Finding the Shards #22
It was not long before redaction criticism gave way to a strictly literary criticism informed by contemporary theories of authorship and composition. This happened in America during the 1960s when religious studies were moving away from theological programs to take up residence in the university. Biblical scholars found themselves in conversation with the full range of the human sciences. What seemed important, finally, was to understand the New Testament in the con- text of the emergence of Christianity as a complex cultural phenomenon. When read against the background of the feisty social histories of the Greco-Roman age, early Christian texts quickly lost their glaze of normative theological significance and fell into place as literary achievements crafted in the rough and tumble of exciting social experimentation.