An Introduction to Biblical Criticism

Alright folks, I’ve been promising this for a while, but I think it’s time I do this.  This won’t be as fun an entry to write as some of the brain teasers, but it is important.  Let me tell you why.

I hear a variety of complaints from Christians and non-Christians alike about what the Bible says and what it does not say.  A variety of people seem to expect a detailed description of everything that has ever transpired, including detailed scientific descriptions of event that happened many hundreds of years ago.   Others complain because the Bible is notably silent on modern issues:  abortion, and so on.  Let me address this briefly, and then I’ll get into the basics.

I think it is critical to remember what the Bible claims it is first, before we try to make demands on it.  The Bible makes no claim to be the incredibly detailed account of every event ever.  The Bible has four claims implicit in it that we must deal with, in regards to the way it records history.  (1) It claims to be factual.  There is no way around this point.  The Bible claims to have recorded things just as they are.  Whether you agree with that claim or not, that is the claim it makes.  (2)  It is selective.  If we look at the end of the Gospel of John, for example, we see that John adds an editorial comment, roughly to the effect that if anyone was to write everything Jesus did down, there wouldn’t be enough books.  Clearly, there is some redaction happening here:  people are choosing which incidents they will choose to include in their accounts, based on their grid of values and purposes.  (3)  It is an artistic work.  If you read the Psalms, or Job or any of the other wisdom books, you quickly come to the conclusion that it’s not simply a list of thousands and thousands of rules.  In the original language, there is extensive wordplay, intentional literary structuring, etc.  This is meant to be more than just a theological treatise.  (4)  It is evaluative.  That is, it makes judgements on various different portions of the historical accounts.  We don’t normally see those four things blended in our cultural writing today, but the lines that we make between secular and religious did not exist in the time of the authorship of the books.  These are the claims the Bible makes, based on the way it recounts history.

Next, is the issue of textual criticism.  Simply put, this is the branch of Biblical scholarship that deals with where we got the texts we use to compile the modern Bible.  There are a variety of textual traditions that undertake describing the texts we have now, but before I get into this in more depth, we need to understand one very important thing, which I have alluded to before.  We must be very, very careful what evidence we will accept in regards to texts.  There are a variety of texts that have been found, at Qumran (The Dead Sea Scrolls) and other places that bespeak a variety of different traditions.  For example, among the Dead Sea scrolls there were a number of pseudographical texts (The Gospel of Thomas would be an example) that are much newer than the texts of the modern Biblical canon that have no attestation anywhere in the Christian correspondence we have before their release.  We have the reactions of the church fathers to these documents, and this is the way we determine the canonicity of a text.  These pseudographical texts also do not fall in line with the stated, expressed theology of the early church, and often come into direct contradiction with older, more established orthodoxy.  (Using the example of the Gospel of Thomas once again, it is commonly agreed that the texts are flavored with gnostic doctrines, a prominent heresy at the time of the earliest manuscripts we have.)  In short, because we don’t have original copies of any of these documents, what we are left with is the attestation of those people in the church who wrote and make reference to those original texts.  The writings of the church fathers (folks like Origen, Eusebius, etc) are first second century AD works that make reference to the letters written, which they had direct contact with.  Textual criticism is the study of the passing on of this tradition, deciding which texts are more authoritative than others.  This is a complicated issue, but let me leave you with this:  The amount of attestation of the Biblical texts is incomparable with other documents of the same age.  It is literally amazing.  I walked into my Seminary classes expecting to have to take things on faith.  My Seminary classes blew that out of the water.  There is a lot of very good, sound scholarship behind the historical attestations to the Biblical texts.  Whether you believe the claims the texts make is something different.  But the texts themselves are remarkably sound historically, especially when you compare it to comparable texts of the same eras.  The attestation part of the process is decidedly New Testament.

There are two major Christian traditions in deciding which texts scholars use in the Old Testament canon they use.  The first school is the Greek/Septuagint school.  (abbreviated in the scholarly literature LXX)  This school is comprised of people who place primacy in the Greek texts of the Jewish bible as collected by Alexandrian (Egypt) Jews for inclusion in the great library there.  There are several different finds that give sections of texts, and that comprised with the portions we have, is adequate evidence to infer that the Greek is solid.  The issue with this tradition from the other side is that it is the work of translation of Alexandrian Jews of the Hebrew.  All the language is in Greek, and there are a variety of issues with this for some modern scholars.  This tradition is the one of the Catholics:  it includes the extra Old Testament books not found in Protestant Bibles.  The reason?  Because there are no records of the extra texts in the original Hebrew.  The other major school is the Masoretic/Hebrew school.  This school is based on the original Hebrew texts as they were recorded by temple scribes for generations.  There was an entire caste of scribes in the Hebrew tradition (and in most Ancient Near Eastern traditions) to keep the texts continually being recopied.  The purpose for this was obvious: as volatile as the area was then, having extra copies of the texts was a requirement. If you didn’t have extra copies, and the copies you had were damaged, you had bubkis.  So, they constantly recorded these documents.  When Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, the temple scribes gathered up their scrolls and buried them near the Dead Sea, on their way to Masada, the last stand of the Jews before the Romans.  The texts were recovered soon after this by a family of prominent Jews, and they continued the tradition of recopying the texts.  These are the two major Old Testament Schools.

(continued, next entry)