David Instone-Brewer's latest Tyndale Tech newsletter is all about William Tyndale in celebration of sixty years of Tyndale House. The newsletter itself is not yet copied to the web, but it does link to a nice visual tour of the 60th Birthday Celebrations. To see it, you have to go to this page:
Visual Tour of Tyndale House
And then you click on number 11 on the list, 60th Anniversary Celebrations. I found it educational. I was surprised to hear it said that in the immediate post-war period, evangelical Biblical scholars were not to be found in the UK, and that this was the catalyst for the creation of Tyndale House (". . . . the struggles to find even one senior evangelical scholar in Biblical Studies in the post-war period"). Wouldn't one class C. H. Dodd, C. F. D. Moule, F. F. Bruce and others as evangelical scholars? I have never been very good at the labels game.
2 comments:
Ah, the labels game. Regarding the three scholars you name, I think F. F. Bruce _was_ one of the founders of Tyndale House; Moule and Dodd, on the other hand, would have failed various evangelical shibboleths (e.g., Dodd, infamously in his Romans commentary, did not espouse the 'correct' view of propitiation, and even declared that the apostle Paul was wrong in some of the things he said).
Mark,
F.F. Bruce most certainly became a 'senior evangelical scholar in Biblical Studies', but was not in the the 1940s (when he was quite junior and a classicist!). In the preface to his commentary on the Greek text of Acts (1949, one of the earliest books from the Tyndale House perspective - scholarly and evangelical/conservative) he notes the transition from classicist to Biblical studies in the writing of the commentary (from 1939 to 1949).
Classifying people is easier by allowing for their own self-definition and association (although this is not the only legitimate approach to labelling people and movements).
On this (and any) basis Dodd was not 'evangelical' in any recognisable sense. Moule would be closer (personally pious, missionary parents, relatively conservative in critical conclusions), but the timing is wrong - he was not a senior scholar in the early 40s and the self-definition and association would seem to be lacking as well. Of course he is still alive, so someone could ask him.
Peter
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