Historical criticism

Historical criticism is a branch of criticism that investigates the origins of ancient texts to understand "the world behind the text" and emphasizes a process that "delays any assessment of scripture's truth and relevance until after the act of interpretation has been carried out". While often discussed in terms of ancient Jewish, Christian, and increasingly Islamic writings, historical criticism has also been applied to other religious and secular writings from various parts of the world and periods of history.
The historian applying historical criticism has several goals in mind. One is to understand what the text itself is saying in the context of its own time and place, and as it would have been intended to and received by its original audience. The historian also seeks to understand the credibility and reliability of the sources in question, understanding sources as akin to witnesses to the past as opposed to straightforward narrations of it. In this process, it is important to understand the intentions, motivations, biases, prejudices, internal consistency, and even the truthfulness of the sources being studied. Involuntary witnesses that did not intend to transmit a piece of information or present it to an external audience, but end up doing so nonetheless, are considered greatly valuable. All possible explanations must be considered by the historian, and data and argumentation must be used in order to rule out various options. In the context of biblical studies, an appeal to canonical texts is insufficient to settle what actually happened in biblical history. A critical inspection of the canon, as well as extra-biblical literature, archaeology, and all other available sources, is also needed. Likewise, a "hermeneutical autonomy" of the text must be respected, insofar as the meaning of the text should be found within it as opposed to being imported into it, whether that is from one's conclusions, presuppositions, or something else.
The beginnings of historical criticism are often associated with the Age of Enlightenment, but it is more appropriately related to the Renaissance. Historical criticism began in the 17th century and gained popular recognition in the 19th and 20th centuries. The perspective of the early historical critic was influenced by the rejection of traditional interpretations that came about with the Protestant Reformation. With each passing century, historical criticism became refined into various methodologies used today: philology, textual criticism, literary criticism, source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, tradition criticism, canonical criticism, and related methodologies.

Overview

The historian Norman Cantor gives this precis of the field:

The great questions of Old Testament scholarship have always been: When was the Hebrew Bible written, and who wrote it? To put it another way: Who founded Judaism — the patriarchs, Moses, the prophets, or some other people? In the nineteenth century, the so-called Higher Criticism began to supply answers to these enduring questions. In the Higher Criticism, the Bible was examined as a socioliterary document and not accepted at face-value This kind of criticism was not entirely new in the nineteenth century: The approach was used in some of the work of the church fathers, in the Talmud, and in some medieval criticism. The first critic to take a genuinely historical approach to the Bible was probably Benedict Spinoza, the Dutch Jewish philosopher of the seventeenth century, who treated the Bible as a social document and eventually was excommunicated. However, like every other kind of modern scholarship, Higher Criticism really began in nineteenth-century in Germany, where philologists applied the tools of classical scholarship to Bible studies.

Definition

Historical-critical methods are the specific procedures used to examine the text's historical origins, such as the time and place in which the text was written, its sources, and the events, dates, persons, places, things, and customs that are mentioned or implied in the text. Investigations using the historical-critical method are open to being challenged and re-examined by other scholars, and so some conclusions may be probable or more likely than others, but not certain. This, nevertheless, enables a field to be self-correcting, as mistakes in earlier work can be corrected in subsequent work, and some have argued that this clarifies the level of confidence that someone today is capable of attaining when it comes to what happened in the past.

Critical approaches

The sense of the historical-critical method involves an application of both a critical and a historical reading of a text. To read a text critically

means to suspend inherited presuppositions about its origin, transmission, and meaning, and to assess their adequacy in the light of a close reading of that text itself as well as other relevant sources... This is not to say that scripture should conversely be assumed to be false and mortal, but it does open up the very real possibility that an interpreter may find scripture to contain statements that are, by his own standards, false, inconsistent, or trivial. Hence, a fully critical approach to the Bible, or to the Qur'an for that matter, is equivalent to the demand, frequently reiterated by Biblical scholars from the eighteenth century onwards, that the Bible is to be interpreted in the same manner as any other text.

Historical approaches

By contrast, to read a text historically would mean to

require the meanings ascribed to it to have been humanly 'thinkable' or 'sayable' within the text's original historical environment, as far as the latter can be retrospectively reconstructed. At least for the mainstream of historical-critical scholarship, the notion of possibility underlying the words 'thinkable' and 'sayable' is informed by the principle of historical analogy – the assumption that past periods of history were constrained by the same natural laws as the present age, that the moral and intellectual abilities of human agents in the past were not radically different from ours, and that the behaviour of past agents, like that of contemporary ones, is at least partly explicable by recourse to certain social and economic factors.

Role of methodological naturalism

Historical phenomena are accepted to be interrelated in a cause-and-effect relationship, and therefore modifications in putative causes will correlate to modifications in putative effects. In this context, an approach called historicism may be applied, where the historical interpretation of cause-and-effect relationships takes place under the framework of methodological naturalism. Methodological naturalism is an approach taken from the natural sciences that excludes supernatural or transcendental hypotheses from consideration as hypotheses. Nevertheless, the historical-critical method can also be pursued independently of methodological naturalism. Approaches that do not methodologically exclude supernatural causes may still take issue with instances of their use as hypotheses, as such hypotheses can take on the form of a deus ex machina or simply involve special pleading in the favor of a religious position. Likewise, present experience suggests that known events are associated with natural causes, and this in turn increases the weight of natural explanations for phenomena in the past when they are competed with supernatural explanations. Therefore, without being excluded, natural explanations may still be favored for being more in line with the regular scientific and historical understanding of reality.

Methods

Historical criticism comprises several disciplines, including textual criticism, source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, tradition criticism, and radical criticism.

Textual criticism

seeks to reconstruct the original form of a text. This is often a prerequisite for the application of downstream critical methods, as some confidence in what the text originally said is needed before dissecting it for its sources, form, and editorial history. The challenge of textual criticism is that the original manuscripts of the texts of the Bible have not survived, and that the copies of them are not identical. Variants range from spelling mistakes, to accidental omissions of words, to more substantial variants such as those involved in the ending of Mark 16 and the Johannine Comma. The task of the textual critic is to compare all the variants and establish which reading is the original.

Form criticism

is the identification and analysis of "forms" in a text, defined by the use of recognizable and conventional patterns. For example, letters, court archives, hymns, parables, sports reports, wedding announcements, and so forth are recognizable by their use of standardized formulae and stylized phrases. In the Old Testament, prophetic forms are typically introduced by the formula "Thus says the Lord". Many sayings of Jesus have a recognizable formulaic structure, including the Beatitudes and the woe pronouncements upon the Pharisees. Form critics are especially interested in the genre of a text, such as 'letter', 'parable', etc Sitz im leben referring to the real-life contexts or settings in which particular forms or language is employed, and oral prehistory of forms, which tend to be short and stereotypical, and so easy to memorize and pass on to others, and their history of transmission.

Redaction and composition criticism

studies "the collection, arrangement, editing and modification of sources" and is frequently used to reconstruct the community and purposes of the authors of the text. Whereas source and form criticism are concerned with the units out of which the text originated, redaction criticism shifts the focus to how the author has, by the time of the final composition of the text, modified earlier forms of the text. This editing process of the text is called redaction, and the author redacting the text is called the redactor. The redactor may be the same figure as the original author. Instances of redaction may cover "the selection of material, the editorial links, summaries and comments, expansions, additions, and clarifications" on the part of the redactor. Redaction criticism can become complicated when multiple redactors are involved, especially over the course of time, producing an iteration of stages or recensions of the text. An investigation of such a process can rely on internal features of the text and, when available, parallel texts, such as between the Books of Kings and the Books of Chronicles. With the progression of scholarship, some have begun to distinguish redaction criticism into redaction criticism and composition criticism. Composition criticism more strictly focuses on the final stages of the redaction of a text, in which the various materials are brought together and fused into a unified whole, and whence the author has imposed a coherent narrative onto the text. The more coherent the final structure is, the more of a "composition" it is, whereas the less coherent the material has been welded, the more it should be seen as a "redaction". Nevertheless, there is no precise boundary in which a text can be said to have moved from a redaction to a composition. Another difference between the two is that redaction criticism is diachronic, looking at the development of the layers of the text through time, whereas composition criticism is synchronic, focusing on the structure of the final text.