Source criticism

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Source Criticism is an aspect of historical criticism, a method of literary study used especially in the field of biblical criticism that seeks to understand a literary piece better by attempting to establish the sources used by the author and/or redactor who put the literary piece together. Sometimes biblical scholars use the term literary criticism as a synonym for source criticism.

In biblical studies, source criticism is tied to the historical-critical approach which is heavily historical in orientation. Source criticism has its origins in the attempt by historians to reconstruct biblical history. In general, the closer a source is to the event which it purports to describe, the more one can trust it to give an accurate description of what really happened. In the Bible where a variety of earlier sources have been quoted, the historian seeks to identify and date those sources used by biblical writers as the first step in evaluating their historical reliability.

Biblical writers at times mention the sources they used. Among the sources mentioned in the Hebrew Bible are: "The Book of the Acts of Solomon" (1 Kings 11:41), "The Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah" (1 Kings 14:29 and in a number of other places), "The Book of the Chronicles of the kings of Israel." (I Kings 14:19 and in a number of other places), "The Book of Jashar" (Josh 10:12-14, 2 Sam 1:18-27, and possibly to be restored via textual criticism to 1 Kings 8:12), and "The Book of the Wars of the LORD" (Num 21:14).

In other cases, Bible scholars use the way a text is written (changes in style, vocabulary, repetitions, and the like) to determine what sources may have been used by a biblical author. With some reasonable guesswork it is possible to deduce sources not identified as such (e.g., genealogies). Some inter-biblical sources can be determined by virtue of the fact that the source is still extant; e.g., where Chronicles quotes or retells the accounts of the books of Samuel and Kings.

An example of source criticism is found in the book of Ezra-Nehemiah (typically treated by biblical scholars as one book) where scholars identify four types of source material: letters to and from Persian officials, lists of things, the Ezra memoir (where Ezra speaks in first person), and the Nehemiah Memoir (where Nehemiah speaks in first person). It is thus deduced that the writer of Ezra-Nehemiah had access to these four kinds of source material in putting together his book.

Among the more famous or controversial examples of source criticism include:

• The Documentary Hypothesis that posits that the narratives of the Pentateuch consists primarily four sources labeled J, E, D, and P
• The division of the book of Isaiah into original Isaiah, Deutero-Isaiah, and Trito-Isaiah
• The identification of sources used by various writers of the Gospels (see the Synoptic Problem)

Criticism of source criticism include the following:

• Source criticism can be speculative. Scholars sometimes deduce hypotheticial sources that may have never actually existed.
• Source criticism is inadequate as a complete analysis of literature. Determination of the sources used by an author hardly exhausts the analysis of his or her literary artistry. Thus source criticism needs to be supplemented by other methods of analysis.
• Because of source criticism's emphasis on the prehistory of the biblical text over the text as received by Church and Synagogue, and because of the commitment to methodological or ontological naturalism by many of the practioneers of this method, religious readers with a commitment to the canonized form of the text often find this method religiously unhelpful.

Related to Source Criticism is Redaction Criticism which seeks to determine how and why the redactor (editor) put the sources together the way he did. Also related is form criticism and tradition history which try to reconstruct the oral prehistory behind the identified written sources.