Biblical criticism

Daniel J. Harrington defines biblical criticism as "the effort at using scientific criteria (historical and literary) and human reason to understand and explain, as objectively as possible, the meaning intended by the biblical writers." The original biblical criticism has been mostly defined by its historical concerns. Critics focused on the historical events behind the text as well as the history of how the texts themselves developed. So much biblical criticism has been done as history, and not theology, that it is sometimes called the "historical-critical method" or historical-biblical criticism (or sometimes higher criticism) instead of just biblical criticism. By 1990, new perspectives, globalization and input from different academic fields expanded biblical criticism, moving it beyond its original criteria, and changing it into a group of disciplines with different, often conflicting, interests. Biblical criticism's central concept changed from neutral judgment to beginning from a recognition of the various biases the reader brings to the study of the texts. Newer forms of biblical criticism are primarily literary: no longer focused on the historical, they attend to the text as it exists now. == History ==

Eighteenth century In the Enlightenment era of the European West, philosophers and theologians such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677), and Richard Simon (1638–1712) began to question the long-established Judeo-Christian tradition that Moses was the author of the first five books of the Bible known as the Pentateuch. Spinoza wrote that Moses could not have written the preface to the fifth book, Deuteronomy, since he never crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land. There were also other problems such as Deuteronomy 31:9 which references Moses in the third person. According to Spinoza: "All these details, the manner of narration, the testimony, and the context of the whole story lead to the plain conclusion that these books were written by another, and not by Moses in person". , often called the "Father of Biblical criticism", at Centre hospitalier universitaire de Toulouse Jean Astruc (1684–1766), a French physician, believed these critics were wrong about Mosaic authorship. According to Old Testament scholar Edward Young (1907–1968), Astruc believed that Moses the first book of the Pentateuch, the book of Genesis, using the hereditary accounts of the Hebrew people. Biblical criticism is often said to have begun when Astruc borrowed methods of textual criticism (used to investigate Greek and Roman texts) and applied them to the Bible in search of those original accounts. Astruc believed that, through this approach, he had identified the separate sources that were edited together into the book of Genesis. The existence of separate sources explained the inconsistent style and vocabulary of Genesis, discrepancies in the narrative, differing accounts and chronological difficulties, while still allowing for Mosaic authorship. Astruc's work was the genesis of biblical criticism, and because it has become the template for all who followed, he is often called the "Father of Biblical criticism". Swiss theologian Jean Alphonse Turretin (1671–1737) is an example of the "moderate rationalism" of the era. Turretin believed that the Bible was divine revelation, but insisted that revelation must be consistent with nature and in harmony with reason, "For God who is the author of revelation is likewise the author of reason". What was seen as extreme rationalism followed in the work of Heinrich Paulus (1761–1851) who denied the existence of miracles. Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791) had attempted in his work to navigate between divine revelation and extreme rationalism by supporting the view that revelation was "divine disclosure of the truth perceived through the depth of human experience". Semler argued for an end to all doctrinal assumptions, giving historical criticism its nonsectarian character. As a result, Semler is often called the father of historical-critical research. Communications scholar James A. Herrick (b. 1954) says that even though most scholars agree that biblical criticism evolved out of the German Enlightenment, there are some historians of biblical criticism that have found "strong direct links" with British deism. Herrick references the German theologian Henning Graf Reventlow (1929–2010) as linking deism with the humanist world view, which has been significant in biblical criticism. British deism was also an influence on the philosopher and writer Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) in developing his criticism of revelation. Instead of interpreting the Bible historically, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827), Johann Philipp Gabler (1753–1826), and Georg Lorenz Bauer (1755–1806) used the concept of myth as a tool for interpreting the Bible. Rudolf Bultmann later used this approach, and it became particularly influential in the early twentieth century. The importance of textual criticism means that the term 'lower criticism' is no longer prevalent in twenty-first century studies. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) paved the way for comparative religion studies by analyzing New Testament texts in the light of Classical, Jewish and early Christian writings. Historical Jesus: the first quest The first quest for the historical Jesus is also sometimes referred to as the Old Quest. It began with the publication of Hermann Samuel Reimarus's work after his death. G. E. Lessing (1729–1781) claimed to have discovered copies of Reimarus's writings in the library at Wolfenbüttel when he was the librarian there. Over time, they came to be known as the Wolfenbüttel Fragments. Reimarus distinguished between what Jesus taught and how he is portrayed in the New Testament. According to Reimarus, Jesus was a political Messiah who failed at creating political change and was executed by the Roman state as a dissident. His disciples then stole the body and invented the story of the resurrection for personal gain. Albert Schweitzer in The Quest of the Historical Jesus, acknowledges that Reimarus's work "is a polemic, not an objective historical study", while also referring to it as "a masterpiece of world literature." According to Schweitzer, Reimarus was wrong in his assumption that Jesus's end-of-world eschatology was "earthly and political in character" but was right in viewing Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher, as evidenced by his repeated warnings about the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of time. This eschatological approach to understanding Jesus has since become universal in modern biblical criticism. Schweitzer records that Semler "rose up and slew Reimarus in the name of scientific theology". In addition to overseeing the publication of Reimarus's work, Lessing made contributions of his own, arguing that the proper study of biblical texts requires knowing the context in which they were written. This is now the accepted scholarly view. This still occasions widespread debate within topics such as Pauline studies, New Testament Studies, early-church studies, Jewish Law, the theology of grace, and the doctrine of justification. According to Robert M. Grant and David Tracy, "One of the most striking features of the development of biblical interpretation during the nineteenth century was the way in which philosophical presuppositions implicitly guided it". Biblical criticism's focus on pure reason produced a paradigm shift that profoundly changed Christian theology concerning the Jews. uses the legal meaning of emancipation, as in free to be an adult on their own recognizance, when he says the "process of the from the Bible ... runs parallel with the emancipation of Christianity from the Jews". In the previous century, Semler had been the first Enlightenment Protestant to call for the "de-Judaizing" of Christianity. While taking a stand against discrimination in society, Semler also wrote theology that was strongly negative toward the Jews and Judaism. In The Essence of Christianity (1900), Adolf Von Harnack (1851–1930) described Jesus as a reformer. William Wrede (1859–1906) rejected all the theological aspects of Jesus and asserted that the "messianic secret" of Jesus as Messiah emerged only in the early community and did not come from Jesus himself. Ernst Renan (1823–1892) promoted the critical method and was opposed to orthodoxy. Wilhelm Bousset (1865–1920) attained honors in the history of religions school by contrasting what he called the joyful teachings of Jesus's and what Bousset saw as the gloomy call to repentance made by John the Baptist. While at Göttingen, Johannes Weiss (1863–1914) wrote his most influential work on the apocalyptic proclamations of Jesus. In 1896, Martin Kähler (1835–1912) wrote The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ. It critiqued the quest's methodology, with a reminder of the limits of historical inquiry, saying it is impossible to separate the historical Jesus from the Jesus of faith, since Jesus is only known through documents about him as Christ the Messiah. Schweitzer revolutionized New Testament scholarship at the turn of the century by proving to most of that scholarly world that the teachings and actions of Jesus were determined by his eschatological outlook; he thereby finished the quest's pursuit of the apocalyptic Jesus. Twentieth century In the early twentieth century, biblical criticism was shaped by two main factors and the clash between them. First, form criticism arose and turned the focus of biblical criticism from author to genre, and from individual to community. Next, a scholarly effort to reclaim the Bible's theological relevance began. Most scholars agree that Bultmann is one of the "most influential theologians of the twentieth-century", but that he also had a "notorious reputation for his de-mythologizing" which was debated around the world. Demythologizing refers to the reinterpretation of the biblical myths (stories) in terms of the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Bultmann claimed myths are "true" anthropologically and existentially but not cosmologically. As a major proponent of form criticism, Bultmann "set the agenda for a subsequent generation of leading NT [New Testament] scholars". The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in 1947 renewed interest in archaeology's potential contributions to biblical studies, but it also posed challenges to biblical criticism. For example, the majority of the Dead Sea texts are closely related to the Masoretic Text that the Christian Old Testament is based upon, while other texts bear a closer resemblance to the Septuagint (the ancient Greek version of the Hebrew texts) and still others are closer to the Samaritan Pentateuch. This has raised the question of whether or not there is such a thing as an "original text". If there is no original text, the entire purpose of textual criticism is called into question. The New quest for the historical Jesus began in 1953 and was so-named in 1959 by James M. Robinson. New historicism, a literary theory that views history through literature, also developed. Biblical criticism began to apply new literary approaches such as structuralism and rhetorical criticism, which concentrated less on history and more on the texts themselves. In the 1970s, the New Testament scholar E. P. Sanders (1937–2022) advanced the New Perspective on Paul, which has greatly influenced scholarly views on the relationship between Pauline Christianity and Jewish Christianity in the Pauline epistles. Sanders also advanced study of the historical Jesus by putting Jesus's life in the context of first-century Second-Temple Judaism. In 1974, the theologian Hans Frei published The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, which became a landmark work leading to the development of post-critical interpretation. The third period of focused study on the historical Jesus began in 1988. By 1990, biblical criticism as a primarily historical discipline changed into a group of disciplines with often conflicting interests. There is no general agreement among scholars on how to periodize the various quests for the historical Jesus. Most scholars agree the first quest began with Reimarus and ended with Schweitzer, that there was a "no-quest" period in the first half of the twentieth century, and that there was a second quest, known as the "New" quest that began in 1953 and lasted until 1988 when a third began. In this stronghold of support for Bultmann, Käsemann claimed "Bultmann's skepticism about what could be known about the historical Jesus had been too extreme". James M. Robinson named this the New quest in his 1959 essay "The New Quest for the Historical Jesus". Sanders explains that, because of the desire to know everything about Jesus, including his thoughts and motivations, and because there are such varied conclusions about him, it seems to many scholars that it is impossible to be certain about anything. Yet according to Sanders, "we know quite a lot" about Jesus. While scholars rarely agree about what is known or unknown about the historical Jesus, according to Witherington, scholars do agree that "the historic questions should not be dodged". == Major methods ==

Theologian David R. Law writes that biblical scholars usually employ textual, source, form, and redaction criticism together. The Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible), and the New Testament, as distinct bodies of literature, each raise their own problems of interpretation - the two are therefore generally studied separately. For purposes of discussion, these individual methods are separated here and the Bible is addressed as a whole, but this is an artificial approach that is used only for the purpose of description, and is not how biblical criticism is actually practiced. It is one of the largest areas of biblical criticism in terms of the sheer amount of information it addresses. The roughly 900 manuscripts found at Qumran include the oldest extant manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. They represent every book except Esther, though most books appear only in fragmentary form. The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work, having over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic, and Armenian texts. The dates of these manuscripts are generally accepted to range from c.110–125 (the papyrus) to the introduction of printing in Germany in the fifteenth century. There are also approximately a million direct New Testament quotations in the collected writings of the Church Fathers of the first four centuries. (As a comparison, the next best-sourced ancient text is the Iliad, presumably written by the ancient Greek Homer in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, which survives in more than 1,900 manuscripts, though many are of a fragmentary nature.) is the oldest existing fragment of New Testament papyrus. It contains phrases from the Book of John. These texts were all written by hand, by copying from another handwritten text, so they are not alike in the manner of printed works. The differences between them are called variants. A variant is simply any variation between two texts. Many variants are simple misspellings or mis-copying. For example, a scribe might drop one or more letters, skip a word or line, write one letter for another, transpose letters, and so on. Some variants represent a scribal attempt to simplify or harmonize, by changing a word or a phrase. The exact number of variants is disputed, but the more texts survive, the more likely there will be variants of some kind. Variants are not evenly distributed throughout any set of texts. Charting the variants in the New Testament shows it is 62.9 percent variant-free. The impact of variants on the reliability of a single text is usually tested by comparing it to a manuscript whose reliability has been long established. Though many new early manuscripts have been discovered since 1881, there are critical editions of the Greek New Testament, such as NA28 and UBS5, that "have gone virtually unchanged" from these discoveries. "It also means that the fourth century 'best texts', the 'Alexandrian' codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, have roots extending throughout the entire third century and even into the second". . The Alexandrian textual family is based on this codex. Variants are classified into . Say scribe A makes a mistake and scribe B does not. Copies of scribe '''A's'' text with the mistake will thereafter contain that same mistake. Over time the texts descended from A that share the error, and those from B that do not share it, will diverge further, but later texts will still be identifiable as descended from one or the other because of the presence or absence of that original mistake. Forerunners of modern textual criticism can be found in both early Rabbinic Judaism and in the early church. • Recension is the selection of the most trustworthy evidence on which to base a text. • Emendation is the attempt to eliminate the errors which are found even in the best manuscripts. Jerome McGann says these methods innately introduce a subjective factor into textual criticism despite its attempt at objective rules. Alan Cooper discusses this difficulty using the example of Amos 6.12 which reads: "Does one plough with oxen?" The obvious answer is "yes", but the context of the passage seems to demand a "no". Cooper explains that a recombination of the consonants allows it to be read "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 personal judgment. This contributes to textual criticism being one of the most contentious areas of biblical criticism, as well as the largest, with scholars such as Arthur Verrall referring to it as the "fine and contentious art". It uses specialized methodologies, enough specialized terms to create its own lexicon, and is guided by a number of principles. Yet any of these principles—and their conclusions—can be contested. For example, in the late 1700s, textual critic Johann Jacob Griesbach (1745 – 1812) developed fifteen critical principles for determining which texts are likely the oldest and closest to the original. Latin scholar Albert C. Clark challenged Griesbach's view of shorter texts in 1914. Some twenty-first century scholars have advocated abandoning these older approaches to textual criticism in favor of new computer-assisted methods for determining manuscript relationships in a more reliable way. The French physician Jean Astruc presumed in 1753 that Moses had written the book of Genesis (the first book of the Pentateuch) using ancient documents; he attempted to identify these original sources and to separate them again. Source criticism of the Old Testament: Wellhausen's hypothesis Source criticism's most influential work is Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Prologue to the History of Israel, 1878) which sought to establish the sources of the first five books of the Old Testament - collectively known as the Pentateuch. The Wellhausen hypothesis (also known as the JEDP theory, or the Documentary hypothesis, or the Graf–Wellhausen hypothesis) proposes that the Pentateuch was combined out of four separate and coherent (unified single) sources (not fragments). J stands for the Yahwist source, (Jahwist in German), and was considered to be the most primitive in style and therefore the oldest. E (for Elohist) was thought to be a product of the Northern Kingdom before BCE 721; D (for Deuteronomist) was said to be written shortly before it was found in BCE 621 by King Josiah of Judah (2 Chronicles 34:14-30). Later scholars added to and refined Wellhausen's theory. For example, the Newer Documentary Thesis inferred more sources, with increasing information about their extent and inter-relationship. The fragmentary theory was a later understanding of Wellhausen produced by form criticism. This theory argues that fragments of documents — rather than continuous, coherent documents — are the sources for the Pentateuch. Furthermore, they argue, it provides an explanation for the peculiar character of the material labeled P, which reflects the perspective and concerns of Israel's priests. Wellhausen's theory went virtually unchallenged until the 1970s, when it began to be heavily criticized. By the end of the 1970s and into the 1990s, "one major study after another, like a series of hammer blows, has rejected the main claims of the Documentary theory, and the criteria on the basis of which they were argued". Problems and criticisms of the Documentary hypothesis have been brought on by literary analysts who point out the error of judging ancient Eastern writings as if they were the products of western European Protestants; and by advances in anthropology that undermined Wellhausen's assumptions about how cultures develop; and also by various archaeological findings showing the cultural environment of the early Hebrews was more advanced than Wellhausen thought. As a result, few biblical scholars of the twenty-first century hold to Wellhausen's Documentary hypothesis in its classical form. Source criticism of the New Testament: the synoptic problem In New Testament studies, source criticism has taken a slightly different approach from Old Testament studies by focusing on identifying the common sources of multiple texts instead of looking for the multiple sources of a single set of texts. The two-source hypothesis stands among one of the most influential and well-known theories of source criticism. As sources, Matthew, Mark and Luke are partially dependent on each other and partially independent of each other. This is called the synoptic problem, and explaining it is the single greatest dilemma of New Testament source criticism. Any explanation offered must "account for (a) what is common to all the Gospels; (b) what is common to any two of them; (c) what is peculiar to each". Multiple theories exist to address the dilemma, with none universally agreed upon, but the two-source hypothesis is the most common, though alternative hypotheses like Farrer are increasing in popularity. Mark is the shortest of the four gospels with only 661 verses, but 600 of those verses are in Matthew and 350 of them are in Luke. Some of these verses are verbatim. Most scholars agree that this indicates Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke. There is also some verbatim agreement between Matthew and Luke of verses not found in Mark. In 1838, the religious philosopher Christian Hermann Weisse developed a theory about this. He postulated a hypothetical collection of the sayings of Jesus from an additional source called Q, taken from Quelle, which is German for "source". The study of pre-Gospel sources is declining in scholarship, with most scholars rejecting unified M and L sources today. Biblical scholar B. H. Streeter used this insight to refine and expand the two-source theory into a four-source theory in 1925. Two-source theory critique While the two-source theory remains the most popular solution, others say it is not solved satisfactorily, with theories suggesting usage of Matthew by Luke or vice versa without Q increasing in popularity within scholarship. Donald Guthrie says no single theory offers a complete solution as there are complex and important difficulties that create challenges to every theory. One example is Basil Christopher Butler's challenge to the legitimacy of two-source theory, arguing it contains a Lachmann fallacy that says the two-source theory loses cohesion when it is acknowledged that no source can be established for Mark. F. C. Grant posits multiple sources for the Gospels. Bible scholar Richard Bauckham says this "most significant insight," which established the foundation of form criticism, has never been refuted. Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932) and Martin Dibelius (1883–1947) built from this insight and pioneered form criticism. By the 1950s and 1960s, Rudolf Bultmann and form criticism were the "center of the theological conversation in both Europe and North America". Form criticism breaks down biblical pasage into short units called pericopes, which are then classified by genre: prose or verse, letters, laws, court archives, war hymns, poems of lament, and so on. Form criticism then theorizes concerning the individual pericope's Sitz im Leben ("setting in life" or "place in life"). Based on their understanding of folklore, form critics believed the early Christian communities formed the sayings and teachings of Jesus themselves, according to their needs (their "situation in life"), and that each form could be identified by the situation in which it had been created and vice versa. Critique of form criticism In the early- to mid- twentieth century, form critics thought finding oral "laws of development" within the New Testament would prove the form critic's assertions that the texts had evolved within the early Christian communities according to sitz im leben. Since Mark was believed to be the first gospel, the form critics looked for the addition of proper names for anonymous characters, indirect discourse being turned into direct quotation, and the elimination of Aramaic terms and forms, with details becoming more concrete in Matthew, and then more so in Luke. Instead, in the 1970s, New Testament scholar E. P. Sanders wrote that: "There are no hard and fast laws of the development of the Synoptic tradition... On all counts the tradition developed in opposite directions. It became both longer and shorter, both more and less detailed, and both more and less Semitic". Some form critics assumed these same skeptical presuppositions based largely on their understanding of oral transmission and folklore. During the latter half of the twentieth century, field studies of cultures with existing oral traditions directly impacted many of these presuppositions. According to religion scholar Werner H. Kelber, form critics throughout the mid-twentieth century were so focused on finding each pericope's original form, that they were distracted from any serious consideration of memory as a dynamic force in the construction of the gospels or the early church community tradition. What Kelber refers to as the "astounding myopia" of the form critics has revived interest in memory as an analytical category within biblical criticism. As in source criticism, it is necessary to identify the traditions before determining how the redactor used them. Redaction critics reject source and form criticism's description of the Bible texts as mere collections of fragments. Where form critics fracture the biblical elements into smaller and smaller individual pieces, redaction critics attempt to interpret the whole literary unit. In the New Testament, redaction critics attempt to discern the original author/evangelist's theology by focusing and relying upon the differences between the gospels, yet it is unclear whether every difference has theological meaning, how much meaning, or whether any given difference is a stylistic or even an accidental change. Further, it is not at all clear whether the difference was made by the evangelist, who could have used the already changed story when writing a gospel. Mark Goodacre says "Some scholars have used the success of redaction criticism as a means of supporting the existence of Q, but this will always tend toward circularity, particularly given the hypothetical nature of Q which itself is reconstructed by means of redaction criticism". Hans Frei proposed that "biblical narratives should be evaluated on their own terms" rather than by taking them apart in the manner we evaluate philosophy or historicity. New Testament scholar Paul R. House says the discipline of linguistics, new views of historiography, and the decline of older methods of criticism were also influential in that process. Brevard S. Childs (1923–2007) proposed an approach to bridge that gap that came to be called canonical criticism. Canonical criticism "signaled a major and enduring shift in biblical studies". John Barton says that canonical criticism does not simply ask what the text might have originally meant, it asks what it means to the current believing community, and it does so in a manner different from any type of historical criticism. (2) Canonical critics approach the books as whole units instead of focusing on pieces. They accept that many texts have been composed over long periods of time, but the canonical critic wishes "to interpret the last edition of a biblical book" and then relate books to each other. it is Herbert A. Wichelns who is credited with "creating the modern discipline of rhetorical criticism" with his 1925 essay "The Literary Criticism of Oratory". In that essay, Wichelns says that rhetorical criticism and other types of literary criticism differ from each other because rhetorical criticism is only concerned with "effect. It regards a speech as a communication to a specific audience, and holds its business to be the analysis and appreciation of the orator's method of imparting his ideas to his hearers". Phyllis Trible, a student of Muilenburg, has become one of the leaders of rhetorical criticism and is known for her detailed literary analysis and her feminist critique of biblical interpretation. Narrative criticism In the last half of the twentieth century, historical critics began to recognize that being limited to the historical meant the Bible was not being studied in the manner of other ancient writings. In 1974, Hans Frei pointed out that a historical focus neglects the "narrative character" of the gospels. Critics began asking if these texts should be understood on their own terms before being used as evidence of something else. Christopher T. Paris says that, "narrative criticism admits the existence of sources and redactions but chooses to focus on the artistic weaving of these materials into a sustained narrative picture". Narrative criticism was first used to study the New Testament in the 1970s, with the works of David Rhoads, Jack D. Kingsbury, R. Alan Culpepper, and Robert C. Tannehill. Stephen D. Moore has written that "as a term, narrative criticism originated within biblical studies", but its method was borrowed from narratology. == Legacy ==

Ken and Richard Soulen say that "biblical criticism has permanently altered the way people understand the Bible". As a result, the Bible is no longer thought of solely as a religious artifact, and its interpretation is no longer restricted to the community of believers. The Bible's cultural impact is studied in multiple academic fields, producing not only the cultural Bible, but the modern academic Bible as well. There are aspects of biblical criticism that have not only been hostile to the Bible, but also to the religions whose scripture it is, in both intent and effect. Part of the legacy of biblical criticism is that, as it rose, it led to the decline of biblical authority. Jeffrey Burton Russell describes it thus: "Faith was transferred from the words of scripture itself to those of influential biblical critics ... liberal Christianity retreated hastily before the advance of science and biblical criticism. By the end of the eighteenth century, advanced liberals had abandoned the core of Christian beliefs." This created an "intellectual crisis" in American Christianity of the early twentieth century which led to a backlash against the critical approach. This backlash produced a fierce internal battle for control of local churches, national denominations, divinity schools and seminaries. On one hand, Rogerson says that "historical criticism is not inherently inimical to Christian belief". "There are those who regard the desacralization of the Bible as the fortunate condition for the rise of new sensibilities and modes of imagination" that went into developing the modern world. Some fundamentalists believed liberal critics had invented an entirely new religion "completely at odds with the Christian faith". There have also been conservative Protestants who accepted biblical criticism, and this too is part of biblical criticism's legacy. William Robertson Smith (1846–1894) is an example of a nineteenth century evangelical who believed historical criticism was a legitimate outgrowth of the Protestant Reformation's focus on the biblical text. He saw it as a "necessary tool to enable intelligent churchgoers" to understand the Bible, and was a pioneer in establishing the final form of the supplementary hypothesis of the documentary hypothesis. Mark Noll says that "in recent years, a steadily growing number of well qualified and widely published scholars have broadened and deepened the impact of evangelical scholarship". Notable exceptions to this included Richard Simon, Ignaz von Döllinger and the Bollandist. The Church showed strong opposition to biblical criticism during that period. Frequent political revolutions, bitter opposition of "liberalism" to the Church, and the expulsion of religious orders from France and Germany, made the church understandably suspicious of the new intellectual currents. In 1864, Pope Pius IX promulgated the encyclical letter Quanta cura ("Condemning Current Errors"), which decried what the Pontiff considered significant errors afflicting the modern age. These he listed in an attachment called Syllabus Errorum ("Syllabus of Errors"), which, among other things, condemned rationalistic interpretations of the Bible. Similarly, the dogmatic constitution Dei Filius ("Son of God"), approved by the First Vatican Council in 1871, rejected biblical criticism, reaffirming that the Bible was written by God and that it was inerrant. That began to change in the final decades of the nineteenth century when, in 1890, the French Dominican Marie-Joseph Lagrange (1855–1938) established a school in Jerusalem called the ''École prátique d'études biblique, which became the École Biblique in 1920, to encourage study of the Bible using the historical-critical method. Two years later, Lagrange funded a journal (Revue Biblique), spoke at various conferences, wrote Bible commentaries that incorporated textual critical work of his own, did pioneering work on biblical genres and forms, and laid the path to overcoming resistance to the historical-critical method among his fellow scholars. and have a knowledge of natural science. The École Biblique and the Revue Biblique'' were shut down and Lagrange was called back to France in 1912. Following Pius's death, Pope Benedict XV once again condemned rationalistic biblical criticism in his papal encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus ("Paraclete Spirit, The dogmatic constitution Dei verbum ("Word of God"), approved by the Second Vatican Council and promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965 furtherly sanctioned biblical criticism. Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer and Roland E. Murphy were the most famous Catholic scholars to apply biblical criticism and the historical-critical method in analyzing the Bible: together, they authored The Jerome Biblical Commentary and The New Jerome Biblical Commentary the later of which is still one of the most used textbooks in Catholic Seminaries of the United States. The Jerome Biblical Commentary for the Twenty-First Century, a third fully revised edition, will be published in 2022 and will be edited by John J. Collins, Gina Hens-Piazza, Barbara Reid and Donald Senior. This tradition is continued by Catholic scholars such as John P. Meier, and Conleth Kearns, who also worked with Reginald C. Fuller and Leonard Johnston preparing A New Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture. Meier is also the author of a multi-volume work on the historical Jesus, A Marginal Jew. Jewish criticism Biblical criticism posed unique difficulties for Judaism. Some Jewish scholars, such as rabbinicist Solomon Schechter, did not participate in biblical criticism because they saw criticism of the Pentateuch as a threat to Jewish identity. The growing anti-semitism in Germany of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the perception that higher criticism was an entirely Protestant Christian pursuit, and the sense that many Bible critics were not impartial academics but were proponents of supersessionism, prompted Schechter to describe "Higher Criticism as Higher Anti-semitism". In the early twentieth century, historical criticism of the Pentateuch became mainstream among Jewish scholars. Bible professor Benjamin D. Sommer says it is "among the most precise and detailed commentaries on the legal texts [Leviticus and Deuteronomy] ever written". Kaufmann was the first Jewish scholar to fully exploit higher criticism to counter Wellhausen's theory. Wellhausen's and Kaufmann's methods were similar yet their conclusions were opposed. For example, the patriarchal model of ancient Israel became an aspect of biblical criticism through the anthropology of the nineteenth century. Three phases of feminist biblical interpretation are connected to the three phases, or 'waves', of the movement. Feminist theology has since responded to globalization, making itself less specifically Western, thereby moving beyond its original narrative "as a movement defined by the USA". Postcolonial biblical criticism In the mid to late 1990s, a global response to the changes in biblical criticism began to coalesce as "Postcolonial biblical criticism". Fernando F. Segovia and Stephen D. Moore postulate that it emerged from "liberation hermeneutics, or extra-biblical Postcolonial studies, or even from historical biblical criticism, or from all three sources at once". Michael Joseph Brown writes that African Americans responded to the assumption of universality in biblical criticism by challenging it. He says all Bible readings are contextual, in that readers bring with them their own context: perceptions and experiences harvested from social and cultural situations. Social scientific criticism Social scientific criticism is part of the wider trend in biblical criticism to reflect interdisciplinary methods and diversity. It grew out of form criticism's Sitz im Leben and the sense that historical form criticism had failed to adequately analyze the social and anthropological contexts which form critics claimed had formed the texts. Using the perspectives, theories, models, and research of the social sciences to determine what social norms may have influenced the growth of biblical tradition, it is similar to historical biblical criticism in its goals and methods and has less in common with literary critical approaches. It analyzes the social and cultural dimensions of the text and its environmental context. New historicism New historicism emerged as traditional historical biblical criticism changed. Lois Tyson says this new form of historical criticism developed in the 1970s. It "rejects both traditional historicism's marginalization of literature and New Criticism's enshrinement of the literary text in a timeless dimension beyond history". Literary texts are seen as "cultural artifacts" that reveal context as well as content, and within New Historicism, the "literary text and the historical situation" are equally important". Many of these early postmodernist views came from France following World War II. Postmodernism has been associated with Sigmund Freud, radical politics, and arguments against metaphysics and ideology. Post-critical interpretation Post-critical interpretation, according to Ken and Richard Soulen, "shares postmodernism's suspicion of modern claims to neutral standards of reason, but not its hostility toward theological interpretation". Subject matter is identical to verbal meaning and is found in plot and nowhere else. "As Frei puts it, scripture 'simultaneously depicts and renders the reality (if any) of what it talks about'; its subject matter is 'constituted by, or identical with, its narrative". == Notes ==