Taking the Old Testament to Task: Getting Our Bearing, Part 1

“Criticizing the Bible?”  This is the somewhat typical remark I get from people when I tell them about my class entitled “Old Testament Criticism.”  For those who have grown up in conservative evangelical homes the words “criticism” and “Bible” do not mix.  They are like oil and water.  The reasons for this are myriad, some good and some bad; the pitting of reason against faith, a deep seeded respect for the nature of the Bible, a somewhat naieve approach to reading the Bible.  For those from a more mainstream background criticism of the Bible may seem to be old hat.  However, my guess is that on a popular level there is a misunderstanding of what is meant by the term biblical criticism.  In general when people write, speak about “Biblical criticism” they are speaking about thinking critically about either the text or message of the Bible.  This critical thinking has more to do with deciphering and analyzing data than it does looking to point out flaws.  I really cannot stress this point enough, everyone is on some level a biblical critic.  Whenever you open and read your Bible you are engaging in some level of biblical criticism.  You are reading and interpreting the words of Scripture and in doing that you are claiming that it says “x” and does not say “y”.  In order to claim that you are using Biblical criticism.

There are two primary areas of biblical criticism.  I said in my definition that Biblical criticism involved thinking critically about either the text or the message of the Bible.  In general these are the two primary areas of Biblical criticism.  Thinking critically about the message of the Bible merges into a field known as hermeneutics.  Hermeneutics is the study of how people interpret a text.  Hermeneutics as a field of study is related to philosophy and theories of communication as well as literature, and sociological studies.  Thinking critically about the message of the Bible then really asks this questions:  How do I read the Old Testament?  What are my methods of readings?  What are my presuppositions?  This kind of biblical criticism is also called higher criticism and deals with different ways of understanding the message of the Bible.  Most of our discussion in this series will focus on this type of Biblical criticism.

Thinking critically about the text of the Bible is what is commonly called textual criticism. This is also known as lower criticism.  Textual criticism is the science that seeks to uncover the original wording of the original manuscripts of Scripture.  Textual criticism of the Old Testament is a vast and complicated field of study about which I know very little, other than that it is probably one of the hardest things in the world to do.  And I’m not kidding about that.  In our next post I will try to give you a little taste of why this field of study is so hard and also why is so fascinating.