Higher criticism

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Higher criticism is a branch of literary analysis known as historical criticism that attempts to investigate the origins of a text, especially the text of the Bible. Higher criticism in particular focuses on the sources of a document and tries to determine the authorship, date, and place of composition of the text. This term is used in contrast with lower criticism or textual criticism, which is the endeavour to establish the original version of a text.

1 Higher criticism and radical criticism
2 Higher criticism of other religious texts
- 2.1 Islam
3 See also
4 External links

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Higher criticism and radical criticism

Higher criticism originally referred to the work of German Biblical scholars. After the path-breaking work on the New Testament by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), in the next generation, David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) and Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), in the mid-nineteenth century, analyzed the historical records of the Middle East from Christian and Old Testament times, in search of independent confirmation of events related in the Bible. These latter are the intellectual descendants of John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Gotthold Lessing, Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Hegel, and the French rationalists.

These ideas were taken to England by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, in particular, by George Eliot's translations of Strauss's Life of Jesus (1846) and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity (1854). La Vie de Jésus (1863), by a Frenchman, Ernest Renan (1823–1892), continued the same tradition. But three years earlier before the appearance of La Vie de Jésus, liberal Anglican theologians had begun the process of incorporating this historical criticism into Christian doctrine in Essays and Reviews (1860). In Catholicism, L'Evangile et l'Eglise (1902), by Alfred Loisy, against the Essence of Christianity of Adolf von Harnack and less inspired than Renan, gave birth to the modernist crisis (1902–1961). Some scholars, such as Rudolf Bultmann, have used higher criticism of the Bible to demythologize it.

Although the questions of higher criticism are widely recognized by Orthodox Jews and many traditional Christians as legitimate questions, they often find the answers given by the radical higher critics unsatisfactory or even heretical. In particular, religious conservatives object to the rationalistic and naturalistic presuppositions of a large number of practioneers of higher criticism that leads to conclusions that conservative religionists find unacceptable. Nonetheless, conservative Bible scholars practice their own form of higher criticism within their supernaturalistic and confessional frameworks. Other Bible scholars, in contrast, believe that the evidence uncovered by higher criticism undermines such confessional frameworks. In addition, religiously liberal Christians and religiously liberal Jews typically maintain that since belief in God has nothing to do with belief in whether a certain text, such as Isaiah or the Pentateuch, has more than one author, it is possible to maintain religious faith while accepting most of the conclusions of religiously uncommitted higher criticism.

One issue of higher criticism for the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) has to do with the authorship of the Pentateuch. See the Documentary hypothesis.

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Higher criticism of other religious texts

Both higher and lower forms of criticism are carried out today with the religious writings of many religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism.

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Islam

Modern higher criticism is just beginning to be carried out on the Qur'an. This scholarship questions some traditional claims about its composition and content, contending that the Qur'an incorporates material from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and that the text of the Qur'an developed both during and after Muhammad's lifetime. For example, Islamic history records that Uthman collected all variants of the Qur'an and destroyed those that he did not approve of. [1]

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