Vishwa Adluri

"It is thus one of the ironies of history that a method that was to become such a core component of the methodological self-understanding of the textual sciences {Textwissenschaften) within the university not only had a theological origin but also was essentially theological: in spite of the name historical-critical method, what Semler was interested in was not history, but to identify that part of scripture that could be considered the pure Word of God."

"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 (i.e., if we take Lassen’s 1837 article on the Mahābhārata as the starting point and Hauer’s 1937 book on the Bhagavadgītā as the end point) 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."