Letters

January/February 2008 Historically Speaking 49 Letters To the Editors: Bruce Kuklick is reliably both entertaining and lucid, buthis interventionin the "Moral Progress" forumin the September/October 2007 Historically Speaking leaves me puzzled. He argues that academic "historians today" are "bearers" of what used to be called die Higher Criticism of the Bible. (The term fell out of use around 1900. Today scholars would call diis approach somethinglike "historical criticism.") Butmost of us, he says, "don't know its background and don't always flawlessly carry out its imperatives." The last charge nears truism: I, to take one historian, neverdo anything flawlessly. Butlet that be. Three things really baffle me in Kuklick's indictment. First,whydo historians bearthelegacyof Higher Criticism?Wouldn'titmake more sense to saythatwe inheritthe axioms and methods of the historiography that developed at roughly the same time as Higher Criticism? WhyJulius Wellhausen over Leopold von Ranke? Orif Kuklickprefers the soberrigorof philology to the cheerful sloppiness of history, why not the Altertumswissenschaft ("science of antiquity") of FA. Wolf, K.O. Müller, and Adolf Böckh rather than biblical philology? The problems and sources thatAltertumswissenschaft dealt with are more like those confronting historians than are those diat higher critics dealt with. To look at die question from another angle, if we historians are to model our work on biblical criticism, why this old variety? Twentieth-century mainstream biblical critics, while acceptingin a broad sense the fundamentalinsights of historical criticism, also judgedit as limitedinits grasp and movedin other directions. I can't say if they were right or wrong. But shouldn't historians today followmore recent biblical critics, if we are going to follow any? Second, Kuklick's account of Higher Criticism doesn't correspond to what I know of its history and impact. (True, I'm no expert) He dates Higher Criticism to roughly the middle of the 19th century and identifies it particularly with DF. Strauss's Das Leben Jesu (1835) and Julius Wellhausen's Geschichte Israels (1878)—better known to mostreaders inits 1 883 version , Prolegomena surGeschichteIsraels. Both chronology and protagonists seem odd.J.G. Eichhorn coined die term Higher Criticism in 1787; mosthistorians of the subject think that his introduction to the study of the OldTestament—Einleitungin dasAlte Testament(178083 )—clearly established die historical approach to the Bible as a fully self-conscious, mainstream (if controversial ) method. Wilhelm deWette alreadyin 1807 created the problem thatWellhausen was trying to solve seventy years later: de Wette's Beiträge surEinleitung in dasAlte Testamentdenied that the apparendyhistorical Old Testament books told of real events (therefore the history of ancient Hebrews had to be reconstructed in odier ways). But Eichhorn and de Wette were hardly the first to applyhistorical criticism to the Bible. One would have to go back at least to Thomas Hobbes, who proposed in Leviathan (1651) that Ezra the Scribe in the 5th century B.C.E. wrote the Pentateuch , the five books traditionallyattributed to Moses (see Leviathan, chapter 33; Ezra 7-10, Nehemiah 8-9). Leaving aside the accuracy of Kuklick's dating, I am mystified by his choice of exemplars. True, Strauss's LebenJesusas notorious, as Kuklick says. And some Victorian post-Christian theists and agnostics did find it liberating (for example, Theodore Parker and Mary Ann Evans—later a.k.a. George Eliot— who translated it in 1846). But relatively few scholars at the time thought it persuasive, and almost all today thinkitwacky. (Theyusuallychoose apoliterword.) If historians were to emulate Strauss's treatment of the New Testament, we would regard Charlemagne as a mythos: words and deeds attributed to "Charlemagne " express thebelief-system of earlydenizens of theHolyRomanEmpire, butwehave nowayoflearning if such an "emperor" really even existed. This is not my idea of how to investigate history (or Kuklick 's), norwasittheideaof mostHigher Critics. As to Wellhausen, Kuklick takes him out of the larger context of historical criticism and, as a result, misreads his impact. Wellhausen did indeed argue that the Pentateuchwas "patched together from other sources"; his formulation of the so-called "documentary hypothesis " is commonly regarded as the definitive one (not that every scholar accepted or accepts the hypothesis ); and it was controversial at the time. So far, so good. But Wellhausen only...