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Course 19 · Lesson 3.1

The rise of historical and literary criticism

11 minute read

Lessons in this course

Course 19 outline

Module 1: The Secular Age: Humanism and Naturalism

  1. What secular, secularism and secularization mean
  2. Secular humanism: its claims and its moral vision
  3. Philosophical naturalism and its alternatives
  4. Christian responses to naturalism and humanism

Module 2: Science, Evolution and Faith

  1. Models of science and religion: conflict, independence, dialogue, integration
  2. What the theory of evolution claims and what it does not
  3. Christian positions on creation and evolution
  4. The history of the conflict story and its critics

Module 3: Criticism of the Bible

  1. The rise of historical and literary criticism
  2. What critics claim about authorship, sources and development
  3. Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant responses to criticism

Module 4: Truth, Relativism and Postmodernism

  1. What postmodernism is, and why the term is hard to define
  2. Truth, language and interpretation
  3. Moral relativism: descriptive, cultural and philosophical forms
  4. Christian responses to relativism and postmodern thought

Module 5: The Masters of Suspicion

  1. Marx on religion, ideology and economic life
  2. Nietzsche on Christianity, morality and the death of God
  3. Freud on religion as illusion
  4. The genetic fallacy, and when explaining the origin of a belief matters

Module 6: Power, Corruption and Morality

  1. Church, state and political power in history
  2. Institutional failure and abuse
  3. Critiques of Christian morality and how Christians reply
  4. Judging a faith by its failures: what follows and what does not

Module 7: Mind, Meaning and Nihilism

  1. Consciousness and the limits of materialism
  2. Meaning and purpose in secular and Christian thought
  3. Nihilism, despair and Christian hope

Module 8: Writing a Response

  1. Stating a challenge in its strongest form
  2. Building a structured response
  3. Conceding what is true in the critic’s case

All courses

Program / Course 19: Modern Challenges / Lesson 3.1

What you will learn

  • Define historical criticism and name its main branches.
  • Trace how the method arose from the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
  • Explain why criticism troubled many believers and why many others found it helpful.
  • Separate the method from the philosophical assumptions that some scholars have attached to it.

The big idea

Biblical criticism is the study of the Bible by the same kinds of questions used for any ancient writing: who wrote it, when, for whom, from what sources, and in what form. The word criticism here means careful judgment, not attack. The method grew from Renaissance learning and was sharpened in the Enlightenment. It has produced many gains, such as better texts and better knowledge of the ancient world. It has also been joined to assumptions that rule out miracles, and believers dispute those assumptions, not the method as such.

Key terms

Historical criticism
The study of a text in its original historical setting, asking about its date, authorship, sources and meaning for its first readers.
Textual criticism
The study of manuscripts to work out the most likely original wording of a text.
Source criticism
The search for earlier written sources that an author may have used.
Form criticism
The study of the small units in a text, such as parables or miracle stories, and the settings in which they may have been passed on.
Redaction criticism
The study of how an author or editor shaped and arranged his material to express his purposes.
Literary criticism
The study of the text as literature, with attention to structure, style and genre.
Higher and lower criticism
Older names for study of authorship and sources (higher) and for study of manuscripts (lower). The names carry no judgment of value.

Background

Questions about the Bible’s text and origin are old. Origen compared Greek versions of the Old Testament, and Jerome translated from the Hebrew and questioned the authority of some books. The Renaissance cry of ad fontes, to the sources, led Erasmus to publish a Greek New Testament in 1516. The Reformation then made the Bible central and encouraged study of its languages. Catholic scholars such as Richard Simon in seventeenth century France wrote on the Bible’s history, and Protestants such as Spinoza asked bolder questions about its authorship.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, German universities developed these methods systematically. Scholars such as Johann Gottfried Eichhorn and Julius Wellhausen proposed theories of sources behind the Pentateuch, and others argued about the origins of the Gospels. Some worked as believers. Others, such as David Friedrich Strauss in his Life of Jesus of 1835, started from the assumption that miracles do not happen and explained the Gospels as myth. The question for believers was whether the method could be separated from that assumption.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: What the method does

A historical critic treats the Bible as a collection of ancient writings that came from real people at real times. He asks the questions that any historian asks of an ancient document. Who wrote this? To whom? What did the words mean then? Does the author use an earlier source? What does the writer want to achieve?

These questions are not foreign to Christian faith. Luke begins his Gospel by saying that he has investigated and set out his account in order (Luke 1:1 to 4). He describes a historian’s work.

Step 2: The main branches

Textual criticism compares thousands of manuscripts to find the original wording. It has led to the conclusion that a few passages, such as the ending of Mark and the story of the woman caught in adultery in John, are missing from the earliest manuscripts. Modern translations mark them. Source criticism asks, for example, why Matthew, Mark and Luke are so alike, and proposes that Mark was used by the others. Form and redaction criticism look at the units and at the author’s own shaping.

Literary and canonical approaches, which became prominent in the later twentieth century, read the final text as a whole. They partly arose because scholars felt that cutting texts into hypothetical sources lost sight of the meaning of the book that the church actually has.

Step 3: Why it troubled believers

Many believers feared that the method would dissolve the Bible’s authority. When critics said that Moses did not write all of the Pentateuch, or that Isaiah was written in more than one period, some heard a denial of inspiration. When others used the method to cast doubt on miracles or on the resurrection, the fear seemed justified. Some church bodies condemned the method, as the Catholic Church did in its early twentieth century responses to Modernism.

At the same time, other believers argued that to study Scripture carefully is a form of reverence. They saw that the method gives better translations and a clearer sense of what the first hearers understood.

Step 4: Method and assumption

Scholars have long noted that historical criticism is not one thing. Ernst Troeltsch argued in 1898 that historical method rests on principles such as analogy, which says that past events must be like present ones, and correlation, which says that events are explained by earlier causes. If these principles are held as rules, the resurrection would be ruled out in advance. Believers reply that the principles beg the question. Others reply that the historian can investigate what the sources claim without ruling on what God can do.

The distinction matters for the rest of this module. Where a critic says that the evidence supports a conclusion, it should be weighed on its merits. Where he says that miracles cannot have occurred, he is no longer making a historical judgment but a philosophical one.

  1. Is this claim about the text, about its history, or about whether God acts?
  2. What evidence is offered, and do experts disagree on its force?
  3. Does the argument assume that miracles cannot occur?
  4. Does a different date or author change what the passage teaches?
  5. How did the church read this passage before the modern method?
  6. What question can this method not answer?

Examples

A textual note

A reader opens a modern Bible and finds that the last twelve verses of Mark are in brackets with a note. He learns that the oldest manuscripts end earlier. He is worried at first, then learns that the content of the verses appears elsewhere in the New Testament and that translators mark the note openly. (A constructed example.)

Two uses of one method

Two scholars study the Gospel of Mark with the same tools. One concludes that Mark shaped his account to teach about the cross. The other concludes that none of the miracles happened. The tools are the same. The difference lies in their assumptions about what is possible. (A constructed example.)

Different perspectives

Catholic

The Church first resisted the new methods, and then, in Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, encouraged the study of ancient languages, literary forms and history. Vatican II’s Dei Verbum taught that interpreters must attend to the intention of the human authors and to the literary forms of the time, and also read Scripture in the light of the whole church’s tradition. The Pontifical Biblical Commission has since given qualified approval to historical-critical method.

Orthodox

Orthodox scholars have engaged the method with caution. They hold that Scripture is the church’s book, read in the church and with the Fathers, and that the aim of exegesis is the encounter with Christ. Many Orthodox scholars use textual and historical study with profit. Others criticize critical scholarship for isolating the text from its liturgical and patristic setting.

Protestant

Protestants range from those who adopted the method fully, especially in German liberal theology, to evangelicals who accept its tools but resist its naturalistic assumptions, and to those who reject much of its results. Conservative scholars such as F. F. Bruce and Richard Bauckham use historical methods to defend the reliability of the Gospels. Barth and others wanted to read Scripture theologically and not only historically.

Jewish and scholarly views

Many Jewish scholars have used the same tools for the Hebrew Bible, and Orthodox Judaism has resisted source theories that deny the Mosaic origin of the Torah. Secular scholars see historical criticism as the proper way to study the Bible as a human document. Many scholars of all backgrounds now ask what each method can and cannot do.

Why it matters

A student who meets the method for the first time in a university class, without preparation, may think faith has been refuted. A student who has heard only warnings may never read serious scholarship. This lesson offers a middle path: use the tools, judge the assumptions and keep the questions of method separate from the questions of faith.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: Biblical criticism is by definition an attack on the Bible.

Correction: The word criticism means careful judgment. Many who use the method are believers, and Christians have always examined texts and translations.

Misunderstanding: Critical scholars all agree that the Bible is unreliable.

Correction: Scholars disagree widely, and some, such as Bauckham and N. T. Wright, argue that the sources are historically credible.

Misunderstanding: Historical method proves that miracles did not happen.

Correction: Method alone cannot do that. If miracles are excluded, it is because of a philosophical assumption that must itself be argued.

Misunderstanding: Only liberal Christians use critical tools.

Correction: Catholic, Orthodox and evangelical scholars use them. Textual criticism, in particular, is basic to every modern translation.

Knowledge check

Name four branches of biblical criticism and say what each does.

Textual criticism compares manuscripts to find the original wording. Source criticism looks for earlier written sources behind a book. Form criticism studies small units such as parables and the settings in which they were passed on. Redaction criticism studies how an author or editor shaped and arranged material to express his own purposes.

How did the Catholic Church’s attitude to the method change?

Early in the twentieth century the Church condemned Modernist uses of criticism. In 1943 Pius XII’s encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu encouraged scholars to study ancient languages and literary forms. Vatican II’s Dei Verbum affirmed attention to the human authors’ intentions. The Church now accepts the method with conditions, including reading Scripture within the tradition.

What is the difference between the method and the assumptions behind it?

The method asks ordinary historical questions about authorship, date, sources and meaning. Assumptions, such as that miracles cannot happen, are philosophical and can be added to it. Believers can use the method and reject the assumption. Critics reply that historians must treat the past by present analogy, and the dispute continues.

Why might careful study be an act of reverence?

Because it takes the words of Scripture seriously enough to want to know what they originally said and meant. Luke begins his Gospel by saying he has investigated the facts carefully. Accurate texts and accurate understanding of the first readers’ world help believers hear the message better. Reverence need not mean avoiding questions.

Think it through

  1. What worries you most about critical study of the Bible, and is the worry about the method or the assumptions?
  2. What difference would it make to your faith if a book had a different author than tradition says?
  3. How should a church teach its members to read critical scholarship?
  4. Which of the four branches would help you most in your own Bible reading?

Independent assignment

Tools on a passage

In your notebook, take one short passage, such as Mark 1:1 to 15. Write 300 to 500 words saying what a textual critic, a source critic and a literary reader would each ask about it. Then write what remains unanswered by all three. Do not send it.

Further study