Birger Gerhardsson about the ‘Uppsala School’

Last Friday I had the privilege of interviewing Professor Birger Gerhardsson in Lund. An elderly academic gentleman, he still is active in reading and reflection. Our topic was the so-called Uppsala School, which was of major importance in the exegetical debate in the middle of the last century. There were two ‘Uppsala schools’, one Old Testament, one New Testament; it must be noted that the notion ‘school’ is not without complications. The link between the two was not least the emphasis on oral tradition, but the Old Testament Uppsala School is also sometimes called the ‘Scandinavian school’ due to the influence of both the Norwegian scholar Sigmund Mowinckel and the dane Johannes Pedersen.

The nestor and founder of the New Testament ‘Uppsala school’  was the Norwegian scholar Anton Fridrichsen (1888-1953) who gave Swedish exegesis a new start. Several well-known scholars more or less came out of this school, e.g., Krister Stendahl and Birger Gerhardsson. Without Fridrichsen’s approach, it is very probable that part of the exegetical landscape would have looked quite different.