Biblical Scholarship Today

by John Barton

(An article first published in The Church Times, 7 September 2001, to mark the publication of The Oxford Bible Commentary)

Most biblical scholars throughout the world are religious believers. Nearly all are Christians, though some Jews also work in biblical studies, especially in Israel and the USA. This has always been so. Only in very recent years has there come to be a substantial interest in the Bible from scholars who are agnostic or even atheist, partly because of a growth in more literary, less theological approaches to biblical study. But a religious motivation for studying the Bible still predominates.

This means that for most biblical scholars a primary concern is to study the Bible in ways that will yield results that are informative and helpful to Christians. Until the last couple of decades this was achieved through what is traditionally called biblical criticism, sometimes ‘the historical-critical method’. Biblical criticism is not really a method, but a collection of questions that can be put to the text. It is not in itself a theological approach, but most scholars have been convinced that no theological assessment of Scripture could afford to by-pass it.

‘Introduction’

The most basic operation of biblical criticism is known, technically, as ‘Introduction’. This amounts to the three Ws, ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘who’. When was Genesis written; where were the Gospels produced; who wrote the book of Job? Many such questions are difficult to answer when dealing with comparatively recent works—think of the problems of arranging Shakespeare’s plays in chronological order, or of discovering who composed a poem by ‘anon’. When the literature being studied is a couple of thousand years old, there is enough work to keep whole hives of scholars buzzing for years.

Readers should beware when faced with books called Introduction to the New Testament. Sometimes these will be introductory books about the New Testament, but others are works of ‘Introduction’ in this technical sense, and make for very dense reading—though they are essential for anyone trying to study the Bible seriously.

Questions of Introduction are one area where archaeological discoveries in modern times have helped. The vast wealth of texts from ancient Mesopotamia and Syria-Palestine which were found and deciphered in the twentieth century provided information about the world in which the biblical writers belonged. Many of these can be studied in English in books such as J. B. Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts relating to the Old Testament. The Dead Sea Scrolls have greatly illuminated the New Testament world, and are most accessible in Geza Vermes’s The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English.

Source criticism

If you ask ‘who’ and ‘when’ questions about many books in the Bible, you are likely to find the data confusing. Many books of the Old Testament contain some passages that seem to imply an earlier origin than others in the same book, and in some cases bits of several texts seem to be interwoven. The story of the Flood (Genesis 6-9) is a classic case. Try reading it through carefully and working out how many days the Flood lasted and how many animals of which sorts went into the ark, and you are likely to end up confused. Most scholars think the story results from weaving together two originally independent (and conflicting) accounts.

Painstaking work on the underlying documents or ‘sources’ from which the first five books of the Bible were composed goes back into the eighteenth century. It reached its classic formulation at the end of the nineteenth in the work of Julius Wellhausen (-), and came to be accepted in Britain and the USA through the Scottish scholar William Robertson Smith and the Oxford professor of Hebrew Samuel Driver. Especially in the German-speaking world it continues to be a major preoccupation. Generations of theological students have learned that the sources of the Pentateuch are called J, E, D, and P, coming respectively from the ninth, eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries BC—and that this implies that the religion of ancient Israel developed from a polytheistic base in the direction of increasing monotheism. The news has never really reached the pews in the Church of England. Desmond Tutu preached a mission in Oxford University a few years ago and astonished his audience by telling them how important a theological breakthrough had been made by P. He was right, but in England at least most (non-theological) students had no idea what he was talking about.

The Gospels are also a case where ‘source criticism’ continues to be a lively scene. Most scholars think that Matthew and Luke, whoever they were, used Mark’s Gospel. Many believe that the other material they share came from a now lost document called Q (from German Quelle, ‘source’). Whole books have been written on this hypothetical entity, and battle rages around it. But just as Old Testament source criticism is important because with its help we can reconstruct how religious thought developed in ancient Israel, source analysis of the Gospels has always had at its heart the hope of getting back to the authentic sayings of Jesus. It is part of the ‘quest of the historical Jesus’, which has passed through many phases since the eighteenth century. It continues today in the American ‘Jesus Seminar’—in which scholars actually vote on the likelihood of this or that saying being a genuine saying of Jesus. But the quest can also be found in less ‘reductionist’ forms in the work of many scholars in both the English- and German-speaking worlds. Readers of the Church Times will be familiar with at least one of them, Tom Wright, who is producing a many-volumed work on the subject.

Form criticism

Obviously we have the Bible in a written form, but much of it must rest on an oral tradition. Jesus, like the Old Testament prophets, probably did not write down any of his teaching. Even the stories about him depend, according to many scholars, on oral teaching in the early churches, and were only written down later to form the documents underlying the Gospels. Similar things can be said about the Psalms. They were probably meant for recitation or singing, and may well have existed for many years before they were written down and collected. In the mid-twentieth century biblical scholars thought we could discover a lot about the original contexts in which such material was used, and the discipline of form criticism was developed. The big names here are Rudolf Bultmann in the New Testament field, and the Norwegian scholar Sigmund Mowinckel in the Old—though Mowinckel was following in the footsteps of another German, Hermann Gunkel.

Form criticism is still practised, but especially in the English-speaking world holds less promise than it did. Dennis Nineham was among those who tried hard to introduce it to this country in his widely read Penguin commentary on Mark. But English Bible readers always thought it too sceptica, and felt it undermined the historicity of the Gospels by reducing them to ‘stories’. The recent interest in narrative theology, described by David Ford in his recent articles here, could have rehabilitated it. But most narrative theologians are interested in the Gospels and the Old Testament as written texts.

Redaction criticism

If the biblical books have been put together from pre-existing documents, then someone put them together—an editor or (as biblical scholars usually say) a redactor. It was redaction criticism that many thought promised most in the 1970s and 1980s, and it is still probably the major approach to the Bible in many German theology faculties. If source critics study the underlying materials in the Gospels, and form critics explain how they were developed over the years in preaching and teaching, a redaction critic has the job of explaining the intentions of the people who put them together. And these people are, after all, the ‘evangelists’ themselves—whether or not they were actually called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

In Old Testament studies redaction criticism has had the effect of putting back together what the source critics had taken apart. Thus scholars write about the finished form of the Pentateuch, or the shape of the book of Psalms, or the intentions of those who edited the book of Isaiah out of the three sections that underlie it (First, Second, and Third Isaiah, as they are usually called). This does not negate source criticism; it simply moves on to the next stage in the process by which biblical books were compiled.

A redaction-critical approach is interested in the distinctive theology of the different Gospels. It notices, for example, that it is Luke who contains much of the teaching of Jesus on God’s kindness to the human race—the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan—and Matthew who talks most of ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth’. Instead of treating the Gospels as a uniform repository of stories and sayings of Jesus, it sees each as having its own profile. The Common Worship lectionary (derived from the Revised Common Lectionary, itself an adaptation of the Roman Catholic lectionary developed in the 1960s) owes much to redaction-critical insights when it insists on reading each Gospel in order as a whole, rather than chopping and changing from one to another. And recently some people have begun to feel that the practice of choosing bits of the Old Testament to illustrate the Gospel does not do justice to the integrity of the Old Testament books. This is why for some parts of the year there is a ‘track’ in which sections of the Old Testament are also read in order.

Redaction criticism was widely perceived as a return to a kind of respect for the biblical text that the more ‘destructive’ work of source and form critics had called in question. Thereby hangs a tale of its own, as we shall see in surveying more recent trends.

A Turn to Theology

Because biblical criticism consists of asking questions that are not in themselves religious, Christians not directly involved in it have often felt that it was in some way disrespectful towards the Bible, and lacking in religious or theological value. In spite of the fact that, as we have seen, most biblical scholars are Christians, suspicion that their work was undermining the faith has been a recurring theme. And this has often been felt by the scholars themselves, who have had a niggling feeling of acting in bad faith: Julius Wellhausen gave up his professorial chair in Theology because he knew he was not providing the kind of teaching the Church really wanted.

Every so often there is a movement to ‘reintegrate’ biblical studies and theology, or to ‘give the Bible back to the Church’. I personally believe that scholars have never really taken it away from the Church, and have often indeed been if anything too ‘reverent’, avoiding hard critical questions. But there can be no doubt that many people do feel there is a division between the scholar in the study and the worshipper in the pew, with the preacher in the pulpit uneasily wedged between them. And a repeated reaction to this perception has been to try to develop some way of making biblical study more ‘theological’.

In the 1940s and 1950s this happened throughout the biblical studies world through what was widely called the ‘Biblical Theology Movement’. In the 1970s and 1980s redaction criticism, as we have just seen, was felt to provide some of the needed reintegration. But at that time too the American theological scene was drastically altered by the work of Brevard S. Childs of Yale, who argued in many publications for what he called a ‘canonical approach’ to biblical study. This meant taking seriously the fact that the Bible is not just a random collection of ancient texts, but functions as the Scriptures of the Christian Church (and, in the case of the Old Testament, of Judaism). More attention, he believed, should be paid to the ‘confessional’—that is, religiously committed—character of biblical exposition. The deliberate neutrality of ‘historical criticism’, appealing to scholarly criteria meant to be acceptable whether or not one has faith, ignored, so he argued, the fact that these books are Holy Scripture for faith communities. Some way must be found of expounding them as such, and so of avoiding the mistake of resting content with purely ‘historical’ information.

Anyone who attends conferences on biblical studies is bound to be aware of the sea-change this has caused. Redaction criticism, which seemed originally quite radical and constructive in refocusing people’s minds on the finished form of biblical texts, now looks rather tame and timid. Canonical critics stop short of nothing but seeing the whole Bible as a single unit, to be expounded in its entirety, and that from a position of deliberate religious commitment, not with any kind of scholarly detachment.

We might put it like this. Older biblical criticism was often practised by scholars who did have a high commitment to the inspiration and authority of Scripture. But they thought the proper way to study it was first to analyse it critically in the ways I have described, and only then to move on to questions of its religious significance. This was true of Catholic and Protestant biblical scholars alike. The newer movement denies that this division of labour is desirable, or even possible. It argues that Christians have a commitment to these texts, and ought not to pretend to neutrality even as a scholarly procedure. The religious claim of Scripture should never be ‘bracketed out’ for the purposes of academic study.

In Britain the major proponents of a ‘committed’ reading of the Bible are Walter Moberly in Durham, who works mainly in the Old Testament field, and the New Testament scholar Francis Watson in Aberdeen. Both would argue that it is not just imperative for scholars to read the biblical texts from a committed position, but in fact that the idea of neutrality was always an illusion anyway. Traditional biblical criticism, they would say, derives from the European Enlightenment and was accordingly inherently biased against a religious interpretation of texts. Scholars thought they were being properly detached and academic when really they were in the grip of a rationalist delusion. I do not believe a word of this, and I think the roots of biblical criticism go back well beyond the Enlightenment to the Reformation and the Renaissance. It rests on the attention to the ‘plain meaning’ of texts that we owe to the Reformers and humanists of that period. But there is no doubt that a ‘canonical’ approach is among the movements making the biggest waves at present, and needs to be taken very seriously.

‘Advocacy’ Readings

The belief that every reader of the Bible has a commitment, however much they may pretend to be neutral, has led to an attempt to identify just what the commitments of many respected scholars actually were. It has not been hard to show that many supposedly neutral biblical critics were very much the product of their class, time, and political location. Certain scholars have been particularly skilful in uncovering the hidden bias of much traditional scholarship—indeed, there is now a genre of writing known as ‘metacommentary’ which seeks to do just that. Outstanding exponents of it are David Clines, of the Department of Biblical Studies at Sheffield, and Yvonne Sherwood of Glasgow, who studied in that Department.

But linked with this acute perception of the failings of past (and some present) scholars there may also be a sense that the Bible now needs to be studied with a more wholesome commitment, a commitment to human liberation. Feminists and liberation theologians have sought to replace the conservative or ‘liberal’ readings of the Bible common in the past with readings based on a liberation perspective. Gustavo Guttierez’s study of the book of Job would be a case in point. Many important biblical scholars are now committed to a liberationist reading of the Bible: in Britain, my Oxford colleague Christopher Rowland is an outstanding example. Especially in the USA, feminist readings now abound, and there is a whole series of feminist Companions to the Bible published by the Sheffield Academic Press (an important source of innovative publishing in biblical studies), edited by the Israeli scholar Athalya Brenner, who teaches in both Israel and the Netherlands.

The Newer Literary Criticism

At the same time as some scholars have been advocating more readings of the Bible with more commitment—either religious or social—there has also been another turn in biblical studies. This is in a literary direction. ‘The Bible as literature’ used to be rather a Cinderella in the theological world. C. S. Lewis derided it as a failure to take the Bible’s religious claims seriously, and many biblical scholars agreed (so they cannot have been so religiously uncommitted as is now often suggested!).

But since the 1980s secular literary critics have started to take the Bible seriously as great literature. One of the first was Sir Frank Kermode with The Genesis of Secrecy, a sophisticated study of Mark’s Gospel in the light of parallels in English literature, especially in James Joyce. He joined forces with Robert Alter, a (Jewish) professor of comparative literature in California, to edit The Literary Guide to the Bible. In this every biblical book is subjected to a literary, rather than a theological or traditional critical analysis. Some of the contributors use the methods of structuralism, which enjoyed a rather brief vogue in biblical studies in the 1970s. But most engage in what literary critics would call a ‘close reading’, often with resemblances to redaction criticism.

The Sheffield Department has been crucial in promoting literary approaches to the Bible in this country. In its many publications, often of doctoral theses formed by this literary tendency, one sees that a concern for literary aspects of the text can coexist with, and complement, a religious commitment. For many students of the Bible a literary reading of the ‘final form’ of the biblical text joins hands with the holistic interpretation required also by the canonical approach. It is often evangelical scholars in particular who feel the appeal of both types of study, which seem to reverse the apparently destructive tendency of traditional biblical criticism.

Prospects

This is an exciting time to be working in biblical studies, a time of controversy and ferment. To speak for myself, I believe there is still a lot of life in biblical criticism of the ‘historical’ kind: news of its death has been greatly exaggerated. But many of the newer approaches promise much. My Oxford colleague John Muddiman and I have just completed editing the new one-volume Oxford Bible Commentary, and he has coined the term ‘chastened historical criticism’ to describe the approach of most of its contributors. We believe that there is no going behind a critical approach to the Bible. Not only is it not the enemy of Christian faith; on the contrary, faith needs it to make sense of its Bible. But we also think that newer directions have raised questions that will not go away, and that Bible readers need to be fully aware of them as they search the Scriptures.