Contents
Introduction:
Historical Criticism 1
Chapter 1:
Fr. Raymond Brown, SS 5
Chapter 2:
The Origins of Historical Criticism 11
Chapter 3:
The Quest for the Historical Jesus 17
Chapter 4:
Critics of Historical Criticism 25
Chapter 5
Limitations of Historical Criticism28
Chapter 6
Vatican II and Biblical Inerrancy 31
Chapter 7
Fr. Brown and the 1964 Pontifical Biblical Commission 54
Chapter 8
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Biblical Interpretation 63
Chapter 9
Other Works by Fr. Raymond Brown 70
Chapter 10
More Critics of Fr. Raymond Brown 89
Introduction
Historical Criticism
In Catholic biblical scholarship a turning point occurred during the reign of Pius XII. In his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, Pius believed it to be beneficial that Catholic biblical scholars be able to use the exegetical tools of what is known as “historical criticism.” In a word, it could be said that historical criticism seeks to apply scientific analysis to a written document. Is the document authentic? What is its date? Who wrote it? Did the author borrow from other sources? What type of literature is it? How much is the author influenced by his culture? Did the author fabricate, exaggerate, or embellish his story? These and many other questions the historical critic brings to his document. The document studied can be any piece of literature of historical worth – a sonnet by Shakespeare, a Greek tragedy by Homer, or even the United States Constitution. In a word, the historical critic tries to get to the real essence of the document so that he can find out the real truth of what occurred, or better said, what he thinks is the real truth.
Historical criticism is not bad in itself. When used properly it can be a great asset to studies in literature. Unfortunately, when good things come into the hands of bad or agenda-driven men, bad things usually happen. Catholic liberals, who had been seething in the pot of dissent since the late 1800’s, took advantage of Pius XII’s Divino Afflante Spiritu and eventually turned biblical scholarship into a three-headed monster – a creature so ghastly that it is safe to predict that Pius XII would have turned his head away in utter disgust were he alive today. It has gotten to the point in the higher echelons of Catholic scholarship that hardly anything the Bible says is taken as face value. Everything from the resurrection of Christ, to the Virgin Birth, to the function of the papacy and the priesthood is questioned today, or even rejected, based on the “historical critical” approach to Scripture.
Essentially, historical critics claim that Scripture is replete with enough historical errors, human biases, religious prejudices and fictional stories that little of it can be taken as factual, and what little is true is confined to “matters of salvation” (so they claim from their distorted reading of Vatican II’s Dei Verbum 11, which we will cover later). But even that is no great concession, since liberal theology has already redefined “biblical” salvation to be little more than a human consensus of God’s existence from which God will save all mankind.