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

For the previous breadcrumb, click here.
_______________________ 
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).