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School of Higher criticism, how smart were these guys anyhow?

Discussion in 'General Baptist Discussions' started by Plain Old Bill, Apr 13, 2007.

  1. Plain Old Bill

    Plain Old Bill New Member

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    I am a little surprized that nobody has mentioned any of the writers of articles in "The Fundamentals" spent most of two volumes attacking the school of higher crticism.:godisgood:
     
  2. gb93433

    gb93433 Active Member
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    How to interpret wisdom literature.
     
  3. Gold Dragon

    Gold Dragon Well-Known Member

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    There are many JEDP theories, but I don't believe that belief in redaction necessitates that the Jesus was wrong to attribute quotes from the Torah to Moses.

    If redaction occurred,
    1) Moses could have been a redactor or the redactor
    2) the redactor could have edited a work primarily written by Moses
    3) Moses could have written very little of the Torah and Christ's attribution of the quotes to Moses was to draw on the authority associated with the text as the same authority associated with Moses in the minds of his audience who attributed the text to Moses.

    While it is possible that none of these is true, I don't believe redaction means that Jesus was wrong or that the bible is contradictory. The same is true of Isaiah.

    Psalms is obviously the work of a redactor who compiled the works of others and lists their names. We have no problem saying that Psalms is primary written by David and is also the inspired word of God.

    Archaeology is not a science?

    There is always a subjective element to all sciences. As someone who is studying the "art" of medical sciences, that is becoming more and more evident the more I study. Science is about observation and experimentation. But from that objective observation and experimentation, a subjective theory and conclusion is arrived at. This is unavoidable with human endeavor.

    Part of the societal misunderstanding of science is regarding scientific laws. As with Newton's Laws of Gravity which has been shown to be incorrect at really small and really large masses by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, scientific laws are not immutable and can be wrong because there is always a subjective frame of reference to them.
     
  4. John of Japan

    John of Japan Well-Known Member
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    Good point. And many of those men were solid scholars. :thumbs:
     
  5. John of Japan

    John of Japan Well-Known Member
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    Only one string on your guitar, eh? [​IMG]

    Okay, I'll bite. What is the name of the higher critic who taught us how to interpret wisdom literature, what did he teach us, and how was it a part of his theory of higher criticism?
     
  6. gb93433

    gb93433 Active Member
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    There is only one string on that guitar because there is only one person I can think of that did any good. His name was Herman Gunkel. Before his time there was little known about wisdom literature and its patterns.
     
    #26 gb93433, Apr 15, 2007
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 15, 2007
  7. John of Japan

    John of Japan Well-Known Member
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    If Moses redacted his own work then I'll agree there is no problem. However, I'm flabbergasted that you think there would be no problem with Jesus quoting something as being from Moses if Moses didn't really write it. You would also then have a problem with the whole canon of Scripture! What, then, would make the Pentateuch Scripture and the Gospel of Thomas not Scripture???

    The problem is even worse with Isaiah. The book was considered a unity in the time of Christ by all, repeat all Jews. If it were not a unity, and someone else wrote the second half, then Christ would be fallible when he attributed quotes from the second half to Isaiah. I really see no way around this. Either Christ was infallible or He was not.
    I wouldn't call that redacting. It is simply editing the psalms (never a unified text) into one volume. Thus the website you mentioned at the start said this was "alleged" evidence.
    Ever hear of an archaelogical experiment? If the scientific method cannot be used in a scholarly discipline, it is not a science.

    Wikipedia:
    "Scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena and acquiring new knowledge, as well as for correcting and integrating previous knowledge. It is based on gathering observable, empirical, measurable evidence, subject to specific principles of reasoning.[1]
    Although procedures vary from one field of inquiry to another, there are identifiable features that distinguish scientific inquiry from other methods of developing knowledge. Scientific researchers propose specific hypotheses as explanations of natural phenomena, and design experimental studies that test these predictions for accuracy. These steps are repeated in order to make increasingly dependable predictions of future results. Theories that encompass wider domains of inquiry serve to bind more specific hypotheses together in a coherent structure. This in turn aids in the formation of new hypotheses, as well as in placing groups of specific hypotheses into a broader context of understanding."
     
  8. gb93433

    gb93433 Active Member
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    It was quite common that the writer was not always the person who signed the document. At the end of three letters Paul wrote, "I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. Remember my imprisonment. Grace be with you." Many writers had an amanuensis who wrote for them. In those days there was a problem with forgeries so Paul attached his own writing at the end to verify its authenticity. That sort of thing happens a lot today in business when a secreatary writes a letter and another person signs their own name. When President bush gives a speech he reads what another has written but basically claims it as his own.
     
  9. John of Japan

    John of Japan Well-Known Member
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    I hardly think that Paul dictating to a secretary is the same as someone else writing parts of Genesis and then Moses claiming he wrote it all.

    And even if the President uses a speech writer, he still has final say on the speech and may even write it himself. Once again, this is not the same as higher criticism saying that Moses didn't write all of the Pentateuch, but it was supposedly redacted many years later.
     
  10. Benjamin

    Benjamin Well-Known Member
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    I would beware of many of the scholars involved in higher criticism that they may often be getting caught up in an irresistible temptation to make a name for themselves, in pride trying to build on an academic kingdom for themselves instead of on the Kingdom of God.

    I think there’s too big a desire to jump on the latest critical methodologies and then readily adopt these philosophical methods that modify beliefs; many will then fall prey to intellectual influences and in pride will trade in orthodoxy for academic respectability.

    Preserving the Evangelical teaching of the Word of God as truth to the, as I think JoJ put it “Almost-Christian”, against an ever growing “scientific evidences” through the academic pridefulness out to prove that men redacted their own thoughts in one passage after another in a free-for-all fashion attacking the inerrancy of the Bible is what we’re up against in a lot of these higher criticism structures IMO.

    Speaking from personal experience my introduction to higher criticism came from some trying to use it to convince me contrary to the Trinity. They had something on almost every passage I used and so you can imagine this made me very leary of the practice.
     
  11. gb93433

    gb93433 Active Member
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    I agree and disagree. Suppose it were written down later, so what? That would not have been an uncommon practice then according to the practice of oral tradition. An excellent book on that is Memory & Manuscript: Oral Tradition & Written Transmission with Tradition & Transmission In Early Christianity, By Birger Gerhardsson

    The gospels were written several years after the fact. The gospels came down by oral tradition for several years before being written down. That was standard practice then.

    It is now thought that quite likely Eccleiastes was written later because of the Persian lone words in the text which were not in use during Solomon's time.

    I think we have to remember that what may be our standard practice is most likely not the same standard practice they had.

    If it was passed down by oral tradition and then written down later I do not have any problem with that because of the way they would have memorized those things so well. You must also rememebr that 1-2% of the people could even read. So think about the way they remembered things.
     
  12. Gold Dragon

    Gold Dragon Well-Known Member

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    I see no problem with that. Whether Moses actually wrote every word or not does not change the correctness of Jesus' statements and the NT.

    Not following your logic here.

    What you just described is redaction.

    Here is the definition of the scientific method in a Dictionary of Archeology

    Here are some examples of archeological experimentation.
     
    #32 Gold Dragon, Apr 16, 2007
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  13. Gold Dragon

    Gold Dragon Well-Known Member

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    Excellent points.
     
  14. John of Japan

    John of Japan Well-Known Member
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    Why in the world not? I just don't understand your reasoning here. Either Jesus was right or wrong when he attributed passages to Moses. If Moses didn't write what Jesus quoted as coming from Moses, how can it possibly "not change the correctness of Jesus' statements and the NT"? How can there be a middle ground here?

    If I say, "Gold Dragon said ABC on the BB" but you didn't really say it, would you not be offended if it was something important? I know that I can be really bothered if someone mistakenly attributes something to me in a discussion on the BB when I didn't really say it. I have even then on occasion doubted the integrity of the one supposedly quoting me! (Aside: GD, you've always been honest in this area.)
    It's a matter of integrity. In the 21st century, plagiarizing or editing someone's article without their permission gets you into big trouble. Just look at what happened to Dan Rather when he believed a fake document and put his neck on the line on national news. It cost him his job. Why would not the people of Bible times have the same integrity, the same ethics?

    The Gospel of Thomas is part of the NT Apocrypha. Why was it not included in the canon of the NT? Because it was untrustworthy. If the person who wrote it lied and said Thomas actually wrote it, how could the early Christians accept it as Scripture when they found out it was fake?

    "More and more from the end of the 2nd cent., the word 'apocrypha' came to stand for what is spurious and untrustworthy, and especially for writings ascribed to authors who did not write them, the 'pseudepigraphal' books" (ISBE, revised edition, vol. 1, p. 162)

    So, the hypothetical sources, if known by the Jews and Christians of Bible times and the early church, would have disqualified the Pentateuch from being Scripture.

    "As the theory grew, however, it soon became possible to speak of the J, E, D, P, L, K and S documents from which the Pentateuch was written over a period of time. But all of these 'sources' were purely hypothetical ones abstracted from an internal investigation of the Pentateuch. No one had ever seen a document either with these materials or labeled as any of these literary sources" (The Old Testament Documents, by Walter C. Kaiser Jr., pp. 53-54).

    Actually, no. Redaction involves more than this. The redactor actually changes and rewrites the content, not just editing the order of the chapters of a book or gathering a bunch of poems into a book. Redaction must include revision. Look at this definition from Microsoft Bookshelf 98
    (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd ed.):

    re·dac·tion (rî-dàk¹shen) noun
    1.The act or process of editing or revising a piece of writing; preparation for publication. 2.An edited work; a new edition or revision.

    The higher critics espousing the JEDP theory (to keep our terminology simple) didn't just say, "Oh, someone changed around what Moses wrote." They said, "A bunch of different guys added some here, wrote their own stuff there, and then called it all the work of Moses."

    I'll yield to you here. You are convincing, though some of this is just archaeology using science, not archaeology being scientific. Anyway, this is beside the point. Have you ever heard of experimentation in higher criticism?
     
  15. John of Japan

    John of Japan Well-Known Member
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    You make some good points here. However, though the Pentateuch itself doesn't explicitly claim Moses as author, the Bible itself over and over again does. (See 2 Chron. 25:4, Ezra 6:18, Neh. 13:1, all the Pentateuch quotes in the NT.)
    The difference is that Matthew the eyewitness wrote Matthew, it was not written by Papias and Polycarp. Matthew told the stories, then one day Matthew wrote them down. This gives the Gospel integrity. Some suppose that Mark wrote what Peter told him. Fine. There is still a direct link with an eyewitness.

    The JEDP theory gives no such direct link. Simple oral tradition written down many, many years later does not have the integrity that eyewitness-supported writings have.
    I don't think this is a parallel case, but I don't have time to do the research. It is late here in Japan. :sleeping_2:

    Their practices may have been different. Their integrity was no different.
    Granted, oral tradition was common then. But it is now also common even when almost everyone can read. In the martial arts, for example, there is much oral tradition about the founder and history of a particular style of a martial art.
    I don't know where you got this figure. I highly doubt that only 1-2% of the people could even read. We have many thousands of papyrii extant which were written by ordinary people.
     
  16. gb93433

    gb93433 Active Member
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    Education in Ancient Israel : Across the Deadening Silence by James Crenshaw

    It was only the wealthy who got an education.
     
  17. EdSutton

    EdSutton New Member

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    Actually, the Pentateuch does claim at least four times that Moses wrote what was said.
    And the book of Joshua, (for the "Hexateuch" crowd) as well, records Joshua's writing.
    I have yet to hear one of the advocates of "higher criticism" advocate Joshua as one of the supposed redactors, however. Just FTR. Personally, I like to refer to these theories as "The Old 'Whose Turn is it to Write, Now?' theory" or "The Old 'Four Writers Taking Turns' theory!" :laugh:

    Personally, I believe I'll stick with Jesus', Paul's and other Biblical writer's opinions, rather than some "Johnny come lately's" opinion (in the last 150 years or so), absent some really good compelling evidence! :rolleyes:

    Ed
     
    #37 EdSutton, Apr 16, 2007
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  18. go2church

    go2church Active Member
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    It is possible to believe that Jesus correctly attributed what he quoted to Moses and still believe there was more then one human author. Even if you do hold to the Moses only theory, you have to deal with the last chapter of Deuteronomy where Moses dies.

    To believe in the inspiration of scripture does not mean that God could not have used several human authors that we do not know the names of, Hebrews is perfect New Testament example. Just because we don't know their names does not mean we can't believe it was inspired. It seems perfectly within reason to seriously consider Aaron as a candidate for authorship in portions of the Pentateuch for example.
     
  19. EdSutton

    EdSutton New Member

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    Actually, one does not "have to deal with the last chapter of Deuteronomy where Moses dies" at all. It is possible to believe that Moses providentially wrote about his own death, having been given the foresight as to what would happen. I personally do not hold this, but do not find it completely untenable. OT prophets spoke and wrote about things they had not, and/or would not see in their lifetimes, and Moses held the 'office' of Prophet. (Deut. 18:15; 34:10; Acts 3:22; 7:37)

    But I personally think it was Joshua who "wrote these words in the Booik of the Law of God". (Josh. 24:26) But much as I said before in a previous post, no one seems to give these words much place, because no one that I've heard has suggested Joshua as one of the so-called 'redactors' of the writings of Moses.

    Ed
     
  20. John of Japan

    John of Japan Well-Known Member
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    Okay, well I'll have to yield to you here.
     
    #40 John of Japan, Apr 16, 2007
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 17, 2007
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