Biblical criticism, as it is practised today, is a predominantly literary–historical business. The skills required are manifold and hard: knowledge of at least two ancient and two modern languages, of textual criticism and of testingly obscure episodes in history, of religion in its popular and its philosophical manifestations, of a vast and sometimes barely readable secondary literature. It is no wonder that, with all this on his hands, the biblical critic has little time or curiosity to spare for retrospect and the history of his subject. This fosters the illusion that biblical criticism is a very recent invention: a deception which is reinforced by the episodic protests of religious practitioners against the new-fangledness of criticism when it invades their piety. So it comes as a surprise to learn that biblical criticism as we know it is at least three hundred years old, and that even in its earlier phases it required skills and knowledge as diverse and difficult as it does now. Its pioneers, such as Spinoza and Locke, were, and needed to be, formidably learned and intelligent men. It comes as a surprise because these three centuries of effort have not officially been allowed to have an effect on the bastions of orthodox belief. They remain, apparently, what they were in the centuries of the foundation of Christianity. Criticism is optional and its official reception uncertain.

Once one has begun to trace modern biblical criticism backwards in time, one gets a disconcerting sense of regress.