Loren Rosson asks:
"The history of biblical studies is replete with scholars who were considered dangerous in their time; Reimarus, Strauss, and Schweitzer, etc. What is your dangerous idea? Any idea you think is dangerous, not because you think it's false, but because many others want it to be false and you think it's true?"
Here are a few suggestions from the brain of Rico. #1 has been percolating for awhile; #2 is a far more recent thought for me:
1. The New Testament isn't big enough and the corpus isn't secure enough* to support style theories for authorship determination when the theory is based on counting criteria like hapax legomenon, common words or conjunction use. This basically means that all stylometric studies, while useful and while providing some insight, can confirm or deny nothing regarding authorship of a particular NT document. Therefore, several of the classic studies used as basis for authorship determination (e.g. P.N. Harrison's Problem of the Pastoral Epistles), while perhaps offering some insight, are inconclusive and do not prove a thing. As my Psych prof used to say, "correlation does not prove causation". [N.B.: I'm indebted to Matthew Brook O'Donnell for the idea that corpus sizes are too small; the application I've made here is my own thought — likely unoriginal.]
2. God is supernatural. To approach Biblical Studies from a viewpoint that does not allow the supernatural to be possible is an invalid approach. I'm not quite sure how to word this thought/idea or how to really describe it. My basic thought is that when I read something dealing with Biblical Studies (particularly commentaries) and it rules out something the Biblical text directly testifies to on the basis that the testified action could not be physically possible ... well, that's a specious argument. The modernist approach of removing the supernatural to a separate sphere and empirically testing a hypothesis to determine physical possibility as the metric of truth is not the only approach. I can't rule out Jesus' raising of Lazarus because, well, raising someone dead for days isn't possible in my thinking. I can't rule out the changing of water into wine at the wedding in Cana because I've never seen water turn into wine. I can't explain away the massive feedings of people because, well, 5000 people just can't be fed from a few loaves of bread and a couple of fishes (let alone have 12 baskets left over). We are dealing with God; therefore supernatural action must be possible and even expected in some instances. It cannot be ruled out or explained away. He can raise one dead for days; He can make wine from water; and He can feed and satisfy the hunger of massive crowds with relative morsels of food. He is God. I realize many will say this is inappropriate and even inaccurate; that a more "scientific" approach must be taken in these instances. I say that's as biased as any approach and we're fooling ourselves if we think otherwise. [N.B.: The basic idea here is not my own, but one I've picked up through other reading and conversation with friends and colleagues.]
* by "secure enough" I mean that most scholars/academics wouldn't consider enough material by any author "genuine" to be of any value for such counting/stylometry sorts of arguments to matter.