Journal of Religion & Society
Volume 9 (2007)
The Kripke Center
ISSN 1522-5658
What Ever Happened to Historical Criticism?1 Michael C. Legaspi, Creighton University
A Review Essay [1] The great cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt observed that historical sources are more revealing in what they conceal than in what they claim; their value lies more in what they unwittingly attest than in what they consciously aver. If their claims are instructive, then their lies are doubly so. [2] Recently, a leading biblical scholar, John J. Collins of Yale University, published an important book on the state of contemporary biblical criticism: The Bible after Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age. The author describes the book, which originated as a lecture series at the University of Edinburgh, as “an account of some of the main changes in the study of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament in the last third of the 20th century” (2005: vii). As the title indicates, it is concerned more specifically with the relation between what might be called conventional biblical scholarship, or “historical criticism,” and the “postmodern” situation in which we find ourselves. These published lectures provide a magisterial overview, not only of some perennial questions in biblical scholarship but also of discoveries, proposals, and methods that have had an impact on the discipline in recent years. [3] Interested readers will learn a good deal from John Collins’s impressive survey of postmodern interpretive frameworks. They will observe the skillful and erudite way in which Collins assesses the impact of specific feminist and postcolonial readings on “conventional” scholarly proposals. The clear and articulate way in which Collins argues his proposals and qualifies his judgments certainly provides important insights into current debates. To read The Bible after Babel is to hear the learned musings of a first-rate scholar on a host of
1 My thanks to R. R. Reno for incisive comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
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