Historical criticism

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from
Higher criticism
)
Part of a series on the
Bible
The Malmesbury Bible
Biblical studies
Biblical criticism
Interpretation
Perspectives
Outline of Bible-related topics
 Bible portal

Historical criticism (also known as the historical-critical method or higher criticism) is a branch of criticism that investigates the origins of ancient texts in order to understand "the world behind the text"[1] and emphasizes a process that "delays any assessment of scripture’s truth and relevance until after the act of interpretation has been carried out".[2] While often discussed in terms of ancient Jewish, Christian, and increasingly Islamic writings, historical criticism has also been applied to other religious and secular writings from various parts of the world and periods of history.[3]

The primary goal of historical criticism is to discover the text's primitive or original meaning in its original historical context and its literal sense or sensus literalis historicus. The secondary goal seeks to establish a reconstruction of the historical situation of the author and recipients of the text. That may be accomplished by reconstructing the true nature of the events that the text describes. An ancient text may also serve as a document, record or source for reconstructing the ancient past, which may also serve as a chief interest to the historical critic. In regard to Semitic biblical interpretation, the historical critic would be able to interpret the literature of Israel as well as the history of Israel.

lower criticism" (textual criticism).[6]

Historical criticism began in the 17th century and gained popular recognition in the 19th and 20th centuries. The perspective of the early historical critic was influenced by the rejection of traditional interpretations that came about with the

tradition criticism, canonical criticism, and related methodologies.[7]

Methods

Historical-critical methods are the specific procedures[1] used to examine the text's historical origins, such as the time and place in which the text was written, its sources, and the events, dates, persons, places, things, and customs that are mentioned or implied in the text.[4]

"Historical" and "critical" approaches

The sense of the historical-critical method involves an application of both a critical and a historical reading of a text. To read a text critically

means to suspend inherited presuppositions about its origin, transmission, and meaning, and to assess their adequacy in the light of a close reading of that text itself as well as other relevant sources ... This is not to say that scripture should conversely be assumed to be false and mortal, but it does open up the very real possibility that an interpreter may find scripture to contain statements that are, by his own standards, false, inconsistent, or trivial. Hence, a fully critical approach to the Bible, or to the Qur’an for that matter, is equivalent to the demand, frequently reiterated by Biblical scholars from the eighteenth century onwards, that the Bible is to be interpreted in the same manner as any other text.[2]

By contrast, to read a text historically would mean to

require the meanings ascribed to it to have been humanly ‘thinkable’ or ‘sayable’ within the text’s original historical environment, as far as the latter can be retrospectively reconstructed. At least for the mainstream of historical-critical scholarship, the notion of possibility underlying the words ‘thinkable’ and ‘sayable’ is informed by the principle of historical analogy – the assumption that past periods of history were constrained by the same natural laws as the present age, that the moral and intellectual abilities of human agents in the past were not radically different from ours, and that the behaviour of past agents, like that of contemporary ones, is at least partly explicable by recourse to certain social and economic factors.[2]

Application

Application of the historical-critical method, in biblical studies, investigates the books of the Hebrew Bible as well as the New Testament. Historical critics compare texts to any extant contemporaneous textual artifacts, i.e., other texts written around the same time. An example is that modern biblical scholarship has attempted to understand the Book of Revelation in its 1st-century historical context by identifying its literary genre with Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature.

In regard to the

synoptic problem, the relations among Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In some cases, such as with several Pauline epistles, higher criticism can confirm or challenge the traditional or received understanding of authorship.[citation needed
] Higher criticism understands the New Testament texts within a historical context: that is, that they are not adamantine but writings that express the traditio (what is handed down). The truth lies in the historical context.

In

classical studies, the 19th century approach to higher criticism set aside "efforts to fill ancient religion with direct meaning and relevance and devoted itself instead to the critical collection and chronological ordering of the source material."[8]
Thus, higher criticism, whether biblical, classical, Byzantine or medieval, focuses on the source documents to determine who wrote it and where and when it was written.

Historical criticism has also been applied to other religious writings from Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Islam.

Methodologies

Documentary Hypothesis
.
* includes most of Leviticus
† includes most of Deuteronomy
‡ "Deuteronomic history": Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings

Historical criticism comprises several disciplines, including

tradition criticism, and radical criticism
.

Source criticism

Main article: Source criticism

Source criticism is the search for the original sources which lie behind a given biblical text. It can be traced back to the 17th century French priest Richard Simon, and its most influential product is undoubtedly Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (1878), whose "insight and clarity of expression have left their mark indelibly on modern biblical studies."[9]

Source criticism: diagram of the two-source hypothesis, an explanation for the relationship of the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.

Form criticism

Main article: Form criticism

Form criticism breaks the Bible down into sections (pericopes, stories), which are analyzed and categorized by genres (prose or verse, letters, laws, court archives, war hymns, poems of lament etc.). The form critic then theorizes on the pericope's Sitz im Leben ("setting in life"), the setting in which it was composed and, especially, used.[10] Tradition history is a specific aspect of form criticism, which aims at tracing the way in which the pericopes entered the larger units of the biblical canon, especially the way in which they made the transition from oral to written form. The belief in the priority, stability and even detectability, of oral traditions is now recognised to be so deeply questionable as to render tradition history largely useless, but form criticism itself continues to develop as a viable methodology in biblical studies.[11]

Redaction criticism

Main article: Redaction criticism

Redaction criticism studies "the collection, arrangement, editing and modification of sources" and is frequently used to reconstruct the community and purposes of the authors of the text.[12]

History

Historical criticism as applied to the Bible began with Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677).[13] When it is applied to the Bible, the historical-critical method is distinct from the traditional, devotional approach.[14] In particular, while devotional readers concern themselves with the overall message of the Bible, historians examine the distinct messages of each book in the Bible.[14] Guided by the devotional approach, for example, Christians often combine accounts from different gospels into single accounts, but historians attempt to discern what is unique about each gospel, including how they differ.[14]

The phrase "higher criticism" became popular in Europe from the mid-18th century to the early 20th century to describe the work of such scholars as Jean Astruc (1684–1766), Johann Salomo Semler (1725–91), Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827), Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), and Wellhausen (1844–1918).[15] In academic circles, it now is the body of work properly considered "higher criticism", but the phrase is sometimes applied to earlier or later work using similar methods.

"Higher criticism" originally referred to the work of

Gottlieb Fichte, G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and the French rationalists
.

Such ideas influenced thought in

modernist crisis (1902–61). Some scholars, such as Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) have used higher criticism of the Bible to "demythologize
" it.

John Barton argues that the term "historical-critical method" conflates two nonidentical distinctions, and prefers the term "Biblical criticism":

Historical study... can be either critical or noncritical; and critical study can be historical or nonhistorical. This suggests that the term "historical-critical method" is an awkward hybrid and might better be avoided.[16]

Evangelical objections

Beginning in the nineteenth century, effort on the part of evangelical scholars and writers was expended in opposing theories of historical critical scholars. Evangelicals at the time accused the 'higher critics' of representing their dogmas as indisputable facts.[

O. T. Allis, C. S. Lewis,[18] Gerhard Maier, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Robert L. Thomas, F. David Farnell, William J. Abraham, J. I. Packer, G. K. Beale and Scott W. Hahn
rejected the historical-critical hermeneutical method as evangelicals.

Evangelical Christians have often partly attributed the decline of the Christian faith (i.e. declining church attendance, fewer conversions to faith in Christ and biblical devotion, denudation of the Bible's supernaturalism, syncretism of philosophy and Christian revelation etc.) in the developed world to the consequences of historical criticism. Acceptance of historical critical dogmas engendered conflicting representations of Protestant Christianity.[19] The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy in Article XVI affirms traditional inerrancy, but not as a response to 'negative higher criticism.'[20]

On the other hand, attempts to revive the extreme historical criticism of the Dutch Radical School by Robert M. Price, Darrell J. Doughty and Hermann Detering have also been met with strong criticism and indifference by mainstream scholars. Such positions are nowadays confined to the minor Journal of Higher Criticism and other fringe publications.[21]

See also

References

Citations

  1. ^
    ISBN 0-664-22314-1
    .
  2. ^
    ISBN 978-0-7486-9576-8
    .
  3. ^ Oliver, Isaac (2023). "The Historical-Critical Study of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Scriptures". In Dye, Guillame (ed.). Early Islam: The Sectarian Milieu of Late Antiquity?. Editions de l'Universite de Bruxelles.
  4. ^ a b c Soulen, Richard N. (2001). Handbook of Biblical Criticism. John Knox. p. 79.
  5. ISBN 978-0-385-51229-9
    .
  6. ^ Soulen, Richard N. (2001). Handbook of Biblical Criticism. John Knox. pp. 108, 190.
  7. ISBN 978-0-567-11130-2
    .
  8. ^ Burkert, Greek Religion (1985), Introduction.
  9. ^ Antony F. Campbell, SJ, "Preparatory Issues in Approaching Biblical Texts Archived 2007-09-28 at the Wayback Machine," in The Hebrew Bible in Modern Study, p. 6. Campbell renames source criticism as "origin criticism".
  10. ^ "BibleDudes: Biblical Studies: Form". bibledudes.com. Archived from the original on 2011-09-28. Retrieved 2008-03-02.
  11. ^ "Review of Biblical Literature" (PDF). www.bookreviews.org. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2021-11-19. Retrieved 2021-11-19.
  12. ^ "Religious Studies Department, Santa Clara University". Archived from the original on February 28, 2006.
  13. ^ Compare:
    ISBN 9780671201593
    . Retrieved 2017-07-23. ...the movement of higher criticism which Spinoza initiated has made into platitudes the propositions for which Spinoza risked his life.
  14. ^
    ISBN 0-06-117393-2
  15. ^ The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2007
  16. ^ John Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, Westminster John Knox Press (2007), p. 39.
  17. ^ https://ehrmanblog.org/how-do-we-know-what-most-scholars-think/ Archived 2021-07-30 at the Wayback Machine Quote: "First, what is taught about the New Testament to undergraduates at the colleges and universities that are NOT evangelical? You can pick any type of school you want, and I (and virtually every other scholar in the field) can tell you the answer, simply because I (and they) know (either personally or through reputation) virtually every senior (and many junior) scholar at those places. These scholars pretty much all toe the line that I indicate: about John, 1 Timothy, the dating of the Gospels, and most other critical issues."
  18. ^ Lewis, Clive Staples (1969). "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism". BYU Studies Quarterly. 9 (1).
  19. ^ "D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones on the Authority of Scripture—We Must Choose Between Two Positions". Albert Mohler. Archived from the original on 23 October 2021. Retrieved 23 October 2021.
  20. ^ Baptist Church, Duncan Street. "Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy". duncanstreetbaptistchurch.co.uk. Archived from the original on 2023-01-22. Retrieved 2023-01-22.
  21. ISBN 978-0-06-208994-6. Archived
    from the original on 2022-08-08. Retrieved 2021-11-17.

Sources

External links
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Historical_criticism&oldid=1213825081"