Westminster United Church

METHODS OF CRITICAL STUDY:

The Bible and Beyond

by Rev. Dr. David Galston

While not everyone is trained as a scholar in biblical criticism, anyone can benefit from the methods used in biblical criticism because the methods of critical study work for other subjects as well. Historians especially use critical methods, but so do bankers and carpenters and city planners. In both our professional and private lives, we all make judgements about things, and to make good judgements, we all need to use a method of one kind or another. Regardless of what that judgement concerns, the methods employed by biblical criticism can be an aid.

There are five basic types of biblical criticism, which I will try to show are beneficial for everyday life. These forms of criticism are always under revision, so I am not venturing beyond a very basic level.

1.Source Criticism

Source criticism is the most elementary form of biblical criticism, and it is easy to understand. My mother used to use it. Whenever I came home with some strange object, she would say, “Where did you get that?” That is source criticism at its core, which consists of questioning where something comes from. In the Bible, Matthew and Luke say the same things with the same words and with the same order of events. Obviously, they got common sayings and a common itinerary for Jesus from common sources. Their common sources are the Q Sayings Gospel and the Gospel of Mark. With Matthew and Luke, we can go to the source of their writings, opinions, and theologies.

We can question how they use the sources, and whether they used them well. Whether the subject is the Bible or not, in everyday life, when we hear news, it is important to ask what is the source? Is it a reliable source? Has the information been relayed accurately?

2.Textual Criticism

Textual criticism is not as obvious as source criticism, but it does ask a question that a parent might ask of a child: “What happened to your room?” When we discover that a child’s room is a mess with various things out of place, we are engaging ina form of textual criticism. In this case, the child’s room is our text. And we have to picture what the room should look like restored.

If we imagine that Mark is like a room, then we ask, “What happened to Mark?” Historical investigation turns up many different copies and fragments of the Gospel of Mark. We can see plainly that Mark is full of errors and edits either added later by a copyist or mistakenly recorded. It takes tedious work to compare and contrasthundreds of surviving manuscripts to determine what is likely the best reading. No version is perfect, and no version is original. Not only for Mark, but for every book of the Bible we must ask “What happened to this text? How was such a mess created?”

In life, a good rule of thumb from textual criticism is to care for what you have inherited from others.

3.Literary Criticism

There is nothing like reading a great novel that you just cannot put down. Why can’t you put it down?

Likely, the novel is full of suspense, mystery, action, clues, comedy, and questions you just have to know the answer to. A good piece of literature involves these elements in its plot. We might say that the question here is, “Who dun it?” The Bible and its books can be looked upon as literature with plots, heroes, villains, and mysteries. There is comedy and tragedy, and in the midst of the story, there are always questions about the meaning and purpose of life. In literary criticism, a book of the Bible is looked upon as a story. The question of whether or not the story is true is dismissed. The point is the plot of the story and its meaning. For example, it does not really matter whether Jesus rose from the dead; what matters is that life is full of the spirit of resurrection, and it can be found everywhere in the cosmic story.

Understanding the literary elements in our own lives generally—the comedy and the tragedy of being who we are—can be comforting because it is good to know our story belongs to humanity.

4.Redaction Criticism

Redaction criticism is another method that surfaces in life all the time. When someone says, “Here, let me fix that for you,” the individual is being your personal redaction critic. Redaction is the process of editing something in a deliberate way. It is not a mistake but a deliberate effort to improve a text. When Matthew and Luke copy from Mark, they act as redactors because they frequently dislike the way Mark uses Greek and the way Mark tells the story. Neither Matthew nor Luke can imagine that Jesus should have been baptized by John, so in both cases they use editorial skill to “improve” Mark on this point. They redact Mark. In our lives, there are lots of people eager to help us improve, and equally we often are eager to improve others.

The lesson of redaction criticism is to be careful. Do not allow your genuine care to become condescending to others, and care for how you “redact” your own life.

5.Form Criticism

Form criticism is my favourite criticism, and I have saved itfor last. In form criticism the question that a parent might ask a child is, “How did you do that?” Children are good at picking up on the latest technical wizardry and performing what seems like “magic” before their parent’s eyes. What the child has learned, however, is a genre of activity, that is, the “type” of skill needed for a particular act. Another way to say this is that the child has learned a form.

In the Bible, and in history as much as in life, we perform acts according to rituals, instructions, special readings, and different styles of storytelling (such as jokes or adventures). In the Bible, a form critic tries to identify a unit of text that comes from a specific genre or type of language use. For example, the Song of Deborah can be separated from the larger book of Judges and studied independently of Judges because it is a “form” of ancient incantation. A Jesus parable is an even better example because it is easy to see where a parable ends and a gospel writer’s interpretation of the parable begins. In Mark 4, the parable about the sower ends at verse 8 and all the verses that follow consist of Mark trying to figure out what the parable means. If we want to know what Jesus really said, then form criticism is our ticket. Form criticism gets us down to the form of a saying, like a parable form or an aphorism form, where we can study the saying as a technique independently of the gospel writers. In life, it is also important to hear what other people are saying and to identify their particular “form” of saying it. We cannot expect people to speak the way we think they should, but we can learn to hear others.

When someone speaks in one way or another, we can learn that the form used expresses their pain or their frustration or their dreams. We do not have to take others only literally; we can learn to hear the art of their particular expressions and can learn, in this way, to see their beauty.

Biblical criticism can make a difference in life because it can teach us how to ask good questions and how to be good listeners. When I was in seminary, I was taught that biblical criticism is something you do in your office but not in your pulpit. I have learned, however, that this advice is unfortunate. Many ministers never conduct biblical criticism in their offices, so it never has a chance to reach the pulpit. That is too bad because the methods are basic, and they can make a difference in our experience of life whether inside or outside the church and whether related or not related to the Bible.