what are the four types of biblical criticism what are the four types of biblical criticism

During the eighteenth century, when it began as historical-biblical criticism, it was based on two distinguishing characteristics: (1) the scientific concern to avoid dogma and bias by applying a neutral, non-sectarian, reason-based judgment to the study of the Bible, and (2) the belief that the reconstruction of the historical events behind the texts, as well as the history of how the texts themselves developed, would lead to a correct understanding of the Bible. [1] ", "Truth or Meaning: Ricoeur versus Frei on Biblical Narrative". [54]:495 The biblical theology movement of the 1950s produced debate between Old Testament and New Testament scholars over the unity of the Bible. [7], Jean Astruc (16841766), a French physician, believed these critics were wrong about Mosaic authorship. Methods to interpret the bible Historical criticism, textual criticism, redaction criticism, form criticism, source criticism . Where form critics fracture the biblical elements into smaller and smaller individual pieces, redaction critics attempt to interpret the whole literary unit. 5. [82]:213 One of Griesbach's rules is lectio brevior praeferenda: "the shorter reading is to be preferred". It began to be recognized that: "Literature was written not just for the dons of Oxford and Cambridge, but also for common folk Opposition to authority, especially ecclesiastical [church authority], was widespread, and religious tolerance was on the increase". A brief treatment of biblical criticism follows. [170] In 1864, Pope Pius IX promulgated the encyclical letter Quanta cura ("Condemning Current Errors"), which decried what the Pontiff considered significant errors afflicting the modern age. [32]:23 In 1835, and again in 1845, theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur postulated the apostles Peter and Paul had an argument that led to a split between them thereby influencing the mode of Christianity that followed. It does not mean the same thing as a complaint or disapproval. [159] Still others believed that biblical criticism, "shorn of its unwarranted arrogance," could be a reliable source of interpretation. There are also approximately a million direct New Testament quotations in the collected writings of the Church Fathers of the first four centuries. [152]:6 A decade later, this new approach in biblical criticism included the Old Testament as well. [96]:136138, Mark is the shortest of the four gospels with only 661 verses, but 600 of those verses are in Matthew and 350 of them are in Luke. Higher criticism. [13]:8284, The two main processes of textual criticism are recension and emendation:[81]:205,209, Jerome McGann says these methods innately introduce a subjective factor into textual criticism despite its attempt at objective rules. Such analysis may be based on a variety of critical approaches or movements, e.g. 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. [133]:47[134], According to religion scholar Werner H. Kelber, form critics throughout the mid-twentieth century were so focused on finding each pericope's original form, that they were distracted from any serious consideration of memory as a dynamic force in the construction of the gospels or the early church community tradition. Expository Expository commentaries are typically written by pastors and expository Bible teachers who teach verse by verse through the Bible. [87][88][89] It uses specialized methodologies, enough specialized terms to create its own lexicon,[90] and is guided by a number of principles. [60] In the 1970s, the New Testament scholar E. P. Sanders (b. The letter gave the first formal authorization for the use of critical methods in biblical scholarship. For full treatment, see biblical literature: Biblical criticism. [54]:99 Frei was one of several external influences that moved biblical criticism from a historical to a literary focus. Newer methods brought about by the globalization of biblical studies and by concerns with the 'world in front of the text' - like new historicism, feminist criticism, postcolonial/liberationist criticism, and rhetorical criticism - are well represented in the series. . In it, Schweitzer scathingly critiqued the various books on the life of Jesus that had been written in the late-nineteenth century as reflecting more of the lives of the authors than Jesus. For purposes of discussion, these individual methods are separated here and the Bible is addressed as a whole, but this is an artificial approach that is used only for the purpose of description, and is not how biblical criticism is actually practiced. [173]:301. [140]:335,336 In the New Testament, redaction critics attempt to discern the original author/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 any given difference is a stylistic or even an accidental change. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. It "rejects both traditional historicism's marginalization of literature and New Criticism's enshrinement of the literary text in a timeless dimension beyond history". Historical criticism can refer to a method of studying the Bible or to a particular view of Scripture used to select interpretations. [27]:25,26 Reimarus's writings, on the other hand, did have a long-term effect. Cooper explains that a recombination of the consonants allows it to be read "Does one plough the sea with oxen?" [152]:3 The New Critics, (whose views were absorbed by narrative criticism), rejected the idea that background information holds the key to the meaning of the text, and asserted that meaning and value reside within the text itself. In this way, biblical criticism also led to conflict. The detailed analysis of biblical books and passages as written texts has benefited from the study of literature in classical philology, ancient rhetoric, and modern literary criticism. [44], In 1896, Martin Khler (18351912) wrote The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ. "It also means that the fourth century 'best texts', the 'Alexandrian' codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, have roots extending throughout the entire third century and even into the second". [38]:228 Supersessionism, instead of the more traditional millennialism, became a common theme in Johann Gottfried Herder (17441803), Friedrich Schleiermacher (17681834), Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (17801849), Ferdinand Christian Baur (17921860), David Strauss (18081874), Albrecht Ritschl (18221889), the history of religions school of the 1890s, and on into the form critics of the twentieth century until World War II. Funk explains that, when it is used properly, the. They made a lasting change in the practice of biblical criticism by making it clear it could exist independently of theology and faith. The biblical scholar Hans Frei wrote that what he refers to as the "realistic narratives" of literature, including the Bible, don't allow for such separation. Turretin believed that the Bible was divine revelation, but insisted that revelation must be consistent with nature and in harmony with reason, "For God who is the author of revelation is likewise the author of reason". The documentary theory has been undermined by subdivisions of the sources and the addition of other sources, since: "The more sources one finds, the more tenuous the evidence for the existence of continuous documents becomes". and M.A. The existence of separate sources explained the inconsistent style and vocabulary of Genesis, discrepancies in the narrative, differing accounts and chronological difficulties, while still allowing for Mosaic authorship. [191]:11 Feminist theology has since responded to globalization, making itself less specifically Western, thereby moving beyond its original narrative "as a movement defined by the USA". By the end of the nineteenth century, these principles were recognized by Ernst Troeltsch in an essay, Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology, where he described three principles of biblical criticism: methodological doubt (a way of searching for certainty by doubting everything); analogy (the idea that we understand the past by relating it to our present); and mutual inter-dependence (every event is related to events that proceeded it). [143]:4,11 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. Though many new early manuscripts have been discovered since 1881, there are critical editions of the Greek New Testament, such as NA28 and UBS5, that "have gone virtually unchanged" from these discoveries. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). mark. [156]:9 As a result, the Bible is no longer thought of solely as a religious artifact, and its interpretation is no longer restricted to the community of believers. Some variants represent a scribal attempt to simplify or harmonize, by changing a word or a phrase. [38]:viixiii, The late-nineteenth century saw a renewed interest in the quest for the historical Jesus which primarily involved writing versions of the life of Jesus. [187]:267, Biblical criticism impacted feminism and was impacted by it. [146]:8991, John H. Hayes and Carl Holladay say "canonical criticism has several distinguishing features": (1) Canonical criticism is synchronic; it sees all biblical writings as standing together in time instead of focusing on the diachronic questions of the historical approach. [58] New historicism, a literary theory that views history through literature, also developed. [158][156]:9 Soulen adds that biblical criticism's "leading practitioners have set standards of industry, acumen, and insight that remain pace-setting today. [191]:27, Feminist criticism is an aspect of the feminist theology movement which began in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the feminist movement in the United States. [141] Mark Goodacre says "Some scholars have used the success of redaction criticism as a means of supporting the existence of Q, but this will always tend toward circularity, particularly given the hypothetical nature of Q which itself is reconstructed by means of redaction criticism". This theory uses the initials JEDP to identify what it considers to be four different hands involved in the composition of . Form criticism identifies short units of text seeking the setting of their origination. 5 Negative criticism. 2 Logical criticism. The trouble, as always, came with human execution. It attempts to discover and evaluate the rhetorical devices, language, and methods of communication used within the texts by focusing on the use of "repetition, parallelism, strophic structure, motifs, climax, chiasm and numerous other literary devices". [159] There are aspects of biblical criticism that have not only been hostile to the Bible, but also to the religions whose scripture it is, in both intent and effect. [36]:90 Notable exceptions to this included Richard Simon, Ignaz von Dllinger and the Bollandist. [19][20] Instead of interpreting the Bible historically, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (17521827), Johann Philipp Gabler (17531826), and Georg Lorenz Bauer (17551806) used the concept of myth as a tool for interpreting the Bible. The major types of biblical criticism are: (1) textual criticism, which is concerned with establishing the original or most authoritative text, (2) philological criticism, which is the study of the biblical languages for an accurate knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, and style of the period, (3) literary criticism. 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. to the Bible), (3) developing sensitivity to the various types of literature present in the Bible (another application of literary criticism), (4) considering the "what" and the "how" of canon, and (5) cultivating a robust sense of curiosity with regard to the biblical text. Browse the Bookstore for books on biblical criticism and biblical errancy. [37]:2, According to Episcopalian priest and queer theologian Patrick S. Cheng (Episcopal Divinity School): "Queer biblical hermeneutics is a way of looking at the sacred text through the eyes of queer people. The obvious answer is "yes", but the context of the passage seems to demand a "no". It can be said to have begun in 1957 when literary critic Northrop Frye wrote an analysis of the Bible from the perspective of his literary background by using literary criticism to understand the Bible forms. Rudolf Bultmann later used this approach, and it became particularly influential in the early twentieth century. For some, the future of form criticism is not an issue: it has none. It analyzes the social and cultural dimensions of the text and its environmental context. The situation precipitated after the election of Pope Pius X: a staunch traditionalist, Pius saw biblical criticism as part of a growing destructive modernist tendency in the Church. For example, Psalm 8 is a hymn that begins, "Lord, our Lord, / how majestic is your name in all the earth!" (verse 1). 9 It is no longer acceptable to hold exclusive beliefs. [note 8] Bible scholar Tony Campbell says: Form criticism had a meteoric rise in the early part of the twentieth century and fell from favor toward its end. community's oral tradition. While form criticism had divided the text into small units, redaction emphasized the literary integrity of the larger literary units instead. According to Reimarus, Jesus was a political Messiah who failed at creating political change and was executed by the Roman state as a dissident. Most scholars agree that this indicates Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke. Thus, the geographical labels should be used with caution; some scholars prefer to refer to the text types as "textual clusters" instead. According to Simon, parts of the Old Testament were not written by individuals at all, but by scribes recording the[which?] [161], the traditional sacrality of the Bible is at once simple and symbolic, individual and communal, practical and paradoxical. Higher criticism, whether biblical, classical . By the Middle Ages, these four methods of interpretation (or 'senses') had become fairly . The rise of redaction criticism closed this debate by bringing about a greater emphasis on diversity. [121]:242[122]:1 Bible scholar Richard Bauckham says this "most significant insight," which established the foundation of form criticism, has never been refuted. But if form criticism embodies an essential insight, it will continue. Key Concepts: Psychoanalysis, the unconscious, drive, psychic Literary criticism also offers many possibilities for enriching the devotional and . German pietism played a role in its development, as did British deism, with its greatest influences being rationalism and Protestant scholarship. Textual criticism examines biblical manuscripts and their content to identify what the original text probably said. This theory argues that fragments of documents rather than continuous, coherent documents are the sources for the Pentateuch. [38]:39,40 This stark contrast between Judaism and Christianity produced increasingly antisemitic sentiments. [187]:213 In the early twentieth century, historical criticism of the Pentateuch became mainstream among Jewish scholars. There is some consensus among twenty-first century textual critics that the various locations traditionally assigned to the text types are incorrect and misleading. [200]:288 Literary texts are seen as "cultural artifacts" that reveal context as well as content, and within New Historicism, the "literary text and the historical situation" are equally important". It focused on the literary structure of the texts as they currently exist, determining, where possible, the author's purpose, and discerning the reader's response to the text through methods such as rhetorical criticism, canonical criticism, and narrative criticism. Historical criticism or higher criticism is a branch of literary analysis that investigates the origins of a text. [143]:3[144] New Testament scholar Paul R. House says the discipline of linguistics, new views of historiography, and the decline of older methods of criticism were also influential in that process. Textual criticism Main article: Textual criticism [2]:119,120 So biblical criticism became, in the perception of many, an assault on religion, especially Christianity, through the "autonomy of reason" which it espoused. [13]:82, New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias (19001979) used linguistics, and Jesus's first-century Jewish environment, to interpret the New Testament. The Old Testament and Criticism. [28] Schweitzer records that Semler "rose up and slew Reimarus in the name of scientific theology". Most scholars agree the first quest began with Reimarus and ended with Schweitzer, that there was a "no-quest" period in the first half of the twentieth century, and that there was a second quest, known as the "New" quest that began in 1953 and lasted until 1988 when a third began. [135][130]:278. In rejecting religious bias, they embraced another set of biases without recognizing they were doing so. Yet according to Sanders, "we know quite a lot" about Jesus. The first article labeled narrative criticism was "Narrative Criticism and the Gospel of Mark," published in 1982 by Bible scholar David Rhoads. [116]:5[117]:157, While most scholars agree that the two-source theory offers the best explanation for the Synoptic problem, and some say it has been solved, others say it is not solved satisfactorily. All together, these various methods of biblical criticism permanently changed how people understood and saw the Bible. Included are examples of biblical racism, wishful thinking, subjugation of women, contradictions, failed prophecies and other biblical problems. Keener. [146]:80 John Barton says that canonical criticism does not simply ask what the text might have originally meant, it asks what it means to the current believing community, and it does so in a manner different from any type of historical criticism. Contextual methods emphasize the context of the reader. Many like Roy A. Harrisville believe biblical criticism was created by those hostile to the Bible. Updates? [49][50] Demythologizing refers to the reinterpretation of the biblical myths (stories) in terms of the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger (18891976). 1937) 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. Wellhausen's and Kaufmann's methods were similar yet their conclusions were opposed. [161], Jeffrey Burton Russell describes it thus: "Faith was transferred from the words of scripture itself to those of influential biblical critics liberal Christianity retreated hastily before the advance of science and biblical criticism. Methods of biblical scholarship are rapidly changing, but one can safely predict that viewing the biblical texts as literature and using the critical methods commonly applied to non-biblical literature will obtain a prominent place in academic study of the Bible. This and similar evidence led Astruc to hypothesize that the sources of Genesis were originally separate materials that were later fused into a single unit that became the book of Genesis. Johann Salomo Semler (17251791) had attempted in his work to navigate between divine revelation and extreme rationalism by supporting the view that revelation was "divine disclosure of the truth perceived through the depth of human experience". A monk called John Cassian (360-435 AD), took the discussion to the next level by bringing both kinds of interpretation together. . [189]:8 Mordechai Breuer, who branches out beyond most Jewish exegesis and explores the implications of historical criticism for multiple subjects, is an example of a twenty-first century Jewish biblical critical scholar. [95]:95[100] The Wellhausen hypothesis (also known as the JEDP theory, or the Documentary hypothesis, or the GrafWellhausen hypothesis) proposes that the Pentateuch was combined out of four separate and coherent (unified single) sources (not fragments). Higher criticism deals with the genuineness of the text. [194]:6 The Postcolonial view is rooted in a consciousness of the geopolitical situation for all people, and is "transhistorical and transcultural". In 1974, Hans Frei pointed out that a historical focus neglects the "narrative character" of the gospels. [168]:140142 Mark Noll says that "in recent years, a steadily growing number of well qualified and widely published scholars have broadened and deepened the impact of evangelical scholarship". [182][183] Meier is also the author of a multi-volume work on the historical Jesus, A Marginal Jew. These changes would both "complement and reconfigure conventional African American religious life". [18] British deism was also an influence on the philosopher and writer Hermann Samuel Reimarus (16941768) in developing his criticism of revelation. Mid-twentieth century scholars of oral tradition objected to the "book mentality" of source criticism, saying the idea that ancients had "cut and pasted" from their sources reflects the modern world more than the ancient one. Redaction criticism later developed as a derivative of both source and form criticism. The differences between them are called variants. [78] The impact of variants on the reliability of a single text is usually tested by comparing it to a manuscript whose reliability has been long established. [143]:425, 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. June 3, 2015 by Roger E. Olson. In general, there are four types of Bible commentaries, each useful for the intended purpose to aid in the study of Scripture. Instead, writing was used to enhance memory in an overlap of written and oral tradition. [4]:79 The height of biblical criticism's influence is represented by the history of religions school [note 1] a group of German Protestant theologians associated with the University of Gttingen. [25]:888 It began with the publication of Hermann Samuel Reimarus's work after his death. For others biblical criticism "proved to be a failure, due principally to the assumption that diachronic, linear research could master any and all of the questions and problems attendant on interpretation". 1956) calls this periodization "untenable and belied by all of the pertinent facts",[25]:697,698 arguing that people were searching for the historical Jesus before Reimarus, and that there never has been a period when scholars weren't doing so. [4]:22 One way of understanding this change is to see it as a cultural enterprise. [203]:120. Unfortunately, due to the antisupernatural presup-positions of many prominent biblical scholars in the last 250 years, bib-lical criticism has gotten a bad name. [25]:668[45]:11, N. T. Wright asserts that the third quest began with the Jesus Seminar in 1988. By then, it became necessary to acknowledge that "the upshot of the first two quests was to reveal the frustrating limitations of the historical study of any ancient person". Proponents of this view assert three sources for the Pentateuch: the Deuteronomist as the oldest source, the Elohist as the central core document, with a number of fragments or independent sources as the third. [4]:22 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. According to Spinoza: "All these details, the manner of narration, the testimony, and the context of the whole story lead to the plain conclusion that these books were written by another, and not by Moses in person". If the encrustations can be scraped away, the good stuff may still be there. Holtzmann developed the first listing of the chronological order of the New Testament texts based on critical scholarship. [4]:21,22 Newer forms of biblical criticism are primarily literary: no longer focused on the historical, they attend to the text as it exists now. [124]:271, In the early to mid twentieth century, form critics thought finding oral "laws of development" within the New Testament would prove the form critic's assertions that the texts had evolved within the early Christian communities according to sitz im leben. [138]:100, 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, have pointed to weaknesses in the redaction-based arguments for the existence of Q and Markan priority. [27]:15, Reimarus's controversial work garnered a response from Semler in 1779: Beantwortung der Fragmente eines Ungenannten (Answering the Fragments of an Unknown). Historical-biblical criticism includes a wide range of approaches and questions within four major methodologies: textual, source, form, and literary criticism. The divisions of the New Testament textual families were Alexandrian (also called the "Neutral text"), Western (Latin translations), and Eastern (used by churches centred on Antioch and Constantinople). [2]:45 Neutrality was seen as a defining requirement. Biblical criticism is an umbrella term covering various techniques for applying literary historical-critical methods in analyzing and studying the Bible and its textual content. ", "Scholars Differ On Life Of Jesus; Research Is Complicated by Conflicting Gospel Data", "P52 (P. Rylands Gk. Scholars continue to discuss and debate the evidence for variants of all kinds. It could no longer be a Catholic Bible or a Lutheran Bible but had to be divested of its scriptural character within specific confessional hermeneutics. [4]:21,22 New perspectives from different ethnicities, feminist theology, Catholicism and Judaism offered insights previously overlooked by the majority of white male Protestants who had dominated biblical criticism from its beginnings. [45]:12 Paul Montgomery in The New York Times writes that "Through the ages scholars and laymen have taken various positions on the life of Jesus, ranging from total acceptance of the Bible to assertions that Jesus of Nazareth is a creature of myth and never lived. The amendment has a basis in the text, which is believed to be corrupted, but is nevertheless a matter of personal judgment. [192]:2 Feminist criticism embraces the inter-disciplinary approach to biblical criticism, encouraging a reader-response approach to the text that includes an attitude of "dissent" or "resistance". Anders Gerdmar[de] uses the legal meaning of emancipation, as in free to be an adult on their own recognizance, when he says the "process of the emancipation of reason from the Bible runs parallel with the emancipation of Christianity from the Jews". [59] Biblical criticism began to apply new literary approaches such as structuralism and rhetorical criticism, which concentrated less on history and more on the texts themselves. [150] Phyllis Trible, a student of Muilenburg, has become one of the leaders of rhetorical criticism and is known for her detailed literary analysis and her feminist critique of biblical interpretation. [173]:300 Two years later, Lagrange funded a journal (Revue Biblique), spoke 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. [71] While scholars rarely agree about what is known or unknown about the historical Jesus, according to Witherington, scholars do agree that "the historic questions should not be dodged". The 1980s saw the rise of formalism, which focuses on plot, structure, character and themes[143]:164 and the development of reader-response criticism which focuses on the reader rather than the author. [184], Biblical criticism posed unique difficulties for Judaism. For example, in the late 1700s, textual critic Johann Jacob Griesbach (1745 1812) developed fifteen critical principles for determining which texts are likely the oldest and closest to the original.