Historical-critical method

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The Historical Critical Method is a broad term that includes numerous methodologies and strategies for understanding ancient manuscripts. Historical Criticism is divided into two main branches: Lower or Textual Criticism and Higher Criticism.

1 Lower criticism
2 Higher Criticism
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Lower criticism

None of the original books of the New Testament have survived to modern times. All that exists are copies of these original documents. Since they often do not match, Lower Criticism was developed to find what the original looked like.

For example, Josephus employed scribes to copy his Antiquities of the Jews. As the scribes copied the Antiquities, they made mistakes. The copies of these copies also had the mistakes. Each generation of copies contained errors, but not necessarily more than the previous generation as errors would be fixed when caught by scribes.

When an error consists of something being left out, it is called a deletion. When something was added, it is called an interpolation.

Today, none of Josephus' original work survives, but different families of texts have survived. Lower Criticism studies these surviving families, particularly the differences among them. Scholars are then able to piece together what the original looked like. The more surviving copies, the more accurately they can piece together the original. Lower Criticism is applied to understanding the source documents of the Historical Jesus.

[edit] Higher Criticism

Once Lower Critics have done their job and we have a good idea of what the original text looked like, Higher Critics can then compare this text with the writing of other authors.

Scholars try to understand whether the author is an eyewitness to Jesus, or whether he is basing his work on primary or even secondary sources. They also try to understand the bias of the writer, which will give us hints to why he focuses on one aspect of Jesus' life but omits another.

An example of Higher Criticism at work would be the study of the Synoptic problem. Higher Critics noticed that the three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, were very similar, indeed, at times identical. The dominant theory to account for the duplication is called the two-source hypothesis . It suggests that both Matthew and Luke relied on two different sources: Mark and the hypothetical sayings document Q.

Today, most Higher Critical Scholars believe that Luke edited three sources: Mark, the Q document, and Proto-Luke into the Canonical Lukean Gospel. They do not agree on the nature of Proto-Luke