Historical Criticism yet Again

I said in my last post I was going to discuss more on the historical critical method, and that's what I am going to do.

In recent years scholars have spent enormous amounts of energy trying to determine who wrote the Bible, but to what end? I have found a many different interpretations of authorship and even the number of people who wrote the books (the Torah, for example, has been ascribed to Moses, Moses and Joshua, JEDPR, and more, some claiming as many as thirty authors for those five books). It's rather clear that no one has any really good idea who wrote what, so why do they keep searching?

Part of the answer is that they are trying to discredit the Bible. This, however, is as much a faith based idea as believing what the Bible proclaims. The other side of the coin is that scholars can say very little about the Bible that has not already been said (I have over ten thousand pages of Biblical commentary on my bookshelves) so they look at seeing who said it. It often simply comes down to inventing new ideas in order to get a graduate degree (nothing wrong with that, it simply means that the means are less important then the end).

In other historical critical news, the system has flaws. Ronald Knox, one of the great early twentieth-century Catholic British authors (along with G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc) wrote "The Authorship of In Memoriam." The work, using the historical critical method, makes the claim that it was not in fact Alfred Lord Tennyson who wrote "In Memoriam" but Queen Victoria.

This claim is only absured to us because we are so close to that moment of history. Likewise, historical criticism of the Bible required a long stretch of history between the penning of the work and man's ability to deconstruct it and insert new authors into the work (there is little chance first and second century readers doubeted the authors of the Gospels). Overall, it seems the historical critical method is a means without a viable end.