by Robert Sungenis

What is Historical Criticism? Naturally, it has to do with history, and second it is a criticism. In short, it is a criticism, or critical examination, of our past in order to determine how it effects the present and the future. It is one of the primary scholarly disciplines taught in all our major universities and seminaries today. In essence, it teaches its students that when one reads a piece of literature from the past, one need not take it at face value, but endeavor to study the "history" of the time with a critical eye, seeking to uncover the "real" truth behind what was written.

Historical criticism assumes that due to the political, cultural, economic, spiritual or other aspirations of the writer, he will write in such a way that, whether deliberately or unintentionally, reveals his particular world view, along with its biases and prejudices. The writer will seek to convince you of his position, but may not tell you all the facts or even have them all at his disposal. He may not tell you that he has a certain leaning one way or the other, or any number of idiosyncracies current in his time, including fabricating various people, places and things to enhance his position. In essence, Historical Criticism is critical because it has an implicit distrust of human nature to accurately and fairly record what transpires. So in order to get to the "real" story, the scholar must have certain techniques to ferret out the truth.

If, for example, the writer states that "the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain," Historical Criticism will seek to verify whether it is indeed true that the plains in Spain receive most of the rainfall. He will employ the latest meteorological evidence to the task. If it isn't true, then the scholar will suggest various reasons why the writer spoke in such a fashion. Perhaps the writer was speaking metaphorically, since only a few regions in Spain actually receive rain on the plain. Perhaps the writer was merely waxing eloquent with his girlfriend, appearing to be knowledgeable about Spain's terrain. Or perhaps he couldn't care less if rain falls on Spain's plains, since he was just giving a lesson in diction and found that "rain," "Spain" and "plain" all rhyme.

Seen in this light, any reasonable person would see some value in the art of Historical Criticism. Who wouldn't want to "get behind the scenes," as it were, to know the real truth, especially if you suspect that there is more to the story than meets the eye? We all know how things and events can be misunderstood or misrepresented, or, in many cases, hidden because the writer has an agenda. It is an inevitable part of life. Even the best and most unbiased writers are still a product of their culture, and often see things through the eyes of the people, places and things with which they associate. Rare is the detached observer who is not influenced by at least some outside force, whether it is his own political leanings or the fact that the person paying him for writing the piece wants it written in a certain way. In light of all this, Historical Criticism can be an indispensable tool for the scholar.

Historical criticism comes in several forms. There is a specific area of study called Source Criticism. This discipline seeks to uncover the sources of information from which a writer decides to write his piece. We've all heard the sayings "What's your source?"or "Just consider the source." When we do so we are engaging in the art of Historical Criticism. Or we could ask: Does the writer have access to a library? Did he get his information by word-of-mouth? Is his account a compilation of various sources, some or all of which he does not identify? Knowing the source is important because the sources will definitely have an influence upon the facts and conclusions the writer gives to us. Bad sources will produce bad reporting. It's really very simple.

There is also Form criticism, Redaction Criticism and Textual Criticism. Form Criticism seeks to identify what kind of literary model the writer used. For example, was the writer intending to write like a newspaper reporter, wherein he leaves little to the imagination but seeks to report "only the facts ma'am"? Or was he putting his words in very symbolic or metaphorical language so as to give a "deeper" meaning to his words?

Redaction Criticism seeks to uncover whether the writer revised or edited the material from which he chose to write his piece. If he did, then the critical scholar must offer suggestions as to what the original material contained, and perhaps, why the writer chose to edit it.

Textual Criticism seeks to uncover the actual text of a particular piece of writing. There may exist more than one version of a particular account, and when the versions are compared, one often contains different words, phrases, or may be missing certain portions. The textual critic must sort through all the known versions and, using standard rules of judgment, offer suggestions as to which text is authentic.

Once again, as I stated above, all these disciplines can be very valuable in helping to discern the reliability of a given text. We use these same techniques in everyday life, in one form or another, although we don't usually put fancy names to them. Essentially, since we live in a world of fallible human beings, some of which try to deceive us deliberately, we must use our intellectual powers to determine if someone is telling the truth. Basically, then, Historical, Source, Redaction, Form or Textual criticism are all doing the same thing -- seeking to determine fact from fiction, truth from falsehood. Moreover, since written documents seem to carry a higher degree of authority, then it is even more important that they be given a considerable measure of scrutiny.

Now for the bad news.

As good as the above methodology sounds, and as useful as it may be in some applications, there are severe problems -- problems that will eventually frustrate the scholar and perhaps force the methodology to be abandoned.

First, although Historical Criticism claims to be getting to the "real" truth behind the story, the simple fact is that the critic never really knows whether he has uncovered the truth. There are so many possible scenarios as to what could have "really" happened that the critic often becomes more confused than he was when he started. Life is complicated, and it doesn't always follow the cookie-cutter theories men bring to it. Unless one is actually in the time period one is analyzing, it is very hard to know precisely what occurred, not only because of one's own limitations, but precisely because he doesn't know what was true and what was false in that time period. It's hard enough to discern the truth when one is in his own time period, let alone when one is five, ten or twenty centuries removed.

When I was in seminary, my professor brought this point home to us in a rather realistic way. One day he recited the old story of Casey at the Bat. If you're an American, you've probably heard about ol' Casey at some time or other in your life. The story centers around the famous baseball slugger, Casey, who was called to bat in a crucial situation by his manager. The professor read the story to us and we all laughed as Casey struck out when his golden opportunity came. But then the professor did something unexpected. He read another version of the same story that appeared in another book. Then he read a third and fourth version. After giving us a few pointers of "historical critical" methodology, he asked us to figure out which story was authentic. The whole class got into the discussion. Everyone had an opinion. So after about ten minutes of arguing, we anxiously awaited the professor to tell us the truth. To our surprise he said, "Nobody here knows which is authentic. I don't know either. You cannot know for sure unless you were there witnessing the writing of Casey at the Bat." Needless to say, this little lesson made an indelible impression on the whole class.

Another problem with Historical Criticism is that, as much as the critic must initiate his investigation on his suspicions about human motives (e.g., politics, religion, culture, sex, money, etc.) and literary devices (e.g., embellishments, fabrications, agendas, half-truths, etc.) in order to help determine what is really "behind" a given narrative, the same motives and devices apply against the historical critic himself. He is not immune from being influenced by his own philosophical opinions or political agendas in order to advance the particular world view he has adopted. We cannot implicitly trust him to give us accurate information any more than he has trouble trusting the historical writer he is examining. What is good for the goose is good for the gander when it comes to those who are "suspect" of creating their own story in order "send a message."

Lastly, what if the piece of writing one is examining claims to be, or is deemed to be, inerrant? This, no doubt, is a horse of a different color. All human writing is fallible. All human conceptions are fallible. All humans are capable of lying. In such cases the historical critic's job is welcomed, even though, as we have seen above, his skill is not an exact science. But when the writing is without error, such as what the Catholic Church has traditionally taught about Scripture, then one would think the historical critic's conclusions would be severely limited. He might be able to tell us, for example, that one biblical author may have used a certain source, or that his writing is a redaction of another biblical author, or any number of interesting literary nuances. But when the historical critic's theories take him to the point where he thinks he must conclude that Scripture is in error because he sees what appears to be a contradiction or misstatement of fact, then the $64,000 question comes to the fore: Is it Scripture that is in error, or the theories and conclusions of Historical Criticism? The historical critic must make a choice. Unfortunately, he does not always make the right choice. But before we get into that kettle of fish, let's take on the role of "historical critic" ourselves as we look at the history of Historical Criticism. We will see that, indeed, it is clouded with the same biases and prejudices as it claims for the literature it examines.

Knowing the proposed benefits of Historical Criticism that I covered earlier, we can perhaps see why, at least in the early stages of the developing methodology, that Pope Pius XII, in his 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, allowed Catholic scholars to use the tools of Historical Criticism in their study of the Bible. Perhaps, he thought, these disciplines could uncover some wonderful insights and nuances to the Bible that would help people to appreciate and understand it much more. Perhaps it would be good to know where Matthew, for example, obtained his material to write his gospel, and why much of his material intersects with Luke, but not John. Perhaps it would be good to know if some or all of the elements of biblical narratives were written from an allegorical, not factual, perspective. Perhaps it would be good to know whether the writers edited their narratives in order to express symbolic truth. There are any number of possibilities one can imagine.

I must interject at this point, however, that Pius XII made some of the strongest statements upholding the historical doctrine of biblical inerrancy. He followed a long line of popes who said the same (e.g., Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV). In Divino Afflante Spiritu, for example, he repeats Pope Leo XIII's decree: "It is absolutely wrong and forbidden either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Sacred Scripture or to admit that the sacred writer has erred." In Humani Generis he condemns the following notion: "...immunity from error extends only to those parts of the Bible that treat of God or of moral and religious matters." These denials of error are as strong as they could be.

Nevertheless, it was almost inevitable that Pius XII would allow Historical Criticism to enter into Catholic biblical studies. Besides the touted benefits of Historical Criticism, by the 1940s, the influence of the sciences in general was very great. From the Copernican revolution, to the Enlightenment's discovery of rationalism and reason, to the Darwinian tenets of evolution, to James' and Freud's teaching on the human psyche, to Einstein's teaching on cosmogony, the arts and sciences were a virtual juggernaut of intellectual power that was sweeping through every area of life. Since the Church, the guardian of truth, could not appear as if she was against the very tools which claimed to uncover the "real" truth, there was little which would have stopped these scholarly disciplines from eventually becoming part of Catholic biblical studies.

At that time (the 1940s) most everyone was very enthusiastic about Historical Criticism. The feeling among the more liberal theologians of the Church (and there were a lot of them in that day) was that Catholicism was finally getting out of the "stone age of medievalism" and into the modern age where one could discover the rational and scientific reason for everything that occurred in life. Their Protestant counterparts had been using these scholarly tools on the Bible for more than a century or two prior, and were way ahead of the game. Catholics needed to catch up. To make a long story short, the Catholics did catch up, and, in fact, superceded the Protestants, but it wasn't in the way that had originally been anticipated, at least by Pius XII. Something went wrong, terribly wrong. In fact, it went so wrong that I dare say that most of our present problems in the post-conciliar church are a direct result of the damage which occurred once the train of Historical Criticism went off the tracks.

In order to see this, we need to go back to the years after Luther's and Calvin's "Reformation" period. As most know, the Reformation occurred around the same time as the Renaissance. The Renaissance was, as it is still described today, an "intellectual awakening" of man's consciousness of himself and of the world around him. To express this new-found feeling, men were creating art and architecture like never before. They were discovering all kinds of interesting things about the intricacies of nature. Nothing was taken for granted. Everything was "studied" to see what made it tick. Spanning over a few centuries, the Renaissance led to the High-Renaissance and to the Enlightenment.

As with anything in life, there were good and bad points to this "awakening." Evil always has a way of awakening whenever good awakens. Men can use their new-found intelligence for getting closer to God and for the betterment of mankind , or for the destruction of both. Unfortunately, there was as much destruction as their was progress, perhaps even more. By pulling himself up by his own bootstraps, as it were, many a man began to distance himself from God. Who needs God when you can explain everything naturally? Releasing oneself from the shackles of medievalism meant, among other things, that even religion was now free from the constraints of the past.

Without the anchor of the Church's authority and tradition, religion was basically up for grabs in Europe during this time. In addition, with the competition Christendom was now receiving from the arts and sciences, many a man's religion was a mixture of his own likes and dislikes, guided by the latest scientific advances -- advances which were on a direct course to take as much "religious superstition" out of human thinking as possible. Although Luther, Calvin and their immediate followers had strong religious convictions, nevertheless, when their brand of Christian individualism spread throughout Europe, it was only a matter of time before those who did not share the same spiritual ideals would begin to have their own revolt. Science was becoming the be-all and end-all. Faith was static. You either believed in God or your didn't. If you did, you still found yourself trying to explain God and His workings in scientific terms. A good example of the product of these times was Deism, the religious belief of many of the founding fathers of America. Deism held that God indeed created the world, but after he did so, he went away and left it totally to man, never to appear again.

Inevitably, the Bible fell into this mixture, or shall we say, became a victim of it. In the Post-Reformation period, men began to use the sciences in order to study, or what may better be described as "dissect," the Bible. Beginning with Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who was heavily influenced by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (i.e., a philosophy of no absolutes outside of yourself; everything is in your head), Protestants of the intellectual variety (university types) proposed that religion is merely a natural activity of man, and is at best an intuitive grasp of the unknown, but is more an emotional response. This set the stage for reexamining the very thing that gave man religion -- the Bible. Thomas Jefferson showed he was a man of his age by cutting out all the references to Jesus' miracles from the New Testament.

Following the groundwork laid by Schleiermacher, Ferdinand Baur, professor of theology at Tübingen, Germany from 1826-1860, came on the scene. This was, more or less, the birth of Historical Criticism. Baur, heavily influenced by the philosophy of Hegel, claimed the Bible was merely a product of a "thesis" (e.g., the philosophy of Jesus, which was geared toward Jews) meeting an "antithesis" (e.g., the philosophy of Paul, which was geared toward Gentiles), which resulted in the "synthesis" of first century Christianity (i.e., the multiethnic Church). Upon this Procrustean bed all the writings of the New Testament authors would be forced to lie.

The result? The Historical Criticism of the Tübingen school concluded the following new "insights": Paul wrote only four of the thirteen epistles attributed to him. The other epistles, and the book of Acts, since they were "conciliatory" in tone, were judged as post-apostolic writings (i.e., not written by those apostles who claimed to write them), since by then the "synthesis" was rapidly unfolding. Matthew was said to be the product of the earliest "Jewish" position, and thus close to Jesus' view, but was, nevertheless, the result of several redactions of some unidentified source. Luke was the best example of the pre-Pauline "antithesis" to Jesus. Mark, however, was a great ecumenist, and thus combined elements of Matthew and Luke. The gospel of John, since its material was judged to be synthetic, was said to be written by some Jewish scribe in the second century when harmony between Matthew and Luke had been accomplished. As a result, John was judged worthless in regards to "historical" value. Baur further stipulated that in the writings of Clement, the apostle Paul was disguised as Simon Magnus who was in constant conflict with his arch rival, Peter, and the conflict between Paul and Peter had its own thesis-antithesis-synthesis of development. Since the book of the Apocalypse (which is traditionally understood to be written by John) was also hostile to Paul's way of thinking, it was judged as primitive and thus the earliest and more "Jewish" of all New Testament books.

Outside of the New Testament, Historical Criticism also made a big impact. Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), another German Protestant, was the heir-apparent to the Historical Critical school, but more in the direction of Old Testament studies. He proposed that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses (the traditional view) but by several unknown individuals and at various times in history. The effects of this theory are manifold, but I will cite one example. Wellhausen's view, better known as the Documentary Hypothesis, proposed that Genesis 1 was written by a different person and at a different time than Genesis 2. Genesis 2 was said to be written very early in Israel's history, while Genesis 1 was said to be written by the "Priestly" group of writers just after the Babylonian captivity (587-517 B.C.). Why? Because in coming back to their homeland after being punished for 70 years in Babylon, the Jews needed a remembrance of how great God was, as well as a fresh start in life, and there was no better way to do this than to write a spectacular story of God's power, especially since the Babylonian god Marduk, who had a similar creation story, needed to be excised from the Jewish mind.

Incidentally, this view of Genesis 1 fit like a glove with the burgeoning field Darwinian evolution. If through "historical criticism" it could be shown that Genesis 1 was not a literal and detailed account of an actual creation, but merely a literary device designed for sixth century Jews in order to reestablish their roots, then there would be no recourse to use Genesis 1 as a historical document, and science, once again, would provide the "real" answer how the world began. (Catholic theologian Fr. Stanley Jaki, who is an avowed evolutionist and presently on the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, ascribes to this very idea, as do most of the other 87 members of the PAS, most of whom are not Catholic).

As one can see, this "science" of Historical Criticism leads in many and varied directions, most of which were diametrically opposed to the traditional teaching handed down in the Church. The appeal of this method, aside from the fact that it was "scientific" and devoid of relying on "superstition," was the need of the investigator to get "behind the scenes." One couldn't just take things at face value. There always had to be an "underlying story" behind the apparent story. This was natural for science. Louis Pasteur found the "underlying story" behind why old milk made people sick. Antoine Lavoisier (1774) found the "underlying story" why things burned (because they combine with oxygen). John Dalton (1803) found the "underlying story" of what made up matter (tiny atoms). After the Renaissance and Enlightenment, life was full of finding out the "why" and "how" of everything, and men now had the tools to do the investigation. They were no longer bogged down by ignorance and superstition, at least so they thought.

One can also surmise that one of the major planks of religious belief that was destined to be the victim of the new science of Historical Criticism was the supernatural. There was little room left, if any, for belief in what was regarded as the "magical" world of Scripture. Those days were gone with alchemy. One of the ways the Historical Critical school sought to introduce this new vision to the world by "The Quest for the Historical Jesus." The plan was to strip away every vestige of the supernatural from the Gospels so that one could get to the "real" Jesus of history -- the "real" man who had to deal with life on an ordinary basis, just like we do. Underlying this "quest," however, was the premise that the supernatural can be stripped away because, in fact, there was no supernatural. Science had already revealed that the supernatural did not exist.

Hence, the apostles, when they spoke of Jesus performing miracles, were said to be merely adding fictional embellishments so as to give an other-worldly appeal to their narratives. According to the Tübingen school, Christianity would have been an utter failure without these embellishments, since the apostles were more or less forced to create them because their "savior" had failed. Hence, Tübingen scholars David Strauss (1835) and H. E. Paulus (1828) claimed that when the Gospel writers said that Jesus walked on water, he was merely walking in a very shallow pool, or near the shore line. When he fed five thousand, the people had already brought food for themselves, but the apostles made it look like Jesus performed a miracle. Strauss convinced his students that Historical Criticism was necessary in order to find out the "real" story behind Jesus' miracles, since they must take as a "given" that miracles, following the philosophy of David Hume (1711-1776), simply did not occur, and that everything has a "natural" explanation.

The quest would lead Rudolph Bultmann (1884-1976), with his extensive use of Form Criticism, to become so skeptical about the veracity of Scripture that he asserted that we could know almost nothing about the "real" Jesus, or even the first century Church. Rather, he concluded that the New Testament was mythological. His most famous work, the 1941 book New Testament and Mythology, argued that Scripture indeed contained what he called the "Kerygma" (the word of God) but we could never know of what it really consisted, since there was always a difference in what the author meant as opposed to what he wrote. (NB: It is well known that Bultmann's students gave him an appropriate present at the last day of class. The gave him a book with the title "Kerygma" on the cover, but inside was hundreds of pages of blank paper). To answer particular issues in the New Testament, he would claim, for example, that John chapter 6 was certainly speaking of the Eucharist as the real body and blood of Jesus Christ, but John was merely redacting his information from another source (the infamous "Q" or "L" introduced by Otto Ritschl) -- a source which mistakenly believed in such superstitious things such as bread becoming divine. Thus, John's writing could be taken as face value, but the person behind John, albeit unidentified, had made up the story.

The quest for the historical Jesus would lead Emil Brunner to say that, yes, the resurrection of Christ definitely occurred, but only in the hearts of the apostles (i.e., if you had a TV camera at the tomb it would not have recorded anything except a dead body). It would lead Karl Barth (from which Hans Küng obtained much of his theology) to deny original sin and claim that man was always the way he is now, and that it is God's responsibility to save all of mankind (universal salvation). It would lead Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), the famous humanitarian doctor of Africa, to say that when Jesus uttered the words "My, my God, why have you forsaken me," he finally realized that he was not God's son, and died in failure.

Many years and much ink went into these labors. Books were produced by the dozens each year. But this "Quest for the Historical Jesus" had a very rude awakening. The scholars found that no matter how hard one tried, the miraculous could not be separated from the Jesus of history. The history and the supernatural were so intertwined, and so meticulously detailed and overlapped, that to subtract the miracles would be to erase the history. The Bible was written in such a way that if you eliminate the one you eliminate the other, and there simply was no escape from this reality. In short, the "quest" ended up as a miserable failure. As one book put it: "The result is that N.T. scholarship now generally realizes that it is impossible to write a life of Jesus" (Encyclopedia of Religion, p. 447). After having surveyed all the attempts of the previous hundred years, Albert Schweitzer concluded in his book The Quest for the Historical Jesus: "The world had never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the Lives of Jesus of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record." The only "real" story the scholars found out was how "real" the Bible was. And sadly, the other "reality" they discovered was that their brand of theology not only didn't advance Christianity but it actually emptied Protestant churches all over the world.

The irony of this whole history is that the Protestants, after almost two centuries of using the historical-critical methodology, failed to produce a single verifiable truth from it. Time after time, they threw their hands up in frustration, realizing that, being quite finite in their intellect and very limited in their data, they simply could not determine with any accuracy what the "real" story was. Of course, taking the text at face value was never an option. Science had proven that you just couldn't stoop to that level of acceptance. No matter how many failures they experienced to get "behind the scenes," they would never admit that maybe, just maybe, Scripture was to be interpreted the way it was written.

By the 1940s, the Catholic liberal theological movement, which, having been egged on by the Protestants as early as the late 1800s, and which caused Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius X to issue strong warnings and condemnations against it, was nevertheless gaining steam. With the rise of Teilhard de Chardin, George Tyrell, Karl Rahner and later Hans Kung, Eduard Schillebeeckx, Maurice Blondel and a few others, Catholic liberal theology was just busting at the seams, rattling its confines like a caged animal. It was their claim that for 1940 years Catholicism had been bottled up in the shackles of primitive patristic and medieval thought and it was now time for new horizons. They were anxious to try what the Protestants were doing with Scripture, and practically begged Pius XII to let them do so. Once Pius XII gave the go-ahead, it was like an avalanche. By the 1950s and into the 1960s, liberal theology, with its new armament "Historical Criticism" was well in place and had actually superceded where the Protestants left off. The Catholic liberals accomplished in about 25 years what it took the Protestant liberals about 200 years to do. John Macquarrie of Union Theological Seminary, a leading liberal Protestant seminary, stated: "...the leadership in theology, which even ten years ago lay with such Protestant giants as Barth, Brunner and Tillich, has now passed to Roman Catholic thinkers" (Principles of Christian Theology, 1966, p. ix).

But the Catholic Church was not without its own critics of Historical Criticism. Fr. George Montague of the Catholic Biblical Association stated that historical critics were "more interested in defending their own scholarship than in comprehending the truth of the New Testament." Jesuit Dennis McCarthy of the Biblicum stated: "...the scholar finds his historical ground constantly shifting as he tires to use it as a platform for affirmation beyond the historical. He never knows what is historical" (Historicism and Faith, p. 37). Martin Hengel, professor of New Testament from none other than Tübingen, stated that New Testament facts "are accessible to us only in a very limited way," and he opted for what he called the "unhistorica-uncritical method," i.e., take Scripture at face value since you cannot be sure of any other value (Acts and the History of Earliest Christianity, p. 25). Walter Wink asserted that today's historical critical theories are "bankrupt," elaborating that "the historical critic's scientific determinism [i.e., we can dissect this and put it back together] results in more denial about the contents of the Bible than affirmations" (The Bible in Human Transformation, p. 26).

But the war goes on. Also graduating from the Union Theological Seminary was Catholic priest Fr. Raymond Brown, the one man, after Karl Rahner, responsible for more Historical Criticism being applied to Catholic Scripture study than any other single figure in the last half of the 20th century. Brown (d. 1998) boasted that he knew who his real enemies were. It was not the Protestants upon whom he cut his theological teeth. As Hans Küng felt kinship with Protestant Karl Barth and adopted the latter's theology, so Brown felt that his closest allies were the liberal Protestants from Union Theological Seminary and like-minded institutions, of which Protestantism, and now Catholicism, was rife with adherents. Showing his comradery, Brown said he "heaved a sigh of relief" when in 1976 Hans Küng was not charged with heresy, advising Rome to stop the "heresy hunt" (America, 11-20-1976). Not surprisingly, this is where most of the "ecumenical" activity takes place today: between the liberals of both Catholic and Protestant camps who have broken down the historic barriers by a mutual dilution of Scripture through Historical Criticism (or better said, the misuse of Historical Criticism). The only other "ecumenical" activity of any significance is between the charismatics of both faiths, since they share a desire for tongue-speaking and are, more or less, anti-theological. The real enemy says Brown is the "Catholic far-right," the "right-wing vigilantes," "arch-conservatives," "fundamentalists," and "those whose opinions have little or no scholarly respectability." He refers to the Traditionalists, and some conservatives, of the Catholic Church.

Historical criticism, although very helpful when it is tamed, is often an unruly tyrant wielding destruction in its path. Such destruction is no more evident than in the exegesis of liberal and modernist Catholic scholars in the last half of the twentieth century. As I noted in my last article, Pius XII's 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu gave Catholic scholars the go-ahead to use the tools of historical criticism. But as even the Protestants discovered all too well a century prior, the benefits of historical criticism were far less than what they were originally touted to be. When all was said and done, their churches were being emptied and the dabblers were losing their faith. In essence, if the Bible could not be trusted to give trustworthy information, but was merely a collection of the personal opinions of ignorant men guided by vague spiritual impulses, why, the man in the pew thought, should he be convicted by its dogmatic propositions?

Nevertheless, Catholic scholars continued to pound away at the Bible. It was almost as if they had a vendetta against Scripture; an obsession to prove it wrong. Anytime Scripture appeared to have even the slightest discrepancy, the historical critics would shout their "discoveries" from the housetops. Whereas the Fathers and Medievals confronted the same discrepancies by quietly and painstakingly working out harmonizations of the conflicting texts, the new breed of modern Catholic exegetes thought little of branding the sacred writers with the most atrocious errors of fact.

Let's look at a small example of a biblical discrepancy to get a feel for the subject. Matthew records that there were two blind men on the way to Jericho who cried out to Jesus to be healed (Mt 20:30), but Mark and Luke say there was only one (Mk 10:46; Lk 18:31). The historical critic would have little hesitation in concluding that at least one writer, probably Matthew, somehow got his wires crossed. He would feel no requirement to seek for a harmonization of the differing Synoptic accounts. To him, such an exercise would be a needless waste of energy, since he has already resolved in his mind that Scripture contains errors, and thus the discrepancy concerning the blind men would just be one more proof of that fact.

Although the example of the blind men may seem insignificant in comparison to the larger issues of life, it is by no means trivial in regards to the veracity of Scripture. As the old saying goes, the devil is in the details. The fact is, no matter how minuscule the supposed error, like a loose piece of yarn hanging from an old sweater, a continual pull will eventually unravel the whole garment. If Scripture can make an error in one place, then it can make errors in two. If it can make errors in two, it can make errors in thousands of places.

Eventually, there was no place that the tentacles of historical criticism did not penetrate. In its quest to "uncover the real story behind the story," not only were the critics seeking to uncover Scripture's "errors," they were on a mission to "naturalize" as many biblical narratives as they could, ripping away any vestige of the miraculous found on its pages. In fact, many of the purported "errors" of Scripture were said to be the result of the biblical writer's penchant to embellish his narratives with extraordinary events for the sake of effect.

The first eleven chapters of Genesis suffered the greatest blow from the modern wrecking ball. Almost everything recorded in the Bible's first chapters was relegated to the area of myth and legend, including the creation account, the Garden of Eden, the Great Flood, and the genealogies. Moses was said to be a Jewish folk hero, as was Joshua, Samson, and even David. Moses' parting of the Reed Sea so that the Israelites could cross it was judged to be nothing more than his forging of a shallow river -- a story later embellished by Israelite cult worship to make their nation appear as a mighty people among their neighbors.

Prophecy, one of Scripture's most prestigious and awe-inspiring testimonies to its divine origin, was also dealt a death-blow by the naturalism of historical criticism. Since prophecy, by its very nature, means that its writer is predicting the future, this did not sit well with the historical critics who had disavowed themselves of ever having to believe that a man had the prerogative to prognosticate under divine guidance. Hence, all prophecies contained in Scripture were said to be "after the fact." That is, the event which appeared as a fulfillment of prophecy was said to have already happened before the biblical narrative was penned, yet the writer made it appear as if an earlier author was predicting the future. In fact, one theory held that the greater part of the Old Testament was written by the Hellenists of the second century BC, and thus, all of the Old Testament prophecies could be accounted for, quite naturally. As for the prophecies that spoke of a coming Messiah, they were said to be pointing to the Jewish desire to overcome their enemies, not to Jesus Christ -- something very similar to how many Jews treat the Old Testament today.

As time passed, archeology helped mollify some of the more extreme historical-critical theories. With the work of William F. Albright (d. 1971), whose list of accomplishments include 800 books and the confirmation of the authenticity of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was shown that Old Testament narratives had a rich harvest of archeological support. One of Albright's most famous finds was the collapsed walls of Jericho, thus vindicating the Bible's testimony of that ancient event. The only discrepancy came from archeologist Kathleen Kenyon, who, although confirming that Albright's excavated Tel was indeed that of Jericho, claimed that his date of circa 1400 was off by about 150 years.

Since Albright, other archeologists have found David's underground water passageway that led him into the city of the Jebusites, which he conquered and renamed Jerusalem (2 Samuel 5:8). Others have found the three major cities: Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer built by Solomon (1 Kings 9:15). Since all these finds verified Scripture, there was a little room left to question the authenticity of other events in the biblical record. Politically speaking, the quest no longer turned on whether the biblical narratives were true, but who could dig deeper to settle the dispute in the Middle East regarding rights to the land of Palestine. While American, English and Israeli archeologists dug down to Jericho; Palestinian and Arab archeologists dug down further to Canaan, claiming that their people had settled the land even earlier than the Israelites!

Despite these stunning archeological finds, it was hard to shake the historical critic from his self-appointed mission. Having made their claims on the Old Testament narratives, they now turned to the New Testament. They continued to make the same question-begging assertions, that is, that much of the biblical narratives were redacted, fabricated, or at the least, embellished. This was the state of Catholic biblical exegesis from the late 1940's onward as it picked up the torch left by their Protestant forebears.

But one thing was different in the Catholic Church that was not true of most Protestant denominations. The Catholic Church put limits on just how far it was going to allow historical criticism to advance. Ironically, what Pius XII gave to the critics in 1943, he took back in large measure in the 1950 encyclical Humani Generis. In that encyclical, for example, he stated that, regardless of how a scholar might interpret the finer details of the creation account, he had to maintain that an actual man and woman were the first human pair, and that they both sinned against God, which resulted in the curse of Original Sin being forced upon the whole human race. Meanwhile, Karl Barth, the famous Protestant historical critic who had heavily influenced Hans Kung, and who in turn influenced many Catholic theologians, was teaching that man is as he always was (i.e., no original sin), and that God intended on saving the whole human race, without exception. So whereas the mainline Protestants allowed historical criticism to penetrate even the bedrock of salvation doctrine, the Catholic Church was clear that those areas of dogma were definitely off-limits to modern hermeneutical science.

So after 1950, the Catholic modernists were somewhat corralled by the Church. They were permitted to write about their speculations concerning Scripture, but they simply could not alter Catholic doctrine from its traditional moorings. So instead of being dogmatic about their heterodox beliefs, Catholic critics began to put their reservations about Catholic dogma in the form of interrogatives. In this way, they couldn't be accused of rejecting Catholic teaching, but they could certainly put doubt in people's minds by asking a lot of leading and provocative questions. They were hoping for a ground swell of popular support as they disseminated their historical-critical ideas in all the universities and seminaries of the world. Unfortunately, due to the unrest in the 1960s and 1970s, many were ripe to hear their message of dissent.

For example, one of the leading proponents in the Catholic historical-critical school, Fr. Raymond Brown (d. 1998), questioned a majority of traditional beliefs, all under the guise of doubting their "historical accuracy" in Scripture. In one of his most famous and controversial works, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, Brown, like his Protestant counterparts Bultmann, Barth and Tillich, questioned the resurrection of Christ. He writes: "Are we thereby perpetually committed to the notion held in times past of the biological how of that exaltation, namely a bodily resurrection?" (p. 12). He also questioned papal infallibility, proposing: "If biblical criticism has qualified the notion of the inerrancy of the Bible, does modern historical study imply that the Roman Catholic notion of the infallibility of Church teaching also has to be qualified?" (Ibid., p. 35). Brown even questioned the legitimacy of the papacy itself, which he based on his "historical critical" conclusion that Matthew 16's narrative of the events at Caesarea Philippi never took place. In the same and other works he questioned the function and identity of apostles, bishops and priests; apostolic succession; the barring of women from ordination; the Eucharist as a sacrifice; the value and authority of Tradition, and Mary's perpetual virginity, all, of course, based on his "historical-critical" approach to Scripture.

Much of this theological interrogation originated from Brown's resolve that Scripture was prone to error. He writes: "In the last hundred years we have moved from an understanding wherein inspiration guaranteed that the Bible was totally inerrant to an understanding wherein inerrancy is limited to the Bible's teaching of 'that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writing for the sake of our salvation'" (The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, pp. 8-9). Brown further documented his beliefs in his book Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine, and later summed them up in the New Jerome Biblical Commentary, stating: "Scriptural teaching is truth without error to the extent that it conforms to the salvific purpose of God" (p. 1169). In other words, if Scripture isn't talking specifically about salvation, it indeed may contain errors. The Pontifical Biblical Commission, which was also populated by the same modernistic mind-set, and of which Brown became the president, helped spread these new-fangled ideas far and wide.

Where did Brown get his notion that Scripture could err on matters outside of salvation? He and his colleagues claimed that the teaching came from Vatican II's document Dei Verbum, ch 3, no. 11, which reads.

Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.

To the casual reader, this statement may not seem problematic, but it has been interpreted in two diametrically opposed ways since Vatican II closed its doors in 1965. The traditional way to read the passage would be to say that Scripture is without error in all that it asserts as true, and all that it asserts as true is put there for the sake of our salvation. The modernist way would say that Scripture is without error specifically in those things that were written for the sake of our salvation, but other things that are not dealing with our salvation, e.g., historical narration, science, math, chronologies, genealogies, etc., may be in error. Seizing on the ambiguity of Dei Verbum, Brown and the modernists made a considerable market for themselves, practically rewriting the Catholic teaching on biblical inerrancy, and all with little admonishment from the Vatican hierarchy.

To see how Brown arrived at his conclusion, it is necessary to delve into some of the discussions that were taking place at Vatican II. There were actually three versions of Dei Verbum's clause "without error...for the sake of salvation" prior to the one finally decided upon. Interestingly, one of the phrases, veritatis salutaris ("salvific truth"), was rejected due to the fact that it implied that Scripture's inerrancy was limited to salvation. In the words of Archbishop Philippe who spoke to the council Fathers:

Therefore it should not be said that the sacred books 'teach' salvific truth without error, because this insinuates a distinction among the scriptural affirmations themselves, as if some of them taught without error truths pertaining to salvation, while others had no such content and were thus not necessarily immune from error...I request that we restore the expression 'without any error,' as in the previous draft, since the documents of the Magisterium...always express themselves in such a way as to exclude completely from the sacred Scriptures error of every kind.

Pope Paul VI was approached on this very important matter in October 1965, just a few months before the council came to a close. After studying the issue, the pope wrote a letter to Cardinal Ottaviani, President of the Theological Commission. The Pope specified that he was "deeply hesitant" about the meaning engendered by the words veritatis salutaris in Schema 4. The Pope said that this wording would be highly controversial, and thus it would be "premature" for the council to make a declaration on "such a doubtful question." He finally stated: "...the Fathers might not perhaps be able to form an adequate judgment as to the gravity of this matter, nor as to the abusive interpretations which may arise from it." This shows that Paul VI had a acute sensitivity to the issue of biblical inerrancy, and did not wish the doctrine to be altered by such loaded wording.

At the request of the Pope, the Commission reconvened. Seventeen of twenty-eight members voted to follow his advice to omit the word "salvific." Since the vote did not reach a two-thirds majority, a group of Fathers suggested they use the phrase "for the sake of our salvation" (nostrae salutis causa), which led to a two-thirds vote of 19 to 9, and the vote was approved by the pope.

These series of events tell us clearly that Paul VI did not intend to have the phrase in question (i.e., "for the sake of our salvation") give any suggestion that biblical inerrancy was limited to matters of salvation. Indeed, in 1970, Paul VI reiterated his resolve in the words of his July 1 allocution: "For the Church, Sacred Scripture is the Word of God, inspired by Him and therefore guaranteed by divine inerrancy in its own authentic meaning." Never, at any time, did Paul VI even hint that inerrancy was in any way limited to matters of salvation, nor did the two popes after him.

True to form, the modernists were not about to give up that easy. Cardinal König and the German bishops sought to excise the words "without error" from the text, claiming that literary genres of Scripture "demonstrate that the Bible's references to matters of history and natural science sometimes fall short of the truth." Based on what he called "current oriental studies," König gave three examples of "errors" in Scripture: (a) In Mark 2:26, Jesus says "in the time of Abiathar the High Priest," the alleged error being that Ahimelech was the high priest at that time (1 Sam 21:1); (b) In Matt 27:9, Matthew is said to err in assigning Jeremiah to a prophecy spoken by Zechariah (11:12-13). (c) Daniel 1:1's statement that Nebuchadnezzer besieged Jerusalem in the third year of Jehoiakim was wrong, since it should be the sixth year of Jehoiakim.

To make a long story short, the council rejected König's request, since there was really no definitive and irrefutable evidence to back him up. In actuality, alleged errors were well-known, all the way back to the patristic age and up through the late Middle Ages, and each anomaly was given a plausible solution. None of the Fathers or Medievals ever suggested that Scripture itself was in error, whether in history or salvation.

As for Abiathar versus Ahimelech, the phrase in Mark 2:26, epi Abiathar archiereos is in the Greek genitive case, which means "at the time of Abiathar the high priest." This nuance fits the Old Testament scene well, since Saul had murdered Abiathar's father, Ahimelech, whereupon Abiathar fled to David and served as his priest, being appointed high priest when David actually became king. Under these circumstances, it would be perfectly legitimate for Jesus to refer to Abiathar as the high priest, just as if one could say "Now when King David was a shepherd boy" even though David was not a king when he was a shepherd boy.

As for Jeremiah versus Zechariah, Matthew 27:9 is a combination of both prophets' words (cf., Jeremiah 18:2; 19:2, 11; 32:6-9; Zech 11:12-13), since neither of them have all the details found in Matthew's quotation. The mere fact that Jeremiah is the more prominent prophet, and was always at the head when the Jews made lists of the prophets (as appears in the Babba Bartha), it would not be out of place to refer to him over Zechariah. The same kind of preference is noted in Mark's choice of Isaiah over Malachi in Mark 1:2-3 (cf., Mal 3:1; Is 40:3).

As for the "third" or "sixth" year of Jehoiakim, König's objection fails to take into account the differing methods of calculation between Jewish and Babylonian calendars. Daniel, following the Babylonian calendar since he was in captivity for seventy years in Babylon, had a three-year discrepancy with the Jewish calendar that Jeremiah used, which was based on the differences between the regnal and accession years of the kings.

As noted, the council Fathers rejected König's examples. The only thing they agreed to do was take the word "any" out of "without any error," but with the stipulation that "without error" meant the same thing as "without any error."

To show the continuity of Vatican II's teaching with previous papal and conciliar statements, the council Fathers added six more references to footnote #5 -- the footnote which comes at the end of Dei Verbum's sentence affirming Scripture's freedom from error. One of the references is a citation from the Council of Trent's The Canon of Scripture, which, ironically, highlights the salvific purpose of Scripture. Referring to both Scripture and Tradition, Trent states that they are "the source of all saving truth" (DS 1501), which is very similar to Vatican II's statement "for the sake of our salvation," yet, as everyone knows, Trent never entertained the notion that Scripture contained errors, either in salvation or history.

The Vatican II Fathers also added statements from Leo XIII's Providentissimus Deus, one remark including comments from Augustine regarding the harmony between science and Scripture, showing that Vatican II's respect of Scripture's inerrancy extended to its affirmations about the physical creation, even though the Bible is not considered a scientific textbook.

The most important addition to footnote #5 was the teaching in Providentissimus Deus that since the sacred writers wrote only what the Holy Spirit wanted them to write, everything which they assert has Him for its author, and is therefore necessarily true, which coincides with the commission's previous conclusion that the word "salvific" in Dei Verbum 11 did not imply a "material limitation" of the truth of Scripture. Since the quote from Providentissimus Deus includes Leo's words about the Fathers and Doctors who "labored with no less ingenuity than devotion to harmonize and reconcile those many passage which might seem to involve some contradiction or discrepancy," this shows that Vatican II agreed that the same labors to preserve the inerrancy of Scripture should be maintained in the Church.

But the modernists after Vatican II, lead by Fr. Brown, would insist otherwise, and still do today. Recently, Archbishop Pell of Sydney, Australia went on record affirming his belief that Scripture contains errors, and was supported by no less of an influential icon as Jesuit priest Joseph Fessio of Ignatius Press fame. In his New Jerome Biblical Commentary, Brown actually makes an allusion to the discussions at Vatican II on inerrancy, saying, "...but pre-voting debates show an awareness of errors in the Bible" (p. 1169). We notice that Brown doesn't say that the "pre-voting" eventually rejected the view that Scripture contained errors, nor that Paul VI was quite active in making sure that such action was facilitated. Instead, Brown shades the truth and makes it appear as if the "pre-voting" was a license for him and his followers to assert that Scripture contains errors. Unfortunately, this is typical of the shell game that modernists have played with Catholic teaching for the last forty years, and unfortunately their teaching still survives in most of our major Catholic seminaries and universities throughout the world.

My thanks to Fr. Brian Harrison for his translation and interpretation of some of the Vatican II texts used in this essay.

Edited versions of this essay appear in two articles of The Latin Mass magazine.

Robert Sungenis
Catholic Apologetics International
April 21, 2003

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