Quote: On tradition and the historical-critical method

Been researching/rereading for my thesis and just had to post this quote from Andrew Louth's Return to Allegory about the role of tradition in the formation, interpretation, and continued formation of the Old Testament:

The tendency of the historical-critical method has been to concentrate on originality and regard what is not original as secondary: but if we see here a process of inspired utterance and reflection on - comment on - inspired utterance within the tradition, itself regarded as inspired, then we have a more complicated, but, I suggest, truer picture. The formation of the Hebrew Scriptures is an object lesson in the kind of complementarity of Scripture and tradition - or inspired utterance and tradition - that I have outlined. The art of understanding is more complicated, and richer, than an attempt to isolate the earliest fragments and to seek to understand them in a conjectured 'original' context: we hear the voice and the echoes and re-echoes, and it is as we hear that harmony that we come to understanding.

- Louth, Return to Allegory, p. 108.