The Historical Critical Method - Part 1 The Enlightenment

THE EUROPEAN 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. Before this time few people in Europe ever thought to question the historical accuracy of the Christian Bible. 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). The larger intellectual picture of the time that feeds into this way of thinking is the emergence of the notion that everything that happens in the world around us, happens by natural processes.

In a different way, Immanuel Kant (a key figure in the German Enlightenment) influenced the interpretation of scripture. Kant questions the idea that anything can be known with certainty. This is 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 whether there can be such a thing as objective knowledge, which then leads to questions about whether any religious statements can be construed as true apart from them 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.

The process of the development of the Historical Critical Method was aided by the infusion of additional ideas in the 18th and 19th centuries that challenged the traditional way of interpreting the Bible. In 1728 a Swiss theologian questioned the notion of biblical inspiration, positing that perhaps the biblical books are best understood as having the same properties as other such books, saying that Biblical books are human documents that speak of religious topics. In 1775 a German New Testament scholar published a book in which he made a distinction between "Holy Scripture" (the Bible) and the "Word of God," in which he argues that the Bible contains books that only had importance in ancient times and cannot contribute to the "moral improvement" of humanity today.

A student of this scholar, Griesbach, makes a break with a tradition going back to the early church, by questioning 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 these three gospels (referred to as Synoptic Gospels since they view the life of Jesus from the same perspective). The fact that there are so many places where the Greek text of these three Gospels is identical requires a theory of literary dependence to explain it (if one does not believe in a theory of full verbal inspiration).

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.