ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #18 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> As you've mentioned, the subject we've dealt with in other classes asserts itself here, as well: Historical criticism. So let me ask you: What is historical criticism and where did it come from? >> Well, Eric, before we maybe trace the actual historical development of historical criticism, we can use that word more than once, it's useful I think that you understand some of the presuppositions that guide or shape the way that historical criticism develops. So I would like to take a minute to talk about sort of the hermeneutical presuppositions behind historical criticism and where they lead us. If you begin to think about what the Bible is, if you just sort of ask that basic question first, there have generally developed over the centuries three answers to that question or at least the answers -- various answers can be categorized into three groups. The one that traditional Christianity held is that the Bible is the word of God. Just as historical Judaism held that the Bible was the word of God. This is what God said through Moses through the prophets, through Christ, through the apostles for us. And so the Bible is the word of God. That's one hermeneutical presupposition that historic Christianity makes. Historical criticism began with a different presupposition. Not that the Bible is the word of God. But that the Bible contains the word of God. That is to say that they believed that the word of God was in there somewhere. But that the Bible was also the product of a historical process. That's why the historical -- historical criticism is not the same as the historical grammatical. The historical in the historical grammatical means the text is a witness to history. The historical in historical criticism means that the text is a product of the historical process. And so seeing the text as a product of the historical process meant that while they believed that the word of God was there, that word of God was also mixed up with other words that were the result of this historical process. So the Bible contains the word of God rather than the Bible is the word of God. The third grouping of historical presuppositions would simply be the radical opposite of the first. If the first is that the Bible is the word of God, the third would be that the Bible is merely a human document. That it has no word of God in it at all. That it's simply the reflection of the religious experiences of individuals and human communities. Well, let's now look at how these three principles affect the work of the interpreter. Okay? If we go back to the first one, the traditional Christian view that the Bible is the word of God, believe that the Bible is the word of God, then what is the task of the interpreter? Well, it's pretty straightforward. It's to understand the word correctly and then to proclaim it. You know, to know what it says and to teach it. So the task of the interpreter is simply to interpret. To understand. To read. To make sure that he understands the text correctly. And then to know how to proclaim that text. If we move from that now to the second level, to the principle that the Bible merely contains the word of God, what then is the task of the interpreter? Well, it if there's word of God and human word mixed together, the word of the interpreter must be to discover which is which. It's to sort out the word of God from the human word that's a result of the historical process. So the work of the interpreter is to discover the word of God in this text and then, of course, to apply it afterwards. And now thirdly, if the Bible is merely a human document, then what is the task of the interpreter? Well, radically different from either one of the other two. If the Bible is merely a human document, then the task of the interpreter is simply to read it and see if he finds anything there that -- that resonates with his religious experience. If it's merely a human document, there's nothing authoritative about it. It's just another example of human religious experience. So you can read it. If you found anything there that helps you, that's great. If not, that's fine, too. So the task of the interpreter in the third approach is radically different from that of either of the other two. So how does this then affect our method? How does this affect how we go about interpreting the Bible? Well, this first principle that the Bible is the word of God, again, remember, leads the interpreter to try to understand the text for the purpose of proclamation. That leads to the approach that we might call traditional Christian exegesis. How do we understand the text as the word of God? How do we know we're using it correctly in teaching and in preaching? But it does involve sort of second-guessing the text. The interpreter stands, if you will, beneath the text and looks for the text for his authority and interpretation and in application. If we move from that to the second principle, that the Bible contains the word of God, there the task of the interpreter is to discover the word hidden in this. This leads in the end to what we call historical criticism. Because the whole purpose of historical criticism in here, the emphasis on the second part, on the critical part, is to critically judge which parts of the text are word of God and which parts are human word. And so the text -- the interpreter becomes a critic. And his text is -- his method has to be a method that helps him sort out which words are the word of God and which words are byproducts of the historical process. The last of these approaches, the idea that the Bible is just a human document in which the interpreter looks to see if he can find some truth that resonates with his own experience, leads to what we might call post critical or sometimes called post modern approaches to interpretation where the task of the interpreter or the task of the reader is simply to find a meaning in the text that is valuable for his own life that he can use for himself. And we'll talk more about that later on. So in this way we see that the basic fundamental presuppostion about what the Bible ultimately gives rise to the method that is appropriate to that presupposition. And so historical criticism is different from traditional Christian interpretation because it starts at a different point and is attempting to find answers to different questions. The historical critical scholars are asking different questions than traditional Christian scholars. Therefore, they find different answers. And the same is true of post modern readers of the text. Because they are asking different questions and approaching the text with different presuppositions, they are going to find different answers in the text. They are going to find them there. So now with that as background, let's get to sort of the heart of your question: Where does historical criticism come from? To do that we need to sort of back up and get just a little bit of philosophical background. There are a couple of people who we need to know who aren't biblical scholars but who had a tremendous effect on biblical scholarship. If we back up to the Renaissance, there were two philosophical movements that came to the floor as a result of the Renaissance that had different understandings about reality. One we call rationalism. Rationalism was the view that reality is understood through the use of human reason. And the other approach came to be called empiricism. That reality was understood through the senses and through the data that come to the senses. And these two different approaches sort of fought it out in philosophy for 100 years or so with different philosophers taking sides and tried to prove that one approach was right or the other one was right. Until we come to I sort of say a good German Lutheran. But you could argue whether he was good or not or he was -- he was German but actually lived in a part of Germany that was later part of Russia. So he may not even have been German. And while he was Lutheran in background, he certainly wasn't much Lutheran in what he taught. So Immanuel Kant in any case who in some ways is probably the most influential philosopher after the Renaissance to the modern day. Almost all modern philosophy begins one way or another with Immanuel Kant. And I'm not going to try to give you a full introduction to Immanuel Kant here because Kant's most famous book, "Critique of Pure Reason," is a pretty heavy reading. In fact, before of it was published he sent it off to a friend of his who was another professional philosophy professor. And he asked his friend to sort of give him some feedback on it. And his friend kept it for about a year. And Kant finally wrote and said, "By the way, are you ever going to get back to me on this?" And his friend wrote "I started reading it and I thought I was going to go insane so I stopped." So it is pretty hefty reading. But Kant's basic idea is simple enough. What Kant was attempting to do was reconcile the claims of rationalism and empiricism. He was trying to come up with a way of explaining how our knowledge about reality depends both upon reason and upon the senses. And what Kant contributed basically is the idea that the mind is active, but what it acts upon is the data that it gets from the senses. You see, the rationalists believe that the mind was active, but it just acted on its own without any real -- that the data it got from the senses was sort of irrelevant to understanding reality. Empiricists believed that data came from -- reality came from the senses, but all the mind did was kind of sit there passively and receive it. That the mind didn't contribute anything to the process at all. And Kant put the two together and said no, the data for reality -- for understanding reality comes from the senses. But the mind doesn't just passively receive it. The mind assembles it into a picture of reality so that what I know about reality is not just what the senses tell me, but it's the picture that the mind builds up from the senses that -- you know, from the data that come by way of the senses. So that was Kant's major contribution. And we'll see how this begins to affect not only biblical interpretation in historical criticism, but even more biblical interpretation in the 20th century when we get to the post modern and post critical interpretation. But Kant was tremendously important. And one of the ways he was important was he changed the direction of philosophy. So that the next important figure was another German, another Lutheran, named Georg Hegel, usually just known as GWF Hegel today or just Hegel. Hegel's view -- and Hegel was really going beyond what Kant emphasized. He took Kant's ideas and moved them forward in a slightly different direction. But Hegel took the view that history was a dynamic process and that reality is apprehended through the historical process. And this process, as Hegel understood it, is a process of conflict. So that this process begins with a position that Hegel called a thesis. That in opposition to this position, another position develops, which he called antithesis. And that as a result of the conflict between these two, a synthesis emerges. And in fact, you can see it in our description of the history of philosophy. You had rationalism, thesis, empiricism, antithesis and Kant providing the synthesis of these two views. And Hegel argues that the whole of reality proceeds in this way so that conflict is essential to reality. And the resolution of conflict through synthesis is the way that reality works. And again, we'll come back to this and I will show you how this contributes to historical criticism in just a minute. So remember that. Hold onto that. And we'll come back to that. But there's one other philosopher that we need to mention before we can get to historical criticism. And he was a French philosopher. Not very well known today. But really pretty important in his own day. His name was Auguste Comte. And he was born in 1798, died in 1857. So he was a latter contemporary of Hegel and was born -- he was six years old I guess when Kant would have died. So there's a clear kind of sequence here between them. Comte is best known today as the father of modern sociology. He was the first person to create the term and to begin to have asked questions that we today think of as sociological questions. Because what Comte was really interested in was not how reality was understood, but how human society and human thought develops historically. And Comte came up with a theory that human social and intellectual development passes through three main stages. The first stage Comte calls the theological stage. And basically, again, to simplify this for you, in this stage, Comte argues that the human mind attributes the causes of events to gods, to things that happened in the realm of the divine. So the belief in gods is the theological state, which is the most primitive of the three stages of human intellectual development. Comte's second stage he called the metaphysical stage. And in this stage of human intellectual development people no longer attributed the development of things to the gods, but rather, to sort of abstract powers. Powers within nature. And so Comte would argue that when science looks for causes and effects in great powers within nature like the power of gravity, it's really doing what he called the metaphysical stage of intellectual development. It's looking for explanations for reality in some power within nature itself. The third stage then Comte calls the positive stage. And this gives rise to a whole group of philosophical schools that we call positivism later on. So Comte is not only the father of sociology. He's also the father of the positivist movement in philosophy down the road. But that's not for us at the moment. In the positive stage Comte basically says man develops enough intellectually that he just stops looking for explanations for the reason that things happen and just accepts that things are the way they are. That reality is what it is. And that we should stop looking for hidden explanations. And so in the positivist stage, even scientific inquiry into things like the law of gravity becomes irrelevant because one simply accepts reality as it is. So Comte is not only the father of sociology, he's not only the father of positivist philosophy, but he's also the father of that study that we might call the history of religion or the sociology of religion. Because he also looked at the way human religion developed. This is all within that first stage for Comte, the theological stage. And Comte took the view which he presented for the first time that human religion develops in a predictable series of events or concepts. That it begins with what Comte called animism. That there is the view that there is sort of a divine spirit within things of nature. That from there it moves to what Comte called totemism. T o t e m. Totemism, the view that this sort of divine force within nature is sort of concentrated in animals. That animals sort of incapsulate or embody this divine force. And so people identified themselves with certain animals along the way. The third stage Comte calls polytheism, the belief that this divine power in animals is personalized into human beings. And so there aren't just a variety of divine powers or animals associated with those divine powers, but also individual personalized gods who become associated with those divine powers. The next stage after polytheism Comte called henotheism. H e n o. Heno from the Greek word meaning one. Hen, one. Henotheism isn't the belief that there's only one God. Henotheism is the recognition that there are many gods but there's only one god that I'm going to worship. In other words, it recognizes that there may be other gods. But my own personal commitment is to one individual god out of the many gods. It's one god preferred above the others. Or the belief that one god has more effect on my life. That there's my god. A god that's connected to me in some way. And finally, the last stage Comte says is monothetic, true monothetic. The view that there is only one God period. That there are no other gods. And so Comte argues that human religion passes through these five stages all the time in every case. From animism to totemism to polytheism to henotheism to monothetic. So with this in the background, we can now turn to where historical criticism comes from. Because to understand the rise of historical criticism, you have to see all of these elements we've been talking about coming into play. Historical criticism, as we said in answering the last question, rises out of the conviction that if we could just have a scientific method, a method that is as reliable as the sciences is -- or sciences are for dealing with nature, then we could solve all of these problems of having different churches and everyone could agree on what the Bible teaches. So science -- we might see historical criticism as part of a larger movement called scientism. The view that absolute and certain knowledge about all things can be attained through the scientific process. That we might also identify philosophically with modernism in general. The belief that you can come up with a method that will provide absolute certainty about reality and everything in it. Well, so how do we get there from the Reformation to historical criticism? The first person we should probably mention is a Jewish Christian philosopher and writer by the name of Benedict Spinoza or Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza was a Jewish philosopher who was expelled from Judaism because of his radical views. He was excommunicated so he became a Christian and brought his radical views with him to Christianity. And Spinoza writes about the Bible. And here I'm quoting. He writes "Scripture speaks inaccurately of God and of events. Seeing that the object is not to convince the reason but to attract and lay hold of the imagination." In other words, Spinoza said the reason that God gave the Bible was not to tell us facts about things or to, you know, appeal to the reason, but to appeal to our emotions. To attract us and to draw us to God. And therefore, the Bible doesn't tell the truth about history or about reality. And it doesn't need to. Because its purpose is not to tell us about reality or to tell us about history or even to tell us about God. Its purpose is merely to attract us. And so Spinoza is the first person in what we might call modern times to directly challenge the view that the Bible contains the truth about history and the truth about Israel and the truth about God and who God is. The next contributor -- and there are others. I'm highlighting some of the main ones along the way. I prepared a document that's part of the course pack that spells out some of these things in more detail. So if you want more detail, I refer you to that. But I just want to pick out some of the highlights for you at this point. Another person who contributed to this process was a Roman Catholic writer by the name of Richard ***Simone, who was a French Roman Catholic priest. And Simone's concern was to prove the Protestants wrong. The Protestants, you remember, believed in solas scriptora. They rejected the authority of the Pope in favor of the authority of the scripture. So Simone had this idea that the way to defeat the Protestants was to show that scripture couldn't be relied upon as an authority. Therefore, you have to depend upon the authority of the Pope. And so to prove this Simone looks at the text. And he identifies a problem, what he sees is a problem. Namely, that some stories in the Bible in Genesis and in Exodus and in other parts of the Bible are told twice. So to give you an example, the most obvious example that most people pick up immediately from Genesis Chapter 1 and Genesis Chapter 2, we have two apparently different accounts of the creation. We have other accounts in the patriarchs. Like Abraham on more than one occasion saying that Sarah was his sister rather than his wife. And many other examples of things that appear to happen more than twice or more than once at least. So Simone's solution to this problem is to say these stories that are told twice are told twice because they come from different sources, that there are different sources or authors behind the current text. Therefore, Simone says you can't depend upon the reliability of the text because it's an amalgam from different sources. Therefore, you can't use it as an authority. You have to depend on the authority of the church and the Pope. Well, as we'll see, Simone was fairly successful at destroying the authority of scripture. Unfortunately, he was a little optimistic about the way the Catholic authorities would take this. Because the Catholic authorities did kind of want to see the Bible as authoritative, as well. And so in the end Simone got in trouble with the Catholic church, even though his purpose was to undermine Protestantism and uphold Catholicism. The next major contributor that we should mention is another German scholar by the name of Wilhelm DeWetti, D e W e t t i. DeWetti looked at the Pentateuch. And say Deuteronomy is just different from the other books. It has more speeches and things like that in it. So following Simone's idea that there were different sources, DeWetti says Deuteronomy is different in tone and in -- and everything else. So maybe it's from a different source, as well. And DeWetti ends up concluding that Deuteronomy was the book that Josiah -- that was discovered at the time of Josiah's reform in the seventh century. And he says this is a later book that was appended to the earlier books. It wasn't originally part of the Pentateuch. It comes from a later time. So I'm going to leave out some of the other contributors that you can get by looking at the document that I prepared for you and just sort of come to the way all of this got put together. It got put together in a theory that came to be known as the documentary hypothesis. That -- following from Simone's idea that there were different documents behind the sources where there were doublets occurring and DeWetti's idea that Deuteronomy was a different document, the view eventually rose that there were three documents that were combined to form the books except for Deuteronomy. And that Deuteronomy was a separate fourth document. And these documents came to be identified according to certain characteristics. The belief was that the oldest of these documents represented a priestly view. And so it was called the P document dated to about 1000 or perhaps 950 BC. And that this book contained narrative and genealogy and chronology that provided the framework for the whole Pentateuch. And it was the first theory developed. Or rather the first of the four documents, the oldest of the four documents. The second document was a document that used the divine name Yahweh. Because one of the ways that critical scholars then went onto separate the documents was by the word or the name that was used for God. This document came to be known as J because it used Yahweh, which is Y but is a J in German, ***Jathae. And it was said to be about 850. And it was mostly the narrative using the divine name Yahweh. The next document used a different divine name. It used the Hebrew word ***Elioheim meaning God. And it dated from about 750. And it too contained narratives. And finally we had the D document, the book of Deuteronomy, dating from about 650 or 621, the time of Josiah's reform. So we had the framework from the P document. Then we had narratives from J and E using different divine names to get edited in. And then we get the D document kind of tacked on at the end of the Pentateuch. And this came to be known as the old documentary hypothesis. The reason it was known as the old documentary hypothesis is because there was a new version coming. At the time they didn't call it the old one. We call it the old one today. And the person who was the main figure in the new documentary hypothesis is the person we most often think about when we think about document hypothesis. And that's Julius Wellhausen. And again, I won't go into tremendous detail because I've given you information in the document about what Wellhausen did. But essentially Wellhausen looks at the old documentary hypothesis and says the sequence is wrong. That the priestly document couldn't be the first document. It must be the last one. And so he simply reorders the documents so that J becomes the first document, E the second and then D and then P the last. And his reasons were that P presumes a single cultic central site while Deuteronomy only says there should be one. And several other things like that where he says there are things in the other documents that are taken for granted in P. So in the end, Wellhausen produces a scheme for the development of the Pentateuch that looks a lot like Hegel's philosophy of history. You get J and E. And they are combined into a document that we would call JE. And then you get P -- or maybe keep them in sequence here -- D. And you get that mixed in with JE. So you get a document called JED. And finally, last historically you get the P document coming along. And it gets edited in with the others to produce a new synthesis, JEDP, or the Pentateuch as we have it. So you get a very -- a nice Hegelian scheme applied to literature for how the document developed. And within this -- and much of the evidence that Wellhausen uses within this to come up with this theory comes Comte's theory of how human religion developed. He says part of the way you can see this is by tracing the development of religion within the documents, according to Comte's scheme. So that J, being the oldest document, has remnants of animism and ***thetacism and totemism. And in the later documents you move through the different stages of religion until you come to a full blown monothetic in the priestly cult. So you can see how Comte's theory of religion comes to be part of this. And I'll just close by saying that we should note that as far as Comte's theory of religion goes, that no credible anthropologist today would accept Comte's theory. It seems like a nice scheme. But in fact, it doesn't work that way. Hardly anywhere in the world and certainly not in the world of the Bible. So while there are many books that were written up until the 1930s that argue that this is how Old Testament religion developed today, it's not generally a very widely held theory today. Even though the documentary hypothesis is built upon it. And the documentary hypothesis continues to be promoted by some people in the academic community even to this day. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***