Contents page | Christis archive | Submissions | Advertising | Links page | Meet the team | Cartoons | Subscribe | Christis timetable | Search Christis

Previous article | Next article

Biblical Criticism

The interpretation of the Bible through the ages

One of the more striking things about the history of Christianity over the last two hundred years or so, is the extent to which attitudes toward the Bible among scholars, theologians, and clergy have changed, without having a major impact upon broader church life or the more general attitudes of worshippers. Among those denominations whose intellectual life has been most affected, it can often seem that a fissure has opened up between a limited circle of those in the know, and the wider church and public. Ideas from the sphere of biblical studies are still capable on a slow news day of exercising journalists, who seem to be unaware that such apparently ‘radical’ developments are really nothing new. This is certainly regrettable, but it is not my function here to begin assigning blame or speculating about likely causes. It is sufficient merely to note the fact. My intention is rather to open up some of the important issues in the sphere of biblical criticism for wider discussion and reflection. I am not claiming any kind of special expertise in this area, and am in no position to do proper justice to the vast world of scholarship that has been produced, so I would appreciate it if this were read as a sort of introductory prelude to a wide ranging and endlessly fascinating subject.

The first Pope to fully endorse scientific criticism as a means to understanding scripture was Pius XII

To a certain degree a critical process goes on whenever someone picks up and reads the Bible, translates parts of it, or tries to apply some teaching to a particular current situation. But apart from the work of a few significant individuals, biblical criticism as a scientifically grounded enterprise is a product of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The basic presupposition behind the application of the various methods considered here is that the bible ought to be investigated according to the same criteria as other kinds of literary source, and that if it contains religious and historical truths, these will be better illuminated as a result. As people will be very much aware, this view was and has remained quite contentious, although it has gained increasing acceptance among adherents of the main established churches, as well as many of the Protestant nonconformist denominations.

Biblical criticism alive today: King James version bibles being bound in Cambridge

Much of the pioneering work in biblical criticism was carried out by German scholars working in state sponsored universities, a feature that remained prominent well into the twentieth century. It was the Old Testament scholar Johann Gottfried Eichorn in the 1780s who made the important distinction between ‘lower’ textual criticism, which sought to determine the most authentic version of a particular text by comparing their features, and ‘higher’ literary criticism, which then investigated questions of authorship, date and place of composition, and the possible inclusion of material from elsewhere. This was done by looking at the internal features of the text, as well as comparing it to related sources. Eichorn used the methods of higher criticism to undermine the traditional belief that Moses had written the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, suggesting that parts such as the Genesis narrative involve the inclusion of diverse traditions. This theory was later extended and developed into the Graf-Wellhausen thesis, which sees the whole of the Pentateuch the product of several layers of oral tradition, developed over time and written down long after the events it records are claimed to have occurred. The ‘higher’ criticism was also applied to the New Testament, with some quite radical results. Under the influence of Ferdinand Christian Baur in the early nineteenth century a significant school developed at Tuebingen, which maintained that the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospels could not have been written before the second century, since they display a tendency to synthesise the previously opposing movements of Petrine or Jewish Christianity with Pauline or Hellenic Christianity. However, because this formulation relied heavily on Hegelian philosophy, which was the basis of many of its assumptions, it has since been effectually discredited. The publication of the innocuously titled Essays and Reviews in 1860 signalled the taking up of the higher criticism by the broad church tendency within the Church of England. It also created at least as much public alarm as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species the year before. British scholars made a significant contribution to the critical study of biblical texts from this time onwards, significantly in the establishment of Mark as the earliest Gospel, and the development of the ‘Q’ theory of the synoptic Gospels. Suggesting that both Matthew and Luke drew for their accounts upon that of Mark, as well as another source — ‘Q’ — which may have been a record of Jesus’ sayings, this theory remains substantially accepted today. Meanwhile the Catholic Church remained considerably more circumspect, issuing a stern rebuttal of the new methods in the form of Leo XIII’s encyclical Providentissimus Deus in 1893. Catholic scholars remained unable to contribute to the ongoing critical process until the middle of the twentieth century, when Pius XII (Divino Afflante Spiritu, 1943) and later the Second Vatican Council endorsed the use of scientific criticism to arrive at a fuller understanding of Scripture.

As the techniques used in biblical criticism became more sophisticated and as other kinds of evidence were utilised, further distinctive types of investigation emerged. Developments during the nineteenth century in the fields of archaeology, studies in comparative religion, and anthropology among others contributed to this process. Tradition criticism and redaction criticism concerned themselves with the processes which lay behind the text of the Bible, respectively in terms of the oral tradition which underlay and predated the final written word, and the editorial process through which the content of different traditions is integrated into a composite account or narrative. Form criticism examined material in the Bible with the aim of locating it firmly in the sitz im Leben or life situation of the community of which it is a product, classifying it according to categories such as hymn, prophecy, myth, credal statement and priestly liturgy. Applied to the New Testament by Martin Dibelius, K.L. Schmidt, and Rudolf Bultmann in the years after the First World War, form criticism raised new doubts about the historical authenticity of the Gospels, emphasising their sitz im Leben in the needs and experience of the early church, whose contemporary concerns might heavily have influenced their form. Although much in the Gospels may be authentic, the form critics suggested, it has been applied selectively and embellished by the evangelists, who were concerned to produce documents which would give consolation and justification to the actions of the early church, rather than an essentially factual account of Jesus’ life.

In the wake of the sceptical conclusions reached by the form critics, critical enquiry into the Bible was characterised by several different approaches during the twentieth century. Many scholars have remained optimistic of the historical reliability of the Gospel accounts, and have attempted to evolve methods by which to establish that part of their content which is most plausible. Through these and similar efforts, the centrality of the Bible to the life of the Church has been maintained, and much modern theology has come upon new insights within the traditional sources, as witnessed by the influence of Paul’s Letter to the Romans upon the thought of Karl Barth, for example. Others, accepting the need to distinguish between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Jesus of history have reopened the nineteenth century ‘quest’ for the historical Christ, a tantalising enterprise going back to David Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu of 1835, but one perhaps doomed to perpetual frustration. A further related development has been the radical existential theology of Bultmann himself, built around the immediate confrontation between the subject and the kerygma, or gospel message, virtually discarding the historical content of the Bible in order to appeal to the Lutheran principle of ‘faith alone’. Central throughout the history of biblical criticism has been the creative interplay of the spiritual and intellectual concerns of each period with the abiding testament of scripture. This is a process whose beginnings can be seen in the Bible itself, and it is one which will in all likelihood continue for as long as there is a Christian faith.

Ian Warren

For further reading a useful introduction from a sympathetic perspective is R. Davidson and A.R.C. Leaney, The Penguin Modern Guide to Theology III: Biblical Criticism (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1972)

Previous article | Next article

	Back to the Christis homepage

Last modified: 25th November 2005