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.
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.
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.
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[edit] Famous examples
[edit] Tanach
Also known as the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament.
- The Documentary Hypothesis that posits that the narratives of the Torah 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
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.
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).
[edit] New Testament
The Synoptic Gospels almost certainly used Q Document. That the Gospel of John used a hypothetical Signs Gospel is possible, but less agreed upon.
[edit] Qur'an
The Qur'an is arranged as an assortment of sermons, many of which contain narratives of prophets. Most of these stories are famous characters from the Bible such as Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. See Similarities between the Bible and the Qur'an. The rest of the stories are previously contained in Jewish and Christian folklore. See Legends and the Qur'an.
[edit] Criticism
Source criticism is potentially dangerous. Critics may create source texts where there are none by assuming that every similarity between two texts can never be coincidental.[citation needed]
For example, it appears obvious that the writer of the Gospel of John uses the same structure as Genesis 1:1 in John 1:1. In actuality, he does not. Christians have translated Genesis 1:1 purposefully in such a way to match John 1:1 in structure.[citation needed] In this case, in a sense, the apparent source text actually uses its counter text as a source.
The work of Carl Jung has done much to discredit what seem like obvious connections. Jung writes that all human minds have common archetypes that come out in our fictional stories and the way we interpret real world events.[citation needed] The Hero Archetype, for example, must die and resurrect. Thus humans view the world in patterns of death and resurrection. Thus the death and resurrection of the god Osiris is not necessarily the source of the death and resurrection of Jesus but both spring from subconscious archetypes.[citation needed] Joseph Campbell proved this by comparing extensively on various mythologies undeniable similar but impossibly distanced by space and time from each other.[citation needed]
Other criticism includes the following:
- Source criticism can be speculative. Scholars sometimes deduce hypothetical 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 practitioners of this method, religious readers with a commitment to the canonized form of the text often find this method religiously unhelpful.
