Higher criticism

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Higher criticism is a name given to critical studies of the Bible that treat it as a text created by human beings at a particular historical time and for various human motives, in contrast with the treatment of the Bible as the inerrant word of God. The phrase "lower criticism" was used for attempts to interpret Biblical texts based only on the internal evidence from the texts themselves. The Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466? - 1536) is usually credited as the first to study the Bible in this light,[1] although many of his methods are also found in the much earlier writing of Saint Augustine (354 - 430).

The higher criticism "studies the biblical text in the same fashion as it would study any other ancient text and comments upon it as an expression of human discourse".[2]

The phrase "the 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 (mid-18th cent.), Johann Salomo Semler (1725-91), Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752-1827), Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), and Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918).[3] In academic circles today, this is the body of work properly considered "the higher criticism", though the phrase is sometimes applied to earlier or later work using similar methods.

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[edit] Lower criticism

None of the original books of the New Testament have survived to modern times. All that exists are copies of the original documents. Lower criticism was developed in an attempt to find out what the original looked like.

For example, Josephus employed scribes to copy his Antiquities of the Jews. As the scribes copied the Antiquities, they made mistakes. The copies of these copies also had the mistakes. Each generation of copies contained errors, but not necessarily more than the previous generation as errors would be fixed when caught by scribes.

When an error consists of something being left out, it is called a deletion. When something was added, it is called an interpolation.

Today, none of Josephus' original work survives, but different families of texts have survived. Lower Criticism studies these surviving families, particularly the differences among them. Scholars are then able to piece together a good idea of what the original looked like. The more surviving copies, the more accurately they deduce information about the original.

[edit] Higher criticism

Once lower critics have done their job and we have a good idea of what the original text looked like, higher critics can then compare this text with the writing of other authors.

Scholars try to understand whether the author is an eyewitness, or whether he is basing his work on primary or even secondary sources. They also try to understand the bias of the writer, which will give us hints to why he focuses on one subject but omits another. Higher criticism is divided up into sub-categories, including primarily source criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism.

An example of higher (source) criticism at work would be the study of the Synoptic problem. Higher critics noticed that the three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, were very similar, indeed, at times identical. The dominant theory to account for the duplication is called the two-source hypothesis. This suggests that Mark was the first gospel to be written, and that it was probably based on a combination of early oral and written material. Matthew and Luke were written at a later time, and relied primarily on two different sources: Mark and a written collection of Jesus's sayings, which has been given the name Q by scholars . This latter document has now been lost, but at least some of its material can be deduced indirectly, namely through the material that is common in Mathew and Luke but absent in Mark. In addition to Mark and Q, the writers of Mathew and Luke made some use of additional sources, which would account for the material that is unique to each of them.

The documentary hypothesis, which attempts to chart the origins of the Torah, is another key issue in higher criticism.

[edit] Roman Catholic view

Pope Leo XIII (1810 - 1903) condemned secular biblical scholarship in his encyclical Providentissimus Deus;[4]. but in 1945 Pope Pius XII gave license to the new scholarship in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu: "[T]extual criticism ... [is] quite rightly employed in the case of the Sacred Books ... Let the interpreter then, with all care and without neglecting any light derived from recent research, endeavor to determine the peculiar character and circumstances of the sacred writer, the age in which he lived, the sources written or oral to which he had recourse and the forms of expression he employed." [5] Today the modern Catechism states: "#110 In order to discover the sacred authors' intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression."

[edit] Protestant Christian view

Martin Luther, leader of the Protestant Reformation, believed strongly in the literal truth of scripture. He wrote, "All the articles of our Christian faith, which God has revealed to us in His Word, are in presence of reason sheerly impossible, absurd and false." But at other times, he accepted the authority of reason, so long as it did not contradict scripture. "Unless I am convicted by the testimony of Sacred Scripture or by evident reason... my conscience is captive to the Word of God." He even used some of the methods that would later be called "higher criticism" in his study of the Bible. He wrote, "The discourses of the Prophets were none of them regularly committed to writing at the time; their disciples and hearers collected them subsequently. ... Solomon's Proverbs were not the work of Solomon."[6]

Around the end of the 18th century Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, "the founder of modern Old Testament criticism", produced works of "investigation of the inner nature of the Old Testament with the help of the Higher Criticism". Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher also influenced the development of Higher Criticism.

A group of German biblical scholars at Tübingen University formed the Tübingen school of theology under the leadership of Ferdinand Christian Baur, with important works being produced by Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach and David Strauss. In the early 19th century they sought independent confirmation of the events related in the Bible through Hegelian analysis of the historical records of the Middle East from Christian and Old Testament times.[7][8]

Their ideas were brought to England by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, then in 1846 George Eliot translated David Strauss's sensational Leben Jesu as the Life of Jesus Critically Examined, a quest for the historical Jesus. In 1854 she followed this with a translation of Feuerbach's even more radical Essence of Christianity which held that the idea of God was created by man to express the divine within himself, though Strauss attracted most of the controversy.[7] The loose grouping of Broad Churchmen in the Church of England was influenced by the German higher critics. In particular, Benjamin Jowett visited Germany and studied the work of Baur in the 1840s, then in 1866 published his book on The Epistles of St Paul, arousing theological opposition. He then collaborated with six other theologians to publish their Essays and Reviews in 1860. The central essay was Jowett's On the Interpretation of Scripture which argued that the Bible should be studied to find the authors' original meaning in their own context rather than expecting it to provide a modern scientific text.[9][10]

Today, some Protestants oppose the methods of the higher criticism, and hold that the Bible is divinely inspired and incapable of error, at least in its original form.[11]

[edit] Response to the higher criticism

Many Christians reacted toward the so called "higher criticism" with hostility, and there are a number of Christian books still in print today designed to refute the claims of higher critics.[12] However, most serious Christian scholars accept many of the methods and conclusions that were so shocking when they were first introduced.

As an example, consider the treatment of Noah's Ark in various editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In the first edition, in 1771, the story of Noah and the Ark is treated as essentially factual, and the following scientific evidence is offered, "...Buteo and Kircher have proved geometrically, that, taking the common cubit as a foot and a half, the ark was abundantly sufficient for all the animals supposed to be lodged in it..., the number of species of animals will be found much less than is generally imagined, not amounting to an hundred species of quadrupeds... ." By the eighth edition, however, the encyclopedia says of the Noah story, "The insuperable difficulties connected with the belief that all other existing species of animals were provided for in the ark are obviated by adopting the suggestion of Bishop Stillingfleet, approved by Matthew Poole...and others, that the Deluge did not extend beyond the region of the earth then inhabited..." By the ninth edition, in 1875, there is no attempt to reconcile the Noah story with scientific fact, and it is presented without comment. In the 1960 edition, in the article Ark, we find the following, "Before the days of "higher criticism" and the rise of the modern scientific views as to the origin of the species, there was much discussion among the learned, and many ingenious and curious theories were advanced, as to the number of animals on the ark..."[13]

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, p. 125, Touchstone, 1961, ISBN 0-671-20159-X,
  2. ^ Interpretation of the Bible
  3. ^ The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2007
  4. ^ Fogarty, page 40.
  5. ^ Encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, 1943.
  6. ^ Will Durant, The Reformation, Simon and Schuster, 1957, p. 361-371
  7. ↑ a b Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin (1988). The Higher Critics. The Victorian Web. Retrieved on 2007-11-06.
  8. ^ Tubingen School. Retrieved on 2007-11-06.
  9. ^ Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin (1988). Essays and Reviews (1860). The Victorian Web. Retrieved on 2007-11-06.
  10. ^ Josef L. Altholz, Professor of History, University of Minnesota (1976). The Warfare of Conscience with Theology. The Mind and Art of Victorian England. Victorian Web. Retrieved on 2007-11-06.
  11. ^ http://www.bible-researcher.com/chicago1.html
  12. ^ Gary North, The Hoax of Higher Criticism, Dominion Press, 1990, ISBN 0930464303, ISBN-13 978-0930464301.
  13. ^ All quotations from the article "Ark" in the 1960 Encyclopedia Britannica

[edit] References

  • Gerald P. Fogarty, S.J. American Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A History from the Early Republic to Vatican II, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1989, ISBN 0-06-062666-6. Nihil obstat by Raymond E. Brown, S.S., and Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J.

[edit] External links

de:Historisch-kritische Methode

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