Was ist realistische Literarkritik?

Hermann-Josef Stipp has published some thoughts in this Journal about the relevance of my »Kritik des Wachstumsmodells« for the study of the book of Jeremiah. In responding, I like to avoid a major misunderstanding: I agree with Stipp and others that differences of language, style or ideology within a given book may be interpreted as hints to its literary prehistory or »history of redaction«. However, I dispute that such differences provide us with sufficient information to reconstruct sources or older versions of a given book. In all cases where the book of Jeremiah or parts of it can be compared with other versions it is evident that the textual reality is much more complex than »growth«. This is true for the pre-Masoretic Jeremiah compared with the Old Greek because of its homogenizing tendency as it is for the Jeremiah passages with parallels in Kings or Isaiah.