Читать книгу New & Enlarged Handbook of Christian Theology - Donald W. Musser - Страница 29

Biblical criticism uses a wide range of methods; all of them involve reading the biblical text “from a distance.” It can be put this way: “Reading” the Bible means entering into the text directly, letting it open its own world to the reader, while “criticism” means looking at the text in order to understand it according to standards that come (at least in part) from a different world and not directly from the text itself. There is no pure “reading” without some form of critical distance (even if unreflective) to enrich it, and all forms of criticism also imply some direct appreciation of the text.

The Historical Critical Method. Most modern biblical criticism has been strongly historical, so much so that the “historical critical method” has often been called the only critical way to read the Bible. Historical study usually moves “behind” the text, to reconstruct the events, people, and religious and social practices from which the written books emerged. The historical critical method emphasizes the movement of history in time but not necessarily as an evolutionary movement from the simple or primitive to the more developed. Also basic to the historical method is comparison between the biblical tradition and the cultures of the environment.

Often historical study of the Bible has been rigidly convinced that the criteria for interpretation should be taken wholly from modern experience, so that anything foreign to the historian’s experience would be explained by modern criteria of reasonableness. Thus, how to interpret miracles was a classic question raised by historical study of the Bible, since most modern people do not experience miracles directly. But historical study can also allow the different world of the past to open new possibilities for the present that would not have seemed reasonable apart from the biblical text.

Historically oriented study of the Bible also raises the question of the canon; that is, what makes the biblical books distinctive, for historical study often points out the similarities between what is found in the Bible and other customs and faith. Modern discoveries of Jewish and early Christian books closely related to parts of the Bible have made the canon an urgent question for modern study of the Bible. What if such a work as the Gospel of Thomas (discovered in Egypt in the twentieth century) were to give a picture of Jesus somehow on a par with that of the Gospels?

Historical study of the Bible runs the danger of being interested only in the distant past. Hence other forms of criticism supplement or replace it. Most of them look at the formal patterns of the biblical literature (see below).

Canonical Criticism. Canonical criticism bridges the gap between critical historical study and the tradition of faith. Historical criticism has often looked “behind” the text to reconstruct a history or an earlier form of the biblical literature, but canonical criticism focuses on the biblical books themselves, usually in their completed present form, since these are the books the church has revered. It affirms that the meaning of the Bible is found in the believing community, yet that this meaning has not been constant, but was always discovered in concrete situations at particular times. Thus the history of the community and its interaction with the biblical texts gives access to the meaning of the Bible today. For example, the repeated effort in the Bible to discover and express a single loyalty to the one God (i.e., the many and varied rejections of idolatry) can be taken, in canonical criticism, to disclose a theme that will be central for interpreting the Bible now.

Sociological Criticism. Sociological criticism is a type of historical study that inquires about the social conditions in which a biblical work originally functioned. It shifts attention away from the individual believer to the group, and reminds the reader that what was originally written for a very different social situation is misunderstood if it is simply applied to a modern individual reader.

Textual Criticism. Printing made a standard text possible. The collection, ordering, and evaluation of the myriad variations in the several thousand manuscript copies of the Bible (or parts of it) is the task of textual criticism. The careful, word-for-word comparison of biblical manuscripts with some standard text and the recording of all the variations is a task that is far from complete today. Recent discoveries of texts—both of the Hebrew Bible (especially those among the Dead Sea Scrolls or Qumran discoveries) and of the New Testament (especially among the papyri found in Egypt)—have added far older witnesses to the biblical text than were available until the twentieth century.

The task of sifting these variations in the text and deciding on the best text is the second phase of textual criticism. It involves the weighing of the age of the variation in question, and also the weighing of the probabilities of how this “reading” fits the thought of the book as otherwise known and how effectively it explains other variations of the same verse or section. For example, in Matthew 5:22, “Every one who is angry with his brother without cause shall be liable to judgment,” the phrase “without cause” has been rejected from modern texts and translations on both counts: It is not found in many early copies of Matthew, and it is not consistent with the sharp challenge that the Sermon on the Mount offers elsewhere.

Philology and Linguistics. The Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages of the Bible have been studied with the goal of determining, as accurately as possible, the particular meanings of words and sentence structures. The splendid grammars and dictionaries of biblical languages now available are the fruit of this philological study. Philology sees language “diachronically,” as it develops in time; it has also shown how the languages of the Bible are related to those of neighboring cultures.

Modern linguistics focuses sharply on the structures of language as a “synchronic” system, as it functions as a self-regulating system at a particular time, without regard to its historical development. Negatively, linguistics makes relative the dictionary approach to language by showing that words do not have constant, self-contained meanings, but that they always function in relationships, in a context within which meaning is created.

Linguistics distinguishes between “language,” the whole system that makes possible the production of any particular sentence, and “speech,” the concrete acts of speaking or writing, and it shows how specific acts or statements in language are made possible by the more general structures. In biblical studies linguistics has been especially fruitful in the work of translation. Since words and sentence structures do not correspond exactly from language to language, careful attention to functional equivalents is important.

Form Criticism. Many passages in the Bible functioned in the life of the community before they were included in the books where we now find them. Psalms, hymns, and parables are clear examples, but others, such as laws, required historical study before the existence of the form prior to the written text could be recognized. Form criticism is the study of formal patterns that functioned in particular sociological ways. First used in the study of the Hebrew Bible, it was able to offer new classifications of the psalms (praise, lament, etc.) and to show patterns of legal, prophetic, and wisdom speech.

Also important for form criticism is the boundary between oral and written language, for many of the forms discerned were originally oral ones. The extent of the influence of oral speech—with its pattern of repetition and its creative reformulation as a story is retold—on biblical literature is a hotly debated topic. Unfortunately, the original setting of many forms can be reconstructed only hypothetically. In New Testament studies, form criticism has been especially useful in classifying the forms of the sayings and narratives in the Synoptic Gospels. Form-critical analysis, by showing the general pattern of a parable or miracle story, for instance, is able to make much clearer the force of a particular parable by showing how it both uses and creatively distorts the basic form.

Redaction Criticism. Redaction criticism studies the changes that an author made in the traditions incorporated into a finished work. It aims to understand how Jews and Christians responded to new situations by creatively reworking their traditions. Form criticism presupposes sufficient stability in tradition so that earlier (often originally oral) forms can be recognized in a later work. Redaction critics agree, but they look at the often slight changes in a section of the Bible and in the introductory and concluding settings of a passage to interpret how the final author related the tradition to a later community and a later pattern of faith.

Redaction criticism is on firm ground when both earlier and later stages of the tradition are available. A clear case is the use of Mark by Matthew and Luke, according to the “two document theory” (see below). Changes that Matthew and Luke made in Mark’s formulation of the tradition about Jesus indicate the special interests of the later writers and their churches. Redaction criticism can also be very successful even when the earlier form of the tradition is present only in its later setting. The editing of earlier forms of the Hebrew story by the writer or writers of Judges and 1 and 2 Kings, for instance, tells us a great deal about the faith of these authors (see Judg. 2:19).

Redaction criticism thus assumes that the writers of the biblical books were not mere collectors (as had sometimes been thought by form critics) but were authors who expressed distinct points of view. Yet its clues to the meaning of a work are found in specific parts; it is left to literary criticism to look at the overall pattern of a book.

Literary Criticism. Literary criticism may be focused in various ways, but in biblical studies most literary criticism has dealt either with literary history or with literary form.

Literary criticism as literary history led to the discovery that many biblical books were not written as unified wholes by single authors but were collections that used earlier sources. The classic “Documentary theory” of the writing of the first five books of the Bible and the “two document theory” of the writing of the first three Gospels in the New Testament are primary examples of historical literary criticism. The Documentary theory of the Pentateuch or first five books of the Hebrew scriptures holds that these books were compiled from a number of previously written “documents,” two of which, “J” and “E,” were narratives of the Hebrew past, and two of which, “D” (the deuteronomic source) and “P” (the Priestly document), were collections of laws. The clue that led to the discovery of this hypothesis is a shift between two names of God, “Yahweh” (“J” in German) and “Elohim” (“E”), in the narrative parts of the books in question. Since an unreflective reading of these books suggests that they were all written by a single author, Moses, the Documentary theory was exceedingly controversial when it was first advanced. Current study, for the most part, accepts the view that these books were compilations, but it is much more flexible about the details, since today oral tradition is recognized as playing a large part in the transmission of the traditions that we now find in these books.

A similar study of the first three Gospels of the New Testament led to the “two document theory,” which is now very widely held, though not universally accepted. It holds that Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a source, and also used a lost document, “Q,” which was a collection of the words of Jesus.

Essential though it is, historical literary criticism, like all forms of historical study, risks leaving the Bible in the distant past if it is the only method employed. Literary criticism that looks at the form of the passage or book in question is more open to present-day appropriation.

Literary criticism directed to form is quite varied. From the time of Aristotle’s Poetics to the New Critics of the twentieth century, formal literary criticism has studied how the form of a work (or shorter passage) is related to the effects the work produces. Attention is shifted away both from the history of the work and from its ideas as abstracted from their role in the work itself. Instead, criticism is turned to how the work appeals to the imagination and to feelings. Such formal criticism thus includes both rigorous attention to the interrelation of the parts of the work—how plot, characters, setting, and language are related, for instance—and a sensitivity to the work’s symbolic, imaginative, and aesthetic aspects.

Narrative is a prominent literary form in the Bible, and formal literary criticism has been exceptionally fruitful in interpreting biblical narrative. Narrative criticism illuminates how the subtle characterization of figures like Joseph is achieved and how the actually narrated story of the Gospels is related both to the figure of Jesus and to the expected events that lie beyond the scope of the Gospel narrative. Study of biblical narrative has also emphasized the contrast between narratives such as the Gospels, which help the reader find a place, and narratives such as the parables, which often dislocate or displace the reader.

Structural criticism has its roots in the formal criticism briefly described above. It attempts to achieve greater rigor, and thus to depend less on intuition, by analyzing a passage into constituent units of meaning, showing how they are related step-by-step as one moves through the work, and how they derive their dynamic from deeper, more general or abstract forces that lie beneath the surface interactions that are studied in traditional formal criticism. Structural criticism is an extension of linguistics to units larger than the sentence. It attempts to show how the deeper structures, such as the fundamental existential tension between life and death, and the fundamental ethical tension between good and evil, provide the energy or dynamic for the production of meaning.

A specific type of literary criticism is genre criticism, which seeks to identify the larger forms of biblical literature and relate them to their functions in the life of the community. An example is the genre of the Gospels, which has been the focus of intense study. How appropriate is the description of the Gospels as biographies? It was long held that their lack of interest in Jesus’ inner life made it wrong to class the Gospels as biographies, but more recent study of Hellenistic biographies has shown that the Gospels are close enough to some ancient biographies that this is an appropriate way to think of them. Yet the apocalyptic element in the Gospels has led some students to think of them as a modification of the form of the apocalypse, while others point to the element of kerygma or proclamation and see the Gospels as a unique genre, created to proclaim the Christian message. The diversity of views is a reminder that important writings may not fit established patterns of genre.

Audience criticism considers how a work makes its impact on its audience. It may deal with the original audience, or with a modern one. In either case, such criticism notes how the reader or hearer must make a creative contribution to what the work becomes as it is understood, so that the meaning of a work is not fixed, but is changed or enriched as people with different backgrounds and questions encounter it.

Conclusion. The specialization that marks academic work has tended to separate biblical criticism from theology, but these two studies always interact and deeply need each other. Historical biblical study contributed enormously to theology when an important task of theology was to show how the biblical narratives or biblical figures such as Jesus were functioning in a world in many respects like the present world. This is still an important contribution, but at the present time another contribution of biblical criticism, especially in its various literary modes, takes precedence. This involves showing how faith is communicated not simply through the intellect, but by narrative or story, metaphor, and imagination. Biblical literary criticism is challenging theology to deal less with ideas and doctrines, important though these are, and to reflect on how God’s presence and purpose are communicated in imaginative ways.

WILLIAM A. BEARDSLEE