Criticism as Apologetics

Critical thinking in biblical exegesis was not born as the result of critical study of the Bible itself. The earliest generations of critical scholars of the Bible such as Erasmus, Scaliger and Grotius, were in the end convinced of the divine and inspired nature and the consistency of the Scriptures. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), for example, was an astute philological critic of the Bible but in the end had no problems in harmonizing contradicting biblical reports (between the Gospels, or between the Old and New Testaments). Neither has philosophy been a direct impulse to the critical study of the Bible. Descartes and Spinoza advocated the idea that true knowledge of God could be attained outside the Scriptures and thus created room for a critical approach of the Bible. However, their ideas had virtually no direct effect on biblical studies in their days: most biblical scholars continued to believe in the infallibility of Scripture.

Rather, the rise of the discipline of historical criticism and other critical approaches of the Bible was the result of a strange interaction between philosophy and Biblical studies. Remarkably, this criticism did not originate as a means to undermine the authority of the Bible, but on the contrary, as a way to defend and underpin the essential reliability of the Biblical accounts and their message. The first New Testament literary critics of the end of the eighteenth century (especially source criticists) were not the deconstructing scholars that some believe them to be. In fact, they were apologists who with their literary and source criticism tried to save what could be saved of biblical history and thus to defend the Bible.

For example, against someone like Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768). He was professor of Hebrew and eastern languages in Hamburg. To the outside world, Reimarus remained a studious philologist of the Hebrew language, but in secret he was a Deist philosopher. Deism rejected everything that contradicted reason and renounced the Bible as a book full of forgeries and fabrications. Reimarus was convinced that he could prove on rational grounds that the writers of the biblical books were deceiving their audiences. The differences between the Gospels led him to the conclusion that the evangelists had made up their stories about Jesus. After Reimarus' death, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) published Reimarus' writings without revealing his name. Adversaries of Deism had a higher opinion of the biblical writers but also had to admit that discrepancies between parallel or related narratives transmitted in the Bible existed. Their solution to both save what they thought was reliable earlier tradition and at the same time explain the differences between parallel biblical narratives, was to explain the differences as the effects of redactional changes in sources. Johann Jakob Griesbach (1745-1812) and others (e.g. Lessing, Herder) thus developed new ways for explaining the relationships between the Gospels: differences were the result of the way the writers had used their sources, and not of their deliberate attempts to deceive gullible believers. And so the biblical books could still be used for tracing reliable, historical information. Only in the 19 th century, the notion "critical" came to be equaled with rationalism, destruction, and unbelief. Perhaps an important impulse to this negative evaluation of "biblical criticism" was given by the new set-up of higher education at several Western European universities: the discipline of historical exegesis gradually became part of public education, separating the interpretation of the Bible from its earlier confessional and ecclesiastical background.