Higher Criticism Research Articles

ביקורת נוסח המקרא: פרקי מבוא [The Textual Criticism of the Bible: An Introduction] (review)

Hebrew Studies 33 (1992) 170 Reviews (several eds., two excellent Spanish translations and one terrible English one). On the citation of Ibn Zabara as well as the matters discussed by Talmage on p. 50 of the introduction, see Judith Dishon's splendid edition (Jerusalem, 1985, p. 218; if Talmage did not see this edition, the editors again surely must have) which cites Davidson, whose edition Talmage did see, yet ignored. These matters aside, the commentary which is of most importance is that of Joseph, while the most disappointing-and even useless-is that of Moses. (Incidentally, the Oxford text [So R. Driver], attributed to Ibn 'Ezra, was also reprinted in Kitvey R' [sic] Avraham Ibn 'Ezra [Jerusalem, 1972], vol. 5; not mentioned by Talmage, nor did he make it clear that the Oxford MS was the one edited by Driver; see his vague remarks, pp. 18-19 of the introduction.) David Qiml:ti's commentary lies somewhere in between these two and is of little value to anyone other than a student of his work. Bible scholars as well as students of medieval Jewish commentaries may benefit, however, from Joseph's fascinating commentary. Talmage's introduction, for all its faults, provides an adequate guide to some of the more important observations. Norman Roth University of Wisconsin Madison, WI 53706 .~':JO 'Pi£) :~ipOn MOU m'p':l [THE TEXTUAL CRITICISM OF THE BIBLE: AN INTRODUCTION ]. By Emanuel Tov. The Biblical Encyclopaedia Library 4. Pp. xxiv + 326. Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1989. Paper. Lower criticism has, lamentably, often been held in low esteem, not only because of the pejorative sound of its name but also because the study of textual minutiae seems to offer rather little intellectual adventure. Though this may not be its purpose, the book under review is certainly qualified to set things straight: The lower (or, better, textual) criticism constitutes the indispensable foundation for any serious study of the Bible. As the author pertinently points out (p. 12), however, it is not the only foundation of the literary analysis of the Bible; the so-called "Higher Criticism ," linguistic investigations, geographic and historical research, and the interpretation of individual verses likewise serve as pedestals. If these topics constitute fascinating subjects of study for their own sake, so does Hebrew Studies 33 (1992) 171 Reviews textual criticism. Tov's book produces the proof, displaying an intriguing segment of cultural history and providing excellent guidance for its appraisal. The exposition starts with a convincing demonstration of the unreliability of any commonly used Bible text (chap. 1). The most carefully printed editions of the Hebrew text, some of which claim to be based on authoritative manuscripts (e.g., Leningradensis or the Aleppo codex), not only differ from one another, but quite frequently reflect the views (or should one say "bias"?) of the scholars who edited them. The author makes us aware of the problem by juxtaposing variant readings exhibited in parallel biblical passages as well as early witnesses to text-forms which differ from the MT, to say nothing of the textus receptus. At the end of this introductory chapter the most important technical terms are explained. The second chapter describes the textual witnesses, beginning with the proto-Masoretic texts and their relation to the MT, then commenting on the Samaritan text and its earlier forms, before finally explaining the classical versions. Numerous comparative tables illustrate the issues under debate, and the problems connected with the text-critical use of the versions are amply discussed. In contradistinction to earlier works on text and versions of the OT, the unique importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls is duly demonstrated here. For the emergence of the MT the author postulates three historic stages, each bearing a characteristic degree of textual stability or variance. Chapter 3 sketches the history of the text, which is compared to previous scholars' outlines. Tov differentiates between pristine literary documents and the later established text, advocating the search for the latter as the ideal goal of textual research even though it can only be progressively approached and never reached. Chapter 4 deals with the transmission of the text, including the material aspects of the scribes' workmanship on the one hand and...

Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible.

Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible.

Lewis explains his reasons for distrusting the so-called "higher criticism," and warns about its consequence to modern Anglicanism

Lewis explains his reasons for distrusting the so-called "higher criticism," and warns about its consequence to modern Anglicanism

Recent Research in the Renaissance: Criticism and Patronage*

The book that everyone in musicology is talking about this year—not just those of us working in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—is Joseph Kerman's Contemplating Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985; called simply Musicology in the English edition). In it, Kerman argues against what he calls positivism, which he defines as a rigid and non-judgmental pursuit of dry facts, and in favor of the higher criticism, by which he seems to mean analysis—or at least some penetrating discussion of the way individual pieces work and what makes them great—informed by a sense of history and written in a humanistic style, with a personal commitment on the part of the author to the quality of the music with which he is concerned.

“Higher criticism” of behaviorism

“Higher criticism” of behaviorism

Passion, Authority, and Faith in The Damnation of Theron Ware

CRITICS of Harold Frederic have frequently noted the relationship between The Damnation of Theron Ware and The Scarlet Letter.' But what has not been explored is how well the romantic revisionist reading of Hawthorne developed by Nina Baym and others can be used to illuminate Frederic's novel.2 For Baym The Scarlet Letter is less a drama of sin and redemption than the story of conflict between the passional self and social authority. A similar point can be made about The Damnation of Theron Ware. For Frederic sexual passion is not an evil, something into which one falls, as is assumed in those interpretations which suggest that Ware's temptation by Celia Madden parallels his loss of faith through exposure to the new science of Dr. Ledsmar and the Higher Criticism of Father Forbes.3 Instead, Frederic presents sexuality, especially female sexuality, as something proscribed by society, by a male authority which fears it. The novel traces several consequences attendant upon this proscription: the blight on the Wares' marriage, which begins when the Methodist trustees insist that Alice no longer wear those roses in her cap on Sundays; the somewhat disordered sexuality of Celia Madden, teased and hated for her red hair; and the effeminization, regression, and adolescent

“This dying out race” W.H.I. bleek's approach to the languages of Southern Africa

Wilhelm Hendrick Immanuel Bleek was the first scholar to intensively study southern African languages and literatures. This paper examines his motivationfor doing so. Important influences included the German “Higher Criticism “ of Biblical texts, and conflict between “High “and “Broad” church tradition in the English church. Bleek's attention to field study of actual oral literature is presented as his most important achievement, and his single‐minded effort to salvage the literature of the Cape Bushmen, “this dying out race” as he called them, was also his last effort before his early death at the age of forty‐eight.

Literary art and oral tradition in Old English and Serbian poetry

Oral literature research entered Old English literature through Albert Lord's 1949 dissertation, eleven years later to becomeThe Singer of Tales, and Francis P. Magoun, Jr's ensuing essay, ‘The Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry’.1As I have pointed out elsewhere,2these two scholars were not the first to identify and discuss the recurrent phrase or ‘formula’ in the poetry; German Higher Criticism of the nineteenth century had analysed the use of commonplaces of diction (orParallelstellen) to try to determine authorship and to establish the text of various poems. What Lord and Magoun originated was the idea of an explicit and necessary connection between the formula, defined by Milman Parry as ‘a group of words regularly used under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea’,3and a poem's orality. Following the lead of Parry's ground-breaking analyses of Homeric epic and the Parry–Lord field work on South Slavic oral epic, they and scholars following them reasoned that the source of formulaic structure lay in a tradition of oral verse-making and that formulaic phraseology was a kind of poetic idiom fashioned over generations by bards responding to the continual pressure of composition in performance. Only if his mind were well stocked with phrases of metrical shape – if, in short, he had learned his poetic language well – could an oral poet fluently tell his tale in the form of traditional verse.

The Chinese Critical Tradition

It is really deplorable that until quite recently there still existed in Western academic circles a number of serious misunderstandings about Chinese historiography, particularly the Chinese theory and practice of historical method and critical techniques. Many well-known academic figures still do not know, or refuse to face the fact, that the Chinese tradition of pursuing an objective knowledge of history can be dated back as far as the first century and that the quality of critical scholarship had reached a level equal, either in terms of textual criticism or higher criticism, to any found in the West up to the beginning of the nineteenth. To cite a few examples of Western ignorance. An American sinologist specializing in Chinese traditional historiography firmly asserts that ‘the Chinese are not a whit behind Western scholarship in the exacting domain of textual or preparatory criticism’, but ‘in the field of historical criticism... Chinese historians of the old school did not evolve those principles which are now regarded in East and West alike as an indispensable part of scientific historical method’, although ‘since the seventh century, a few bold, independent spirits have evolved the elements of historical criticism’.1 Another sinologist holds nearly the same position by stating that ‘what was missing’ in traditional Chinese historiography until the sixteenth century was a ‘systematic method’ of criticism, while recognizing that ‘there was an almost continuous line of doubters’ from the early eighth century onwards, and that under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) attempts were ‘made to bring all the doubts together into one publication’and so to lay‘ the basis for organized study’, an active role being played by ‘ancillary studies of all’ including philology in the development of the Chinese textual criticism of history.2 The most bigoted and dogmatic verdict passed on Chinese historiography which I have ever read in the Western literature is Professor J. H. Plumb's assertion that Chinese historians ‘never attempted, let alone succeeded, in treating history as objective understanding’, and that ‘Chinese scholars were using historical materials for the same purposes in the early twentieth century as in the T'ang and Han dynasties’. Professor Plumb's bias is further reflected in the affirmation, which was added after his reading of Professor E. G. Pulleyblank's remarkable essay Chinese historical criticism: Liu Chih-chi and Ssu-ma Kuang,3 that ‘I would maintain that the Chinese were concerned solely with creating an educative past - subtle, highly detailed, accurate in commission, but not history’4.

Strauss's English Propagandists and the Politics of Unitarianism, 1841–1845

In 1856 Ralph Waldo Emerson stated boldly that the English “cannot interpret the German mind.” 1Although German higher criticism did not “merely attack the Scriptures” but rather “studied them in a new spirit,” it was to be censured, feared, ignored, or misunderstood in the early decades of the nineteenth century in England.2 Such was not the case in the country which gave birth to the school of which David Friedrich Strauss is perhaps the most notorious and most distinguished representative. Eduard Zeller asserted that, in his own country, Strauss's work “had … a decided effect upon the philosophy and the general culture of our own day.”3

“Monument Facts and Higher Critical Fancies”: Archaeology and the Popularization of Old Testament Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Historians of the development of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century have normally treated this aspect of intellectual history as a preserve of the university don and the ambitious cleric. However, further study points to a movement of considerable magnitude and momentum beginning in the last decades of that century which aimed at popularizing the methods and results of the higher criticism of the Old Testament. Widespread popular recognition of a critical approach to the Old Testament and its implications began in the 1860s in response to the work of J. W. Colenso and the contributors to Essays and Reviews.

Theory divided from practice: The introduction of the higher criticism into Canadian Protestant seminaries

Theory divided from practice: The introduction of the higher criticism into Canadian Protestant seminaries

Calpurnius Siculus: Technique and Date

In 1854 Moritz Haupt, in a classic exercise of the higher criticism, established that only the first seven poems of a collection of eleven which had all passed under his name could be attributed to Calpurnius, and that the last four belonged to Nemesianus (Opuscula I. 358–406). This division and attribution is beyond question now. Haupt then went on to show that Calpurnius was active in the Neronian age. Some of the evidence was philological. Indeed, it was the very evidence which he had used to distinguish the techniques of the two poets. E. Champlin, however, claims that ‘all the traditional indications of a Neronian date are based on circumstantial details which are equally appropriate to other periods in imperial history’. This is incautious. For Champlin, unlike Haupt, fails to consider such matters as prosody and diction, which are, after all, historical data that may prove to be as useful tools to the historian as an allusion to a barbarian invasion or to a consular year. In fact, all the ascertainable evidence was not put into the balance. We now turn to that evidence.

Language, History, and Text in Eliot's “Journey of the Magi”

Abstract“Journey of the Magi,” anticipating the Four Quartets, constitutes a vision of historical process and a metaphor of religious mystery more complex than in Eliot's earlier work. Experimenting with dramatic monologue, remembering Browning's interest in the Higher Criticism, Eliot juxtaposes oral recitation against recorded account to provide an analogy for the Incarnation. As elsewhere, Eliot finds symbol and writing suspect: the Magus, in ironic ignorance, uses literally a figurative language Christianity had not yet created, but he intuits the Word better than readers steeped in biblical symbolism. Simultaneously Eliot interfiliates the Magus' speech with Matthew's gospel, Andrewes' 1622 Nativity sermon, and his own “impossible” re-presentation of the original utterance: the resulting historical sequence, collapsed by anachronisms, makes the poem's structure emblematize the Logos. Through the ostensible “loss” of the scribe's transcription, Eliot implicitly questions biblical canonicity and the traditions of Christian interpretation. The poem approximates his religious position in 1927.

How to Be a Newer Critic: Metonymic Mumblings or a Generative Lexicon of Apposite Apothegms

CRITICAL GAMESMANSHIP: To write the NEWER or HIGHER CRITICISM it is not so much a matter of pursuing an argument or exploring a text invoking the right WORDS. One's critical posture is almost immediately revealed by the choice of sanctified words and familiar constellations of phrases. Schools and charters of critical privilege are, however, frequently dissolved or reorganized, so it is crucial that the aspiring critic not be caught on the ledge of yesterday's discarded lexicon. The following basic Do-It-Yourself Kit should suffice get any newly licensed critic into the game. The motor of this package is the the Generative Lexicon, which-it must be emphasized-should be carefully checked every quarter for obsolescence. (Charter subscribers may enroll Our automatic review service; for rates and further information, write: ihe Critics Guyed, Checkerboard Square, Baltimore, Md 21218.) As a Chinese restaurant, use the Lexicon you merely select one (but not more than one) KEY word from each column, left write on. Double-credit KEY words are CAPITALIZED. This generative model should afford the apprentice the choice of something over four billion sentences, at least enough keep up with the current received journals. If a sentence thus generated should approach transparency-and hence critical bankruptcy-try interposing a NEGATIVE, which may open new and surprising depths of opacity. If the machine stalls before an especially tenebrous sentence, try introducing it with as it were, in a manner of speaking, as Hegel failed observe, or to put it baldly.

The Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought

This book was conceived by Alan Bullock, a distinguished 20th-century historian and Oxford don, when he encountered the word "hermeneutics" while reading the<i>Times Literary Supplement</i>, did not know what it meant, and was uncertain about where to look it up. (If a full-time scholar finds himself at a loss in dealing with a term related to his own field, we full-time physicians are in trouble.) Recognizing that even the best and brightest of us all cannot keep pace with the present exponential expansion of knowledge, he decided to develop a dictionary of terms used in both ordinary and obscure 20th-century writing and conversation. The result is a delightful adventure of ideas. The book contains approximately 4,000 terms. "Modern thought" is flexibly conceptualized. If one glances randomly through two pages of the<i>H</i>section, one finds<i>heterozygote</i>and<i>heuristic</i>keeping company with<i>hi-fi, high-level programming language, higher criticism, Hilbert space,</i>

The Defence of Christian Belief in Australia 1875–1914: The Responses to Evolution and Higher Criticism

The Defence of Christian Belief in Australia 1875–1914: The Responses to Evolution and Higher Criticism

The Mausoleum Frieze: Membra Disjectanda

Coming as they do from one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the frieze-blocks of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus are among the most celebrated sculptures in the British Museum. In the century since their acquisition, many mutually contradictory attempts have been made to attribute the various slabs to the four sculptors of the Mausoleum as named by Pliny: Skopas, Bryaxis, Timotheos, and Leochares. Most of these attributions have been made by scholars working away from London, apparently chiefly from photographs. A new study of the slabs themselves suggests that the establishment of the integrity of the sculpture is an essential preliminary to the ‘higher criticism’ that has been practised so assiduously. It is therefore the purpose of this note to examine the various fragments that have been attached to the slabs from time to time, and to try to determine whether these joins can be accepted. As Curtius said, ‘Primum monumenta, deinde philosophia’.

Executive Privilege, Professor Rosenblum, and the Higher Criticism

Professor Victor Rosenblum's review' of my Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth,' is an exercise in straddling which befogs the issue. At one and the same time he pays tribute to the vitality and timelessness of Berger's '3 and accepts United States v. Nixon4 without blinking, delicately circling the fact that Berger's myth charge is utterly incompatible with Chief Justice Burger's discovery that a privilege for confidential communications is inextricably rooted in separation of powers. 5 On Burger's premise Berger's timeless contribution falls in shards. Not a word about the salvo of criticism that greeted the Burger opinion,6 though one might expect that a reviewer would welcome the opportunity to weigh that criticism against the book and the opinion.

Dwight L. Moody: American Evangelist, 1837-1899 (review)

book reviews353 Dwight L. Moody: American Evangelist, 1837-1899. By James F. Findlay , Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Pp. 440. $10.00.) "Dwight L. Moody was an honest, sincere, devoted Christian." These are the words of a contemporary editor and the epitaph with which Professor Findlay closes his biography of one of the most dynamic popular figures of the Gilded Age. The epitaph was, of course, understatement . An honest, sincere, devoted Christian must deserve more than these adjectives for his life to be worth a biography. The man from Northfield, Massachusetts was a vigorous, innovative, commanding, impressive organizer and speaker who confronted hundreds of thousands of people with their own hopes and fears, offering them a theology familiar and practical enough to provide personal discipline and security in a confusing and often threatening world. In an admirable, craftsmanlike, scholarly fashion, Findlay analyzes the career of the man who was a symbol of transitional evangelical Protestantism which, like Moody, was nurtured in a simple, individualistic, democratic community , and was matured in a complex, mass society. The problems of such maturation Moody never solved. Rather, he kept them from crushing a generation of middle-class Americans by employing the techniques and preaching the values of mass evangelism: organization, enthusiasm, personal piety, self-discipline. Findlay's purpose in writing this biography is explained in a comprehensive preface: to place Moody within the context of evangelical Protestantism , to explain the world view of that context, and to do what biography should always do—explain a personality. What emerges is a public man whose inner life is often obscured by inadequate sources, his own personal reserve, and, while Findlay does not say so, perhaps Moody's own limited powers of introspection and sophistication. Although we know Moody went through two "conversion" experiences, the second (1871) is not examined as thoroughly as might have been expected, even though it impelled him upon his career as an international evangelist, after having cast him into a profound depression. To be fair, however, it should be conceded that the psychology of evangelical Protestantism is not Findlay's chief interest. And his balanced, sympathetic reconstruction of the restless, aggressive Moody reveals a brusque, simple man of strong emotions indefatigably impressing upon a generation of middle-class Protestants the virtues of self-discipline and the ideals of love and calm assurance in the transcendent Christ. All this in the face of science, higher criticism and the attractions of secularism; in many ways Moody's Christianity was a rear-guard action against the forces that threatened Americans' sense of community, in this case a beloved community based on evangelical precepts. Findlay is successful in his threefold purpose, for those who read this biography will not remember Moody as a "mass" evangelist so much as the symbolic evangelical man attempting to revitalize the ideology of middle-class America. Findlay's work may enable some historians to see 354CIVIL WAR HISTORY the necessity of analyzing religion as a social force, of understanding religion as ideology as well as theology. As a businessman in a business age, Moody conjoined in his person and work the values of the AngloAmerican middle classes and the morals of a simplified Christian theology which have been perceived as identical by both friends and foes. Trying to show the interdependency of the two without confusing them is a demanding, perhaps impossible, task; but, to his credit, Findlay has tried to do so. Throughout the book he weaves the themes of middleclass consciousness and evangelical articulation, as he follows Moody from Northfield to Chicago to England to Northfield again in his search for ways to get men back into the church and the church back into the center of American life. One is inclined to demur from some observations , for example, that the Ritualists of England either by goal, status, or perception were democratic, or that Moody really was "responding" to the actual social problems of the city. Also, some readers may be annoyed by the recurrent italicization of the word "Bible" for no apparent reason. These are minor, perhaps minute faults; the book is so good that it should be read as an excellent contribution to social history...