A History of theHigher Criticism

Robert C. Newman

In order to fully understand the present view of thestructure and formation of the Old Testament (particularly the first fivebooks), it is worthwhile to study the history of such theories.  Let us first look at the course ofevents in Old Testament studies leading up to and following the presentation ofthe so-called Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis in 1878. Then we shall consider these events in the context of similarwork done in general literature, making appropriate observations as we go.

A History of thePresent Critical Theory of the Pentateuch

Origin of the Documentary Theory

The first five books of the Old Testament, variously knownas the Pentateuch or the Torah, were universally ascribed to Moses in the Oldand New Testaments, the Talmud, and both Jewish and Christian tradition.  It was not until the eighteenth centurythat this view was seriously questioned, at a time when deism in England,skepticism in France, and rationalism in Germany provided a climate favorableto rejection of the supernatural and skepticism toward the historicity ofancient documents.

In 1711 a German pastor, Heinrich Bernhard Witter, firstadvanced the idea that the variation in the use of the terms "God"and "LORD" (as rendered in our English Bibles) indicated that twodocuments had been fitted together to form the book of Genesis.  Witter's speculation had no historicalimpact, however; it was soon forgotten, not to be rediscovered until 1924.  The next person to advance such a viewwas a French physician Jean Astruc, who in 1753 published a book entitled ConjecturesConcerning the Original Memoranda Which It Appears Moses Used to Compose theBook of Genesis. As the title shows, Astruc's proposal was not very radical,as he did not deny Mosaic authorship to Genesis. He did divide the book into two main sources and ten smalldocuments, however. Though no onepaid much attention to Astruc's book for som e30 yearss, he is usuallyrecognized as the "Father of Higher Criticism."

In 1780-83, the German scholar Johann Gottfried Eichhornproduced his Introduction to the Old Testament. He divided all ofGenesis and two chapters of Exodus into two documents which he called J and E,corresponding to the Hebrew words (as transliterated into German)"Jahve" and "Elohim," each representing the name used forGod in that document. Hecorrelated alleged "parallel accounts" with these sources anddetermined the stylistic characteristics of each document. Eichhorn's work was much more influentialthan Astruc's and really marked the beginning of "higher criticism"of the Pentateuch.

The Fragmentary Theory

The three authors so far discussed had rather similar viewsregarding the division of Genesis into documents: that there were two main oneswith marked differences in style and vocabulary. But other theories soon appeared to vie for the approval ofOld Testament scholars. Theso-called Fragmentary Theory was the next to appear, as presented by the ScotsRoman Catholic priest Alexander Geddes in his Introduction to the Pentateuchand Joshua, published in 1792. Geddes suggested that the Pentateuchwas compiled in the time of King Solomon (10^th century BC) from manysmall fragments, some of which dated back to the time of Moses.  Ten years later, he was followed byJohann Vater, who divided Genesis into 39 fragments, which he felt had been puttogether in the time of the Babylonian captivity of the Jews (6^thcen BC).

The Supplementary Theory

While the proponents of these views debated, another German,Heinrich Ewald, published The Composition of Genesis in 1823. Ewald stressed the remarkable unity of the Pentateuch, especiallyGenesis, and suggested that most of it was a single foundation document (GermanGrundschrift) of early, if not Mosaic,composition. This document wasroughly similar to Eichhorn's E, though larger, comprising about two-thirds ofGenesis and Exodus, most of Numbers and all of Leviticus. Ewald held that the Grundschrift had been supplemented later by a writer using thename "Jahve" for God, so his view came to be known as SupplementaryTheory. Ewald was later supportedby Friedrich Bleek and Wilhelm DeWette. Notice that this theory contrasted sharply with the fragmentary view (asdid Eichhorn's two-document view), as the supplementary view recognized twodistinct styles in the Pentateuch, while the fragmentary saw many.  Eichhorn and Ewald both thought theycould distinguish two styles, but disagreed over whether certain passagesbelonged to J or to E.

Although the work so far described has been that of Germans(with one Frenchman), the English were not to be entirely shut our of thecontest. John William Colenso, theAnglican Bishop of Natal (South Africa) studied the Old Testament as a hobbyfor many years. He claimed to havefound many "flaws, inconsistencies and contraditions" in thePentateuch, most of them in Ewal's Grundschrift. This weakened thesupplementary view in the eyes of many. Colenso's work was finally published between 1862 and 1879 as ThePentateuch and Joshua Critically Examined.

The Crystallization Theory

As a result of Colenso's work, Ewald tried to find anothertheory which would take these observations into account.  In 1840, in his History of Israel, Ewald advanced the so-called CrystallizationTheory. Just as a seed-crystalwill collect ions of sodium and chlorine from a supersaturated solution to forma large salt crystal, so Ewald suggested that there had been an alternativingseries of J- and E-type writers building up material around a small core toform the Pentateuch. This alsofitted Ewald's own observation that certain statements in J assumed theexistence of others in E and vice versa. However, thecrystallization theory never became widely accepted.

Developmental Ideas

While many were thus engaged in dividing the Pentateuch intosmall pieces and grouping the pieces into documents in accordance with variousnotions, others were constructing the notions by which to sort the pieces.  The most important of these was theidea that Israel's religion must have developed from a lower, primitive form toa later, higher type. Views ofthis sort began to appear in 1805 when DeWette published his Dissertation. Looking at the reforms instituted by King Josiah (narrated in 2 Kings22), he noticed that they corresponded very closely to the teaching ofDeuteronomy, a fact which few would deny. DeWette went on to say that the "book of the law" found in thetemple (2 Kings 22:8) was actually the book of Deuteronomy.  This is certainly a possibility, thoughit might have been the whole Pentateuch. But DeWette did not stop here. He claimed that the book was a fraud which had been written by thepriests and planted in the temple in order that it might be "found"and used to advance their own religious views. Thus a development of Israel's religion is postulated, ofwhich a big step was alleged to be the discovery of Deuteronomy in 621 BC.  Later critical scholar have held tothis date, though many of them have shied away from the fraud idea.

The theme of development was continued in the teaching ofEduard Reuss, a popular professor at Strassburg in the 1830s and beyond, whowrote little but had many students who became influential.  Reuss felt that the Biblical religionhad developed by a long process, during which monotheism arose from polytheism,worship became more formal and centralized, and the laws became morecomplex. To this type ofdevelopment, Wilhelm Vatke added Hegel's dialectical philosophy of history, bywhich one movement provokes a counter-movement, the two later combining after along period of struggle to form a synthesis. In his Biblical Theology Scientifically Presented, published in 1835, Vatke reversed the Biblicalorder of the law and the prophets. The prophets, he suggested, had developed the idea of one God, thenfought the polytheistic priests in the realm of theology and ethics.  Finally there was a compromise in whichthe law was written, retaining both the ethical monotheism of the prophets andthe sacrificial system of the priests.

Production of the Graf-Wellhausen Theory

In these two strands – the idea that the Pentateuch ismade up of documents woven together, and the theory that Israel's religiondeveloped from primitive beginnings – we have the basis of theGraf-Wellhausen hypothesis. Let ussee how these two came to be combined.

In 1853, Hermann Hupfeld published The Sources of Genesis, in which he sought to solve the problems of thesupplementary theory by dividing E into two sources E¹ and E²,so that there would now be three documents in the first four books of thePentateuch. Although many hadpreviously thought there were two documents, each with a very different styleand a different name for God, Hupfeld now split E in two, claiming that E¹was filled with genealogies, details and statistics (this documents is todaycalled P). whereas E² was mostly narrative, with a style verymuch like that of J, but using"Elohim" for God. Thissecond document was later given the old name E.

Thus Hupfeld split the two original criteria by which thesources of Genesis had been identified, so that two documents now used"Elohim" for God and two documents had almost the same style.  Some have called this the "Copernicanrevolution of Higher Criticism" because of the drastic change it wroughtin the documentary theory of the Pentateuch. Unlike Copernicus' theory, however, this view was morecomplex than its generally-accepted predecessor. This was not the first time E had been split, as karl Ilginhad done so in 1798, But Ilgin hadfound 17 documents in Genesis, and his work was not influential.

Hupfeld also suggested that the documents composing thePentateuch had been written in the order P, E, J, D (using the modern labels,with D for Deuteronomy), and that they had been assembled by an editor orredactor (labelled R) who added a few comments and occasionally put a"Jahve" in P or E or an "Elohim" in J.

But Hupfeld's dating was not satisfactory to those whobelieved in the evolution of religion. The complex laws of P could not have come first!  Therefore Karl Kenirich Graf, in 1866,suggested that P be split up and the legal material in it be dated even laterthan D. The Dutch scholar AbrahamKuenen replied to Graf in 1869 (in his Religion of Israel), arguing that P could not be split because of itsuniformity of style. He suggestedthat all of P should be dated after D.

With this revision, the stage was finally set for theappearance of Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena to the History of AncientIsrael, published in 1878. The book contained no significantinnovations in dividing the Pentateuch into documents, but Hupfeld's view wasstated brilliantly, and the documents were dated in accordance with the theorythat Israel's religion had developed from a primitive to an advancedstate. Wellhausen's unusuallyreadable German style helped give the book a wide circulation, and theevolutionary view of religion he presented for ready acceptance in a time whenDarwin and Hegel had such influence.

In Germany, Wellhausen's presentation of the theory almostimmediately gained the support of the younger scholars.  The older men in Old Testamentcriticism did not rush to endorse the view, but men do not live forever, so thetheory gained almost complete acceptance within a generation.

In the English-speaking countries, Wellhausen's views spreadmore slowly among the scholars but more rapidly among laymen.  This seems to have been the casebecause the major proponents of the theory writing in the English language wereSamuel R. Driver and William Robertson Smith, both pious men who took a moreconservative approach to the New Testament than their continentalcounterparts. Driver's Introductionto the Literature of the Old Testament,which appeared in 1891, has been the standard work on the documentary theory inEnglish. It was recently reprintedin paperback by Meridan Books.

Recent Developments

Since the time of Wellhausen there have been few changes inthe documentary theory which have gained wide acceptance.  One exception has involved the relativedating of E and J. Opinion hasgradually shifted to favor J as the earlier. However, many of the outstanding scholars in Pentateuch studieshave advanced views which differ on the number of documents from which thePentateuch was formed, usually dividing J into two parts.

Thus Otto Eissfeldt, in his Hexateuchsynopse of 1922, indentified a Lay Source (L) which heclaims has a nomadic outlook hostile to the Canaanite way of life.  Smend and Eichrodt have isolated asimilar document which they call J¹. In 1927, Julius Morgenstern wrote The OldestDocument of the Hexateuch, in which heclaims to recognize a Kenite Source (K), which is similar to Eissfeldt's L andwas used in the reform of King Asa about 900 BC.

Robert H. Pfeiffer, in his Introduction to the OldTestament, published 1941, splits J quitedifferently, calling the material in Genesis 1-11 previously assigned to J bythe name S, standing for Mt. Seir in Edom. He claims this document is the earliest of all those in thePentateuch, but that it was added to the others last.

Georg Fohrer, whose Introduction to the Old Testament was translated into English in 1965, dividesWellhausen's J into N and J, the latter document reflecting the attitudes ofthe farmer and the former those of the nomad.

Thus some of the leading writers in the field of OldTestament studies have felt the division of sources generally accepted isfalse. They are each convincedthat their newly discovered document is very different from J in style.  Certainly this must raise questionsconcerning the objectivity of stylistic determinations.

In addition, various scholars who generally accept thedocumentary theory have attacked different features of it, so that virtuallyevery aspect of the theory has been questioned by several criticalscholars. This is discussedbriefly in Gleason Archer's Survey of Old Testament Introduction, 1964. Some have raised questions about the criterion of divine names asevidence of different documents. Others have wondered whether J, E and P were ever separate documentswritten at different times. Evenamong those who fell that J and E were separate, there is controversy overwhich was written first. Finally,there have been doubts expressed about the origin of D in the reign of Josiah,a result once hailed as assured.

It must be admitted that the majority of Old Testamentscholars still hold to a division of documents like that favored by Wellhausen,even though they have abandoned most of his development theory (a major factorin its original acceptance). Thequestion to be answered is, do they do so because the evidence favors it, orare they caught in a traditionalism which will not leave a sinking ship?

A Brief History of"Higher Criticism" in General Literature

Having seen something of the history of the higher criticismof the Pentateuch, it will be valuable now to see how similar methods havefared in the study of literature outside the Bible.

The Rise of Higher Criticism in General Literature

The beginnings of higher criticism in modern times can betraced back to the Renaissance. The first important triumph of this art was that of Lorenzo Valla, aLatin scholar and Papal secretary, who showed that the Donation ofConstantine was not genuine. This document, which claimed to be anofficial paper of the Roman emperor Constantine (4^th cen AD) andwhich assigned the central part of Italy to the Pope, was shown by Valla to bea forgery written in the 10^th century.

About this same time, the Dutch humanist Erasmus questionedthe authenticity of a group of 148 letters reputedly written by Phalaris, atyrant who ruled Sicily in the 6^th century BC.  But it was not until 1699 that theseletters were actually shown to be inauthentic, when Englishman Richard Bentleydemonstrated they were written about AD 200. Apparently, the letters were not intentional frauds, butcomposition excercises for students. Less successfully, Bentley attempted to show that about half of Milton'sParadise Lost was written by hissecretary.

In 1761 and 1763, two epic poems were published in Scotland,later collected under the title The Poems of Ossian. Thesewere presented by James Macpherson as ancient Celtic epics which he had foundand translated. In an age of greatsentimentality and interest in the heroism of primitive people, the poemsbecame very popular. Goethetranslated them into German. Napoleon carried an Italian translation with him on his campaigns.  But Dr. Samuel Johnson, a notedliterary critic, questioned their authenticity. When he was presented with the "originalmanuscripts," he showed they were of recent origin.  Nevertheless, the controvery continuedwell into the 19^th century. Today it is agreed that the poems are almost entirely Macpherson's owncompositions, with only a few links to poetry he had found in the Scottishhighlands.

Extremes of the Wolfian School

About this time, higher criticism began to enter the fieldof Biblical studies with the work of Astruc and Eichhorn.  In general literature these methods beganto be applied extensively by Friedrich Augustus Wolf (1754-1824) and hisfollowers. Wolf carried skepticismtoward ancient writings to an extreme, not trusting any statement he found inthem unless supported by other evidence. Working especially with the writings of Homer, he published his Prolegomenaad Homerum in 1795. In it he claimed that Homer did notwrite the Iliad or the Odyssey. Instead, they grew up by a natural process, being a collection of songssung by wandering Greek minstrels. Goethe was very much impressed by Wolf's thesis at first.  Later, however, Geothe concluded thatworks of this caliber could not have been the result of a haphazard process ofcollection.

Karl Lachmann followed Wolf, dividing the German epic poem Niebelungenlied into twnety short lays which eh felt were writtenmuch later than their setting would suggest. Lachmann felt these lays had been combined almostaccidentally to form the epic. Later, Lachmann wrote Reflections on Homer's Iliad, in which he divided that poem into eighteenseparated lays, some of which were supposed to have been intertwined when theywere combined.

Thereafter the prevailing view of the Iliad was that it had formed by accretion, with a shortpoem, "The Wrath of Achilles" gradually accumulating additionalmaterial in the course of several centuries. George Grote's History of Greece, 1856, reflects this view.

Another work which came under the scrutiny of highercriticism was Beowulf, the oldest knownGermanic epic. This work survivedto modern times in only a single manuscript (now lost) written inAnglo-Saxon. During the 19^thcentury, critics following the example of Wolf decided that Beowulf was the work of six authors, the earlier ones paganand the later ones Christian. Again, it was thought that the material was compiled rather informally.

Likewise Pier's Plowman,an English work dating back to the 14^th century, was said to be thework of five writers. J. A. Manleywrote an article in support of this view early in the 20^th century,which may still be found in the most recently revised edition of the CambridgeHistory of Literature.

A somewhat similar situation developed in the study ofmedieval ballads. The Grimmbrothers (of fairy-tale fame) advanced a theory for the communal origin of folksongs and ballads. These works,they claimed, were produced spontaneously by the people during folk dances andsimilar festive occasions. Thisview came to be summarized in the German phrase, Das Volk dichtet (the common people compose poetry).

Another important area analyzed by higher criticism wasShakespearean literature. Thegroup of plays traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare are recognizedthroughout the world as among the greatest ever written.  Not much is known about Shakespeare'slife. The fact that he left schoolat the age of 14 led Herbert Lawrence, shortly before 1800, to suggest thatShakespeare could not have had the qualifications necessary to produce theworks attributed to him. Thereaster, certain scholars began to suggest alternative authors.

In 1857, William Henry Smith wrote Bacon and Shakespeare, in which the literary endeavors ascribed toShakespeare were transferred to his noted contemporary Francis Bacon.  Certain phraseology common to both,together with Bacon's well-attested intellectual gifts, led to this suggestion. Later men extended this reasoning to the point where itlooked like most of elizabethan literature had been written by Bacon!  This seems to suggest that thephraseology was characteristically Elizabethan, not an individual style.

In 1888, Ignatius Donnelly went even further.  In his Great Cryptogram, he claimed that Bacon had written secret messagesin the plays to show that he wrote them. Donnelly's methods of deciphering "messages" were so arbitrarythat virtually anything could be found in the plays. Consequently the Baconian authorship theory is generallydiscredited today. In themeantime, others claimed that the plays attributed to Shakespeare had beenwritten by other writers or noblemen of the period, but none of these viewshave been widely accepted.

A less extreme application of higher criticism toShakespearean literature has been to seek sources for the material used in hisplays. Obviously many of the ideasin the plays come from older sources. Some of the plays are even very similar to earlier plays, although thereis an enormous difference in literary quality. An examination of style suggests that both Henry 6 and Henry 8 involved collaboration with another writer. But here also, certain extreme views have beenadvanced. For instance, DoverWilson assigns certain lines in most of Shakespeare's plays to inferiorauthors.

In the meantime, the higher criticism of the Pentateuch wasbeing extended to the entire Old Testament. Eichhorn's view that Moses used documents in writing Genesiswas discarded in later editions of his Introduction where the documents were continued into Exodus,Leviticus, etc., where Moses would have been an eyewitness of the eventsdescribed. Meanwhile DeWetteproposed his fruad theory for the writing of Deuteronomy.  By the time that Vatke's idea ofreversing the chronological order of the law and the prophets had bee accepted,such evolutionary ideas required that the books of Samuel, Kings and Chroniclesbe rejected as reliable history (since they did not show an evolutionarydevelopment). Similarly the Psalmscould not be regarded as written at the time of King David.  Stylistic theories and the rejection ofpredictive prophecy (which is supernatural, and therefore not allowed) then ledto the dissection, and later the trisection, of the book of Isaiah.  This latter principle required that thebook of Daniel be dated in the Maccabean period (170 BC) rather than during theBabylonian captivity (6^th century BC) as the book itselfclaims. Such are "the assuredresults of higher criticism" when applied to the Old Testament.

The Decline of Higher Criticism in General Literature

One of the earliest events to cast doubt on some of theresults of higher criticism in general literature came in 1887 with thediscover of some old manuscripts in a house where the German poet Goethe hadlived as a young man. Goethe hadworked on his masterpiece Faustthroughout most of his life, finally publishing it shortly before his death in1832. Some years later WilhelmScherer, a noted philologist, applied the principles of higher criticism to theprologue of Faust, publishing hisresults in a book entitled Goethestudien. Scherer showed that somesections of the prologue were written when Goethe was young, having anenthusiastic and idealistic tone. Other passages showed the disillusionment of old age and must have beenwritten late in Goethe's life. These results were hailed as important achievements of higher criticismat the time. However, themanuscripts found in 1887 included an early version of Faust in which the prologue had almost the exact form ofthat finally published. Scherer'sassignment of passages to Goethe's old age, based on stylistic considerations,were shown to be incorrect when objective, external evidence came to light.

In the field of ballads and early prose narratives, the ideathat a work was composed by a group has fallen into disfavor.  Dr. Louise Pound, in her 1921 work, PoeticOrigins and the Ballad (reprinted 1948,1962), summarizes here findings as follows:

Songs composed and sung by individualsand songs sung by groups of singers (or "throngs," if you prefer) areto be found in the most primitive of living tribes. That in the earliest stage there was group utterance only,arising from the folk-dance, is fanciful hypothesis. That primitive song is of group composition orcollaboration, not individual composition, is quite as fanciful.

This view is corroborated by Paul Radin in an article"Primitive Literature" in The World Through Literature (1959), edited by Charlton Laird:

I think we can safely dismiss alltheories of communal authorship. The evidence at our disposal today proves overwhelmingly that poems andprose narratives are composed by individuals, no matter how communal thesetting in which they are composed. Nor is there any reason for believing that at any time in the history ofthe world it has been otherwise.

As regards medieval literature, for example, the Nibelungenlied and Beowulf, R. W. Chambers (in Man'sUnconquerable Mind) and others have pointedout that, although these works show a combination of ideas from differentsources, the quality of composition does not allow merely sticking laystogether. Chambers well remarks,"Half a dozen motorbikes cannot be combined to make aRolls-Royce." Concerning theview that Beowulf was the work ofboth pagan and Christian writers, he says:

… most students have long ago abandonedthe attempt [to sort the poem into Christian and non-Christian sections], andhave come to agree that the Christian elements are, almost without exception,so deeply ingrained in the very fabric of the poem that they cannot beexplained away as the work of a reviewer or later interpolator.

Today only a few scholars argue for the multiple authorshipof Pier's Plowman, most feeling thatWilliam Langland was the sole author. It is true that the recently reprinted Cambridge History ofLiterature still contains are old articleadvocating multiple authorship, but Helen Gardner in The Business ofCriticism (1959) says:

The importance of the single author andthe single work dominates literary studies, as can be seen if the plan andtreatment of the new Oxford History of English Literature, now in progress, is compared with that of the old CambridgeHistory.

In Homeric studies there has been a strong shift toward theunity of the Iliad and the Odyssey, though many think the two have differentauthors. Of course no one arguesthat Homer made up his material from nothing, so there may well be sourcesbehind Homer. But this does notdeny the unity of authorship. C.M. Bowra, in Tradition and Design in the Iliad (1930, reprinted 1950, 1958, 1963) discusses thecriticism of Homer. Whererepetitions have been cited to show multiple authorship, he questions themethod used to assign an earlier date to one of the passages.  He admits that the Iliad contains some inexplicable contradictions, but theeno more indicate multiple authorship than a fallible single author:

Homer's name, remembered and honoured,is perhaps the best evidence for his early fame and influence, and the bestanswer to those who think that the Iliadis the work of several great poets and several bunglers. Even the Odyssey in antiquity was sometimes taken from him, but the Iliad remained his until scientific criticism strained atthe gnat of some difficulties in composition, and swallowed the camel ofmultiple authorship. The creditfor the Iliad rest primarily withHomer who gave the poem its shape, its unity of character and style, itsdramatic impetus and high, imaginative life. Such gifts come only from genius, and genius does not belongto compilers or guilds.

Albert Guerard, Professor of General and ComparativeLiterature at Stanford University, summarizes the present situation regardingHomer as follows:

… internal evidence, of a convincingnature, reveals a commanding artistic personality. To dissolve Homer into a myth or a committee, much strongeracid would be needed than the Wolfian school has been able to supply.

In the study of Shakespeare, the theory of Baconianauthorship was never widely accepted among scholars and is considered absurdtoday. Thus in the article"Shakespeare" in the 1956 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica we read:

Thus a kind of thesis which finds itsmotive in the assumed improbability of the possession of abnormal literarygenius by an actor who left school at 14, has accumulated through all itsvariants a mass of improbabilities not to be matched in speculative research onany other field.

A somewhat less radical view of the Shakespearean plays isdiscussed by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren in The Theory of Literature (1942, 1949):

… The work of Dover Wilson morelegitimately belongs to "higher criticism." Wilson makes very large claims for the method: "We canat times creep into the compositor's skin and catch glimpses of the MS throughhis eyes. The door ofShakespeare's workshop stands ajar." No doubt, the "bibliographers" have thrown some light on thecomposition of Elizabethan plays and have suggested, and possibly proved, manytraces of revision and alteration. But many of Dover Wilson's hypotheses seem fanciful constructions forwhich evidence seems very slight or even completely lacking.  Thus Dover Wilson has constructed thegenesis of The Tempest. He claims that the long expositionscene points to the existence of an earlier version in which the pre-history ofthe plot has been told as a loosely constructed drama in the style of TheWinter's Tale. But the slight inconsistencies and irregularities in linearrangement, etc., cannot yield even presumptive evidence for such farfetchedand needless fancies.

Thus a view identified as "higher criticism" ofShakespeare is today generally rejected.

Not only has higher criticism now been rejected in manyworks of general literature (of which we have cited only a few), so that itsapplication to the Bible almost stands alone, but the principles themselves bywhich higher criticism is conducted have recently come under generalattack. Richard Altick in TheArt of Literary Research (1963) says:

The determination of authorshiprequires the gathering and judicious assessment of as much evidence, bothinternal and external, as can be found. Internal evidence is normally more abundant, but it is also veryslippery … The premise underlying its use (statistical studies of word usage,meter, etc.) is that every author's work has unique idiosyncrasies of style …Theoretically, this manner of proceeding is legitimate enough, and some of theresults obtained have won wide acceptance. Many authorship studies, notably in the later nineteenthcentury and early twentieth, laid claim to scientific rigor, and were publishedwith an imposing panoply of statistical charts and tables.  F. G. Eleay's Shakespeare Manual (1878) is an easily accessible example of such work.

It is to be admitted that "unique idiosyncrasies ofstyle" may be valuable in determining authorship, but only if we haveknown examples of the suggested authors' styles already in hand.  Even then there may be problems.  Altick continues:

Sometimes, too, the styles of severalauthors, all of whom may have contributed to a work, are so similar thatdifferentiation of their respective portions is impossible.  Though we know that have a dozen men(Swift, Arbuthnot, Pope, Gay, Parnell, and the Earl of Oxford) composed the Memoirsof Martinus Scriblerus, we cannotpositively isolate the contributions of any one of them.

The easy assumption of multiple authorship has come on hardtimes, as Helen Gardner (cited above) points out:

In field after field theories ofcomposite authorship, earlier versions, different strata have beendiscarded. The kind of analysiswhich was once thought to be the particular duty of literary criticism is nowmarkedly out of fashion. Theassumption today is more and more in favour of single authorship, unless thereis clear external evidence to the contrary, and of taking works as they standand not postulating earlier versions to account for inconsistencies.  Even where the inconsistencies in thework as published are as glaring as they are in The Faerie Queene, most people would agree with Professor C. S. Lewisthat it is "quite impossible to reconstruct historically the phases inSpenser's invention of which particular inconsistencies are, so to speak, thefossils," and would applaud him for taking the poem as it exists and notspeculating on its growth … "Schools of influence" are now out of fashion.  Old disintegrating theories whichassumed that Shakespeare spent much of his career revising other men's plays,and later attempts to show him as almost continuosly engaged in revising hisown, theories of Beowulf beingbased on heroic lays, and laater theories of a pre-Christian Beowulf were all in the air, or at least being debated,thirty years ago [~1930], although they were then being increasinglychallenged. The modernundergraduate is not troubled by these discussions. Occam's razor has been applied to the critical postulatesbeloved by the ninteenth-century scholars. The modern scholar or critic concentrates in the first placeon making what he can of his text as it has come down to him.  There has been a strong reactionagainst the study of even extant and known sources, much more againt thediscussion of hypothetical ones.

Even in the case of a work generally recognized to be ofmultiple authorship, the Indian epic Mahabharata, division into component documents in uncertain. Charles Drekmeier (in Kinshipand Community in Early India, 1962) says:

Hopkins many years ago concluded thatthe original narrative core of the epic is impossible to isolate from the latermythical and moralistic accretions, and few present-day students of the Mahabharata would question his judgment.

In conclusion, it appears that many of the methods andassumptions of higher criticism have been discredited in generalliterature. Why has this not beenso in Biblical studies?

Written about 1970 as a chapter in a book that was neverpublished. For a detailed critiqueof the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis, also known as the JEDP theory, see Allan A.MacRae, JEDP: Lectures on the Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch (Hatfield, PA: Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute, 1994).