Historical criticism (also known as higher criticism) is the foundation of biblical interpretation in most theological institutions worldwide. Both those who reject an inspired view of Scripture and those who hold Scripture as inspired and inerrant use it. For Christians who believe the Bible is God’s word spoken through human authors, both to an original historical audience and also to us today, should we accept or reject this historical critical method of studying scripture?
What is Historical Criticism?
In 1989, Catholic theologian Jospeh Fitzmyer wrote an article describing and defending historical criticism and summarized its foundational belief about scripture as this:
“the Bible, though containing the Word of God, is an ancient record, composed indeed by a multiplicity of authors over a long period of time in antiquity. Being such an ancient composition, it has to be studied and analyzed like other ancient records.”1
Compared to many historical critics, Fitzmyer has a fairly high view of scripture. However, I note he does not describe scripture as the Word of God, but says that it “contains” the Word of God. This may or may not indicate some latitude on whether the entirety of scripture can be described as the Word of God.
The core of historical criticism is therefore bringing the tools of history and literary criticism (criticism meaning study, not disagreement) to the task of reading our bible. In other circles, this might simply be described as “reading our Bibles in context”.
Whilst it is true that the bible can accurately be described as a collection of ancient documents, for those of us who believe in the doctrine of inspiration, we also believe it is a book for readers yesterday, today, and tomorrow. So, there will be questions we ask of scripture that are outside the scope of historical criticism. There will be those who reject this and argue that historical criticism, and historical criticism alone, is how one must properly study the scriptural texts. This is a view we must reject, as to do so would deny the impact of scripture for us today.
However, it is also possible to make the opposite mistake and reject all the questions of historical criticism as unhelpful, instead relying on other methods of interpretation. This may sound an appealing option, as neither Calvin, Luther, Cranmer, or any of the Church fathers could be described as historical critics – so why should we ask questions of the biblical texts that Christians for centuries never did?
Quite simply, the answer is that the great theologians in the church were not able to ask the questions of historical criticism, because the history that historical criticism is based on didn’t exist yet. In the same journal article, Fitzmyer outlines the history of the historical study of the bible – noting that the Rosetta Stone was only translated in the 19th century2, as was Akkadian. Many ancient Greek papyri were not discovered or categorized until the late 19th or even early 20th century. Without these documents, there was relatively little history that we could map the biblical texts onto. I cannot be certain, but I suspect that were Calvin and Luther to live in the 20th or 21st centuries, they would be very interested in learning more of the historical background of the texts they spent their lives studying.
Furthermore, there is another reason why asking historical questions of scripture is crucial for those who believe it speaks today. To put it simply, historical exegesis provides the guidelines for our modern hermeneutics. In order to understand what the bible says today, we need to understand what it said for its original audience – for:
“a text cannot mean what it could never have meant for its original readers/hearers. Or to put it in a positive way, the true meaning of the biblical text for us is what God originally intended it to mean when it was first spoken or written. This is the starting point.”3
Here is a good articulation of a positive use of historical criticism for believers in inspiration – it is a starting point, not an end goal. Asking the questions of historical criticism can be a helpful tool in studying scripture, but staying there forever is something like re-reading an introduction to a book 50 times without ever actually reading the book.
What Questions should we ask?
Here I will go through the methods of historical criticism as outlined by Fitzmyer and briefly comment on how we might use them helpfully, and the dangers of using them unhelpfully.
1. Introductory Questions
1a. Authenticity of writing
Most of the time, it’s quite helpful to know who actually wrote a particular piece of literature. It tells us all about their historical background, assumptions they might bring to writing, and may inform us about their purposes for writing. In Biblical studies, this might look like asking – “Did Paul write Ephesians?” or “Who wrote Isaiah?”
However, most of the time, it’s quite hard to get definitive evidence from outside of a text on who wrote specific texts, so this can quickly become a rabbit hole that develops many fruitless arguments. It is also worth noting that a consequence of our belief in the doctrine of inspiration is inerrancy. That is, we believe that the bible does not err in fact, when it intends to make a statement of fact. Where a text has a clearly stated author, we can reasonably hold them to be the actual author. Although, a caveat here – a “clearly stated” author may not always mean what we think, in the case of Paul’s letters it’s more straightforward, but in the case of prophecy –a prophet may have spoken words of prophecy, which were passed down through oral tradition before being recorded in written form. This written form may contain element of literary style, such as poetry, not present in the original prophecy but nevertheless still holding accurately to the message of the original spoken prophecy. So asking questions of authorship can sometimes be helpful, but it not wrong to take the authorship of scripture at face value.
1b. The integrity and/or unity of writing.
This question looks at whether a specific author wrote all the text we have, or whether text was added or removed. The most famous example of this comes at the end of Mark’s gospel where there are very serious concerns as to the authenticity of the final verses. Occasionally, there are other places in our copy of the Scriptures where evangelical scholars have similar questions and places where more liberal scholars would question far more sections.
For this question, it is not wrong to ask whether there are any concerns around the unity of a specific document, but with the exception of the ending of Mark, there is very little consensus for any large interpolations, and scholarly opinion on specific passages can differ from decade to decade. As with the question of authorship, its perfectly acceptable to take the unity of a scriptural text at face value.
1c. The date and place of composition.
This is a much more straightforward question, although that does not mean there is universal agreement, and scholarly opinion can and does change. But broadly-speaking this is a helpful question to as, as it informs you of what historical period to compare the text to and allows you to compare the text with the Biblical narrative’s timeline.
For example, knowing that 1 & 2 Kings were written during the exile of Israel and 1 & 2 Chronicles were written after the restoration of Israel helps us understand the perspective of each piece of writing, and therefore understand the original message to its intended audience. Lastly, this helps us understand the message for us today.
1d. The content of writing.
This is identifying the structure, genre, style, and form of a particular piece of literature. We interpret history differently than parables, which are in turn different frompoetry, which is similar but also different from prophecy. Coming to a biblical text knowing about the common historical patterns of letter writing, for example, helps us understand some of what Paul wrote.
1e. The occasion and purpose of writing
This is what it says on the tin – why a particular piece of literature was written. One common example might be to ask why Paul wrote his letters to the Corinthians:what was happening in the Corinthian church that motivated him to intervene. But a more complicated version of this question might be to ask the same question of Judges. For instance, was Judges intended to support or oppose Israel’s monarchy? This is another example of a helpful (but not always essential) question that may lack a definitive answer and may result in something of a hermeneutical dead end.
1f. The Background
This is a similar question to 1c – but dives a bit more deeply and specifically into whether a writer was likelyexposed to and possibly influenced by ideas from their culture or surrounding cultures. For the OT, this might look like how Genesis creation narratives subvert Near-Eastern creation narratives by saying that creation was made from the start in an ordered way, not generated by the forces of chaos. Another example could be how the book of Job might be a reaction to common Near Eastern philosophy of suffering and sin. These are good questions to ask, and have almost no downside for those of us who hold to the doctrine of inspiration. We believe that God sovereignly placed the biblical authors in a time and place such that they would produce exactly the text that God wanted and that the claim the bible is God’s word is not denied in any way by saying the biblical authors may have external influences in mind when they wrote their documents.
2. Textual Criticism
Textual criticism is the name given to the field of study that looks at the biblical manuscripts and work out, as best as we can, what the original documents most likely said. The good news is we a wealth of biblical manuscripts to do this from, most notably the mid 20th century discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls gave us manuscripts that are, in some cases, centuries older than the oldest we previously had.
Out of all the fields of historical criticism, this is arguably the one that we can be most supportive of – if we believe that the original documents are indeed the word of God, then it is in our best interest to be as accurate as we can.
3. Literary Criticism
This is a field of study that very much overlaps with question 1d, but will likely come from a point of view of treating biblical texts as purely literary documents, rather than theological ones. There are many interesting and useful things that do come out of this particular field of study, but when engaging with literary criticism, be aware that the theological importance and purpose of the texts may be sidelined, or ignored – and many of those in this field will likely not hold to doctrines of inerrancy or inspiration, instead, treating the biblical documents as fallible human texts.
4. Source Criticism
Source Criticism is a historical study of texts that seeks to look behind the texts, to try and work out whether there were existing literary sources that the biblical author used in composing the text. It may be common in this field for scholars to treat the biblical authors more as editors or compliers of texts, rather than authors. Fitzmyer gives his view on why this is important here:
“In some biblical books the text simply cries out for such source analysis because of parallel accounts of the same event, stereotyped phraseology, etc. If the book forms part of the Pentateuch, the interpreter has to discern the difference of composition among the Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomic, and Priestly writings. If the text is part of a Synoptic Gospel, the distinction of it as derived from Mark, or “Q,” or from private Matthean or Lucan sources is an important aspect of the interpretation of the passage.”4
Here Fitzmyer draws on the 2 most common examples of source criticism that you are likely to come across. First is the theory that the books of the Pentateuch were an edited collection of 4 different authors, and secondly that there was an unknown authorial source called “Q” who penned sections of what is now included in the gospels of Matthew and Luke.
Ultimately this field is highly speculative, and you many find that the practice of form criticism is not as common in the field of biblical studies today as it was fifty years ago. But it is worth being aware of, as in reading older commentaries you will likely see the above two theories mentioned and simply assumed to be correct.
In my personal opinion there is little to be gained in trying to piece together the pre history of a text that goes beyond simply asking the questions of 1c and 1f. Because of the speculative nature of the field, it means any interpretation differences flowing from form criticism are incredibly hard to definitively defend or refute.
A similar style of historical criticism to form criticism is redaction criticism, that functions in much the same way to form criticism except it presumes the biblical authors already possessed original texts that were then edited (redacted), which may lead to possible interpretive differences.
5. Form Criticism
Form criticism
“seeks to determine the literary form or subform of a given biblical writing. What kind of a psalm is it? Is the text part of apocalyptic or Wisdom literature? Is it a parable or other type of saying of Jesus, a miracle story, a pronouncement story?”5
Conclusion
This field of study therefore asks questions similar to those of 1d, but goes deeper, and asks whether, even within a biblical book, there are different forms of writing that need to be interpreted differently. This is generally a very helpful field of study as it primarily deals with the texts we actually have and helps us discern what the authorial intent for the original audience is likely to have been. It can lead to new insights into a biblical passage that have been lost due to our historical distance between the 21st century and whenever the biblical text was written. Otherwise put, form criticism may allow us to see what would have been obvious, but not explicitly stated, to the original audience.
Overall, I believe that Christians who believe in the full verbal and plenary inspiration of scripture can faithfully use the fruits of historical criticism in their study of the bible. But as students of theology dive ever deeper into historical criticism, there will increasingly be those who are using similar methods with very different presuppositions as to the validity of theological interpretation, which will lead to significant differences in overall interpretation. Regardless of this, historical criticism from scholars of every theological difference is an attempt at reading their bible carefully. It is wrong to say that those who use historical criticism with different presuppositions do not take their bible any less seriously, but it does mean that we should approach the fruits of their work with a critical eye.
It is my hope that this article helps you understand the opportunities and dangers of historical criticism, as well as understanding some of the nuances of how it is applied. You will likely have noticed that many of the areas I have defined are not exact – they overlap with each other significantly.
And remember that all of this is in service of the command “tolle, lege” – Take up, and read! Read and study the amazing gift we have in God’s word so that your hearts may be moved to love and worship of him!
Footnotes
- Joseph A. Fitzmyer, “Historical Criticism: Its Role in Biblical Interpretation and Church Life,” JTS 50, no. 2 (1989): 244–59. I quote Fitzmyer several times in this article, as his history and description of historical criticism is both helpful and clear – and I believe that to critique a particular viewpoint we should engage with the best example of it. However, this is not an endorsement of Fitzmyer’s overall view of historical criticism, nor his theology of the inspired nature of the biblical passages. ↩︎
- Joseph A. Fitzmyer, “Historical Criticism: Its Role in Biblical Interpretation and Church Life.” 247 ↩︎
- Gordon D. Fee and Douglas K. Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2014). 34-35 ↩︎
- Joseph A. Fitzmyer, “Historical Criticism: Its Role in Biblical Interpretation and Church Life.” 250-251 ↩︎
- Joseph A. Fitzmyer, “Historical Criticism: Its Role in Biblical Interpretation and Church Life.” 251 ↩︎
