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Higher Biblical Criticism
By Brother Jeffrey Keith
Higher biblical criticism came about in the 16th century with the problems of
relating science and the bible and the rise of the laboratory method of
research. For many years the lands of Palestine and the surrounding areas were
considered the land of the bible. Theologians would go to visit or just to make
topological observations. Scientists did not have the means to do extensive
study. The Jewish people and the Christians saw no need for scientific research
into the lands. Only in the last couple of centuries has science discovered the
means to examine some of the problems that show up when scientifically examining
the bible claims. Theologians and preachers have not prepared themselves to be
able to examine the original or any other text with respect to science. The
bible was to be believed by faith..."Romans 5:1 Therefore being justified by
faith..." and no attempt to confront the problems that arose was made. If the
bible said it, they believed it and that was the end of the matter
During the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries science began to develop the tools
that changed all of Europe in respect to their views of the bible. The advent
and improvement of expeditional and laboratory method of research caused many
questions to be asked. With the advent of Rationalism, (defined as logic, using
the mind and reason. There must be a rational logical explanation for each cause
and effect), people wanted to know. Any given problem must have a rational
answer. Just telling me something is so, is not good enough. Give me a rational,
logical explanation from which to evaluate.
Fact gathering has long been an occupation. Asher Bonapaul, King of Assyria,
669-633 BCE (before current era) had a 30,000 volume library at Nineveh,
Nabonitz, King of Babylon, father of Belshazzer researched in the field of
religion and ecclesiastical archeology. Herodotus the Greek and Menestho an
Egyptian wrote histories of their countries. Eusebus, 265-340 CE (current era)
the bishop of Caesarea and Jerome 340-420 CE, the Bordeaux Pilgrim, 333 CE all
gathered facts.
New procedures and fact gathering came with Hans Lippendia, with Galileo and
Newton developing the telescope. Jensens' microscope allowed a glimpse into
myriads of minute life forms never before considered. Charles Darwin, from 1831
to 1836, sailed on the HMS Beagle observing, speculating and theorizing. In due
time as a result of his work, laboratories were set up to evaluate and speculate
in many chemical, biological and psychological scientific areas.
The bible was also subjected to this reasoning and men began to speculate.
Philosophers took up the bible and the writings of Jerome, Eusebus, etc. and
they interpreted the bible with their subjective opinions and loosed them upon
the world. Higher biblical criticism became vogue. In 1753 a French physician
named John Astruck formed the "documentary hypothesis". I won't go into it all
but scientists used this hypothesis to be able to date and interpret each word
of the bible. They would take the text using, usage of divine name (using
Genesis, Astruck decided that G-d had two different names and the biblical text
was written by three different sources, J,E,P and could be evaluated under this
assumption with other things, diction and style, the parallel or duplicate text)
they assigned it to a particular source. This hypothesis discounts any
inspiration of the text and accounts for the compilation of the bible strictly
from natural means. From this time on, the bible schools used this tool for
study and research. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls this hypothesis
went out the window. But the information provided by the discovery of the Dead
Sea Scrolls has not filtered down into the bible colleges. Much like the theory
of Transformism is still taught as fact, neglecting the evidences that show
different.
Dr. William S. Albright, (gone now) but whose work remains unparalleled in
the field of biblical archaeology and who was the foremost biblical archeologist
of our time, on page 5 in his conclusion of an article called "Archeological
discovery and the scriptures" in June 1968, in 'Christianity Today' said, "Much
nonsense has been repeated about what constitutes orthodoxy in dealing with the
text of the old and new testament. Its even been asserted recently that the
Pentateuch (penta=5, first 5 books of the old testament) was written by Moses in
the exact form that has come down to us in the Hebrew bible. So called, critical
scholarship, was partly responsible for this approach since 19th century critics
insisted that the text of our printed Hebrew bible had come down to us from the
time of its supposed final editing in the time of Ezra, without any appreciable
change. Today, thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, we know that this is not true.
There were different recitions (versions) of the pentateuch and no immutable
form can be attributed to any part of it. It is quite impossible to cut the
pentateuch up into a patchwork of J, E, P, (1753 documentary hypothesis) with
any hope of increasing our knowledge of what actually happened. That the
pentateuchal law is substantially Mosaic in origin and the patriarchal and
Mosaic historical traditions are astonishingly early and dependable seems, in my
opinion, certain".
Albrights' comments were at the outset, theory. But this man and his
followers, were men of science, so as the scientific facts presented themselves,
they were forced to pull back and re-examine the evidence and evaluate their
positions. But these "new" evaluations and positions are not generally known and
it is a lot easier to keep teaching what you've always taught rather than admit
you were wrong.
The scientific method starts with a hypothesis. Based on an assumption (mine
is that the biblical text is basically correct) then data is collected and a
theory formed. Then more data is collected and the theory tested against the
data. When proved, the theory becomes law, but the law is only a law until it
changes in the light of previously undiscovered data.
At the outset we have erred in our analysis of the bible in the light of the
Hebrew text. The primary source of the bible is Hebrew. It doesn't say the same
thing as the English text.
Pattle Pun did a technical book called "Evolution, Nature and Scripture in
Conflict" which I have not been able to obtain an English copy of but is a good
reference to those further inclined to study in this area. Another author,
Gerald L. Schroeder, a teacher and author of "Genesis and The Big Bang" writes
in "The Science of God", 1997, (reproduced here for education only, all material
is copyrighted).
"Cognitive dissonance, humanity's inherent ability to ignore unpleasant
facts, helps us in our struggle to retain the error of our ways...Charles D.
Walcott...one of the most famous scientists in his field...(in) Burgess
Pass...(of) the Canadian Rockies...Here the silt captured...Fossils, complete
with three-dimensional impressions of their soft tissues and organs, had been
formed...Walcott was a world-renowned paleontologist and the world's expert on
the explosion of multicellular life that occurred in the Cambrian period, 500 to
600 million years ago...
Using his geologist's hammer, Walcott would have rapped the multilayerd slab
on its edge. The layers separated and there, held within, was the fine imprint
of a crustacean. But this was impossible. The shale was too old to contain a
fossil as complex as this specimen. Some 550 million years ago, at the start of
the Cambrian, the only life on Earth was the most simple of forms, one celled
bacteria, algae, protozoans, and some pancake-shaped life of uncertain
definition known as Edicaran fossils. There was no way evolution could have
advanced life from one-celled protozoans to the complexity of this crustacean in
the twenty or so million years of the Cambrian. There simply had not been time
for that development. Well into the 1970's, evolutionary theory assumed that in
excess of 100 million years were needed for the basic body plans of advanced
life to evolve from the simplicity of pre-Cambrian life...
Other shale pieces yielded a variety of equally fantastic animal fossils.
Walcott, meticulous as always, recorded their shapes in his diary. During the
next decade Walcott collected and shipped between sixty and eighty thousand of
these specimens to his institute in Washington, D.C.
That Walcott realized he had made a major discovery is obvious from the vast
number of fossils he collected. Representatives of every animal phylum, the
basic anatomies of all animals alive today, were present among those
half-billion-year-old specimens. These fossils revealed an extraordinary
fact.
Eyes and gills, jointed limbs and intestines, sponges and worms and insects
and fish, all had appeared simultaneously. There had not been a gradual
evolution of simple phyla such as sponges into the more complex phyla of worms
and then on to other life forms such as insects. According to these fossils, at
the most fundamental level of animal life, the phylum or basic body plan, the
dogma of classical Darwinian evolution that the simple had evolved into the more
complex, that invertebrates had evolved into vertebrates over one hundred to two
hundred million years, was fantasy, not fact.
...no scientist questioned the role of random evolution, and certainly not if
that scientist was director of the Smithsonian Institution...Walcott reburied
the fossils, all sixty thousand of them, this time into the drawers of his
laboratory. The year was 1909. Eighty years were to pass before their
rediscovery...
Rediscovery of Walcotts' fossils in the mid-1980s changed the concept of
evolution...The Burgess fossils do not question the development of classes of
life. It is no secret that each individual phylum first appeared as simple
aquatic forms and became more complex with the passage of time.
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Other articles:
Open Letter by Brother Jeffrey
Higher Biblical Criticism by Brother Jeffrey
Seeds of the Kingdom by Brother Jeffrey
Gnosticism by Brother Jeffrey
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