THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGY,
Biblical.
See Archeology, BIBLICAL CANON. See Canon of Scripture.
BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
II
JII
I. Conception and Problem.
The History of the Term (§1).
Limitations and Sphere of the Critic (5 2).
Biblical Criticism (§ 3).
The Critical Method.
Fundamental Assumptions (5 1).
Classification (§ 2).
Function (§ 3).
The Departments of Criticism.
Criticism of the Canon (§ 1).
Textual Criticism and Apparatus (§ 2).
Linguistic Criticism (§3). Historical Criticism (§ 4). Criticism of Style (§ 5). Reconstructive Criticism (§6). IV. History of Criticism.
Meaning and Limitations
(§ 1). Hellenistic and Patristic
Criticism (§ 2). Criticism from the Time
of the Reformation
(§3). Modern Criticism (§ 4). V Biblical Criticism in
the Roman Catholic
Church.
I. Conception and Problem: Criticism, like interpretation, is an art; the two are related to each other as sisters, and both are nourished by science. Interpretation is the art of bringing to the comprehension what has really been handed down and of grasping it as it really is; criticism is the art of rightly estimating what has been actually apprehended according to its real value. Interpretation without criticism befogs and enervates; criticism -without interpretation is vague and mere intellectual play. Since man can not understand without •exercising the faculty of judgment, in work that deals with spiritual verities the two are not separated, yet the point of view from which they approach ■the same object is as different as their method. Interpretation proceeds inductively, collecting everything which bears upon the understanding of the matter; criticism proceeds deductively, furnishing the canons by which to value that understanding. While one asks about the fact, the other asks about the truth of it; one builds, the other classifies and estimates the material and tests the building process. Criticism is the inverse of interpretation, and more. While it pronounces upon the results of interpretation, it opens new questions about the trustworthiness or untrustworthiness, the completeness or fragmentariness, the genealogy and the significance of the object; and thus it affords a starting-point for final valuation and definition. It is skill, partly natural, paitly acquired, in distinguishing and appropriating true from false, good from bad, beautiful from ugly, whether derived from contemplative perception and revelation or through chance or tradition. Its purpose is positive, though its result may often be negative. It knows no other authority than that of the case before it, no other method than that demanded by the same.
The word has been in use since Plato's time; he distinguished between criticism and construction, the two being employed in the 1 . The His- sc;ence 0f knowledge. Aristotle introtory of the , , v .• ■■ . . ,,
Term. duced a distinction between the critical and the literary arts, which was taken un by the Alexandrian school in connection with literature and particularly with poetry. Clement
of Alexandria established in his review of Greek culture the fact that grammatikos as a technical term is later than kritikos. Terminology, however, was unstable in the ancient world. Philologos was differentiated from philosophos, meaning not the independent inquirer but the critic and expounder of classical productions. As the art of valuing, criticism is the product of the eighteenth century. The Encyclopedists called it in particular the restorer of ancient literature, in general the art of open-eyed examination of human productions and of judging them justly.
The critic stands in an opposition between
subjective and objective. The obscure, the ugly,
the disorderly, the arrogant, the
2. Limita- artificial — everything which tends to tions distort a pure impression — arouse
Snhere ^e critical function, which manifests of the itself in simple aversion or blame, or Critic. in a deliberate exposition of the causes of distortion. Limitations to understanding lie also in the person. Complex and difficult to grasp are the conditions and impulses which deceive, divert, and suborn the faculty of judgment. Personal taste, inexperience, dogmatic piesupposition, arrogance — such hindrances are as numerous as the emotions of the soul. A valuable inheritance sometimes suffers injury by the encroachments of critical ineptitude. Whoever regards a thing as worthy has a sense of loss, even if the criticism be pertinent ; much more is that the case if in the critical process insincerity and arbitrariness be present. It is not surprising, therefore, that esthetic and religious natures are filled with aversion to criticism and distrust of it. Goethe once said that a book which had accomplished great results was simply above the operations of criticism, and that criticism is generally a mere habit of moderns. Such an attitude seems to the critic mere obedience to blind authority. Great events and much of literature have rested on fictitious bases. Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha claim genuineness. Such facts are warrant enough for the activities of critical science.
The general standards of criticism, like those of
interpretation, rest on logic, philosophy, and
rhetoric. It applies those standards
3. Biblical to the particular case, and the general Criticism, rules are modified to accord with the
demands of the occasion. Since the Scriptures of the Old and the New Testaments have a special importance as a related whole, Biblical criticism is a special and independent branch. It deals with sources, history, and religion; it tests the historical worth of the documents which set forth the religion of the two Testaments. It has as its object the discovery of the religious life operative therein by reason of which this literature has its special meaning. There is a double outlook here; insight into the essence of religion and into the essence of historic fact.
Biblical criticism is on its other side historical criticism. Hence its function is to separate the natural progress of events and the religious limitations of the Biblical exposition of history in order to comprehend their relations upon the basis of