what i learnt from reading the Nature of Biblical criticism part 6.2

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.

But that actually sharpens my problem with the rest of his argument. If he admits that genre determines whether something counts as inconsistency, then when he comes to the Gospels, Genesis, or the Passover texts, he cannot simply say “here are inconsistencies” and then condemn harmonization. He first needs to show that, according to the genre of those texts, these differences really are inconsistencies.

Take the Gospels. Barton says the critical reader cannot accept harmonization because it goes against the character of the Gospel. But he also admits that the precise genre of the Gospels is debated. So how can one say harmonization goes against their character before establishing what that character is? If the Gospels belong to a genre close to historical reportage, eyewitness testimony, ancient biography, or selective historical narration, then harmonization may not be non-critical at all. It may follow from the genre. Harmonization is not automatically opposed to reading each Gospel as a finished whole, unless “finished whole” is silently being defined as isolated, exhaustive, and non-supplementable. And that definition needs to be argued.

This is also why I do not find convincing the claim that saying Jesus healed one blind man means he did not heal two. Even as a narrative claim, that does not follow. Omission is not negation. A narrator can mention one person because that one person is sufficient for the purpose of the account. We do this constantly. If I say I had lunch with a colleague, that does not mean no one else was present. So if Barton wants to use this as a rule of narrative reading, he needs to argue for it. It cannot just be assumed as “how stories work.”

The same issue appears with the temple cleansing. Barton says it is historically conceivable, though improbable, that Jesus cleansed the temple more than once, but not conceivable that the evangelists thought so, because each narrates the event as unique. But again, what exactly makes the narration signal uniqueness? Especially when John himself says that his Gospel is not exhaustive. If John openly admits that he did not record everything Jesus did, then why is it impossible that he knew of another cleansing and chose to place or narrate one cleansing where it best served his purpose?

Then there is the issue of Dahl. Barton argues that the Gospels were not read as self-contained witnesses, but as compendia of material to be extracted and recombined. But I still do not see how his evidence proves that. Showing that the Gospels were harmonized, extracted from, or recombined does not show that they were not treated as self-contained witnesses, unless “self-contained” means isolated and non-recombinable. A text can be a coherent whole and still provide information that can be compared with other texts. And even if the Gospels functioned as compendia of material, why does that challenge Dahl’s idea that they are alternative tellings of the same story of salvation? A compendium of material can still be a version of a larger kerygmatic story.

The same kind of issue appears in Barton’s discussion of the Passover. He says Exodus requires the Passover sacrifice to be roasted and not boiled in water, Deuteronomy commends boiling, and Chronicles awkwardly harmonizes them by saying Josiah “boiled in fire.” But that seems too strong. First, the word bashal may not always strictly mean “boil”; it may mean “cook” or “prepare,” and only clearly mean “boil” when qualified with “in water.” So Chronicles may simply mean Josiah prepared the Passover with fire. Second, Barton assumes Exodus 12:9 is a universal law, but that is not obvious. It may be a circumstantial instruction for that specific Passover in Egypt, under urgent conditions, rather than a timeless legal prohibition for every future Passover. If Exodus is circumstantial and Deuteronomy is legislative, then the supposed contradiction is not obvious.

So when Barton says the Chronicler disregards the integrity of each text and treats them as raw material, I think that conclusion comes too fast. Maybe the Chronicler is harmonizing, but maybe we have misunderstood the wording. Maybe there is no contradiction to harmonize. Maybe the texts operate with different scopes. These possibilities need to be excluded before the charge lands.

Then Barton moves to Pentateuchal source criticism. He says great use was made of the four-source hypothesis in reconstructing Israel’s history, especially in Wellhausen. I cannot really comment on Wellhausen because I have not read him. But even here, when Barton says that the sources were correlated with different periods in Israel’s history, I immediately wonder what arguments were given for dividing the sources that way and assigning them to those periods, especially since the source question itself has not been universally settled.

But more importantly, Barton says source analysis itself was not originally produced by a historical impulse, but by the desire to explain how the text came to contain inconsistencies without recourse to harmonization. And again, I feel like the term “inconsistency” needs to be unloaded. If consistency depends on genre, then source criticism cannot begin by presupposing inconsistencies. It must first show, through genre-sensitive reading, that the text as it stands contains tensions that the genre does not allow.

For example, Barton says Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are not simply raw material from which details about creation can be cropped out, but two incompatible stories: one where humans are created after the animals and one where humans are created before the animals. But that only works if both texts are meant to function with strict chronology in the same way. And that itself needs to be argued. Many have argued that Genesis 1 especially is arranged thematically rather than chronologically. If the arrangement is theological or literary rather than strictly temporal, then the charge of incompatibility is not obvious. Again, it might be true, but it needs to be argued, not simply asserted.

So when Barton says these perceptions accumulated and led to source analysis, I want to ask: perceptions according to what reading framework? If the perceptions are shaped by modern expectations of consistency, chronology, and narrative, then they also need to be tested against ancient literary conventions and genre expectations. Otherwise, the “inconsistencies” may reveal more about the reader’s assumptions than about the text itself.

This is why I keep coming back to the same point. I do not reject Barton’s basic principle. In fact, I think his principle is exactly right: genre matters. Texts must be read according to what they are. But precisely because I agree with that, I think his critique of harmonization needs more argument. Harmonization can be wrong when it ignores genre, as in Proverbs. But harmonization is not automatically wrong. In genres connected to historical testimony, memory, legal tradition, or reportage, harmonization may be a legitimate critical move.

So my issue is not that Barton is necessarily wrong. My issue is that he often moves from difference to inconsistency, from inconsistency to incompatibility, and from incompatibility to anti-harmonization, without fully arguing the genre-based steps in between. And given his own definition of biblical criticism, those steps are exactly where the argument should happen.

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