Biblical criticism

The use of critical analysis with the goal of better comprehending and elucidating the Bible is known as biblical criticism. When it was first developed as historical-biblical criticism in the eighteenth century, it was based on two distinguishing characteristics: the scientific concern to avoid dogma and bias by applying a neutral, non-sectarian, reason-based judgment to the study of the Bible, and the belief that the reconstruction of the historical events that led up to the texts. Both of these distinguishing characteristics are still present today This distinguishes it from earlier, pre-critical methods; from the anti-critical methods of those who are opposed to criticism-based study; from later, post-critical orientation; and from the many different types of criticism that biblical criticism transformed into in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The vast majority of academics agree that the German Enlightenment (about 1650–around 1800) was the impetus behind the development of biblical criticism; nevertheless, others argue that its origins may be traced back to the Reformation. Its growth was influenced by pietism from Germany as well as deism from the United Kingdom; nonetheless, rationalism and Protestant scholarship were its most significant inspirations. The Age of Enlightenment, with its inherent distrust of biblical and church authority, sparked a new wave of inquiry into the historical foundations of traditional theological perspectives on Jesus' divinity while at the same time raising questions about the historical foundations of Jesus' humanity. This search for the historical Jesus can be traced back to the earliest days of biblical criticism, and it has continued to be an area of interest for biblical scholars, on and off, for well over 200 years.

Textual criticism, source criticism, form criticism, and literary criticism are the four primary schools of thought that make up historical-biblical criticism. Within these schools of thought, a broad variety of techniques and questions are addressed. Textual criticism is the process of analyzing biblical manuscripts and the information they contain to determine what the original text most likely said. The practice of source criticism involves looking for evidence of the authors' sources inside the text. Form criticism isolates concise sections of work and investigates the context in which they were first written. Later on, as a derivation of both source criticism and form criticism, a new kind of critique known as redaction criticism emerged. Each of these approaches was largely historical and focused on events that took place before the texts were composed in their current form. These early approaches were quite different from what we now know to be literary criticism, which arose in the twentieth century. It concentrated on the literary structure of the texts as they now exist, ascertaining, to the extent that this was feasible, the author's aim, and understanding of the reader's reaction to the text via the use of approaches such as rhetorical criticism, canonical criticism, and narrative criticism. The interpretation and view that people had of the Bible were fundamentally altered as a result of the many different types of biblical criticism.

In the latter part of the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first century, biblical criticism underwent significant development as a result of being affected by a broad variety of other academic fields and theoretical viewpoints. After being dominated for a long time by white male Protestant academics, the field of biblical criticism saw several new notable voices emerge throughout the twentieth century. These new voices included non-white scholars, women, and people from the Jewish and Catholic traditions. The advent of globalization introduced a wider variety of perspectives on the globe into the discussion, as well as new areas of study as varied as New approaches to biblical criticism were developed as a result of research in sociology, cultural anthropology, psychology, and other related fields. These new approaches include social scientific critique and psychological biblical criticism. In the meanwhile, postmodernism and post-critical interpretation started calling into question the role and function that biblical criticism played in the first place. Biblical criticism moved from the historical to the literary, and its fundamental premise shifted from neutral judgment to a recognition of the various biases the reader brings to the study of the texts. Along with these new methods came new goals, as biblical criticism moved from the historical to the literary.