Literary approaches

Abstract

The literary turn in New Testament studies was indicative of a larger shift in the landscape of biblical scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s. For more than a century, historical criticism had been the dominant approach to interpreting biblical texts. Under its influence, the task of interpretation had to do with investigating the prehistory and formation of biblical texts through the use of source, form, and redaction criticisms. Some scholars, however, began to question whether a solely historical and positivistic approach could fully illuminate the nature of biblical texts, generating a movement to read the Bible as literature. This movement was anticipated by two seminal works, Hermann Gunkel’s The Legends of Genesis (1901), and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality on Western Literature (1946), both of which employed narratological methods for performing biblical interpretation. Subsequently, a pair of Society of Biblical Literature presidential addresses disputed the historical-critical hegemony in biblical studies by introducing a literary-rhetorical approach. First, Amos Wilder (1955) challenged biblical scholars to draw from literary, anthropological, and psychological resources to interpret the symbolic language of the New Testament, because he believed historical-critical tools to be ill-equipped to do so. A decade later, James Muilenberg (1968) introduced the phrase “rhetorical criticism” to describe a supplementary investigation to form criticism. He challenged biblical scholars to attend not only to forms but also to the literary devices that lay bare the progression of an author’s thought. In response to these challenges, biblical scholars sought and found theoretical allies among contemporary literary critics. The landscape of contemporary literary criticism had already shifted, since its practitioners had critiqued historical approaches to its canonical texts in the mid-twentieth century. Biblical scholars had first used literary criticism (Literarkritik) to refer to source criticism as part of the historical-critical toolbox. But with the appropriation of modern literary theory, scholars distinguished the “new literary criticism” to refer to the variety of approaches to the biblical text that followed developments in modern literary studies. I divide the following discussion into two parts. First, I discuss narrative criticism and reader-response criticism, by which New Testament scholars tend to approach texts as formal structures. Second, I discuss poststructuralism, by which New Testament scholars tend to approach texts as cultural artefacts.