The Critique of Religion Also Begins with the Critique of the Bible

Since Reverend Doctors now declare That clerks and people must prepare

To doubt if Adam ever were; To hold the flood a local scare . . . That David was no giant-slayer . . . And Joshua's triumphs, Job's despair . . . And Daniel and the den affair, And other stories rich and rare, Were writ to make old doctrine wear Something of a romantic air. . .

Since thus they hint, nor turn a hair, All churchgoing will I forswear, And sit on Sundays in my chair, And read that moderate man Voltaire.

-Thomas Hardy, "The Respectable Burgher, On 'The Higher Criticism' "

The Bible's New Readers: Skeptics and Seekers

What the search for natural religion should, in part, teach us is how religion became a problem because of the imagination, curiosity, and courage of both believing as well as skeptical individuals, like the “deists” Jean Bodin, Herbert of Cherbury, John Locke, and their chief skeptical critic, David Hume. In attempting to respond to the tumultuous political and religious crises of their times, Bodin and Herbert sought to devise a view of the nature of religion that would offer an alternative to the proud assertion of religious particularity that they thought instigated the interreligious strife in their day. For a certain class of unimaginative believer, it was typically considered impious and even blasphemous to employ everyday reasoning to treat the sacred subject of religious truth. While it was becoming acceptable in the seventeenth century to apply God-given reason to politics, jurisprudence, diplomacy, science, and common human affairs, such reason was thought somehow inappropriate for application to the equally God-given domain of religion! But, in full confidence that reason itself was a divine endowment, the deists went boldly ahead and brought God-given reason to bear on questions concerning religion. In doing so, in principle, they brought religion into the arena of shared human knowledge for the first time in the West.

In forging ahead into this unknown territory, bolstered in part by their confidence in the divine origins of reason itself, the early naturalists not only opened up a veritable Pandora's Box of questions, but also took steps to answer at least some of them in the form of the idea of Natural Religion. For them, human experience, rational argument, and historical data became the bases for evidence as to the nature of Natural Religion. Natural facts, then, became the bases for agreement about what we can say and what we can know about religious claims, at least in a minimal sense. At a certain point in the intellectual history of the West, giving an account of religious life in terms of facts, common to human experience, became a basis for talking about religion – at least by certain critical thinkers. Of course, many religious believers continued as they always had, relying from case to case upon strictly religious forms of discourse. They thus continued to justify their views about religion based upon their personal religious experiences, dreams, visions, and such, or grounded in both scriptural and ecclesiastical authority. But the emergence of thinkers like Bodin and Herbert as well as empiricists and skeptics like John Locke and David Hume, meant that a new – naturalistic – approach to fundamental religious issues could be said to have first seen the light of day by the end of the eighteenth century. The ‘deists,’ and of course their critics, such as David Hume, can be said then to have been the first to put ‘religion’ into play as a subject of rational, naturalistic inquiry.

The ‘deist’ breakthrough into the naturalistic study of religion, tempered as it was by Hume’s hostile skeptical critique, brings us to the subject of the present chapter – the significance for the study of religion of the rise of the critical study of the Bible. (I shall adopt the convention of calling the new methods of criticism of biblical texts ‘Higher Criticism,’ a term that properly came into prominence during the last third of the nineteenth century.) The ‘deists’ and skeptics contributed to the rise of the historical-critical study of the Bible primarily by means of encouraging an entire range of naturalistic studies in the humanities – of sciences of philology, history, and the study of ancient literatures. In addition to their support of scientific approaches to religion, the ‘deists’ also gave impetus to the art of interpreting these documents: “hermeneutics” (Byrne 1989, p. 94). In theory, therefore, the ‘deists,’ skeptics, and Higher Critics of the Bible all shared the conviction that the Bible could and should be scrutinized like any other piece of literature – in a rational, empirical, that is to say, naturalistic way, all the while recalling the ‘deist’ sense of human reason as a divine endowment. It was left to people trained to do this kind of critical work to fulfill the implications of the deist critique of religion.

If opposition or suspicion dogged deist attempts to apply critical tools to the religions, biblical criticism itself has known controversy from the start – and for good reason. While historical inquiry may have grown out of a pious desire to deepen knowledge of the scriptures, for some religious folk the application of historical analysis to sacred texts seemed impious. Even when it was not immediately considered to upset ordinary expectations about the nature and content of the Bible, critical study of the Bible promised reorientation of entrenched views among Western religious folk. Of this impact of historical critical methods of Bible study, the historian Van Harvey notes that the great modern theologian Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) “discerned that the development of this method constituted one of the great advances in human thought; indeed, that it presupposed a revolution in the consciousness of Western man” (Harvey 1966, pp. 3–4). Some defenders of unexamined understandings of the sacrosanct character of the Bible would even describe the results of historical criticism of the Bible as “traumatic” (ibid.). Still others felt that the “method itself . . . was based on assumptions quite irreconcilable with traditional belief.” Supernaturalism, miracles, Christian uniqueness, reliance on faith as a fundamental basis for life – all these came into question with the advent of the kind of methods the leaders of this revolution brought forward (Harvey 1966, p. 5). Such prophecies would, naturally enough, often come true. One of the most radical of biblical critics, David Friedrich Strauss, fell by the wayside. His adoption of historical critical methods eventuated in his own slide into heresy. Although Strauss began by promising only strict historical criticism, he ended being a proponent of a religion of humanity (Harvey 1966, p. 7).

But, as in the quest for Natural Religion, critics like Strauss did not monopolize the field and drive out the believers, nor do they today. Higher Criticism of the Bible had as many, if not more, of its Herberts and Bodins as it had of its Humes. More typical of the spirit of biblical criticism than Strauss were liberal Protestants who saw critical historical study of the Bible as an aid to more mature religious conviction. Thus, William Robertson Smith, himself a student of Julius Wellhausen, one of the Higher Critics of the Bible to be discussed later, affirmed the Christian virtues implicit in taking the critical scientific and historical path:

The higher criticism does not mean negative criticism. It means the fair and honest looking at the Bible as a historical record, and the effort everywhere to reach the real meaning and historical setting, not of individual passages of the Scripture, but of the Scripture Records as a whole; and to do this we must apply the same principle that the Reformation applied to detail Exegesis. We must let the Bible speak for itself. Our notions of the origin, the purpose, the character of the Scripture books must be drawn, not from vain traditions, but from a historical study of the books themselves. (Smith 1912, p. 233)

Despite his religious optimism, Robertson Smith was hardly blind to the potentially upsetting impact of the critical work of a Strauss: “The science of Biblical Criticism has not escaped the fate of every science which takes topics of general human interest for its subject matter, and advances theories destructive of current views on things with which everyone is familiar and in which everyone has some practical concern” (Smith 1881, p. 1). “In this process the occasional destruction of some traditional opinion is a mere incident....the historical critic must destroy the received view, in order to establish a true one” (Smith 1881, pp. 24, 25). But this shaking of the received religious foundations is no reason for a daring religious soul to draw back from the challenges science presents:

We must not be afraid of the human side of Scripture. It is from that side alone that scholarship can get at any Biblical question....In this department of intellectual life science and faith have joined bands. There is no discordance between the religious and the scholarly method of study. They lead to the same goal; and the more closely our study fulfils the demands of historical scholarship, the more fully will it correspond with our religious needs. (Smith 1881, p. 27)

Such, at any rate, was an outline of Robertson Smith's progressive Christian resolution of the problem of the relation between criticism and biblical piety. It is one that continues to inform the spirit of contemporary Higher Criticism of the Bible today as well. Of course this is not to claim that all biblical critics shared Robertson Smith's progressive Christian vision. Skeptics like Renan felt little desire to celebrate the supernaturalistic elements in biblical narratives, nor did those like Strauss resist the opportunity critical study of the Bible provided to launch their own post-Christian theological agenda. Each critic will have to be taken on their own terms.

Representing the Sacred: Why Biblical Words Matter More than Sacred Images

Before engaging the major protagonists of Higher Criticism of the Bible, it is worth dwelling on the deeper reasons why critical examination of biblical texts made a disproportionately greater impact upon Christian self-consciousness at all! Why, for example, did not critical examination of other religious media, such as visual and graphic representations, stir as much controversy, create as many problems of religion? Why should disputes among the faithful about the reading the biblical narrative differ so much from those regarding the 'reading' of iconographic representations of Jesus? Why has criticism of the Bible caused such an extraordinary amount of acrimony and ill-will, while Christians – the iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries for the moment excluded – at any rate, seem rather free and easy about how Jesus, for instance, is represented in visual or plastic form (Pelikan 1974, ch. 3)? (See figure 2.1.)

The reason for this asymmetry between feelings about these religious media needs to be traced back to a radical shift in the way the Bible was read in the course of the history of Christianity. Reading the Bible exclusively in a literal way – as being a document that was assumed to correspond to a state of affairs in the world as well as in eternity – came rather relatively late. For over a thousand years, the Bible had been read in numerous ways. In fact, the most prominent way of reading the Bible before the Protestant Reformation was as allegory or symbol – and not only literally. For Christians for over a thousand years before the Reformation, God had graciously provided humanity with two ‘books,’ as it were. God had given people knowledge of himself both through the book known as ‘the Bible,’ but also through the ‘book of nature.’ Seeing God’s creation – nature – as revealing the creator meant that the entire ‘natural’ (really on this view a world suffused with the supernatural as well) world spoke to pious Christians in various and sundry ways. Everything, no matter how humble and useless to human purposes, revealed the divine purpose. Everything bore the mark of its divine origins. Everything was a symbol of some, often quite small, part of the divine plan. “Animals,” for example, as historian Peter Harrison tells us, “had a ‘story.’ They were allocated meanings, they were emblems of important moral and theological truths, and like the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt they were to be thought of as the characters of an intelligible language” (Harrison 1998, p. 2). Similarly, alongside the handiwork of the divine author of nature – the ‘book of nature’ – the biblical book was as well a source of powerful sacred meanings, evidence of hidden divine codes and symbols of divinity. To wit, the Bible was not always, nor perhaps even principally, taken literally. Christians of the first thousand years of the history of the church did not, therefore, see the Bible as some kind of protoscientific or historical text.

Figure 2.1. Jesus depicted as Greco-Roman god on the tympanum over the main entry to the Church of the Madeleine, Paris (1807–45) Source: Church of the Madeleine, Paris.

The Book of Genesis was revelation of God's power, majesty, and love, not an early version of today's high-school biology textbooks! It was instead a religious document – a powerful source of revelation of the wisdom and beneficence of God's sustaining power and love for humanity.

Not to be disrespectful in any way to believers, I would hazard a comparison of the way the Bible was read in those early centuries of the Christian movement with media that today might be said to reveal truths about life to people today. One might liken this pre-Reformation way of reading the Bible to the way, say, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is read – or 'watched' in our modern cinemas. Without doubt the world of Middle Earth, Mordor, the Marches, and such are depicted, in Tolkien's books and in the film versions of them, as highly realistic and concrete. We are shown maps of that world, plans of how difficult it will be for our heroes to penetrate the redoubt of Mordor and destroy the ring. Not only that, but Tolkien provides an elaborate history explaining the evolution of the world's many humanoid peoples – Elves, Fairies, Hobbits, Orcs, Nazgul, Wizards, Men – into the world we inhabit, sadly depleted of wondrous beings such as Elves, Hobbits, and such, but happily free of Orcs and their ilk. Part of the joy of reading/watching the Lord of the Rings comes precisely from the credible details of a lost world that Tolkien provides.

But I would suggest that the putative historicity, so to speak, of the Tolkien books is only part of the reason for their hold on the good-hearted spiritual imaginations of modern readers. No modern reader – or at least very, very few – believe that these books are to be read, indeed ought to be read, literally. But, what matters here for our comparison with reading the Bible literally is that the lack of real historicity of the Tolkien books in no way depletes their value – indeed, their religious or spiritual value. What is paramount for readers of the Tolkien books is their symbolic or allegorical meaning, and not whether, say, Orcs, Gandalf, or Frodo really lived in historical time or whether Middle Earth, the Shire, or Mordor can be found on any automobile club map, or unearthed by some enterprising archeologist. Thus, whether the Ring trilogy recounts actual occurrences in actual places in history – whether it is literally true or not – means nothing for the spiritual or religious impact of the Tolkien books. It makes no difference that Frodo does not ‘live.’ What matters to readers is what the Ring trilogy, its key characters, struggles – both internal and external – and such, mean. To any attentive reader or viewer, it seems clear that the many struggles depicted in the Tolkien books present edifying spiritual virtues at work or under threat – values like courage, faithfulness, honesty, love, honor, kindness, affection, steadfastness in the face of evil, and so on. What is the point of the common graffiti like “Frodo lives!”? Ironically, although posed as a claim about someone’s really being alive, it is itself a clearly meant to be read as a symbolic statement – just like pre-Reformation allegorical or symbolic readings of the Bible. A graffiti artist who thought they were declaring a fact that could even qualify as historical would surely have misfired. And viewers would have missed the point entirely of such a graffiti, if they as well thought that Frodo could have had an actual historical existence that could be asserted! Furthermore, they would have missed the whole point of the way Tolkien wanted his books to be read if the historicity of Frodo mattered to the real meaning of his books. One might just as well pack the detailed maps of Middle Earth packaged in the Lord of the Rings on one’s next road trip across the United States, or along the borders of England and Wales!

It is revealing, therefore, that iconic representations of Jesus, for example, have been commonly accepted by Christians as not needing to conform to the actual (historical) way that Jesus looked. Indeed, we do not know with any degree of certainty how Jesus looked – just what some skeptics of the New Testament's recording Jesus' exact utterance would say as well. Rather, without loss of their sacred character, graphic representations of Jesus have typically been seen as symbols of various Christian truths. Jesus' solidarity with humanity is exemplified in biographical scenes, such as the nativity, not the precise historical details of a stable and manger of the first century! The range of graphic representation of Jesus has, as well, been fairly broad across the centuries of Christian history, indicating a spirit far from the literalism that can attach to the biblical narrative. When the earliest Christians rendered their understanding of Jesus pictorially, they often did so to represent their savior to the world and to themselves in sometimes abstract symbols of new life and resurrection – in emblems declaring Jesus' conquest of death. Jesus as cosmic divinity is also evident in the powerful Pantokrator and world-ruler images from the great western European cathedrals or Eastern orthodox icons of Christ in glory.

Evidently, there is much theology and straightforward religious instruction, and of a good broad range of it as well, occurring in the way Jesus has been represented in visual terms. What I want to underline is how relatively little controversy this wide range of representation has provoked. I do not say no controversy, since Christians have disagreed on a number of ways in which Jesus has been represented visually, such as with the Iconoclast Controversy in the eighth century. In this light, it is hard to evaluate why the catacomb art of the early Christians represented Jesus in abstract cryptic symbols and codes, rather than in more graphic representations of the image of Jesus and the saints.

The abstract representations of early Christianity included such symbols as, for example, the Greek letters, χρ (chi rho), usually laid one over another indicating the first two letter of the Greek word, “Christos.” Or the earliest Christians would indicate Jesus by the sign of the fish – the “Ichthos” – a coded form of the pious declaration, “Jesus Christ, Son of God,” where the “I” stood for the Greek form of Jesus (Iesu), the “ch” for “Christos,” and the “thos” for the Greek word for God, “theos.” Beyond these examples, the earliest Christians freely shared and declared other dimensions of their young faith in Jesus, such as that found in the baptistery of Dura Europos, where Jesus is depicted as the Good Shepherd or Man of Wisdom, and so on. Thus was abstraction rooted in some sort of theological position, much as it is in Islam’s interdiction against depicting living animal forms. Did the Iconoclast movement of the eighth century somehow pick up this strand of early Christian piety by trying to outlaw any visual representation of religious subjects at all? We do not know. There are also controversies surrounding presentation of what today may be the most prominent image of Jesus – the crucified, suffering, dying lord. There are, for example, no Christian representations of the crucifixion of Jesus for the first 400 years of Christian history! Reacting to Roman Catholic emphasis upon depicting suffering Christ, the Protestant Reformers stood against its depiction, preferring instead the symbol of the empty cross to signify the centrality of the resurrection over the passion.

What one wants to take from this brief treatment of representations of Jesus is that in our times – at least ever since the Reformations, both Protestant and Catholic – the status of the literal biblical narrative has become a heated issue, in a way that visual depiction has not. Instead, a swarm of problems has settled round the nature of the biblical narrative. To what extent is the Bible like or unlike competing genres of narrative form, such as 'history' on the one hand, and 'myth' on the other? Here is where our controversies about representing Jesus cluster. By the early nineteenth century, the level of controversy rose so high as to provoke another one of those 'problems of religion' around which the study of religion has been constructed. When it came to literary or putatively historical representations of Jesus, it became controversial indeed how Jesus would be rendered in narrative, how his presence there would be interpreted in texts and documents such as the Bible.

"Frodo Lives!": Myth, History, and Mystery

The Jesus of the gospel narrative then became controversial because of the post-Reformation dominance of literal readings of the Bible. Literal readings were powerful for all sorts of reasons, not least of which was the superficial similarity of some of them to literary modes, like 'history,' which was at the same time enjoying an increasing prestige. But unlike allegorical or symbolic readings of the Bible, reading it literally also put it at risk of conflict with other kinds of narratives purporting to give a different or contrary account of the same events narrated in the Bible. These accounts are what we may call 'history.' On the one hand, if one read the Bible literally, one also ran the risk of too close a resemblance to other narratives, like 'myth.' These were but two of the most prominent genres for classifying ancient documents such as the Bible that occurred to those trying to understand the nature of the biblical narrative.

Concomitant with the rise of the historical sciences were, as well, their ancillary 'sciences' – the comparative philological and literary sciences directed at writing ancient history. (The same kind of conflict arises, incidentally, for alternative accounts of the 'book of nature' – what we may call 'science' or, in its original terminology, 'natural philosophy.') As for the alternatives of 'history' and 'myth,' the status of the Bible was thrown into controversy as the literatures of the ancient world came to be uncovered and published. Just to take one small example, it might be thought that the classic deities, Attis or Cybele, as depicted in the mythologies of the ancient world, were not actual historical persons. We might call them 'fictional' or 'mythical' creations, but ones that were nonetheless religious and redolent with powerful meanings – like say the Gandalf or Frodo characters of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. That is why we frequently refer to the narratives in which all such characters appear as 'myths,' and why we speak of them as 'mythical' personages – even though we also sometimes seem to wish they were historical figures, as seems to be the case for those who proclaim that "Frodo lives!"

When, however, scholars reflected on the reasons for such classifications, they found good reasons to suppose that the character of Jesus, as represented in the Bible, was equally 'mythical' as, say, the figure of Attis was, and that the gospel narratives could plausibly be called 'myths' in the same sense as the stories relating the life and death of Attis, to take but one example. These scholars reasoned that the Jesus of the gospels – depicted as a kind of magician or wonder-worker, multiplying loaves and fishes, raising the dead, transforming water into wine, as well as having been born miraculously of a virgin, then finally killed as part of some cosmic sacrificial or expiational drama, only to rise to life again from the dead – seemed about as "mythical" a figure as any from the "mythology" of the ancient world. How could such a representation be "historical," then – not least of all because the events and patterns of behavior of Jesus conformed so well with those of the accepted "mythical" figures from the "myths" of the ancient world?

Reasoning further, some of these Higher Critics of the Bible posed the question of whether, despite the “mythical” qualities of the gospel narrative, parts of the gospel might contain historical elements nonetheless. Once this move to sift out the historical features concerning Jesus from the mythical ones began, the quest for an “historical Jesus” was launched! Here we seek information about Jesus, the flesh and blood man, who lived during the time of Caesar Augustus in Palestine. We seek to know about Jesus in the same sense as we would seek to know about any other historical personage, such as Socrates, Plato, Caesar, and so on.

Another way of talking about the historical Jesus was also by contrasting him with the “mythical” one. The term for this ‘Jesus,’ friendlier to Christian believers and more current in today’s religious discourse, is to refer to the opposition between the “Jesus of history” versus the “Jesus of faith.” Here, the Jesus whose acts and words can be affirmed by the historical sciences is the “historical Jesus,” the Jesus, for example, whose existence was attested to by the Jewish historian of the first century, Flavius Josephus (37–100 CE). The Jesus of faith would then be that understanding of Jesus affirmed in Christian creedal statements, but either of a dubious historical nature or none at all. Here would be aspects of Jesus’ career such as his “sitting at the right hand of the Father” – not the kind of claim even put forward as a candidate for “history,” since it would be a state of affairs occurring in eternity. But, although it is believed by Christians to have occurred in time and space, the resurrection of Jesus would qualify as a state of affairs encompassed by the rubric, the “Jesus of faith,” because of its miraculous nature. Indeed, believing that the resurrection was an historical fact is for many Christians a defining feature of Christian orthodoxy.

In recent days, two major activities of scholarship taking part in the quest for the historical Jesus are the work of the Jesus Seminar and the investigation of the so-called

Gnostic gospels. In both cases, the results of the scholarship, if accepted, would tend to change Christianity in the way Christians understood themselves. The Jesus Seminar consists of a large team of scholars, each of whom was asked to read through the New Testament and to rank sayings and passages there in terms of the likelihood of their being actual sayings of Jesus. The consensus reached by these scholars is that the majority of sayings attributed to Jesus in the gospels are fabrications. Nor, did Jesus perform miracles or physically rise from the dead, according to the scholarly consensus among the members of the Jesus Seminar. The implication of their work is that much of what we understand as Christianity is in fact the creation of the church and Jesus' followers, rather than of Jesus himself. As one might imagine, these conclusions created a scandal among Christians and created immense theological problems for them. Ramon E. Morales of San Gabriel, California, wrote in a letter (March 18, 1995) to the Los Angeles Times:

It is ludicrous for the Jesus seminar to state that their “findings” do not act to tear down any people’s faith. They claim the Jesus didn’t speak the words attributed him, he didn’t perform any miracles and that he didn’t physically resurrect after his death. Since most of the New Testament theology is depended on at least one of those three things, that leaves us following some wimpy do-gooder who got in trouble with the law and was crucified. Not much point to that.

If the past experience of resistance to attempts to lay before believers an image of Jesus at variance with what is commonly held in the hearts of believers be a guide, this and similar reactions may be expected to future efforts at Higher Criticism of the Bible.

The point to be made here is that such conflict – the raising of questions or problems – has been one of the leading ways that religion has been put into question in the West. It has as well been a constant prod to new thinking about the nature of religion, starting by way of critical inquiry into the source documents of Judaism and Christianity. For that reason alone, we need to appreciate the vital role in the making of modern-day religious studies of Higher Criticism of the Bible. At this point, to do this with the right degree of depth and polish, we need to press on and learn something of the ways that Higher Criticism first challenged received understandings of the Bible. First, we will need to know further about the methods employed to force a new look at the status of the Bible. Second, we will need to know something about how the first major players in the Higher Criticism of the Bible brought about a fresh way of looking at the Bible.

Biblical Criticism's New Methods

We began understanding the rise of Higher Criticism of the Bible by noting that, like the 'deists,' some were motivated by skepticism (Renan and Strauss, for example) while others were tribunes of progressivism (Robertson Smith). The rise of the Higher Criticism of the Bible differs from the circumstances of 'deist' approaches to religion in that it announced the appearance of at least the four new disciplines for studying religion – history, philology, text criticism, and hermeneutics. Now more than ever, anyone wishing to study the Bible critically needed to be more than just masters of polemics like the jurist Bodin and philosopher Herbert were. One needed to be a good historian as well as someone adept in the ancient and exotic languages of the Bible, knowledgeable about how texts were put together, and adept at interpreting them.

First, history. In their commonly-held belief in the value of the naturalistic treatment of religious texts – especially those of Christianity – ‘deists,’ skeptical empiricists, and Higher Critics of the Bible each advanced the naturalistic study of religion in their own ways. Like the ‘deists’ in their quest for what might lie behind or precede ‘revelation,’ we will see that the Higher Critics of the Bible sought to uncover the ‘historicity’ of, the actual historical substrata underlying, biblical narratives. As skeptical, empirical historians, Higher Critics of the Bible wondered, for instance, whether there really had been a great historical flood as related by Genesis? Did the walls of Jericho, also, in fact ‘come tumbling down’? Or, at least, is there empirical evidence that they did so when and if an historical Moses was in fact on hand to expedite their collapse? In this connection, historical approaches to religion raised questions of religious documents, such as which events narrated actually occurred in the past in contrast to events which were only imagined, such as stories and myths.

We will recall that Hume set something of an example of the way in which history could be applied to the study of religion. His Natural History of Religion set out an object lesson in how one could submit religion to the rigors of historical inquiry and criticism. Hume showed, in effect, that it was not enough just to be clever at dialectic, as he supremely was. Nor was it enough to excel in legal polemics or in working the nuances of concocting diplomatic compromises, as both Bodin and Herbert of Cherbury were. A firmer grasp was needed of 'doing history.' We will recall as well that by training and inclination, the 'deists' and skeptical empiricists tended on the whole to be philosophers. Thus, when Bodin did historical work, as he had in his legal histories, he pursued this discipline in relative isolation rather than in a growing movement with others engaged in a definite kind of special inquiry. The rise of Higher Criticism of the Bible represents something altogether different – namely the growth of an historical mentality or consciousness, as Van Harvey has argued.

To be sure, Western culture, in contrast to many others, has always been characterized by a sense of history. But only in the nineteenth century did this manifest itself in a sustained and critical attempt to recover the past by means of the patient analysis of evidence and the insistence on the impartiality and truthfulness of the historian....This revolution in consciousness found its formal expression in he creation of a new science, history. (Harvey 1966, p. 4)

The ‘deists,’ then, had been concerned with comparing religious doctrines and beliefs, or religions as institutions. The Higher Critics of the Bible, on the other hand, were devoted to the historical study of the religious scriptures common to both Judaism and Christianity, and to the historical contexts in which these documents arose. We will look more closely into the work of critical historians in exploring the contributions of representatives of the influential ‘Tübingen School’ based at the progressive Eberhard Karls University (Tübingen) in the Germany of the early to mid nineteenth century, F. C. Baur and D. F. Strauss

Next, philology. Once the historicity of religious texts was established, the texts had to be either read in their own languages and/or translated into modern European languages – quite often by the same persons we have identified as ‘critical historians.’ Addressing such historical questions demanded many new skills of students of religion. Most of all, the biblical critics needed to be trained in philology – the serious study of language in all its dimensions. As such, a new syllabus of questions presented themselves. The new biblical scholars had often to determine, for example, the identity of the very languages in which the Bible had been originally and subsequently written. How correct were the translations made along the way? Typically, philologists needed to construct afresh the grammars of the ancient tongues, some of which had never been formalized in this way. Dictionaries of exotic languages had to be assembled as well, often without the help of native speakers to assist the process. As students of ancient texts and obscure literary forms, these scholars were in effect involved in elaborate projects of the reconstruction of lost cultures and civilizations through the media of studying ancient languages.

Taken together, history added to philology became indispensable for another discipline – text-critical approaches to scripture. From the time of the late middle ages to the Renaissance, two cultural developments set in motion the need to develop text-critical methods of biblical study. The first was the discovery of apparently ancient biblical and other religious manuscripts purporting to be of great, yet undetermined, antiquity. The second was the development of printing. Both produced a great increase in the number of actual physical texts – copies – in circulation throughout Europe. Some of these ‘copies’ were authentic, others forgeries (Popkin 2003, p. 219). This inevitably gave rise to questions about how to distinguish the real versions of old texts from false ones. How do we determine authenticity, and find the ‘best’ physical text? What concrete version of something purporting to be an ancient text actually was truest to the original? Once the historical location of a text was secured and its linguistic pedigree established, how was a given text in fact constructed over the course of its life?

What applied to any ancient text applied in this respect to the Bible itself. Since different versions of the biblical texts circulated at a particular time, it made sense to ask whether a particular text was authentic or a clever counterfeit, whether one text contained fewer errors than another, whether one was a 'better' one than another? Historians might also want to know, for example, which particular version of the text, or part of a text, was the oldest? Or, they might want to know which particular text may have been based or derived from another text? How indeed could we assign dates of composition or of creation to the texts in hand, since most of the texts did not come with such explicit identifying markers; or if they did, how could one be sure these were accurate? Students of the ancient literatures want to know, for instance, whether there might be textual errors in the Bible, mistakes that perhaps had crept in during the course of copying and recopying by medieval and ancient scribes? Were there even deliberate distortions made to the texts by unscrupulous scribes or scheming clerics? How do we know that we possess the most authentic rendition of the words and thoughts of the four evangelists, Paul, Jesus, Moses, the prophets of Israel, or King David? And how do we know what the words of these texts meant for the people of the time of their creation? Was the text at hand the product of a single author, and who was that author, if it be only one? Or is the text the edited sum of the works of several authors or voices? Who indeed are they? And what have they to do with each other? Are they allies, opponents, or something yet different again?

The Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1634–77) provides a fine, very early example of how sacred texts were studied in order to unpack the mysteries of their authorship. But, as we will see, it fell to the Tübingen School, especially F. C. Baur, D. F. Strauss, and others, to produce a rigorous practice of biblical criticism. Nonetheless, Spinoza can be seen as precursor of Tübingen School scholars in his querying of Mosaic authorship of the

Torah, or in further unpacking the order and make-up of the composition of an ancient text in order to understand the evolution of the present form of a text from possible earlier versions of it. The critical study of texts as a science thus entailed the systematic and rigorous study of documents for the purpose of determining their actual authenticity, their factual authorship, their true date of creation, the cultural and social circumstances of their origins – what the German Higher Critics of the Bible called Sitz im Leben, their situation in a particular living context. This new textual criticism of the Bible thus worked more concretely on religion than the 'deists,' in ways such as seeking to evaluate something as seemingly mundane as the origins of the physical texts that they held in their hands. Again, were they originally composed in the form in which they now existed? Or were they perhaps compilations and/or redacted versions of more primitive texts? Like the gospels, had they issued from a single author as the Bible itself claimed? Or were names like 'Matthew' and 'Mark' codenames for entire schools of biblical authors? If they were compilations, then the critics sought to disentangle the chronology and contents of ancient religious texts as they had developed in order to write a history of the physical text, so to speak.

In their close attention to the empirical details of religious data, then, the Higher Critics of the Bible fostered a naturalistic study of religion. Revelation was not denied because the Bible was now to be studied naturalistically – historically and empirically; it was just something that had to be squared with the naturalistic investigations of religious texts. Together with ‘history,’ the close study of texts thus produced distinctions that we now take for granted, such as that between the early and later versions of a text, the ‘source’ document and its derivatives, the ‘canon’ and the noncanonical, and so on. In turn, this enabled scholars to conjecture about the degree to which a document was historical or legendary or mythical. Indeed, the very category of scripture itself, especially as implied in distinctions between ‘history’ and ‘scripture,’ or other literary forms, became an issue. Nowhere did these distinctions come to bear with more consequence than in Higher Criticism of the Bible. One great contribution to the naturalistic study of religion, made by the Higher Criticism of the Bible, then, was to approach a sacred text such as the Bible as a human document that could be pulled apart and held up to the light of critical scrutiny (Harvey 1966, ch. 1).

Finally, hermeneutics. Once these languages had been identified, their grammars mastered, and some notion of the composition of the biblical text achieved, the students of the Bible were faced with the most interesting and intellectually challenging problems of all: interpreting what the biblical texts meant in their original and present form, and how they should be construed in the future. This eventually called forth a general theory of interpretation, hermeneutics, to begin to deal with a host of problems afflicting the intelligent reading or interpretation of sacred texts such as the Bible. How, for example, does the whole of a text shape the way we interpret any given part? Paradoxically, can we even understand any part of a text until we grasp the meaning of the whole? As the philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), generally acknowledged as founder of philosophical hermeneutics, put it: "The sense of every word in a given location must be determined according to its being-together with those that surround it" (Bowie 1998, p. 44). This is not even to begin querying the many other questions of interpretation that arise in the context of understanding the Bible, such as how recent interpretations of the biblical text can be squared with earlier ones. Or how past readings of the meaning of sacred texts conform to those that were traditionally taught – since it is often held that religious truth is one and unchanging. At one time, as we know, biblical texts were chiefly interpreted allegorically, only later to become interpreted literally – some would say like 'history' or 'science.' Indeed, some folk still interpret the words of the Bible in this way today, even down to believing that creation, for example, happened in seven days. But others see the biblical narrative in more spiritual ways, reading the same creation narratives as signs of divine love and concern for humanity (Evans 1963).

The major figure in the development of a formal theory of hermeneutics, Schleiermacher, devoted himself to constructing a system for interpreting texts correctly. For him, it became the subject of a formalized, complex, high-level intellectual inquiry. Schleiermacher set out this serious intellectual inquiry in his formidable Hermeneutics and Criticism (1838), a document that modern readers will find more reminiscent of a technical manual in engineering than a treatise on how to read the Holy Book. There, Schleiermacher argued on the one hand, along with our 'philologists,' that proper interpretation required mastery of the objective rules of correct language use (Bowie 1998, p. 6). For Schleiermacher, then, hermeneutics was first of all a demanding form of rule-governed activity – "requiring the talent for language" (Bowie 1998, p. 11). Aside from normal attention to grammar, Schleiermacher asserted, for example, that proper understanding of particulars required an understanding of how they were situated within the whole of a text. He thus advanced appropriate methodological maxims, arranged in numbered paragraphs, such as the following:

20. The vocabulary and the history of the era of an author relate as the whole from which his writings must be understood as the part, and the whole must, in turn, be understood from the part.

21. Complete knowledge is always in this apparent circle, that each particular can only be understood via the general, of which it is a part, and vice versa. And every piece of knowledge is only scientific if it is formed in this way... (Bowie 1998, p. 24)

22. Even within a single text the particular can only be understood from out of the whole, and a cursory reading to get an overview of the whole must therefore precede the more precise explication. (Bowie 1998, p. 27)

Second Canon: The sense of every word in a given location must be determined according to its being-together with those that surround it. (Bowie 1998, p. 44)

But Schleiermacher went further than a concern with the relative placement of objective materials in pursuit of adequate interpretation. He argued that hermeneutics also involved understanding the subjective or “psychological” presuppositions that readers brought to the texts. Schleiermacher also tells us that hermeneutics is a high art calling for a “talent for knowledge of individual people” (Bowie 1998, p. 11). This attention to the knowing subject eventuated in Schleiermacher’s assertion that hermeneutics contained a “subjective element . . . a talent,” as well as the rigorous objective knowledge and skills that he outlined (Bowie 1998, p. 12). In the subjective vein, and more controversially, Schleiermacher advanced an approach to interpretation known as “divination” – “the ability to arrive at interpretations without definitive rules . . . hermeneutics [as] an ‘art,’ because it cannot be fully carried out in terms of rules” (Bowie 1998, p. xi). Among others, Schleiermacher has been read in this way by the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) as principally meaning that the interpreter must empathize with the text: “Before the application of the art one must put oneself in the place of the author on the objective and the subjective side,” says Schleiermacher (Bowie 1998, p. 24). It is a point of some controversy whether this language actually implied that Schleiermacher advocated what later came to be attributed to him as a Romantic theory of “empathetic understanding.” We will see that something quite close to the Romantic theory of empathetic understanding featured prominently in the methodology of the phenomenologists of religion, although mostly attributed to Dilthey. But, doubtless because of Dilthey’s intellectual admiration for Schleiermacher, the method of empathetic understanding as identified with Dilthey came to be attributed as well to Schleiermacher (Bowie 1998, pp. vii, xx, xxix). Not coincidentally, Dilthey’s biography of Schleiermacher, Leben Schleiermachers (1922), is regarded as Dilthey’s finest realization of the method of empathetic understanding (Ermarth 1978, pp. 267–71). Following the lead of Schleiermacher in more recent times, the existential theologian Rudolf Bultmann, a sophisticated proponent of a “demythologizing” interpretation of biblical narratives, echoes this subjective aspect of Schleiermacher’s rich hermeneutical theories:

Schleiermacher (1768–1834) already recognised that such [grammatical and philological] hermeneutic rules are not sufficient for the real understanding of a text. He demands the completing of the philological interpretation by a psychological one, and he calls it an interpretation by divination. A literary work has to be understood as a moment in the author's life. The interpreter must reproduce in himself the incident out of which the work which he has to interpret grew. He must, so to speak, produce the work again. (Bultmann 1957, p. 111)

Together with history, philology, and textual criticism, hermeneutics lives on, along with more recent innovations of its own, in present-day Higher Criticism of the Bible.

Higher Criticism: Internal Discrepancies

It is easy to understand resistance to the application of scientific procedures to religious scriptures such as the Bible. Such critical studies meant that the status of the Bible (or any other allegedly divinely inspired text) as God's inspired word, along with its lofty position as eternal revealed truth, was put into a very different context than it had had for the believer who had not interrogated the text. In the light of the textual-critical sciences, the Bible was a human document like any other, and thus was subject to the same scrutiny as any other text. The critical study of the biblical text, therefore, launched a whole raft of questions quite often challenging innocent faith. It is possible to divide these questions into two broad categories. On one hand were queries spurred by an “internal” critique of the biblical narrative; on the other were problems generated by what one may call an “external” critique of sacred scripture. Let us consider the matter of “internal” critique first. All such questions arose once the proposition was entertained that the biblical texts seem to have a human side with an equally human history, a history that might include honest errors or deliberate distortions, dictated by political or religious interests.

As one investigated the internal character of the biblical narrative, for example, puzzles were thrown up about certain oddities and discrepancies found there. Right from the very beginning of the Bible in the Book of Genesis, ch. 1, a version of creation is given that differs from that in the very next chapter! In ch. 1, for example, God creates things in a certain order, heaven and earth, light, day and night, etc. But in ch. 2, God creates in another order – the earth already exists, and then is followed by the creation of man. Pointedly, in ch. 1, verse 26, man is created in God's image, while in ch. 2, verse 7 and following, Adam is formed from dust and moisture. Another early discrepancy occurs in ch. 4, where Genesis recounts the story of Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve's only children. As we know, Cain kills his brother, Abel. Shortly thereafter, God asks Cain where his brother is, only to receive the now classic retort, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Unhappy with this answer, God curses Cain and dooms him to bear the mark of his murder – the infamous "sign of Cain" – and to be forbidden henceforth to settle and practice agriculture. What, however, struck the new critics of the local narratives was the fact that in the first 17 verses of ch. 4, the Bible tells us that Cain subsequently went on to marry, produce a son, Enoch, and continue his life as a city dweller – despite the fact that the Bible gives no account of the origin of the wife that Cain took in the process. How, indeed, could Cain have found a wife to marry, if he and Abel were the only offspring, as the Bible relates, of the first parents of the human race? The Bible is silent on this matter, but critics of the biblical narrative fell upon this as a sign of the human character of the biblical text. Equally noteworthy was the discrepancy in the Genesis account of Noah and the flood in ch. 7. There, in verses 1 through 6, the narrative relates how God commanded Noah to take seven pairs of each kind of ritually clean animal into the Ark, but with only one pair of each kind of unclean animal. Yet verses 6 through 10 relate a flood story beginning with the statement that Noah was 600 years old when the flood came upon the earth and concluding with the onset of the flood after the entry of only single pairs of animals of the earth into the Ark. Critical students naturally question why two flood stories occurred in the passages relating to Noah. Historians considering such an oddity might be tempted to suggest that the different texts reflect different historical dates of origin, later fused together into a single narrative. In the New Testament we find similar internal discrepancies in the genealogies attached to Jesus. Matthew, ch. 1, traces Jesus' origins to Abraham. Yet, in Luke, ch. 3, Jesus' genealogy is traced as far back as Adam. Another example: at the Last Supper, Luke records that Jesus used two cups, 22:17 and 22:20, while Matthew 26:26 and Mark 14:23 mention only one.

In the viewpoint of the historical, philological, and hermeneutic sciences, these discrepancies did not necessarily invalidate the claims of Christianity or ancient Judaism. At the very least, they opened up a vast range of problems and questions about the composition and character of biblical texts, with possible implications to our present-day understanding of the nature of Christianity and Judaism. We know, for example, that early Christians assembled the Bible, and that in this sense the Bible is the daughter of the church. Thus, the church decided which books and which teachings were to be included in the Bible – placed in the “canon” – and which were not to be included. Recent scholarship on these so-called Gnostic gospels, not to mention their popularization in Dan Brown’s runaway bestseller The Da Vinci Code, conveys some of the excitement and scandal that new readings of the Christian canon can produce (Brown 2003).

Elaine Pagels is one of the leaders in the new scholarship of these excluded texts. Pagels believes that the study of such noncanonical texts, such as the notorious Gnostic “gospels,” may help us understand the development of Christianity. Her inquiries raise a whole set of historical, textual-critical, and hermeneutic problems with the status and content of the biblical narrative. What were the bases of the decisions that the early church made about the content of the New Testament? Why were some ‘gospels’ included and others (the so-called Gospel of Thomas, for example) excluded from the New Testament canon? Do passages in the New Testament retain older, conflicted versions of Christian religious thought? Should these be challenged or at least revisited? For example, these days it is often asked why women have traditionally had an inferior role within Christianity. But in the Gnostic gospels, on the other hand, the role of women there is often quite prominent. Raising the hermeneutic question, one wonders how this discrepancy with the New Testament canon should be interpreted. Could the casting of women in inferior roles in the canonical gospels have been more a matter or early Christian misogyny than, say, straightforward loyalty to the words and wishes of Jesus? What, therefore, is the meaning these differences? What meaning should we attach to the way women are portrayed in the New Testament? This juxtaposition of canonical and noncanonical “gospels” thus has the power to make us think anew about commonly accepted assumptions about religious orthodoxy. It creates one of those “problems of religion” that I mentioned in my introduction, and that are so important in the development of critical studies of religion.

Higher Criticism: The Question of the "External" Fit of Biblical Narrative with "Facts"

On the other hand, proponents of the “external” criticism of the Bible were more concerned with the factual truth of the biblical narrative – its ‘historicity’ as explained above – rather than with issues of “internal” consistency. “External” critics challenged various doctrines, such as the trinity, the virgin birth, the resurrection of Jesus, and the occurrence or performance of miracles and other supernatural events, such as the multiplication of the loaves and fishes or ascension of Jesus into heaven.

One strategy for checking the factual nature of events narrated in the Bible brings us back to the matter of historical methodology discussed earlier. How do biblical accounts of events square with those of contemporaneous documents of indubitable historical value? Is the Bible good 'history'? Do Roman or Jewish records of the time confirm biblical accounts of the same period? Is the Bible 'historical,' and to what extent, and in what sense? Was there really a Roman procurator in Judea named Pontius Pilate, and was he involved in the condemnation of Jesus to death – if indeed such a person as Jesus of Nazareth existed? Did Jesus exist, and to what extent did his existence conform to the picture given of him in the Bible? If Pilate existed, the usually factual, and thus historically reliable, Roman records should confirm Pilate's existence to be a 'fact.' If they do not, one would tend to be skeptical of the biblical account, since Roman records for these matters tend to have a high degree of historical accuracy, and would not be motivated to overlook such a routine matter.

A second strategy for checking the factual accuracy of the Bible – especially regarding miracles – is by comparing claims made there to our knowledge of the natural world. Is it possible, for example, that Moses could have caused the Red Sea to divide? Is the virgin birth of Jesus or any other human being a biological possibility? When the Bible says that God made the sun stand still at the battle of Jericho, could this really have been the case – especially since we know that relative to the sun it is the earth that moves? There are additional, conceptual, problems with claims about miracles. If we understand a miracle to be a God-caused intervention into nature, how can we tell if it was God who caused the event? We may note an irregularity in nature and observe an apparent suspension of a law of nature. Human beings only see the event. But we do not see God causing it. How do we know that an apparent suspension of or an anomaly in a natural process was God-caused? The answer is faith. I would suggest that we might conceptualize the notion of a miracle as a believer's seeing an event as an intervention of God in natural processes.

Major Jewish Players: Spinoza and the "Scientific Study of Judaism"

I have already mentioned in passing some of the early figures in the development of Higher Criticism of the Bible, such as F. C. Baur, D. F. Strauss, and others, but how and where did the critical study of the Bible begin? While it is generally true that Protestant Christian scholars in German-speaking countries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as members of the Tübingen School, were the most prominent practitioners of critical methods of studying the Bible, full credit should be given to the independent developments in Jewish critical biblical scholarship of the same vintage – the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) movement and earlier (Neusner 2000, p. 102). In Germany, as early as 1822, the Jewish scholar Immanuel Wolf, one of the founders of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, put forth a view of the desirability of a historical, scientific study of scripture identical with that of the Christian Higher Critics of the Bible. Says Wolf of the Wissenschaft des Judentums,

the aim will be to depict Judaism, first from a historical standpoint, as it has gradually developed in taking shape; and then philosophically according to his inner essence and idea. The textual knowledge of the literature of Judaism must precede both methods of study. Thus we have, first, the textual study of Judaism. (Wolf 1980, p. 194)

In 1819, the Jewish historian Leopold Zunz founded an independent and private organization for the scientific study of Judaism, the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Albert 1977, p. 251). Together with Abraham Geiger, Zunz launched the official organ of the movement, the Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums. Its express aim was to publish original work on all aspects of the history of Jewish life the world over, including critical studies of the Bible.

In the same period, the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz aspired to a critical historical study of rabbinic literature. This marked the beginnings of the study of the Talmud as history. For Graetz, the Talmud should be regarded as a human document, and whatever its spiritual values, should be studied using the same methods of historical, philological, and critical resources applied to profane literature (Neusner 2000, pp. 100 ff.). Taken cumulatively, the movements of critical scholarship with which Graetz can be associated had lasting effects for the Jewish community. In the words of Jacob Neusner,

Alongside the historicistic frame of mind shaped in the aftermath of the Romantic movement, there was an enduring critical spirit, formed in the Enlightenment and not to be eradicated later on. This critical spirit approached the historical allegations of ancient texts with a measure of skepticism. So for biblical studies, in particular, the history of ancient Israel no longer followed the paths of the biblical narrative, from Abraham onward. (Neusner 2000, p. 102)

Although it would take us too far afield to explore all these effects, Neusner also notes additional, perhaps unintended consequences of the work of supposedly critical historians like Graetz. He and his ilk were far less mere critics than they make out. They sought, ironically, to achieve positive “theological results” for reinvigorating and shaping the future of Judaism (Neusner 2000, p. 103).

As early as the 1830s, French Jews too became interested in developments within the German university system, and sought actively to lure German scholars to France. Among those attracted by emigration to France were a number of German Jewish scholars connected to the group Geiger and Zunz had assembled in 1819. Having refused to convert to Christianity in pursuit of higher careers in the German professional world, their careers were effectively stymied. In pursuit of the benefits of emancipation, some therefore emigrated to France. Thus within a short time of the establishment of the Wissenschaft des Judentums itself, the originally German movement was carried to France, subsequently to become part of the intellectual scene of the study of religion in France flourishing within the milieu in which Durkheim and his collaborators worked on the social-scientific study of religion. In this regard, perhaps doing most to set the pace for avant-garde French Jewish scholars was Salomon Munk. For Munk, Judaism stood alongside other religious traditions like Islam and Christianity as an equal – and equally appropriate – object of scientific study, not as a separate, autonomous entity. Like the Durkheimians, Munk was a comparativist and an original proponent of interdisciplinary work. He sought to orient the study of Judaism toward the disciplines of archeology, history of antiquity, and philology (Simon-Nahum 1991, pp. 90–5).

In some respects, these critical attitudes to Jewish scriptures and religion, as well as their modern successors, can be linked all the way back to an earlier thoroughgoing naturalistic critic of the Bible, such as the Jewish religious thinker Baruch Spinoza (1634–77) (Simon-Nahum 1991, p. 12). In his most dedicated critical work on the Bible, A Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza tells us of his desire to study the sacred text according to the light of reason – scientifically or naturalistically – like the ‘deists’ Bodin and Herbert. Spinoza’s determination to steer clear of ‘religious’ approaches to religious documents like the Bible, also echoed the ‘deists’ in pursuing Natural Religion. Spinoza undertook his efforts to construct a religiously neutral approach to biblical interpretation for the same purposes of overcoming religious conflict followed by the ‘deists.’ In his case, Spinoza was driven to undermine conflicts and fanaticism that religious disagreements over interpretations of meaning in the Bible had caused in his time (Spinoza 1670/1951):

As I pondered over the facts that the light of reason is not only despised, but by many even execrated as a source of impiety, that human commentaries are accepted as divine records, and that credulity is extolled as faith; as I marked the fierce controversies of philosophers raging in Church and State, the source of bitter hatred and dissension, the ready instruments of sedition and other ills innumerable, I determined to examine the Bible afresh in a careful, impartial, and unfettered spirit, making no assumptions concerning it, and attributing to it no doctrines, which I do not find clearly therein set down.

Beyond such sincere scientific resolutions, made in the interests of seeking social peace, Spinoza laid out a series of procedures and questions that might inform a naturalistic or scientific approach to biblical study. He may then be said to have assembled perhaps the first program of problems or questions that could be used to guide critical or naturalistic inquiry into biblical narrative, and by way of this point of entry the first syllabus of problems of a critical or naturalistic study of religion.

With these precautions I constructed a method of Scriptural interpretation, and thus equipped proceeded to inquire – What is prophecy? In what sense did God reveal Himself to the prophets, and why were these particular men chosen by Him? Was it on account of the sublimity of their thoughts about the Deity and nature, or was it solely on account of their piety? These questions being answered, I was easily able to conclude, that the authority of the prophets has weight only in matters of morality, and that their speculative doctrines affect us little. (Spinoza 1670/1951, p. 8)

The implications of Spinoza's methods for Bible study conform as well to the naturalistic approach of the 'deists' and skeptical empiricists to religion in general, and anticipate the critical historical approach of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. For him, the scriptures should be studied like any other bit of nature, in particular by means of the systematic method of investigation that Spinoza borrowed from Descartes – even though the more pious Descartes refused to submit holy writ to his own scientific method! For Spinoza, the Bible's "speculative doctrines affect us little." That is to say, that it was not a true source of knowledge in his view, although the Bible had valuable moral guidance to offer. Instead, it was chiefly as an object of inquiry that the Bible held interest for the scientific student of religion. We should then go forth and apply the methods of scientific scrutiny to what had heretofore been considered exempt from it (Popkin 2003, pp. 242–3).

Similarly, in our own day of religious turmoil and change, scholars from religious traditions outside the ambit of Western culture are applying the same kinds of critical tools to the analysis of their sacred texts as Christian and Jews had from the early nineteenth century. The critical approach is even penetrating the Islamic tradition, despite continued resistance to historical critical study of the Koran. A Muslim scholar in Germany writing under the pseudonym Christophe Luxenberg has argued that the Koran has been misread and badly translated for centuries. Luxenberg's scholarship concerns itself with the earliest extant copies of the Koran, and argues that parts of Islam's sacred scripture are derived from preexisting Christian literature, later misinterpreted by Islamic scholars preparing editions of the Koran that are still read today (Stille 2002: p. A1).

Major Protestant Players: Ferdinand Christian Baur and the Tübingen School

Despite the brilliant beginnings made by Spinoza, it took nearly 150 years before his theoretical insights began to appear in the concerted work of other scholars in the West, both among Jews and now Christians. It took at least that long before Higher Criticism of the Bible in the style in which it has come to be known provoked “problems of religion”

that challenged the way the bulk of Europe's religious population conceived and studied religion, especially religious documents, scriptures, or texts.

The first seminal figure fully to articulate and extensively practice the historically skeptical approach adumbrated by Spinoza was the German Protestant historian and philosopher Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860). Inspired by G. W. F. Hegel's historicizing philosophical thought, Baur took the view that the Bible should be submitted to rigorous historical interpretation and criticism in the same way as profane literature. One should not grant privileges to traditional readings of scripture or the feelings of pious believers about the nature of the Bible. Instead, one had to apply critical methods of interpretation to attain a proper understanding of the teachings of the Bible. Therefore, while the Bible may remain divinely inspired, close attention to the nature of religious texts did not support the view, for example, that the entirety of scripture had fallen whole and supernaturally formed from the hands of God. Rather, the Bible itself reflects human authorship, as Spinoza and the Wissenschaft des Judentums thinkers argued as well. And if human authorship had to be taken into consideration, we had to apply our understanding of human processes to the interpretation of the Bible.

For Baur, a principle source for understanding human processes was Hegel's philosophy of history. It was in terms of Hegel's conception of the logic of historical change as a dynamic interaction between 'thesis' and its opposite, 'antithesis,' subsequently resolved into a 'synthesis,' that Baur's reading of the Bible took shape. In particular, Hegel made Baur sensitive to this pattern of opposed tensions and struggles, resolved into resolutions that shaped the profane human history of nations and peoples. In this logic of dialectical struggle and synthesis, the forces represented in the Bible were no different. After all, in the Bible one could discern how different theological parties contended for dominance in shaping religious history just as literal military forces contended for political supremacy in profane human history. As one might expect, Baur's approach greatly upset many of the faithful, since it challenged the entire conception of the Bible as a simple revelation of a preformed divine plan. Instead of serene supernatural origins and reassuring ideas of divine inspiration in holy scripture, Baur claimed that the Bible was a record of human – albeit religious or theological – struggles.

Baur thought that an excellent example of such a tension within early Christianity conforming to this pattern of Hegelian dialectic tension was what he detected in the Pauline letters. When read through Hegelian eyes, the letters of Paul reveal a theological battle between two opposed factions of early Christians. On one side was the party of Jewish Christians associated with the apostle Peter (Petrine); on the other were those new Gentile Christians recently evangelized by Paul (Pauline). Their fight was nothing less than one to define the nature of early Christianity and, in effect, how the church would evolve from that point forward – in part at least, whether to become a Christian one had first to become a Jew, and among other things, whether male converts and newborns had to undergo circumcision.

It was my study of the two Corinthian letters that first caused me to concentrate my attention more directly on the relation of the apostle Paul to see that this relationship was one quite other than is ordinarily assumed; that where it is taken for granted that there existed a complete harmony between all the apostles, there was actually an opposition, one which even went so far that the very authority of the apostle Paul was brought into question by Jewish Christians. (Baur 1851)

Engaging this struggle required that Baur do some of the first extended work in historical criticism and textual criticism. For one, in order to retrieve the historical position held by Paul – and not just ones piously attributed to the Apostle by the Gentiles – Baur had to sort out the authentic Pauline letters from those claiming his authorship, but which were not authentic products of Paul himself. To Baur, historical criticism thus entailed skepticism about traditional assignment of Pauline authorship to scriptural books such as the Letters of Paul. Baur, in fact, concluded that Paul had only authored four of the ten letters traditionally ascribed to him.

Having sorted out the authentic texts from the inauthentic, Baur then argued that one party was aligned with those still clinging to their Jewish identities – the party of Peter – while the other fell in with the more radical universalizing line taken by the ‘new apostle to the Gentiles’ – Paul of Tarsus. Baur here tried to capture the dynamic logic of opposition embodied in the Hegel’s logic of dialectic confrontation of thesis with antithesis, with the Petrine and Pauline forces playing their respective contending roles. In Baur’s view, the Gospel of Matthew resolved these oppositions into a harmonious synthesis. Despite such a seemingly innocent resolution to the struggles that Baur saw in the New Testament, his entire approach was so profoundly disturbing to the received wisdom of traditional believers that Baur was severely attacked over the years, and finally isolated from his colleagues. In their religious cowardice and stiff-necked resistance to changing their old habits, Baur’s opponents thought it better to reject the fruits of the God-given endowments of human reason that led Baur better to understand the real message of Paul. For them, ironically clinging to their human-originated habits of reading the Bible, it made no difference that, thanks to Baur, they now were in a better position to understand the depths of God’s word by better understanding Paul, for example!

Major Players in the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Renan and Strauss

Beyond the critical studies of the Bible by Baur and others in the early nineteenth century, one major question has dominated the fortunes of historical criticism right up to our day. This is the so-called ‘quest for the historical Jesus.’ Although more than just a single ‘quest,’ it was an attempt to sort through the traditional narrative representations of Jesus in order to provide a historically reliable biography (Harvey 1966, p. 9). It was this quest that attracted some of the most prominent figures of nineteenth-century biblical criticism, such as a one-time student of Baur’s, David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74), as well as the French rationalist historian and former Catholic, Ernest Renan (1823–92).

Born in the traditionally conservative Catholic milieu of Brittany, Ernest Renan trained for the academic clergy, specializing in philology and history with a special attention to Jewish studies. An avowed devotee of the ideals of Higher Criticism of the Bible as a “positive, creative faculty,” Renan exhibited a love of science that led him both to appreciate religion as an object of scientific study and to make science itself a kind of religion in his life (Chadbourne 1968, pp. 39, 46). And, although dedicated to science and the autonomy of scientific endeavor, Renan did not deliberately set out to antagonize the Catholic faithful, who might well have found his critical ideas threatening to their faith. Renan thereby set the tempo for the relatively tolerant, undogmatie, though critical and skeptical style of modern religious studies in France, much in the spirit of one of France's first critical students of religion, Jean Bodin.

Reflecting the great strides that scholarly study of sacred texts had taken in the nineteenth century, Renan studied Hebrew at the seminary of Saint Sulpice, and maintained his love of the language throughout his life. Along with certain other Gentile savants, Renan was even recognized for contributions to Jewish studies with election into the Société des Études Juives – the official professional society of French Jewish learning, the 'French' cousin of the German Jewish Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, which in turn launched the movement known as Wissenschaft des Judentums, which we have discussed above. As a model nineteenth-century philologist and critical historian of religion, Renan published major works on the history of Semitic languages, his Histoire générale des langues sémitiques (1855), a seven-volume study of the origins of Christianity (1863–81), his Les Origines du Christianisme, and the five-volume history of the Jews (1887–93), L'Histoire du peuple d'Israël. Renan was named professor at the prestigious Collège de France in 1862, only to be suspended for having, in effect, denied the divinity of Jesus (Houtin & Sartiaux 1960, p. 396).

Although one can see that Renan's record of weighty publications ranks him as a major scholarly figure in his own right, he owed tremendous intellectual debts to the pioneering work of people like F. C. Baur, D. F. Strauss, and the entire Tübingen School (Carbonell 1979, p. 61). In 'Catholic' France, however, this association doomed Renan to incessant conflict with the Roman Catholic church's teaching on the inerrancy and immutability of the Christian scriptures. In 1845, Renan finally and reluctantly broke with the church over the very 'Protestant' issues of the freedom of intellectual inquiry and the liberty of the individual conscience. James Frazer felt that Renan always retained a profound sympathy for Roman Catholicism and remained emotionally attached to it throughout his days (Frazer 1923, p. 38). While being constitutionally incapable of converting to Protestantism, Renan so admired the liberating ideals of his colleagues in the Tübingen School, that he is supposed to have voiced the desire to have been "born a German Protestant!" (Chadbourne 1968, p. 94).

Renan's Vie de Jésus

Giving voice to his critical attitude to the biblical narrative, Renan declared what we can call a classically rationalist skepticism toward such elements of the Bible as miracle and myth. In his Life of Jesus (1861), Renan thus declares:

If the miracle has any reality, this book is but a tissue of errors. If the Gospels are inspired books, and true, consequently, to the letter, from beginning to end, I have been guilty of a great wrong in not contenting myself with piecing together the broken fragments of four texts, like as the Harmonists have done, only to construct thus an ensemble at once most redundant and most contradictory. If, on the contrary, the miracle is an inadmissible thing, then I am right in regarding the books which contain miraculous recitals as history mixed with fiction, as legends full of inaccuracies, errors, and a systematic expedients. (Renan 1861, pp. x–xi)

His reference to Jesus in his inaugural lecture as an “incomparable man” won him an immediate suspension of his teaching privileges! (Houtin & Sartiaux 1960, p. 396). But this and more severe censures did not stop Renan. He continued in this vein with the publication of his rationalist biography of Jesus, Vie de Jésus, and won dismissal from his chair at the Collège de France. The story of the inspiration of Renan's great popular work in part, at least, may help us understand the thrust of his intentions. A trained and expert archeologist, Renan had been supervising a scientific expedition to 'Syria' in 1860–1, when he was struck by the pious realization that he was "treading the same ground" and "breathing the same air" as Jesus and his disciples had centuries earlier. Renan's desire to convey this sense of the reality of the milieu in which Jesus lived led him to undertake the project that later became Vie de Jésus. Contrary to standard expectations, although Renan's work here is often characterized for the rationalist impieties it deploys in debunking sacred Christian traditions surrounding Jesus, it is abundantly evident that Vie de Jésus nonetheless sprang from Renan's genuine, heart-felt religious motivations. Renan is reported, for example, to have "knelt briefly" at a local shrine in pious memory of Jesus, revealing an attitude of sweet reverence that suffuses Renan's "least scientific and most personal" work (Chadbourne 1968, p. 115).

There has hardly been a more popular attempt to produce a biography of Jesus than Renan's. As late as the 1970s, distinguished historians of Christianity, such as Owen Chadwick, still judged Renan's work in extraordinary terms:

The Life of Jesus was a landmark; no landmark in theology, where its influence was negligible or neglected, but in the attitude of the middle class to religion. It was the first time that a biography of the man was written, which excluded the supernatural and at the same time was aimed at the general reader and written by a master of the evidence. It was also the last time that such a biography of the man was written by a scholar, for the progress of inquiry made men see that the historic materials were not sufficient to enable the writing a biography which excluded the supernatural. (Chadwick 1975, p.219)

Much the same verdict about the book's popular appeal was reached on the opposite shore of the Atlantic a century earlier by Renan's American contemporary, the Harvard philosopher John Fiske. His review of Vie de Jésus begins with these words of dubious praise. "It is by far the most readable book which has ever been written concerning the life of Jesus. And no doubt some of its popularity is due to its very faults" (Fiske 1876, p. 77). The problems Chadwick, Fiske, and subsequent scholarly critics find with what is, in effect, a kind of historical novel is precisely with its fidelity to history:

Renan is certainly very faulty, as a historical critic, when he practically ignores the extreme meagreness of our positive knowledge of the career of Jesus, and describes scene after scene in his life as minutely and with as much confidence as if he had himself been present to witness it all. Again and again the critical reader feels prompted to ask, How do you know all this? or why, out of two or three conflicting accounts, do you quietly adopt some particular one, as if its superior authority were self-evident? (Fiske 1876, p. 77)

But, again, at the time there was a public demand for accounts of the life of Jesus, and the then rapidly growing reading public wanted something that at least looked historical. (One thinks of parallels from our own time, such as the runaway popularity of books written in a similar vein, like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.) To the mass-market reader, the complaints of Fiske and his ilk must have seemed pedantic academic quibbles – as the chagrined Fiske himself admits in the same review:

But in the eye of the uncritical reader, these defects are excellences; for it is unpleasant to be kept in ignorance when we are seeking after definite knowledge, and it is disheartening to read page after page of an elaborate discussion which ends in convincing us that definite knowledge cannot be gained. (Fiske 1876, p. 77)

D. F. Strauss: Mythologist and Religious Humanist

As great as Renan was, he owed immense intellectual debts to the German Protestant pioneers of Higher Criticism of the Bible in the Tübingen School, F. C. Baur, and especially D. F. Strauss. Indeed, Strauss might be called his generation's chief protagonist in pressing the critical historical examination of the life of Jesus. His Life of Jesus (Leben Jesu) (1834) – marked a major event in the progress of critical study of the Bible. Although it was not the rationalist skeptical and demythologizing biography of Jesus that Renan achieved, its theological assaults on received conceptions about the character of Christianity created scandal enough in its time. Like Renan, Strauss challenged a host of traditional beliefs about Jesus in his great work – the historical accuracy of the birth stories, the narratives of Jesus' temptation by Satan, his baptism by John, the many reported occasions of miraculous healing performed by him, and, of course, Jesus' transfiguration, resurrection, and ascension (Harvey 1966, p. 11). But, unlike Renan, Strauss went beyond mere naturalist skepticism of the French rationalist, and sought to build on the ruins of the biblical narrative a new religious vision entirely – religious humanism (Harvey 1966, p. 7). As Van Harvey sarcastically puts it:

The issue [of the motivations behind Higher Criticism of the Bible] was frequently clouded by the fact that the earliest biblical critics sallied forth into speculative theology in the name of a factual science. D. F. Strauss, for example, after a thousand or so pages of reasoned historical argument in his Life of Jesus, took pen in hand and charted a theological program for the future in which the doctrine of the Incarnation was to be supplanted by the idea of the deification of humanity. (Harvey 1966, pp. 6–7)

Strauss's constructive theological ambitions aside, even though he worked a generation before Renan, in many ways his style of interpretation of the biblical narratives might be seen to supersede Renan's. One's evaluation of Strauss's Leben Jesu will depend in part on one's evaluation of the value of the Hegelian notions that Strauss imbedded in his work. For the French positivist, the Bible was rife with plainly dissembling or erroneous materials. Renan's aim was simply to get down to a historical bedrock beneath the 'mythical' overlay obscuring the core of the biblical message. Although with Strauss, we find at first the same skeptical attitude to miracles so well worked out in the writing of David Hume, Baur, and others, we also, however, are introduced to a technical concept of 'myth' that greatly enriches critical approaches to sacred texts. Thus, while Strauss, like Renan, argued that any biblical passage containing reference to the occurrence of miracles could not, ipso facto, be considered 'historical,' he would perhaps say more about the religious consciousness, and say it, perhaps, more subtly than his French follower.

It was true for Strauss that Christians, for example, proclaimed Jesus' resurrection, and equally true that Jesus really did not reanimate – in an historical sense. Yet Strauss did not believe that the evangelists or early Christians were lying, mistaken, or holding back what they knew to be true, as Renan in a sense implied. True, the critic needed to separate the miraculous and mythical from the real and historical, as Strauss eagerly did. Instead, Strauss felt that in calling attention to the miraculous and 'mythical' character of parts of the biblical narrative, he was saying that the people of biblical times thought about the world differently than modern folk, who thought 'historically.' They thought about the world 'mythically' because their minds had not yet developed an historical consciousness. The 'Spirit' – in the Hegelian sense – that shaped the mentalities of people at various stages in the mental development of the human race simply had not evolved to the same level that it would later in modern times. Wrong as they might be, people of biblical times did not deliberately fabricate "myths" about Jesus, but rather naively and sincerely saw the world in an unpremeditated 'mythical' way. They were only expressing themselves in a way appropriate to their level of mental development. People of today, informed as they were by an historical and scientific consciousness, could no longer see the world in this 'primitive' way. 'We' had to ask historical questions of the biblical narrative, and inform our religious belief and practice according to the results of historical inquiry. There was no other way for modern folk to continue being religious, because failing to do so would fly in the face of knowledge. Critical study of the Christian sacred scriptural writings thus was fated to have a huge impact on the future of religious faith among Christians in the West.

Taken together, then, the combined influence of the representatives of Higher Criticism of the Bible – from Spinoza, through Baur, Strauss, and Renan – would then be to put into question a whole range of issues about the status of the biblical narrative. In bringing to bear questions about the historicity of the Bible, in querying the character of the versions of the Bible in circulation, in raising the matter of the authenticity of the authorship of various sacred books, in interrogating sacred scripture about its internal discrepancies, the Higher Criticism of the Bible opened a new and extensive chapter in the study of religion.

Looking Forward to the Perils of Comparison

One final source of external criticism of the biblical narrative, and one that would become another indirect source of questions about the nature of religion, emerged in comparing Jewish and Christian religious documents with those originating outside Judaism and Christianity. While the founders of Higher Criticism of the Bible did not themselves press the implications of interreligious comparison, a loyal student of theirs would. As we will see in the work of Friedrich Max Müller in the next chapter, cross-cultural comparison would be employed to raise questions about one of the core beliefs of so-called 'orthodox' Christians – the uniqueness of Christianity, and especially of the Bible itself. Significantly, as we will see, Max Müller was deeply influenced by the founders of Higher Criticism of the Bible and conversant with their methods. I should like to make a transition to the next chapter and conclude this chapter on the Higher Criticism of the Bible by anticipating Max Müller's impact on the study of religion from just the sort of cross-cultural comparisons of religious narratives that called into question the Bible's uniqueness.

Consider unidentified narratives, for example, such as the following. Here, one immediately thinks of Jesus accepting his impending suffering and death for the sake of human salvation: "The Lord resolved to take upon itself the burden of all human suffering. 'I am determined to take his own, not to turn or run away, not to tremble or to be terrified.' Yet, this text is Buddhist in origin, and articulates the career of the bodhisattva – the person in the process of becoming the Buddha. What does this parallel mean? What sort of problems of religion does it raise? Does it signify that the older text – in this case the Buddhist one – was borrowed by the younger – Christian – one? Or does it suggest – if looked at in the manner of the 'deists' – that both Buddhism and Christianity are rooted in a common religious source, however unknown it may be to them? Likewise, what would seem more Christian than these phrases celebrating the love of God for humanity, articulating a religion of grace and devotion to God?

In Him alone seek refuge with all your heart, all your love, and by His grace, you will attain eternity and everlasting peace.

Keep Me in mind, love Me and worship Me, bow down before Me, and if you do, I promise that you will be with Me. You are dear to Me, so put aside matters of the Law, and turn to Me your true refuge. I will deliver you from all evils. Have no cares.

This is drawn from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gītā. As such, does it indicate that the oft-heard claim that Christianity is a unique religion of grace and love for the savior might not be so unique after all? And if that is so, are not the same problems of religion, related to borrowing and such, raised? And what would it mean to Christian belief if it were discovered that Christianity had borrowed from a ‘pagan’ and even polytheist religion, such as much of Hinduism is? Or who, when presented with the following quote, would not identify it – at least at first glance, and certainly in terms of its spirit – as the story of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:11–32?

A man left his father's house and went to live in another city. He lived there for many years. But while the father continued to grow rich, the son became miserably poor. In the course of time, the son wished to see his father and went on a journey back home. When he arrived, however, he found that the father had moved to a distant land. All the while, the father too thought of the son he had lost many years ago, and grieved inwardly: "I am old, well advanced in years, and though I am rich, have lost my son. It would be bliss indeed if my son could someday enjoy all the wealth that I have acquired."

The real source of this excerpt is the Buddhist scripture, the Lotus Sutra. Could it be that the gospels hide within themselves elements planted there from other religions? And again, if that is so, what does this mean not only to claims of the uniqueness of Christian revelation, but what does it mean to the relations of religions to one another as a whole? The close critical study of the Bible is for a good reason an excellent source of some of the great problems of religion.

From Deism to "Mr. Tylor's Science" to Müller's Comparative Study of Religions

As we will see with regard to Friedrich Max Müller in the next chapter, the method of the Higher Criticism of the Bible was combined with comparative method, and extended in principle to all religious texts from all traditions. Applying these methods to the study of ancient Indian texts, Max Müller too sought to identify and to reconstruct the character of the different historical strata of Indian religion in a naturalistic way from evidence provided by the systematic study of language. Are the Vedas as primitive as the Hindus of today claim? If so, does linguistic evidence indicate this? Or are such claims theological and political? Does the study of the Vedic language point to the existence of a religion that historically preceded and materially contributed to the character of the Vedas? From linguistic evidence, such as comparative phonology, can we deduce that the Vedas have precedents, near relatives, and such among other religious traditions outside India, such as other scriptures composed in Indo-European languages, such as the Avestan of Iran? Why are so many of the features of Vedic religion like those found in comparison with ancient Iranian, Greek, and Roman religion, and so on? These kinds of questions asked by Max Müller of ancient India were typical of the same kinds of questions critical textual scholars and historians had been asking about the Bible for well over a generation.

Now, while Max Müller was no anthropologist, since he limited himself to the study of written texts, the advent of the historical linguistic study that he practiced bore on the work of future anthropologists of religion such as Tylor and Frazer. I argue that we cannot really understand the context of E. B. Tylor's work, the man called the 'father of anthropology,' without taking into consideration his relations with the theories of Max Müller, his great Oxford colleague, rival, and critic, as well as the leading critical philologist and historian of (Indian) religions of his time. Both thought they had been able, in their related but different ways, to uncover the nature of the origins of religion – and certainly the methods by which one could do so. Yet they disagreed about both their methods and results. Second, the historical critical method of the study of the biblical texts, as developed in Germany under Paul Lagarde and Julius Wellhausen, made direct methodological contributions to the development of the anthropology of religion associated with William Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and the Durkheimian school.

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Classic Nineteenth-Century Theorists of the Study of Religion: The Quest for the Origins of Religion in History