Radical criticism

Radical criticism names a late nineteenth century movement that treated the Pauline letter collection and the Acts as second century literary products and typically denied authentic authorship of any Pauline epistles. It developed in Dutch and German scholarship after Allard Pierson's 1878 study of the Sermon on the Mount, reached programmatic form in Abraham Dirk Loman's Quaestiones Paulinae of 1882–1886, and was elaborated in Willem Christiaan van Manen's three volume Paulus published 1890–1896.

Building on Bruno Bauer's earlier critique of the Pauline corpus and of Acts, radical critics argued that the earliest dateable collection of Pauline letters is Marcion's Apostolikon, described by recent scholarship as the "earliest witness of Pauline letters." In the Netherlands the movement continued into the early twentieth century under Gustaaf Adolf van den Bergh van Eysinga, but with his death in 1957 the line of university appointments associated with the school ended. Outside of a small circle, the thesis remained a minority view and faced sustained criticism from mainstream New Testament scholars.