticism fromBart D. Ehrman,Maurice Casey andR. Joseph Hoffmann.[2][3]
Members of the Radical Dutch School argued against the existence of Jesus, which caused controversy.Robert Van Voorst wrote that "their arguments were stoutly attacked in the Netherlands, especially by other scholars, but largely ignored out it."[4]