Biblical Criticism

BIBLICAL CRITICISM. - Criticism, or the art of distinguishing the true from the false, when applied to a literary work, sets out to establish its authenticity (who its author is), its integrity, the kind of truth that belongs to it, etc. The Bible, being the Word of God and therefore guaranteed against all error (v. INERRANCY), is subject to the laws of criticism, because the charism of inspiration, while it elevates the faculties of the sacred writer, leaves him entirely his own human manner of activity. So that 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 sets out to determine which words the author used, and literary criticism, or sublimior, which has as its object the work itself, its integrity, its authenticity and the various circumstances that influenced its composition. After sketching the history of criticism and in particular outlining the part that Catholics have taken in it, these two aspects will be treated in turn (v. also BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS; LITERARY GENRES).

I. HISTORY OF BIBLICAL CRITICISM

As soon as reflection and study were brought to bear on 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 Holy Books the rules of criticism elaborated for the works of profane authors. Origen himself provided on the authenticity of the Epistle to the Hebrews a solution that is still the one most commonly accepted among Catholics; he further 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 with those of the books of Kings and Chronicles. Later, in the 14th-15th centuries, the renewal of the study of ancient languages and the discussions stirred up 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 at least inopportune assertions, his principles are still those of modern critics. Unfortunately, in the 18th-19th centuries, rationalism seized the weapons that the new discipline provided it in order to undermine at its foundation the authority of the Holy Books and to construct from scratch a history of Israel, indeed a history of Christian origins, in which every supernatural intervention disappears and the principal figures, not even excluding Jesus Christ, end up having a quite secondary part, when indeed their very existence is not denied, as has happened more than once. It suffices to cite among the most representative of these critics in Germany J. Wellhausen with his explanation of the Pentateuch (v.), 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 then A. Loisy, who ended by dating the New Testament literature, including the Pauline epistles, to the middle of the 2nd century. It is no wonder that more than one Catholic showed diffidence toward methods so compromised. There were nevertheless those who, responding to the invitation that Leo XIII addressed to exegetes to be « doctiores atque exercitatiores in vera artis criticae disciplina » (encyclical Providentissima), judged it their first duty to detach the critical method from the use that the rationalists made of it. They were, certainly, at times misunderstood, indeed vigorously attacked, accused of abandoning too soon certain positions believed untenable; and certainly today, after 50 years of work, of research, of clarifications, it is possible to find formulas more clear, more accurate, more exact; all, however, recognize not only that these pioneers were always animated by an ardent love for the Church, but that in reality the majority of their most fundamental positions have become the common good of Catholic exegesis, according to the rules traced by the ecclesiastical magisterium itself in the encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu of 30 Sept. 1943 and in the letter of the Pontifical Biblical Commission of 16 Jan. 1948. These two documents will be our guide.

II. TEXTUAL CRITICISM

The encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu underlines the importance of textual biblical c. in unequivocal terms. Since in fact the only inspired text is the original text and not the versions, however perfect, the exegete's first care, "precisely because of the reverence owed to the Word of God," will be to "procure for himself a correct text," to "restore with all possible precision the Sacred Text to its primitive tenor, purging it of the deformations introduced into it, of the shortcomings of copyists, and freeing it from glosses and lacunae, from transpositions of words, from repetitions and from similar defects of every kind, which in writings handed down by hand for centuries are wont to infiltrate themselves."

From the point of view of textual c., the Old Testament offers a wholly particular physiognomy. The most ancient manuscripts - apart from the discovery of 1947 - do not go back beyond the 8th-9th century of our era, and all reproduce one and the same text, indeed a single archetype (as is proved by the evident errors repeated in all known manuscripts, without any exception), fixed in its consonantal part between the 2nd and 5th centuries and provided with vowel points only after St. Jerome. Certain 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 been translated first into Greek (v. SETTANTA; GRECHE, VERSIONI) around the 2nd or 3rd century B.C., then into Syriac around the 1st or 2nd century A.D.; these testimonies suggest, at least in some passages, a Hebrew text very different from the Masoretic text. The aforementioned discovery of Hebrew manuscripts, which probably go back to the 1st or 2nd century B.C., shows that the majority of these divergences must be attributed to the Greek translator. The few ancient testimonies thus leave a relatively considerable field for conjectural corrections. These abound in the apparatus of the critical edition of R. Kittel and P. Kahle (3rd ed., Stuttgart 1937) and are not lacking even in the Latin Psalter published by the Pontifical Biblical Institute (Rome 1945), nor in the Italian translation of the Bible edited by A. Vaccari (Florence 1943 ff.).

Unlike what happens with the Old Testament, the difficulty of the textual c. of the New would come rather from the too great number of testimonies: papyri, manuscripts, versions, patristic citations. No profane work possesses so many. While of the work that in all antiquity was most often copied, the Iliad, only 190 manuscripts are possessed, and of these only 2 uncials (of Plato 23, of Thucydides 21, of Hesiod 20, etc.), of the New Testament 2641 have been catalogued (complete or partial) and of these fully 212 uncials, without counting 51 papyri. But above all many of these manuscripts are far less posterior to the original than all the manuscripts of the classical authors, without exception; and among these one, pap. 52 (P. Rylands 457) is almost contemporary with it: it is a leaf of a codex found in Egypt and 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 the first half; it thus goes back almost to the era in which Catholic tradition places the composition of the Gospel of St. John (end of the 1st century).

Moreover, for the New Testament even more than for the Old, the variants, however numerous, refer only to particulars that are often minimal, and the majority of modern critical editions, both those of Catholics (e.g., H. Vogels, A. Merk, J. Bover) and those of non-Catholics (e.g., C. Tischendorf, B. F. Westcott-F. J. A. Hort, H. von Soden, E. Nestle) offer a text more or less similar. The present effort of critics tends principally to reconstruct the history of the text of the New Testament, and for this purpose the ancient versions as well as the patristic citations occupy a place of the first order: hence even a manual edition such as that of Merk accords them a prominent place.

III. LITERARY CRITICISM

The first problem that ordinarily confronts the exegete before a book of the Bible (or a passage of it) is that of investigating, as far as possible, the human author whom the Holy Spirit used as an instrument, that is, of establishing 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," as in the New Testament the pericope of the woman taken in adultery (Jn. 7:53-8:11), the verses on the sweat of blood and the comforting angel (Lk. 22:43-44), the ending of the Gospel of St. 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 today incorporated, and, in fact, the critical edition of Merk suggests that for Mk. 16:9-20 and Jn. 7:53-8:11 this is probably not the case.

Now, in order to interpret a given passage, it is not a matter of indifference to know its author, its date and possibly the circumstances in which it was written. Indeed, sometimes the historical value of a book will depend on this more or less directly: hence one understands how in certain cases, moreover quite rare, the Church has intervened to give precise directives. Nevertheless, the relationship between a writer and what may rightly be called his work is susceptible of many nuances that Catholic exegesis is careful not to neglect: St. Paul is probably not, according to the most 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 holds to be the author of the Pentateuch, the aforementioned letter of the Biblical Commission speaks of him with great care, alluding to the "great part and profound influence that 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 doubt." Precisely the investigation of sources is, after questions of authenticity, one of the principal objects of literary criticism. Now Catholic scholars are expressly invited "to study these problems without prejudice, in the light of a sound criticism and of the results of those sciences that have interferences with these matters": a most delicate study, especially because external criticism must generally be replaced by the sole resources of internal criticism, that is, the examination of style, language, vocabulary, etc. All the more so since, as regards the Old Testament, the majority of the books have not escaped a work of updating: as H. Höpfl noted, "it is beyond doubt that the Sacred Text, starting from 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 perhaps is nothing other than a literary usage, and more generally of interpreting the Bible without taking sufficient account of the habits of thinking and writing of the ancient Oriental peoples (v. GENERI LETTERARI).

Certainly, in all this work of investigation the Catholic exegete will let himself be guided by the magisterium of the Church and by Tradition. But here too the encyclical Divino afflante

Spiritu very opportunely warns him that "among the many things contained in the Sacred Books, legal, historical, sapiential and prophetic, few are those whose meaning the Church has declared by her authority, nor are those more numerous concerning which there is the unanimous judgment of the Fathers."

From this, therefore, one may conclude how false and unjust it is to claim, as has been done, that Catholic doctrine "excludes all critical and historical exegesis of the Bible."

Stanislao Lyonnet