Talk:Higher criticism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article is supported by WikiProject Bible, an attempt to promote the creation, maintainance, and improvement of articles dealing with the Bible. Please participate by editing this article, or visit the project page for more details on the projects.
|
|
| ??? | This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article. | |
 Archives |
| /Archive 1 |
[edit] Move proposal
Does anyone mind if I move this page back to Higher criticism? It was moved here last summer with no discussion I don't think, and an independent higher criticism article was started. However, now the two have been re-merged again, and this article is clearly discussing higher criticism. So I propose we move it back, at the very least to merge the page histories for GFDL purposes, but also because I believe the other title is more common. -Andrew c [talk] 14:14, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
-
- Suits me, there are many links to higher criticism, and it's a common term in histories. The present title is more long winded and less common. . . . dave souza, talk 15:29, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
- I have big problems with this page. It talks about an Old testament, but that's a Christian term - those books are actually Jewish in origin, and the order of the books in the Hebrew bible is not the same as in the Christian OT. As a result, the table has the Book of Ruth in the middle of what the Hebrew bible would call the Former Prophets. This in turn creates problems for the "modern scholarship" column - the former prophets make up, collectively, the Deuteronomic History, which modern scholars treat as a unit, but you can't do that with Ruth in the middle. And then (and worse), much of what the table says is simply wrong: the Deuteronomic History isn't thought to have been written by a Deuteronomic author, it's thought to have been composed (meaning edited together from older sources, plus some additions) by a school of like-minded Deuteronomists extending over centuries. I tried to correct some similar oversimplifications and ommissions in the Torah section, but on balance it the whole subject is too complex to be approached in this way (i.e., by a table). It would be better to delete the article. PiCo (talk) 13:43, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
-
- The article is about a significant historical school of bible study, and covers the points that the Christian theologians covered, in the relevant terms. If you've sources for a different approach to historical criticism that might be best suited to a separate article, or could be set out in suitable detail in a specific section of this article. .. dave souza, talk 15:29, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
-
-
-
- Historical criticism denotes contextual criticism, the endeavor to establish the authorship, date and place of composition of a text, as opposed to text criticism; Historical criticism is applicable to any text and needs to be treated in its own separate article, not a redirect to any particular little corner. "Higher criticism" is an excellent choice for this special material; it sounds just the right nineteenth-century tone. --Wetman (talk) 20:12, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
-
-
I still have problems with the article. The first few words are: "Historical criticism or Higher criticism..." In other words, it equates higher criticism with historical criticism. Given that "higher criticism"is the better-known term, why not use that for the title? Then it says"that higher/historical criticism "investigates the origins of a text, ... focus[ing] on the sources of a document to determine who wrote it, when it was written, and where." In my book that's a description of source criticism. The term "higher criticism" really belongs to the late 19th century, when it was the only academic game in town, but during the 20th century a whole new corpus of critical methods and objectives came into existence. Form criticism and tradition history brought new methodologies that the "higher criticism" had never heard of, while today you find feminist scholarship, liberation scholarship, and a whole host of other scholarships which have no interest at all in who, when and where, but focus instead on the meaning of the text. So in short, I find this article a duplication of the article about source criticism on level, and at another, quite misleading in that it treats "higher criticism" as if it were a term still relevant in the 21st century. It should be deleted, and any useful material moved to other articles. PiCo (talk) 04:48, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
- I have moved the article, merged page histories, archived and moved talk pages and so on. Hopefully everything worked fine and other users are happy with these changes.-Andrew c [talk] 15:16, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Deletion of canonical and other formns of criticism
I've deleted material dealing with a variety of critical forms and strategies which have no connection with historical criticism - canonical criticism, feminist criticism etc study the meaning of texts, not their origins.
There are so many other things wrong with this article I don't want to get into correcting them, but this is so egregious it just has to be done. PiCo (talk) 18:17, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
- And for the record. This content hasn't been completely deleted from wikipedia. It exists at Biblical Criticism. -Andrew c [talk] 21:45, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
