This common response to the idea of biblical criticism has never been shared by the Catholic Church. From the earliest years her scholars have been perfecting the tools of textual and historical criticism in order to man which was transmitted through men who used the literary forms, styles and conventions of their age. This book traces the whole story of biblical criticism from Origen and Jerome through the Middle Ages and the crisis at the Reformation, when the Bible was erroneously put forward as the sole sources of faith and authority, right down to the modernist controversy and the subsequent establishment of the contemporary schools of criticism by Lagrange. Nowadays, when the great development on archaeology and philology make it possible to date the books of the Old Testament with confidence and to see the history of Israel in the general setting of the ancient Middle East, the wonder of God's revelation, far from being diminished, s enhanced, its eternal freshness and enduring relevance made starkingly clear.