I wish to respond to something Eli Franco stated here a few months ago (6/12/15), when he wrote about The Nay Science: A History of German Indology, a book I co-authored with my teacher Vishwa Adluri:

“My impression was that the book started as a project on the Bhagavadgita, which was a bit expanded to include the history of research on the Mahabharata. The whole thing was then packaged as a history of German Indology, but obviously the book does not deliver what its subtitle promises. The authors are blissfully ignorant of German Indology, and they probably know it. They claim to provide a history of German Indology by sketching a history of its method. But Indology, the German included, does not have a method (in the sense that it does not have a single method, as the authors imagine).”

Eli Franco has a poor sense of the "internal history" of a text, because the composition history he gives is quite the reverse: our book started as a project on the Mahābhārata and the sections on the Bhagavadgītā were added only later. In fact, our researches on Bhagavadgītā scholarship after 1969 were still continuing at the time of publication of the book and have only been published now: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11407-016-9187-4.

If philologists cannot correctly guess the compositional sequence of texts written today, with two living authors and without the long chain of scribes transmitting them, what reason have we for confidence in their assertions about ancient texts? The authors of ancient texts subjected to this method of "internal criticism" (innere Kritik) must be turning in their graves. The linked paper shows how the criteria used for identifying “layers” and proposing “textual histories” for the Bhagavadgītā were unscientific and circular. Unless new criteria are proposed, there is no reason to speak anymore of the Bhagavadgītā’s “layers” and we can conclude that the whole tradition of “Gītā criticism” was a sham.