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This chapter introduces the arguments of Boyarin, Lieu, and van Henten concerning martyrdom and identity construction among Jews and Christians, arguing that the death of Stephen should be considered through this theoretical lens. As supporting argument for considering Stephen alongside second-century martyrologies, it situates Acts as an early second-century text. Appropriating Castelli’s arguments concerning martyrdom in Christian cultural memory, it argues that scholarly assertions concerning the historicity of Stephen’s death are more indebted to the force of cultural memory than to the historical-critical method. While concurring with Penner that verisimilitude, not “historical accuracy,” is the coin of ancient historiography, it then moves to suggest that this is not a reason to abandon the historiographic project but rather to frame historical narrative differently, in terms of rhetoric and ethic, as has been long argued in biblical studies by Schüssler Fiorenza.

The examination of the critical method as applied in German Mahābhārata and Bhagavadgītā scholarship has shown that although German scholars claimed to take a scientific approach to the epic, their interpretations were at best tangential and at worst irrelevant to the text at hand. No German interpreter in a period extending one hundred years had succeeded in presenting a coherent, philosophically illuminating interpretation of the Mahābhārata. The histories they presented of the epic existed nowhere else outside their own minds. The problem in German interpretations of Indian texts is not simply one of the inevitable misinterpretations that beset every hermeneutic endeavor. Rather, the critical method itself entailed a number of problematic prejudices. This chapter seeks to understand the reasons why the Indologists themselves could not see these problems. It looks at the scientization of Protestant theology in the critical method; the secularization of Protestant theology in the study of the history of religions; and the institutionalization of Protestant theology in Indology. It examines how the historical-critical method participates in a tradition of projecting a universal history, most characteristic of Christianity; how the method makes use of a teleological narrative of history, where history moves from a state of immaturity (the Kantian Unmündigkeit) to an enlightened, free, and critical use of reason; and how this narrative was used to justify implantation of an alternative tradition of textual scholarship in place of the Indian commentarial tradition.

The jointly authored introduction defines biblical criticism (or the historical-critical method) broadly as the process of establishing the original, contextual meaning of biblical texts and of assessing their historical accuracy. Next it traces the history of biblical criticism in both the Jewish (rabbis, Rashi) and Christian (Church Fathers, Luther) traditions. Then it describes the emergence of biblical criticism with Baruch Spinoza and its development especially in liberal German Protestant circles (Ernst Troeltsch, Julius Wellhausen).