07/01/2020 – Historical Critical Method in Religion

The historical-critical method? What the heck is that? Come check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. Today we’re going to talk about the historical-critical method in religion. Put simply, there is a difference between a faith perspective and a historical perspective about faith (what others believed in the past). For example, one can believe in one or more Hindu deities and those religious practices have certain effects on how to live one’s life. This is often referred to as a devotional perspective usually relating to what occurs in a place of worship such as a mosque, temple, church, or synagogue. One could also study the history of when and how belief in various Hindu deities arose in India without necessarily believing in them. One could study and trace the history of the figure of Moses and how he is understood in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But how is one to go about accomplishing tasks such as these? A common method used in the academic field of religion is called the Historical-Critical Method. We often impose our contemporary and modern views about reality onto the past without realizing it, and this is one way to try and get around that problem.

When people are confronted with the results of the historical-critical method for the first time, especially if they are committed to a particular faith tradition, they often have a range of reactions. This is normal as they are used to thinking, speaking, and engaging in a devotional way and not accustomed to someone talking about their faith from a historical and critical perspective. Critical does not mean criticizing in the negative sense, but thinking critically, asking questions which might not otherwise be asked in devotional settings, like places of worship.

But what is history? There is a difference between mythology, literature, and history. Some figures and events live in one, two, or all three of these realms. Zeus is mythology and literature but not history. Hamlet is literature but neither mythology nor history. Figures like Jesus and the prophet Muhammed in some ways exist in all three realms. So how does one parse this out? “History” is not the same as “the past.” The past is everything that has happened before; history, technically speaking, is what can be established as having happened before, using historical forms of evidence. Historical evidence is not, and frankly cannot, be based on religious and theological assumptions that some, but not all, people share. A brief discussion of the difference between the historical-critical method and science will help explain this.

The historical-critical method is both like science and not like science.

First, how is it not like science? Historians have no direct access to the past. There is no way to repeat a past event all over again. This makes historical evidence different from the kinds of evidence in the physical sciences like chemistry, medical research, physics, biology, geology and so forth. In these kinds of science one can repeat an experiment. In fact, one must repeat an experiment to determine if the hypothesis is true or not. If I wanted to find out which floats better in a bucket of water, an ice cube or a rock, all I need are 50 buckets of water, 50 ice cubes and 50 rocks. After 50 tries I will have 50 floating ice cubes and 50 sunken rocks. And if I do it again, I have the intuition that the future will be like the past.

History is not like science because history is working with a past that has already happened, not a future that will happen. The luxury of being able to repeat an event once it happens isn’t there, and so other kinds of evidence and methods are needed. That’s why history is not like science.

Second, how is it like science? The historical-critical method is like science in that it is based on probability, judging what is more or less probable. For example, miraculous events which defy known natural laws = less probable explanation and more likely a narrative creation or retelling in a way that made sense in that particular time and culture. The least likely result cannot be the most likely result. Historians cannot say that Moses parted the Red Sea or that the Buddha attaiEnlightenment. But the historian can do two things regarding these kinds of narrated events in written records.

• Which memories of a person or event are historically probable? History is a matter of greater or lesser probabilities.


• Consider & study the memories rooted in historical realities or invented by later storytellers.

Let’s reflect on the example of an actual 1992 plane crash in Amsterdam for a moment. A Boeing 747 cargo plane lost several of its engines and crashed into a 10-story apartment building at night. Being a cargo plane there were only a handful of people on the plane, but none survived. Ten months later, a research question on a survey of 193 people asked, “Did you see the television news film of the moment the plane hit the apartment building?” 107 said yes (55%). Sometime later the researchers gave a similar survey with the same question to 93 law school students. 62 (66%) said yes. There was just one problem. There was no film. There were only short news video clips and photographs of a partially demolished apartment building in the aftermath. Our brains want to imagine and fill in the gaps. This was from 1992. So, what are we to do with interpreting descriptions of religious events from hundreds or thousands of years ago?

A historian can look at the evidence and utilize methods to determine plausible conclusions. Historians have devised criteria which they implement to discern this. What are the different types of evidence the historical-critical method looks for?

• First, there is a real preference for hard, physical evidence, for example, photographs, or in the case of really recent events, videos.
• In addition to physical evidence, historians look for surviving products that can be traced with relative certainty back to the person such as construction, or literary remains.
• Finally, historians look to other kinds of evidence not from the person but about the person – that is, reference to, quotations of, or discussions about the person by others.
• Historians prefer to have lots of written sources, not just one or two.
• Historians also prefer to have sources that are relatively near the date of the person or event that they are describing.
• Historians also like these numerous and early sources to be extensive in scope, preferably from disinterested parties. If historians find stories that clearly do not serve the purposes of the persons telling the story, they have a good indicator that the stories are reasonably disinterested.

Take the example of one of the most well-known religious figures worldwide: Jesus. There is no hard, physical evidence. No photographs or archeological evidence of any kind. No writings. But none of this is expected as photography wasn’t invented yet and Jesus didn’t build or write anything. There is no Greek or Roman historian from the 1st century that mentions Jesus. Also, not expected. Even for Pilate, the Roman political official who crucified Jesus, there are only coins and one fragmentary inscription.

There are no eyewitness accounts of Jesus. The four biblical gospels are originally anonymous narratives. The titles on the documents were not added until around 100 years after they were originally written. These documents describe the disciples of Jesus in the third person. These disciples were largely lower-class, Aramaic-speaking peasants from rural Galilee, non-literate, especially in upper-class Greek. Also not expected. But even the same thing could also be said of the Roman official, Pilate. Again, not even a single eyewitness account of Pilate. Not really a surprise.

Mass literacy only started to become widespread after the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800’s (made possible by Gutenburg’s printing press in Europe in the 1400’s). People had a whole lot of beliefs about reality that were handed down generation to generation which were not necessarily “text-based.” When literacy became widespread, the sacred nature of religious texts caused people to understand and interpret texts literally rather than use an interpretive method.

Just a quick sidebar on a whole other can of worms called textual criticism. This actually affects religious studies much more than many people realize. Textual criticism is a somewhat complicated field of study which focuses on the transmission of a text over time through one or more languages. The problem is, copies of many ancient texts only go back so far, and a lot of them are in fragments in varying states of deterioration.

The best historians can do is get back to an early stage in a text’s transmission and hope that it reasonably reflects the original content. Textual scholars do this based on the internal evidence of language, vocabulary and writing style and the external evidence of a text’s relationship with other copies and other quotations of that document by different writers in history. This includes identifying what motivations someone in history might have had to change a text.

Generally speaking, the earlier the source, the better, although there are exceptions. Once historians have the best available texts, they use various methods to analyze them.

There are a variety of ways historical-critical scholars analyze texts but there are three main criteria that scholars tend to use the most to analyze documents. These are contextual credibility, multiple attestation, and the criterion of dissimilarity.

First, contextual credibility – if a tradition does not fit into the context of the culture and time era, then it almost certainly can be discounted as a later legend. Imagine a thousand years from now someone is reading a story of President Reagan checking his online social media accounts. Social media as we know it today did not arise until the mid-2000’s, and since Reagan was president in the 1980’s such a story would obviously suffer from contextual credibility. In the academic field of religion modern Jewish scholars almost unanimously agree that the narrative in Genesis ranging from Abraham down to Jacob is an attempt by much later authors to explain the origin of a people because they project on the past experiences and perspectives of people living much later. If something doesn’t fit into the known historical or cultural context, then it is less likely to have occurred and so there must be another explanation sought for why the original author wrote that.

Second, multiple attestation – a tradition appearing in multiple, independent sources has a greater likelihood of being historically reliable than a tradition that appears in only one. Suppose someone hears a story from their mother that their great-grandfather used to like a certain Italian dish, but they initially don’t believe her. Some years later, they are doing ancestral research and discover two newspaper articles from a hundred years ago that he had a short stint as a restaurant owner and one of the key menus items was the same Italian dish. There are now multiple, independent sources confirming the information. It has a much higher probability of being an accurate portrayal.

Third, the criterion of dissimilarity – the biases of a source, and those of the source behind the source, need to be taken into account. When historians encounter stories that do not support specific religious agendas or that seem to run contrary to what that group of believers would have wanted to say, the story is more likely to be historically reliable since it is less likely to have been made up. Again, in the case of Jesus, no Jews would have expected a crucified messiah. That means there is a higher probability that Jesus was crucified by the Roman government. The criterion of dissimilarity is best used in a positive way to establish traditions that most probably can be accepted as reliable because it cuts against the grain, as writing that does not promote the views or perspectives of the community or the author.

Contextual credibility, multiple attestation, and criterion of dissimilarity.

Such judgments are not always so easy though as culture, society, and politics heavily influence religious history, and specifically religious texts. For instance, Islam goes beyond being a faith system: at its core it was, and in many areas still is, a social and political framework. In Christianity, Paul’s triumph is almost wholly a literary victory. All later writers in the tradition are shaped by his views one way or the other.

But what if the historical-critical method doesn’t work? What if one doesn’t want a disinterested, historical perspective?

What are the possible reasons for not wanting to use the historical-critical method?

One is that one might be interested in other aspects of the past, such as a theological, or faith perspective.

One might be interested in an insider perspective on a particular religious tradition or subgroup which would then not be publicly available. If only the “insiders” really know, then one must become an insider.

Or, if there’s not enough evidence to satisfy, and one is not content with the barebones conclusion, then one has to look elsewhere. Early Buddhism is largely legendary and as hard as one tries the historical-critical method will not result in a robust account regarding the historical Buddha figure in ancient India.

Finally, what are the obstacles in accepting the results of the historical-critical method?

This is largely a psychological question. The human brain wants what it perceives as reality to make sense. When one is confronted with something that seems to make sense but somehow does not fit into what one already believes as being true, one experiences cognitive dissonance. Something has to be either rejected or modified. It is often difficult to challenge the status quo in our brains as the desire to conform is strong – conforming to both the ideas of people whom we trust and the ideas of people whom we recognize as authorities.

Think about the story of Galileo for a minute. In the early 1500’s Copernicus combined physics, mathematics, and astronomy to produce his view of heliocentrism; basically, the sun with planets in fixed circle-shaped orbits. A hundred years later after the telescope was invented, Galileo determined that local motion fits a central sun, planets moving around the sun, and a rotating earth. He supported the Copernican system and his observations essentially proved Copernicus right. Roman Catholic leaders felt Copernicus (and those who came after him) only had theories based on math and did not have any physical proof. When Galileo provided that proof, he put himself into the hot seat.

Nonetheless, Galileo anticipated this being a problem with the Roman Catholic Church. He wrote a letter in 1615 and in “this letter he had argued that, of course, the Bible was an inspired text, yet two truths could not contradict one another. In cases where it was known that science had achieved a true result, the Bible ought to be interpreted in such a way that makes it compatible with this truth. The Bible, he argued, was an historical document written for common people at an historical time, and it had to be written in language that would make sense to them and lead them towards the true religion,” (source).

The issue, as we can look back at it today, ended up not being the text of the Bible itself, but the commonly accepted interpretation of the text by the Roman Catholic Church during that time frame. (I’m pretty sure the Roman Catholic Church accepts the heliocentric solar system today…I think?)

The goal is not absolute historical truth, but relative plausibility. Historians do not ask if it is plausible in an absolute sense, they simply ask it if is more plausible than the next best alternative. The historical-critical method’s goal is to interpret historical information into the most likely scenarios. Based on a variety of factors, combining historical evidence with reasoning to yield as plausible and probable a conclusion as possible. When new evidence emerges, the conclusions can be reevaluated and adjusted.

The more one understands and accepts the historical-critical method the more one realizes how human religion actually is. It is impossible for one to know the past without any inference from one’s own personal and social situation as knower. This does not necessarily lead to a loss of faith. One can have history without faith, but one cannot have faith without history. For many, this actually leads to a less prejudicial and more informed faith.

I hope this short introduction has helped you better understand this topic. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, please like this video and subscribe to the channel. This is TenOnReligion.