Historical Critical Method 1 - The Enlightenment

The English and German Enlightenment of the early 1700's paved the way for the emergence of the Historical Critical Method as it developed in the 20th century. A most momentous development in Biblical criticism was the challenge to the whole idea of miracles as they are found in the Bible. The English Deist David Hume is perhaps the most widely read writer of the time to challenge the reality of Biblical miracles (1748), which may be found today in the Hackett edition of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The larger intellectual picture of the time that feeds into this way of thinking is the emergence of the notion that everything that happens, happens only by natural processes.

In a different way, Immanuel Kant became a key figure in the German Enlightenment. Kant questioned the idea that anything can be known with certainty (the epistemological question - how do we know what we think we know and can we know it with any degree of certainty?), which leads to an emphasis on subjectivism in both knowledge and interpretation. This in turn leads to the question of whether there can be any such thing as objective knowledge, which then leads to questions about whether any religious statement can be construed as true apart from it being true only for the person believing it so. Hume and Kant provide the backdrop for the challenges to traditional biblical interpretation that would be made in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In 1728, the Genevan Jean Turrentini is the first Christian theologian to question the notion of biblical inspiration, positing that perhaps the biblical books are best understood as having the same properties as other such books, in that they are human documents that speak of religious topics, but that they do not have a position of privilege by divine inspiration, but rather have value solely because of their historical proximity to the events they describe.

Johann Semler continued this line of thought in 1775 with the publication of a book on the New Testament in which he makes a distinction between "Holy Scripture" (the Bible) and the "Word of God," in which Semler argues that the Bible contains books that only had importance in ancient times and cannot contribute to the "moral improvement" of humanity today. Also, we find first introduced with Semler the insistence that the Bible be interpreted from a rigorous historical perspective, without the intrusion of the interpreter's theological ideas. This leads to the premise that a Biblical book ought to be explained only in terms of what it meant within its original historical context, and what it intended to say to its original readers.

This distinction that Semler makes between the Bible and the "Word of God" is the origin of the very common idea in "liberal" Christianity that not all of the Bible can be considered "inspired" or the "Word of God" or even the "words of God." Rather each passage or book must be evaluated on its own merits of any claim to religious authority. This view is rather obvious in Marcus Borg's book. Bart Ehrman, on the other hand, does not have a personal stake in the truths of Christianity, so the whole question of the "Word of God" is irrelevant to him.

Semler's student Johann Griesbach makes a break with the tradition going back to Augustine and questions the accepted view that Matthew's Gospel (Matthew being an Apostle of Jesus) was written first and that Mark and Luke (not Apostles) used Matthew in the composition of their Gospels. The reason for the logic of a literary relationship between the first three Gospels is the inescapable similarities between them (referred to as Synoptic Gospels since they view the life of Jesus from the same perspective). In fact, there are so many places where the Greek text of these three Gospels is identical that it would seem to require a theory of literary dependence to explain their interrelationship (if one does not believe in a theory of full verbal divine inspiration).

Griesbach still accepts the idea that Matthew was written first, but recognizes problems with the idea that Mark used Matthew, but does not offer an alternate theory. However, Griesbach does publish a "synopsis" of the first three Gospels, in which the parallel passages are placed in parallel columns, which offers the opportunity for easy comparison of the three accounts of the same passage. His published "synopsis" serves to spur the interest of other scholars in coming years. At this point, scholars have not yet jettisoned the traditional view of Gospel authorship. But in questioning the historical interrelationship of the Gospels, the question of authorship will soon to follow. Griesbach recognizes the "Synoptic Problem," but fails to produce a satisfactory solution. The solution to this "problem" is at the heart of the development of the historical critical method.