Full Text for Exodus- Volume 19 - Do liberal scholars today still believe in the documentary hypothesis? (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #19 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. *** >> Wow, that was interesting. Do liberals today still believe in the documentary hypothesis? >> Well, Eric, this is another one of those yes-no kind of situations. Yes, they do sort of still believe in the documentary hypothesis. But in many ways historical criticism has changed dramatically since the time of Wellhausen. And the changes started almost immediately not even after Wellhausen's death but even during his life as other liberal scholars began to understand the weaknesses of the documentary hypothesis. Now, you remember when we started talking about the history of the documentary hypothesis, we began with looking at some of the philosophical issues that shape their development. And we probably should pause here and look at some of the outside influences that help to shape the way that biblical interpretation began to change at the beginning of the 20th century. One of the most important of these outside influences was the growth of sociological theory at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century. There was a significant increase in interest and study in the way that societies and cultures develop and the change. And so that explosion of knowledge about society and culture began to influence biblical studies, as well as people began to take the results of those studies and attempt to apply them to the Bible. Another major source of change at the beginning of the 20th century was the influx of concrete knowledge about the ancient world that was coming through the development of archeology. When early critical scholars were forming their theories about how books were written in the ancient world, the truth is, they didn't have any books written from the ancient world except the Bible. And oh, yeah, well, a few Greek classics and stuff like that. But they are from a much later period than from the biblical period and from a very different culture, as well. And so they were really working in a vacuum. They developed the theory of the documentary hypothesis without any concrete knowledge about ancient near eastern literature. And at the beginning of the 20th century, end of the 19th century as archeology began to produce results and we discovered texts and other things about the ancient world, there was a significant influx of knowledge about how things actually were in the ancient world. And that began to change the way that scholars thought about things, as well. Finally there was a growing awareness. That for all of the talk among historical critics about treating the Bible like any other book, there was an increasing awareness of the fact that the documentary hypothesis really didn't treat the Bible like any other book. That there was sort of no other book that was developed in exactly the kind of way that the documentary hypothesis suggested that this book was developed. Well, these various influences began to have an effect in biblical studies. And the first person to offer a major new theory that incorporated some of these elements was a German scholar by the name of Hermann Gunkel. Now, Gunkel was a contemporary of Wellhausen. He was living at roughly the same time. But Gunkel took an entirely different view than Wellhausen did. Whereas Wellhausen was focused on documents, hence the name documentary hypothesis, Gunkel began to see the text as the end product of the life of a community. And here you can see the sociological influence begin to have an effect. In fact, Gunkel was very influenced by the study of Nordic and northern European epics. And the study of northern European epics had led scholars to conclude that these epics had been handed down for many generations by mouth being repeated orally from generation to generation before they were written down. And Gunkel takes that insight and applies it to the Bible and says the text, the written form the document, not the document that we had but he was thinking in terms of JED and P, those documents. Because he was still working within the historical critical framework. But he said those documents weren't the product of the person who just sat down and wrote them. They were a product of a long period of development in which these texts were handed down orally from generation to generation. And so Gunkel set out to rediscover what the community was like that would have created these texts and would have handed this process on from generation to generation. The process that Gunkel created as he did this came to be known as form criticism. And so we today refer to Hermann Gunkel as the father of form criticism. We should perhaps mention some of the working principles that Gunkel operated with. There are three major principles that shape the way that form criticism develops. First is the obvious one. Namely, that there's a history of preliterary or oral development behind all of the text of the Pentateuch. Gunkel also did studies of the Psalms and of the prophets and he believed that those works, as well, were handed down for a long period orally before they were written down. And that may well be true, especially of the Psalms. But it, of course, can't be proved for anything. But Gunkel held that the Pentateuch was -- and he accepted Wellhausen's view of the documents, JED and P. But he said these documents were the product of a long history of oral development and transition. The second principle -- and this was a critical one for form criticism. Gunkel's second principle was that events in the life of a community generate a specific type of literary response. So for example, if someone that I love dies, I might produce a lament, a poem of lament, as a way of expressing my sorrow for the death of a loved one. This would be a literary response to something that happens in my life. Now, this is important because of the third principle that Gunkel articulated. Namely, that there's a consistent relationship between the life experience of individuals in communities and the literary responses that they create. For Gunkel it wasn't enough just to suggest that experiences of life give rise to literature. Gunkel maintains that a specific experience in the life of the community always gives rise to the same literary response within the community, the same type of response. So that for every genre of literature, there is an identifiable experience in the life of the community that we can go back to. And that experience in the life of the community Gunkel called by the German phrase sitz ***emlaban. The sitz, s i t z, or the situation. Emlaban, in life. The life situation or the setting in life of the event. Now, Gunkel here was using a principle that was also common to the documentary hypothesis. Namely, that authors or in this case these communities are very consistent in the way that they write. So that as Gunkel says, there's a consistent relationship between experience and the literary response. Well, this view was somewhat different from that of Wellhausen. Even though Gunkel accepted the sources JED and P behind the Pentateuch, he disagreed with Wellhausen. Wellhausen believed that you could never go back beyond the written documents because Wellhausen conceived these documents as having been written by individuals. Gunkel, on the other hand, believed that not only can you go past these documents, but, in fact, you must go past these documents. Because the whole purpose of study, according to Wellhausen, was not merely to study the documents, but to reengage the life experience of the community that gave rise to those documents in the first place. To get back to the sitz emlaban of the people that caused them to produce these documents in the beginning. Well, these three form critical principles led to the development of a methodology that we today call form criticism. There are actually three different stages to this methodology. Each stage has a different name in German. And I hope you'll forgive me if I don't give you the long technical German names for each of these three stages. The first stage in the form critical method was to identify the form itself. That is to say: What literary genre do we have in this piece? And Gunkel at least initially believed that one could identify the genre of certain -- according to certain literary characteristics. And that these literary characteristics were always consistent or at least almost always consistent within a single genre as time went on. So the first step was to identify the form or to identify the genre. The second step was recognizing that a given community always responds to an experience in a given manner. Therefore, we can work backwards from the literary form to the experience in the life of the community that gave rise to that form. So if we have here a lament, say a community lament, then we know that this community created these kind of laments when this event happened in the life of the community. So any time we have one of these, we have a reflection of the experience in the life of the community. So we move backwards from the literature to the experience in the community. The third step for Gunkel -- and this was sort of Gunkel's grand design. This was his ultimate goal. And he never got there. And neither did anyone else in form criticism. But we'll come to the reasons for that later. Gunkel's grand design was to attempt to reconstruct the whole experience of the life of the community in the ancient world by examining the literary history of the people. Moving from the literary history to the life experiences so he could, in effect, reconstruct the spiritual life of the community as it developed over time in the ancient world. This, as I said, was the grand design of Gunkel's intention in form criticism. But he was never able to succeed in it. In fact, he hardly even got as far as trying. Now, before we leave form criticism, it's probably worth recognizing that form criticism had some positive and some negative aspects to it as compared to the documentary hypothesis that had gone before. One of the strengths or benefits of form criticism was that it refocused study on the text itself. The tendency in the documentary hypothesis was to fragment text into little bitty bits. In some cases one or two words even would be edited out of a text and said to have come from a different source. So you get some verses where you get two or three sources even within a single sentence. It really did reach that level of absurdity. That they conceived of the editors almost as working like cutting words out of a newspaper and assembling them to create the story of the patriarchs or something like that. And so form criticism tended to refocus study on the form of the text that we actually have in front of us instead of trying to reconstruct the earlier forms of the text. And while Gunkel was by no means a conservative, still this refocusing on the text as we have it was a positive move and a benefit of form criticism. Another strength or benefit of form criticism was that it did recognize the antiquity of biblical accounts. Again, as I said, Wellhausen believed that these documents JED and P were basically written by individuals or at least by small groups of people at a given time. And essentially they were invented from scratch at the time they were written. They preserve nothing about the reality of what went before. And so if, for example, the oldest of Wellhausen's documents, the J document, was written around 950, well the patriarchs lived between 2000 and 1700 BC. So what do -- what does the patriarchal narrative tell us about the real lives of the patriarchs? Nothing at all. Because it was completely invented. So according to Wellhausen, you couldn't know anything about the real life of Abraham or Isaac or Jacob because the stories we had were all invented hundreds of years after the fact. By contrast, form criticism maintained that the oral traditions had been passed down from generation to generation before the documents were invented or before they were written anyway. Therefore, form criticism was a positive in the sense that it recognized that you could actually know something about Abraham or Isaac or Jacob for the patriarchal narratives even if those documents aren't written down until much later after the fact. Again, Gunkel isn't approaching this from a conservative perspective. But at least he's moving in a direction that's a little better from our perspective. Another strength that's not immediately evident within Gunkel but is there is that Gunkel recognized the role of worship and of the religious cult in ancient religious life. For Wellhausen in particular, the priests were a very negative thing. Wellhausen saw the priestly literature as a step backwards and kind of a -- a negative development within Israel's religious history. And anything that is priestly is, you know, kind of negative or bad from Wellhausen's perspective. He views that as an entirely negative development. And so he's always criticizing the priestly material. And anything related to the cult is regarded as late and bad by Wellhausen. Well, Gunkel understood that worship and religious ceremonies were an important part of the life of the community. And therefore, he has a much more positive attitude toward them than Wellhausen did. Well, having said that, we should recognize that there are considerable weaknesses, as well, in the form critical theory. First is that most texts in the Bible simply do not belong to clearly recognizable forms or genres. And this led to a tremendous debate within the practitioners of form criticism so that they ended up spending most of their energy arguing about the slight verifications in the types of forms that they found in the literature and whether this was a different genre or whether it was a subgenre or how this genre was related to that genre. And this led to a lot of debate about the actual forms of the text. But never really moving beyond that in the way that Gunkel had hoped that they would. Because again, most texts just don't fit the obvious clear-cut forms in the way that Gunkel would have liked them to. Some do. For example, the lament form in the Psalms is fairly consistent. But that's the exception rather than the rule. Another weakness -- and this is really a major weakness -- is that like the documentary hypothesis, form criticism assumes an element of consistency on the part of writers that is simply unreasonable. For the documentary hypothesis, writers always write in exactly the same way all the time. They have the same interests. They write with the same vocabulary, with the same style. They are very consistent in the way that they work. So that a J document will always use the same words. Will always have the same way of talking about things. And will reflect the same ideas. For form criticism, this is -- this notion of consistency is also present. And I've already mentioned it in the relationship between the community experience and the kind of literature that's produced as a response. And this is simply unrealistic. It's not the way that writing occurs. It's not the way it occurs in the modern world. And it's not the way it occurred in the ancient world, either. And most scholars today, even most liberal scholars, would recognize that earlier biblical scholarship just went too far in arguing for this consistency in the way that writers work. This leads to another weakness within form criticism, specifically that is the assumed direct connection between the sitz emlaban and the text form. There is simply no evidence from anywhere in the world that a given experience produces a given literary response beyond something fairly obvious like a lament or a love poem. And there's a lot of variety between laments and love poems as anyone who reads them or writes them will soon recognize. But beyond those very specific kinds of literature, there's really no predictable pattern between the experiences in human events and the kinds of literature or art that are produced as a result. There's one other weakness that appears within form criticism, as well. And this one is particularly important for conservatives. While Gunkel did focus more on the final form of the text than his predecessors, he certainly didn't believe that the Bible was the word of God. He saw it more as the record of the experiences of a human community. This will lead to the denial of any kind of traditional doctrine of inspiration. The most you could argue was for some kind of community inspiration where the experiences of the community were inspired and produced and inspired result. But that's a long way from the traditional Christian understanding of what the doctrine of inspiration is. So even while there are some positive things about Gunkel and form criticism, we shouldn't confuse those with a truly conservative understanding of the text. Well, form criticism was not the end of the line, either. I've already mentioned that form critical scholars ended up spending a great deal of their time debating about what the form of the text was. So they were in the end arguing more about that than anything else. And this led to frustration even within the scholarly community, particularly among those who wanted to focus more an the content of what was being written or, as we might say, the theology of the text. This led toward the development of what later came to be known as tradition criticism, which tends to focus primarily on the content of the text. Well, perhaps I should modify that last statement just a bit. There are really two different approaches within what we call tradition criticism. The first approach and probably the predominant approach within tradition criticism focuses on the content of the tradition. A second approach within tradition criticism tends to focus not on the content of the tradition but on the process by which the tradition is passed from generation to generation. In fact, these two elements of tradition criticism can often be found within a single scholar. They are sort of two subsidiary branches that interrelate to one another but are, you know, different in many respects. Well, tradition criticism as it focused on the content and the process of transmission of these traditions adopted some of the ideas of form criticism. But it also modified them slightly. For example, it took the concept of sitz emlaban or life situation and it adapted it. Because within tradition criticism most scholars held the view that traditions arose not only within a certain community but that certain community was located within a certain place, a certain geography. So in tradition criticism the geographic location of a community becomes a significant factor. And traditions tend to be located with places in tradition criticism. So we talk about the tradition of Bethel or the tradition of Jerusalem or the tradition associated with Mount Sinai. Within tradition criticism then the emphasis is shifted from the experience of the community to the life of the community as it was located in a particular place. And the place of the community as tradition critics understood it tended to shape the way the community thought. So there were traditions that arose within settled communities like agricultural communities. And those were thought to be different than those traditions that arose among nomadic types of communities or people who moved around. One of the most important early scholars in the development of tradition criticism was a German scholar by the name off Albrecht Alt. Alt is probably the single most influential figure in this movement, at least in the early part of this movement. His doctoral dissertation, which was later published under the title "The God of the Fathers" in 1929 really opened the door for the study of patriarchal religion because Alt wanted to look at the theological content of the faith of the patriarchs. And so he studied the content of the tradition as it would -- developed and was passed on in the patriarchal community as he understood it. Another very important form critical scholar, probably the most important form critical scholar in the second half of the 20th century. Was another German scholar by the name of Gerhard von Rad. Von Rad believed that the Pentateuch originated around a kernel. And this kernel he thought was a -- a creed or confession of faith. And he finds this creed in Deuteronomy Chapter 26 Verses 5 to 11, the assertion that "My father was a wandering Aramean" in that section of the text. As von Rad develops it, the traditions of Israel arise in two primary forms that were later assembled by the Yahwists to create a kind of national theology that merged these two traditions. One of the forms was the Sinai exodus tradition. And excuse me; I misspoke. One of the forms was the Sinai covenant tradition. The other form was the exodus and conquest tradition. Wellhausen sees the Sinai tradition as a tradition that existed among nomadic groups that moved around. And the exodus tradition as a tradition that arose among people who were settled particularly, of course, in Egypt. And it was the merging of these two bodies of tradition by the Yahwist that gave rise to the theology of the Old Testament. And so for von Rad, the Yahwist was really the theologian of the Old Testament. And the rest of the Old Testament writers were people who developed other traditions in and around this Yahwistic tradition. Another very influential German tradition critic in the middle of the 20th century was Martin or Martin Noth, N o t h. Like von Rad, noth held there was a core around which the theology of the Old Testament developed. Noth called this core the G or ***grund laga tradition, the foundational tradition of the Old Testament. For Noth, this was a culture and confessional faith around which various traditions associated with J and E and later P were merged as time went on. Noth also saw the book of Deuteronomy as a separate core tradition that was not part of the Pentateuch but part of a separate group of texts that he called the Deuteronomic history. Included in the Deuteronomic history was the book of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. And Noth saw this as a second epic tradition. That there was one epic tradition that is reflected in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers. And a second epic tradition observed in that Deuteronomic history. A final person I would like to mention is in some ways the end of the line for tradition criticism. He's the great German scholar Claus Westermann. Westermann died in the year 2000 and he was immensely influential over the last couple of decades particularly in the study of the book of Genesis and also in the Psalms. Westermann emphasized primarily the process of the transmission and how the process of transmission led these texts to be accumulated and combined together. And his great three-volume commentary on the book of Genesis has been tremendously influential in studies in the book of Genesis in particular. Westermann has some special emphasis in the family and in creation that also emerges in his studies that go along with his focus on the process of the tradition. I think Westermann is also probably the end of the line as far as tradition critics are concerned. It seems that historical criticism now has turned the corner and is moving in another direction. And so I really don't expect any other great developments in the field of tradition criticism, either. There's one last thing that we should mention very briefly. And that's redaction criticism. Like the other efforts, redaction criticism grows out of earlier efforts. And reduction criticism is concerned with how the traditions come to be edited or turned into documents. And it emphasizes the role of the editor or the redactor in this process. Now, I just want to mention this in passing because this is radically different from how Wellhausen thought the documents were combined into the final form. For Wellhausen, the primary theologians were the authors of the documents JED and P. That's where the creative theology took place for Wellhausen. But for the redaction critiques, they argued the theology of the documents was one thing but the real theology that matters is the theology of the editors. Because it's the editors who decide what portions of which documents are selected. And it's the editors who decide how these documents are put together to -- into the final form that we have today. So what we have reflects not so much the theology of the documents but the theology of the editors or the redactors. And so redaction criticism attempts to study the way that the documents are put together to determine the theology of the redactors as they engaged in this process. So that sort of summarizes some of the major developments from the time of Julius Wellhausen to oh, say, the 1980s or so where tradition criticism and redaction criticism finally reached their peak and began to crest. And then we then turn the corner toward new developments in historical criticism that have followed in the last 20 years. *** 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. ***