6 - Source, form, redaction and literary criticism of the Bible

Summary

Scholars reserve the term 'literary criticism' for approaches influenced by contemporary literary criticism as taught under the banner of Comparative Literature or of a single language such as English or Spanish. Source, form and redaction criticism are historical rather than literary approaches. This chapter examines how these criticisms view author, text and audience. It also focuses on narratives, and traces a move from the dominance of German to Anglophone scholarship and beyond. Source criticism presented and presents a challenge to Jews and Christians holding Mosaic authorship to be critical to Torah's divine inspiration and authority as well as to literary unity grounded in that authorship. Classic form criticism views many biblical texts as the products of oral tradition in which small units circulated. Redaction criticism focuses on the editing. In the Hebrew Bible studies this often falls under the rubric of tradition history. In New Testament studies, the literary turn gave birth to narrative criticism.