Joshua Berman’s essay, “The Corruption of Biblical Studies,” purports to provide an “insider’s tour of today’s field of biblical studies.” In it, he tells a story of how biblical scholarship became slave to putatively pseudo-scientific ideas about its character as a value-free enterprise. This development, Berman believes, has led to a failure to recognize the overall liberal bias of the field and to a widespread exclusion of scholarly perspectives that affirm the coherence, historical accuracy, and/or antiquity of a biblical text.
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