Notes Along the Way -- Asbury 2.2 -- Biblical "Criticisms"

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8. Dr. Wang's New Testament History and Criticism course introduced me formally to the various biblical "criticisms," although I'm sure I had encountered some of them before and I would live through them afterwards. The word criticism seems like an unfortunate choice of words to me, because it sounds like the goal is to criticize the Bible. But, language shifts meaning over time. Historically, the term simply referred to an approach that sought careful, disciplined, and relatively objective investigation.

When I started teaching college in 1997, I had the thought that my journey had somewhat followed the path of these criticisms. The first "criticism" on my journey was textual criticism, in which I decided what I thought on the text of the New Testament. Was the King James Version more like the original or new versions like the Revised Standard Version or the NIV?

Textual criticism has always been allowed for evangelicals. Since the late 1700s, these studies had been called "lower criticism." What was viewed with great suspicion were the "higher criticisms" I will soon mention. Josh McDowell's More Evidence that Demands a Verdict targeted these in 1975.

In the 1950s, Stephen Paine (then president of Houghton College) urged the Wesleyan Methodists not only to put "inerrancy" in their church Discipline, but to specify that the Bible was inerrant "in the original manuscripts." He would become deeply involved in the translation of the NIV and fully accepted the findings of lower criticism with regard to the biblical text.

9. Next stop on the journey was source criticism. The goal here was to identify any written sources that might underlie the biblical materials. Over the years, I have found little to object to here from an evidentiary point of view. Not only are the cases quite compelling from an objective standpoint, but it seems to me that most of the objections are based on feelings and sentiment rather than substance.

For example, can't God inspire editing as well as writing? Of course he can. What if Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source? Why would that be a problem for inspiration -- especially if we can switch to an oral paradigm rather than an anachronistic literary one? [1]

The biggest objection is that it implies that what you see may not be precisely what happened. But then again, all of the Gospels are in Greek, and Jesus almost certainly spoke Aramaic. So, from the very beginning, we do not have the exact words of Jesus (the ipsissima verba). In the end, our obsession with precise wording and history probably says more about us and our culture than about the Bible and its context.

I have not found nearly as much resistance to source criticism of the Gospels as toward source criticism of the Pentateuch. I suspect there is a little hangover from history here. The German Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) did not come across as a friend of the Bible when he proposed his JEDP source theory of the Pentateuch. The source theories of the Gospels had more English connections and came across less hostile to faith when they reached the public, I suspect.

10. Perhaps I will do a more detailed version of my hermeneutical journey elsewhere. I was uncertain at first what to conclude about all these things. My background had all sorts of warning lights going off. But then again, my background knew almost nothing about such things and was not evidence or truth oriented. It was "use your intellect to defend tradition" oriented.

I remember being very impressed with Donald Guthrie's New Testament Introduction. He presented each position so objectively that they all sounded convincing. Only when he came to his conclusions did I know what he actually thought. I have found this to be a model of scholarship over the years.

It all just kind of hanged there until I started to take a position here or there. "OK, this position seems to fit the evidence best." Then if I took that position on that issue, then this position on this issue seemed coherent.

After the next few years, I traced the steps of the great biblical interpreters, drawing my own conclusions in dialog with the text and history. I consider myself fortunate to have studied in England where I didn't have interest groups vying for my reasoning. I was free to be as objective as possible there. Over time, I have mostly concluded that there were good reasons for the great consensuses of the twentieth century.

What were these consensuses? For one, that Mark was the first Gospel and that Matthew and Luke constructed their Gospels with Mark as their starting point. I still think it most likely that there was another source of Jesus' sayings in the mix (so-called "Q"). It's quite popular to reject Q at the moment, but I attribute much of this to scholarly sentimentality, although I think Mark Goodacre is an honest innovator.

With regard to the Pentateuch, it seems virtually certain to me that these books had different sources that used different names for God, although what precise form they may have had is a matter of great debate. It's somewhat silly to attack Wellhausen. He's been dead for over 100 years. His theories have been evaluated and reformulated repeatedly. [2] You're 150 years late to the game.

11. I think part of the problem is that we narcissistically think that the Bible is for me. But it wasn't written to me or you. It says so. It was written to Israelites, Corinthians, and Romans who have been dead for 2000 years. To say differently is to reject the text. 

There is a lot of naivete here. For example, someone might make a counter-suggestion that the Bible was written to everyone (which is really another way of saying, for me!). It is an attempt to say that the meaning was the same for them as it is for me.

Suffice it to say, language just doesn't work that way. There is no such thing as timeless, contextless meaning in a text. [3] If you don't know the intended meaning, you will inevitably fill in context for the text with your own assumptions. These insights became crystal clear to me during my years in England as I became aware of the later Wittgenstein (1889-1951).

So if someone suggests that the text isn't how it appears to me, I may get very defensive, perhaps even very angry. This is my book! And you're suggesting it's different than it looks to me?

An example is those who say Acts couldn't have been written after Paul's death or else it would have told us how he died. 

But it wasn't written to you!!! I strongly believe that the people for whom Acts was written knew that Paul died at the hands of Nero. To tell that part of the story would have distracted from the author's purposes in writing, some of which were to highlight that Christians were law-abiding, authority-respecting individuals under the Empire.

12. After source criticism came form criticism, which tried to trace oral traditons behind the biblical texts. I personally feel like the Germans made a bit of a mess with this one. The study almost had to be rebooted fresh in the late twentieth century. For one thing, their obsession to classify everything rigidly was ludicrous when we are talking about the way humans pass along stories. 

I especially laugh when I think of Adolf Jülicher (1857–1938), who said that if you find sayings of Jesus in the Gospels that have more than one point or are allegorical, Jesus probably didn't say it. Oh ye great German categorizer. People in oral cultures can do whatever they d*mn please whether it fits your spreadsheet or not.

The initial work of Kenneth Bailey (1930-2016) was very helpful here. [4] Learning from his missionary work with nomadic peoples in the Middle East, he suggested that oral tradition in oral cultures is "informal controlled" tradition. That is to say, the details to the story-telling can vary, but the core elements tend to stay the same. [5]

This is exactly what we find across the Gospels and even in the Pentateuch. It is actually an argument for the kernel of traditions being historical even though some of the details among the variations might not be. But this is a hard pill to swallow for many evangelicals. Perhaps there is an idol of certainty at work here.

If we weren't talking about the Bible, I think we would readily acknowledge some of these dynamics. Forgive me for saying it is like we are required to turn our brains off and think irrationally. How does that fit with a God of truth? It's no wonder, in my opinion, that the evangelical church gets so easily caught up in conspiracy theories and counterfactualism.

Perhaps some day I will go into more detail.

13. Next was redaction criticism in the 60s and 70s. It shifted away from the search for endless hypothetical sources to the question of how those sources might have been modified given the theologies and ideologies of the editors. How does the way Matthew edited Mark reveal his theology?

In the 1980s, there was a turn. Instead of studying hypotheticals, why don't we study the texts we have? Narrative criticism looked at the Gospels as stories. This allowed us to forget the question of sources and go with the texts as they are. Who are the characters, what are the events, what are the settings in Matthew? We can ignore the historical questions and just focus on the text as it is.

It was a nice way to get a PhD in a critical environment without violating any institutional faith statement. It reminds me of the story of Bud Bence when he went to do his doctorate at Emory. He was told he could study Wesley in the church history department but not in the theology department. After all, the thinking of Wesley was "obviously wrong" as a theologian, way out of date.

I think David Thompson (if I remember correctly) did his dissertation on some arcane aspect of Hebrew grammar at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Wang and my college professor Ken Foutz were at Emory together too, I think. Wang used to talk about how Hendrikus Boers was required to speak in chapel once a year. Apparently, he would get up and preface his sermons with something like, "Let me tell you a myth." Then he would preach a perfectly wonderful sermon.

Although it happened a decade before I came to Asbury, apparently Dr. Wang announced on July 30, 1976 -- the day of Rudolph Bultmann's death -- "Today, Bultmann die. Today, Bultmann know." I should surely mention Bultmann somewhere in these reflections, although this doesn't seem the time. Perhaps when I get to my first stay in Germany in 1995.

14. Narrative criticism is where the flow of scholarship was when I was in seminary, and Dr. Bauer was all over it. My doctoral dissertation was on the settings of the narrative substructure of Hebrews, a triangulation between what I had learned from Bauer and the early work of Richard Hays on the narrative substructure of pistis Christou in Galatians.

As I was leaving seminary came postmodernism in the 90s. There was reader-response critiicsm, which focused on how various audiences read the biblical texts. This could be divided into different ideological groups like feminists or African-Americans or Latin@s.

I was fortunate to attend a playful seminar with Stephen Moore presenting a postmodern interpretation of Mark in 1991. It was hilarious. [6] After the resurrection, Jesus is the "post-man," and as the postman, he sends a letter to his disciples.

In good postmodern fashion, when asked why he was doing this, he answered that he needed a job and this approach seemed as good as any to secure one.

15. These last two posts have covered some of my first delvings into New Testament studies (yes, I used the word delve--it's not AI). Dr. Wang's class seemed a good place to present some of these wrestlings. In the words of Dr. Bauer, "Of course, much more could be said."

[1] I remember enjoying Wayne Goodwin's Servant as Leader course my third year at Asbury. I remember 1) that he loved a systems approach to management, 2) he set out five leadership styles, and 3) he loved Walter Ong's then recent book that had come out on Orality and Literacy.

[2] It's a little like thinking that you are making headway against evolution by attacking Darwin. Contemporary evolution is nowhere close to straight Darwinism. 

[3] Some texts may approach being "omni-contextual" because of common human experience, but this is not a-contextual meaning. It would be accumulated contextual meaning. Yet even here, the connotation of a statement like "God is love" will vary some from context to context.

[4] Although I was far less satisfied with his interpretive work. When I looked at the Table of Contents of his book on 1 Corinthians and saw that he interpreted it as a giant chiasm, I closed the book and never opened it again.

[5] "Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels," Themelios 20.2 (January 1995): 4-11.

[6] I believe you'll find it in this volume on Mark and Method (Fortress, 1992).

Notes Along the Way -- Asbury Years 2.1 -- New Testament Criticism 1

Here is the previous bread crumb.
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1. Let me sum up two key shifts that had taken place in my understanding as I embarked on my second year at Asbury. One was personal. I had come to view my early approach to faith as one of bondage and legalism. My Easter morning turning point marked a change in the flavor of my faith and my sense of what God was like.

The second turning point was a commitment to truth. Not to my theological tribe. Not to some dogmatized sense of what the Bible meant. But to the most likely conclusions given the evidence and sound reasoning. In my mind, this was what God thought.

In terms of how this was playing out in my interpretation of the Bible, I had come to accept that the King James tradition probably wasn't the most original one. I also was beginning to think that my tradition often made the text say what we needed it to say. Our approach to many issues like the Sabbath were probably instances of special pleading. 

I was developing a sense of when an interpreter was "cooking the books," largely based on my own pilgrimage. I was developing a feeling that the causes my mother was now being fed regularly from Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and the early days of Christian talk radio were likely full of special pleading. They seemed to approach the evidence the way I used to -- to use one's intelligence and the evidence to rationalize my own preconceptions rather than being a real truth seeker who followed the evidence to its most likely conclusion. 

In retrospect, they seemed to come from a particular fundamentalist Calvinist worldview that I might now say was an infection to a purer Wesleyan theological heritage. This infection has only strengthened among grass-roots Wesleyans over the years, in my opinion. It is a high fever at the moment.

2. In the fall of 1988, I took New Testament History and Criticism with Dr. Joseph Wang. I could smell my old approach to truth in him. It seemed to me that a not-so-hidden goal for him was to go through the history of New Testament criticism and show how it was wrong (except in those cases where we were allowed to say it was right). In other words, it struck me to some extent as an apologetics class disguised as a history of New Testament studies class.

But Dr. Wang -- as Dr. John Oswalt would a year later -- presented the positions of the critics fairly. He argued against them at various points, but he did not pull their punches. He and Dr. Oswalt were fair enough in their treatments that they often convinced me of the opposite side to what they took.

I encountered Reimarus (1694-1768), whose posthumous writings drew a sharp division between Jesus' goals and those of his followers. (He thought Jesus' disciples stole the body.) He saw Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher who expected the kingdom of Israel to be restored immediately and never imagined starting a new religion like Christianity.

(I don't think for one minute that Peter or James or John stole Jesus' body or that the resurrection was some elaborate hoax cooked up by the disciples. That doesn't fit the clear resurrection dissonance that the New Testament embodies.)

3. I encountered David Strauss (1808-74), who marked a turning point in the study of Jesus. Before him, those with a naturalist approach to the Gospels assumed the Gospels were largely historical and tried to come up with alternative explanations (like that Jesus was only mostly dead). But Strauss suggested that the Gospels were full of myth and thus that many of the stories didn't happen at all.

Wang strongly criticized Strauss' understanding of myth, as many later critics of him have. But this opened a new trajectory in biblical studies. What if not all the stories in the Gospels actually happened?

This question was a key one in some of the inerrancy debates of the 1970s. It is pretty much assumed in Chicago Statement circles that inerrancy means that all the stories in the Bible are historical and do not contradict each other. The question of genre of course is a key one. How creative were history writers and biographers allowed to be? [1]

It is a fundamental question. It is not a question asked from the evangelical pulpits of America each Sunday. I have occasionally heard sermons that suggest that the genre of a biblical story meant that it was not meant to be taken literally. But almost every sermon I have ever heard in America lives in the space before Strauss.

Strauss was crude in his critical thinking by later standards, many would say. But he opened a door.

4. F. C. Baur walked through it (1792-1860). Baur was an easy target for Wang because of how hamfistedly he applied Hegel's supposed dialectic to biblical studies (as Wellhausen would for the Pentateuch).

The Jerusalem church is the thesis. Paul is the antithesis. Catholic Christianity is the synthesis. To think that this was all the rage in the late 1800s in German biblical studies is a bit embarrassing. But we shouldn't mistake his German oversystematization for a complete absence of data points. Baur looks amateurish to us now -- he shoved the data into his preconceived template. But that doesn't mean he didn't see some data.

It was also Baur that severed the Gospel of John from the Synoptic Gospels. His ideological scheme located John far too late -- in the second century. But he -- as also had Strauss -- pointed out just how different John was from the other Gospels.

An unfortunate by-product was that the historicity of John was largely dismissed in New Testament scholarship until C. H. Dodd dared to open the question up again in 1953. [2] Could there actually be some historical material in John? He thought so, and I think so -- although its highly symbolic nature means that such questions are best handled with care.

5. I'll go through the sequence of "criticisms" of biblical studies that would follow over the next hundred years in the next post. Here, let me simply sketch out the devolution of historical Jesus studies into early twentieth century oblivion.

At the same time that John's historicity was being detached from that of the Synoptics, scholars like Heinrich Holtzman (1832-1910) were showing the likelihood that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source. By the end of the 1800s, it was a clear consensus of biblical scholarship that Mark was the core source and the other two expansions of it. Another "Quelle" or "source" of Jesus' sayings (Q for short) was also thought by most to be in the mix.

You can see a progression of uncertainty that took place among some scholars. 1) So John isn't as historical as the Synoptics. 2) So Matthew and Luke aren't as historical as Mark and Q.

Now along comes William Wrede (1859-1906). He suggests in 1901 that Mark itself was theological rather than historical. He writes a book on the "messianic secret" in Mark. He sees it as Mark's way of getting around the fact that -- as he concluded -- Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah at all. How do you claim that someone is the Messiah when they never claimed it themselves? You claim that he told his followers to keep it secret. Clever.

80 years later, some of these conclusions would be questioned by individuals like E. P. Sanders (1937-2022) in what has been called the "third quest" for the historical Jesus. Perhaps somewhere down the line I'll get to that part of my own pilgrimage. Sanders made a very convincing case to me that Jesus believed himself to be the Messiah, once upon a time. [3]

6. The story above is sometimes called the "quest for the historical Jesus," and it is usually said to close with Albert Schweitzer's (1875-1965) work by that name in 1906. He strongly criticized what he considered the fanciful portraits of Jesus that had come out of the Liberal Protestantism of his day. (That's the actual name they used for themselves, not a slam.)

The Liberal Jesus was the Jesus of Charles Sheldon of "What Would Jesus Do?" fame. For them, Jesus was a great moral teacher. He was the ideal human. He was everything we should aspire to be.

Fundamentalists would critique the Liberal vision of Jesus because it did not necessarily see Jesus as God. They did not necessarily believe in miracles or the resurrection. C. S. Lewis would effectively critique them for not taking Jesus' claims to Lordship seriously (and Lewis assumed that Jesus had made these claims.)

By contrast, Schweitzer criticized the Liberal portrait of Jesus for not being historical enough. Jesus for him was an end-of-the-world preaching apocalyptic prophet, more like Reimarus saw Jesus. For Schweitzer, the historical Jesus was more like the lunatic of Lewis' trilemma. "He comes to us as one unknown," Schweitzer wrote in his 1906 watershed. He wasn't who we like to think he was, Schweitzer claimed.

7. I suppose most pastors -- let alone most Christians -- have never heard of these names or debates. These conversations were part of my journey in my early 20s as I retraced them, and I didn't feel like I had an honest guide to lead me. My first instinct was to make fun of them. I wanted to scoff with Wang. 

But some of the ideas also made sense. How could I tell the difference between reasonable conclusions and bad arguments? I've had almost 40 years now to sort things out for myself. But it's probably not a conversation most need to have. 

[1] Caleb Friedeman has recently published a book arguing that the Gospel writers likely intended their readers to take their stories as historical. Gospel Birth Narratives and Historiography: Reopening a Closed Case (Baylor University, 2025).

[2] The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (1953). Dodd is my Doktor Urgroßvater. The lineage will end with me apparently. We wanted to start a PhD program in Biblical and Theological Studies at IWU, but the rights were given to another part of the university that never managed to do it. 

[3] Jesus and Judaism (Fortress, 1985).