Introduction to Redaction Criticism

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Introduction to Redaction Criticism

• OT-Hermeneutics

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Introduction

• "Redaction criticism is the most confusing and
  contradictory of all the methodologies used in
  Old Testament studies today. Yet the studies that
  claim to employ this method are proliferating
  rapidly and their results are being hailed as a
  radical revision of literary criticism in
  biblical studies. . . . " John van Seters

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Definition

• "Redaction criticism is a method of biblical
  study which examines the intentions of the
  editors or redactors who compiled the biblical
  texts out of earlier source materials. It thus
  presupposes the results of source and form
  criticism, and builds upon them." John Barton

• N.B. van Seters argues that OT Redaction
  Criticism does not derive from either source nor
  form criticism. It is instead an inappropriate
  borrowing from New Testament Synoptic studies.

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What does it do?

• "Redaction criticism tries to deal with the
  authentic and the inauthentic together, without
  blurring uncritically the difference between
  them."Terence Collins
• "Redaction criticism seeks to establish the way
  in which a body of literary material has been
  arranged, adapted and shaped into a book. The
  shaping process is often referred to as redaction
  (editing), and the people responsible for it are
  called redactors (editors)." Terence Collins

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What does it do?

• "Redaction criticism looks not only at the
  process of selection of the material and its
  organization but also at the network of
  relationships that resulted. It observes the
  relationships that bind together into a new unity
  all the parts of the work. Consequently it
  includes both a historical and a literary aspect
  in its analysis, but it shifts the focus of the
  historical inquiry from the life and times of the
  prophets themselves to the life and time so the
  people who produced the books about the prophets
  . . . ." Terence Collins

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Elements of Redaction Criticism

• 1. "Strictly speaking, it makes sense to practice
  redaction criticism only when it is certain that
  a book is composite in character." Barton
• 2. The Siglum "R" is quite often used to
  designate the Redactors active.
• 3. Redactional additions can help "avoid an
  awkward breat in the text," or "can have a
  profound effect on the meaning of the passage in
  which they stand." Barton

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John van Seters's Criticism

• 1. "The invention of the redactor by 19th
  century biblical scholars as a way of explaining
  the literary form of the Pentateuch, particularly
  in the Documentary Hypothesis, must be viewed as
  an anachronism and a grave mistake. Recognition
  of this fact makes the Documentary Hypothesis of
  independent documents combined by editors quite
  untenable."
• 2. "This judgment also applies to the rise of
  redaction criticism in New Testament studies,
  which depends directly upon Wellhausens
  introduction of his style of literary criticism
  into his study of the Gospels, with the
  Evangelists viewed as redactors."

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John van Seters's Criticism

• 3. "The recent proliferation of redactors in
  literary criticism in which they are combined
  with, or replace, authors simply compounds the
  error of the 19th century to the point of
  absurdity."
• 4. Likewise, the recent tendency in text-critical
  study to view the process of text transmission as
  merely part of the whole redactional process
  from the creation of the final form of the text,
  the work of R, to the major recensions and then
  to the canonical version of the Masoretic Text
  is a mistake (contra Tov 1992155-197). It merely
  repeats Wolfs error of the text history of
  Homer.

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John van Seters's Criticism

• 5. "The method of inner-biblical exegesis
  advocated by Fishbane (1985) is also called into
  question. This is because he erroneously links
  the rabbinic exegetical tradition with the
  Masoretic scribal tradition and then reads both
  anachronistically back into the process of the
  composition of the biblical books in the form of
  learned scribal redactors."