Historical Criticism - 0 views
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Historical criticism is the art of distinguishing the true from the false concerning facts of the past. It has for its object both the documents which have been handed down to us and the facts themselves. We may distinguish three kinds of historical sources: written documents, unwritten evidence; and tradition. As further means of reaching a knowledge of the facts there are three processes of indirect research, viz.: negative argument, conjecture, and a priori argument.
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The critic must now make the best possible use of the written sources at his disposal, i. e. he must understand them well, which is not always an easy matter. His difficulty may arise from the obscurity of certain words, from their grammatical form, or from their grouping in the phrase he seeks to interpret. As to the sense of the individual words it is supremely important that the critic should be able to read the documents in the language in which they were written rather than in translations.
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In general, whenever there is occasion to verify the exactness of a quotation made in support of a thesis, it is prudent to read the entire chapter whence it is taken, sometimes even to read the whole work. An individual testimony, isolated from all its surroundings in an author's work, seems often quite decisive, yet when we read the work itself our faith in the value of the argument based on such partial quotation is either very much shaken or else disappears entirely.
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This is a Catholic work dated in 1908. One can see the negotiation of science and faith in the writing. While Kantian terms such as a priori and a sence of evaluating data, there is a space for accepting unquantified data as part of the author's definition of historical criticism. -
I think that when we start to talk about what is authentic in the Bible versus what isn't authentic can lead us to call things "false" or untrue when in fact the stories may very well be true and authentic, just not in the modern way of what we deem as true. This is why I found Philip Davies commentary posted by Michael H. quite helpful because it talks about reading the Bible from the perspective of what the writer or scribe was trying to convey to his audience instead of reading from the perspective of trying to figure out for example, if hundreds of thousands of Hebrew people actually lived and survived in the desert for more than forty years.
