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There can be little doubt that the modern scholarly engagement with the Bible and the Quran in the western world has been dominated by what is customarily called ‘historical criticism’ or ‘the historical-critical method’ (Soulen and Soulen 2001: 78–80). The compound adjective ‘historical-critical’ only seems to have gained programmatic currency in biblical studies around 1800 (Kraus 1982: 176), but the second component of the term is already employed in Ludwig Cappellus’ Critica sacra (1650), a manual of biblical exegesis which, among other topics, treats the transmission of the biblical text and establishes methodological principles for the assessment of textual variants (Kraus 1982: 49–50, 83–4; Burnett 2008: 789–92). Cappellus is perhaps best known for an earlier work (published anonymously in 1624) which demonstrates, against the orthodox Protestant dogma of the divine origin of all aspects of the Hebrew text of scripture, that the biblical vowel signs were only introduced in the fifth or sixth century ce (Kraus 1982: 31–5, 48). An even more sustained application of the ‘critical’ mindset is Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678), which ventures far beyond issues of textual criticism and argues, as Thomas Hobbes and Isaak de la Peyrère had already done in the 1650s (Hobbes 1996: 252–3 (ch. 33); Nellen 2008: 817–23), that the Pentateuch cannot have been composed by Moses alone (Kraus 1982: 65–70; Rogerson 2008: 838–43). By way of a preliminary definition, we may thus say that to study the Bible, or any other text, critically is to set aside traditional presuppositions about its origin, transmission, and meaning, and instead to follow, as Hobbes put it, the ‘light…which is held out to us from the books themselves’ (Hobbes 1996: 252); and to pursue such a critical enquiry from a historical perspective is to take an overriding interest in what the text in question might have meant to its original addressees or human author(s), and how these and later redactors and transmitters contributed to its present shape.
Due to the paradigmatic status which the historical-critical approach has enjoyed in modern scholarship, any student of the historical interactions and structural homologies within the Abrahamic family of religions would do well to give some thought to the methodological underpinnings of historical-critical readings of religious writings, which were to a significant extent developed and honed by scholars grappling with the Bible. The present chapter is meant to assist in such a self-reflective endeavour. I shall begin by attempting to transcend the more or less lexical definition of historical criticism given above and to further carve out its hermeneutical peculiarities.
Although describing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as ‘scriptural religions’ may be a simplification, it is certainly a defensible one: the notion of a revealed or inspired corpus of literature seems to be inscribed into the very genome of all historical descendants of the biblical tradition. Normally, recognition of a particular text as constituting ‘scripture’ is expressed in terms of genealogical statements about how the text’s proximate human author or transmitter—for example, Moses, the apostolic authors of the Gospels, or Muhammad—came to function as a conduit for divine communications, or to receive divine inspiration. Nevertheless, endowing a text with scriptural authority is not simply a matter of such explicit affirmations of revelatory status: it also requires a special kind of hermeneutics, which Moshe Halbertal has characterized as applying an extreme version of what modern philosophers call the ‘principle of charity’ (Halbertal 1997: 27ff.). In order to throw into relief some of the defining features of historical-critical interpretation, it will be useful to briefly survey the most important principles of traditional scriptural exegesis.
As John Barton has observed, treating a certain text, or a collection of texts, as constituting scripture (at least in the common sense of the term) generally entails the ‘hermeneutical imperative’ that it ought to be read as containing teachings which are both individually true and collectively consistent (Barton 1996: 73). This imperative may manifest itself, for example, in attempts to resolve apparent contradictions between different scriptural passages, or to defuse tensions between scripture and the worldview espoused by its interpreters.1 To be sure, the twin postulate of scripture’s truth and coherence is not always applied to the entire corpus: traditional Islamic exegetes often consider certain earlier quranic commandments to have been ‘abrogated’ by later ones; and Mark’s Jesus insists that the establishment of marriage as an indissoluble bond in Gen. 2: 24 overrides the Mosaic permission of divorce (Deut. 24: 1), said to have been decreed merely ‘for the hardness of your hearts’ (Mark 10: 5). Nevertheless, it seems correct to insist that hermeneutical practices which we would recognize as endowing a text with properly scriptural status must uphold the truth and coherence at least of a significant chunk of it.
In addition to being true and consistent, scriptural texts are also generally assumed to be transhistorically significant—i.e. they are credited with an abiding formative and normative relevance for contemporary believers (Barton 1996: 73–6; Halbertal 1997: 3). Many scriptural interpreters will thus display a concern with maintaining and extending the respective text’s foundational role for the way in which a community (or a scholarly elite within it) understands God, the world, and itself; with the scriptural derivation of moral or legal norms; and with unlocking scripture’s potential for individual ethical or spiritual progress (Sinai 2009: 16–21). Finally, it should be noted that canonical practices of reading also engender an intense concentration of intellectual energy on details which in a profane text would be viewed as negligible or even ‘subsemantic’ (Barton 1996: 77): a text credited with canonical authority is presumed to repay any amount of exegetical pondering that its human interpreters are capable of. One may call this the assumption of scripture’s exegetical inexhaustibility (Sinai 2009: 10–16).
Going beyond the preliminary clarification of ‘historical criticism’ given above, we may thus say that to interpret the Bible (or the Quran) from a historical-critical perspective is not only to be prepared to question established opinions about its origin, transmission, and meaning, but to systematically suspend the traditional postulates of consistency, abiding truth, and contemporary significance that endow these texts with scriptural authority in the first place. The earliest explicit articulation of this second and stronger understanding of historical criticism is found in Benedict Spinoza’s (d. 1677) landmark Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670). The next section therefore proposes to take a closer look at this foundational manifesto of modern biblical hermeneutics.2
Spinoza explicitly rejects the postulate that scripture is ‘everywhere true and divine’, laid down as an a priori foundation for discovering its ‘true sense’ (Spinoza 1925: 9; English translation in Elwes 1883–4: 8 [henceforth cited in brackets]), and complains that this assumption has all too often led interpreters to ‘wring their own figments and opinions out of the sacred text’ (Spinoza 1925: 97 [98]). Spinoza, by contrast, would have the exegete bracket the question whether the biblical text has anything to say which contemporary readers will be able to accept as true and relevant: ‘we are at work not on the truth of what is said, but solely on its sense’ (Spinoza 1925: 100 [101]). In interpreting the Bible, then, we are to engage in an extensive exercise in double-entry bookkeeping: whatever we contemporary interpreters may believe to be true about God, man, and the world is not allowed to directly determine the beliefs about God, man, and the world that we ascribe to, say, the ancient Israelites.3 Linguistic and historical data come to replace the interpreter’s theological, scientific, and other beliefs as the background against which the plausibility of a given interpretation is to be gauged: safeguarding or maximizing the truth and significance of a text—which constitute primary concerns of traditional scriptural exegesis—cease to be legitimate grounds for discarding a literal and commonsensical understanding of a particular passage in favour of an allegorical one or a complex harmonization with another passage. The interpreter of scripture must resolutely resist the temptation of reading it too charitably, of mistaking ‘the mind of the Prophets and the Historians [who composed the biblical writings] with the mind of the Holy Spirit and the true nature of the matter’ (Spinoza 1925: 105 [106]).
Spinoza himself provides an example for the exegetical procedure he has in mind. When it is stated in Deut. 4: 24 that God is a ‘consuming fire’, are we to understand that Moses believed God materially to be a fire, or are we to construe the statement as a metaphor? According to Spinoza, the relevant consideration must not be which one of the various possible interpretations conforms to what we take to be a reasonable view of the nature of God: there is nothing to guarantee that the Pentateuch might not contain unreasonable theology. Instead, we are to base our interpretation of the verse on an understanding of the text’s historical background, which to Spinoza means that we must interpret it in the light of the other theological views expressed in the Pentateuch and according to the semantics of ancient Hebrew. Hence, if we are unable to provide evidence that in ancient Hebrew calling someone a ‘fire’ could carry a metaphorical meaning, we will be forced to take the text literally, ‘however repugnant it may be to reason’ (Spinoza 1925: 100–1 [102]). Although Spinoza maintains that a metaphorical reading of the above statement in fact turns out to be correct, his hermeneutics thus opens up the very real possibility that the Bible may turn out to be grossly mistaken—or, as scholars would start to put it towards the end of the eighteenth century, to contain ‘myths’ (Kraus 1982: 147–51 and Kümmel 1973: 101–4, 111–12)—and to be inconsistent (given that, as Spinoza registers, other biblical verses teach that God has no likeness to any visible thing, see Spinoza 1925: 101 [102]). As the important Enlightenment theologian Johann Salomo Semler (d. 1791), who fully subscribed to the basic principles of Spinoza’s hermeneutics,4 was to observe a century later, scripture may even turn out to be theologically and ethically irrelevant: ‘it is therefore false to assume that Holy Scripture always, and in the first instance, brings about men’s edification and must also be directly employed to that end’ (Kümmel 1973: 66). When Johannes Weiß argued in his 1892 work Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes that the historical Jesus was not a forerunner of nineteenth-century liberal theology but an apocalyptic prophet announcing the imminent end of the world (Schweitzer 1911), he provided a striking illustration for the radical otherness that might accrue to scripture on the basis of Spinoza’s hermeneutics.
Although historical-critical scholarship has undergone significant refinement since Spinoza, I would submit that its basic approach—which is well summarized by the frequently reiterated maxim that the Bible must be interpreted in the same way as any other text5—has remained recognizably similar to the methodology set out in Spinoza’s Tractatus. By virtue of suspending the a priori assumptions discussed above, historical-critical interpreters are bound to be highly sensitive to tensions, inconsistencies, and redundancies within scripture, as well as to divergences between scripture and later tradition, and to be disinclined to resort to non-literal strategies of reading or complex harmonizations in order to resolve such anomalies. Instead, they will typically seek to understand the text at hand in the light of views, concepts, and modes of expression current in the historical situation from which it originated, and of events and developments contemporaneous with it. This implies both that a text’s historical context will play a fundamental role in determining what it is that the text is saying; and that traditional assumptions about its dating and ascription become falsifiable if there is reason to doubt that its style and content are historically plausible under the historical circumstances to which it has so far been assigned. A celebrated early instance of this sort of reasoning is Lorenzo Valla’s demonstration in 1440 that the so-called ‘Donation of Constantine’, supposedly an official decree by which the Emperor Constantine had given over the western part of the Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester, could not have been composed in the fourth century ce. It is a consequence of Spinoza’s hermeneutics that the traditional ascription, or even the explicit self-ascription, of biblical works can be prosecuted on the same grounds: de Wette’s claim that the Book of Deuteronomy was a product of the seventh century bce rather than having been authored by Moses, or Wellhausen’s late dating of the priestly law (see below), are epistemological siblings of Valla’s argument.
Against a simplistic view of historical criticism as simply more ‘neutral’ than traditional scriptural exegesis, it bears pointing out that it is likewise based on assumptions which it does not, and indeed cannot, itself justify:
These postulates are obviously rooted in a distinctively modern understanding of the material world as a self-contained field of causally interconnected occurrences, in which every event is caused by other events from within the system: divine or other supernatural interventions thus cease to be part of the explanatory toolkit.6
The remainder of this chapter will attempt to convey a sense of the rich diversity of modern biblical and quranic scholarship that has developed around the core hermeneutical commitments sketched above on the basis of Spinoza’s Tractatus. Before turning to the subsequent history of the discipline, however, it is important to briefly look back and examine how the new exegetical approach pioneered by Spinoza and Simon crystallized. A good point of departure for such retrospection is the question of the genesis of the Pentateuch. As intimated above, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Simon all contest the traditional belief that the Pentateuch was composed by Moses and instead argue that it can only have reached its final shape at a much later time; Spinoza, for example, singles out Ezra as the most probable editor of the sequence of historical books reaching from Genesis to Kings. In support of this position, Hobbes and Spinoza invoke various passages whose literal sense suggests the perspective of post-Mosaic writers, such as the description of Moses’ death and burial in Deut. 34: 5–6, or Gen. 12: 6 (‘At that time the Canaanites were in the land’), which presupposes the later Israelite takeover of Canaan (Hobbes 1996: 253; Spinoza 1925: 119 [121–2]; Nadler 2011: 108–10). Simon adds further references to various repetitions and inconsistencies that likewise cast doubt on the Pentateuch’s unitary authorship (Simon 1685: 31–40 [book 1, ch. 5]).
Such textual observations have a centuries-long prehistory. This is signalled by Spinoza himself, who opens chapter 8 of the Tractatus with a citation from the Jewish exegete Abraham ibn Ezra’s (d. 1164) commentary on Deut. 1: 1. The quotation enumerates various verses from the Pentateuch—such as Gen. 12: 6—that are prima facie incompatible with Mosaic authorship.7 Havah Lazarus-Yafeh has suggested that Ibn Ezra could have been influenced by Islamic polemicists like Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064), whose ‘Book of Opinions on Religions, Sects, and Heresies’ presents a long list of the Bible’s geographical and chronological inconsistencies, theological impossibilities, and moral abominations in order to prove the quranically inspired charge that the Jews have ‘falsified’ the text of the Torah (Lazarus-Yafeh 1992: 26–35).8 Lazarus-Yafeh’s conjecture that elements of medieval Islamic polemics against Judaism, transmitted through Jewish scholars like Abraham ibn Ezra, resurface in Spinoza’s Tractatus is furthermore supported by the fact that Ezra the scribe, whom Spinoza took to be the final editor of the historical writings of the Hebrew Bible, is cast in a similar role by Ibn Ḥazm.9 It should also be noted that the statement describing God as a ‘consuming fire’ from Deut. 4: 24, employed by Spinoza in order to demonstrate proper exegetical procedure, is already cited by Ibn Ḥazm as an illustration of the shocking anthropomorphism of the Bible.10 As Lazarus-Yafeh emphasizes, such a polemically motivated close reading of the Bible pre-dates the Islamic Middle Ages (Lazarus-Yafeh 1992: 28, 130–3), and Ibn Ḥazm’s sources may ultimately reach back to ancient authors like the second-century pagan philosopher Celsus11 or Marcion.12
Nevertheless, it is not obvious that textual discoveries of the sort adduced by Abraham ibn Ezra must necessarily be viewed as affording a sort of Archimedean point from which to lift traditional Jewish and Christian beliefs about the origin of the Bible off their foundation. The passage about Moses’ death and burial, for example, is already highlighted, and conveniently domesticated, in the Talmud: ‘Is it possible that Moses whilst still alive would have written “So Moses…died there” (Deut. 34: 5)? The truth is, however, that up to this point Moses wrote, from this point Joshua, son of Nun, wrote.’13 And a Christian allegorist like Origen (d. c.254) could freely admit Celsus’ point that the Bible contained ‘impossibilities and contradictions’, in order to then go on to maintain that such impossibilities constitute ‘stumbling blocks’ inserted by the Holy Spirit in order to direct the reader of scripture to a spiritual layer of meaning hidden beneath its literal surface sense (Turner 2010: 76). The prominence which early modern writers like Spinoza give to such long-recognized anomalies therefore requires a separate explanation. The most pertinent one is surely the emphasis on the literal sense of the Bible that can already be found in late medieval exegesis (Grant and Tracy 1984: 87–91; Smith 2008: 55–60) and then received a powerful boost by the Reformation.14 If scripture was to function as the exclusive arbiter of theological truth over and against ecclesiastic tradition, it had to possess one ‘simple’ and ‘literal’ sense, as Luther insisted (Raeder 2008: 375). Despite the fact that Luther was still committed to a Christological interpretation of the Old Testament (Raeder 2008: 377–8), historical and philological considerations thus came to be recognized as important ways of access to the sense of scripture. Luther himself raised the possibility that the final editing of the Book of Isaiah might have been undertaken by someone other than the prophet (Raeder 2008: 389; Kraus 1982: 16), and Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt cited Deut. 34: 5, among other verses, as prima facie speaking against the view that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch (Kraus 1982: 28–31). Thus, textual observations of the sort put forward by Abraham ibn Ezra were only able to display their full force as a result of the unprecedented theological weight that Protestant hermeneutics imposed on the literal sense of the Bible. From this perspective, Spinoza’s tongue-in-cheek presentation of his exegetical approach as a consistent application of the Reformationist principle of sola scriptura, while certainly a rhetorical artifice, does not appear to be so far off the mark after all (Spinoza 1925: 99 [100]).
Another important precondition for the work of Spinoza and Simon was of course the significant increase of philological expertise in Greek and Hebrew that owed as much to Renaissance humanism as to the Reformationist emphasis on the primacy of scripture. A crucial first step consisted in printings of the Hebrew and Greek text of the Bible becoming available at the beginning of the sixteenth century (Schenker 2008). The foundations for a proper command of Hebrew grammar and lexicography by Christian interpreters were established by Johannes Reuchlin (d. 1522) and Conrad Pellican (d. 1556), who paved the way for the impressive philological erudition displayed in Hugo Grotius’ Annotata ad Vetus Testamentum (1644) (Kessler-Mesguich 2008; Kraus 1982: 26–7, 50–3). During the same period, and in partial imitation of the established procedures of classical scholarship, the methodology of textual criticism was honed, reaching a first apogee in Cappellus’ Critica sacra (1650).15 Thus, over the course of the 150–200 years preceding Spinoza and Simon, Christian interpreters of the Bible had systematically acquired a previously non-existent set of textual and linguistic skills without which the novel hermeneutical approach outlined in the previous section would not have been feasible. Incidentally, it may be remarked that in doing so, they attained for the first time a level of philological competence comparable to that routinely expected of Islamic interpreters of the Quran, who from the ninth century on had taken a close interest in grammatical and lexicographical issues and quranic reading variants.
Utilizing analytical categories coined by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn, one might characterize the works of Spinoza and Simon as marking an exegetical shift of ‘paradigm’ followed by a period of ‘normal science’, in which ever more data is accumulated and the theoretical models used to explain this data become ever more refined (Kuhn 1962). In spite of the important differences between canonical and historical-critical hermeneutics highlighted above, it must be emphasized that there is at least one significant commitment that historical-critical ‘normal science’ has inherited from traditional biblical exegesis: its commitment to a close reading of the biblical text which, while adhering to the same general principles that govern the interpretation of ordinary historical documents, nevertheless deems the Bible to merit an amount of philological attention that one would not normally accord to ‘profane’ writings—a sort of latter-day equivalent of what was called the ‘assumption of scripture’s inexhaustibility’ above. In this respect, the consolidation of historical-critical practices of close reading after Spinoza and Simon, in spite of contributing to a partial subversion of the Bible’s religious authority, was nevertheless squarely predicated on the latter. This was certainly a result of the fact that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany, the historical-critical study of the Bible increasingly came to be practised within Protestant theological faculties.
While the present chapter obviously cannot hope to do justice to such a centuries-long collaborative scholarly enterprise, it will be useful to provide at least one illustration for the further development of historical-critical Bible scholarship since the early eighteenth century. In order to link this to the preceding sections, I shall again concentrate on the genesis of the Pentateuch. A decisive advance over the works of Spinoza and Simon occurred when Jean Astruc (d. 1766), the personal physician of Louis XIV of France, realized that the two creation accounts at the beginning of the Book of Genesis are marked by a systematic preference for different divine names, namely, the term ‘Elohim’ (Gen. 1: 1–2: 3) and the tetragrammaton YHWH (Gen. 2: 4–3: 24). In a book published in 1753, Astruc proposed that this state of affairs could be explained by assuming that the two narratives stemmed from two different sources on which Moses had drawn in composing the Book of Genesis. Remarkably, the same discovery had already been made about four decades earlier by Henning Bernhard Witter, but had subsequently fallen into oblivion (Lods 1925). Witter and Astruc mark the birth of the Documentary Hypothesis, i.e. the theory that repetitions, incongruities, and anomalies of the sort catalogued by Simon could be accounted for by postulating that the Pentateuch in its present form had been compiled from a number of originally independent works with significantly different terminological and theological characteristics. Astruc’s approach was taken up by Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (d. 1827), who in his German introduction to the Old Testament (1780–3) conducted his own source-critical analysis of Genesis based on Astruc’s general principle (Rogerson 1984: 19–20). In 1798, Karl David Ilgen proposed an important refinement of the Documentary Hypothesis by distinguishing two different sources using the divine name ‘Elohim’. Various alternative models to the Documentary Hypothesis that were proposed during the first decades of the nineteenth century were ultimately abandoned (Whybray 1995: 12–28).
While Astruc and Eichhorn had still considered Moses to have been responsible for the compilation of the Pentateuch, subsequent Old Testament criticism was marked by increasing doubts about the biblical account of ancient Israelite history. Already Johann Severin Vater (d. 1826) and Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (d. 1849) saw the Pentateuch as a comparatively late work dating from the seventh or sixth century bce (Rogerson 1984: 34–5), thus broadly agreeing with Spinoza’s dating. De Wette was also responsible for a hypothesis that was to become a veritable cornerstone of Pentateuchal scholarship: in his 1805 dissertation, he argued that the Book of Deuteronomy was not composed by the same author as the other books of the Pentateuch and that it was in part identical with the ‘book of the law’ which according to 2 Kings 22–3 was discovered in the Jerusalem Temple in the eighteenth year of King Josiah of Judah (622 bce). Rather than being a work of Moses, de Wette maintained that Deuteronomy had only been composed under Josiah in order to support the latter’s centralization of the sacrificial cult in Jerusalem (Rogerson 1992: 39–43). For the first time, it seemed, part of the Pentateuch had been securely placed in a specific historical situation—although it should be noted that contemporary scholarship has found reason to question the historicity of the report from 2 Kings, thus undermining de Wette’s chronological anchor point (Würthwein 1994).
Drawing on the work of Ilgen and de Wette, Hermann Hupfeld and Eduard Riehm in 1853 and 1854 formulated the classic version of the Documentary Hypothesis which postulated four Pentateuchal source layers: one using the tetragrammaton (the ‘Yahwist’), two using the divine name ‘Elohim’ (the ‘Elohist’ and the Priestly Source), and the Book of Deuteronomy (Kraus 1982: 247–8). The Documentary Hypothesis reached its consummation with Julius Wellhausen’s (d. 1918) Prolegomena to the History of Israel, first published in 1878, which demonstrated, on the basis of earlier work by Karl Heinrich Graf and Abraham Kuenen, that the Priestly Source with its extensive legal portions (now found in Leviticus and Numbers) was in fact younger than Deuteronomy and postdated the classical literary prophets such as Amos and Hosea.16 The ‘Mosaic’ law accordingly emerged as the youngest element of the Pentateuch—a groundbreaking inversion of the biblical view of Israelite religious history, which, unlike Hobbes’ or Spinoza’s somewhat casual denial of the Pentateuch’s Mosaic authorship, was based on a painstaking, multi-generational sifting of texts. Although Pentateuchal scholarship continued to evolve in the first half of the twentieth century, cultivating a new interest in questions of literary genre and in the oral traditions underlying the literary sources of the Pentateuch, Wellhausen’s formulation of the four-source theory of the Pentateuch survived virtually unchallenged until the 1970s. Since then, scholars have developed various alternative models, although these generally retain important elements of nineteenth-century Pentateuchal source criticism.17 Partly in recognition of the fact that theories about the literary and redactional prehistory of the Pentateuch and other biblical books are, at least to some degree, inevitably hypothetical, recent decades have also seen a growing emphasis on the end product that has emerged from these processes, i.e. on the final shape of individual biblical writings, or even the Hebrew Bible as a whole (Sheppard 1992).
Before moving on to the Quran, one seminal development in the history of the discipline must be briefly touched upon: the discovery of the Hebrew Bible’s ancient Near Eastern context. By the 1850s, Grotefend, Rawlinson, Champollion, and Hincks had made groundbreaking contributions to the decipherment of Old Persian and Akkadian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs (Wiesehöfer 2001: 231–42; Allen 2010: 8–9; Cathcart 2011). Their work made it possible to read the numerous ancient Near Eastern documents that were being discovered over the course of the nineteenth century, such as the thousands of clay tablets excavated at Nineveh. An early product of this new type of scholarship was George Smith’s The Chaldean Account of Genesis (1876), offering translations of Babylonian texts which showed close parallels with the biblical accounts of the creation and the deluge. Spinoza had assumed that the historical background of the biblical writings would have to be reconstructed on the basis of the Bible itself, and this had essentially remained the approach even of Wellhausen (although the latter had supplemented the biblical data by parallels from pre-Islamic Arabic religion, assumed to preserve vestiges of the primitive stage of Semitic religion). For the first time, the new material that was now becoming available offered direct glimpses into the Bible’s wider cultural context.
It is perhaps understandable that the striking parallels between the primeval history in Genesis 1–11 and ancient Near Eastern texts such as the Enuma Elish or the Atrahasis story led some scholars to conclude that much of the Bible was little more than a distant echo of Mesopotamian civilization, a position forcefully expressed in Friedrich Delitzsch’s (d. 1922) lectures on ‘Babel und Bibel’, delivered in 1902, which triggered a famous controversy (Johanning 1988; Lehmann 1994). Contemporary scholarship has reached a much more nuanced perspective than Delitzsch and has transcended the heady triumph of discovery by rightly emphasizing the Bible’s deliberate recasting of, and implicit polemics against, ancient Near Eastern notions.18 The availability of the new ancient Near Eastern material has therefore required biblical studies to undergo a crucial learning process that can perhaps be summed up by saying that intertextual comparison does not imply reductionism—a truth to which we will have occasion to return in the next section, dealing with the emergence of modern quranic scholarship.
For more than a millennium, Christians had been accustomed to reviling the Quran as a rehash of Christian heresies, and its presumed author Muhammad as an ‘impostor’ and a ‘false prophet’ (Bobzin 2004). Any first-hand discussion of the Quran was thus closely bound up with anti-Islamic polemics.19 A precondition for the modern western study of the Quran was therefore the gradual dissipation of such a primarily polemical stance (Stroumsa 2010: 124–44). This change in attitude is well illustrated by the Catholic theologian Johann Adam Möhler (d. 1838), who, in spite of ascribing the Quran’s rejection of the divinity of Jesus to Muhammad’s ‘ignorance’ and ‘misapprehensions’, criticized the traditional view that the Islamic prophet was a religious impostor as rendering inexplicable the genesis of the Quran, and speaks with respect of the latter’s ‘highly original piety, its touching devotion and [its] peculiar religious poetry’ (Möhler 1839: 357, 370).20 The Quran, then, was not a deliberate fabrication aimed at furthering Muhammad’s craving for power, but a genuine expression of human religiosity, and as such could be seen to deserve dispassionate study. While the historical-critical study of the Bible emerged when European scholars started to read the Bible with significantly less charity than before, that of the Quran was born when western scholars began to read it more charitably (although in no way going so far as to assume its truth or coherence). Like the Bible, the Quran thus ceased to be evaluated primarily in terms of whether or not it corresponded to what was taken to be theologically (or morally, or cosmologically) true.
The view that Muhammad had practised conscious deception was also rejected in Abraham Geiger’s (d. 1874) Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judentume aufgenommen (‘What did Muhammad Borrow from Judaism?’, 1833) (Geiger 1898: 25; cf. Sinai 2008), the earliest scholarly treatment of the Quran that still figures in contemporary western publications. Geiger’s impressive catalogue of quranic ‘borrowings’ from biblical and rabbinical literature was superseded in the 1930s by Heinrich Speyer’s even more comprehensive Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, but even today a full picture of the complicated ways in which the Quran is intertwined with the religious landscape of late antiquity—for example, with Syriac Christianity—has yet to emerge. In marked contrast to the Hebrew Bible, for which comparative work of the sort carried out by Geiger only began to be feasible with the rediscovery of the ancient Near East in the last decades of the nineteenth century, after more than a century of intense source-critical analysis, the modern western study of the Quran was from its inception intensely focused on intertextual comparison with biblical and post-biblical Jewish and Christian literature. As a result, the temptation of intertextual reductionism was even more acute in quranic studies than in biblical scholarship: for all their erudition, Geiger, Speyer and others often tended to assume that the Quran simply replicates a given Jewish or Christian narrative or concept.21 As in the case of the Bible, however, many scholars would now readily admit that the Quran does not simply and invariably ‘borrow’ from earlier traditions, but frequently appropriates and inflects them in line with its own theological agenda and purposes, often in highly sophisticated and creative ways (Griffith 2008: 115–16).
Geiger’s treatise was followed, in 1843 and 1844, by two works by Gustav Weil (d. 1889), a study of the life of Muhammad and a brief ‘historical-critical introduction to the Quran’. Weil’s most lasting contribution consisted in his attempt to reconstruct the chronological order in which the texts now collected in the Quran had originally been promulgated by Muhammad. Weil’s division of the quranic material into four periods (three Meccan, one Medinan) (Weil 1844: 54–80) was further refined in Theodor Nöldeke’s (d. 1930) Geschichte des Qorâns (1860), which in a thoroughly revised and enlarged edition prepared between 1909 and 1938 has remained an important reference work until today (Nöldeke 1909–38).22 The notion that the quranic material can be reorganized into a linear series of texts datable to different stages of Muhammad’s prophetic career, as well as the distinction between suras and verses reportedly revealed at Mecca and at Medina, is already prominent in traditional Islamic exegesis, where Weil’s and Nöldeke’s four-period chronology clearly has its point of departure (Weil 1843: 363ff.). Nonetheless, the Weil–Nöldeke chronology is meant to be based primarily on stylistic and terminological criteria immanent in the Quran itself, such as the extreme divergences in verse length exhibited by different suras, rather than on extra-quranic reports of frequently dubious authenticity. The four-period chronology may thus be seen as a methodological and functional analogue to the Documentary Hypothesis. The question to what extent Weil’s and Nöldeke’s chronological reordering stands in need of revision or should even be replaced by an entirely different approach will certainly remain on the agenda of quranic scholars for some time to come. The problem is closely bound up with that of determining the scope of the textual units that are to be dated: do these consist in brief passages encompassing merely a few verses, or can we assume that at least the short and mid-sized suras, and perhaps even the longest ones, are unified literary wholes?23
Weil’s work was also paradigmatic insofar as it closely linked the study of the Quran to that of the life of Muhammad, an approach inherited from medieval Islamic scholarship. The Quran itself offers little more than indirect and frequently opaque allusions to its historical context, yet post-quranic Islamic literature contains an extensive corpus of traditions dealing with the biography of Muhammad (sīra) and the revelation of specific quranic verses. Writing in 1851, Ernest Renan was therefore able to famously declare Islam to have been ‘born in the full light of history’ and the life of Muhammad to be ‘as well known to us as that of any reformer of the 16th century’ (Renan 1851: 3 [my translation]). Subsequent scholarship has been forced to take note of the strong likelihood that this highly detailed body of material may only have emerged over the course of the first two Islamic centuries and consequently does not afford us direct access to the Quran’s historical milieu of origin—an insight which, incidentally, is not confined to western scholarship and has recently been underscored by the Tunisian historian Hisham Djait (Sinai 2011). It was mainly due to two famous books published in 1977—John Wansbrough’s Quranic Studies, and Hagarism by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook—that the historical reliability even of the basic chronological and geographical framework of the sīra tradition has also become subject to sustained doubt, including the Quran’s provenance from the western Arabian towns Mecca and Medina, and its traditional dating to the first decades of the seventh century. As a result, the almost instinctive projection of later Islamic historiography and exegesis on the text of the Quran that characterizes the work of earlier western scholars has now deservedly fallen into discredit. Even if, as I believe, cogent reasons can be adduced in favour of a suitably revised version (rather than dismissal) of the traditional narrative of Islamic origins, such scepticism should in no way be seen as excessive or superfluous: as demonstrated by de Wette’s and Wellhausen’s redatings of Deuteronomy and the Priestly Source, and F. C. Baur’s view that the Gospel of John was not composed before the second half of the second century ce (now generally rejected), the construction, evaluation, and, if needs be, dismissal of historical counter-narratives is an integral part of the historical-critical commitment to bracketing commonly received beliefs and opinions.
As I have argued above, to read scripture historically-critically is to systematically suspend the question of its truth, coherence, and contemporary relevance; to be attentive to inconsistencies and redundancies within scripture, as well as between scripture and later beliefs; and to account for the textual phenomena thus observed by means of historical models, which often include complicated redactional processes. It must be emphasized, though, that nothing about this approach prevents the historical critic from discovering the Bible or the Quran to exhibit considerable literary artistry (instead of mechanically, and often quite arbitrarily, dissecting them into earlier and later textual layers); or from finding them to be engaged in a highly sophisticated debate with previous traditions (instead of reducing them to mere reverberations of things said before). Although it would be easy to compile a martyr’s memorial of the historical-critical study of scripture, the proposition that a religious commitment to the Bible or the Quran is compatible with the historical-critical approach, and may even have important things to learn from it—a conviction expressed not only by Christian theologians, but also, for instance, by the Egyptian scholar Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd (d. 2010)24—should therefore not be lightly dismissed.
1 This can be achieved either by insisting that the reader adapt his worldview to the literal sense of scripture (for example, by denying evolutionism in favour of creationism), or by reading contemporary beliefs into scripture (for example, by arguing that the Bible or the Quran allude to modern science).
2 My discussion of Spinoza draws on and partly reproduces Sinai 2010. For a recent study of the Tractatus, see Nadler 2011.
3 However, at a very basic level any such exercise in double-entry bookkeeping must involve some measure of hermeneutic charity: for while we may attribute to a past culture views that directly contradict our own, it is certainly part of the interpreter’s task to explain how holding such beliefs is a rationally intelligible thing to do, given certain historical circumstances.
4 ‘An interpreter ought not to interject anything of his own ideas into the writing he wishes to interpret, but to make all he gets from it part of his current thinking and make himself sufficiently certain concerning it solely on the basis of its content and meaning’ (quoted in Kümmel 1973: 66).
5 See the citations from various seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors in Reventlow 2008: 860–1 and Kümmel 1973: 50, 58, 61, 87, as well as Stroumsa 2010: 49–61.
6 Human agents, of course, are often seen as requiring an exception to this general view of the world as a causally self-contained system—see, for example, Descartes’s understanding of humans as immaterial minds interacting with the material world.
7 Spinoza 1925: 118–20 (120–3). For a more detailed exposition of the passage see Nadler 2011: 108–9, who points out that Spinoza gravely overstates Ibn Ezra’s position.
8 On Ibn Ḥazm and his Kitāb al-fiṣal see Adang 1996: 59–69.
9 On Ezra in Islamic polemics see Lazarus-Yafeh 1992: 50–74. Already the sixteenth-century scholar Andreas Masius had suggested that the books of Joshua, Judges, and Kings were only compiled by Ezra and that the Pentateuch continued to be edited ‘long after the time of Moses’ (Rogerson 2008: 839).
10 See Lazarus-Yafeh 1992: 17–18, with n. 29 (who does not note the overlap with Spinoza).
11 According to Celsus, as cited by Origen, the books of the Hebrew Bible ‘do not admit allegories, but are utterly ridiculous myths’ (Schott 2008: 46–7). The parallel to Ibn Ḥazm’s assertion that the contradictions to be found in the Torah and the Gospels ‘do not admit allegorical interpretation’ (Lazarus-Yafeh 1992: 26) is suggestive. Like Ibn Ḥazm, Celsus was also scandalized by the moral improprieties that the Bible attributes to the patriarchs, such as Lot’s incest with his daughters (cf. Schott 2008: 47 and Lazarus-Yafeh 1992: 33–4).
12 Marcion argued that the Mosaic God of justice, commanding to take ‘an eye for an eye’, could not be identical with the God of love proclaimed by Jesus, and also identified various contradictions within the Hebrew Bible (Metzger 1988: 90–4).
13 Babylonian Talmud, Menaḥot 30a, quoted after Lazarus-Yafeh 1992: 10.
14 Kraus 1982: 6–16; Grant and Tracy 1984: 92–9. See also the chapters on individual Reformers in Sæbø 2008.
15 As pointed out by Kraus 1982, 582 (n. 3 on § 14), Cappellus explicitly acknowledges the paradigmatic role of a work by Heinrich Stephanus on Cicero (1557).
16 On the ‘path to Wellhausen’ see Rogerson 1984: 257–72.
17 A detailed overview of some recent approaches is given in Zenger et al. 2004: 92–122.
18 For a comparative overview see Clifford 1994.
19 As emphasized in Burman 2007, the polemical function of medieval Latin translations of the Quran should not lead one to overlook that, despite their philological limitations, they constituted bona fide attempts at rendering the Arabic original.
20 I owe my awareness of Möhler’s article to Bobzin 1999: 16–17.
21 For a case study, see Nicolai Sinai, ‘Pharaoh’s Submission to God in the Qur’an and in Rabbinic Literature: A Case Study in Qur’anic Intertextuality’, forthcoming in a volume edited by Holger Zellentin.
22 The question of chronology is treated in vol. I, 58–234.
23 The first position, associated with the name of Richard Bell, has been criticized—persuasively, in my view—in Neuwirth 1981. For a holistic reading of a long (Medinan) sura see Cuypers 2009.
24 On Abū Zayd and his predecessors see Wielandt 2002: 131–7.