BIBLICAL CRITICISM. — Criticism, or the art of distinguishing the true from the false, when applied to a literary work seeks to establish its authenticity (who the author is), its integrity, the kind of truth proper to it, etc. The Bible, the Word of God and therefore safeguarded from every error (v. INERRANZA), is subject to the laws of criticism, because the charism of inspiration, while elevating the faculties of the sacred writer, leaves them entirely their own human mode of activity. Thus the writing, being the Word of God, is at the same time a human work; and to the exact extent that it is a human work, it is subject to the criteria by which other human works are judged.
Two kinds of criticism are commonly distinguished: textual criticism, also called humilior, which seeks to determine what words the author used, and literary criticism, or sublimior, whose object is the work itself, its integrity, its authenticity, and the various circumstances that influenced its elaboration. After outlining the history of criticism and, in particular, describing the part played in it by Catholics, these two aspects will be treated successively (v. ERMENETUICA; GENERI LETTERARI).
I. HISTORY OF BIBLICAL CRITICISM
As soon as reflection and study began to be applied to the Sacred Books in the Christian Church, Origen, Lucian of Antioch, Hesychius of Alexandria and, among the Latins, St. Jerome and St. Augustine applied to the Sacred Books the rules of criticism developed for the works of profane authors. Origen himself offered, concerning the authenticity of the Epistle to the Hebrews, a solution that is still the one most commonly accepted among Catholics; he also defended against Julius Africanus the deuterocanonical passages of the book of Daniel; St. Dionysius of Alexandria subjected the Apocalypse to a genuine study of literary criticism; Theodoret concerned himself with the sources of the book of Judith, as he did with those of the books of Kings and Paralipomeni. Later, in the 14th and 15th centuries, the renewal of the study of ancient languages and the discussions provoked by the Protestants prepared the ground for the rise of modern criticism, whose first representative was the Catholic priest Richard Simon with the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Paris 1678, etc.); despite certain bold opinions and some assertions that were at least ill-advised, his principles are still those of modern critics. Unfortunately, in the 18th and 19th centuries, rationalism seized the weapons supplied by the new discipline in order to undermine the authority of the Sacred Books and construct from the ground up a history of Israel, indeed a history of Christian origins, in which every supernatural intervention disappears and the principal figures, not excluding Jesus Christ himself, end up playing a very secondary role—when their very existence is not denied, as has happened more than once. Among the most representative of these critics, it suffices to mention, in Germany, J. Wellhausen, Pentateuch (v.), and F. C. Baur (v.), founder of the Tübingen school, with his explanation of Christian origins through the struggle between Petrinism and Paulinism; in France, E. Renan and later A. Loisy, who ended by dating New Testament literature, including the Pauline epistles, to the middle of the 2nd century. It is not surprising that more than one Catholic should have shown distrust toward methods so compromised. Nevertheless, there were those who, responding to the invitation that Leo XIII addressed to exegetes to be « doctiores atque exercitatores in vera artis criticae disciplina » (encyclical Providentissima), judged it their first duty to detach the critical method from the use made of it by rationalists. They were, certainly, at times misunderstood, indeed vigorously attacked, and accused of abandoning too quickly certain positions held to be untenable; and certainly today, after 50 years of work, research and clarification, it is possible to find clearer, more careful and more precise formulations; everyone, however, recognizes not only that these pioneers were always animated by an ardent love for the Church, but also that in reality most of their more fundamental positions have become the common possession of Catholic exegesis, in accordance with the rules laid down by the ecclesiastical magisterium itselfin the encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu of 30 September 1943 and in the letter of the Pontifical Biblical Commission of 16 January 1948. These two documents will guide us.
II. TEXTUAL C
The encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu underscores the importance of textual b. c. in unequivocal terms. Since in fact the only inspired text is the original text, and not the versions, however perfect they may be, the exegete’s first concern, “precisely out of the reverence due to the Word of God,” will be to “procure a correct text,” to “restore the Sacred Text with all possible precision to its primitive form, purging it of the corruptions introduced into it, of the copyists’ shortcomings, and freeing it from glosses and lacunae, transpositions of words, repetitions, and similar defects of every kind, which in writings transmitted by hand for centuries are wont to infiltrate.”From the standpoint of textual c., the Old Testament presents a wholly particular character. The oldest manuscripts—if one disregards the discovery of 1947—do not go back beyond the 8th–9th century of our era, and all reproduce the same text, indeed a single archetype (as is demonstrated by the evident errors repeated in all known manuscripts, without a single exception), fixed in its consonantal portion between the 2nd and 5th centuries and supplied with vowel points only after s. Girolamo. Some readings were placed in the margin by the editors called Masoretes, readings “to be read” (qērē) instead of those “written” (bēthibh) in the text; these readings constitute the most ancient list of variants. But many centuries earlier the Hebrew Old Testament had first been translated into Greek (v. SETTANTA; GRECHE, VERSIONI DELLA BIBBIA) around the 2nd or 3rd century B.C., and then into Syriac around the 1st or 2nd century A.D.; these testimonies suggest, at least in certain passages, a Hebrew text very different from the Masoretic text. The aforementioned discovery of Hebrew manuscripts, probably dating from the 1st or 2nd century B.C., shows that most of these divergences are to be attributed to the Greek translator. The few ancient testimonies thus leave a relatively considerable scope for conjectural emendations. They abound in the apparatus of the critical edition by R. Kittel and P. Kahle (3rd ed., Stuttgart 1937), and are found also in the Latin Psalterium published by the Pontifical Biblical Institute (Rome 1945), as well as in the Italian translation of the Bible edited by A. Vaccari (Florence 1943 ff.).
Unlike what occurs with the Old Testament, the difficulty of the textual c. of the New Testament would arise rather from the excessively large number of testimonies: papyri, manuscripts, versions, patristic quotations. No profane work possesses so many. Whereas only 190 manuscripts are extant of the work most frequently copied throughout antiquity, the Iliad, and of these only 2 are uncials (of Plato 23, of Thucydides 21, of Hesiod 20, etc.), 2641 manuscripts of the New Testament (complete or partial) have been catalogued, including no fewer than 212 uncials, without counting 51 papyri. But above all, many of these manuscripts are much less remote from the original than are all the manuscripts of classical authors, without exception; and among them one, pap. 52 (P. Rylands 457), is almost contemporary with it: it is a leaf from a codex found in Egypt, bearing on the verso Io. 18, 31–33 and on the recto Io. 18, 37–38, dated by specialists to the 2nd century, more probably to its first half; it therefore goes back almost to the period in which Catholic tradition places the composition of the Gospel of s. Giovanni (end of the 1st century).
Moreover, in the New Testament, even more than in the Old, the variants, although numerous, concern only often very minor details, and the majority of modern critical editions, both those by Catholics (e.g., H. Vogels, A. Merk, J. Bover) and those by non-Catholics (e.g., C. Tischendorf, B. F. Westcott–F. J. A. Hort, H. von Soden, E. Nestle), offer a more or less
similar text. The present effort of critics is directed chiefly toward reconstructing the history of the text of the New Testament, and for this purpose the ancient versions, as well as patristic quotations, occupy a foremost place: hence even a manual edition such as that of Merk assigns them a prominent place.
III. LITERARY C
The first problem ordinarily posed to the exegete when confronted with a book of the Bible (or a passage from it) is to investigate, insofar as possible, the human author whom the Holy Spirit used as an instrument, that is, to establish its authenticity.The Council of Trent declared authentic the books preserved in the ancient Latin Vulgate cum omnibus suis partibus (v. VOLGATA); but it is known that the Council intended to speak only of canonical or dogmatic authenticity, not of literary authenticity. The Catholic exegete must regard these parts as «sacred and canonical», such as in the New Testament the pericope of the adulterous woman (Io. 7, 53-8, 11), the verses concerning the bloody sweat and the consoling angel (Lc. 22, 43-44), and the ending of the Gospel of s. Mark (16, 9-20); in the Old Testament, the parts of Esther and Daniel that are not found in the Hebrew text. But he is not obliged to affirm that they belong literarily to the book in which they are incorporated today; in fact, Merk’s critical edition suggests that this is probably not the case for Mc. 16, 9-20 and Io. 7, 53-8, 11.
Now, in interpreting a given passage, it is not irrelevant to know its author, its date, and, if possible, the circumstances in which it was written. Indeed, at times the historical value of a book will depend more or less directly upon these matters; hence it can be understood how, in certain cases, which are in any event quite rare, the Church has intervened to provide precise directives. Nevertheless, the relationship between a writer and what may rightly be called his work is capable of many nuances, which Catholic exegesis is careful not to overlook: s. Paul probably is not, according to the more common opinion, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews in exactly the same way as he is the author of that to the Galatians; as for Moses, whom tradition regards as the author of the Pentateuch, the aforementioned letter of the Biblical Commission speaks of him with great precision, alluding to «the great part and the profound influence he had as author and as legislator».
The same document likewise alludes to the sources of the Pentateuch, whose «existence no one nowadays any longer calls into question». More precisely, the investigation of sources is, after questions of authenticity, one of the principal objects of literary c. Catholic scholars are expressly invited «to study these problems without prejudice, in the light of a sound c. and of the results of those sciences that have points of contact with these matters»: a very delicate study, especially because external c. must generally be replaced by the sole resources of internal c., that is, the examination of style, language, vocabulary, etc. All the more so because, with regard to the Old Testament, most of the books did not escape a process of updating: as H. Höpfl noted, «there is no doubt that the Sacred Text, beginning with the exile, was read publicly in the synagogues and that it was adapted to the conditions of the Holy Land and to contemporary modes of expression» (DBs, col. 190). The exegete must also beware of attributing to diversity of sources what may perhaps be nothing more than literary usage, and more generally of interpreting the Bible without taking sufficient account of the habits of thought and writing of the ancient Oriental peoples (v. GENERI LETTERARI).
Certainly, throughout this entire work of investigation, the Catholic exegete will allow himself to be guided by the Church’s magisterium and by Tradition. But here too the encycl. Divino afflante
Spiritu very appropriately warns him that «among the many things contained in the Sacred Books, legal, historical, sapiential, and prophetic, there are few whose meaning the Church has declared with her authority, nor are those more numerous concerning which there is the unanimous judgment of the Fathers».
One may therefore conclude from this how false and unjust it is to claim, as has been done, that Catholic doctrine «excludes all critical and historical exegesis of the Bible».