by David Lester

David Lester, a computer scientist at the University of Manchester, wrote this essay in June 1991 in the context of a soc.religion.christian debate about Biblical authorship. Rather than engage the particular controversy, he stepped back and asked a larger question: where does the critical method come from, and why do we apply it differently to the Bible than to other ancient texts?

What follows is a compact intellectual history — Homer and the Trojan War, the Greek city-states, Aquinas and the schoolmen of Oxford, Renaissance textual criticism, and finally the question of Scripture. Lester writes with the dry clarity of a mathematician, but the argument is genuinely theological: the tools we use to understand any ancient text have the same lineage, and the reasons we exempt the Bible from them deserve scrutiny.

He comes clean at the end: he thinks critical questions have very little relevance to Christian faith, whose heart is in the Great Commandment, not in historical verification. The essay is preserved here as a model of honest, generous intellectual engagement in a medium that did not always reward it.

It can often be helpful, when trying to take the heat out of these sorts of discussions, to look at the rise of critical methods in other fields.

I suppose that it goes back to Greece, as most of these things do, and to a couple of poems: the Iliad and the Odyssey. Traditionally, both were ascribed to Homer; the first is a tragedy describing the critical action of the Trojan War, the second is a "comedy" and describes the difficult return of one of the warriors from the war. By the way, if you haven't read them already I recommend that you do.

Eventually, by about 400BC, the Greek city states had made the transition from intermittent civilisation to a more or less continuous one. My definition of civilisation is fairly naive: civilisation occurs when agricultural surpluses lead to leisure time for at least some of the population. In this leisure time people naturally started to ask questions. Let's start with a simple one: where is Troy? At that time no one knew exactly. This might lead an adventurous mind to ask various other questions: when did the war occur, and where are the other places mentioned?

So far we have asked questions that implicitly accepted that the events described really occurred. Much more interesting questions were finally asked: did thousands of people spend ten years fighting over a woman? Could the same man have been responsible for writing both poems? Are there really cyclops? Of course the Greek intelligentsia failed to resolve these issues, the general consensus being: yes, yes, and probably. Just like today there were mavericks who would insist that the answers were no, no and no.

It is interesting to try to categorise these questions: perhaps we might agree that the first is about historical accuracy, the second is about authorship, and the third about "common sense." To give you an idea of the difficulty of asking the final question, it would be a little like asking someone today whether they thought that there was such a thing as gravity. It sounds such a dumb question!

With the eclipse of Greek culture by the Romans, leisure time was spent more on imperial expansion rather than philosophical speculation, and with the collapse of the empire there was rather less leisure time in Europe.

It's ironic that just at the time Aquinas was putting the finishing touches to his synthesis of Aristotle and Theology, the scholars at Oxford were busy preparing the ground for a comeback of the critical method. John Duns and William Ockham had both started asking real questions again, and insisting that their students do the same. To get an idea of how revolutionary this seemed to their contemporaries you might try reading the fictional account in Eco's The Name of the Rose. Alternatively, the contemporary joke — "I've been sent to Oxenford to study heresy" — might give you a clue.

In Renaissance Italy, time was again being made to ask questions about the Classics. Only now there was only a limited amount of material on which to make judgements, and even that material might have been corrupted by copyists. Stylistic questions began to be asked: could the same man have written the Iliad and the Odyssey? Once again no conclusive answers were given. For a light-hearted account of the debate circa 1700, see Swift's Battle of the Books; his view of "criticks" is given in Tale of a Tub, which is also an entertaining read.

What's the situation today? Well, Ilium has been discovered; it had cycles of fabulous wealth and destruction, one of which would fit quite well into the supposed time of the Trojan War. And that's it as far as history goes. We just can't answer the historical question: did thousands of men fight a war for ten years over a woman? However, given some of the insanities that have occurred in history, I find this an entirely plausible reason for a war. Did Clytemnestra murder her husband after he returned? Consider what you would do if your husband said "I'm just popping out with the boys," and didn't return for 10 years. Are there really cyclops? No one really asks that question these days.

And, if you asked me personally, whether the same man wrote both poems, I'd have to unask the question. In my view both of them are the product of a 500-year oral tradition, followed by over 2000 years of rewritings and copying. It is hard under the circumstances to think of either poem being "written" at all.

Furthermore, so far we have just been talking of the text; but that is just a lot of Greek symbols on paper. What do they actually mean? A simple example: libations. Over and over again the protagonists in the narrative pour out libations. To understand what is being said we have to know something about the society in which the story is set. We must be particularly careful about reading our own values and interpretations into the story, but of course we need to do precisely this in order to make the story come alive. So should the translation of libations be:

(a) spilt some wine on the ground, or
(b) praised God, by celebrating communion.

(Well, I exaggerate a little, but I hope you see the point.)

Back to the Bible

Let's get back to the Bible.

This kind of editorial choice — the selective use of critical scholarship to support particular conclusions — has been a particularly common technique throughout Church History. The most famous example is that of Luther, whose German translation did not include the Epistle of James, as it was "an epistle of straw."

Let's try a little test:

(a) Is it permissible to ask critical questions about the classics?
(b) What techniques is it permissible to use, in answering critical questions about the classics?
(c) What criteria will we use to evaluate the answers to critical questions of the classics?

And another:

(a) Is it permissible to ask critical questions about the Bible?
(b) What techniques is it permissible to use, in answering critical questions about the Bible?
(c) What criteria will we use to evaluate the answers to critical questions of the Bible?

In my view it is perfectly acceptable to come to entirely different answers to the parallel sets of questions. One should not, however, expect others to automatically accept the criteria you use to distinguish the two sets of problems. ("Why are the answers to the two sets of questions different?" is itself a critical — or perhaps meta-critical — question.)

Only you can really decide these issues.

The Reviewer's Position

I should finally come clean about my position: I think that critical questions have very little relevance to Christian Faith. One has only to ask: "What is the Greatest Commandment?" and to read the reply in Mark 12:28ff to realise how unimportant critical questions are.

in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,

Colophon

Written by David Lester, Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK. Posted to soc.religion.christian on June 25, 1991, in the context of a discussion on the authorship of New Testament epistles.

Preserved from the Usenet UTZOO archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: [email protected]

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