Criticism as applied to the Bible simply means the exercise of judgment. Both conservative and nonconservative scholars engage in two forms of biblical criticism: lower criticism – [which] deals with the text [itself]; [and] higher criticism –[which focuses on] the source of the text. Lower criticism attempts to determine what the original text said, and the latter asks who said it and when, where, and why it was written.
Most controversies surrounding Bible criticism involve higher criticism. Higher criticism can be divided into negative (destructive) and positive (constructive) types. Negative criticism denies the authenticity of much of the biblical record. Usually an antisupernatural presupposition is employed in this critical approach.
In the 21st century, historical criticism is the more commonly used term for higher criticism, while textual criticism is more common than the expression lower criticism.
Historical criticism began in the 17th century and gained popular recognition in the 19th and 20th centuries. (Wikipedia)
Historical criticism is a broad term that covers techniques to date documents and traditions, to verify events reported in those documents, and to use the results in historiography to reconstruct and interpret.
Historical literary critics seek to understand a piece of literature from a historical perspective; as it would have been understood by the people alive during the time of the writing of the poem or the story. Over time, words in the same language, gain and lose meanings to such a degree that a certain element of a poem or story may be completely lost to a modern reader. (M. Foster, Yahoo.com)
With each passing century, historical criticism became refined into various methodologies used today: source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, tradition criticism, canonical criticism, and related methodologies.
Source criticism, also known as literary criticism, attempts to discover and define literary sources used by the biblical writers. It seeks to uncover underlying literary sources, classify types of literature, and answer questions relating to authorship, unity, and date of Old and New Testament materials. Some literary critics tend to decimate the biblical text, pronounce certain books inauthentic, and reject the very notion of verbal inspiration.
[‘Bible criticism’ isn’t necessarily always a ‘bad’ thing.] Careful literary criticism can prevent historical misinterpretations of the biblical text.
Source criticism in the New Testament over the past century has focused on the so-called “Synoptic problem,” [examining the] similarities and dissimilarities among the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Theories tend to work with the idea of a now-absent Q or Quelle (“Source”) used by the three evangelists, who wrote in various sequences, with the second depending on the first and the third on the other two.
Form criticism studies literary forms, such as essays, poems, and myths, since different writings have different forms. Often the form of a piece of literature can tell a great deal about the nature of a literary piece, its writer, and its social context. Technically this is termed its “life setting”. Form criticism has been most profitably used in the study of the Psalms.
The classic liberal position is the documentary or J-E-P-D Pentateuchal source analysis theory established by Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918). These documents are identified as the “Jahwist” or Jehovistic (J), dated in the ninth century B.C., the Elohistic (E), eighth century, the Deuteronomic (D), from about the time of Josiah (640-609), and the Priestly (P), from perhaps the fifth century B.C.
[Some ‘Form critics’ (positive criticism) believe that Paul and Peter arranged the oral tradition and created artificial contexts to serve their own purposes. In challenging the authorship, date, structure, and style of other New Testament books, destructive critics arrived at similar conclusions. To derive a fragmented New Testament theology, they rejected Pauline authorship for all Epistles traditionally ascribed to him except Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, and Galatians (Hodges, 339-48).
Tradition criticism is primarily concerned with the history of traditions before they were recorded in writing. The stories of the patriarchs, for example, were probably passed down through generations by word of mouth until they were written as a continuous narrative. These oral traditions may have been changed over the long process of transmission. It is of great interest to the biblical scholar to know what changes were made and how the later tradition, now enshrined in a literary source, differs from the earliest oral version.
Redaction criticism is more closely associated with the [Biblical] text than is tradition criticism. As a result, it is less open to the charge of subjective speculation. Redaction (editorial) critics can achieve absolute certainty only when all the sources are used that were at the disposal of the redactor (editor), since the task is to determine how a redactor compiled sources, what was omitted, what was added, and what particular bias was involved in the process. (Wenham, “Gospel Origins”).
Redaction critics tend to favor a view that biblical books were written much later and by different authors than the text relates.
The following is a comparison of the two major categories of Higher Criticism:
Some of the negative presuppositions call for scrutiny, especially as they relate to the Gospel record. This analysis is especially relevant to source criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism, as these methods challenge the genuineness, authenticity, and consequently the divine authority of the Bible. This kind of biblical criticism is unfounded.
The originator of modern negative criticism, Benedict Spinoza, for example, declared that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, nor Daniel the whole book of Daniel, nor did any miracle recorded actually occur. Miracles, he claimed, are scientifically and rationally impossible. In the wake of Spinoza, negative critics concluded that Isaiah did not write the whole book of Isaiah. That would have involved supernatural predictions (including knowing the name of King Cyrus) over 100 years in advance. [Higher criticism looks at the ‘virgin birth’, miracles and signs, and ‘the resurrection’ as impossible.]
Unfounded higher criticism undermines the integrity of the New Testament writers by claiming that Jesus never said (or did) what the Gospels claim. Even some who call themselves evangelical have gone so far as to claim that what “‘Jesus said’ or `Jesus did’ need not always mean that in history Jesus said or did what follows, but that in the account at least partly constructed by Matthew himself Jesus said or did what follows” (Gundry, 630). This clearly undermines confidence in the truthfulness of the Gospels and the accuracy of the events they report. On this critical view the Gospel writers become creators of the events, not recorders.
Much of the rejection of the Gospel record is based on the assumption that the writers could not be expected to remember sayings, details, and events twenty or forty years after the events. For Jesus died in 33, and the first Gospel records probably came (at latest) between 50 and 60 (Wenham, “Gospel Origins,” 112-34). [But, they are not understanding that the Holy Ghost can, and did, cause them to remember accurately; or, they wrote it down daily as it happened and then later it was formulated into a ‘book’].
(Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics by Norman L. Geisler)