Part 7 What i learned reading the Nature of Biblical Criticism by John Barton

Barton continues by saying that sometimes a historical observation can point the reader toward a literary question. For example, in Genesis 12:6, the phrase “at that time the Canaanites were in the land” led many early Jewish and Christian scholars to conclude that the chapter could not have been written by Moses, because the phrase seems to presuppose a time after the Canaanites were no longer in the land.

I understand the point, but I would still add a small caveat. Even if that phrase is later, it does not automatically follow that the whole chapter is later. It could be a later gloss. And even then, the phrase does not necessarily have to be written after the complete expulsion of the Canaanites; it could perhaps have been written at a time when that expulsion was expected or underway. I am not saying this solves the issue, only that the move needs some care.

Barton then says that once the question of Mosaic authorship is raised, the solution has to come through literary analysis. He quotes Wellhausen, saying that the supporters of the Graf hypothesis wanted to place the legal and narrative strata of the Pentateuch in the right historical order, but that the problem itself was literary and had to be solved by literary means, through inner comparison of the sources and correlation with securely transmitted facts of Israel’s history. So history enters the discussion, but the primary emphasis remains literary. The question may be historical, but the answer is literary.

I can understand that. I have not read Wellhausen, so I cannot really comment on whether his source divisions or historical correlations were justified. But immediately, when Barton says that Wellhausen correlated each source with a particular period of Israel’s history, I want to know how exactly that was argued. Because as far as I know, the question of how many sources there are, how to divide them, and how to date them is not something everyone has settled. So I cannot comment on the details, but I can at least say that the argument needs to be made carefully.

Barton then says that source analysis itself was not originally produced by a historical impulse, but by the desire to understand how the text came to contain inconsistencies and to explain them without recourse to harmonization.

And again, this is where I feel that the word “inconsistency” needs to be unloaded. What counts as inconsistency depends on what counts as consistency, and what counts as consistency depends on genre. So the charge of inconsistency should not come before critical reading; it should be the result of critical reading. First, identify the genre. Then identify what kind of coherence that genre requires. Then, and only then, decide whether something is actually inconsistent.

So when Barton says source criticism explains inconsistencies without recourse to harmonization, I want to say: you only need to explain without harmonization once you have first shown that harmonization is not a legitimate way of reading that text. But if the genre permits harmonization, then excluding it is itself something that needs argument.

He gives Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 as an example. He says they are not merely raw material from which details about creation can be pulled out, but two different and incompatible creation stories: one where humankind is created after the animals, and one where humankind is created before the animals.

But again, that assumes that the texts are meant to be read according to a strict shared chronology. And that needs to be argued. Many people have argued that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are not primarily concerned with chronology in the same way, and that Genesis 1 especially may be arranged thematically rather than temporally. So to say that one has humans after animals and the other before animals only becomes a contradiction if both are trying to give the same kind of chronological sequence. That may be true, but it needs to be shown, not just asserted.

Barton says that it was an accumulation of perceptions like these that led to traditional source analysis. But again, I want to ask: perceptions according to what idea of coherence? Because if those perceptions are shaped by modern expectations of coherence, then they need to be tested against ancient literary conventions. Barton himself later acknowledges that this objection can be made. Someone can object that the ideas of coherence being invoked are modern ideas, and that biblical authors may have worked with different notions of what it means for a text to cohere.

And Barton agrees that this objection has some force. He says that such an objection does not undermine biblical criticism itself, because it is itself a critical argument: it asks how texts held together in the ancient mind and accuses some critical scholars of anachronism. He even says that the plea for biblical criticism to be more sensitive to ancient literary genres is in some measure well-founded.

And here, I think Barton is right. This does not undercut the basic critical perception that a text can only be understood by recognizing its genre. But what it does undercut is a quick charge of inconsistency. If what counts as coherence is genre-dependent, then what counts as inconsistency is also genre-dependent. So this objection can absolutely be used against quick dismissals of harmonization. The harmonizer may simply be working with a different idea of coherence. He may not be anti-critical; he may be critical in another way, if his harmonization comes from a different genre judgment.

This is exactly why I liked Barton’s Proverbs example, because there the genre issue is clear. Proverbs 26 says, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly,” and then, “Answer a fool according to his folly.” The rabbis harmonized this by assigning one verse to Torah matters and the other to secular matters. Barton says that, to the modern interpreter, Proverbs is the kind of material where wisdom is communicated through opposing aphorisms. Like in English: “many hands make light work” and “too many cooks spoil the broth.” Both can be true depending on the situation.

And here I agree with him. In Proverbs, the so-called contradiction is not really a contradiction once you understand the genre. It is a feature of the text. Wisdom literature works through contextual maxims, tension, and contrast. So harmonizing those sayings into one flat rule may indeed ignore the genre.

But that strengthens my broader point. If Barton admits that genre determines whether something counts as inconsistency, then he must do the same for the Gospels, the Pentateuch, and the Passover laws. He cannot simply assume that differences are inconsistencies before establishing what the genre allows.

This also comes up when Barton talks about biblical archaeology. He says some manifestations of biblical archaeology strike scholars as non-critical because they do not ask the crucial genre questions, but instead treat the text simply as a repository of potential facts.

At first, I found that strange, because archaeology is not the same discipline as literary criticism. Archaeology does not always need to care about genre in the same way. A poem can mention a castle, and archaeology can still investigate whether that castle existed, even if the poem is poetic. So I do not think archaeology as such is non-critical just because it extracts possible facts from a text.

But I do see Barton’s point if the historical reconstruction depends on misreading the genre. If, for example, a poetic text describes mountains symbolically, and someone goes looking for exactly those mountains in a literal geographical sense, then yes, the historical use of the text would be flawed. So I would qualify it this way: the accusation can be valid, but only if it is demonstrated that the historian or archaeologist extracted information by misidentifying the genre. It cannot just be assumed.

Then Barton discusses the dispute between John Bright and Martin Noth. He says the issue was not really about archaeological facts on the ground, but about the kind of literature the Old Testament is and whether it can be used to reconstruct Israel’s history. For Noth, the patriarchal stories were not the kind of material from which history could be written, but legends, or sagen, as Gunkel called them.

Again, I understand the logic. But it always comes back to the same point: the question is literary before it is historical. What kind of text is this? What kind of information does it provide? What sort of coherence does it require?

Then Barton says something very important about the Pentateuch. He says harmonization has already occurred within the biblical text itself, and that the critical move is to notice that the finished product is not a coherent work. Source analysis then separates out strands that do cohere with unity of theme, purpose, and plot, and suggests that these were combined, somewhat like Tatian combined the Gospels into the Diatessaron. For Barton, this is not especially historical-critical, but literary-critical.

And again, I ask: by which notion of coherence has this verdict been reached?

Why is the critical move only to notice that the finished product is incoherent? Why can the critical move not also notice that the finished product has a new coherence imposed by the redactor? Even if there are sources, once they are arranged into a final form, that final form has its own shape, purpose, and unity.

This is where I think of a patchwork. You can recognize that a patchwork is made of different strands of material, but that does not mean the finished patchwork is incoherent. To call it incoherent, you need to know what kind of coherence the maker intended. If you take all the blue pieces and say, “this must be one source because they are blue,” that may be meaningful only if color was important to the maker. But what if the maker was colorblind? What if the arrangement was based on texture, memory, family history, or something else entirely?

So even if source analysis is possible, ignoring the final redactor as an author can itself become a failure of criticism. The redactor is not just a mechanical compiler. The arrangement of the sources is also an authorial act. If Barton defines criticism as attention to the plain meaning and literary character of the text, then ignoring the redactorial finished form may itself go against his definition.

This is also where his comparison with the Diatessaron seems limited. We know the Diatessaron is a combination because we have the Gospels from which it was derived. But with the Pentateuch, we do not possess the alleged sources in the same way. So we cannot simply assume the analogy works based only on our perception of coherence.

Barton then concludes that what makes an approach pre-critical is not lack of interest in history, authorship, dates, or origins. Augustine and Osiander were deeply interested in producing a coherent historical picture of Jesus. Conservative or non-critical readers are often very interested in questions like the date of Daniel or authorship of the Pastorals. What makes an approach pre-critical, for Barton, is its inability to engage the literary character and genre of the biblical text. Critical reading, by contrast, attends to exactly that question.

And here again, I agree with the principle. Ordinary readers can be critical in this sense if they know what kind of questions a biblical book can and cannot answer. But precisely because I agree with that, I push back against some of his examples. Because many of his charges against harmonization seem to presuppose genre judgments that have not yet been demonstrated.

Barton then suggests that the rift between historical criticism and newer literary approaches may be more apparent than real. He says the usual distinction between diachronic and synchronic approaches is not as absolute as people think. Biblical criticism has always had an essential literary focus, even before the nineteenth-century historical impulse became dominant. Modern literary critics of the Bible may therefore have more in common with older biblical criticism than they realize.

I find that bridge interesting. But I would add that maybe the rift between biblical criticism and harmonization may also be more apparent than real. If harmonization results from a certain genre-sensitive idea of coherence, especially if the Gospels are taken as narratives that intend to give true information about Jesus, then harmonization may not be outside criticism. It may be one possible result of criticism.

Barton then introduces another important idea: the macro-semantics of whole texts. I really like that phrase, and I want to keep it highlighted. By this he means not just the meaning of individual words, but the overall meaning of the whole text: how it hangs together, its drift, its ductus, how one section leads to another, how the argument moves forward, and what kind of overall sense it makes.

Here again, I agree. Before using a text for historical reconstruction, it first needs to be understood. Otherwise, one will not know how to use it properly.

But then Barton says that the question of a passage’s truth needs to be bracketed out while it is studied, not out of skepticism, but procedurally. He says that in harmonizers, a premature concern for the truth of the Gospel stories gets in the way of proper literary understanding.

I agree that one can be too quick here. But I do not think concern for truth is always premature or unjustified. It may be the result of taking seriously what the text claims to do. If a text presents itself as reporting what Jesus did, then genre recognition itself must include that claim. A poem about Jesus and a narrative about Jesus may report in different ways, but both may still provide information about Jesus according to their genre.

So when Barton says Augustine wants to know what Jesus said before asking what kind of stories he is dealing with, maybe that is true. I have not read Augustine deeply enough to judge. But it needs to be argued. It may also be that Augustine wants to know what Jesus said because he has already determined that the Gospels are the kind of accounts that transmit information about Jesus.

Barton then says Augustine already knows that the differences among the four Gospels must be reducible to a single concordant account before he has examined them. Again, maybe that is true. But maybe the order is the reverse: maybe Augustine believes they are reducible to one concordant account because he believes he has already recognized what kind of accounts they are. Barton says Augustine forces them into a frame derived from none of them, but that too needs argument.

He also says Augustine approaches the text from what is now called a confessional point of view, already convinced that they convey absolute truth. But there is a danger of a kind of genetic fallacy here. The fact that Augustine approaches the Gospels confessionally does not by itself show that there is no objective harmony. It may explain his motivation, but it does not refute the conclusion. He may have assumed objective harmony, or he may have concluded it. That distinction matters.

Barton contrasts this with biblical criticism, which he says studies the text in a value-neutral manner, trying to understand it before judging truth, falsehood, relevance, or irrelevance. I am not fully sure what he means by value-neutral. In principle, I understand the procedural idea. But in practice, from what I have seen, he also seems to assume many things: about coherence, about what counts as inconsistency, about what a finished whole entails, about how narrative works, and about why harmonization is excluded.

So my conclusion for this chapter is this: I agree with Barton’s main definition more than I disagree with it. I agree that biblical criticism is not fundamentally about dates, authorship, sources, or historical reconstruction. It is about understanding the kind of text one is reading. It is about genre, literary character, and the macro-semantics of whole texts.

But precisely because I agree with that, I think he needs to be more careful with the charge that harmonization is non-critical. Harmonization can be non-critical when it ignores genre, as in the Proverbs example. But harmonization can also be critical if it follows from genre recognition. If the text is the kind of text that gives testimony, memory, historical report, or selective narrative about real events, then harmonization may be a legitimate literary-historical operation.

The real issue is not harmonization itself. The real issue is whether harmonization respects the genre and macro-semantics of the text. And that has to be argued case by case.

So the gap I keep seeing is the same: Barton moves from difference to inconsistency, from inconsistency to incompatibility, and from incompatibility to anti-harmonization. But if genre determines what counts as coherence, then each of those steps needs argument. Otherwise, the criticism risks doing exactly what it criticizes: imposing an idea of coherence on the text before proving that this is the coherence the text itself demands

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