Between the age of the Protestant Reformers and our own time lies a great gulf, created by the emergence of what is often described as historical criticism of the Bible. (The word “criticism” here does not imply finding fault; it has its original sense of “analysis,” in the same sense as one speaks about literary criticism. Older writers sometimes distinguish between lower criticism, the textual criticism discussed in the first part of this study, and higher criticism, the focus of the present discussion.) What is the historical criticism of the Bible? When and how did it emerge?
The simplest way of approaching this momentous shift in attitude is by way of the question of authorship. Christians had always recognized that the Bible had human authors. Its authors were believed to be Moses (in the case of the first five books) and the prophets of the Old Testament, as well as the evangelists and apostles of the New Testament. But if the Bible had human authors, this fact was not regarded as terribly significant; it was overshadowed by belief in the Bible’s divine inspiration. As an inspired work, the Bible could be said to have God as its author.
This attitude began to change in the seventeenth century. In a process that began in the mid-1600s and accelerated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the divine authorship of the Bible came to be overshadowed by a new focus on its human authorship. Very often, the divine inspiration of Scripture was not denied. Many biblical interpreters remained devout Christians who continued, at least in principle, to hold to the doctrine of inspiration. But their focus was now on the Bible as a document of human history, a work comparable to any other, produced by human beings and able to be studied using the same methods as other documents of history.
What lay behind this shift? The religious thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was characterized by a crisis of biblical interpretation and (at a deeper level) a crisis of biblical authority. The wars of religion that followed the Protestant Reformation had contributed to this crisis, with both sides claiming biblical authority for their persecution of those who disagreed. The deepest reason for this crisis lay in the new knowledge of the age, both scientific and historical, and the challenge this posed to biblical interpretation.
There were, for instance, tensions between the biblical view of the universe and that emerging from the new Copernican astronomy espoused by such thinkers as Galileo Galilei. With the voyages of discovery that opened up the cultures of Asia and the Americas to European thought, there also emerged difficulties with the Bible’s view of history. The approximately six thousand years of the biblical chronology seemed unable to accommodate either the diversity of human cultures or the existence of ancient non-biblical civilizations such as that of China.
There were, of course, many thinkers for whom this new knowledge simply discredited biblical authority. To such thinkers, Christianity appeared to be merely one religion among others, no longer able to enjoy its taken-for-granted place in human life. Similarly, its Scriptures seemed to be merely one set of sacred writings among others, all too obviously the product of human beings whose knowledge was limited to that of their time and place. Even those who wished to maintain their traditional faith were forced to admit that the biblical writers had been very much men of their age. Divine inspiration had not lifted them above the limited knowledge of their own cultures. If the Bible was to have a message for today, that message needed to be understood as shaped by the particular historical context in which it was received.
It was these developments that lay behind the emergence of historical criticism. The earliest forms of such criticism focused on the Old Testament, particularly the first five books (the Pentateuch). Nineteenth-century scholars began to dismember these books, to see them as the product of a long period of transmission—both by word of mouth and in writing—and of editing. The most famous outcome was the division of the first five books of the Bible into four written sources: the Yahwist (J), the Elohist (E), the Deuteronomic (D), and the Priestly (P), a division that arose from the work of Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918).
This analysis allowed one, for instance, to distinguish between the first and the second chapters of Genesis. Genesis 1 came to be seen as a composition belonging to the so-called Priestly tradition, from relatively late in Israel’s history, while Genesis 2 was a work from the Yahwist tradition, containing material from much earlier in Israel’s history. These forms of analysis were soon applied to the New Testament where a key issue was that of the composition of the gospels. Here the most notable achievement was the two-source theory of the gospels, first formulated by Heinrich Julius Holtzmann (1832–1910). According to this theory, the Gospel of Mark was the earliest of our canonical gospels, while Matthew and Luke were composed using both Mark and a now-lost written collection of Jesus’ sayings that has come to be known as Q (probably from the German Quelle, “source”).
There is no need to dwell on these developments or on the fate of these theories in more recent times. (Those matters will be discussed in the later volumes in this series.) In this context we need only note some of the consequences of historical criticism. One of the most noteworthy was a gradual widening of the gap between the academic study of the Bible and its use in the churches. The historical criticism of the Bible seemed to require no particular religious commitment: it was a work of secular scholarship. Therefore the biblical scholars who pioneered these methods often thought of themselves as historians rather than as theologians.
From many points of view, this was a good thing. It allowed, for instance, Catholic, Protestant, and even Jewish scholars to work together in a common academic undertaking, setting aside for the moment their confessional commitments. But when one took their results back into the life of the church (or synagogue), it was difficult to know what use could be made of them. To put it bluntly, once one had understood what the Bible meant to those for whom it was written, the question remained of what it means to the contemporary believer. Ancient Babylonian creation myths may well shed light upon the book of Genesis, but they are not the kind of thing that would inspire your average congregation.
This widening gap between biblical scholarship and church life was exacerbated by another feature of historical criticism: its complete neglect of the spiritual interpretation. Patristic and medieval writers, convinced of the divine authorship of the Bible, were prepared to find meanings in the biblical text that would have been inaccessible to their human authors. For instance, while the eighth-century B.C. author of Isaiah 7:14 (“. . . the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel”) could hardly be expected to know about the yet-to-occur virginal conception of Jesus, the God who inspired him certainly did. This could therefore constitute a new level of meaning above and beyond that intended by the human author.
The Protestant Reformers condemned the more fanciful forms of allegorical interpretation, but they continued to believe that the Bible spoke of a divinely guided history in which the events of the Old Testament could be seen to foreshadow those of the New Testament, as well as shedding light on the events of their own time. Among historical critics such ways of reading the Bible seemed entirely discredited. Since historians, as historians, could not speak of divine inspiration or of a divinely guided history, all they could do was to describe the one meaning intended by the human author. Believers found themselves marooned in the past with no way of building a bridge to later times or to the present.
It is perhaps a tribute to the adaptive power of religious traditions that what began as a serious challenge to biblical authority was gradually absorbed into mainstream Christian practice. This positive reception, however, was far from universal. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a strong conservative reaction against historical criticism among both Protestant and Catholic Christians.
Given the uniquely important role the Bible plays within Protestant Christianity, one would expect a certain suspicion of historical criticism among conservative Protestants. Historical critics argued that the Bible needed to be understood as a human work, the product of particular historical contexts. In practice this suggested that the authority of the Bible was a limited authority: it was limited by the assumptions of its authors who were people of their time and place. Sometimes we must judge their ideas to have been simply mistaken.
To many conservative Christians, such claims seemed to overlook the divine inspiration of the Bible. If these authors were divinely inspired, God would at the very least have protected them from making false statements. God could also have raised their minds above the limitations of their own cultural context to transmit truths that were of divine and not merely human origin. The Bible, such Christians insisted, was not merely a record of human thought or of religious experience; it was a record of, or at least a witness to, divine revelation.
The great rallying point for conservative Protestants soon became the doctrine of biblical infallibility or inerrancy, the belief that the Bible was without error. This was the first doctrine defended in a famous series of booklets entitled The Fundamentals, published in the United States from 1909 onward and distributed to large numbers of Christian teachers and leaders. (Over three million copies were eventually circulated.)
A similar list of doctrines was adopted by the General Assembly of the North Presbyterian Church in 1910. On this occasion, too, the first of the “fundamentals of faith” to be defended was belief in the inspiration and infallibility of the Bible. Incidentally, the term “fundamentalist” dates from this period. It seems to have been coined following a similar defense of basic Christian beliefs at the Northern Baptist Convention in 1920. The word was initially used on both sides of the debate, being willingly embraced by those to whom it was applied. Only gradually has it become a term of opprobrium.
It is easy to ridicule the more extreme manifestations of this movement. It achieved notoriety, for example, in 1925 during the trial in Dayton, Tennessee, of John T. Scopes, a secondary school teacher who taught Darwin’s theory of evolution in defiance of a religiously motivated state law. Although Scopes was convicted (the decision later being overturned on a technicality), there were many who saw the trial as a symbol of religious ignorance in the face of scientific knowledge. Such tendencies have not gone away. On the contrary, resistance to the theory of evolution seems to have increased, particularly in the United States. A 1991 survey suggested that 47 percent of Americans believe that “man was created pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years,” a statement that implies a remarkably literal interpretation of Genesis 1. To avoid the constitutional implications of introducing religious beliefs into public classrooms, defenders of a literal reading of Genesis 1 have recently begun describing their position as creation science (offering it as a scientific rather than a religious position) or simply as evidence against evolution. However, its roots lie in the same reaffirmation of biblical authority that prompted the Scopes trial of 1925.
Not all conservative Protestants, however, have adopted such extreme views. The great British evangelical J. I. Packer (b. 1926), a defender of conservative Christianity, insists that the inerrancy of the Bible does not necessarily imply a woodenly literal interpretation of what it teaches. For instance, there is nothing to prevent the devout Christian from reading the story of Adam and Eve as a symbolic expression of revealed truth. Packer also argues that one should not confuse the message of the Bible (what it actually teaches) with those beliefs about the world that the biblical writers simply took for granted. Belief in the inerrancy of the Bible need not extend to the latter any more than it implies that the biblical authors always wrote grammatically perfect Hebrew, for “they do not claim to teach either science or grammar.”
Even in the early twentieth century there existed evangelical Christians who combined a reaffirmation of biblical authority with attempts to take seriously the claims of history and the sciences. A key figure here, particularly for American evangelicalism, was J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937), who had been trained in German New Testament scholarship and who could use at least some of its methods in defense of traditional Christian doctrines. Machen also realized that the crisis of biblical authority transcended the divisions established by the Reformation. On the matters that divide Protestants from Catholics he stood firmly with the Reformers, but he could see that on central matters of doctrine conservative Protestants and Catholics had much in common.
While the leading biblical scholars of the nineteenth century were from the Protestant world, it was not long before Catholic scholars became interested in their work. They were hampered, however, by a conservative reaction on the part of the Catholic authorities, one that in many ways parallels that found among Protestants. The mood of the Roman authorities in the mid-nineteenth century was not conducive to freedom of thought. In 1864, for instance, Pope Pius IX issued a Syllabus of Errors, a list of eighty propositions that he regarded as worthy of condemnation. These propositions covered a very wide range of topics. Among the condemned propositions were those that asserted that Scripture was no more than a record of human experience and that the Bible’s account of events is not always historically accurate. The same Pope summoned the First Vatican Council (1870), which strongly reaffirmed the Council of Trent’s position on the canon, divine inspiration, and biblical interpretation.
In 1893 there was a change of mood. In that year Pius IX’s successor, Pope Leo XIII, issued an encyclical on biblical interpretation entitled Providentissimus Deus. In many respects this encyclical was exceedingly cautious. It reaffirmed both the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, insisted on the traditional Catholic principles of interpretation, and condemned the pretensions of higher criticism, which it associated with the rationalist attack on the idea of revelation. The encyclical did, however, encourage serious biblical scholarship: the study of biblical texts in the original languages using the best methods of analysis available. It also addressed the apparent conflict between the biblical worldview and that of modernity. It suggested that, while it was not permissible to limit the authority of the Bible to matters of faith and morals, we should recognize that the sacred writers were not trying to teach scientific truths. Rather, they were concerned to teach those things that are “profitable to salvation” (a principle first enunciated by St. Augustine). In doing so, the sacred writers sometimes expressed their message in language that was “more or less figurative” or “in terms that were commonly used at the time.”
A year before the publication of this encyclical, Leo XIII had commended the work of Marie-Joseph Lagrange (1855–1938), a Dominican priest who in 1890 had founded the École Biblique, a school of advanced biblical studies in Jerusalem. Lagrange is perhaps the greatest pioneer of historical criticism among Catholics. To open the door to historical criticism, Lagrange had been forced to rethink the doctrine of divine inspiration.
Whereas previous descriptions of inspiration had suggested that the sacred writers were merely passive recipients of the divine message, Lagrange insisted that they were truly authors. They were responsible for the entire process by which the Scriptures were composed: namely, gathering sources, both written and oral, selecting material, and shaping it into its present form. Throughout this process they were guided by God so that what they taught was indeed without error. What they taught, however, must be sharply distinguished from the forms in which the teaching is clothed. With regard to the latter we need to take into account the existence of different literary genres so that we may judge some stories to be edifying fiction rather than historical fact. (One thinks, for instance, of the story of Jonah and the large fish.) We also need to take into account the intention of the sacred writers. Sometimes, for instance, they simply repeat the account of Israel’s history that they find in their sources without intending to endorse its accuracy.
While these seem bold statements for a Catholic to make at the beginning of the twentieth century, Lagrange could appeal to sections of Providentissimus Deus in support of his views. However, if the pontificate of Leo XIII represented a cautious opening of the door to historical criticism, that door soon closed. Alarmed by developments in a number of fields, his successor Pope Pius X issued a series of documents in 1907 condemning a number of propositions under the heading of modernism. Among the Pope’s targets was the proposition that the biblical interpreter should approach Scripture as a “merely human document.” While critics such as Lagrange were also devout believers who did not regard the Bible as a merely human document, the change of tone was clear.
One of the first victims of this crisis was the French biblical scholar and theologian Alfred Loisy (1857–1940). While Loisy’s work included a defense of the Catholic view of religious authority, his critical attitude toward the historical value of the gospels resulted in his excommunication in 1908. In 1905 Père Lagrange himself was forbidden to publish on any controversial question and, after failing to obtain permission to publish works in Old Testament studies, switched his attention to the New Testament. In 1912–1913 he was also removed for a time from his post at L’École Biblique. Although he was later restored to his position, he no longer dared to tackle such a dangerous question as that of inspiration.
The effect of what has come to be known as the modernist crisis was to drive Catholic biblical scholarship underground. The moment at which it emerged was the publication in 1943 of an encyclical by Pope Pius XII entitled Divino Afflante Spiritu. The encyclical endorses the view of inspiration defended by Lagrange, according to which the sacred writer is a true author, using all his human powers in the composition of what he writes.
It follows that the interpreter must try to understand the character of these human authors, the context in which they were writing, the sources they used, and the forms of expression they employed. In other words, the primary task of the biblical scholar is to uncover the literal meaning of the biblical text, that is to say, the meaning intended by its human authors. To discover this meaning the interpreter ought to use the same methods of interpretation as would be used for any other human document. While repeating the traditional Catholic view that the final arbiter of the sense of Scripture must be the church, in accordance with her own tradition, the encyclical notes that relatively few passages of Scripture have had their meaning fixed in this way. There is still plenty of freedom for the biblical scholar. With these remarkable statements, the highest authority of the Catholic Church formally endorsed the program of historical criticism.
The publication of Divino Afflante Spiritu was a watershed in the Catholic Church’s attitude to modern biblical scholarship. The Second Vatican Council with its Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum, 1965) offers a further endorsement of historical criticism but adds little to the program set out in Divino Afflante Spiritu. Nor has this endorsement been withdrawn in more recent times.
Indeed a 1993 statement by the Pontifical Biblical Commission, while approving a wide range of new methods of interpretation, describes the historical-critical method as “the indispensable method for the scientific study of the meaning of ancient texts.” In this respect the Commission is surely correct. Whatever criticisms it may meet at the hands of its detractors, it is difficult to see how one could dispense with the historical-critical approach to the Bible. As we will see shortly, even some “postmodern” critics have recently returned to the historical study of the Bible, although in a more nuanced and self-conscious way. It seems that the best insights of the historical critics are here to stay. If the next section of this work is entitled “Postmodern Biblical Interpretation,” this is not intended to suggest that the historical criticism, so characteristic of the modern age, is now superseded. It suggests only that it must now be supplemented by more sophisticated approaches to the meaning of the biblical text.