Biblical scholarship encyclopedia topics

In Judaism

In Judaism, especially among the Orthodox, traditional Bible study entails the study of Tanakh with medieval and modern rabbinic commenataries or with Midrashim. Jews traditionally study in the home or in institutions like the yeshiva.

Jewish academic institutions where Bible studies may include less traditional approaches include Hebrew Union College (Progressive Judaism), the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative) and Yeshiva University (Modern Orthodox) in the United States; and all major universities in Israel, whose Bible department actually concentrates on Biblical criticism.

In Christianity

In Christianity, the theological interpretation of Biblical passages is called biblical exegesis. Other branches of Bible study aim instead at elucidating the provenance, authorship, and chronological order of Biblical texts. This is a branch of philology more than theology, and sometimes comes into conflict with theology. "Higher criticism" and its findings, including the well known documentary hypothesis which suggests that the Bible was compiled from the writings of several different hands, and the work of the Jesus Seminar, which attempted to cull "inauthentic" sayings of Jesus from the "authentic" ones contained in the Gospels, are examples of Biblical studies whose results have been particularly controversial in theology.

Bible Study is the activity in which Christians read and reflect on the Bible individually or, including discussion, in small groups or base communities.

Additionally, Biblical Studies is a common discipline offered in the Bible colleges, Bible institutions or schools and some secular colleges. It centered on the study of the Scriptures as found in the Bible. In the U.S., it is not listed as an academic discipline following the pursuit of academic studies in normal stream colleges and universities. In Europe, however, Theology is a faculty in many respectable universities (e.g. Oxford and Cambridge) although several countries have transferred the training of priests and ministers to their respective churches.

It seems that the discipline of Bible studies in many U.S. institutions is practically the same as theology in more traditional institutions. A distinction should be made, therefore, between

Biblical studies which concentrate on the Bible and its interpretation, as in Exegesis.
Biblical studies as an all-around name for minister training.

Presently in the U.S., "Biblical studies" are taught mainly in non-academic schools and institutions under the support of many Christian denominations and missionary organizations.

In traditional churches, the training of priests and ministers includes the study of theology, which is a wider field incorporating more aspects of religion. Typically this takes place in a university or a seminary, depending on country and denomination.

Background

Biblical Studies involve the studies of the Bible and can be studied as a subject for themselves or as a subdivision under Theology. It is often offered as a postgraduate course in some Christian colleges or Bible institutions as a non-academic study course. In contrast with most divinity schools, seminaries or older theological schools, Biblical Studies does not attempt to criticize the Bible as in higher (or literary criticism) or lower (or textual criticism) form. In this, it differs markedly from the usual scientific method or from the Neutral point of view approach used in this Wikipedia article. However, its content varies but usually covered a wider scope including the following:

Principles of Biblical interpretation

The Bible is the holy scripture for most Christian denominations and its interpretation forms part of the core of each denomination's faith. Therefore, there are very few clear rules accepted by all who consider themselves Christian and making a neutral point of view clarification of principles is most difficult. Exegesis using the inductive method is used in understanding the texts in scriptures. Some guides or rules of interpretation have been formulated and are, in some circles known as Principles of Interpretation, in others as Hermeneutics. According to the Bible it is the word of God and gives these rules. However, no clear consensus on them exists. Typically a biblical passage may be understood

literally, as meaning exactly what is written.
figuratively, meaning that there is a clear parallel to something else.
allegorically, meaning that the passage is an allegory of something more

In addition, in some denominations, any of these may be either addressed to its historical audience or to mankind in general. All three ways may even be correct simultaneously. According to most denominations, the only way to choose a right interpretation is through use of Holy Spirit, which may be found, depending on denomination, from person's conscience, from tradition or from some combination of them. Typically, old churches stress the use of tradition, while Protestant churches stress the use of personal inspiration. However, most denominations do draw a line somewhere in the literal interpretation, accepting some traditional standpoints.

Hermeneutical exegesis focuses on the origin writer’s sense in relation with the expected audience response. The rule of context applies, and "scriptures interpret scriptures". The ideas and meanings are likely to be in harmony within the language and cultural context. Therefore the rule allow for the meaning to be limited and interpreted within the intent and purpose of the original writers. This interpretative view obviously leads to more focus individual understanding than collective interrelated consensus.

Biblical canon scriptures are accepted by many Christian's as God-inspired. Thus, attention is given to accepting the divine Holy Spirit who is thought to be the original inspiration or Author of all scriptures. However, there are several different doctrines on the nature of the inspiration, ranging from "word" inspiration to context inspiration. Exegesis is different from the traditional method of literary study but approaches it when moving towards religious philosophy.

Hebrew and Greek languages

The study of original languages within the Bible is usually considered an imperative to any correct interpretive work, although a minority of U.S. Christians hold that King James Version is the sole, inspired, true word of God. Most seminaries and Universities, in fact, require their candidates for doctorates in divinity to possess adequate knowledge of these two disciplines. Although Aramaic was the verbal language of the inter- and New Testament period, many schools do not provide the study of this ancient language but leave it to the faculties of Arts. The Septuagint translation of the Old Testament into Greek is also important while trying to understand the religious life of the early church. The New Testament is written in Koine Greek, a form which probably carried Hebrew and Aramaic influences.

Biblical criticism

Biblical criticism is a scientific approach to the study of the Bible, based on the assumption that the Bible is a human creation, rather than divine. Thus while apparent contradictions are interpreted in theology as having deeper or different meaning, they are interpreted in Biblical criticism as originating from the human writers. Prophecies fulfilled after the alleged time of writing are interpreted in Theology as a proof for the divine origin of the text, and in Biblical criticism as a proof that the real time of writing was later than claimed.

According to Jewish tradition, different books of the Bible were written in different times by different people. Biblical criticism extends this idea, and assumes that different parts (even different verses in the same chapter) may have been written in different times by different people, and later edited by other people. Some are based on local traditions, and others have been added to reflect the writer's political of religious agenda. The final editor of the Bible had his own agenda, but could not simply omit parts which have become sacred over time, so he made minor changes in order to promote his own agenda .

Biblical criticism uses mostly the following study tools:

Study of the language used in different parts of the Bible. According to the critical approach, this may teach us, for example, about the period at which each part was written, and perhaps about the writers as well.
Comparison of different but similar stories and verses from different parts of the Bible. According to the critical approach, this may teach us, for example, about the identity of the writer, his agenda and how different stories and ideas may have originated from each other.
Comparison of different ancient versions of the same text, such as the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint (basis of the Old Testament in European languages).
Comparison to ancient myths and to later Midrash.
Archaeology may sometimes also serve as an aiding tool, though there are different approaches among scholars to its use as a scientific tool.

References

External links

Searchable Bible text; multiple versions (New Revised Standard; King James; et al.)
Independent Bible Schools in the evangelical Christian tradition:

Historical approach to Bible studies
History of Jewish Secular Thought, Chapter 4: Bible, from Oberlin College Jewish studies program.
BiblicalStudies.org.uk A resource for Biblical Studies featuring detailed bibliographies plus hundreds of free articles and books.
Bible Study Tools with searchable Bible by verse and topic, commentaries, concordances, dictionaries, etc.

CITE THIS SOURCE|PRINT

Sponsored Links Christian Scholarship
Request Free Info From 500+ Schools Offering Scholarship Assistance.
CourseAdvisor.com/Scholarship

Theology Studies Online
Accredited BA Degree Program. Classes Start Soon, Get More Info!
www.Regent.edu

Wikipedia

This article is about the academic treatment of the bible as a historical document. This is not the same thing as Criticism of the Bible, which is where criticisms are made against the Bible as a source of reliable information or ethical guidance.

Biblical criticism is "the study and investigation of biblical writings that seeks to make discerning and discriminating judgments about these writings. It asks when and where a particular text originated, how, why, by whom, for whom, and in what circumstances it was produced, what influences were at work in its production, what sources were used in its composition, and the message it was intended to convey. It also addresses the physical text, including the meaning of the words and the way in which they are used, its preservation, history, and integrity. Biblical criticism draws upon a wide range of scholarly disciplines, including linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, folklore, oral tradition studies, and historical and religious studies.

Background

Biblical criticism, defined as the treatment of biblical texts as natural rather than supernatural artifacts, grew out of the rationalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. It can be broadly divided between the Higher Criticism (the term is perhaps a little old-fashioned today), which is the study of biblical texts to discover their composition, history, and meaning, and textual criticism, which is the close examination of the text to establish variant and original readings. Contemporary criticism has seen the rise of new perspectives which draw on literary and multidisciplinary sociological approaches to address the meaning(s) of texts and the wider world in which they were conceived.

Within "higher criticism" a division can be made between historical criticism and literary criticism. Historical criticism seeks to locate the text in history: it asks such questions as when the text was written, who the author/s might have been, and what history might be reconstructed from the answers. Literary criticism asks what audience the authors wrote for, their presumptive purpose, and the development of the text over time. Historical criticism was the dominant form of criticism until the late 20th century, when biblical critics became interested in questions aimed more at the meaning of the text than its origins, and developed methods drawn from mainstream literary criticism. The distinction is frequently referred to as one between diachronic and synchronic forms of criticism. The former, broadly identified with historical criticism, concerned the development of texts through time. The latter viewed texts as they exist at a particular moment, in comparison with other writing of the time. In many studies, both methods are used.

History of Biblical criticism

Both Old Testament and New Testament criticism originated in the rationalism of the 17th and 18th centuries and developed within the context of the scientific approach to the humanities (especially history) which grew during the 19th. Studies of the Old and New Testaments were often independent of each other, largely due to the difficulty of any single scholar having a sufficient grasp of the many languages required or of the cultural background for the different periods in which texts had their origins.

Old Testament

Biblical criticism begins with the 17th century philosophers and theologians - Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, Richard Simon and others - who began to ask questions about the origin of the biblical text, especially the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). They asked specifically who had written these books: according to tradition their author was Moses, but these critics noticed and then wrote about what they believed to be many contradictions and inconsistencies, which in their minds made the Mosaic authorship tradition improbable. In the 18th century Jean Astruc, a French physician, set out to refute these critics. Borrowing methods of textual criticism already in use to investigate Greek and Roman texts, he discovered what he believed were two distinct documents within Genesis. These, he felt, were the original scrolls written by Moses, much as the four Gospel writers had produced four separate but complementary accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus. Later generations, he believed, had conflated these original documents to produce the modern book of Genesis, producing the inconsistencies and contradictions noted by Hobbes and Spinoza.

Astruc's methods were adopted by German scholars who, in the course of the next century, refined and used them to further investigate the bible. By mid-century the consensus was that the Pentateuch contained four (not Astruc's two) original sources, that Moses had had no hand in any of it, and that the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings made up a unified history of Israel known as the Deuteronomic History because of its links to the book of Deuteronomy. 19th century German biblical criticism reached its peak with two books by Julius Wellhausen, his "Sources of the Pentateuch", and his subsequent and even more influential "Prolegomena to the History of Israel". Wellhausen summarised and distilled the previous century of scholarship into the definitive version of the documentary hypothesis, arguing that the Pentateuch was made up of four originally distinct documents, none of them composed prior to the 10th century BC, and combined by an editor into their present form as late as the 5th century BC.

Wellhausen's hypothesis was immensely influential, but also immensely controversial, especially with believing Christians and Jews, who saw its essentially secular orientation as a challenge to faith. Subsequent scholarship amended Wellhausen and softened the initially hostile reception of religious critics. Hermann Gunkel and Martin Noth developed tradition history, the theory that the biblical texts, even if they were composed after the 10th century, had been based on prior oral traditions, and that the texts therefore contained accurate memories of the events they described. Biblical archaeology as developed by William Foxwell Albright seemed to support the same conclusion: the stories of the bible, especially the Pentateuchal stories of the Patriarchal Age, the Exodus from Egypt, and the conquest of Canaan, were validated by physical evidence from archaeological exploration, and therefore essentially trustworthy. By the middle of the 20th century the Vatican had reversed its original condemnation of biblical criticism, and actually commended it to Catholic scholars.

The consensus at the middle of the 20th century was that the Documentary Hypothesis was essentially correct, but that the bible nevertheless contained genuine traditions of Abraham, Moses and later ages in Israelite history. This began to change in the 1960s: John Van Seters, Thomas L. Thompson and William G. Dever questioned, and effectively demolished, the Albrightean view that archaeology had validated the books of Genesis and Exodus; and Van Seters (again), R. N. Whybray, Rolf Rendtorff and others questioned and abandoned the Documentary Hypothesis, proposing in its place new theories based on supplementary and fragmentary models of composition. In the last decades of the century the biblical minimalists went so far as to propose that the bible was an entirely fictional product dating from the last few centuries before Christ, and of no value as history whatsoever; biblical minimalism remains a minority position, but the nature and scope of source criticism are again, at the opening of the 21st century, a matter of heated debate.

New Testament

The seminal figure in New Testament criticism was Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768), who applied to it the methodology of Greek and Latin textual studies and became convinced that very little of what it said could be accepted as incontrovertibly true. Reimarus's conclusions appealed to the rationalism of 18th century intellectuals, but were deeply troubling to contemporary believers. In the 19th century important scholarship was done by David F. Strauss, Ernst Renan, Johannes Weiss, Albert Schweitzer and others, all of whom investigated the "historical Jesus" within the Gospel narratives. In a different field the work of H. J. Holtzmann was significant: he established a chronology for the composition of the various books of the New Testament which formed the basis for future research on this subject, and established the two-source hypothesis (the hypothesis that the gospels of Matthew and Luke drew on the gospel of Mark and a hypothetical document known as Q). By the first half of the 20th century a new generation of scholars including Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, in Germany, Roy Harrisville and others in North America had decided that the quest for the Jesus of history had reached a dead end. Barth and Bultmann accepted that little could be said with certainty about the historical Jesus, and concentrated instead on the kerygma, or message, of the New Testament. The questions they addressed were: What was Jesus’s key message? How was that message related to Judaism? Does that message speak to our reality today?

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948 revitalised interest in the possible contribution archaeology could make to the understanding of the New Testament. Joachim Jeremias and C. H. Dodd produced linguistic studies which tentatively identified layers within the Gospels that could be ascribed to Jesus, to the authors, and to the early Church; Burton Mack and John Dominic Crossan assessed Jesus in the cultural milieu of 1st Century Judea; and the scholars of the Jesus Seminar assessed the individual tropes of the Gospels to arrive at a consensus on what could and could not be accepted as historical.

Contemporary New Testament criticism continues to follow the synthesising trend set during the latter half of the 20th century. There continues to be a strong interest in recovering the "historical Jesus", but this now tends to set the search in terms of Jesus' Jewishness (Bruce Chilton, Geza Vermes and others) and his formation by the political and religious currents of 1st century Palestine (Marcus Borg).

Methods and perspectives

The critical methods and perspectives now to be found are numerous, and the following overview should not be regarded as comprehensive.

Textual criticism or Lower criticism

Textual criticism refers to the examination of the text itself to identify its provenance or to trace the history of a family of texts. Textual criticism was developed in an attempt to find out what the original looked like. For example, Josephus employed scribes to copy his Antiquities of the Jews. As the scribes copied the Antiquities, they made mistakes. The copies of these copies also had the mistakes. Each generation of copies contained errors, but not necessarily more than the previous generation as errors would be fixed when caught by scribes. When an error consists of something being left out, it is called a deletion. When something was added, it is called an interpolation.

Today, none of Josephus' original work survives, but different families of texts have survived. Lower Criticism studies these surviving families, particularly the differences among them. Scholars are then able to piece together a good idea of what the original looked like. The more surviving copies, the more accurately they deduce information about the original.

Textual criticism is a rigorously objective discipline using a number of speciaised methodologies, including eclecticism, stemmatics, copy-text editing and cladistics. A number of principles have also been introduced for use in deciding between variant manuscripts, such as: "The harder of two readings is to be preferred. Nevertheless, there remains a strong element of subjectivity, areas where the scholar must decide his reading on the basis of taste or common-sense: Amos 6.12, for example, reads: "Does one plough with oxen?" The obvious answer is "yes", but the sense of the passage seems to demand a "no"; the usual reading therefore is to amend this to "Does one plough the sea with oxen?" The amendment has a basis in the text, which is believed to be corrupted, but is nevertheless a matter of judgement. Similarly, the Masoretic (i.e., Hebrew) manuscripts of Genesis 4:8 have: "Cain said to Abel his brother," but stop at that point, with no indication of what it was that Cain said. The Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint (Greek), the Latin Vulgate, and two of the three Aramaic Targums, all have Cain saying words to the effect: "Let us go into the fields." Possibly the non-Masoretic texts are adding this, or possibly the Masoretic text has lost it, but there is no way to tell; the decision is ultimately subjective.

Source criticism

Source criticism is the search for the original sources which lie behind a given biblical text. It can be traced back to the 17th century French priest Richard Simon, and its most influential product is Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (1878), whose "insight and clarity of expression have left their mark indelibly on modern biblical studies. An example of source criticism is the study of the Synoptic problem. Citics noticed that the three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, were very similar, indeed, at times identical. The dominant theory to account for the duplication is called the two-source hypothesis. This suggests that Mark was the first gospel to be written, and that it was probably based on a combination of early oral and written material. Matthew and Luke were written at a later time, and relied primarily on two different sources: Mark and a written collection of Jesus's sayings, which has been given the name Q by scholars . This latter document has now been lost, but at least some of its material can be deduced indirectly, namely through the material that is common in Mathew and Luke but absent in Mark. In addition to Mark and Q, the writers of Mathew and Luke made some use of additional sources, which would account for the material that is unique to each of them.

Redaction criticism

Redaction criticism studies "the collection, arrangement, editing and modification of sources", and is frequently used to reconstruct the community and purposes of the author/s of the text.

Form criticism and tradition history

Form criticism breaks the Bible down into sections (pericopes, stories) which are analyzed and categorized by genres (prose or verse, letters, laws, court archives, war hymns, poems of lament, etc). The form critic then theorizes on the pericope's Sitz im Leben ("setting in life"), the setting in which it was composed and, especially, used. Tradition history is a specific aspect of form criticism which aims at tracing the way in which the pericopes entered the larger units of the biblical canon, and especially the way in which they made the transition from oral to written form. The belief in the priority, stability, and even detectability, of oral traditions is now recognised to be so deeply questionable as to render tradition history largely useless, but form criticism itself continues to develop as a viable methodolgy in biblical studies.

Canonical criticism

Associated particularly with the name of Brevard S. Childs, who has written prolifically on the subject, canonical criticism is "an examination of the final form of the text as a totality, as well as the process leading to it. Where previous criticism asked questions about the origins, structure and history of the text, canonical criticism addresses questions of meaning, both for the community (and communities - subsequent communities are regarded as being as important as the original community for which it was produced) which used it, and in the context of the wider canon of which it forms a part.

Rhetorical criticism

Rhetorical criticism was invented by James Muilenberg in 1968, but remains a rather poorly-defined field. "What Muilenberg called rhetorical criticism was not exactly the same as what secular literary critics called rhetorical criticism, and when biblical scholars became interested in "rhetorical criticism," they did not limit themselves to Muilenberg's definition. ... In some cases it is difficult to distinguish between rhetorical criticism and literary criticism, or other disciplines." Unlike canonical criticism, rhetorical criticism (at least as defined by Muilenberg) takes no interest in meaning, but concentrates on identifying and elucidating the stylistic markers of the text and asks how the rhetoric functions in discourse, beginning with the original audience.

Narrative criticism

Narrative criticism is one of a number of modern forms of criticism based in contemporary literary theory and practice - in this case, from narratology. In common with other literary approaches (and in contrast to historical forms of criticism), narrative criticism treats the text as a unit, and focusses on narrative structure and composition, plot development, themes and motifs, characters and characterisation. Narrative criticism is a complex field, but some central concerns include the reliability of the narrator, the question of authorial intent (expressed in terms of the context in which the text was written and its presumed intended audience), and the implications of multiple interpretation (meaning an awareness that a narrative is capable of more than one interpretation, and thus of the implications of each).

Psychological criticism

Psychological Biblical Criticism is a perspective rather than a method. It discusses the psychological dimensions of the authors of the text, the material they wish to communicate to their audience, and the reflections and meditations of the reader.

Socio-scientific criticism

Socio-scientific criticism (also known as socio-historical criticism and social-world criticism) is a contemporary form of multidisciplinary criticism drawing on the social sciences, especially anthropology and sociology. A typical study will draw on studies of contemporary nomadism, shamanism, tribalism, spirit-possession, millinarianism, etc. to illuminate similar passages described in biblical texts. Socioscientific criticism is thus concerned with the historical world behind the text rather than the historical world in the text.

Postmodernist criticism

Postmodernist biblical criticism treats the same general topics addressed in broader postmodernist scholarship, "including author, autobiography, culture criticism, deconstruction, ethics, fantasy, gender, ideology, politics, postcolonialism, and so on." It asks such questions as, What are we to make, ethically speaking, of the program of ethnic cleansing described in the book of Joshua? What does the social construction of gender mean for the depiction of role and female roles in the bible? In textual criticism, postmodernist criticism rejects the idea of an original text (the traditional quest of textual criticism, which marginalised all non-original manuscripts), and treats all manuscripts as equally valuable; in the "higher criticism" it brings new perspectives to themes such as theology, Israelite history, hermeneutics and ethics.

Notable biblical critics

William Albright (seminal figure in biblical archaeology)
Albrecht Alt
Jean Astruc (adapted the methods used by Classics scholars to lay the foundations of biblical criticism)
F. C. Baur
Harold Bloom ("The Book of J", a popular reconstruction of the Jahwist source)
William G. Dever (Archaeologist, contributions to the understanding of early Israel)
Johann Gottfried Eichhorn
Ludwig Feuerbach
Israel Finkelstein (archaeologist, re-dated remains previously ascribed to King Solomon)
Richard Elliott Friedman (revised the documentary hypothesis in answer to increasing criticism)
Hermann Gunkel (the "father" of source criticism, the study of the oral traditions behind the text)
John Hampden
Thomas Hobbes
Andreas Karlstadt
Yehezkel Kauffman
Niels Peter Lemche (biblical minimalist, warns against uncritical acceptance of biblical texts as history)
Martin Noth (developed tradition history, important work on the origins of the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History)
Isaac de la Peyrère
Rolf Rendtorff (advanced an influential non-documentary hypothesis for the origins of the Pentateuch
Friedrich Schleiermacher
John Van Seters (rejects the documentary hypothesis; favours a supplementary model for the creation of biblical texts)
Richard Simon (the Bible consists of numerous archival documents that were rather artificially combined by editors without any addition or intervention in the text)
Baruch Spinoza (collected discrepancies, contradictions, anachronisms etc from the Torah to show that it could not have been written by Moses)
David Friedrich Strauss
Albert Schweitzer
Thomas L. Thompson (criticised Albright's conclusions about archaeology and the historicity of the Pentateuch)
Julius Wellhausen (his formulation of the documentary hypothesis dominated scholarship through most of the C.20th)
Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette
R. N. Whybray (critique of the assumptions underlying the Wellhausian documentary hypothesis)