In the first edition of his now fabled Golden Bough, James George Frazer began with the tale of an unnamed priest-king waiting for his slayer and successor in the sacred grove at Nemi. “A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest,” wrote the armchair anthropologist, “and having slain him he held office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.”Footnote ¹ Scholars of the Hebrew Bible have often cast their own history in these terms: if the established August Dillmann or Franz Delitzsch fell to a trailblazing Julius Wellhausen, Wellhausen himself succumbed to a pathfinding Hermann Gunkel.Footnote ² For the period after “the triumph of Wellhausen”—to use language from John Rogerson's classic history—the scope then usually narrows, with Wellhausen and Gunkel forming legendary foils.Footnote ³ Which of them, exactly, has rightful claim to the crown or represents the true hierarch of the Hebrew Bible muse depends upon the narrator's own disposition. Indeed, experts in biblical studies have long juxtaposed the two as intellectual opposites. In the process, they appear, ofttimes, as almost mythic figures, largely bereft of context—historical milieu otherwise being a crucial component of biblical scholarship for well over a century.

Biblical scholars ought to contextualize their discipline as much as they contextualize their own primary sources. Like the biblical texts themselves, established methods were produced—and reproduced—in a concrete time and place. They embraced, and embrace still, specific values, concerns, and premises potentially dismissed or eschewed today. Whether, or the extent to which, such procedures—embedded as they are—may simply be extracted from historical contingency and redeployed apart from full consideration of the program they comprised merits studied rumination. Alongside these procedures, their protagonists need more evaluation, less adulation. Instead of some Manichean struggle in the air, debates on theory and method emanate from human agents, who themselves derive from distinct and local settings. Indeed, the Wellhausen–Gunkel contrast was rather symptomatic of far greater social shifts. Much more than warring minds, they were historical human beings: their divergence thus encompassed cultural, personal, and institutional elements. Furthermore, the dynamics of their disparity were neither exceptional nor extraordinary. As a brief foray into these savants’ relations, this essay hopes to demonstrate the kind of insight won when a broader lens is used. Such a “non-cognitive” (or nonconceptual) perspective complements more conventional historiography composed by Bible scholars: in a sense, it foregrounds the background.Footnote ⁴ In consequence, the enabling conditions crucial for academic products, trends, and triumphs can then come into view.

Be it Germanophone or Anglophone, whether Continental, British, or American, the standard historiography told by Bible critics tends to characterize Gunkel and Wellhausen as quite different in degree and at times even in kind.Footnote ⁵ Echoing an earlier essay by the Australian New Testament expert J. C. O'Neill, who long resided in Edinburgh, the Swiss(/German) specialist of Hebrew Bible Thomas Römer titles one section of a recent contribution “Gunkel versus Wellhausen, Tradition Criticism versus Redaction Criticism.”Footnote ⁶ Rudolf Smend sees a fork in the road as well. This Germanic doyen of biblical scholarship states, “Far beyond the lifetimes of their bearers, the names Wellhausen and Gunkel signify the [two] directions of critical work on the Old Testament—and actually also the New—for the course of the 20th century.”Footnote ⁷ Most palpably, perhaps, the American theologian Walter Brueggemann typifies such antithesis when he reasons,

In all these estimations, the contrast is largely intellectual, a difference of paradigm, procedure, or, in the very least, perspective. Yet this line of interpretation boasts an agéd history. In fact, it traces back to the scholars themselves.

In a short, public, and mostly unilateral academic altercation, Gunkel reassured his readers, “The personal [dimension] is entirely irrelevant for me, as I believe it is also irrelevant for Wellhausen. The issue here is not a personal dispute but one of principle.”Footnote ⁹ As if to reinforce the point, his subtitle plainly reads “Several Considerations of Principle.” The source of debate was the question of sources. In 1895, Gunkel had published his Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit. Eine religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung über Gen 1 und Ap Joh 12.Footnote ¹⁰ Since confirmed by a letter to Adolf von Harnack, academic lore and family tradition have long preserved Wellhausen's own assessment: more chaos than creation.Footnote ¹¹ He himself did not address the book, at least in any public forum, until 1899, when he issued his own essay on apocalyptic literature.Footnote ¹² Though he tempered his earlier albeit unexpressed appraisal, Wellhausen admitted that he must remain in protest.Footnote ¹³ “The proton pseudos,” he concluded, “is that [Gunkel] assigns great value to the question of origins in the first place. . . . Where this material originally comes from is methodologically irrelevant altogether.”Footnote ¹⁴ While the debate itself transpired beneath the banner of Zeitgeschichte and Traditionsgeschichte—namely, contemporary history and that of tradition—the discussion actually encompassed three distinct dimensions: synchrony versus diachrony, literacy versus orality, and interiority versus exteriority. Wellhausen had accused Gunkel of opposing investigations synchronic and diachronic, “as though they were mutually exclusive.”Footnote ¹⁵ Gunkel, in Wellhausen's judgment, sought all explanation in origins and placed the peripheral at centrum. More fundamentally, the dispute stemmed from priorities: first, whether the immediate or distant past conveyed the most importance for textual explanation and, second, whether proper interpretation included materials transmitted not only across generations but also from other cultures. In the end, Wellhausen deemed such preoccupations perhaps of “antiquarian interest” but “not the task of the theologian and the exegete.”Footnote ¹⁶

Gunkel was incensed. He fumed over thirty pages in reply to the few from Wellhausen. In Gunkel's own perspective, Wellhausen may have offered some passing statements on the antiquity of certain material, but he finally failed to draw any real methodological consequences from this concession of his.Footnote ¹⁷ Gunkel stressed material while Wellhausen emphasized authors: trees were missed for forests; product eclipsed production. Consequently, an argument ensued over accent more than principle, but the root cause lay in virtue. Gunkel himself averred, “The real point of contention is therefore whether or not the question of the material's pre-history is of value to the theologian and exegete.”Footnote ¹⁸ His own answer being affirmative in the extreme, he declared the origin and meaning of inherited raw material a crucial component of the theological enterprise.Footnote ¹⁹ Indeed, he considered exploration of materials’ prehistory “an interesting, important, and truly theological problem.”Footnote ²⁰ He opined even further, “very often the most significant conclusions for religious history will result from such method when consistently applied.”Footnote ²¹ Such diffusionary inquiry was not an end in itself. For Gunkel, the question of origins could reveal the distinctiveness of ancient Judaism and, most importantly for him, that of Christianity as well.Footnote ²² In his judgment, Wellhausen not only disregarded this line of inquiry but even placed it out of bounds for others. Gunkel's most immediate concern may have been less interpretation than investigation, but he nonetheless wanted to understand the text.Footnote ²³

Protestations notwithstanding, the conflict was also personal. His own reply betrayed a certain sensitivity. Beyond the tone itself, Gunkel expressed umbrage at being misunderstood at best and simply ignored at worst. He conveyed a readiness to heed the advice of such an eminent scholar but only after said savant had read him more than superficially. In Gunkel's estimation, not only did Wellhausen distort his work, but he also embellished the space between their positions.Footnote ²⁴ Furthermore, when he did confess resemblance, Wellhausen argued the course was his alone, ostensibly taking pride in an autonomy from Gunkel.Footnote ²⁵ In an undated letter to Harnack, probably from 1899, Gunkel lodged the same complaints.Footnote ²⁶ Yet he would not leave the argument there. He alluded to Wellhausen's judgment, about half a decade later, in at least two other venues.Footnote ²⁷ In the first volume of “Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments” (FRLANT), a series he founded with Wilhelm Bousset, Gunkel rehearsed the debate with Wellhausen and honed his own critique: “With such statements, Wellhausen falls into conflict with fundamental principles established everywhere in historical science and recognized and followed even by him in other spheres.” He continued, “Our cardinal conviction of history is that we are not in the position to understand a person, a time, or a concept apart from their prehistory but that we can only speak of a true, living understanding once we know history in its formation.”Footnote ²⁸ Both here and in a review of Max Reischle's Theologie und Religionsgeschichte, Gunkel showed considerable indignation at construal of his work as only antiquarian in interest.Footnote ²⁹ Accordingly, Werner Klatt concludes, “Gunkel is not affronted by Wellhausen's position of principle; rather, he is resigned that the scholar he so esteemed simply does not want to see the problems.”Footnote ³⁰ If Gunkel requested that his publisher, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, send Schöpfung und Chaos to Wellhausen in 1894, no longer did his name stand on the list for free exemplars of his Genesis commentary, published two years post the skirmish, in anno 1901.Footnote ³¹

Gunkel admired Wellhausen. Not only did Die Composition des Hexateuchs represent the “standard-work” of literary criticism, but that “masterpiece” Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels turned the tides of Old Testament research, its description of the Priestly Source being Wellhausen's “immortal achievement.”Footnote ³² In a programmatic essay, first published in 1904, he found Wellhausen's “particular greatness. . . not only in the sharpness of his criticism but also in the positive, that is, in his splendid and persuasive total view and especially in his wondrous gift for tracking the earthy smell of portions of the Old Testament [den Erdgeruch der alttestamentlichen Stücke aufzuspüren].”Footnote ³³ Gunkel even adored his mastery of language. Elsewhere, he lauded, “No modern—it would have to be Wellhausen, whom we have to thank for an extraordinary translation of the Minor Prophets—could hope to reach the power and warmth of Luther's locution.”Footnote ³⁴ If Wellhausen's likeness hung on his wall, his presence loomed all the larger in Gunkel's mind.Footnote ³⁵ The necrology he wrote upon the death of Wellhausen Smend has rightly styled a “hymn.”Footnote ³⁶ In the assessment of Klatt, again, Gunkel would have wanted for no further recognition had he known that it was Wellhausen who commended him as a substitute for Paul Hinneberg's “Die Kultur der Gegenwart.”Footnote ³⁷ Awareness of the endorsement penned by Karl Budde during his Gießen appointment proceedings would have boosted his confidence too.Footnote ³⁸ Notwithstanding his successes, a felt dearth of affirmation, let alone appreciation, inflamed his already trying personality and sizable insecurity for the duration of his life—qualities both manifest in and exacerbated by his early troubles in Göttingen, his publication conflicts with Martin Rade for Die Christliche Welt, and his own heavy redactional hand in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (both first and second editions) as well as “Schriften des Alten Testaments.”Footnote ³⁹ Wellhausen's own gruffness did not ease the situation. In the words of Konrad Hammann, “Given the dominant academic enterprise, always characterized by factional struggles and personal rivalries, his hope for universal approval of his merits amounted clearly to an illusion.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet the “principle” disputation echoed once again, in the year 1906, though this time between Gunkel and Adolf Jülicher, New Testament professor and Wellhausen confidant.Footnote ⁴¹ Almost two decades after this recurrence they finally made amends, and Gunkel confessed in a 1925 letter,

Gunkel still denied any personal component. However, he did admit another: that of nascency and dotage.

Beyond divergences in principle and person, Wellhausen and Gunkel showed a change in generation. While practitioners of Hebrew Bible often observe a difference in their age, rarely do they pursue the nature of this dimension: the new generation was no mere younger crop of the same variety.Footnote ⁴³ The divide was patent even then. In his velitation with Wellhausen, Gunkel fulminated, “An older yet esteemed man, whose word counts for much, should first orient himself quite accurately as to whether he does injustice before ridiculing a younger one, who still seeks an established position.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Voicing disappointment in an “older school” solely concerned with internal explorations of ancient Israelite history, Gunkel admitted utter surprise to hear such sentiment from “a visionary, whom we have admired as our pioneer and leader.”Footnote ⁴⁵ At the end of his rejoinder, Gunkel appealed to ultimate vindication (i.e., the “judgment of the future”) and declared he could not remain in silence when such grave misunderstandings—advanced by no less an authority than Wellhausen himself—could “smother the young seed in embryo that only wants to grow.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Up until his death, almost three decades later, Gunkel regarded Wellhausen along with Bernhard Stade as exemplars of a musty generation.Footnote ⁴⁷ The passing of the old guard prompted more than lamentation. When Gunkel eulogized Stade, his predecessor and onetime professor in Gießen, he could not refrain from affirming, “our science has entered a new epoch of transmutation.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Deservedly or not, Wellhausen—for Gunkel and many others (then and now alike)—personified Old Testament research toward the end of the nineteenth century. He embodied the way things had been, the way things were, but not necessarily the way things ought to be. Gunkel penned the entry on Wellhausen for RGG in 1913 (revised for the second edition of 1931), listing several accusations: the Wellhausen School had ignored the ancient Near East, entrenched itself with literary criticism, launched a line of inquiry it then openly resisted, and grown old and unproductive in the end.Footnote ⁴⁹ That same year, in a letter to Hugo Greßmann—who himself proceeded with far more polemical flare—Gunkel recalled that he had gone to Halle “still a Wellhausian on the whole”; however, Albert Eichhorn helped him to unloose himself from Wellhausen, as well as Albrecht Ritschl.Footnote ⁵⁰ At least some seven years later, he would draft a letter to Budde and confess his sincere hope that the future would one day deem him “a true Wellhausian, who brought critical Old Testament scholarship into a different period and thereby saved it from decay.”Footnote ⁵¹ As Hammann stresses, however, Gunkel did not see himself as any mere acolyte but rather the Wellhausen of his own generation, hardly a modest ambition.Footnote ⁵²

As for Wellhausen's own reflections, all too little features in his extant correspondence and his public declarations. Gunkel loomed much smaller in his world than the other way around, at least in the current record. His thoughts upon this clash remain allusive and hence elusive. A dispatch sent to Harnack, dated 1891, did critique the “dreadful bustle of children's work [Kinderarbeit]” with reference to pursuits of Religionsgeschichte. Though admitting the appeal was “understandable indeed,” he lacked any sort of confidence in the haste of such endeavors: “reconstruction is fun, and you need not read or learn too much [to do it]; commentaries and concordances are everywhere.”Footnote ⁵³ Over two decades later, in the year 1915, he would reckon Gunkel to the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, albeit beneath the dubious designation as a certain “Göttingen clique.” “The gentlemen proceed with a predilection for the whole,” he diagnosed to Enno Littmann, “One must let them play themselves out, the bubble will surely burst soon.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Similarly, he wrote Theodor Nöldeke, in 1905,

Most explicitly of all, he remarked—with no little irony—on an essay by “my friend Gunkel,” in 1897, the article typifying “the rather windy scholarship” often seen in the Preußische Jahrbücher.Footnote ⁵⁶ The same “harrumphing” figure merited comment somewhat later, owing to an essay written on the Odes of Solomon. Adapting an apothegm, the old guard Wellhausen averred, “Vanity always disfigures even the prettiest dame. In substance, I often agree with Gunkel, but I've never learned anything from him.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In yet another missive from 1894, he alluded to the “Novissimus” of Harnack, Gunkel being slated for a new post in Berlin. He judged enthusiasm outweighed evidence in Gunkel's new Schöpfung und Chaos.Footnote ⁵⁸ With epithets racial and other, he then scorned Eduard Meyer, who himself had granted Gunkel a rather positive review. In fact, Wellhausen's general disposition toward the younger generation is probably most embodied in his own exchange with Meyer, a dispute that proved far more heated—and certainly more bilateral—than what transpired with Gunkel.Footnote ⁵⁹ As perhaps a foretaste of the venom yet to come, Wellhausen lambasted Die Entstehung des Judenthums two years before his public censure of Gunkel.Footnote ⁶⁰ Wellhausen's adverse assessments forged a kind of bond between the two. In 1901, the dust having settled more or less, Gunkel wrote to Meyer, “I, too, have experienced that Wellhausen has no more desire to learn and that he sometimes reviews books he only reads very superficially.”Footnote ⁶¹ If scholars like Gunkel and Meyer suffered public censure from Wellhausen, others of the younger generation sustained it in private instead.Footnote ⁶² Such polemical exchanges only solidified the self-consciousness of the junior band of scholars.Footnote ⁶³

The Wellhausen–Gunkel disparity featured also in institutions. Gunkel railed, in 1905, “The Wellhausian School, for instance, will never turn anyone into a full professor [ordinarius] who opposes Wellhausen.”Footnote ⁶⁴ He alluded to clannishness (Cliquenwirtschaft). In autumn of 1888, Gunkel had received his licentiate and habilitation in biblical theology along with exegesis.Footnote ⁶⁵ Having long had problems in Göttingen, he requested, in 1889, that Halle permit him to teach Old and New Testament there.Footnote ⁶⁶ Try though they might, Halle's faculty of theology could not refuse Friedrich Althoff, a demigod in Prussia's Ministry of Culture, who intervened on his behalf. So it was that Gunkel went to Halle as private lecturer.Footnote ⁶⁷ Five years later, in 1894, he was promoted to associate professor [extraordinarius], but he left to occupy a comparable post in Berlin the following year, likely by dint of Harnack's intervention.Footnote ⁶⁸ During his years in Berlin, misfortune befell him time and time again. Departmental politics precluded his promotion to full professor in 1898, despite the apparent will of some faculty members. (Wolf Wilhelm Graf Baudissin assumed the post in 1900.) Two years later, he stood first on the list for a full position in Marburg, but the Prussian Ministry of Culture passed it to Budde instead—a turn of events Johannes Weiß, a onetime colleague of Gunkel's in Göttingen and a supporter of his in Marburg, read as Prussian attempts at atonement, since Budde's previous home lay in the Alsace city of Strasbourg. Nor did the year 1901 see a change in his tides of fortune. Ranking him only third, Jena chose to advance an internal nominee (Bruno Baentsch). Although Berlin weighed application, in 1906, to Prussia's Ministry of Culture for a second full position intended explicitly for Gunkel, the prospect never did come to fruition.

In 1907, he finally seized his ordinarius, as successor to Stade in Gießen, at the age of 45.Footnote ⁶⁹ Although the faculty had intended to seize a more prominent persona to replace the lauded Stade, the second round of the appointment process gave Gunkel a proper chance, and favorable assessments from Budde, along with Carl Heinrich Cornill, helped secure him primo loco and the position in the end. For nearly thirteen years, Gunkel resided there, though he did desire escape. The hope was to expand the sphere of his own influence. Indeed, he endured almost as much trouble securing an ordinarius as already full professor as he had had while still associate. Institutional obstacles continued to stand in his way. Heidelberg sought to appoint him, in the year 1909, in an attempt to raise its profile and become a second Marburg, but the government in Baden acquiesced to churchly pressures and opted instead for a conservative (Georg Beer). Only four years later, such politics would foil him once again. In 1913, Kiel placed Gunkel first; the Prussian Ministry, however, yielded to regional church demands and selected a different candidate (Ernst Sellin). The same year, Tübingen classed him second to Alfred Bertholet, who won the academic spoils. When Bertholet went on to Göttingen only one year later, Gunkel found himself then standing atop the list: a government preference for locals seems to have dashed his hopes there, too. (It was Paul Volz who profited from such priorities.) After years of disappointment, he finally had an ally. His memorandum on the state of Old Testament scholarship within the bounds of Prussia found a sympathetic reader in Carl Heinrich Becker, who rose within the Ministry of Culture at the end of the Great War.Footnote ⁷⁰ Becker battled the local faculty and secured him the first vacant professur in Prussia, in Halle, in 1920.Footnote ⁷¹ The Ministry's heavy hand in this particular appointment only fanned the flames already well ablaze in Protestant church politics, igniting debate across the churchly periodicals. Although some members of the Marburg faculty wanted Gunkel as Budde's replacement, to be filled the following year, his would-be predecessor objected with nothing less than fury—an (alleged) academic squabble having driven the two apart.Footnote ⁷² Thus, Gunkel stayed in Halle for the rest of his career, until 1932. The experience of Gunkel, a rather common story for the younger generation, provides a considerable contrast to the age of ascent for Stade, Harnack, and Wellhausen (27–28) as well as Meyer (30), Jülicher (32), and Budde (39), to name but only a few.Footnote ⁷³ In the end, Gunkel fell victim—though not an innocent one—to academic feuding, ecclesiastical strife, and government concerns. To overcome these obstacles, he turned to other venues.

As a final field of contrast, Wellhausen and Gunkel conceptualized their efforts in radically different terms. The former's entire oeuvre may have its clearest expression in the name he chose for a personal series of studies: “Skizzen und Vorarbeiten” (Sketches and Spadework).Footnote ⁷⁴ With a resolved dedication to more technical endeavors, Wellhausen closed his Prolegomena zur ältesten Geschichte des Islams with the simple declaration, “I hope to have hammered home that historiography floats in the air without such prolegomena.”Footnote ⁷⁵ True, he would later serve as advisor for “Quellen der Religionsgeschichte”—a project commissioned by the Königliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen and published jointly by J. C. Hinrichs and Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht—but this particular series centered on printing the sources themselves, and he himself only counseled for the section on Islam.Footnote ⁷⁶ Wellhausen fully endorsed the analytical enterprise, manifest in his full support of lexica and the like, yet he firmly believed synthetic ventures were far too premature. Furthermore, he abhorred more popular work. Hans Liebeschütz thus describes his “almost ascetic conception of scholarship.”Footnote ⁷⁷ He declined Hans Delbrück's request to contribute, on occasion, to the Preußische Jahrbücher, in 1886. “I have absolutely no desire to let my practical thoughts be published,” he confessed to his publisher, Ernst Reimer. “I have already enough to do with the publication of the theoretical.”Footnote ⁷⁸ As another example of many, Wellhausen rebuffed participation at the founding of Althoff's Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik in the year 1907. “I cannot popularize,” he wrote Harnack of the affair.Footnote ⁷⁹ Wellhausen also had little need to avail himself of these organs, for he was established early on. Even more, no matter how much he might have downplayed his position, he enjoyed a privileged status within the upper echelons of the academy as well as the Prussian regime.Footnote ⁸⁰ He died a mid-century liberal historian devoted to empirical research and averse to any (overt) speculation, theorization, or generalization.

Gunkel spent substantial time and effort in promoting his own work—as with that of his contingent.Footnote ⁸¹ Apart from academic journals, he distributed his diverse material in churchly periodicals, culture magazines, and even daily papers—albeit with varying regularity—from Die Christliche Welt, Kirchliche Gegenwart, and Deutsch-evangelisch. Monatsblätter für den gesamten deutschen Protestantismus through Preußische Jahrbücher, Internationale Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik, Theologische Literaturzeitung, and Deutsche Literaturzeitung für Kritik der Internationalen Wissenschaft to Frankfurter Zeitung, Deutsche Rundschau, and Tägliche Rundschau, to enumerate some but not all.Footnote ⁸² Such attempts to popularize proceeded from at least three basic causes, all closely interwoven.

First, he needed the funds. Coinciding with his years spent in Berlin, much of this engagement came before his full position. Gunkel's correspondence, especially with his publisher, reveals his (in the very least perceived) dire circumstances even after his full position. Reprints and revisions had pecuniary force.Footnote ⁸³ Reciprocally, he avoided certain organs with low honoraria. Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft hence hosted few of his essays. He once reflected to Harnack, “Certainly, I could have accomplished more by far if a German government had given me an adequate salary and I did not have to work my whole life for daily bread.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet beyond the stick of funding, Gunkel also had some carrots: namely, effect and influence.

Second, Gunkel and his cohort sought to maximize their impact. Some entrepreneurial publishers proved quite happy to oblige. In fact, many channels for the popular work of Gunkel had not been open long. Previously called Evangelisch-Lutherisches Gemeindeblatt für die gebildeten Glieder der evangelischen Kirche (1886), Die Christliche Welt changed its name in 1888—the organ later acquired by Mohr in 1897, which would then reestablish a residence in Tübingen in 1899.Footnote ⁸⁵ Side by side with Mohr, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht was an early advocate of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, and both profited quite handsomely from their interest and investment.Footnote ⁸⁶ Thus, Mohr launched the journal Theologische Rundschau (1897), issued the sequence “Sammlung gemeinverständlicher Vorträge und Schriften aus dem Gebiet der Theologie und Religionsgeschichte” (1896), and secured the series “Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbücher für die deutsche christliche Gegenwart” (1906)—previously published by Gebauer-Schwetschke (1904), which Bousset's brother had helmed as general manager—to say nothing of RGG (1908). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht started the circular Monatsblätter für den Evangelischen Religionsunterricht (1908) and printed the series “FRLANT,” (1903), “Schriften des Neuen Testaments” (1904), and “Schriften des Alten Testaments” (1911) too. Gunkel's work appeared in many of these channels, which flowed to students, women, school teachers, and the moyenne bourgeoisie more broadly. Not only academic slight but also positive ambition drove Gunkel to these outlets: he was convinced he had something to say the public sorely needed to hear.

Third, popularization came with the theological territory, at least in the eyes of Gunkel and his ilk. “This activity I consider part of my occupation,” he penned to Ruprecht in 1910.Footnote ⁸⁷ When engaging Gunkel's writings, many a Bible scholar ignores his audience and aim, a public and objective shown in publication choices. Much of his work aspired to a wider reading public, whether RGG (for which he served as editor and author), “Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbücher” (which held Das Märchen im Alten Testament), or “SAT”—also know as, tellingly, “Gegenwartsbibel,” “Göttinger Bibel,” “Laienbibel,” or “Lehrerbibel”—(in which Die Urgeschichte und die Patriarchen [Das erste Buch Mosis] materialized and several studies of his introduced Hans Schmidt's Die großen Propheten). Initially, Ausgewählte Psalmen came in mainstream papers, too. All these media aimed at a general yet very specific public: namely, Bildungsbürgertum, the educated middle classes. They bloomed from an overt theological project rooted in Kulturprotestantismus, especially in its manifestation at the end of the long nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁸ Gunkel began a book on Genesis—and thus the series “SAT”—with the following panegyric:

Beyond bringing biblical scholarship to the broader public, he wanted to recalibrate such scholarship to the very nature of religion. As but one example, Gunkel once declared, “Our people thirst for your words about religion and its history! Do not be so timid and do not believe that you must conceal from the laity what you have discerned! How do you expect to have trust when you avoid the ultimate question? Now there is still time. Soon it will be too late. But if you keep silent, then the blatherers will speak.”Footnote ⁹⁰ This “outcry” for religious restoration was but one of many tokens of the larger sense of crisis that pervaded the professorate towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Apart from any individual, intellectual, or institutional opposition, the Wellhausen–Gunkel variance involved much broader social forces. The tremors quaking biblical research accorded with the powerful earthquake rocking society in general and humanities in particular at the fin de siècle. Indeed, cultural historians have long recognized a distinguishable 1880s generation—a phenomenon Suzanne Marchand has explored in rather dazzling detail.Footnote ⁹¹ As she herself contends, “these clashes were neither simply personal, nor exclusively ideological, but were also the product of the rapidly changing public sphere and scholarly scene of the 1880s to 1920s.”Footnote ⁹² In terms of academia, texts were pouring in from the East and being deciphered back at home. Within the public province, these rumblings thundered all the more. This rather boisterous timeframe witnessed urban centers bustle and industry loudly boom. It saw social democrats rise in politics while women and workers and Catholics and Jews all entered the public arena. It watched churches lose their influence and schools sustain reform. It observed an outbreak of über-nationalism and gaped as war demolished Europe. Amidst the blur of bicycles, the swell of coffeehouses, and the wave of periodicals, German mandarins saw their once tight grip on culture quickly slip between their fingers. Thus came the cries for renewal resounding throughout academia's halls—with jeremiads against the sins of a previous epoch. Regardless of their accuracy, accusations of positivism and materialism lambasted the efforts of mid-century research. Fathoming these deeply troubled waters, Fritz K. Ringer writes, “In history as in other disciplines, the widespread sense of social and cultural crisis produced a reorientation in the methods and purposes of learning. Thus from 1890 on, the substantive concerns of German scholarship were inextricably intertwined with the mandarins’ passionate interest in a revival of ‘Idealism.’”Footnote ⁹³ The Wellhausen–Gunkel antithesis was therefore symptomatic of an endemic diagnosed in German culture at the turn of the twentieth century—only one of many manifestations across the human sciences. Accordingly, their friction corresponded to the broader shift from liberalism to neo-romanticism and all this upheaval brought with it.

Rather than train their focus upon royal-priestly scholars waging war with mental blades, practitioners of Hebrew Bible would do well to compose their histories with an eye on the grove itself. For the long nineteenth century in Germanophone lands, specifically, such a setting would include, in the very least, shifts in academic culture, effects of professional politics, affairs of appointment procedures, policies of administrative structures (stately and churchly alike), impacts of personal rivalries, choices in publication, and—to move from the non-cognitive to the non-disciplinary, more properly—changes in theory and method across the human sciences. The same skills Bible scholars hone to read their texts in context should also be applied to write the history of their field. As with the scholars themselves, the problems they saw and methods they used were shaped in time and space, with interests and assumptions built into their core: protagonists, priorities, and projects were not detached from circumstance. Scrutinizing historiographic discord, Robert Oden apprehends the cardinal conviction of Gunkel: “[the] failure to go backward far enough behind the historical sources meant that Wellhausen was, in the end, not a true historian.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Debate over proper method ultimately expressed a time-bound discrepancy in historical understanding, from object to objective—a perceived disparity at minimum. Methodological selection still implies such premises. Semblance notwithstanding, the world of modus operandi is not one “in which grins [hang] about without the cat.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Beyond the pursuits of modern history—and apart from any antiquarian interest—critical interrogation of foundational research exposes why biblical scholars do what they do in the manner they do and which presumptions may remain inbuilt. This line of inquiry moves from descriptive questions of who, what, when, and where to analytical assessments of the more difficult how and why: how and why, for instance, theories, methods, and figures attained the dominance they now enjoy. Like the biblical texts themselves, any academic orthodoxy did not arise from nowhere. Production, from this perspective, is even more important than product—“principle” but one of many dimensions.