Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Bible Study

  • Source Criticism

    [Note, 3/25/06 — the original post was truncated due to a syntax error I made in the HTML. This is the corrected version.]

    (Continuing my series on Biblical criticism, from my last post From Criticism.)

    If Form Criticism can properly be called a “tree method” rather than a forest view, Source Criticism might be said to be a “grove method.” It looks at a broader swath of the text than Form Criticism, but still is not looking at the passage as a whole. To see the relationship between these various forms, look at my chart in the pamphlet What is Biblical Criticism?.

    Again, I must emphasize that this tool assumes certain stages of the text, that is a point in time when various literary elements were gathered together into larger documents, which were in turn gathered into the larger document that we have before us. In many cases this textual history will not be true. In a prophetic book such as Isaiah, for example, the prophet made certain proclamations of God’s word. These proclamations were then gathered into a larger document. It’s possible that there were a number of larger documents that were smaller than the final book of Isaiah (1-35, 36-39, 40-55, 56-66, for example), though in the case of Isaiah we discover these documents through literary study of the text itself.

    In Jeremiah, on the other hand, we have direct internal and external evidence of a process such as would be expected by Source Criticism, and so would be studied by this tool. In Jeremiah 36:4ff, Baruch receives some of Jeremiah’s prophetic oracles and writes them into a book. Note, in addition, that this copy of Jeremiah’s work was destroyed, and then was recreated (Jeremiah 36:32). The individual oracles that Jeremiah dictated would be of the general form of “prophetic oracles” (there are many types of prophetic oracle), and the document that Baruch wrote would constitute one of the source documents of the book of Jeremiah. How do I know this was not the actual book of Jeremiah as we have it today? Because Jeremiah ministered for some years after this incident (see 36:1-3 for dating), and we have a record of those incidents.

    Further evidence of sources in Jeremiah comes from the differences between the Septuagint and Masoretic text of the book. I’m not here discussing the differences in length between the two texts, but rather the position of the oracles about foreign nations, which is chapters 46-51 in the Masoretic Text, but is instead located at chapter 26 and following in the LXX. This is not proof that this is a source, but it strongly suggests that we have at least two sources in the book of Jeremiah, one the Baruch scroll, and the second a document containing prophetic oracles against the nations.

    In an earlier post I used the parable of the sower as an example of a parable that is attested in three gospels. Having the same form (parable) in three different larger documents helps us to study the nature of the form. The gospels are even more useful as an example of forms in action. There are blocks of text in Matthew, Mark, and Luke that show very close verbal parallels, suggesting some form of copying one from another. The question is what was copied, and who copied whom.

    These blocks involve text that is in all three synoptic gospels, some that is in Matthew and Luke, but not Mark, and some that is in Matthew or Luke, but not in any other gospel. The most common explanation for this phenomenon is known as the two source or two document hypothesis. This suggests that Matthew and Luke copied from Mark and an unknown source known as ‘Q’ for ‘Quelle’ which is German for ‘source.’

    You can identify various elements in this system using a gospel parallel. Where you find all three gospels in agreement, you are generally dealing with Markan material. When Luke and Matthew agree but Mark does not, you are dealing with Q material, when Matthew or Luke are alone in a reading, they are dealing either with their own independent material, or with further hypothetical sources ‘M’ or ‘L’. There are cases in which this loose equation doesn’t work, for example there are some elements of Q that appear in Mark, or there can be cases where only Luke or Matthew copy Mark. Note also that this is not the only theory of how the gospels were composed. (For related information see Understanding the Search for the Historical Jesus.)

    Careful source criticism is useful in understanding the history of the text and how it was composed. It can tell us about the people who were involved in creating the text. It is also a necessary adjunct to redaction criticism, which I will discuss in my next entry on this topic.

    There are a couple of dangers in source criticism, however. First, like all critical methods, it often must be based on limited evidence. Speculation added to speculation can get very doubtful. Second, there are cases in which Bible students conclude that they have solved a problem because they have identified the sources.

    As an example, Genesis 1:1-2:4a and Genesis 2:4b-25 are normally regarded as coming from two separate sources. There are differences in the way creation is described, and some potential issues in the order of creation. One response is simply to assume that they are different sources, and thus it’s no big deal that they tell a different story. But that is to miss an important element of interpretation. Even if you believe that the two passages come from different sources, someone seems to have thought they fit together. An interpreter must consider also what they mean when combined. Source criticism shouldn’t be used to shortcut a full exegesis of a passage.

  • Examples of Textual Issues in Translation

    One issue that is commonly neglected in comparing Bible translations is the text used. Translators are well aware that differences in translation can be the result of differences in the text used, but in modern times, the approach to the text used by most translations has been very similar, and thus tends to be ignored by non-professionals. One major distinction is between those translations that follow the Textus Receptus, and those that use a more modern, eclectic text in the New Testament. The NKJV is a good example of a modern translation that follows that text.

    But in discussing the RSV, ESV, and NRSV, I was reminded of another textual difference that is less well known: The attitude of the translators toward conjectural readings and readings in supported only by an ancient version or one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Typically, in translating the Hebrew scriptures, Christian translators have followed the Masoretic Text, the text printed in the vast majority of Hebrew Bibles, unless they find it impossible to translate the MT intelligibly. In that case they will look to the versions, the scrolls, or even to a conjectural emendation in some translations. The tendency in New Testament textual criticism, because a large amount of external evidence is available, is to study each variant and determine the best text, but this procedure has not yet carried over into Old Testament studies.

    (More conservative translations tend to produce more of a “conjectural translation” as opposed to a conjectural emendation. By “conjectural translation” I mean a translation that is simply one’s best guess at what a text may mean. In many cases, I find these translations no less questionable than a conjectural emendation. I will try to write a blog entry sometime soon on some examples of difficult texts in the Hebrew scriptures and how they are handled by various versions.)

    So a significant difference between translations may be their handling of the text, in particular the text of the Hebrew scriptures. I’m going to look at two examples, from two different translations. In each case, the particular text accepted is accepted only by the version cited amongst modern versions.

    The first is an added paragraph between 1 Samuel 10:27 and 11:1. In this case we have an explanatory paragraph that comes between Saul becoming king and the situation in Jabesh Gilead which is Saul’s first problem as the leader of Israel. The NRSV alone among the modern translations includes this paragraph as part of the text. It is noted in a footnote in both the NLT and the CEV.

    The paragraph reads:

    Now Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had been grievously oppressing the Gadites and the Reubenites. He would gouge out the right eye of each of them and would not grant Israel a deliverer. No one was left of the Israelites across the Jordan whose right eye Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had not gouged out. But there were seven thousand men who had escaped from the Ammonites and had entered Jabesh-gilead. (NRSV)

    In favor of adding this paragraph to our current text are the following:

    1. It is contained in 4QSama
    2. It could easily have been left out by haplography, with the scribe’s eye scanning from the first Nahash here to the second at the beginning of 11:1
    3. Its use by Josephus indicates that it was likely in the Greek text he was using
    4. Compared to 4QSama the MT is very short. Using both the LXX and this evidence, it is likely that there has been a considerable amount of haplography in the MT.

    Against adding this paragraph are the following:

    1. The external evidence for this reading is extremely weak
    2. The explanatory paragraph could well have been a marginal comment that was later incorporated into the text.
    3. The MT is generally the more carefully copied text type. (But note that it was probably not under that type of control when 4QSama was created.

    The NRSV shows its tendency here to be nearer the leading edge of modern scholarship than are other versions. I think in this case they made the correct choice, though I’m sympathetic to the considerations that probably led the NLT and CEV teams to place this additional text as a footnote.

    A second case involves the text of Isaiah in the Revised English Bible (REB) and the New American Bible (NAB). Isaiah 41:6-7 are transposed in that version to follow Isaiah 40:20. This is a correction supported by no external textual evidence at all. Presumably the change is based on a copying error involving miscopying part of a column, but the mechanism by which the change could occur is a bit obscure. It would have had to occur very early in the text.

    In favor of this change:

    1. The apparent logical structure of both chapters is corrected
    2. The presumption that an early error might have been made in copying columns

    Against the change:

    1. Complete absence of external evidence to support it
    2. Though the chapter logic is made smoother, it is a common style in Isaiah 40 and following chapters to intrude diatribes against idols into the flow. Following the author’s style, then, would seem to suggest that the passage would be acceptable in its current location.
    3. The process of copying that would result in the present text when starting with the presumed text is somewhat obscure.

    Here, though I like the REB generally, I think that the translators’ choice was not the best one.

  • Form Criticism

    We’ll begin our discussion of specific tools within the historical-critical method by looking at form criticism. I’m going to try to present this in a way that will be useful to lay students of the Bible, so note that I will be ignoring the more obscure forms and some technicalities of the method. The general outline I provide should help in the use of various critical commentaries. The key is to read critical judgments critically. (I would note that form criticism generally becomes less certain and therefore less useful in my view as it tries for greater and greater detail.)

    In my previous overview entry, I looked at the different phases of the production and transmission of a text, and showed that form criticism referred to the oral transmission stage. There was a time when I would have said that form criticism applied only when there was an oral stage of transmission, but more recent studies have shown that it can be applied to some texts that did not have an oral stage, such as epistles. There is a danger, however, of finding special oral forms everywhere just because one wants to apply form criticism. Watch out for this when you use critical commentaries.

    Form criticism is possible because in oral transmission and in some types of written transmission, particular types of material tend to take specific, repetitive forms. This is best illustrated in the beginning for children’s stories, “once upon a time.” Because these materials tend to take particular forms, we can discover something about their intended meaning and use from identifying the forms, and then comparing them to other material that displays the same form.

    In discussing the Parable of the Sower I mentioned the form only briefly, but now let’s look at some of the forms in the material that Jesus used. Parables, for example, could come in at least two types, the short, pithy comparison, or the illustrative story. The parable of the sower is of the second variety. So we would compare it in terms of form to parables such as the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, or other similar longer stories. This may not seem terribly profound, but it does lead us to ask just what differences there might be in interpretation of the two types of parables. For example, many interpreters (I’m one of them) will tell you to look for the one main point of a parable, and be very careful when trying to assign meaning to the details. But would there not be a difference in how one might understand the simple comparison and the longer illustrative story? Certainly there should be. The details of the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32; note that this is a good example on which to study the boundaries of the passage to be studied) are far more important to interpretation than the Pearl of Great Price (Matthew 13:45-46), for example.

    Most interpretation can be reduced to finding good questions to ask, and then looking for the answers. Often we look for answers in Bible study before we have considered our questions carefully. So what are the questions of form criticism?

    There are basically four three things we look for:

    1. The structural elements of the passage we are studying, which also involves finding the correct boundaries of the passage
    2. What type or genre is it?
    3. What is its setting and purpose?
    4. Compare and contrast to other similar passages.

    You may need to go through these elements a number of times. It’s convenient to start with someone else’s divisions of the text and someone else’s division of the forms into named types, but I would suggest trying to practice this yourself before simply accepting someone else’s division. You will find it especially helpful to reconsider your division of the text into individual passages after you have compared it to other similar passages.

    In the case of parables, I’ve already made some suggestions of types. But let’s look at another form–the proverb. This is a good early example to work with, because with the book of Proverbs we have many examples already laid out for us. Note, however, that not all of Proverbs consists of proverbs. Especially in the early chapters there are some other forms, such as the hymn to wisdom in chapter 8. But now consider some other examples of proverbs elsewhere in scripture.

    Ezekiel uses a proverb in Ezekiel 18:2, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are dull from grinding.”

    Now it’s very much in the form of a proverb. It’s a short, pithy saying that illustrates a point of common wisdom. What would it’s original setting be? We can imagine a situation in which children suffer for their parents’ actions, something that is not all that uncommon. This one is fairly easy. Ezekiel, on the other hand, is using it in another setting. He is using the form of a prophetic oracle. How do I know that? Well, the first clue is in verse one, when he says, “The word of YHWH came to me.” In his case, he’s using the proverb that was probably originally about the general human condition to discuss God’s action; God’s judgment is not going to fall on the children for what the parents did, but rather, God’s judgment will fall on the person who has committed the wrong. We can gain some understanding of the passage by realizing that this proverb was first an expression of an aspect of the human condition. It was probably first used by the Israelites to express how they felt that God was dealing with them, and then is reused in this oracle in Ezekiel to express how God was going to reverse that. The use of this one form in another can be considered an element of redaction, which I’ll discuss later.
    Now consider an instance in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. There he uses what is probably a proverb, “Nothing beyond what is written” (1 Corinthians 4:6). Now there is some question about the meaning here. Some would suggest that this is a call to use nothing outside of scripture. But considering when Paul wrote this, is it likely that Paul is saying to stick to written scripture? He’s still dealing with an oral form of the gospel message itself. So we can ask what might this parable have meant in its original setting. I’m going to suggest that there was a possibility that this is used as a statement about someone who is working entirely on material that has been passed on. It is not a compliment to someone who is sticking with the letter; it’s a criticism of someone who has nothing original to contribute.

    Paul is now bringing this to the Corinthians. Is it a criticism in his use? In one sense. He’s saying that the Corinthians have not (yet?) contributed anything to the message of the gospel, and yet they are acting as though they had created an original contribution and attained spiritual superiority. It would be like a student who presented a research paper consisting entirely of quotations, and then claimed to have accomplished original research.

    Let me conclude by listing some benefits of form criticism and some potential problems.

    Benefits:

    1. Gets us to look closely and in detail at a small portion of the text
    2. Encourages us to ask certain questions of the text
    3. Helps us discover other passages that we can use effectively in comparison
    4. Encourages us to discover, if possible, how a text has been used in various settings
    5. Helps us block off a subsection of text and to find its function in a larger passage

    Dangers:

    1. It’s a tree method rather than a forest method, i.e. it gets you to focus on a small portion of the text, and then often you won’t look more broadly. Avoid this by first surveying a larging scripture portion before looking at the individual passage.
    2. It tends to focus us back on the original setting and purpose of a passage. For example, the form critic is first interested in why a proverb or parable would have originated in oral use. It’s final use, such as by Ezekiel or Paul can be ignored. Avoid this by continuing your study after identifying and working with an individual passage as a form using other methods, especially using redaction, literary, and canonical criticism.

    The best way to build your skills with this type of criticism is to get good commentaries that include use of this methodology (most commentaries in the Old Testament Library or the Anchor Bible series do so, see my reader’s guides on Bible Study, Old Testament, New Testament, and Biblical criticism), then do your own work, and then compare that work to the results in the commentary.

  • Criticism Example: The Parable of the Sower

    The following chart is designed to allow persons who are not skilled in Greek to work with the parallel accounts of the parable of the sower, Matthew 13:1-9, Mark 4:1-9, and Luke 8:4-8. Notes cover very basic cocepts of textual criticism, form criticism, source criticism, and redaction criticism. In future entries I will expand on these issues and also discuss literary, tradition, genre and canonical criticism.

    As background, consult my pamphlet What is Biblical Criticism? which provides an extremely basic overview of the method. To that discussion, I need to add that not every portion of the general history of a document takes place with each document. For example, in the case of one of Paul’s letters, for example, there is no oral stage. In general, there are no sources, or sources provide only a very limited portion of the text. There are also no further redactions or editions of the text. Paul writes or dictates the letter, and then it is delivered. In this case form, source, and redaction criticism have very little to say. Sometimes scholars try to make use of these techniques on literature to which they are not well suited, and the results are not terribly helpful.

    If we limit ourselves to the limits of this single pericope (or short, defined scriptural passage), then most of our questions relate to form criticism. We are asking what the form of the parable is. A good way to think of this is to ask yourself what it was about this that told you it was a parable. In this case, it is labeled “parable.” But what if you just heard the starting point: “A sower went out to sow.” Would you still recognize it as a parable? Did Jesus very likely say, “I’m going to use a parable now?” So the phrase that introduces the parable, as well as the setting is part of the redaction, or a result of editing the text.

    To deal with sources we would have to look at more text. Within this parable, we can ask whether it is more likely that Mark was first, and Matthew and Luke copied from him, or was Matthew first? It would be a rather odd view these days, but logically one must consider whether Luke was first, and the others copied him. But in the passage in question, we see very little indication of who copied whom. Mark’s vocabulary and style is a little simpler, and Luke’s is more complex, but those changes could be made by any of the three.

    There’s a likely reason for this. On the assumption that Mark is first (which I might argue with, but I want to work with the consensus for right now), this parable is probably part of the ‘Q’ source. (Q is an abbreviation for German “Quelle” which means “source.”) This parable is also repeated in the Gospel of Thomas, verse 9, which provides support for the possibility that it was part of a sayings source. Note also that Thomas does not include either the setting (one would expect it not to) nor does it include the final “He who has ears, let him hear.”

    One major benefit of this sort of study is that it forces you to look in detail at every word and ask precisely how it fits into the intent of the author. Whether you agree with the work of any critical or scholar or not, that study cannot help but benefit you.

    The Parable of the Sower
    Matthew 13:1-9 Mark 4:1-9 Luke 8:4-8 Notes
    1On that day, when Jesus had gone out of the house, he sat beside the sea,2and large crowds came together to him,so that he into a boat embarked
    to sit.
    And all the crowd stood on the shore.    		 1And again he began to teach beside the sea,and a large crowd was coming to him,so that into a boat he embarked
    to sit on [in] the sea,
    and the whole crowd by the sea on the land were.    		 4Now a large crowd gathering, and people from various towns came together to him, Note that the setting of the story differs in Luke. One of the functions of form criticism is to find the boundaries of the orally transmitted unit. In the gospels, we are aided in this process by having the units embedded in three different documents that we can compare. In this case, Matthew and Mark place this parable in the context of Jesus teaching in a boat by the sea. Luke uses the same setting (Luke 5:1-3) but with different teaching.Redaction criticism then deals with the way in which the parable is used to express the theme of the particular book or document, while the individual differences in the story itself aid us in source criticism, as we ask the question of who, if anyone, copied from whom.In Matthew, compare verses 1 & 2 to verse 1 in Mark. There are manuscripts of Matthew and Mark that make them read alike in each of the cases. Why do we not accept the variants that make the two passages more similar? Besides the fact that they do not have the best text, scribes had a tendency to accommodate texts rather than differentiate them. See further discussion of textual criticism at my previous entry, Textual Criticism – Briefly.
    3And he spoke to them
    many things in parables saying,
    Look, one who sows went out to sow.
    4And while he was sowing,
    some [of the seeds] fell by the path,
    and when the birds came they consumed them [the seeds].    		 2And he taught them
    in parables many things and said to them in his teaching,3Listen! Look! Went out one who sows to sow.4And it happened in the sowing that some [seed] fell beside the path,and came the birds and ate it.    		 he said by means of a parable,
    5“Went out one who sows to sow his seed. Some feel beside the path and was trampled, and the birds of heaven ate it.    		 Now we get to the start of the parable. Just like “once upon a time” at the start of a children’s story “he spoke a parable” or something very similar begins the actual parable. There are frequent textual variants that accommodate the various passages.
    5But some, fell on the rocky grounds, where they did not have much dirt, and immediately sprouted leaves because they didn’t have deep dirt. 6But after the sun rose, they were scorched and because they did not have root, they withered.
    7But some others fell among the thorns, and when the thorns grew up they choked them.    		 5and other [seed] fell on the rocky where it did not have much dirt, and immediately it sprouted because it didn’t have deep dirt. 6And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and because it didn’t have root, it withered.
    7And other [seed] fell in the thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and fruit it didn’t bear.    		 6and other [seed] fell on the rock, and when it grew, it withered, because it didn’t have moisture. 7And other [seed] fell among the thorns, and the thorns grew together and choked it. Note that Luke has the shortest version and that there are minor grammatical differences between all three stories. These differences are to be expected in orally transmitted material.
    8But others fell on the good ground and bore fruit,
    some a hundredfold, some sixtyfold, and others thirtyfold.
    9Let the one who has ears hear.    		 8And other [seeds] fell into the good ground, and it gave fruit when it grew up, and got larger and bore one thirtyfold, and one sixtyfold, and one a hundredfold.9And he said, whoever has ears to hear, let him hear. 8And other [seed] fell into the good ground and when it grew it produced fruit a hundredfold.Having said these things, he called out: “Let the one who has ears to hear, hear!” All three parables end with the command for those with ears to listen, though Matthew leaves out “to hear.”Note that I do not include the interpretation of the parable as part of the unit. The parable itself is a unit used in teaching, and Jesus did not include the explanation in the original statement for it. In the gospels, the explanation is given very shortly afterward to the disciples. Many scholars believe that these longer explanations are the product of the early church, and were not part of the explicit teaching of Jesus.

    In future entries I will discuss the methods further and also bring examples from other texts, then eventually take a look at Isaiah 24-27 as a passage that can benefit from the work of form, source, redaction, and canonical criticism.

  • Textual Criticism – Briefly

    Note: This is a second excursus in my series on Biblical criticism. When I begin my next entry, dealing with the parable of the sower, I will begin by discussing textual issues and applying these principles.

    I was encouraged to make a few notes on textual criticism after I read the collection of essays The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research. This reminded me of some of the issues of textual criticism that tend to give non-scholars problems in reading the Bible.

    Non-scholars usually encounter textual criticism when there is a note in their Bible that says something like, “Other ancient authorities read . . .” or “mss . . .” followed by an alternate reading for a passage. Sometimes this starts with brackets being put around a block of text. John 7:53 through 8:11, for example, is bracketed in my NRSV Bible with the note “The most ancient authorities lack 7:53-8:11; . . .” The question many laypeople have is what are these ancient authorities, and why should they care?

    Textual criticism is simply the study of the various manuscripts, or witnesses, to the text of the Bible in order to determine the text that is closest to the autograph. “Manuscripts” here may include Greek manuscripts, lectionaries, quotes in church fathers, or versions in other ancient languages. For textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, some of the witnesses are different, as are some of the details of practice, but in general they are quite similar. In addition, many scholars are also interested in other stages of the text. They recognize that while we use the manuscripts to determine the original text, for the person who made the manuscript, and those who used it, that was their Bible. It wasn’t a stage leading to something else. They would use it as their scripture. We can learn something about them from the way that manuscript was made and copied.

    But for this entry, I’m focusing on how we work to discover the text closest to the autograph. First, no two ancient manuscripts are completely alike. Thus we must do textual criticism in some sense before we can have a Bible. We might just decide to grab one manuscript, presuming it’s complete, and use that one, but even that is a decision about the text. In practice, translators depend on textual critics, who produce editions of the text. An edition is basically a text produced by the editors’ best conclusions about the text of each passage. Usually, it will have a critical apparatus, which is simply a listing of the other variants, or options that could have been chosen.

    The textual critic is presented with two types of evidence:

    1. External evidence – the manuscripts, quotations, and so forth, that are available to him. From these he can get a picture of all the different readings for the passage he is working on.

    2. Internal evidence – the things that are likely to have happened in copying. We know from observing how people copy that certain errors are more likely. If copying is done by ear, with one person reading a manuscript, and the other writing down what he hears, similar sounding words may be confused. Letters that look similar can be confused when copying by eye, or the eye can skip over from one word to anther that looks much like it. This can result either in duplicating part of the text or in omitting part of it.

    There are some simple rules for this. In general, in evaluating external evidence, an older manuscript is better than a newer one, simply because it is likely that it has not been through as many generations of copying. You can see that a more precise rule would be to look for how many times a manuscript has been copied, i.e. how many generations it has been through. Unfortunately, we don’t usually know that for sure. On average, however, an older manuscript will have been through less generations.

    Internal evidence is more slippery. Here are some of the basic rules:

    a. Choose the more difficult reading, provided it is not nonsense. Basically, if a scribe corrected a passage, it was probably from something he did not understand to something he did.

    b. Choose the shorter reading. This is based on the notion that scribes generally tending to add rather than to omit. This has been called into question, however, by James R. Royse, “Scribal Tendencies in the Transmission of the Text of the New Testament” in The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research. He cites studies that have found that scribes tended to leave out more than they added. It would be easy to think this is more important than it is, but remember that each of these rules is simply one piece of evidence in the whole puzzle.

    c. Choose a reading that agrees with an author’s style. We know something about how Paul wrote. If a reading is substantially different, it might be an error.

    d. Choose the reading that best explains the others. One reading may create an error that another one corrects. The one that motivates the correction must be earlier than the correction.

    You can see that internal evidence is much more subjective, but it is often the only way to choose various readings.

    This is a very short introduction. I will comment further as I examine textual issues in the passages I use for examples in this series.

    For more information see my book What’s in a Version?. For more information specifically on textual criticism, see my review of The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research. In that review I link to some more basic volumes as well.

    [Updated January 18, 2015 to correct links to my book review of The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research.]

  • Dating the Book of Daniel

    Note: This is a small excursus in my series giving an overview of Biblical criticism. In this entry I want to apply some of the material I discussed about authorship and dating to the book of Daniel. Next, I will write an additional entry on methods of textual criticism in general, and then I will continue my overview of the method by working through the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:1-9/Mark 4:1-9/Luke 8:4-8) applying the methodologies I’ve been discussing. Then I’ll discuss the individual methodologies in a bit more detail, and then look at Isaiah 24-27 as a block to discuss how they are applied.

    In this entry I’m going to focus on the arguments as presented by Alexander Di Lella in the Anchor Bible volume The Book of Daniel. I intend to return to the book of Daniel a number of times as I discuss Biblical criticism and other issues of Biblical interpretation, and I expect to discuss dating further as well, but Di Lella makes an essentially conservative argument for the late dating of the book of Daniel. He is also a bit more respectful of arguments for an early date than are many critical scholars, though he does reject an early date unequivocally.

    If you are unacquainted with general issues of dating in Daniel, please read my entry Determining Date and Authorship, in which I discuss the basics of how a Biblical book would be dated, and also make reference specifically to the book of Daniel. There are two major views on dating Daniel, and several compromises between these views. First, there is the view that the book contains narrative history in its stories, and that it should be dated according to its internal chronology. This has generally been the conservative view of this book. This puts it in the 6th century BCE, and therefore sees the prophetic passages as definite and quite accurate predictions of the future. The second major view, which now has the overwhelming support of the scholarly community other than conservatives (and some conservatives as well) is that the book was written during or just before the time of Antiochus Epiphanes (175-164 BCE), king of Seleucia, and that the majority of the prophecy in it is retrospective rather than predictive. Depending on the details of dating and authorship in this second view, some of the final elements of each prophecy may be predictive in nature.

    Though I don’t intend to present my own views on Daniel at any length in this entry as I’m interested in methodology here, I will note that I would reject the idea that one can a priori reject the early date because such a date would involve predictive prophecy. Indeed Di Lella does not argue that the predictive element makes the early date impossible, though some scholars would. Norman Porteous, for example, in the Old Testament Library commentary Daniel, pages 169-170 comments on the point at which the book turns to genuine prophecy (in his view Daniel 11:21-45), in which he sees an inaccurate prediction of the death of Antiochus Epiphanes. Thus, the majority of the apparent predictions in the book, in his view, are accurate, but once we arrive at genuine prediction, it is inaccurate.

    Di Lella, on the other hand, makes the following statement: “. . . it should be emphasized that in no way at all does the argument presented above [which I will discuss below-HN] impugn or even call into question the sacredness, authority, and inerrancy of the Book of Daniel which are accepted here without question as truths of the Christian faith” (p. 54). Since I do not accept the doctrine of inerrancy, I have a hard time judging this, but this is the first commentary on Daniel that I have read that both affirms inerrancy and also a late date.

    Let me summarize the basic arguments, and then look at how they can be evaluated. Let me repeat that I’m not trying to present my own view on dating the book of Daniel, but rather a general set of arguments (using Di Lella in the Anchor Bible [AB] as model), and how they might be evaluated. I will present my own set of arguments in a future entry.

    1. Language – AB suggests imperial Aramaic, 700-200 BCE, and more specifically later than the Aramaic of the Elephantine Papyri (late 5th century BCE).

    2. Internal chronology – AB rejects the internal chronology of the book on the grounds that there are extensive historical errors that make it difficult to take seriously. The errors include the date of Daniel’s exile, which does not fit any known siege of Jerusalem, and actually comes a year before Nebuchadnezzar’s accession, the presence of the Median empire in the sequence of four empires in the book’s prophecies, the madness of Nebuchadnezzar for seven years (Daniel 4) for which there is no space available in the known history of Nebuchadnezzar. Di Lella would reject moving this to Nabonidus, who is known historically to have suffered a period of madness on the fascinating grounds of inerrancy; such a correction would save the outline of the story, but not the precise setting. Darius the Mede is not identifiable as an historical character, and thus the chronology related to his reign must also be rejected, along with the entire Median kingdom. It is precisely because of these historical errors that Di Lella rejects the sixth century dating. They convince him that the genre is not history, but rather edifying stories accompanied by apocalyptic.

    3. Externally, Daniel is quoted by I Maccabees (c. 100 BCE), but is not mentioned in the section of Ben Sira, on praise of the fathers (44:1-50:21) in which he mentions Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the minor prophets as a group, but not Daniel. This seems to comfortably bracket the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175-164).

    4. Given the interpretation AB espouses of the apocalyptic portions of the book, the predictions lead nicely into the time of Antiochus and end there.

    Now this short entry is getting rather long, but I do need to comment on some of the arguments.

    1. The language is an interesting argument, and in fact it first caught my attention as an argument in favor of an earlier date. Porteous (p. 13) describes the Aramaic as “late” and states it is not earlier than the 3rd century. (His copyright date is 1965.) The AB volume copyright date is 1978. Why is this significant? Because much evidence has been discovered since then, including the Genesis Apocryphon discovered amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls. Desmond Ford summarizes the linguistic evidence in his commentary (Daniel), pp. 31-33. That dating evidence is clearly in view in the AB comments on the language, which are much less precise, as they should be. (One of his major citations is Gleason Archer, in a book I do not have. I have it on request from interlibrary loan and will likely comment further once I have it in hand.)

    2. Internation chronology is much harder to deal with. I’m simply going to comment here that your understanding of the internal chronology is heavily dependent on your understanding of the prophecies of the book as a whole. For example, until I read Porteous’s commentary when I was in graduate school (1980), I was unacquainted with the view that the Median Empire formed part of the sequence of Daniel 2 & 7. Now that may be mostly an indication of my own ignorance, but it does show that one can’t assume that interpretation, and then use it for dating, without providing support. The AB does, indeed, provide support for that view, but before you accept the argument in terms of dating, make certain that you accept the arguments that underlie that point. In addition, note that a number of solutions to historical difficulties in Daniel are apparently excluded by Di Lella’s belief in inerrancy. For example, I’ve already noted the possibility of moving Daniel 4 to Nabonidus rather than Nebuchadnezzar. Is that a valid approach? That is another topic. Here I’m simply noting that it is a possibility that’s excluded.

    3. One should be concerned about the possibility of an argument from silence. But Di Lella is not guilty of such an argument here. That Ben Sira does not mention Daniel in his list is significant, in that it indicates that it may be possible that Ben Sira did not know of Daniel. If Ben Sira mentioned Daniel, of course, we could be certain that the book was extant at that time. As it is, the more convinced you are that Ben Sira was trying to be exhaustive in his list, the more likely you are to accept that passage as evidence that Ben Sira did not, in fact, know about Daniel. It cannot, however, prove it. Note that this does put some tension on the language evidence. The latest date for the language is suggested at 200 BCE, while Ben Sira wrote around 180 BCE. One option is to suppose that the author intentionally used archaic language.

    4. This point is contingent on interpretation. There will be some circularity here, as the interpretation also depends on the dating to a significant extent. The question will be how does it all fit together best?

    Again, let me remind you that I’m just outlining some material here. I will be more forthcoming about my own views in a later entry.

  • Translation and Interpretation

    Mike Sangrey has an excellent post on translation and interpretation on the Better Bibles blog, entitled, appropriately,
    Interpretation versus Translation — Competition or Teamwork?.This can be a very contentious issue, but the bottom line is that a translator cannot function without interpretation. Normally we complain about interpretations that we don’t like. Formal equivalence advocates like to leave the options open, but this is just a more subtle form of introducing the interpretation. Can you truly produce an English translation with precisely the same range of meanings as its original in Greek or Hebrew?

    A better plan for the serious student is either to learn the source languages, or to use multiple translations and read the footnotes. For translators, when there is substantial doubt as to the precise meaning to be expressed, footnotes are very valuable.

  • Determining Date and Authorship

    This is a continuation of my series on Biblical criticism that started with my post Overview of Biblical Criticism – I. You might think I would now continue with Overview II, but I’m not nearly that consistent. My next post will continue that line, but first I want to look at some caveats, and a couple of the most basic issues in examining an ancient document.

    One of the major difficulties that I see with Biblical scholarship in general and Biblical criticism in general is simply that conclusions are often presented very confidently without an adequate presentation of the facts and reasoning that produced that conclusion. This is overwhelmingly true in material written for popular use.

    I’m writing this series to try to help improve on this situation. While I cannot provide a graduate education in Biblical studies or Biblical criticism in a few blog entries, I believe I can point out some key elements of how conclusions are reached in those areas so that lay persons can judge what they read more effectively.

    Cautions:

    First, some general considerations.

    1. Don’t read just one introduction to a Bible book or one article on a topic. While some writers are quite good at summarizing all views and providing the arguments and evidence for them, those writers are rarely the ones who write for a popular audience, and if they do, time and space constraints make it difficult for them to truly cover the evidence.

    2. Choose your sources carefully. Make sure that you have material both that presents the argument from the point of view of your faith community, if any, and also something that argues a view that is substantially different.

    3. Don’t mistake confidence for accuracy. There’s the old story about the minister who wrote in the margin of his sermon notes, “Point weak, shout louder.” That’s true of scholars sometimes as well. I recall a book by a well-known Biblical critic of the 20th century. As I was reading the first couple of chapters about 60 or so years after he had written them, I noted that there was a great deal there that I would disagree with, that there was hardly anything there I would regard as “proven,” and that much of the material had not stood the test of time in scholarly consensus. At the start of the next chapter he said, “All of this is the assured result of scientific study.” (I paraphrase.) Beware of that attitude!

    Date and Authorship:

    No matter where we go with Biblical criticism, from studying whole sections of the Bible involving multiple books (such as Samuel/Kings, Chronicles/Ezra/Nehemiah) down to individual pericopae (such as a single parable), the question of who wrote it and when will come up. (We will also want to ask what it was written for, and to whom, but that goes beyond the scope of this post.) Any student of the Bible will encounter this type of question, as it is included in most introductions to Biblical books in study Bibles. But if you look at a variety of study Bibles you will find significant disagreements on these questions.

    How can one determine the date and authorship of a book? We generally divide the evidence into two categories, external and internal.

    External evidence includes a number of elements.

    1. References by other authors
      If another author makes reference to a work, that work must obviously have been written before the reference. In addition, in some cases the author may simply state when he believes the document was written. One must, of course, determine the reliability of the person making the reference. A good example of this is when Eusebius quotes Papias (c. 140 CE) regarding the authorship of the gospel of Mark. External references also apply to authorship.
    2. Manuscripts of the text
      Again obviously the document must have been written earlier than the earliest known manuscript of this. You may laugh at having this mentioned as a specific point, but the discovery of a tiny fragment of the gospel of John from about 125 CE forced many scholars to rethink their dating of the gospel into the mid to late 2nd century.
    3. Quotations of the text
      Clearly, the book must have been written before it can be quoted. This is not always a simple as it might seem, because in many cases there is a valid question as to who is quoting whom, and therefore is the later author. Ancient authors did not always specify the name of a person they were quoting, and also sometimes quoted very loosely or simply made allusion to a passage.
    4. Inclusions in collections
      Again, it’s clear that a book can’t be part of a collection before it’s actually available. This issue comes up in dating books of the Hebrew Bible, because it appears that in the Hebrew book order, the books were accepted as canonical in three portions–Torah, Prophets, and Writings. For Christian interpreters, this applies particularly to the book of Daniel, which is grouped with the major prophets in our English Bibles, alongside Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, but is included in the Writings in the Hebrew Bible. The Writings tend to contain later material. (More on Daniel below.)

    Internal evidence:

    1. Statements in the book itself
      When the book of Isaiah begins, “The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz which he saw in the which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah,” we get a pretty straightforward piece of evidence for authorship and date. Though there is some disagreement about the precise dates of the reigns of those kings, that variation is hardly significant to the issue at hand. (But see below.)
    2. Chronological statements in the book
      Here I’m talking about statements that go beyond the general prologue I quoted above. For example, Isaiah 6 begins, “In the year that King Uzziah died . . .” Daniel gives precise chronological information, though in his case the dating is nonetheless controversial.
    3. Allusions and references to events and persons
      In the case of Isaiah, this is one of the key issues that has produced the 2nd Isaiah theory. Between chapters 44 and 48, reference is made to the Persian King Cyrus, who was certainly not a contemporary of the kings listed earlier. Was Isaiah in fact prophesying the work of Cyrus that much in advance, or was part of the book written later. (I’ll be talking a bit more about this in an introduction to Isaiah I’m preparing to place on my Energion.com web site. I’ll make a short blog post when that introduction is completed.) Such references can be obscure in themselves, such as the reference to Darius in Daniel 6. Who is this guy?
    4. Language used
      This is tricky, because a document can be written in archaic language, but especially when it concerns technical terms, it can be helpful. Jacob Milgrom, in his 3 volume Anchor Bible Commentary on Leviticus, surveys technical terms from the temple and tabernacle in late Jewish literature, in Ezekiel, and in the Pentateuch, and shows that the priestly source for the Pentateuch must be dated before Ezekiel. Since Ezekiel’s date is fairly well established, that pushes the date back considerably from what critical scholars have been saying.
    5. Interests and priorities
      This is more general, but one can expect a writer who is very interested in war to have written in either a time of war or when war was threatened. If the writer talks about a time of peace and complacency, he may be writing in an era when those were problems. This is very general, but if you have other indicators, it can help make the result more precise.

    In determining authorship, in addition to these items, one must consider the style of writing. This is a process of comparing material that is known to be by the author in question with items that are in dispute. One must be very careful of such arguments, however, because they often depend on assumptions about the topic and surrounding history. For example, in arguing that Jesus did not make certain statements about the end of the world, some scholars depend on the assumption that he must be either a wisdom teacher or an eschatalogical preacher, but not both. That assumption may or may not be valid, but it is often made implicitly and accepted without due consideration. In arguing that the pastoral epistles must be written by a disciple of Paul and attributed to him, scholars work with an assumption of how the church developed (things in the pastoral epistles reflect a more developed church structure than existed in the time of Paul), and also an assumption of how much Paul’s own interests can changes as circumstances develop. Again, these may be valid assumptions, but they need to be considered and accepted or rejected consciously.

    These are just the bare basics, but I will touch on many of these topics more as I continue this series on Biblical criticism.

  • The Bible and Theistic Evolution

    Previously I’ve discussed young earth creationism, old earth creationism, and ruin and restoration creationism.  That brings us to theistic evolution, or I could say theistic evolutionary creationism.

    Though theistic evolutionists may have varying beliefs regard to the nature of God, in general, they see God as the source of all existence in one way or another.  Evolution is simply a process which diversifies life in the universe, as much a product of God’s activity as any other natural process such as gravity or a chemical reaction.  In Christianity, theistic evolutionists can be found in most of the major theological streams.  There are people who believe in Biblical inerrancy and nonetheless are theistic evolutionists.

    Also, there is generally no difference between the scientific understanding of theistic and non-theistic evolutionists.  They will generally see very different philosophical frameworks for the events that they study, but the events themselves, and the properly scientific framework for them are the same.  In terms of science, all three of the other views I have discussed involved some debate over what may be regarded as natural processes, and some expectation of an identifiable intervention by God in the natural world.  While a theistic evolutionist can believe that God can intervene (I do, for example), in general he or she will not regard such intervention as a proper subject for scientific study, because it will not be repeatable.

    To the Biblical literalist, there is nothing about theistic evolution that would commend itself.  It is not compatible with a literal reading of the first 11 chapters of Genesis.  This is one area of debate that can become unnecessarily heated.  When a literalist tells a non-literalist that he is “abandoning the Bible” in accepting evolution, what he really means is that the evolutionist is abandoning a literal reading of the Bible.  For many Biblical literalists, the literal reading is the only possible one, and thus the two are equivalent, but it is important to note that for many, many Biblical scholars, there is no such bias.

    Old earth creationists read Genesis less literally than do young earth creationists.  In particular, they interpret the days of Genesis 1 as symbolic of substantially longer time periods, and take the descriptions of the individual days as much more general looks at what happened over that period of time.  While this approach does not take the passages literally, it does take them as historical in some sense.  The old earth creationist does not take the genealogies of Genesis 5 & 11 as complete literal history, but they do take the individuals as historical people, and simply assume that there are significant gaps in the lists.

    For the theistic evolutionist, Genesis 1-11 is not to be taken literally at all.  There may be historical events behind some of the stories, but the purpose of those chapters is not to convey literal history.  What they do is present God’s activity and his relationship to the universe in terms that would have been comprehensible to the people who first heard and then read them.  It may be possible that people described in the genealogies were historical people, but that is not the primary question.  The line of connections drawn between the first human being and Abraham, and then from Abraham to the chosen people is the key factor, irrespective of historical details.

    This understanding is anathema to Biblical literalists, and makes many Biblical moderates uncomfortable, but it is really an application of a very sound Biblical principle:  Take what is intended literally as literal and what is intended figuratively as figurative.  In this case, one needs to look at the principles, i.e. the message that was encapsulated in these stories that goes beyond the common background material.  If one studies the cosmology of the ancient near east and the literature written about it, one will find that it is very compatible with the language of the Bible.  The stories and the events are substantially different, because the Bible is teaching monotheism, and the one God it teaches is very different from the pagan gods.  But the Bible does not try to change the basic idea of the earth that is round like a dinner plate, floating on the sea beneath with the vault of heaven stretched above it.  (See my articles Genesis Creation Stories – Form, Structure, and Relationship, The Two Genesis Flood Stories, and Psalm 104:  God, Creator and Sustainer.

    Understanding the part of the message that is timeless is really quite simple.  Remove the common elements, and what is newly introduced is the important part, or more precisely they constitute the message that God intends to convey.  This is why one can truly believe in Biblical inerrancy (I don’t, read my statement), and yet accept this figurative view, because according to the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, what must be understood to be inerrant is the message that the Bible intends to convey, and also allows that the message can be presented through the cultural background of those who write.

    A Christian theistic evolutionist (and theistic evolutionists are by no means all Christians) does not seek scientific knowledge in the Bible.  He will seek God’s message and an understanding of how God works with people and interacts with the created universe in a spiritual sense.

    This rather extreme difference in the way the camps understand the scriptures is one of the elements that makes creation-evolution debates so very heated.  To a convinced young earth creationist, even an old earth creationist has stepped outside of the scriptural foundations of the faith.  It is not just a matter of disagreement on a minor point of doctrine.  It is a fundamental difference in the foundation of the faith.

    But if the various members of the camps would recognize just where the disagreement lies, that it is in how they understand scripture, it might be easier at least to debate the same thing.  For those who regard the Bible as authoritative, the difference between the camps can be as simple as the answer to the two questions:  1)  Must I always take the Bible literally, and 2) How can I tell?

     

  • Ruin and Restoration Creationism

    In two previous entries I’ve discussed young earth creationism and old earth creationism. Continuing with this series on how various groups of Christians understand origins, I will now discuss the ruin and restoration theory.

    I have previously mentioned this theory in the pmaphlet God the Creator and in my review of the book The Invisible War by Donald Grey Barnhouse. I discuss some of the translation issues involved in my translation and notes on the creation story.

    The ruin and restoration theory holds that the current creation is one of a series. Most advocates would hold that there was one creation, then a destruction, and then recreation, though some allow there may be a number that we don’t know about. The key basis for this doctrine is a translation of one word in Genesis 1:2, the Hebrew word which practically all translations render “was.” The Hebrew word here is “hayah” which is the perfect (suffix) form of the Hebrew verb “hayah” which means “happen,” “become,” or “was” in most cases. Advocates of the ruin and restoration theory argue that it should be translated “became” here rather than “was” and they point to the huge number of cases in which this verb is translated in that way throughout the Bible. The difficulty with this argument is that it ignores the syntax of the passage. The vast majority of the uses of this verb are also used with a different syntax. If one limits one’s study to those uses in which the syntax is similar to what it is in this verse, the statistics look much different.

    Advocates of this view also bring Isaiah 45:18 and Jeremiah 4:23-26 as descriptions of the destroyed world. Such interpretations ignore the use of figurative language. Advocates of this view take these particular verses very literally. Both are part of an existing prophetic oracle with a very specific application at a time that is now past, but easily identifiable. An interpreter would need to establish a strong contextual basis for applying these verses to a different time than is clearly the referrent of the passage of which they are part.

    What are the advantages of this view? Basically one can hold that the earth is old, which eliminates some of the clearest difficulties of the young earth view. Like old earth creation and theistic evolution, this view also allows for death prior to the creation story. In fact, it allows pretty complete destruction of life on the planet prior to the current creation. At the same time, advocates can take Genesis 1-3 absolutely literally, as long as the one translation change in Genesis 1:2 is allowed.

    The disadvantages include the need to explain the recent date of the flood as determined from the genealogies of Genesis 1 & 11. One either has to assume gaps in these genealogies as do old earth creationists, in which case one may be accused of not constructing the text strictly enough, or one must deal with all of the archeological problems that a late date (24th century BCE) for the flood produces. In addition, the interpretation required for the texts in Isaiah 45:18 and Jeremiah 4:23-26 are very difficult to sustain.

    This position is largely held by those who accept dispensationalism as a system of interpretation. It is a minority position, but is nonetheless held by a substantial number of Christians, and should be given considerations.