Brethren, Peace and Good to all in Jesus Christ.
Many of you are already familiar with the different
approaches to biblical interpretation. There are many because the Word of God
is such a versatile collection of writings that no single approach is
sufficient to fathom its riches.
Higher criticism and
the Bible student
Among the approaches developed in the 17th
century that survives to this day is that of “higher criticism.” This approach
is really a toolkit of techniques that requires seeing Holy Scripture and its
constituent books as primarily literary works made by human beings. Theology
and doctrine are secondary concerns to higher critics. In other words, they
would focus on the work of human writers as the principal authors of Holy
Scriptures, if not always ruling out God as the primary author – but many, in
fact, deny the divine authorship or inspiration of the Bible, period.
Among the tools available to the higher critics are textual criticism, or the study of the
evolution of a text from as near as the original writing as possible down to
the canonical text as received and read today; form criticism, or the study of the oral tradition and communities
that may have had a hand in choosing – some say “creating” – discrete sets of
“memories” that were later redacted by
one or more writers or editors into the canonical text. In fact, the “redaction
process” has its own study, redaction
criticism, which is the attempt to recreate “the plan” followed by the
redactors in putting together what later became the canonical text, as well as
the religious, social, and political cultures and realities informing their
redaction plan. Finally, literary critics
of Holy Scripture explore the different literary genres one often finds in the Bible: poetry, narrative, stories,
novels, songs, history, legislation, even translations from older forms of
Hebrew or Greek, etc.
Higher critics often also invoke the help of auxiliary
empirical sciences to perform their work. As such, the findings – and also
often highly interpreted findings –
by archeologists, historians, comparative religion scholars, paleographers,
paleodemographers, paleontologists, geologists, geographers, language
specialists, antiquarians, you name it, often influence the work of the higher
critics.
There is nothing wrong a
priori with higher criticism. The different criticisms often mutually influence each other, bringing greater
clarity to words and meanings of Holy Scripture, resulting in better, more accurate
translations and theological insights. The findings from the scientific
disciplines mentioned above also enrich these methodologies, helping set the
Holy Scriptures in their rightful geographical, cultural, religious, literary,
and historical setting.
In fact, the adoption and judicious application of the tools
of higher criticism in biblical studies is what distinguishes Catholic exegetes
from those who cling to a literal-grammatical
interpretation of Holy Scripture, often called “fundamentalists” in the
United States. What’s more, even conservative Christians in Protestant
ecclesial bodies are increasingly aware of these aids to interpretation aids
and the results are showing up on their teachings and sermons.
By this I don’t mean that one needs to be a “higher critic”
in order to understand Holy Scripture. The Bible is a singular composition in
that respect: its teaching, particularly its moral teaching, can be apprehended
plainly and its organic evolution traced
throughout the history bound between its cover. Higher criticism, for example,
becomes very useful in the elucidation of difficult passages where the received
text may record an archaic word, a word borrowed foreign words, or in detecting
transposed sections, even entire chapters, where the traditional order
preserved such transpositions and “broke the flow” of a given narrative,
oracle, etc. It also help us understand the historical setting of the biblical
stories, by illuminating the daily life, local customs, laws, and religions of
the Middle East, which are often acknowledged, but not described in the
biblical text. One final – among the many I can come up with – is that higher
criticism helps us to make sense of obscure sayings or proverbs, or of highly
symbolic prophecy like that contained in the book of Daniel and Revelation.
All things considered, the higher criticism of Holy
Scripture is similar to a surgeon’s scalpel: in the right hands it does a lot
of good. However, when does it do evil?
The problem with
certain higher critics
Continuing with the scalpel metaphor I used above, higher
criticism becomes problematic when higher critics
wield the scalpel as a machete, or better still, when these critics see their
object of study – Holy Scripture – as a corpse they are performing an autopsy
upon. These are the critics who deny what we call a sensus plenior, the salvific meaning of the Bible which we
understand by approaching the Bible as the Word of God in the words of men.
Higher critics for whom the Bible is just another literary creation in the
world of myth and stories of national or religious origins feel no compunction
in interpreting the Bible according to particular ideologies or personal or
academic prejudices. I can multiple the examples, but in the interest of time and
length I’ll just mention two, one for each Testament:·
- Many higher critics engage in a systematic
fragmentation of the Pentateuch, following an over-application of the documentary
hypothesis, and creating a tabula
rasa which the critic fills with his or her own pet interpretive theory.
Some critics pretend to discover the motivations
of the redactors and describe them in terms of local or international political
intrigue or rivalries; or in terms of class
warfare: the rich vs. the poor; women against men; nobility vs. common
citizens; etc. Once they achieve their preferred interpretive mode, they
proceed to thread entire new theologies based upon their findings. We heart
then about liberation theology, feminist theology, psychological theology – all the while forgetting, or burying the
simple truth under tons of jargon or footnotes, that there is no one shred of
empirical evidence substantiating their claim to know the mind of the redactor. Would a pre-exilic redactor of the Torah
recognize himself in the claims made about him by some higher critics? Probably
not.
- Mainstream
higher critics of the New Testament – or at least, the ones who get the most
media coverage – are stuck with a fundamental premise they seldom challenge, at
least in public: that there is little or nothing in the New Testament that
gives us ground facts attesting to
the historical Jesus, his acts and words, much less his miracles and
resurrection. These critics see, the Gospels as the product of a complex
interactions between early Christian communities which, after receiving the
early kerygma – early apostolic
teaching – and bits and pieces of oral tradition that may have had bits of
historical data about Jesus – and much exaggeration – and created their own narratives to fit their own understanding of the kerygma. Author-redactors then
consolidated the stories and contributed their own theological understanding to
form the Gospels as we know it. The author also invested the Gospel with his
own cosmology, mythic understanding of the world, and his social, cultural, and
class prejudice. As a consequence we see the rise of all sorts of
controversies: the unending quests for “the historical Jesus”; the “invention”
of Christianity by Paul and the supposed mutual opposition between “Pauline
communities” and “the Jerusalem Mother Church”; the elevation of heterodox
movements to the rank of “alternative Christianities”; the characterization of
one Gospel as “more historical” than another; and the expunging of every
hierarchical ecclesiology in the New Testament smacking of Catholicism. The
problem is: there is no archeological, textual, or otherwise empirical proof
for the existence of such “creative” communities, redactors, and conflicts. Nada,
zero, zilch. These entities are
nothing but hypothetical constructs existing only in the mind of these critics.
What’s the result of these approaches? Utter confusion among
the masses, particularly when these views are popularized in documentaries in
the History, Science, Smithsonian, or National Geographic channels. The
impression given by these documentaries and other publications aimed at the
public is that “orthodoxy” is a political construct, concocted by either the
Pope or “the imperial Church” or other theological class enemy, aiming at the
destruction of the other “Christianities” and to the oppression of women, the
enforcement of monastic and then clerical celibacy, and enforced by
persecution, excommunication, banishment, etc.
These critics have help recast Christian theology as a quest
to restore these other Christianities, e.g., the Gnostics, Monophysites,
Nestorians, and other sects; and to empower women; the variously disenfranchised;
and those who hold to “alternative sexualities” or genders, to embrace their self-defined
identities as wholesome and good, over and against the antique, oppressive, obsolete,
and “patriarchal” dictats proposed as true and binding for all ages by orthodox
Christianity.
These are the problems and the challenges we believers face
in today’s marketplace of ideas. The other side has recast the entire Gospel in
the name of “science” into postmodern narratives of freedom and liberation.
Meanwhile, they’ve sidelined those who hold to the Gospel as originally preached
to the margins of ridicule, bigotry, and oblivion.
There’s good, there’s
bad
I finish with some brief recommendations. Check out the
website of
The Society of Biblical
Literature. The society groups scholars of all persuasions to foster
research into the Bible using the toolkit I described above. Their sheer number
of participants brings by itself a balanced view of today’s trends in biblical
scholarship. Also, if you want to know what it takes to write a peer-reviewed
research paper on biblical interpretation, this is the place to go. If you are Catholic, please don't forget to visit
The Sacred Page, an excellent blog about biblical interpretation and scholarship.
Read two authors that bring the latest biblical scholarship
to Christian theology who actually strengthen historical Christian claims: the
Anglican bishop
N.T. Wright and
Pope (Emeritus) Benedict XVI. If you want
to attain competence on the subject of higher criticism and its fruitful
application to central issues in theology, they are your men.
Don’t buy into the theses put forward by
The Jesus Seminar,
John Dominic Crossan,
and
Elaine Pagels. The
last two star in many of the most popular documentaries about the Bible you see
on TV. I don’t tell you not to read anything by them – I am not a censor – but,
be skeptical. “Criticize the critics,” I would say. Take whatever they say with
a grain of salt.
And may Almighty God, Father, Son, and +Holy Spirit be
with us as we pursue a greater knowledge of Him through Sacred Scripture.
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