ABSTRACT
Modern biblical criticism began in the eighteenth century in France and Germany. Criticism (that is, scholarly study) of the Bible was not new. Textual criticism (called “lower criticism”), the determination of the original text of Scripture, had been practiced since the Renaissance, when the first critical editions of the New Testament were produced. “Higher criticism” was the attempt to determine the context in which the ancient texts were created and involved the study of the authorship, date, place of origin, and cultural and religious background of the biblical books. What was different about the new criticism was that it was based on naturalistic principles derived from the Enlightenment, in which supernatural events like miracles and predictive prophecy were believed not to occur. Christians had always held Scripture to be the product of God’s revelation to mankind, written by prophets and apostles under the influence of divine inspiration. Proponents of the new criticism viewed the Bible as a fully human product and began to study it as they would any ordinary ancient text, without recourse to explanations that invoked miracles or prophecy. They were influenced as well by evolutionary theories of the origin and development of religion as a natural phenomenon. Biblical scholars, influenced by the study of anthropology and comparative religion, were reluctant to regard the origin of Judaism among the Israelites or Christianity among the first followers of Jesus as the product of supernatural revelation or divine intervention. Instead, they contended that all religions, including Judaism and Christianity, evolved from, and adapted to, their surrounding environments.
