Radical criticism

This went beyond the higher criticism of the Tübingen school which (with the exception of Bruno Bauer) held that a core of at least four epistles had been written by Paul of Tarsus in the 1st century.

The Dutch school of radical criticism started in 1878 with a publication by Allard Pierson, who denied Pauline authorship of Galatians.

Similarly, Willem Christiaan van Manen, who had written a doctoral thesis defending the authenticity of 1 Thessalonians, wrote in 1889 that he had come to the same conclusions as Loman.

However, the works of Adolf Harnack proved more influential, and radical criticism was eventually abandoned and is now a fringe position in current New Testament scholarship.

These attempts have largely been ignored by mainstream scholarship and have received strong criticism from Bart D. Ehrman, Maurice Casey and R. Joseph Hoffmann.