In the 80s the methods of Gospel Criticism were pushed off the table in academic circles to make room for the surge and flowering of a bundle of disciplines that reshaped Gospels studies into texts that needed to be studied as works of literature.
How important do you think biblical “scholarship” is to the life of the Church? What is the relationship of the Church to the theological/biblical academic life?
The name for this movement can be roughly called literary or narrative or story criticism. These are not the same, for there are nuances distinguishing them, but roughly they are each concerned with treating the Gospels as texts and not as sources through which we look to see the history of how they came to be.
Major books:
D. Rhoads, D. Mitchie, Mark as Story. This was the ground-breaking work for Gospel studies.
J. Kingsbury, Matthew as Story.
W.S. Kurz, Reading Luke-Acts.
For me the definitive studies for learning about narrative criticism are
Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative.
Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative.