As such, this 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. [86], This contributes to textual criticism being one of the most contentious areas of biblical criticism, as well as the largest, with scholars such as Arthur Verrall referring to it as the "fine and contentious art". [77] Variants are not evenly distributed throughout any set of texts. [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". This theory argues that fragments of documents rather than continuous, coherent documents are the sources for the Pentateuch. [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. According to Simon, parts of the Old Testament were not written by individuals at all, but by scribes recording the[which?] [32]:4952 The fragmentary theory was a later understanding of Wellhausen produced by form criticism. Over time the texts descended from 'A' that share the error, and those from 'B' that do not share it, will diverge further, but later texts will still be identifiable as descended from one or the other because of the presence or absence of that original mistake. In rejecting religious bias, they embraced another set of biases without recognizing they were doing so. [4]:22 It begins with the understanding that biblical criticism's focus on historicity produced a distinction between the meaning of what the text says and what it is about (what it historically references). [22]:298 A similar view was later advocated by the Primitive Methodist biblical scholar A. S. Peake (18651929). It remained the dominant theory until Wilhelm Schmidt produced a study on "native monotheism" in 1912 titled. [11]:214, Communications scholar James A. Herrick (b. 1954) says that even though most scholars agree that biblical criticism evolved out of the German Enlightenment, there are some historians of biblical criticism that have found "strong direct links" with British deism. [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. [4]:108, A twentyfirst century view of biblical criticism's origins, that traces it to the Reformation, is a minority position, but the Reformation is the source of biblical criticism's advocacy of freedom from external authority imposing its views on biblical interpretation. [96]:20, As a type of literary criticism, canonical criticism has both theological and literary roots. There is some consensus among twenty-first century textual critics that the various locations traditionally assigned to the text types are incorrect and misleading. [168]:136,137,141, Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Catholic theology avoided biblical criticism because of its reliance on rationalism, preferring instead to engage in traditional exegesis, based on the works of the Church Fathers. 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, [167]:29 There have also been conservative Protestants who accepted biblical criticism, and this too is part of biblical criticism's legacy. [81]:213 Clark's claims were criticized by those who supported Griesbach's principles. [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". 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. Meanwhile, post-modernism and post-critical interpretation began questioning whether biblical criticism had a role and function at all. While taking a stand against discrimination in society, Semler also wrote theology that was strongly negative toward the Jews and Judaism. It was derived from a combination of both source and form criticism. [37]:2 African-American biblical criticism is based on liberation theology and black theology, and looks for what is potentially liberating in the texts. Destructive criticism on the other hand . [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. 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. Hence, "Wellhausen's theology is based upon an anthropological theory which most anthropologists no longer endorse". Higher criticism is an umbrella term that encompasses the more sophisticated types of biblical criticism, such as source criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism. [186]:83 The growing anti-semitism in Germany of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the perception that higher criticism was an entirely Protestant Christian pursuit, and the sense that many Bible critics were not impartial academics but were proponents of supersessionism, prompted Schechter to describe "Higher Criticism as Higher Anti-semitism". William Robertson Smith (18461894) is an example of a nineteenth century evangelical who believed historical criticism was a legitimate outgrowth of the Protestant Reformation's focus on the biblical text. 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. [25]:34 This quest focused largely on the teachings of Jesus as interpreted by existentialist philosophy. -modern historians are more objective than their ancient counterparts, suspicious of the supernatural, establishes historicity of a biblical text by means of comparative study (religion, historiography, archaeology) Source Criticism: -assumes isolating literary sources in a written document unlocks meaning of a text [27]:15, Reimarus's controversial work garnered a response from Semler in 1779: Beantwortung der Fragmente eines Ungenannten (Answering the Fragments of an Unknown). [104] By the end of the 1970s and into the 1990s, "one major study after another, like a series of hammer blows, has rejected the main claims of the Documentary theory, and the criteria on the basis of which they were argued". [91], Latin scholar Albert C. Clark challenged Griesbach's view of shorter texts in 1914. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. [143]:374,410, New Testament scholar Donald Guthrie highlights a flaw in the literary critical approach to the Gospels: the genre of the Gospels has not been fully determined. 5) Constructive Criticism : This type of Criticism aims to show the purpose of something which is but achieved by a different approach. [125] Instead, in the 1970s, New Testament scholar E. P. Sanders wrote that: "There are no hard and fast laws of the development of the Synoptic tradition On all counts the tradition developed in opposite directions. [24]:820, Redaction critics assume an extreme skepticism toward the historicity of Jesus and the gospels, just as form critics do, which has been seen by some scholars as a bias. 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. It has often been used in attempts to categorize the supposed sources within the Torah or Books of Moses (Genesis through Deuteronomy . 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). [173]:301. Wellhausen's theory went virtually unchallenged until the 1970s, when it began to be heavily criticized. 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. 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. Literary criticism also offers many possibilities for enriching the devotional and . 2 Logical criticism. For example, a scribe might drop one or more letters, skip a word or line, write one letter for another, transpose letters, and so on. [25]:34, After 1970, biblical criticism began to change radically and pervasively. This is now the accepted scholarly view. [154]:166 Sharon Betsworth says Robert Alter's work is what adapted New Criticism to the Bible. The dates of these manuscripts are generally accepted to range from c.110125 (the 52 papyrus) to the introduction of printing in Germany in the fifteenth century. [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. They represent every book except Esther, though most books appear only in fragmentary form. 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. Where form critics fracture the biblical elements into smaller and smaller individual pieces, redaction critics attempt to interpret the whole literary unit. Scholars began writing in their common languages making their works available to a larger public.[14]. A brief treatment of biblical criticism follows. [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. [114]:41 Q allowed the two-source hypothesis to emerge as the best supported of the various synoptic solutions. [22]:298[177] The dogmatic constitution Dei verbum ("Word of God"), approved by the Second Vatican Council and promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965 furtherly sanctioned biblical criticism. These three approaches have three different emphases. Theological studies is topical. The Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible), and the New Testament, as distinct bodies of literature, each raise their own problems of interpretation - the two are therefore generally studied separately. In the 1980s, Phyllis Trible and Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza reframed biblical criticism by challenging the supposed disinterest and objectivity it claimed for itself and exposing how ideological-theological stances had played a critical role in interpretation. [81]:212215 Based on his study of Cicero, Clark argued omission was a more common scribal error than addition, saying "A text is like a traveler who goes from one inn to another losing an article of luggage at each halt". Source criticism attempts to determine the various sources, oral or written, that were used to write a particular book. This eschatological approach to understanding Jesus has since become universal in modern biblical criticism. [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. It "rejects both traditional historicism's marginalization of literature and New Criticism's enshrinement of the literary text in a timeless dimension beyond history". It is dated around 850 B.C. [169], The Church showed strong opposition to biblical criticism during that period. Biblical criticism is also known as higher criticism (as opposed to "lower" textual criticism), historical criticism, and the historical-critical method. Higher criticism, whether biblical, classical . Don Richardson writes that Wellhausen's theory was, in part, a derivative of an anthropological theory popular in the nineteenth century known as Tylor's theory. Contents 1 Aesthetic criticism. [54]:69[97]:5 These sources are supposed to have been edited together by a late final Redactor (R) who is only imprecisely understood. According to Old Testament scholar Edward Young (19071968), Astruc believed that Moses assembled the first book of the Pentateuch, the book of Genesis, using the hereditary accounts of the Hebrew people. [101], Later scholars added to and refined Wellhausen's theory. [58] New historicism, a literary theory that views history through literature, also developed. The questioning of religious authority common to German Pietism contributed to the rise of biblical criticism. Historical criticism is often applied to ancient records. [68] In this stronghold of support for Bultmann, Ksemann claimed "Bultmann's skepticism about what could be known about the historical Jesus had been too extreme". [4]:21[note 2] Globalization also brought different worldviews, while other academic fields such as Near Eastern studies, sociology, and anthropology became active in expanding biblical criticism as well. Evaluation of the Scriptures to uncover evidence about historical matters was formerly called higher criticism, a term first used with reference to writings of the German biblical scholar J.G. These new points of view created awareness that the Bible can be rationally interpreted from many different perspectives. [138]:9697 It focuses on discovering how and why the literary units were originally edited"redacted"into their final forms. "Higher" criticism is used in contrast with Lower criticism (or textual criticism), whose goal is to determine the original form of a text from among the variants. For example, the seventeenth-century French priest Richard Simon (16381712) was an early proponent of the theory that Moses could not have been the single source of the entire Pentateuch. Another problem is posed by dating (see note 4. Tylor's theory had, in the meantime, been picked up and used in other fields beyond anthropology. "[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. [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. ", "Truth or Meaning: Ricoeur versus Frei on Biblical Narrative". biblical criticism, discipline that studies textual, compositional, and historical questions surrounding the Old and New Testaments. [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. [142][143]:34 Hans Frei proposed that "biblical narratives should be evaluated on their own terms" rather than by taking them apart in the manner we evaluate philosophy or historicity. [130]:276278 What Kelber refers to as the "astounding myopia" of the form critics has revived interest in memory as an analytical category within biblical criticism. [201]:73 Many of these early postmodernist views came from France following World War II. [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. [14] Old orthodoxies were questioned and radical views tolerated. [201]:74 Biblical scholar A. K. M. Adam says postmodernism has three general features: 1) it denies any privileged starting point for truth; 2) it is critical of theories that attempt to explain the "totality of reality;" and 3) it attempts to show that all ideals are grounded in ideological, economic or political self-interest. Schmidt asserted these small units were remnants and evidence of the oral tradition that preceded the writing of the gospels. 5 Negative criticism. They made a lasting change in the practice of biblical criticism by making it clear it could exist independently of theology and faith. This qualitative analysis involves three primary dimensions: (1) analyzing the act of criticism and what it does; (2) analyzing what goes on within the rhetoric being analyzed and what is created by that rhetoric; and (3) understanding the processes involved in all of it. [4]:22, There is no general agreement among scholars on how to periodize the various quests for the historical Jesus. [152]:5, As a form of literary criticism, narrative criticism approaches scripture as story. [1] His disciples then stole the body and invented the story of the resurrection for personal gain. Historical-biblical criticism includes a wide range of approaches and questions within four major methodologies: textual, source, form . What are the four types of biblical criticism? The differences between them are called variants. [203]:120. [2]:45 Neutrality was seen as a defining requirement. These changes would both "complement and reconfigure conventional African American religious life". Five major categories of biblical criticism, described, including the Documentary. [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. [13]:viiiix, Textual criticism involves examination of the text itself and all associated manuscripts with the aim of determining the original text. He saw it as a "necessary tool to enable intelligent churchgoers" to understand the Bible, and was a pioneer in establishing the final form of the supplementary hypothesis of the documentary hypothesis. Lower criticism is an attempt to find the original wording of the text since we no longer have the original writings. [192]:1 Three phases of feminist biblical interpretation are connected to the three phases, or 'waves', of the movement. 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". [147]:156 (5) "Canonical criticism is overtly theological in its approach". [96]:208[119] One example is Basil Christopher Butler's challenge to the legitimacy of two-source theory, arguing it contains a Lachmann fallacy[120]:110 that says the two-source theory loses cohesion when it is acknowledged that no source can be established for Mark. In Old Testament studies, source criticism is generally focused on identifying sources of a single text.
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