The Modern Study of the Bible

During the nineteenth and twentieth century, scholars participated in a project of recovering the literary history of the Bible. Various methods and strategies have been employed to determine the earliest strata of the literature -- a oral or preliterary stage -- the written sources upon which various books are based, and the editing of sources into the form in which we find the text.

Source criticism has produced the Documentary Hypothesis that behind the Pentateuch lies a series of written sources to which specific passages can be ascribed. The sources have been named J (for its use of YHWH), E (for its use of Elohim), P (a priestly source) and D (attributed to the Deuteronomist). This same methodology has been applied to the New Testament, in particular the Gospels, and has given rise to the Synoptic Problem, an attempt to determine the literary relationship of the first three gospels.

Form criticism looks at the variety of literary forms found in the Bible and asks what the Sitz im Leben, the"situation in life" is in which such a form develops. For example, the royal wedding Psalms were probably composed for royal weddings. Form criticism is interested in the social history that gives rise to the text.

Redaction criticism studies how traditions, forms and sources have been combined into the final written form, that is, the text we have, and asks what sort of editorial principles guided the redactor/editor.

Textual criticism, sometimes called lower criticism, tries to determine which of the various textual traditions represented by the manuscript evidence is closest to the autograph, that is the very first written text. The critical apparatus of a Greek New Testament or the Hebrew Bible often indicates the name of the manuscript that the textual critics have chosen and offers variant readings from other manuscript traditions.

Historical criticism is interested in what really happened and treats the Bible as a source for reconstructing history rather than a history book. It asks, "What really happened?"

During the last few decades of the twentieth century several new forms of criticism found their way into scholarly activity. Some of these fall under the category of literary criticism and others under ideological criticism.

Under the influence of scholars such as Claude Levi-Straus, an anthropologist,the questions of structuralism began to influence the way that biblical scholars examined the construction of biblical narrative and poetry. Structuralism seeks to add objectivity to literary studies by looking at patterns, systems and structures that fit into some universal system of meaning making. For example, binary oppositions like male and female point to systems of power and value. Under the influence of philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, structuralism has been largely supplanted by post structuralism, a philosophy that puts certainties about reason into question.

Among the various forms of literary criticism, Reader Response criticism gained prominence in the field of biblical studies during the 1980s and shifted the focus away from the origins of the text to the act or process of reading. The meaning of a text lies in the meaning that is made during the performance of reading and lies in the dialogic relationship between text and reader. Narrative Criticism or Narratology raises the questions of point of view of narration and examines how knowledge is transmitted and to whom and the reliability of a narrator. How is does the plot unfold? Is action told or shown, and from whose point of view do events unfold. Irony, allusion and characterization all fall within the purvey of this form of criticism.

Ideological criticism is the child of post structuralism. It looks for the ideologies that inform both the text and its reading. The most practiced of this form of criticism is feminist criticism that looks for the androcentric and patriarchal assumptions that inform biblical authors, societies and interpreters. Other forms of ideological criticism include the examination of how the West has constructed the Orient and how racist readings of the text are constructed.

 For another page that survey's this topic see Carol Newsom's piece Probing Scripture:The New Biblical Critics or John Barton's piece Biblical Scholarship Today