Historical Criticism and Beyond - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > October 1993

Historical Criticism and Beyond

Historical criticism has yielded a view of Scripture that challenges the community of faith, both Jewish and Christian.

By Bernhard W. Anderson

As I survey what has been going on in the field of biblical studies during the past generation, one thing is clear: The emphasis has shifted from a “historical criticism” that attempts to understand biblical texts in their original social and historical contexts to a “literary criticism” that seeks to appreciate and appropriate the symbolic dimension of the text. Some scholars invite us to a “postmodern” study that departs from the assumptions that have dominated biblical studies since the Enlightenment. A historical approach was once regarded as liberating, for it helped the reader to understand that the story of […]

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Footnotes

1.

In early Christianity, Docetism was the heretical view that God’s revelation in Christ was only a spiritual appearance and not a flesh-and-blood reality.

Endnotes

1.

See Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, The Old Testament, and Historical Criticism (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), esp. chap. 1.

2.

See William G. Dever, “What Remains of the House That Albright Built?” Biblical Archaeologist 56/1 (1993), pp. 25–35.

3.

Amos N. Wilder, The Bible and the Literary Critic (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg/Fortress, 1991), “Text and History,” pp. 29–36.

4.

See Maxine Clarke Beach, “Edom Among the Nations,” doctoral dissertation, Boston Univ., 1993. See also Itzhaq Beit-Arieh, “New Light on the Edomites,” BAR 14:02.

5.

Jonathan Rosen, “The Misguided Holocaust Museum,” The New York Times, Sunday, April 18, 1993.

6.

“This formulation is reminiscent of a famous essay by my teacher, James Muilenburg, “From Criticism and Beyond,” Journal of Biblical Literature 88 (1969), pp. 1–18.