what are the four types of biblical criticism

4. Critics are interested in what the text means for the community"the community of faith whose predecessors produced the canon, that was called into existence by the canon, and seeks to live by the canon". [9]:204,217,210. 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. mark. Historical-biblical criticism includes a wide range of approaches and questions within four major methodologies: textual, source, form, and literary criticism. . In any case, the form critics did not derive the laws from or apply the laws to the Gospels systematically, nor did they carry out a systematic investigation of changes in the post-canonical literature. As John Niles indicates, the "older idea of 'an ideal folk communityan undifferentiated company of rustics, each of whom contributes equally to the process of oral tradition,' is no longer tenable". Biblical criticism is the use of critical analysis to understand and explain the Bible.During the eighteenth century, when it began as historical-biblical criticism, it was based on two distinguishing characteristics: (1) the scientific concern to avoid dogma and bias by applying a neutral, non-sectarian, reason-based judgment to the study of the Bible, and (2) the belief that the . Five major categories of biblical criticism, described, including the Documentary. [36]:91 fn.8 Michael Joseph Brown points out that biblical criticism operated according to principles grounded in a distinctively European rationalism. Having long been dominated by white male Protestant academics, the twentieth century saw others such as non-white scholars, women, and those from the Jewish and Catholic traditions become prominent voices in biblical criticism. [187]:215 According to Aly Elrefaei, the strongest refutation of Wellhausen's Documentary theory came from Yehezkel Kaufmann in 1937. 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. Lower criticism: the discipline and study of the actual wording of the Bible; a quest for textual purity and understanding. 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. Textual criticism examines biblical manuscripts and their content to identify what the original text probably said. 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. [11]:6 Rationalism also became a significant influence:[12][13]:8,224 Swiss theologian Jean Alphonse Turretin (16711737) is an example of the "moderate rationalism" of the era. [41] Ernst Renan (18231892) promoted the critical method and was opposed to orthodoxy. Form criticism then theorizes concerning the individual pericope's Sitz im Leben ("setting in life" or "place in life"). It analyzes the social and cultural dimensions of the text and its environmental context. This indicates additional separate sources for Matthew and for Luke. [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. archetypal criticism, cultural criticism, feminist criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxist Criticism, New Criticism (formalism/structuralism), New Historicism, post-structuralism, and reader-response criticism. [87][88][89] It uses specialized methodologies, enough specialized terms to create its own lexicon,[90] and is guided by a number of principles. 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. Herrick references the German theologian Henning Graf Reventlow (19292010) as linking deism with the humanist world view, which has been significant in biblical criticism. 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. Biblical scholar Hermann Gunkel's system covers the following categories: Hymns: Many of the psalms are simple hymns or songs of praise. [4]:20[48], Most scholars agree that Bultmann is one of the "most influential theologians of the twentieth-century", but that he also had a "notorious reputation for his de-mythologizing" which was debated around the world. [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". Recension is the selection of the most trustworthy evidence on which to base a 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". [54]:99 Frei was one of several external influences that moved biblical criticism from a historical to a literary focus. 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. [4]:20 Karl Barth (18861968), Rudolf Bultmann (18841976), and others moved away from concern over the historical Jesus and concentrated instead on the kerygma: the message of the New Testament. [38]:viixiii, The late-nineteenth century saw a renewed interest in the quest for the historical Jesus which primarily involved writing versions of the life of Jesus. Textual criticism examines biblical manuscripts and their content to identify what the original text probably said. 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. The differences between them are called variants. According to Reimarus, Jesus was a political Messiah who failed at creating political change and was executed by the Roman state as a dissident. [199], New historicism emerged as traditional historical biblical criticism changed. "[162]:151,153 This created an "intellectual crisis" in American Christianity of the early twentieth century which led to a backlash against the critical approach. Included are examples of biblical racism, wishful thinking, subjugation of women, contradictions, failed prophecies and other biblical problems. 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. In 1943, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Providentissimus Deus, Pope Pius XII issued the papal encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu ('Inspired by the Holy Spirit') sanctioning historical criticism, opening a new epoch in Catholic critical scholarship. [81]:205 Sorting out the wealth of source material is complex, so textual families were sorted into categories tied to geographical areas. [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". 1956) calls this periodization "untenable and belied by all of the pertinent facts",[25]:697,698 arguing that people were searching for the historical Jesus before Reimarus, and that there never has been a period when scholars weren't doing so. 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. [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. [203]:120. [143]:3, By 1974, the two methodologies being used in literary criticism were rhetorical analysis and structuralism. [55]:241,149[56] This has raised the question of whether or not there is such a thing as an "original text". The rise of redaction criticism closed this debate by bringing about a greater emphasis on diversity. Thus, we may say that the Bible itself may help to retrieve the notion of a sacred text. Yet any of these principlesand their conclusionscan be contested. Lois Tyson says this new form of historical criticism developed in the 1970s. [38]:25,27 He saw Christianity as something that 'superseded' all that came before it. [79], Variants are classified into families. Instead, writing was used to enhance memory in an overlap of written and oral tradition. [4]:21 Redaction criticism also began in the mid-twentieth century. For full treatment, see biblical literature: Biblical criticism. [93][94]:1 The French physician Jean Astruc presumed in 1753 that Moses had written the book of Genesis (the first book of the Pentateuch) using ancient documents; he attempted to identify these original sources and to separate them again. [145]:4 Brevard S. Childs (19232007) proposed an approach to bridge that gap that came to be called canonical criticism. [14]:92, Nineteenth-century biblical critics "thought of themselves as continuing the aims of the Protestant Reformation". The book was culturally significant because it contributed to weakening church authority, and it was theologically significant because it challenged the divinity of Christ. Omissions? [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. Canonical criticism "signaled a major and enduring shift in biblical studies". [102]:93, Advocates of Wellhausen's hypothesis contend it accounts well for the differences and duplication found in the Pentateuchal books. [9]:204,217 Astruc believed that, through this approach, he had identified the separate sources that were edited together into the book of Genesis. [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. [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. Historical-biblical criticism includes a wide range of approaches and questions within four major methodologies: textual, source, form, and literary criticism. 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. [13]:43[15] Semler argued for an end to all doctrinal assumptions, giving historical criticism its nonsectarian character. Recognition of this distinction now forms part of the modern field of cognitive science of religion. [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. There is some consensus among twenty-first century textual critics that the various locations traditionally assigned to the text types are incorrect and misleading. [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. [194]:6 The Postcolonial view is rooted in a consciousness of the geopolitical situation for all people, and is "transhistorical and transcultural". [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. [159] There are aspects of biblical criticism that have not only been hostile to the Bible, but also to the religions whose scripture it is, in both intent and effect. 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. 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". Postmodernism has been associated with Sigmund Freud, radical politics, and arguments against metaphysics and ideology. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, biblical criticism was influenced by a wide range of additional academic disciplines and theoretical perspectives which led to its transformation. [77] Variants are not evenly distributed throughout any set of texts. Grade Mode: A . [96]:19 The validity of using the same critical methods for novels and for the Gospels, without the assurance the Gospels are actually novels, must be questioned. [189]:8 Kaufmann was the first Jewish scholar to fully exploit higher criticism to counter Wellhausen's theory. [152]:4 It is now accepted as "axiomatic in literary circles that the meaning of literature transcends the historical intentions of the author". [44], In 1896, Martin Khler (18351912) wrote The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ. The Old and New Testaments were thought to constitute a single story, which was historically accurate and which taught clear lessons for moral practice. [25]:697 However, Stanley E. Porter (b. 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. This essay will elucidate these approaches along with some critical observations. [184], Biblical criticism posed unique difficulties for Judaism. Clark responded, but disagreement continued. [141], In the mid-twentieth century, literary criticism began to develop, shifting scholarly attention from historical and pre-compositional matters to the text itself, thereafter becoming the dominant form of biblical criticism in a relatively short period of about thirty years. 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. Such analysis may be based on a variety of critical approaches or movements, e.g. Holtzmann developed the first listing of the chronological order of the New Testament texts based on critical scholarship. [143]:425, Structuralism looks at the language to discern "layers of meaning" with the goal of uncovering a work's "deep structures" the premises as well as the purposes of the author. Frequent political revolutions, bitter opposition of "liberalism" to the Church, and the expulsion of religious orders from France and Germany, made the church understandably suspicious of the new intellectual currents. These new points of view created awareness that the Bible can be rationally interpreted from many different perspectives. 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. Biblical criticism is an umbrella term covering various techniques for applying literary historical-critical methods in analyzing and studying the Bible and its textual content. [197][198] It grew out of form criticism's Sitz im Leben and the sense that historical form criticism had failed to adequately analyze the social and anthropological contexts which form critics claimed had formed the texts. [4]:vii,21 New criticism, which developed as an adjunct to literary criticism, was concerned with the particulars of style. [4]:21,22 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. [161], the traditional sacrality of the Bible is at once simple and symbolic, individual and communal, practical and paradoxical. Biblical criticism is the use of critical analysis to understand and explain the Bible. "Lower" or textual criticism addressed critical issues . In societies where the "lay person" often has a passionate relationship with the Bible, it has been controversial to examine the book through historical types of literary criticism.Even though, as religious experts explain, historical criticism is used in seminaries, it is not popular in non-academic environments, where many people . [149]:29 Rhetorical criticism is a qualitative analysis. [13]:8284, The two main processes of textual criticism are recension and emendation:[81]:205,209, Jerome McGann says these methods innately introduce a subjective factor into textual criticism despite its attempt at objective rules. It was derived from a combination of both source and form criticism. The Old Testament and Criticism. [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). 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. [152]:7 Christopher T. Paris says that, "narrative criticism admits the existence of sources and redactions but chooses to focus on the artistic weaving of these materials into a sustained narrative picture". [26] Over time, they came to be known as the Wolfenbttel Fragments. [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". Tradition played a central role in their task of producing a standard version of the Hebrew Bible. [147]:156, Rhetorical criticism is also a type of literary criticism. Exemplars drawn from the Bible provided models for contemporary human activity, in part by embodying types of ideal behaviour. Interest waned again by the 1970s. Higher criticism: the study of the sources and literary methods employed by the biblical authors. It is dated around 850 B.C. What are the five basic types of biblical criticism? [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. [124]:298[note 6], Scholars from the 1970s and into the 1990s, produced an "explosion of studies" on structure, genre, text-type, setting and language that challenged several of form criticism's aspects and assumptions. Mid-twentieth century scholars of oral tradition objected to the "book mentality" of source criticism, saying the idea that ancients had "cut and pasted" from their sources reflects the modern world more than the ancient one. [58] New historicism, a literary theory that views history through literature, also developed. [157]:129 Or as Rogerson says: biblical criticism has been liberating for those who want their faith "intelligently grounded and intellectually honest". By the end of the eighteenth century, advanced liberals had abandoned the core of Christian beliefs. [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. [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. Historical-biblical criticism includes a wide range of approaches and questions within four major methodologies: textual, source, form, and literary criticism. 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. [27]:15, Reimarus's controversial work garnered a response from Semler in 1779: Beantwortung der Fragmente eines Ungenannten (Answering the Fragments of an Unknown). Jonathan Sheehan has argued that critical study meant the Bible had to become a primarily cultural instrument. 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. [19][20] Instead of interpreting the Bible historically, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (17521827), Johann Philipp Gabler (17531826), and Georg Lorenz Bauer (17551806) used the concept of myth as a tool for interpreting the Bible.

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