Biblical criticism is the study of the Bible using historical, literary, and other methods of critical analysis. Modern biblical criticism initially focused on reconstructing the historical events behind biblical texts and the history of how the texts developed, using methods that emphasized reason and objectivity. Biblical criticism helped establish the Bible as an object of cultural and academic study beyond confessional interpretations.
The emergence of modern biblical criticism is generally traced to the European Enlightenment, particularly the German Enlightenment, although a minority view traces its origins to the Protestant Reformation. Rationalism, German pietism, and British deism influenced its development. In the nineteenth century, biblical criticism became a major approach to biblical studies. The quest for the historical Jesus had begun in the late eighteenth century and continued through successive periods of research into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Biblical scholars commonly employ textual, source, form, and redaction criticism together. Textual criticism examines biblical manuscripts and their variants; source criticism investigates the sources underlying biblical texts; form criticism analyzes smaller units of text and their historical settings; and redaction criticism examines how sources and traditions were edited into their final forms. From the mid-twentieth century, literary criticism increasingly shifted attention from the historical development of texts to the texts themselves; literary approaches included canonical, rhetorical, and narrative criticism.
After 1970, biblical criticism expanded beyond its predominantly historical orientation as literary and interdisciplinary approaches became more prominent. By 1990, it had developed into a group of disciplines with differing and sometimes conflicting interests. New perspectives from scholars of different ethnicities and from feminist, Jewish, and Catholic traditions, together with globalization, broadened the field. This diversification also challenged the earlier ideal of neutral judgment, placing greater emphasis on recognizing the perspectives and biases that readers bring to biblical texts. Postmodern biblical criticism questioned claims to objective or neutral foundations, while post-critical interpretation questioned the separation of a text's meaning from its historical reference.
Definition Daniel J. Harrington defines biblical criticism as "the effort at using scientific criteria (historical and literary) and human reason to understand and explain, as objectively as possible, the meaning intended by the biblical writers." The original biblical criticism has been mostly defined by its historical concerns. Critics focused on the historical events behind the text as well as the history of how the texts themselves developed. 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. Biblical critics used the same scientific methods and approaches to history as their secular counterparts and emphasized reason and objectivity. Neutrality was seen as a defining requirement.
By 1990, new perspectives, globalization and input from different academic fields expanded biblical criticism, moving it beyond its original criteria, and changing it into a group of disciplines with different, often conflicting, interests. Biblical criticism's central concept changed from neutral judgment to beginning from a recognition of the various biases the reader brings to the study of the texts. Newer forms of biblical criticism are primarily literary: no longer focused on the historical, they attend to the text as it exists now.
History Eighteenth century
In the Enlightenment era of the European West, philosophers and theologians such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677), and Richard Simon (1638–1712) 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. Spinoza wrote that Moses could not have written the preface to the fifth book, Deuteronomy, since he never crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land. There were also other problems such as Deuteronomy 31:9 which references Moses in the third person. 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".
Jean Astruc (1684–1766), a French physician, believed these critics were wrong about Mosaic authorship. According to Old Testament scholar Edward Young (1907–1968), Astruc believed that Moses the first book of the Pentateuch, the book of Genesis, using the hereditary accounts of the Hebrew people. Biblical criticism is often said to have begun when Astruc borrowed methods of textual criticism (used to investigate Greek and Roman texts) and applied them to the Bible in search of those original accounts. Astruc believed that, through this approach, he had identified the separate sources that were edited together into the book of Genesis. The existence of separate sources explained the inconsistent style and vocabulary of Genesis, discrepancies in the narrative, differing accounts and chronological difficulties, while still allowing for Mosaic authorship. Astruc's work was the genesis of biblical criticism, and because it has become the template for all who followed, he is often called the "Father of Biblical criticism".
The questioning of religious authority common to German Pietism contributed to the rise of biblical criticism. Rationalism also became a significant influence: Swiss theologian Jean Alphonse Turretin (1671–1737) is an example of the "moderate rationalism" of the era. 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". What was seen as extreme rationalism followed in the work of Heinrich Paulus (1761–1851) who denied the existence of miracles.
Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791) had attempted in his work to navigate between divine revelation and extreme rationalism by supporting the view that revelation was "divine disclosure of the truth perceived through the depth of human experience". He distinguished between "inward" and "outward" religion: for some people, their religion is their highest inner purpose, while for others, religion is a more exterior practice – a tool to accomplish other purposes more important to the individual, such as political or economic goals. Recognition of this distinction now forms part of the modern field of cognitive science of religion. Semler argued for an end to all doctrinal assumptions, giving historical criticism its nonsectarian character. As a result, Semler is often called the father of historical-critical research. "Despite the difference in attitudes between the thinkers and the historians [of the German enlightenment], all viewed history as the key ... in their search for understanding".
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. Herrick references the German theologian Henning Graf Reventlow (1929–2010) as linking deism with the humanist world view, which has been significant in biblical criticism. Matthew Tindal (1657–1733), as part of British deism, asserted that Jesus taught an undogmatic natural religion that the Church later changed into its own dogmatic form. 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". British deism was also an influence on the philosopher and writer Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) in developing his criticism of revelation.
The biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791) 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. Instead of interpreting the Bible historically, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827), Johann Philipp Gabler (1753–1826), and Georg Lorenz Bauer (1755–1806) used the concept of myth as a tool for interpreting the Bible. Rudolf Bultmann later used this approach, and it became particularly influential in the early twentieth century.
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. The term was originally used to differentiate higher criticism, the term for historical criticism, from lower, which was the term commonly used for textual criticism at the time. The importance of textual criticism means that the term 'lower criticism' is no longer prevalent in twenty-first century studies.
A twenty-first 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. Long before Richard Simon, the historical context of the biblical texts was important to Joachim Camerarius (1500–1574) who wrote a philological study of figures of speech in the biblical texts using their context to understand them. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) paved the way for comparative religion studies by analyzing New Testament texts in the light of Classical, Jewish and early Christian writings.
Historical Jesus: the first quest
The first quest for the historical Jesus is also sometimes referred to as the Old Quest. It began with the publication of Hermann Samuel Reimarus's work after his death. G. E. Lessing (1729–1781) claimed to have discovered copies of Reimarus's writings in the library at Wolfenbüttel when he was the librarian there. Reimarus had left permission for his work to be published after his death, and Lessing did so between 1774 and 1778, publishing them as Die Fragmente eines unbekannten Autors (The Fragments of an Unknown Author). Over time, they came to be known as the Wolfenbüttel Fragments. Reimarus distinguished between what Jesus taught and how he is portrayed in the New Testament. According to Reimarus, Jesus was a political Messiah who failed at creating political change and was executed by the Roman state as a dissident. His disciples then stole the body and invented the story of the resurrection for personal gain.
Albert Schweitzer in The Quest of the Historical Jesus, acknowledges that Reimarus's work "is a polemic, not an objective historical study", while also referring to it as "a masterpiece of world literature." 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. This eschatological approach to understanding Jesus has since become universal in modern biblical criticism. Schweitzer also comments that, since Reimarus was a historian and not a theologian or a biblical scholar, he "had not the slightest inkling" that source criticism would provide the solution to the problems of literary consistency that Reimarus had raised.