[199], New historicism emerged as traditional historical biblical criticism changed. Biblical criticism - Wikipedia Source criticism searches the text for evidence of their original sources. 5. [37]:2 African-American biblical criticism is based on liberation theology and black theology, and looks for what is potentially liberating in the texts. Criticism by outsiders accused the phenomenon as manufactured emotionalism and sensationalism. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Theological studies is topical. Historical criticism is often applied to ancient records. A monk called John Cassian (360-435 AD), took the discussion to the next level by bringing both kinds of interpretation together. 20. Historical-biblical criticism includes a wide range of approaches and questions within four major methodologies: textual, source, form, and literary criticism. 5) Constructive Criticism : This type of Criticism aims to show the purpose of something which is but achieved by a different approach. When examining a text, the term criticism is a reference to analysis, related to the idea of a "critique.". Recension is the selection of the most trustworthy evidence on which to base a text. Robinson. [102]:32 Deuteronomy is seen as a single coherent document with a uniformity of style and language in spite of also having different literary strata. The labor of many centuries has expelled us from this edenic womb and its wellsprings of life and knowledge [The] Bible has lost its ancient authority". [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. [147]:156, Rhetorical criticism is also a type of literary criticism. [23] Hugo Grotius (15831645) paved the way for comparative religion studies by analyzing New Testament texts in the light of Classical, Jewish and early Christian writings. Unit 1 - Bible - these are notes over lecture videos, close readings in [9]:166168[95]:7,8, Examples of source criticism include its two most influential and well-known theories, the first concerning the origins of the Pentateuch in the Old Testament (Wellhausen's hypothesis); and the second tracing the sources of the four gospels of the New Testament (two-source hypothesis). [102]:93, Advocates of Wellhausen's hypothesis contend it accounts well for the differences and duplication found in the Pentateuchal books. [13]:43[15] Semler argued for an end to all doctrinal assumptions, giving historical criticism its nonsectarian character. 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, Biblical criticism The word criticism does not mean to be negative or critical of the bible but rather refers to the application of scholarly methods and approaches to study, analyze, and interpret biblical texts. [96]:147. Reimarus distinguished between what Jesus taught and how he is portrayed in the New Testament. E lohist (from Elohim) - primarily describes God as El or Elohim . Any explanation offered must "account for (a) what is common to all the Gospels; (b) what is common to any two of them; (c) what is peculiar to each". Most forms of biblical criticism are relevant to many other bodies of literature. what are the four types of biblical criticism - iccleveland.org [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. [4]:204 A variant is simply any variation between two texts. What are the four types of biblical criticism? [14]:117 117,149150,188191, George Ricker Berry says the term "higher criticism", which is sometimes used as an alternate name for historical criticism, was first used by Eichhorn in his three-volume work Einleitung ins Alte Testament (Introduction to the Old Testament) published between 1780 and 1783. [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. Next, a scholarly effort to reclaim the Bible's theological relevance began. [188] Bible professor Benjamin D. Sommer says it is "among the most precise and detailed commentaries on the legal texts [Leviticus and Deuteronomy] ever written". This eschatological approach to understanding Jesus has since become universal in modern biblical criticism. This theory argues that fragments of documents rather than continuous, coherent documents are the sources for the Pentateuch. Using the perspectives, theories, models, and research of the social sciences to determine what social norms may have influenced the growth of biblical tradition, it is similar to historical biblical criticism in its goals and methods and has less in common with literary critical approaches. [201]:73 Many of these early postmodernist views came from France following World War II. [124]:296298, Form critics assumed the early Church was heavily influenced by the Hellenistic culture that surrounded first-century Palestine, but in the 1970s, Sanders, as well as Gerd Theissen, sparked new rounds of studies that included anthropological and sociological perspectives, reestablishing Judaism as the predominant influence on Jesus, Paul, and the New Testament. The scientific principles on which modern criticism is based depend in part upon viewing the Bible as a suitable object for literary study, rather than as an exclusively sacred text. [143]:8,9 Critics of rhetorical analysis say there is a "lack of a well-developed methodology" and that it has a "tendency to be nothing more than an exercise in stylistics". [82]:213[note 3], Forerunners of modern textual criticism can be found in both early Rabbinic Judaism and in the early church. [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". Scholars continue to discuss and debate the evidence for variants of all kinds. [153], Narrative criticism was first used to study the New Testament in the 1970s, with the works of David Rhoads, Jack D. Kingsbury, R. Alan Culpepper, and Robert C. [113]:86, If this document existed, it has now been lost, but some of its material can be deduced indirectly. [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. history [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. [138]:98[13]:181 Form critics saw the synoptic writers as mere collectors and focused on the Sitz im Leben as the creator of the texts, whereas redaction critics have dealt more positively with the Gospel writers, asserting an understanding of them as theologians of the early church. (PDF) Literary Approaches to the Bible - ResearchGate . [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". 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". Biblical Criticism: Introduction But Fr. [16][17]:1315 Matthew Tindal (16571733), as part of British deism, asserted that Jesus taught an undogmatic natural religion that the Church later changed into its own dogmatic form. Biblical literature - Critical methods | Britannica Lower criticism: the discipline and study of the actual wording of the Bible; a quest for textual purity and understanding. MacKenzie and Kaltner say "scholarly analysis is very much in a state of flux". [4]:161 In the late nineteenth century, they sought to understand Judaism and Christianity within the overall history of religion. Thus, the geographical labels should be used with caution; some scholars prefer to refer to the text types as "textual clusters" instead. 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. [27]:25 Respect for Semler temporarily repressed the dissemination and study of Reimarus's work, but Semler's response had no long-term effect. [87][88][89] It uses specialized methodologies, enough specialized terms to create its own lexicon,[90] and is guided by a number of principles. The differences between them are called variants. 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. [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. In Old Testament studies, source criticism is generally focused on identifying sources of a single text. The errancy of the Bible, the fact of no extant originals, the compilation and inclusion of the books of the Bible are almost never discussed from the Pulpit, leaving the ordinary Christian in the dark. [194]:56 It has a focus on the indigenous and local with an eye toward recovering those aspects of culture that Colonialism had erased or suppressed. For some, the future of form criticism is not an issue: it has none. The Absurdity of "Higher Criticism" of the Gospels - Roger E. Olson The student body was hurt by these accusations as it seemed to impugn their motives and sincerity. 7 Destructive criticism. [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. [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". Biblical studies is the study of the Bible. [192]:1 Three phases of feminist biblical interpretation are connected to the three phases, or 'waves', of the movement. German pietism played a role in its development, as did British deism, with its greatest influences being rationalism and Protestant scholarship. [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. Biblical scholar B.H. Streeter used this insight to refine and expand the two-source theory into a four-source theory in 1925. [54]:99 Frei was one of several external influences that moved biblical criticism from a historical to a literary focus. [94]:2 He did this by identifying repetitions of certain events, such as parts of the flood story that are repeated three times, indicating the possibility of three sources. [47]:1318 In 1974, the theologian Hans Frei published The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, which became a landmark work leading to the development of post-critical interpretation. 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 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). [147]:155 (3) Canonical criticism opposes form criticism's isolation of individual passages from their canonical setting. [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. Keener. [99][95]:95 Wellhausen correlated the history and development of those five books with the development of the Jewish faith. The term "biblical criticism" is an unfortunate one, because it gives the impression that the scholars who practice it are engaged in criticizing the Bible, in a hostile sense. [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. Other schools of biblical criticism that are more exegetical in intentthat is, concerned with recovering original meanings of textsinclude redaction criticism, which studies how the documents were assembled by their final authors and editors, and historical criticism, which seeks to interpret biblical writings in the context of their historical settings. Notes: Required of M.Div. [76], The exact number of variants is disputed, but the more texts survive, the more likely there will be variants of some kind. 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". [72]:47 It is one of the largest areas of biblical criticism in terms of the sheer amount of information it addresses. [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". Thus, he explicitly condemned it in the papal syllabus Lamentabili sane exitu ("With truly lamentable results") and in his papal encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis ("Feeding the Lord's Flock"), which labelled it as heretical. Postmodernism has been associated with Sigmund Freud, radical politics, and arguments against metaphysics and ideology. [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. [105]:96 Yet no replacement has so far been agreed upon: "the work of Wellhausen, for all that it needs revision and development in detail, remains the securest basis for understanding the Pentateuch". [191]:15 Third wave feminists began raising concerns about its accuracy. [49][50] Demythologizing refers to the reinterpretation of the biblical myths (stories) in terms of the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger (18891976). For example, Psalm 8 is a hymn that begins, "Lord, our Lord, / how majestic is your name in all the earth!" (verse 1). Before anything else, let me say that I do not reject all "biblical . 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. [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. Historical-biblical criticism includes a wide range of approaches and questions within four major methodologies: textual, source, form, and literary criticism. Lower biblical criticism has actually made several valuable contributions to biblical studies, since its only aim is to make certain that what we are reading are the actual words that the prophets and apostles wrote. 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. It has often been used in attempts to categorize the supposed sources within the Torah or Books of Moses (Genesis through Deuteronomy . Wellhausen argued that P had been composed during the exile of the 6th century BCE, under the influence of Ezekiel. The questioning of religious authority common to German Pietism contributed to the rise of 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. [157]:126,129, By the end of the twentieth century, multiple new points of view changed biblical criticism's central concepts and its goals, leading to the development of a group of new and different biblical-critical disciplines. [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). By the mid-twentieth century, the high level of departmentalization in biblical criticism, with its large volume of data and absence of applicable theology, had begun to produce a level of dissatisfaction among both scholars and faith communities. [172], That began to change in the final decades of the nineteenth century when, in 1890, the French Dominican Marie-Joseph Lagrange (18551938) established a school in Jerusalem called the cole prtique d'tudes biblique, which became the cole Biblique in 1920, to encourage study of the Bible using the historical-critical method. 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. 457) and the Nomina Sacra: Method and Probability", "The Long and Short of Lectio Brevior Potior", "A Statistical Study of the Synoptic Problem", "Biblical Studies: Fifty Years of a Multi-Discipline", "Biblical Scholarship 50 years After Divino Afflante Spiritu", "First Vatican Council | Description, Doctrine, & Legacy | Britannica", "Introduction: Pascendi dominici gregis The Vatican Condemnation of Modernism", "The Jerome Biblical Commentary for the Twenty-First Century". His disciples then stole the body and invented the story of the resurrection for personal gain. 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. [36]:91 fn.8 Michael Joseph Brown points out that biblical criticism operated according to principles grounded in a distinctively European rationalism. With these new methods came new goals, as biblical criticism moved from the historical to the literary, and its basic premise changed from neutral judgment to a recognition of the various biases the reader brings to the study of the texts. Four types of historical criticism Source, Form, Tradition-Historical, Redaction Three text-based methods of criticism Social-Scientific, Canonical, Rhetorical Six reader-focused methods of criticism Structural, Narrative, Reader-Response, Post-Structuralist, Feminist, Socioeconomic The analysis and study of sources used by Biblical authors What is it called to study the Bible? [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. [152]:6 A decade later, this new approach in biblical criticism included the Old Testament as well. Biblical criticism can be broken into two major forms: higher and lower criticism. 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". [203]:120 "As Frei puts it, scripture 'simultaneously depicts and renders the reality (if any) of what it talks about'; its subject matter is 'constituted by, or identical with, its narrative". [4]:21,22, In the Enlightenment era of the European West, philosophers and theologians such as Thomas Hobbes (15881679), Benedict Spinoza (16321677), and Richard Simon (16381712) began to question the long-established Judeo-Christian tradition that Moses was the author of the first five books of the Bible known as the Pentateuch. 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. Theism Christianity Criticism Internet Infidels [114]:12[115]:fn.6 There is also material unique to each gospel. [54]:69[97]:5 These sources are supposed to have been edited together by a late final Redactor (R) who is only imprecisely understood. "[It] is safe to conclude that in many measurable features contemporary evangelical scholarship on the scriptures enjoys a considerable good health". [138]:99[139] Redaction critics reject source and form criticism's description of the Bible texts as mere collections of fragments. Biblical Exegesis: Methods of Interpretation - Catholic Resources [18] British deism was also an influence on the philosopher and writer Hermann Samuel Reimarus (16941768) in developing his criticism of revelation. Problems with Higher Criticism : r/AcademicBiblical - reddit
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