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Biblical criticism is an umbrella term for those methods of studying the Bible that embrace two distinctive perspectives: the concern to avoid
dogma and
bias by applying a
non-sectarian,
reason-based judgment, and the reconstruction of history according to
contemporary understanding. Biblical criticism uses the grammar,
structure, development, and relationship of language to identify such
characteristics as the Bible's literary structure, its
genre, its context, meaning, authorship, and origins.
Biblical criticism includes a wide range of approaches and questions within four major contemporary methodologies:
textual,
source,
form, and
literary
criticism. Textual criticism examines the text and its manuscripts to
identify what the original text would have said. Source criticism
searches the texts for evidence of original sources. Form criticism
identifies short units of text and seeks to identify their original
setting. Each of these is primarily historical and pre-compositional in
its concerns. Literary criticism, on the other hand, focuses on the
literary structure, authorial purpose, and reader's response to the text
through methods such as
rhetorical criticism,
canonical criticism, and
narrative criticism.
Biblical criticism began as an aspect of the rise of
modern culture in the West. Some scholars claim that its roots reach back to the
Reformation, but most agree it grew out of the
German Enlightenment. German
pietism played a role in its development, as did British
deism, with its greatest influences being
rationalism and
Protestant
scholarship. The Enlightenment age and its skepticism of biblical and
ecclesiastical authority ignited questions concerning the historical
basis for the man
Jesus separately from traditional theological views concerning him. This "
quest" for the
Jesus of history
began in biblical criticism's earliest stages, reappeared in the
nineteenth century, and again in the twentieth, remaining a major
occupation of biblical criticism, on and off, for over 200 years.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, biblical criticism was influenced by a wide range of additional
academic disciplines and
theoretical perspectives, changing it from a primarily historical approach to a
multidisciplinary field. In a field long dominated by white male
Protestants, non-white scholars, women, and those from the Jewish and Catholic traditions became prominent voices.
Globalization brought a broader spectrum of worldviews into the field, and other academic disciplines as diverse as
Near Eastern studies,
psychology,
anthropology and
sociology formed new methods of biblical criticism such as socio-scientific criticism and psychological biblical criticism. Meanwhile,
post-modernism and post-critical interpretation began questioning biblical criticism's role and function.
History
Beginnings: the eighteenth century
Title page of Richard Simon's Critical History (1685), an early work of biblical criticism
According to tradition,
Moses was the author of the first five books of the Bible, including the
book of Genesis. Philosophers and theologians such as
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679),
Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677), and
Richard Simon
(1638–1712) questioned Mosaic authorship. Spinoza said Moses could not
have written the preface to Deuteronomy, since he never crossed the
Jordan; he points out that Deuteronomy 31:9 references Moses in the
third person; and he lists multiple other inconsistencies and anomalies
that led him to conclude "it was plain" these Pentateuchal books were
not written by Moses himself.
Jean Astruc (1684–1766), a French physician, believed these critics were wrong about
Mosaic authorship. According to Old Testament scholar
Edward Young, Astruc believed Moses used hereditary accounts of the Hebrew people to assemble the book of Genesis. So, Astruc borrowed methods of
textual criticism,
used to investigate Greek and Roman texts, and applied them to the
Bible in search of those original accounts. Astruc believed he
identified them as separate sources that were edited together into the
book of Genesis, thus explaining Genesis' problems while still allowing
for Mosaic authorship.
Astruc's method was adopted and developed at the twenty or so
Protestant universities in Germany. There was a willingness among the
doctoral candidates to re-express Christian doctrine in terms of the
scientific method and the historical understanding common during the
German Enlightenment (circa 1750–1850).
German
pietism played a role in the rise of biblical criticism by supporting the desire to break the hold of religious authority.
Rationalism
was also a significant influence in biblical criticism's development,
providing its concern to avoid dogma and bias through reason.
For example, the Swiss theologian
Jean Alphonse Turretin (1671–1737) attacked conventional
exegesis
(interpretation) and argued for critical analysis led solely by reason.
Turretin believed the Bible could be considered authoritative even if
it was not considered
inerrant. This has become a common modern Judeo-Christian view.
Johann Salomo Semler
(1725–1791) argued for an end to all doctrinal assumptions, giving
historical criticism its non-sectarian nature. As a result, Semler is
often called the father of
historical-critical research.
Semler distinguished between "inward" and "outward" religion, the idea
that, for some people, their religion is their highest inner purpose,
while for others, religion is a more exterior practice: a tool to
accomplish other purposes more important to the individual such as
political or economic goals. This is a
concept recognized by modern psychology.
Communications scholar
James A. Herrick
says even though most scholars agree that biblical criticism evolved
out of the German Enlightenment, there are also histories of biblical
scholarship that have found "strong direct links" with British
deism. Herrick references the theologian
Henning Graf Reventlow as saying deism included the
humanist world view, which has also been significant in biblical criticism. Some scholars, such as
Gerhard Ebeling (1912–2001),
Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), and
Ernst Käsemann (1906–1998) trace biblical criticism's origins to the
Reformation.
Three early scholars of the Reformation era who helped lay the foundations of modern biblical criticism were
Joachim Camerarius (1500–1574),
Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), and
Matthew Tindal
(1653–1733). Camerarius advocated for using context to interpret Bible
texts. Grotius paved the way for comparative religion studies by
analyzing New Testament texts in light of Classical, Jewish and early
Christian writings. Tindal, as part of English deism, asserted that
Jesus taught
natural religion,
an undogmatic faith that was later changed by the Church. This view
drove a wedge between scripture and the Church's claims of religious
truth.
The first scholar to separate the
historical Jesus from the theological Jesus was philosopher, writer, classicist, Hebraist and Enlightenment free thinker
Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768). Copies of Reimarus' writings were discovered by
G. E. Lessing
(1729–1781) in the library at Wolfenbüttel where he was librarian.
Reimarus had left permission for his work to be published after his
death, and Lessing did so between 1774 and 1778, publishing them as
Die Fragmente eines unbekannten Autors (
The Fragments of an Unknown Author). Over time, they came to be known as the
Wolfenbüttel Fragments
after the library where Lessing worked. Reimarus distinguished between
what Jesus taught and how he is portrayed in the New Testament.
According to Reimarus, Jesus was a political
Messiah
who failed at creating political change and was executed. His disciples
then stole the body and invented the story of the resurrection for
personal gain.
Reimarus' controversial work prompted a response from Semler in 1779,
Beantwortung der Fragmente eines Ungenannten (
Answering the Fragments of an Unknown).
Semler refuted Reimarus' arguments, but it was of little consequence. Reimarus' writings had already made a lasting change in the practice of
biblical criticism by making it clear such criticism could exist
independently of theology and faith. Reimarus had shown biblical
criticism could serve its own ends, be governed solely by rational
criteria, and reject deference to religious tradition.
Lessing contributed to the field of biblical criticism by seeing
Reimarus' writings published, but he also made contributions of his own
work, arguing that the proper study of biblical texts requires knowing
the context in which they were written. This has since become an
accepted concept. During this period, the biblical scholar
Johann David Michaelis
(1717–1791) wrote the first historical-critical introduction to the New
Testament, in which the historical study of each book of the Bible is
discussed. Instead of interpreting the Bible historically,
Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827),
Johann Philipp Gabler (1753–1826), and
Georg Lorenz Bauer
(1755–1806) took a different approach. They used the concept of myth as
a tool for interpreting the Bible. This concept was later picked up by
Rudolf Bultmann and it became particularly influential in the early twentieth century.
The nineteenth century
Theologians
Richard and Kendall Soulen say biblical criticism reached full flower
in the nineteenth century, becoming the "major transforming fact of
biblical studies in the modern period" and noted that the people working
at that time "saw themselves as continuing the aims of the Protestant
Reformation."
Landmarks in understanding the Bible and its background were achieved
during this century, with many modern concepts having their roots here.
For example, in 1835 and again in 1845, theologian
Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860) postulated a sharp contrast between the
apostles Peter and
Paul.
Since then, this concept has had widespread debate within topics such
as Pauline and New Testament studies, early church studies, Jewish Law,
the theology of grace, and the doctrine of justification.
Foundations of anti-Jewish bias were also established in the field at this time under the guise of scholarly objectivity.
The first Enlightenment Protestant to call for the "de-Judaizing" of
Christianity was Johann Semler. The "emancipation of reason" from the
Word of God
was a primary goal of Semler and the Enlightenment exegetes, yet the
picture of the Jews and Judaism found in biblical criticism of this
period is colored by classic anti-Jewish stereotypes "despite the
tradition's lip-service to emancipation."
He took a stand against discrimination in society while at the same
time writing theology that was strongly negative toward the Jews and
Judaism. He saw Christianity as something new and universal that
supersedes all that came before it.
This stark contrast between Judaism and Christianity became a common
theme, along with a strong prejudice against Jews and Judaism, in
Herder,
Schleiermacher,
de Wette,
Baur,
Strauss,
Ritschl, the
history of religions school, and on into the form critics of the Twentieth century until World War II.
Biblical criticism was divided into
higher criticism and
lower criticism
during this century. Higher criticism focuses on the Bible's
composition and history, while lower criticism is concerned with
interpreting its meaning for its readers. Later in the 19th century, the discovery of
ancient manuscripts revolutionized textual criticism and translation. During this period, Bible scholar
H. J. Holtzmann developed a listing of the chronological order of the New Testament.
The height of biblical criticism is also represented by the history of religions school (known in German as the
Kultgeschichtliche Schule or alternatively the
Religionsgeschichtliche Schule).
This school was a group of German Protestant theologians associated with the
University of Göttingen
in the late 19th century who sought to understand Judaism and
Christianity within their relationship to other religions of the Near
East.
The late nineteenth century saw the second "
quest for the historical Jesus" which primarily involved writing versions of the "life of Jesus." Important scholars of this quest included
David Strauss
(1808–1874), whose cultural significance is in his contribution to
weakening the established authorities, and whose theological
significance is in his confrontation of the doctrine of Christ's
divinity with the modern critical study of history.
Adolf Von Harnack (1851–1930) contributed to the quest for the historical Jesus, writing
The Essence of Christianity in 1900, where he described Jesus as a reformer.
William Wrede (1859–1906) was a forerunner of redaction criticism.
Ernst Renan (1823–1892) promoted the critical method and was opposed to orthodoxy.
Johannes Weiss (1863–1914),
W. Bousset,
Hermann Gunkel, and
William Wrede were key figures in the founding of the
Religionsgeschichtliche Schule in Göttingen in the 1890s.
While at Göttingen, Weiss wrote his most influential work on the apocalyptic proclamations of Jesus. It was left to
Albert Schweitzer
(1875–1965) to finish pursuit of the apocalyptic Jesus and
revolutionize New Testament scholarship at the turn of the century. He
proved to most of that scholarly world that Jesus' teachings and actions
were determined by his
eschatological
outlook. He also critiqued the romanticized "lives of Jesus" as built
on dubious assumptions reflecting more of the life of the author than
Jesus.
The twentieth century
In the early part of the twentieth century,
Karl Barth,
Rudolf Bultmann, and others moved away from concern over the historical Jesus and concentrated instead on the
kerygma: the message of scholars such as theologian Konrad Hammann call Bultmann the "giant of
twentieth-century New Testament biblical criticism: His pioneering
studies in biblical criticism shaped research on the composition of the
gospels, and his call for
demythologizing biblical language sparked debate among Christian theologians worldwide."
Bultmann's demythologizing refers to the reinterpretation of the
biblical myths (myth is defined as descriptions of the divine in human
terms). It is not the elimination of myth but is, instead, its
re-expression in terms of the
existential philosophy of
Martin Heidegger. Bultmann claimed myths are "true" anthropologically and existentially but not cosmologically. As a major proponent of
form criticism, Bultmann's views "set the agenda for a generation of leading New Testament scholars".
Redaction criticism
was also a common form of biblical criticism used in the early to
mid-twentieth century. While form criticism divided the text into small
units, redaction emphasized the literary integrity of the larger
literary units.
The discovery of the
Dead Sea scrolls at
Qumran
in 1948 renewed interest in the contributions archaeology could make to
biblical studies as well as to the challenges it presented to various
aspects of biblical criticism.
New Testament scholar
Joachim Jeremias used linguistics and history to describe Jesus' Jewish environment.
The biblical theology movement of the 1950s produced a massive debate
between Old Testament and New Testament scholars over the unity of the
Bible. The rise of redaction criticism closed it by bringing about a
greater emphasis on diversity.
After 1970, biblical criticism began to change radically and pervasively.
New criticism (literary criticism) developed.
New historicism, a
literary theory that views history through literature, also developed. Biblical criticism began to apply new literary approaches such as
structuralism and
rhetorical criticism, which were less concerned with history and more concerned with the texts themselves.
In the 1970s, the New Testament scholar
E. P. Sanders advanced the
New Perspective on Paul, which has greatly influenced scholarly views on the relationship between
Pauline Christianity and
Jewish Christianity in the
Pauline epistles.
Sanders also advanced study of the historical Jesus by putting Jesus' life in the context of first-century
Second Temple Judaism. In 1974, the theologian
Hans Frei published
The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, which became a landmark work leading to the development of
post-critical biblical interpretation. The third period of focused study on the historical Jesus began in 1985 with the
Jesus Seminar.
By 1990, biblical criticism was no longer primarily a historical
discipline but was instead a group of disciplines with often conflicting
interests.
New perspectives from different ethnicities, feminist theology,
Catholicism and Judaism revealed an "untapped world" previously
overlooked by the majority of white male Protestants who had dominated
biblical criticism from its beginnings.
Globalization brought different world views, while other academic
fields such as Near Eastern studies, sociology, and anthropology became
active in biblical criticism as well. These new points of view created
awareness that the Bible can be rationally interpreted from many
different perspectives.
In turn, this awareness changed biblical criticism's central concept
from the criteria of neutral judgment to that of beginning from a
recognition of the various biases the reader brings to the study of the
texts.
Major methods of criticism
Theologian
David R. Law writes that textual, source, form, and redaction criticism
are employed together by biblical scholars. The Old Testament (the
Hebrew Bible) and the New Testament are distinct bodies of literature
that raise their own problems of interpretation. Therefore, separating
these methods, and addressing the Bible as a whole, is an artificial
approach that is necessary only for the purpose of description.
Textual criticism
Textual criticism examines the text itself and all associated manuscripts to determine the original text.
It is one of the largest areas of Biblical criticism in terms of the
sheer amount of information it addresses. The roughly 900 manuscripts
found at Qumran include the oldest extant manuscripts of the Hebrew
Bible. They represent every book except Esther, though most are
fragmentary. The
New Testament has been preserved in more
manuscripts than any other ancient work, having over 5,800 complete or fragmented
Greek manuscripts, 10,000
Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including
Syriac,
Slavic,
Gothic,
Ethiopic,
Coptic and
Armenian. The dates of these manuscripts range from c.110—125 (the
papyrus) to the introduction of printing in Germany in the 15th
century. There are also a million New Testament quotations in the
collected writings of the
Church Fathers of the first four centuries. As a comparison, the next best-sourced ancient text is Homer's
Iliad,
which is found in more than 1,900 manuscripts, though many are of a
fragmentary nature. The two chief works of the first-century Roman
historian
Tacitus,
Annales and
Historiae, each survive in only a single medieval manuscript. There are a total of 476 extant non-Christian manuscripts dated to the second century.
These texts were all written by hand, by copying from another
handwritten text, so they are not alike in the manner of a printed work.
The differences between them are called variants.
A variant is simply any variation between two texts, and while the
exact number is somewhat disputed, scholars agree the more texts, the
more variants. This means there are more variants concerning New
Testament texts than Old Testament texts.
Variants are not evenly distributed throughout the texts. Textual scholar
Kurt Aland explains that charting the variants shows the New Testament is 62.9% variant-free.
Many variants originate in simple misspellings or mis-copying. For
example, a scribe would drop one or more letters, skip a word or line,
write one letter for another, transpose letters, and so on. Some
variants represent a scribal attempt to simplify or harmonize, by
changing a word or a phrase. Ehrman explains: scribe
'A' will introduce mistakes which are not in the manuscript of scribe
'B'. Copies of text
'A'
with the mistake will subsequently contain that same mistake. The
multiple generations of texts that follow, containing the error, are
referred to as a "family" of texts. Over time the texts descended from
'A' that share the error, and those from
'B'
that do not share it, will diverge further, but later texts will still
be identifiable as descended from one or the other because of the
presence or absence of that original mistake. Textual criticism studies
the differences between these families to piece together what the
original looked like.
Sorting out the wealth of source material is complex, so textual
families were sorted into categories tied to geographical areas. The
divisions of the New Testament textual families were
Alexandrian (also called the "Neutral text"),
Western (Latin translations), and
Eastern (used by
Antioch and
Constantinople).
Forerunners of modern textual criticism can be found in both early
Rabbinic Judaism and the early church.
Rabbis addressed variants in the Hebrew texts as early as AD 100.
Tradition played a central role in their task of producing a standard
version of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew text they produced stabilized by
the end of the second century, and has come to be known as the
Masoretic text, the source of the Christian Old Testament.
However, the discovery of the
Dead Sea Scrolls
in 1947 has created problems. While 60% of the Dead Sea manuscripts are
closely related to Masoretic tradition, others bear a closer
resemblance to the
Septuagint (the ancient Greek version of the Hebrew texts) and the
Samaritan Pentateuch.
For textual criticism, this has raised the question of whether or not
there is such a thing that can be considered "original text."
The two main processes of textual criticism are
recension
and emendation. Recension is the selection of the most trustworthy
evidence on which to base a text. Emendation is the attempt to eliminate
the errors which are found even in the best manuscripts.
Despite its use of objective rules, there is a subjective element
involved in textual criticism. The textual critic chooses a reading
based on personal judgment, experience and common-sense. Biblical
scholar
David Clines gives the example of
Amos
6.12. It reads: "Does one plough with oxen? The obvious answer is
'yes', but the context of the passage seems to demand a 'no'; the usual
reading therefore is to amend this to, 'Does one plough
the sea
with oxen?' The amendment has a basis in the text, which is believed to
be corrupted, but is nevertheless a matter of personal judgment."
All of this contributes to textual criticism being one of the
most contentious areas of biblical criticism as well as the largest. It uses specialized methodologies, enough specialized terms to create its own lexicon,
and is guided by a number of principles. Yet any of these can be
contested, as well as any conclusions based on them, and they often are.
For example, in the late 1700s, textual critic
Johann Jacob Griesbach developed fifteen critical principles for determining which texts are likely the oldest and closest to the original. One of Griesbach's rules is
lectio brevior praeferenda:
"the shorter reading is preferred". This was based on the idea scribes
were more likely to add to a text than omit from it, making shorter
texts more likely to be older. Latin scholar Albert C. Clark challenged
this in 1914.
Based on his study of
Cicero,
Clark argued omission was a more common scribal error than addition,
saying "A text is like a traveler who goes from one inn to another
losing an article of luggage at each stop."
Clark's claims were criticized by those who supported Griesbach's
principles. Clark responded, but disagreement continued. Nearly eighty
years later, the theologian and priest James Royse took up the case.
After close study of multiple New Testament papyri, he concluded Clark
was right. Some scholars have recently called to abandon older approaches to
textual criticism in favor of new computer-assisted methods for
determining manuscript relationships in a more reliable way.
Source criticism
Source criticism
is the search for the original sources that form the basis of biblical
text. It can be traced back to the 17th-century French priest
Richard Simon.
In Old Testament studies, source criticism is generally focused on
identifying sources within a single text. For example, the modern view
of the origins of the book of Genesis was first laid in 1753 by the
French physician
Jean Astruc. He presumed
Moses
used ancient documents to write it, so his goal was identifying and
reconstructing those documents by separating the book of Genesis back
into those original sources. He discovered Genesis alternates use of two
different names for God while the rest of the Pentateuch after
Exodus 3 omits that alternation.
He found repetitions of certain events, such as parts of the
flood story
that are repeated three times. He also found apparent anachronisms:
statements seemingly from a later time than Genesis was set. Astruc
hypothesized that this separate material was fused into a single unit
that became the book of Genesis thereby creating its duplications and
parallelisms.
Further examples of the products of source criticism include its two
most influential and well-known theories concerning the origins of the
Pentateuch (the
Documentary hypothesis) and the four gospels (
two-source hypothesis).
Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis
Theologian
Antony F. Campbell says source criticism's most influential work is
Julius Wellhausen's
Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (
Prologue to the History of Israel, 1878) which sought to establish the sources of the first five books of the Old Testament.
Wellhausen correlated the history and development of those five books,
known as the Pentateuch, with the development of the Jewish faith.
The Documentary hypothesis, also known as the
JEDP theory, or the Wellhausen theory, says the Pentateuch was combined out of four separate and coherent sources known as
J (which stands for
Yahwist, which is spelled with a
J in German),
E (for
Elohist),
D (for
Deuteronomist), and
P (for the
Priestly source). Old Testament scholar
Karl Graf (1815–1869) suggested the
P in 1866 as the last stratum of the Wellhausen theory.
Therefore, the Documentary hypothesis is sometimes also referred to as the
Graf–Wellhausen hypothesis.
Later scholars inferred more sources, with increasing information about their extent and inter-relationship.
The fragmentary theory was a later understanding of Wellhausen
produced by form criticism. This theory argues that fragments of various
documents, and not continuous documents, are the sources for the
Pentateuch. This accounts for diversity but not structural and
chronological consistency. The
Supplementary hypothesis
can be seen as an evolution of the Documentary hypothesis that
solidified in the 1970s. Proponents of this view assert three sources
for the Pentateuch, with the Deuteronomist as the oldest source, and the
Torah assembled from a central core document, the Elohist, then
supplemented by fragments taken from other sources.
Advocates of the Documentary hypothesis contend it accounts well
for the differences and duplication found in each of the Pentateuchal
books. Furthermore, they argue, it provides an explanation for the
peculiar character of the material labeled P, which reflects the
perspective and concerns of Israel's priests. However, the original
theory has also been heavily criticized. Old Testament scholar
Ernest Nicholson
says that by the end of the 1970s and into the 1990s, "one major study
after another, like a series of hammer blows, ... rejected the main
claims of the Documentary theory, and the criteria on ... which those
claims are grounded."
It has been criticized for its dating of the sources, for assuming that
the original sources were coherent, and for assuming E and P were
originally complete documents. Studies of the literary structure of the
Pentateuch have shown J and P used the same structure, and that motifs
and themes cross the boundaries of the various sources, which undermines
arguments for separate origins.
Problems and criticisms of the Documentary hypothesis have been brought
on by such literary analysis, but also by anthropological developments,
and by various archaeological findings, such as those indicating Hebrew
is older than previously believed.
Presently, few biblical scholars still hold to Wellhausen's Documentary
hypothesis in its classical form. However, while current debate has
modified Wellhausen's conclusions, Nicholson says "for all that it needs
revision and development in detail, [the work of Wellhausen] remains
the securest basis for understanding the Pentateuch." Critical scholar Pauline Viviano agrees, stating that the general contours of Wellhausen's view remain with the
Newer Documentary Hypothesis providing the best answers to the complex question of how the Pentateuch was formed.
The New Testament synoptic problem
The widely-accepted two-source hypothesis, showing two sources for both Matthew and Luke
Streeter's
four source hypothesis, showing four sources each for Matthew and Luke
with the colors representing the different sources
In New Testament studies, source criticism has taken a slightly
different approach from Old Testament studies by focusing on identifying
the common sources of multiple texts. This has revealed the Gospels are
both products of sources and sources themselves.
As sources,
Matthew,
Mark and
Luke are partially dependent on each other and partially independent of each other. This is called the
synoptic problem, and explaining it is the single greatest dilemma of New Testament source criticism.
Multiple theories exist to address the dilemma. However, two theories have become predominant: the
two-source hypothesis and the
four-source hypothesis.
Mark is the shortest of the four gospels with only 661 verses,
but six hundred of those verses are in Matthew and 350 of them are in
Luke. Some of these verses are copied verbatim. Most scholars agree that
this indicates Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke. There is also
some verbatim agreement between Matthew and Luke of verses not found in
Mark. In 1838, the religious philosopher
Christian Hermann Weisse
developed a theory about this. He postulated a hypothetical collection
of Jesus' sayings from an additional source called Q, taken from
Quelle, which is German for "source". If this document existed, it has now been lost, but some of its
material can be deduced indirectly. Comparing what is common to Matthew
and Luke, yet absent in Mark, the critical scholar
Heinrich Julius Holtzmann
demonstrated (in 1863) the probable existence of Q well enough for it
to be accepted as a likely second source, along with Mark, for Matthew
and Luke. This allowed the two-source hypothesis to emerge as the best
supported of the various synoptic solutions.
There is also material unique to each gospel. This indicates additional
separate sources for Matthew and for Luke. Biblical scholar
B. H. Streeter used this insight to refine and expand the two-source theory into a four-source theory in 1925.
While most scholars agree that the two-source theory offers the
best explanation for the Synoptic problem, it has not gone without
dispute. The Synoptic Seminar disbanded in 1982, reporting that its
members "could not agree on a single thing", leading some to claim the
problem is unsolvable.No single theory offers a complete solution. There are complex and
important difficulties that create challenges to every theory. One example is
Basil Christopher Butler's challenge to the legitimacy of two-source theory, arguing it contains a
Lachmann fallacy that says the two-source theory loses cohesion when it is acknowledged that no source can be established for Mark.
Form criticism
Form criticism began in the early twentieth century when theologian
Karl Ludwig Schmidt
observed that Mark's Gospel is composed of short units. Schmidt
asserted these small units were remnants and evidence of the oral
tradition that preceded the writing of the gospels.
Bible scholar
Richard Bauckham says this "most significant insight," which established the foundation of form criticism, has never been refuted.
Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932) and
Martin Dibelius (1883-1947) built from this insight and pioneered form criticism. Form criticism breaks the Bible down into those short units, called
pericopes,
which are then classified by genre: prose or verse, letters, laws,
court archives, war hymns, poems of lament, and so on. Form criticism
then theorizes concerning the individual pericope's
Sitz im Leben ("setting in life" or "place in life"). Based on their understanding of
folklore,
form critics believed the early Christian communities formed the
sayings and teachings of Jesus according to their needs (their
"situation in life"), and that each form could be identified by the
situation in which it had been created.
Form criticism, represented by Rudof Bultmann, its most influential
proponent, was the dominant method in the field of biblical criticism
for nearly 80 years. However, Old Testament scholar
Rolf Knierim
says contemporary scholars have produced an "explosion of studies" on
structure, genre, text-type, setting and language that challenge several
of its aspects and assumptions.
Biblical scholar
Richard Burridge explains:
The general critique of form criticism came from various
sources, putting several areas in particular under scrutiny. The analogy
between the development of the gospel pericopae and folklore needed
reconsideration because of developments in folklore studies; it was less
easy to assume the steady growth of an oral tradition in stages... the
length of time needed for the "laws" of oral transmission to operate was
greater than taken by the gospels; even the existence of such laws was
questioned.
In the early to mid twentieth century, Bultmann and other form
critics said they had found oral "laws of development" within the New
Testament.
In the 1970s, New Testament scholar
E. P. Sanders argued against the existence of such laws.
During the latter half of the twentieth century, observations from
field studies of cultures with existing oral traditions lent support to
Sanders' view.
For example, in 1978 linguists
Milman Parry and
Albert Bates Lord observed that oral tradition does not develop in the same manner as written texts.
Writing tends to develop in a linear manner, beginning with a crude
first draft which is then edited bit by bit to become more polished.
Oral tradition is more complex and multidirectional in its development.
Religion scholar Burke O. Long sums up the contemporary view by
observing that, since oral tradition does not follow the same
developmental pattern as written texts, laws of oral development cannot
be arrived at by studying written texts.
Additional challenges of form criticism have also been raised.
For example, biblical studies scholar Werner H. Kelber says form
criticism throughout the mid-twentieth century was so focused toward
finding each pericope's original form, that it distracted from any
serious consideration of memory as a dynamic force in the construction
of the gospels or the early church community tradition.
What Kelber refers to as form criticism's "astounding myopia" has
produced enough criticism to revive interest in memory as an analytical
category within biblical criticism.
Knierim says
Sitz im Leben has been challenged by studies that demonstrate a text type "does not automatically reveal the setting." Another example concerns the
Hellenistic culture that surrounded
first-century Palestine. Form criticism assumed the early Church was heavily influenced by that culture.
However, in the 1970s, E. P. Sanders, as well as Gerd Theissen, sparked
new rounds of studies that included anthropological and sociological
perspectives, reestablishing Judaism as the predominant influence on
Jesus, Paul and the New Testament. New Testament scholar
N. T. Wright says, "The earliest traditions of Jesus reflected in the Gospels are written from the perspective of
Second Temple Judaism [and] must be interpreted from the standpoint of
Jewish eschatology and
apocalypticism."
Bultmann has been personally criticized for being overly focused on
Heidegger's philosophy in his philosophical foundation, and for working with
a priori
notions concerning "folklore, the distinction between Palestinian and
Hellenistic communities, the length of the oral period, and more, that
were not derived from study but were instead constructed according to a
preconceived pattern".
For some, the many challenges to form criticism mean its future is in doubt. Bible scholar Anthony J. Campbell says:
Form criticism had a meteoric rise in the early part of
the twentieth century and fell from favor toward its end. For some, the
future of form criticism is not an issue: it has none. But if form
criticism embodies an essential insight, it will continue. ...Two
elements embody this insight and give it its value: concern for the
nature of the text and for its shape and structure... If the
encrustations can be scraped away, the "good stuff" may still be there.
Redaction criticism
A diagram of the complexity of the Synoptic problem
Redaction is the process of editing multiple sources, often
with a similar theme, into a single document. Redaction critics focus on
discovering how the literary units were originally
edited—"redacted"—into their current forms.
Redaction criticism
developed after World War II in Germany and in the 1950s in England and
North America, and can be seen as a correlative to form criticism.
It is dependent on both source and form criticism, because it is
necessary to identify the traditions before determining how the redactor
has made use of them.
However, redaction criticism rejects source and form criticism's
description of the Bible texts as mere collections of fragments. Where
form criticism fractures the biblical elements into smaller and smaller
individual pieces, redaction criticism attempts to interpret the whole
literary unit. As a result, redaction criticism "provides a corrective to the methodological imbalance of form criticism".
Form criticism saw the synoptic writers as mere collectors and focused on the
Sitz im Leben
as the creator of the texts. Redaction criticism deals more positively
with the Gospel writers restoring an understanding of them as
theologians of the early church.
Bible scholars Richard and Kendall Soulen explain that when redaction
criticism is applied to the synoptic gospels, "it is the evangelist's
use, disuse or alteration of the traditions open to him that is in view,
rather than the form and original setting of the traditions
themselves."
Since redaction criticism was developed from form criticism, it
shares many of its weaknesses. For example, it assumes an extreme
skepticism toward the historicity of Jesus and the gospels just as form
criticism does. Redaction criticism seeks the historical community of
the final redactors of the gospels, though there is often no textual
clue, and its method in finding the final editor's theology is flawed.
In the New Testament, redaction discerns the evangelist's theology by
focusing and relying upon the differences between the gospels, yet it is
unclear whether every difference has theological meaning, how much
meaning, or whether a difference is a stylistic or even an accidental
change. Further, it is not at all clear whether the difference was made
by the evangelist, who could have used the already–changed–story when
writing a gospel.
The evangelist's theology more likely depends on what the gospels have in common as well as their differences.
One of the weaknesses of redaction criticism in its New Testament
application is that it assumes Markan priority. Redaction criticism can
only function when sources are already known, and since redaction
criticism of the Synoptics has been based on the Markan priority of
two-source theory, if the priority of Matthew is ever established,
redaction criticism would have to begin all over again.
Followers of other theories concerning the Synoptic problem, such as those who support the
Greisbach hypothesis which says Matthew was written first, Luke second, and Mark third, do not accept redaction criticism.
Literary criticism
Statue of Northrop Frye, an important figure in biblical criticism, on a bench in Toronto.
Literary criticism shifted scholarly attention from historical and
pre-compositional matters to the text itself, becoming the dominant form
of biblical criticism in a relatively short period of about thirty
years. New Testament scholar
Paul R. House
says the discipline of linguistics, new views of historiography, and
the decline of older methods of criticism opened the door for literary
criticism. In 1957 literary critic
Northrop Frye
wrote an analysis of the Bible from the perspective of his literary
background that used literary criticism to understand the Bible forms.
It became influential in moving biblical criticism from a historical to a
literary focus.
By 1974, the two methodologies being used in literary criticism were
rhetorical analysis and
structuralism.
Rhetorical analysis divides a passage into units, observes how a single
unit shifts or breaks, taking special note of poetic devices, meter,
parallelism, word play and so on. It then charts the writer's thought
progression from one unit to the next, and finally, assembles the data
in an attempt to explain the author's intentions behind the piece.
Structuralism looks at the language to discern "layers of meaning" with
the goal of uncovering a work's "deep structures": the premises as well
as the purposes of the author.
In 1981 literature scholar
Robert Alter
also contributed to the development of biblical literary criticism by
publishing an influential analysis of biblical themes from a literary
perspective. The 1980s saw the rise of
formalism, which focuses on plot, structure, character and themes.
Reader-response criticism, which focuses on the reader rather than the author, was put forward by the Old Testament scholar
David M. Gunn in 1987.
New Testament scholar
Donald Guthrie
highlights a flaw in the literary critical approach to the Gospels. The
genre of the Gospels has not been fully determined. No conclusive
evidence has yet been produced to settle the question of genre, and
without genre, no adequate parallels can be found, and without parallels
"it must be considered to what extent the principles of literary
criticism are applicable."
The validity of using the same critical methods for novels and for the
Gospels, without the assurance the Gospels are actually novels, must be
questioned.
Types of literary criticism
Canonical criticism has both theological and literary roots. Its
origins are found in the Church's views of scripture as sacred as well
as in the literary critics who began to influence biblical scholarship
in the 1940s and 1950s. Canonical criticism responded to two things: 1)
the sense that biblical criticism had obscured the meaning and authority
of the canon of scripture; and 2) the fundamentalism in the Christian
Church that had arisen in America in the 1920s and 1930s. Canonical
criticism does not reject historical criticism and sociological
analysis, but considers them secondary in importance.
Canonical critics believe the texts should be treated with respect as the canon of a believing community.
Canonical critics use the tools of biblical criticism to study the books of the Bible, but approach the books as whole units.
They take the books as finished works and treat each book as a unity,
instead of taking them apart and focusing on isolated pieces. This
begins from the position that scripture contains within it what is
needed to understand it, rather than being understandable only as the
product of a historically determined process.
Canonical criticism helped literary criticism move biblical studies in
a new direction by focusing on the text rather than the author. It uses
the text itself, the needs of the communities addressed by those texts,
and the interpretation likely to have been formed originally to meet
those needs. The canonical critic then relates this to the overall
canon. Canonical criticism is associated with
Brevard S. Childs (1923–2007), though he declined to use the term.
James Muilenburg (1896–1974) is often referred to as "the prophet of rhetorical criticism".
A product of the 1960s, rhetorical criticism seeks to understand text
type, as does form criticism, but moves beyond form criticism by looking
into the inner theological meaning the author was trying to
communicate. The rhetorical scholar
Sonja K. Foss
says there are ten methods of practicing rhetorical criticism, but each
focuses on three dimensions of rhetoric: the authors, what they use to
communicate, and what they are trying to communicate.
Rhetorical criticism is the systematic effort to understand the message
being communicated in a focused and conscious manner. Biblical
rhetorical criticism asks how hearing the texts impacted the audience.
It attempts to discover and evaluate the rhetorical devices, language,
and methods of communication used within the texts to accomplish the
goals of those texts.
Phyllis Trible,
a student of Muilenburg, has become one of the "leading practitioners
of rhetorical criticism" and is known for her detailed literary analysis
and her
feminist critique of biblical interpretation.
Within narrative criticism, critics approach scripture as story.
Narrative criticism began being used to study the New Testament in the
1970s, and a decade later, study also included the Old Testament. However, the first time a published approach was labeled
narrative criticism was in 1980, in the article "Narrative Criticism and the Gospel of Mark," written by Bible scholar David Rhoads. Narrative criticism has its foundations in form criticism, but it is
not a historical discipline. It is purely literary. Historical critics
began to recognize the Bible was not being studied in the manner other
ancient writings were studied, and they began asking if these texts
should be understood on their own terms before being used as evidence of
something else like history.
It is now accepted as "axiomatic in literary circles that the meaning
of literature transcends the historical intentions of the author."
Narrative criticism embraces the textual unity of canonical criticism,
while admitting the existence of the sources and redactions of
historical criticism. Narrative critics choose to focus on the artistic
weaving of the biblical texts into a sustained narrative picture.
The literary scholar Steven Weitzman (1892–1957) has argued that
"narrative economy" (omitting comments about the thoughts or emotional
state of a character) and "narrative unity" are what make the text a
"work of art". Narrative critics encourage the "implied reader" to see biblical
characters as literary figures, observe textual unity, the importance of
the narrator, "implied"
authorial intent, and to be aware that a narrative can be interpreted in multiple ways.
This perspective is key, Auerbach says: "Since so much in [Bible
stories] is dark and incomplete, and since the reader knows that God is a
hidden god, [the reader's] effort to interpret it constantly finds
something new to feed on... there is no end for interpretation."
Life of Jesus research
The Quest for the historical Jesus, also known as life of Jesus
research, is an area of biblical criticism that seeks to reconstruct the
life and teachings of
Jesus of Nazareth by
critical historical methods.
The quest began with the posthumous publication of Hermann Reimarus'
effort to reconstruct an "authentic" historical picture of Jesus instead
of a theological one. The quest was a product of the
Enlightenment skepticism of the late eighteenth century and produced a stark division between history and theology. The study flourished in the nineteenth century, making its mark in the theology of the
German Protestant liberals.
They saw the purpose of a historically true life of Jesus as a critical
force that functioned theologically against the high Christology
established by Roman Catholicism centuries before.
After Albert Schweitzer's
Von Reimarus zu Wrede was published as
The Quest of the Historical Jesus in 1910, its title provided the label for the field of study for the next eighty years.
Interest languished in the early twentieth century, but revived in the
1950s, with some scholars asserting there have been three distinct
quests. However, Bible scholar Stanley Porter asserts that there has
been one fluctuating, but still continuous, multifaceted quest for the
historical Jesus from the beginning. By the end of the twentieth century, a more trusting attitude towards
the historical reliability of sources gradually replaced Enlightenment
skepticism. E. P. Sanders explains that, because of the desire to know
everything about Jesus, including his thoughts and motivations, and
because there are such varied conclusions about him, it seems to many
scholars that it is impossible to be certain about anything. Yet
according to Sanders, "we know a lot" about Jesus. Sanders' view
characterizes most contemporary studies.
Reflecting this shift, the phrase "quest for the historical Jesus" has largely been replaced by "life of Jesus research".
The lasting achievement of the contemporary quest has been sensitizing scholars to Jesus' Jewish environment.
Contemporary developments
Responses
At first, biblical historical criticism and its deductions and
implications were so unpopular outside liberal Protestant scholarship it
created a schism in Protestantism. The
American fundamentalist movement of the 1920s and 1930s began, at least partly, as a response to
nineteenth century liberalism.
Some fundamentalists believed liberal critics had invented an entirely
new religion "completely at odds with the Christian faith". However, there were also conservative Protestants who accepted it.
William Robertson Smith (1846–1894) is an example of a nineteenth century
evangelical who believed historical criticism was a legitimate outgrowth of the
Protestant Reformation's
focus on the biblical text. He saw it as a "necessary tool to enable
intelligent churchgoers" to understand the Bible, and was a pioneer in
establishing the final form of the
supplementary hypothesis of the documentary hypothesis. A similar view was later advocated by the
Primitive Methodist biblical scholar
A. S. Peake (1865–1929).
Other evangelical Protestant scholars such as
Edwin M. Yamauchi,
Paul R. House, and
Daniel B. Wallace have continued the tradition of conservatives contributing to critical scholarship.
M.-J. Lagrange was instrumental in helping Catholicism accept biblical criticism.
Monseigneur
Joseph G. Prior
says, "Catholic studies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
avoided the use of critical methodology because of its rationalism [so
there was] no significant Catholic involvement in biblical scholarship
until the nineteenth century."
In 1890, the French Dominican
Marie-Joseph Lagrange
(1855–1938) established the École Biblique in Jerusalem to encourage
study of the Bible using the historical-critical method. Two years later
he funded a journal, spoke thereafter at various conferences, wrote
Bible commentaries that incorporated textual critical work of his own,
did pioneering work on biblical genres and forms, and laid the path to
overcoming resistance to the historical-critical method among his fellow
scholars.
However,
Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) condemned biblical scholarship based on rationalism in his encyclical letter
Providentissimus Deus ("On the Study of Holy Scripture") on 18 November 1893. It declared that no
exegete was allowed to interpret a text to contradict church doctrine.
Later, in 1943 on the fiftieth anniversary of the
Providentissimus Deus, Pope Pius XII issued the papal encyclical
Divino afflante spiritu
('Inspired by the Holy Spirit') sanctioning historical criticism,
opening a new epoch in Catholic critical scholarship. The Jesuit
Augustin Bea (1881–1968) had played a vital part in its publication.
This tradition is continued by Catholic scholars such as
John P. Meier,
Bernard Orchard,
and
Reginald C. Fuller.
Hebrew Bible scholar
Marvin A. Sweeney
argues that some Christian theological assumptions within biblical
criticism have reached anti-semitic conclusions. This has discouraged
Jews from engaging in biblical criticism.
Hebrew Bible scholar
Jon D. Levenson described how some Jewish scholars, such as
rabbinicist Solomon Schechter (b. 1903),
saw biblical criticism of the Pentateuch as a threat to Jewish
identity. The growing anti-semitism in Germany of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, the perception that higher criticism was
an entirely Christian pursuit, and the sense many Bible critics were not
impartial academics but were proponents of
supersessionism, prompted Schechter to describe "
Higher Criticism as
Higher Anti-semitism".
Professor of Hebrew Bible Baruch J. Schwartz states that these
perceptions delayed Jewish scholars from entering the field of biblical
criticism.
These problems began to be corrected in the modern era. The
Holocaust
led to Christian theologians rethinking ways to relate to Judaism, and
the entry of Jewish scholars into academic departments from which they
had formerly been excluded aided that process.
The first historical-critical Jewish scholar of Pentateuchal studies was
M. M. Kalisch in the nineteenth century.
In the early twentieth century, historical criticism of the Pentateuch became mainstream among Jewish scholars. In 1905, Rabbi David C. Hoffman wrote an extensive, two-volume,
philologically based critique of the
Wellhausen theory, which supported
Jewish orthodoxy. Bible professor Benjamin D. Sommer says it is "among the most precise and detailed commentaries on the legal texts [
Leviticus and
Deuteronomy] ever written."
Yehezkel Kaufmann was the first Jewish scholar to appreciate fully the import of higher criticism.
Mordechai Breuer, who branches out beyond most Jewish
exegesis
and explores the implications of historical criticism for multiple
subjects, is an example of a contemporary Jewish biblical critical
scholar.
Contemporary methods
Socio-scientific criticism is part of the wider trend in biblical criticism reflecting interdisciplinary methods and diversity. It grew out of form criticism's
Sitz im Leben
and the sense that historical form criticism had failed to adequately
analyze the social and anthropological contexts which form criticism
claimed had formed the texts. Using the perspectives, theories, models,
and research of the social sciences to determine what social norms may
have influenced the growth of biblical tradition, it is similar to
historical biblical criticism in its goals and methods. It has less in
common with literary critical approaches. It analyzes the social and
cultural dimensions of the text and its environmental context.
In the 1940s and 1950s the term
postmodern came into use to signify a rejection of modern conventions. Many of these early postmodernist views came from France following World War II. Postmodernism has been associated with
Karl Marx,
Sigmund Freud,
radical politics, and arguments against metaphysics and ideology.
Soulen and Soulen quote French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard saying
"I define postmodernism as incredulity toward meta-narratives."
Biblical scholar
A. K. M. Adam says postmodernism is not so much a method as a stance.
It has three general features: 1) it denies any privileged starting
point for truth; 2) it is critical of theories that attempt to explain
the "totality of reality"; and 3) it attempts to show that all
ideals are grounded in ideological, economic or political self-interest.
Postmodernists are suspicious of traditional theology and the
neutrality of reason, and emphasize relativism and indeterminacy of
texts. In textual criticism, postmodernists reject the idea of a sacred
text, treating all manuscripts as equally valuable.
Feminist criticism is an aspect of the
feminist theology movement which began in the 1960s and 1970s in the context of Second Wave feminism in the United States.
Feminist theology has been ground-breaking in biblical criticism,
disrupting the long-standing exclusivity of Christian theology as
Western.
In the 1980s, Phyllis Trible and
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
reframed biblical criticism itself by challenging the supposed
disinterest and objectivity it claimed for itself and exposing how
ideological-theological stances had played a critical role in
interpretation. Feminist biblical interpreters are characterized by the claim that
classical models of understanding are patriarchal and therefore that
makes it impossible for those models to identify the true contribution
of women. Feminist criticism embraces a
reader-response approach to the text that includes an attitude of "dissent" or "resistance."
Post-critical biblical interpretation shares the postmodernist suspicion of non-neutrality of traditional approaches, but is not hostile toward theology.
It begins with the understanding that historical biblical criticism's
focus on historicity produced a distinction between the meaning of what
the text says and what it is about (what it references). This produced
doubts about the text's veracity. The theologian
Hans Frei
writes that what he refers to as the "realistic narratives" of
literature, including the Bible, don't allow for such separation. Subject matter is identical to verbal meaning and is found in plot and nowhere else.
"As Frei puts it, scripture 'simultaneously depicts and renders the
reality (if any) of what it talks about'; its subject matter is
'constituted by, or identical with, its narrative'."
Psychological biblical criticism
applies psychology to biblical texts; it was not until the 1990s that
it began to have an influence among the new critical approaches.
Bible scholar Wayne Rollins says the goal of a psychological critical
approach is to find expressions of the human psyche in the biblical
texts.
It can be used in both a historical and a literary manner to examine
the psychological dimensions of scripture through the use of the
behavioral sciences.
