BS2615-1-WI10

The approach to the text of Sacred Scripture known as historical criticism began as far back as 1678, when Richard Simon, a Catholic priest, published a "critical history" of the Old Testament (placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1682).

This critical approach was taken up and fostered throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by liberal Protestant exegetes. In the late nineteenth century the assumption was firmly in place among these liberal scholars that the early chapters of the Book of Genesis were little more than a concatenation of myths and legends, and the search was under way for the history behind the fiction.

The historical critics eventually won the long and at times bitter fight for the ear of the hierarchy over the contested Replies of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, and the reason for this victory seems to have been a tactical error in the approach of the traditional Catholic exegetes who opposed them. Many of these traditional exegetes were able scholars, but they pitched their arguments against the historical critics more in terms of the questionable orthodoxy of the presuppositions and logical results of the form-critical method than by analyzing in detail and refuting the technical procedures of the method itself.

The science of historical criticism is a new method based upon a secular understanding of history. In its basic intent it therefore differs radically from biblical studies which arose out of the Reformation. The Reformation assumed that the content and production of Scripture resulted by the will of God rather than the will of man, and that, although the prophet himself operated within a historical situation and within a particular language, culture, and thought form, that he was nonetheless guided by the Holy Spirit in such a way that the result was the Word of God.

The historical-critical method has been under development since the age of the enlightenment. It was popularized for biblical studies by Ernst Troeltsch at the end of the nineteenth century. He enunciated three basic principles to guide the historian: (1) the principle of criticism or methodological doubt indicates that all knowledge relies upon the judgment of historical science and receives a status or probability, (2) the principle of analogy indicates that present experience is the criteria of probability for that which took place in the past—all events are in principle similar, (3) the principle of correlation indicates that events are so interrelated that a change in one phenomenon necessitates a change in its causes and effects