Introduction to Biblical Criticism, Pt. 2

(continued from last entry)

Now, about New Testament criticism.  Critics have dealt with the New Testament under a variety of lenses since the Renaissance, when the copies of the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts were found and scholarship once again started up.  (From the Middle Ages until the Renaissance, the Latin Vulgate was used exclusively.)  The first movement was to remove the theological aspect from the book and study it as any antique document.  There were many critics who found naturalistic solutions to interpret the text.   (For example, natural explanations for the feeding of the 5,000).  This held sway from the Renaissance to the middle of the 19th century or so, when proto-moderns began to see the accounts as myths, and explained them in that way. Complicated solutions were elaborated upon.  From there, there was a move to something else:  source criticism.  Source criticism is the evaluation of the Biblical texts from the perspective that inside the various Gospel accounts, there were actually several different manuscripts at work.  For example, Both Luke and Matthew make reference to enormous portions of what Mark says in his Gospel.  From this, scholars have concluded that Mark was probably written first, and that both Matthew and Luke had access to Mark’s account when they wrote.  In addition, both Matthew and Luke share other material, from a source we don’t have, which was named the Q source by German Friedrich Schleiermacher (from the German word, quelle, or source.)  After this, form criticism took prominence.  This theory basically goes after the comparison of the biblical texts to prevalent forms of the day.  For example, the Epistles of St. Paul fall in very closely with the common Greco-Roman letter of the day.  Form critics read the texts through the lens of that form, and use that to determine meaning.   From there, modern critics have explored in more depth all of these different lens, but they have also begun the quest for the ‘historical Jesus.”  In other words, these commentators look for what Jesus was ‘really like’ by a variety of Biblical and extra-Biblical sources, to attempt to sift through what Jesus really did and said, and that which they extrapolate was added to the story to make a cogent theology.  Generally speaking, these scholars dismiss the Bible as authoritative, reliable truth, and place much more stock in the extra-biblical (pseudographical) accounts. 

What does all this garble mean in the simplest language?  It means that as time has gone on, the Bible has increased, generally speaking, in the reliability of the texts in terms of what they say explicitly, but liberal scholarship has increasingly seen that reliability under different lenses in an attempt to make sense of what the Gospels say about the person of Jesus.  They posit that he cannot be God, and so therefore must find another way to explain what they see in the Biblical texts.  It is important to note here, that traditional scholars have engaged in these movements as well as more liberal scholars, but they do not find the need to discredit the Bible texts to use the methods to make sense of the texts themselves. As has always been the case, what you choose to believe about Jesus when you come to the text is the issue.  The issue of the sanctity of the text is not so much the issue of debate.

In very real terms, this means that many of the arguments used about different Bible translations and so forth are gibberish.  The claims have no basis in scholarship, because the scholarship is based on the original texts, not the modern translations.  You will often hear criticisms of Isaiah 7:14 for example.  Christians routinely say that this is a prophecy about Jesus.  Modern philosophers looked up the word for “virgin” (As in, “The virgin will be with child,”) and discovered with glee that the word translated virgin also means, “young girl.”  The scream about this and claim it proves the Bible is fallible.  What it really proves is their ignorance to the original language.  The Hebrew culture and language of the time did not have two words for the concept.  A young girl was a virgin.  Only in our culture do we find the need to distinguish between the young girls who are virgins and those who are not.  At the time of marriage in that culture, a woman ceased to be young with the consummation of the marriage.  If the woman was found to not be a virgin, either she was stoned as a harlot, or the man who raped her was stoned.  Many modern criticisms of modern translations and modern Christianity make this egregious mistake.  No one should take it seriously, unless they’ve got some scholastic bounds to suggest they have a point.  I study under 4 language experts at my Seminary, and the have given a bibliography of literature on this subject which I would be happy to send along to anyone who wants it.  The bibliography covers both liberal and conservative theories, so you can get the entire picture if you so desire.  But the texts are solid, for the most part, and that is not a question for debate–it is only about interpretation.  And the texts give us hints about how we should interpret any given text based on word usage, syntax, grammar, etc.  We also have secular documents of the time to see the contemporary usages of words.  The information is there for the taking, if you so desire.  I’m going to let this sit for a bit, and perhaps I’ll come back and clarify some things if there are questions.  If you have one, you know what to do.