[171] Similarly, the dogmatic constitution Dei Filius ("Son of God"), approved by the First Vatican Council in 1871, rejected biblical criticism, reaffirming that the Bible was written by God and that it was inerrant. Understanding and evaluating modern critical approaches to the study of the Old Testament can be a very real problem for any theological student; however, for the evangelical student, committed to the belief that the Bible is the Word of God, the problems raised are manifold. In reality, biblical criticism or various critical approaches to the Bible are not about attacking the Bible but rather relate to the careful, academic study of it. [35]:89 According to Robert M. Grant and David Tracy, "One of the most striking features of the development of biblical interpretation during the nineteenth century was the way in which philosophical presuppositions implicitly guided it". [25]:888 It began with the publication of Hermann Samuel Reimarus's work after his death. 2. [74]), These texts were all written by hand, by copying from another handwritten text, so they are not alike in the manner of printed works. This theory argues that fragments of documents rather than continuous, coherent documents are the sources for the Pentateuch. Biblical criticism, in particular higher criticism, covers a variety of methods used since the Enlightenment in the early 18th century as scholars began to apply to biblical documents the same methods and perspectives which had already been applied to other literary and philosophical texts. [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. The early critics were all male. 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. Where form critics fracture the biblical elements into smaller and smaller individual pieces, redaction critics attempt to interpret the whole literary unit. It "rejects both traditional historicism's marginalization of literature and New Criticism's enshrinement of the literary text in a timeless dimension beyond history". [102]:32 This accounts for diversity but not structural and chronological consistency. [39] In The Essence of Christianity (1900), Adolf Von Harnack (18511930) described Jesus as a reformer. another term for biblical exegesis. [163]:93, On one hand, Rogerson says that "historical criticism is not inherently inimical to Christian belief". JEDP are initials representing the four hypothetical sources as follows: J awist (or Yahwist, from Yahweh) - describes God as Yahweh, starting in Gen 2:4, it includes much of Genesis and parts of Exodus and Numbers. Thus, we may say that the Bible itself may help to retrieve the notion of a sacred text. Thus, the geographical labels should be used with caution; some scholars prefer to refer to the text types as "textual clusters" instead. Emendation is the attempt to eliminate the errors which are found even in the best manuscripts. [61][62] Sanders also advanced study of the historical Jesus by putting Jesus's life in the context of first-century Second-Temple Judaism. Source criticism searches the text for evidence of their original sources. [151], In the last half of the twentieth century, historical critics began to recognize that being limited to the historical meant the Bible was not being studied in the manner of other ancient writings. [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". [152]:2,3 According to Mark Allen Powell the difficulty in understanding the gospels on their own terms is determining what those terms are: "The problem with treating the gospels 'just like any other book' is that the gospels are not like any other book". [32]:38, One can see the Supplementary hypothesis as yet another evolution of Wellhausen's theory that solidified in the 1970s. [4]:vii,21 New criticism, which developed as an adjunct to literary criticism, was concerned with the particulars of style. [37]:2 African-American biblical criticism is based on liberation theology and black theology, and looks for what is potentially liberating in the texts. [81]:205 Sorting out the wealth of source material is complex, so textual families were sorted into categories tied to geographical areas. Schmidt asserted these small units were remnants and evidence of the oral tradition that preceded the writing of the gospels. Interest waned again by the 1970s. 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 their separate origins. [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. [201]:67 It questions anything that claims "objectively secured foundations, universals, metaphysics, or analytical dualism". While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. It was derived from a combination of both source and form criticism. [178], Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer and Roland E. Murphy were the most famous Catholic scholars to apply biblical criticism and the historical-critical method in analyzing the Bible: together, they authored The Jerome Biblical Commentary and The New Jerome Biblical Commentary the later of which is still one of the most used textbooks in Catholic Seminaries of the United States. Higher criticism: the study of the sources and literary methods employed by the biblical authors. [147]:156 (5) "Canonical criticism is overtly theological in its approach". [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. [97]:62[98]:5 Old Testament scholar Karl Graf (18151869) suggested an additional priestly source in 1866; by 1878, Wellhausen had incorporated this source, P, into his theory, which is thereafter sometimes referred to as the GrafWellhausen hypothesis. Before anything else, let me say that I do not reject all "biblical . [186]:42,83, One of the earliest historical-critical Jewish scholars of Pentateuchal studies was M. M. Kalisch, who began work in the nineteenth century. [203]:119 Subject matter is identical to verbal meaning and is found in plot and nowhere else. "[27]:22,16 According to Schweitzer, Reimarus was wrong in his assumption that Jesus's end-of-world eschatology was "earthly and political in character" but was right in viewing Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher, as evidenced by his repeated warnings about the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of time. He says all Bible readings are contextual, in that readers bring with them their own context: perceptions and experiences harvested from social and cultural situations. [54]:495 The biblical theology movement of the 1950s produced debate between Old Testament and New Testament scholars over the unity of the Bible. . This essay will elucidate these approaches along with some critical observations. [citation needed] Devout Christians have long regarded their Bible as the perfect word of God (and devout Jews have held the Hebrew Bible similarly in high regard). [122]:16,17 Susan Niditch concluded from her orality studies that: "no longer are many scholars convinced that the most seemingly oral-traditional or formulaic pieces are earliest in date". Based on their understanding of folklore, form critics believed the early Christian communities formed the sayings and teachings of Jesus themselves, according to their needs (their "situation in life"), and that each form could be identified by the situation in which it had been created and vice versa. [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. [53][54]:443, The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran in 1948 renewed interest in archaeology's potential contributions to biblical studies, but it also posed challenges to biblical criticism. [127]:42,70[note 7] For example, the period of the twentieth century dominated by form criticism is marked by Bultmann's extreme skepticism concerning what can be known about the historical Jesus and his sayings. During the latter half of the twentieth century, field studies of cultures with existing oral traditions directly impacted many of these presuppositions. They derived them by two methods: (a) by assuming that purity of form indicates antiquity, and (b) by determining how Matthew and Luke used Mark and Q, and how the later literature used the canonical gospels. [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. What are the 10 types of literary criticism? Redaction criticism later developed as a derivative of both source and form criticism. [179][180] The Jerome Biblical Commentary for the Twenty-First Century, a third fully revised edition, will be published in 2022 and will be edited by John J. Collins, Gina Hens-Piazza, Barbara Reid and Donald Senior. Yet any of these principlesand their conclusionscan be contested. "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 steady growth of an oral tradition in stages; significant steps were sometimes large and sudden; the length of time needed for the 'laws' of oral transmission to operate, such as the centuries of Old Testament or Homeric transmission, was greater than that taken by the gospels; even the existence of such laws was questioned Further the transition from individual units of oral tradition into a written document had an important effect on the interpretation of the material. What are the four types of biblical criticism? This was due to a shift in perception of the critical effort as being possible on the basis of premises other than liberal Protestantism. Historical-biblical criticism includes a wide range of approaches and questions within four major methodologies: textual, source, form, and literary criticism. [157]:121 The most profound legacy of the loss of biblical authority is the formation of the modern world itself, according to religion and ethics scholar Jeffrey Stout. Destructive criticism on the other hand . This indicates additional separate sources for Matthew and for Luke. [138]:9697 It focuses on discovering how and why the literary units were originally edited"redacted"into their final forms. The following forms are common to folklore: legends, superstitions, songs, tales, proverbs, riddles, spells, nursery rhymes; pseudo-scientific lore about weather, plants, animals; customary activities at births, marriages, deaths; traditional dances and forms of drama. 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. [199], New historicism emerged as traditional historical biblical criticism changed. The roughly 900 manuscripts found at Qumran include the oldest extant manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. The Quest for the Historical Jesus- [203]:120. [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. 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. Since 1966 the United Bible Societies have published four editions of the Greek New Testament designed for translators and students. 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". ", continues to be debated by theologians and historians such as Wolfgang Stegemann[de], Gerd Theissen and Craig S. The word "criticism" is not to be taken in the negative sense of attempting to denigrate the Bible, although this motive is found in its history. 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. [43] While at Gttingen, Johannes Weiss (18631914) wrote his most influential work on the apocalyptic proclamations of Jesus. Higher criticism deals with the genuineness of the text. Tindal's view of Christianity as a "mere confirmation of natural religion and his resolute denial of the supernatural" led him to conclude that "revealed religion is superfluous". 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. 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. In fact, like the related term "literary criticism," it refers not to hostility towards the text, but the application of one's critical faculties to reading it. [2]:33 So much biblical criticism has been done as history, and not theology, that it is sometimes called the "historical-critical method" or historical-biblical criticism (or sometimes higher criticism) instead of just biblical criticism. Most scholars believe the German Enlightenment (c.1650 c.1800) led to the creation of biblical criticism, although some assert that its roots reach back to the Reformation. [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. Hermeneutics and Bible Study Methods: A study of principles or sound interpretation and application of the Bible, including analysis of presuppositions, general rules and specialized principles for the various biblical genre and phenomena and the development of an exegetical method. But if form criticism embodies an essential insight, it will continue. 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. Textual critics study the differences between these families to piece together what the original looked like. community's oral tradition. [17]:13, The biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis (17171791) advocated the use of other Semitic languages in addition to Hebrew to understand the Old Testament, and in 1750, wrote the first modern critical introduction to the New Testament. Textual criticism examines biblical manuscripts and their content to identify what the original text probably said. 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 - collectively known as the Pentateuch. They accept that many texts have been composed over long periods of time, but the canonical critic wishes "to interpret the last edition of a biblical book" and then relate books to each other. [45]:10, The Old Quest was not considered closed until Albert Schweitzer (18751965) wrote Von Reimarus zu Wrede which was published in English as The Quest of the Historical Jesus in 1910. [63] The third period of focused study on the historical Jesus began in 1988. The amendment has a basis in the text, which is believed to be corrupted, but is nevertheless a matter of personal judgment. E lohist (from Elohim) - primarily describes God as El or Elohim . The term "biblical criticism" refers to the process of establishing the plain meaning of biblical texts and of assessing their historical accuracy. [76], The exact number of variants is disputed, but the more texts survive, the more likely there will be variants of some kind. Following Pius's death, Pope Benedict XV once again condemned rationalistic biblical criticism in his papal encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus ("Paraclete Spirit"). Wellhausen's and Kaufmann's methods were similar yet their conclusions were opposed. This sets it apart from earlier, pre-critical methods; from the anti-critical methods of those who oppose criticism-based study; from later post-critical orientation, and from the many different types of criticism which biblical criticism transformed into in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Theological studies is topical. Textual criticism is concerned with the basic task of establishing, as far as possible, the original text of the documents on the basis of the available . [154]:166 Scholars such as Robert Alter and Frank Kermode sought to teach readers to "appreciate the Bible itself by training attention on its artfulnesshow [the text] orchestrates sound, repetition, dialogue, allusion, and ambiguity to generate meaning and effect". history [157]:129 The Bible's cultural impact is studied in multiple academic fields, producing not only the cultural Bible, but the modern academic Bible as well. [191]:9 Feminist scholars of second-wave feminism appropriated it. [160] Part of the legacy of biblical criticism is that, as it rose, it led to the decline of biblical authority. MacKenzie and Kaltner say "scholarly analysis is very much in a state of flux". 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. Another problem is posed by dating (see note 4. [4]:22 One way of understanding this change is to see it as a cultural enterprise. [145]:4 Canonical criticism does not reject historical criticism, but it does reject its claim to "unique validity".