Barton’s whole point, as I understand him, is that biblical criticism is not primarily born from a historical impulse, but from a literary or hermeneutical one. He keeps insisting that what makes criticism critical is not merely noticing inconsistencies, because harmonizers also notice them. What makes criticism critical is the way one understands the nature of the text: as a finished whole, with its own internal dynamic, logic, and genre. And I agree with that principle in itself. I agree that certain types of texts provide certain types of information. I agree that we cannot just go to every text looking for a simple transcript of events. Every text tells a story in its own way, and to read it well, we need to ask what kind of text it is. Barton even quotes Matthias Flacius Illyricus, who says that in reading a text one must decide whether it is narrative, history, instruction, consolation, accusation, description, speech, and so on. I completely agree with that. But that is exactly why I am struggling with Barton’s use of the principle. Because if genre recognition is the heart of the critical attitude, then what counts as an inconsistency should itself depend on genre. The charge of inconsistency should be the result of a critical reading, not something presupposed before the critical reading. You first identify the genre, then you determine what kind of consistency that genre requires, and only then can you say whether a tension is truly an inconsistency. This is why I find his Proverbs example much stronger than his Gospel or Pentateuch examples. In Proverbs, the so-called contradiction between “answer a fool according to his folly” and “do not answer a fool according to his folly” is not really an inconsistency once you recognize the genre. Proverbs is wisdom literature. It works through maxims, tensions, contextual judgment, and sometimes opposing aphorisms. So harmonizing those verses into one flat rule does misread the genre. There, Barton’s point works.

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