In everyday language, "criticism" describes finding fault, pointing out errors, or describing disapproval, so that to read something "critically" suggests an attitude of suspicion toward it. When the same word attaches to scripture, the impression can be that the scholar approaches the Bible hunting for things to disprove. That impression is widespread, and it has shaped how many readers picture the academic study of the Bible, yet it rests on a confusion between two quite different senses of a single word.
In biblical studies the term descends from the Greek verb krinein, which means to decide, to judge, or to evaluate, and it refers to the use of careful reasoning to investigate the origins, wording, composition, history, and content of the books of the Bible.[1] In modern English the word has acquired largely negative associations, with the result that a phrase such as "historical criticism" is often understood as playing a primarily negative role in the reading of scripture, when in practice it functions as a tool for gaining access to the meaning of texts written long ago in languages and settings far removed from the present.[2]
What the Word Once Implied
The suspicion attached to the term is not merely a popular misreading, since it has a history of its own. An older vocabulary distinguished "higher criticism," which studied the composition and sources of the biblical books, from "lower criticism," which studied the wording of the text itself. For some writers "higher" simply meant more important, while for others it carried overtones of speculative, biased, and even irreverent activity, set against the more solid and reverent labor of recovering the original wording. Because the labels invited that confusion, careful writers now tend to avoid them in favor of more precise terms such as textual criticism, source criticism, and redaction criticism. Across all of these the word "criticism" carries no disparaging sense, and the task is not to belittle the Bible or to tabulate its supposed errors but to establish the original, contextual meaning of a text and to weigh what can be known about its history.[3]
That some readers have heard hostility in the very name of the discipline is well documented, as though the enterprise amounted to an assault on the text comparable to open polemic against the Bible.[4] The activity the name describes, however, is considerably more modest. At its core the critical study of the Bible comes down to close attention to the plain meaning of the text, an effort to read carefully and to take seriously every feature of what is actually written.[5]
Criticism as Careful Reading
The critical spirit begins in something as ordinary as noticing that a text contains difficulties, whether a problem in the wording, a tension between one passage and another, or an inconsistency within a single book. Measured that way, the impulse is far older than the modern university. Readers in late antiquity and the medieval period, among them Origen, Augustine, and Jewish commentators, observed such difficulties and tried to account for them through reasoned argument, which means that reading the Bible critically, in the sense of attending rationally to its problems, did not begin with the Enlightenment.[6] What the modern discipline added was not the suspicion of a hostile outsider but a more systematic and methodical way of asking the questions careful readers had always asked.
A Family of Methods, Not a Single Procedure
A further source of confusion is the habit of speaking of "the historical-critical method," as if one fixed procedure existed that a scholar could simply apply. It is more accurate to say that there are methods used in historical criticism rather than a single method, since the label gathers a family of related approaches that includes source criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism, among others.[7] What unites them is the recognition that the biblical texts were composed in cultural settings very different from the modern world, so that understanding them means placing them first within those settings rather than reading present-day assumptions back into them. Source criticism asks whether a book draws on earlier written material and tries to identify it. Form criticism studies the smallest units of a text and the typical social settings in which their genres arose. Redaction criticism studies how editors arranged and shaped inherited material into the form a book now has. These developed as complementary ways of tracing how the biblical writings took shape over time.[8]
The Rules of the Craft
Nowhere is the rule-governed character of the discipline clearer than in textual criticism, the effort to recover, among the variant readings preserved across manuscripts and translations, the wording most likely to stand closest to the original. The work proceeds by formulated guidelines rather than by impression. One holds that the more difficult reading is generally to be preferred, the principle of lectio difficilior, on the reasoning that copyists tended to smooth a hard reading into an easier one rather than the reverse. Another holds that the shorter reading is generally to be preferred, the principle of lectio brevior, on the reasoning that scribes more often expanded a text with clarifying additions than trimmed it. Still other guidelines flag readings that appear to have been harmonized to a similar passage elsewhere, or altered so that the meaning would conform to a particular view.[9]
These guidelines are not mechanical levers, and the discipline is candid about their limits. A scribal slip can itself produce a more difficult reading, two variants may be equally difficult, and judging which of two readings is genuinely the harder is itself a matter of trained judgment. The rules bear on only a fraction of the cases that need deciding, and they cannot make the work fully objective, so the critic is obliged to set out the arguments for and against each reading and to choose among them. Textual evaluation in this sense cannot be bound by any fixed rule and amounts instead to a skill developed through wide experience, the art of defining a problem precisely and finding the considerations that weigh on either side.[10] Far from licensing arbitrary fault-finding, the practice binds the reader to evidence and to reasoning that others can examine and dispute, which is exactly what makes a judgment critical in the proper sense of the word.
Criticism Is Not Hostility
Because these procedures rest on evidence and argument rather than on prior conviction, scholars from very different communities, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish, along with those who hold no faith at all, can use them and reach agreement on the basic elements of a question, which allows people who disagree sharply about the meaning and authority of the Bible to discuss its interpretation on common ground.[11] To read the Bible critically, then, is to ask of it the questions one would ask of any text from a distant time and place, to follow the rules of the relevant method, and to arrive at a conclusion that can be defended and tested. Establishing the original meaning of a text in this disciplined way is regarded, even within communities that hold the Bible to be authoritative, as an indispensable first step in reading it well rather than a threat to it.[12]