Biblical criticism, as a term, has often given rise to much misunderstanding. It does not, in its proper academic sense, necessarily imply that the Bible is being criticized in a nasty, sneering, or unbelieving way, for “criticism” in this context means analysis and elucidation – making clearer, in fact. On the other hand, it has to be admitted that some honestly conceived criticism (often styled “higher criticism”), especially over the past two centuries, has fed currents of unbelief. For certain aspects of “higher criticism” thinking have been gleefully seized upon by atheists, who have used them to present the Bible as no more than made-up Jewish fairy tales, with “the church” hoodwinking simple folk into believing nonsense as a way of furthering its unscrupulous grip. But more of this myth shortly.
In fact, biblical criticism is as old as the Bible itself. The pre-Christian Jewish rabbis applied critical thinking to their own Hebrew books, while early church scholars, such as St Athanasius, Eusebius, St Gregory, St Augustine, and St Jerome, analysed the Old and New Testament texts with critical minds. First, they had to decide which sections of the Jewish Bible, with its rich traditions of prophecy, vision, law, historical narrative, and wisdom, should go into the Christian Bible. For it was by no means a simple or an obvious task, especially as the four Gospels and the Epistles had, by custom, come into fairly standard liturgical use by the early second century ad. Indeed, sorting through the enormous manuscript literature about Jesus generated within decades of the crucifixion, and deciding what was canonical and of a piece, and what was aberrant and should be excluded, was a mammoth undertaking. The four Gospel narratives, Acts, St Paul’s letters, and Revelation tied in with Old Testament messianic prophecies, such as those of Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, and others and the Psalms, and could thus be viewed as authentic; whereas others, such as the later “Gnostic” gospels of Judas and Mary Magdalene, clearly came from a different, often much later, Greek philosophical speculative tradition.
No one has ever claimed that the Bible, unlike the holy books of some other religions, fell down from heaven perfect and in one piece. Indeed, right from the word “go”, its production was first a customary and then a collaborative scholarly exercise. And very much in keeping with the Greco-Roman democratic “civic virtue” tradition within which Christianity grew up, the hammering out of the biblical canon of texts was done by inspired, devout, and critically minded learned men who worked together and held meetings and “councils” of the early church, such as at Nicaea and Chalcedon. And very crucially, these men prayed to God for guidance in their deliberations.
It was also by this process of scholarly analysis, discussion, and meetings that the great doctrines of Christianity, such as the incarnation, the resurrection, and the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the Trinity, were elucidated. For another myth frequently trotted out by secularizers is that all the church’s key beliefs were made up centuries after the events to which they purported to relate. But once again, this only exposes the ignorance of the atheists, for these doctrines, even if not formulated canonically until centuries after the events described (such as the adoration of the Virgin Mary), can be traced back to specific passages in Scripture, to particular textual principles, or to well-recorded early church usage, for all doctrines were, and are, intended to provide clearly thought out mental and spiritual hooks upon which people could anchor the Christian message.
And perhaps the greatest of these early church scholars was St Augustine himself, writing between c. AD 390 and 430. His great commentary on Genesis, AD 401–15, for instance, provides an excellent example of how un-naïve these men were, for, among other things, he looked at the cosmology of the Mosaic books, with its flat earth and curved sky, and related them to the spherical earth and sky of Greek learning. In this context, however, one must remember that St Augustine was not what we might now call “writing about science”. Rather, he was trying to prevent fellow-Christians from looking ridiculous when talking to well-educated pagans by defending ideas about cosmology which had long since been superseded and were known to be physically incorrect (a lesson of which many modern-day fundamentalists might profitably take note).
But what mattered was not the physics of Genesis, but the book’s proclamation of the fact that God the Father was the source of all creation, that he had made the world from nothing, had created humanity in his own image, and loved his creation. A well-argued counter to simple fundamentalism, in fact.
And this tradition of elucidating “criticism” continued through the centuries. It continued through the supposed “Dark Ages”, and was there at the Reformation, as the early Protestants came to exclude the Jewish Apocryphal books from the official inspired scriptural canon, though the majority of the Reformers accepted the Apocrypha’s value as a source of historical and edifying reading. Most of the Apocrypha was included as a useful Appendix to the Lutheran, Geneva, and 1611 Authorized Version Bibles, although the Puritans were instrumental in excluding it from later seventeenth-century printings, and it is still excluded from most “Protestant” Bibles today.
Martin Luther, the effective founder of Protestantism, moreover, expressed scholarly doubts about the full canonical status of James and Hebrews, and perhaps even Revelation, because they did not, in his view, contain a full expression of the doctrine of justification by faith. And some years later, in Geneva, John Calvin argued that St Peter had not actually written the second letter ascribed to him in the New Testament (it does, after all, argue more like a Greek philosopher or Greek-educated rabbi than a simple Galilean fisherman); while he also suggested that Psalms 74 and 79 were very late, dating from the Jewish Maccabean period of the second century BC, rather than from the Priest Asaph (to whom the Bible ascribes authorship) of the Davidic Kingdom of 700 years before.
Yet all of this, and what was to be written and argued by scholars over the next few centuries, is not what most people now think of as biblical criticism, for this “lower criticism” of textual details never questioned the essential uniqueness of the Christian revelation, but set out rather to clarify specific points. What so many people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did find disturbing, however, was the “higher criticism”, which really began in the early nineteenth century.
For centuries the German universities, especially Tübingen, had enjoyed a high theological reputation. And it was to be there that higher criticism would be born: very much the child of German metaphysical philosophy. Engendered in part from the secular philosophies of the “Enlightenment”, and in part from ancient Christian mystical traditions, higher criticism was by definition highly philosophical and often abstract, as it began to explore secular lines of thinking and attempt to apply them to theology. One such line was that of “mythos”: did the ancient cultural narratives of the Greek poet Homer, Moses, or Jesus actually describe real people and real incidents, or were they – in the kindest sense – made up? Perhaps no less so than were the Germanic folktales of the kind being collected by the devoutly Protestant Brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, or those studied by Sanskrit and other Orientalist scholars who were beginning to translate into European languages the religious and cultural narratives of India and China?
And in addition to the “mythos” school of ancient history interpretation, there was the incalculable influence of German metaphysics, beginning in a serious way in the eighteenth century with Immanuel Kant, but especially taking European thought by storm in the teachings and writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel by 1820.
Legendarily difficult to understand, Hegel postulated a developmentalism in the world of ideas: an early, abstract philosophical expression of that way of looking at life which decades later would be seen as “evolutionary”. But Hegel did not deal with people or animals so much as with abstract philosophical ideas. For an idea rarely rested for long without challenge. First, in Hegel’s system of thinking, would be the thesis, or original argument; next would come the antithesis, to challenge it; and from this conflict would emerge the synthesis. It was, in many ways, a radical new development of the logical system of Aristotle.
Hegel’s intellectual techniques could be used to envisage or analyse all sorts of philosophical situations, creating as they did methods or patterns for thinking. Yet when they were applied to religious texts, they could give rise to all manner of curious ideas, many of which alarmed more orthodox Christian scholars. The Revd Canon Edward Bouverie Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Christ Church, Oxford, was concerned when his warnings to his own students about the dangers of the new German philosophy proved counter-productive, and only stimulated them to read German metaphysical theology and, in some cases, to undertake periods of study in Germany!
But the Tübingen theologian and disciple of Hegel who sent unintended shivers through Victorian Christendom was David Friedrich Strauss, for the ideas contained in his Das Leben Jesu (1835–6) would come, for many people, to epitomize the essence of biblical criticism with all its horrors. In this work, Strauss analysed the life of Jesus from a non-transcendent, naturalistic, historical viewpoint. Rather than being the genuine incarnation of God, the Jesus of the Gospels was a character of late Jewish myth, built up by storytellers somewhere between the crucifixion and the supposed – very late – composition of the Gospels in the second century ad. To Strauss, the primitive church of Galilee and of St Paul could be interpreted in terms of the Hegelian dialectic, as the Jesus myth countered the pagan myths to produce a new dominant myth – Christianity.
Of course, Strauss’s book was an exercise in Hegelian speculative philosophy, but it cost him his professorship. Then, some thirty years later, the French seminarian Ernest Renan lost his faith after reading German Hegelian philosophy and in his La Vie de Jésus (1863) produced his own explanation of the Christ story: was not the historical Jesus what we might now call no more than an attractive and charismatic local preacher, whose brief story got blown up out of all proportion by legend-builders? After all, positivistic styles of thinking in mid nineteenth-century Europe were coming to argue (as we saw in Chapter 3) that scientific naturalism was the only yardstick of truth, and notions such as miracle, transcendence, God-given morality, and salvation were really the outdated cultural fossils of a more primitive, unscientific stage of human progress. A nearly 200-year-old line of argument, indeed, that the New Atheists of today are so busy trying to convince us is daring and original!
There were, however, two home-grown British examples of biblical criticism that did cause serious ructions in the 1860s, which, in our modern-day obsession with men and monkeys during that decade, we have tended to lose sight of. The first of these was the publication, in 1860, of Essays and Reviews, a volume of essays written by seven eminent theological scholars which argued for a less rigid and more context-related interpretation of Scripture than was acceptable in certain quarters at that time. And included within the book’s wider argument, and relating to the preceding section of this chapter, was a textually related plea for a less rigid interpretation of the doctrine of eternal damnation. Several thousand clergy, however, were quick to sign a petition affirming their belief in damnation, and there were successful legal attempts to have some of the essayists removed from their posts.
The second came in 1863 when, in good faith, John Colenso, bishop of the new Anglican Diocese of Natal in South Africa, published a work suggesting that the Pentateuch and Joshua, constituting between them the first six books of the Old Testament, might not actually have been written by Moses and Joshua, and might not be wholly authentic as historical sources. Colenso’s Pentateuch study came, moreover, in the wake of his controversial 1861 commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, where once again eternal damnation had been called into question. It is clear, however, that Colenso – a popular and hard-working missionary bishop – had many supporters, both ordained and lay, and petitions and fighting funds to finance his legal resistance to being deprived of his see accumulated.
On the other hand, Essays and Reviews, Colenso, eternal damnation – and, to some extent, even responses to Darwinism – must be seen within the context of the wider Anglican politics of the mid nineteenth century, for at the time, the Church of England was neither a unified nor an especially happy institution. The new and powerful spiritual forces that had swept through late Georgian Britain had not only re-energized the once slothful church, but had also divided it. The Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement of the 1840s, for example, had brought a sacramentalism and an approach to scriptural interpretation into Anglicanism which made many Low Church evangelicals, with their more “back to the plain word of Scripture” approach, see red, while the more liberal “Broad” Churchmen frequently angered them both. A modern reader might, therefore, be forgiven for being confused about how different groups of sincerely Christian scholars could rail at each other about the literal or more figurative interpretation of a particular passage of Scripture or ensuing doctrine. But all of these disagreements could, and still do, provide ammunition for those atheists who will gleefully seize upon any brickbat they can throw against Christianity, and that is why they must be addressed in a chapter attempting to trace the roots of anti-Christianity.
Yet there is one aspect of nineteenth-century Christian history that receives surprisingly little attention from present-day scholars and writers: the burgeoning Victorian fascination with the study of the Holy Land. Phasing in almost exactly, chronologically speaking, with the new Hegelian “higher criticism”, yet running in diametrical opposition to it, was a growing passion to study, visit, and even excavate the Holy Land. Almost as if wanting to overturn the “myth” theory of biblical interpretation by actual physical proof, people began to descend in increasing numbers on the lands between Egypt and Mesopotamia, but most of all Galilee and Jerusalem, especially from about 1850 onwards.
Of course, at that time, a century before the foundation of the state of Israel, there were few Jews living in the Holy Land, although there were pockets of Coptic and Nestorian Christians which had hung on since antiquity. But since the seventh century, and particularly following the destruction of Christian Byzantium in 1453, the whole region had been overwhelmingly Muslim. By the late eighteenth century, however, and especially after the establishment of a Franco-English presence in the Middle East following Napoleon in the 1790s and the destruction of his fleet by Nelson in the Battle of the Nile in 1797, Egypt had become the first “Holy Land” country to open up to tourism. And by the 1860s, with steam boats on the Nile, growing numbers of well-to-do Europeans and Americans were coming, often Bibles in hand, to find the “Land of Goshen”, where the Jews of the captivity had lived, or to explore the Sinai peninsula and try to identify the places described in Exodus. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Queen Victoria’s future Dean of Westminster, and a group of gentlemen went to Egypt and then to rough it in the wastes of Sinai over the winter of 1852–3, and Stanley’s resulting book, Sinai and Palestine (1856), became a major bestseller, going through over twenty editions by the early twentieth century, and stimulating others to follow in his footsteps.
It had been the American biblical scholar Dr Edward Robinson and the Arabic-speaking missionary Eli Smith, however, who received permission from local rulers to travel in Palestine in 1838, and got the ball rolling. Smith’s book Biblical Researches in Palestine (1841), with its attempt to identify key scriptural locations, whetted Christian appetites on both sides of the Atlantic for tangible evidences of their faith. Indeed, it is my argument that at the same time as German higher criticism was apparently undermining faith, so the new scheduled steamships, hotels, organized tourism, and a growing well-off and leisured Euro-American middle class was fuelling a passion to show the Bible to be based on physical fact. Not myth, not a product of Hegelian or positivistic dialectic, but demonstrably true.
And these Victorians were willing to put their money where their mouths were. In 1864, for instance, a private subscription began the Palestine Exploration Fund, to use the latest scientific techniques to survey, measure, and excavate the Holy Land. (Egyptian archaeology was already in full swing by 1864.) And nine years after his first visit, Stanley returned to the Holy Land, in a party to show the holy places to the Prince of Wales – the future King Edward VII.
Tourism hit the Holy Land in a big way after 1869, when Thomas Cook of Northampton, an already highly successful package holiday and travel promoter, took his first group of middle-class English folk to see the Bible lands with their own eyes. Seeing the River Jordan for the first time, it was reported, Cook, a devout Baptist, waded in and immersed himself fully clothed, frock coat and stovepipe hat included, as did others. For were they not reliving the very act that the Bible said the historical John the Baptist had done to Jesus himself?
It has been estimated that Thomas Cook, along with his rival tour promoters in Europe and America, took more Christians to the Holy Land between 1869 and the early twentieth century than did all the crusading armies of the Middle Ages. Cook’s first expedition accommodated travellers in a hired, sumptuous Bedouin-style travelling camp, complete with large tents, beds, chairs, portable kitchen, and servants, over the course of several weeks. But it was the growing volume of Western tourists that gave Palestine, just like nearby Egypt, its first modern hotels, with sanitation, hopefully clean water, and electric light well before the time of World War I. And what all the visitors wanted to see was Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Galilee, and the Jesus-related holy places, for, quite frankly, if all you wanted was sunshine and sea, by 1880 there was no shortage of package tours to take you on a comfortable train journey to the south of France or the Italian Riviera. It needed commitment to do the Holy Land, with its flies, camp beds, and necessity for armed guards.
Needless to say, these Holy Land package tours did not come cheap, but were aimed at that growing body of comfortably off middle-class folk who were not stuck for a hundred guineas or so, and could afford to spend a couple of months travelling abroad. And Great Britain, northern Europe, and America were producing such people in ever increasing numbers, as professional, mercantile, and industrial fortunes burgeoned. And these were exactly the same people who, so some argue, were losing their faith because of Darwinism, positivism, or biblical criticism, as they read Comte (or his English disciple Frederic Harrison), Strauss, or Renan in English translation. Yet no matter what, there were sufficient of these middle-class people not only to sustain Holy Land tourism, but also to subscribe to research and archaeological bodies such as the Palestine Exploration Fund.
Of all branches of archaeology, however, that of the Bible lands has probably received the most adverse criticism, on the assumption that you do not have an “open mind” if you go with a preconceived agenda. It is true that early claims to have found the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, direct evidences for the Flood of Noah and the plagues of Egypt, and Christ’s tomb in the Garden of Gethsemane raised critical eyebrows, and rightly so, for one cannot properly archaeologize with a Bible in one hand and a shovel in the other. Yet what the real fruit of biblical archaeology has been is its provision of a wider context for the biblical world: from Sir Austen Henry Layard’s discovery of the genuine ruins of the biblical Nineveh and Babylon in the 1840s, to Sir Leonard Woolley’s 1920s excavations at Ur of the Chaldees in modern-day Iraq, to Dame Kathleen Kenyon’s later digs in Palestine.
What archaeology has shown is that the world of the pharaohs, Sennacherib’s failed siege of Jerusalem in the days of Isaiah, and Nebuchadnezzar’s successful assault 130 years later were events in real time, as recorded in written texts, stone relief pictorial carvings, and archaeological artefacts. And while no one can reasonably expect that the three-year ministry of Jesus would have left any visible impact on Roman Palestine, archaeology nonetheless reveals a world that is congruent with New Testament narratives, as is the Romano-Greek world with that described in St Paul’s travels.
Suffice it to say, however, that just as Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations in Victorian Greco-Turkey disproved the then parallel classical orthodoxy that the world of Homer was one of myth, so the excavation of the Holy Land, from the Pyramids of Egypt to the ziggurats of Babylon and Ur in Mesopotamia, showed that the world of the Old and New Testaments was real, and a credible backdrop to what was described in the Bible.
So in a way, one might argue that what the higher criticism with its philosophical theories at first undermined, so later archaeology and evidence-hungry travellers helped to restore, as the “mythical Bible” itself became an outdated cultural myth.