Literary criticism endeavours to establish the literary genres (types or categories) of the various biblical documents and to reach conclusions about their structure, date, and authorship. These conclusions are based as far as possible on internal evidence, but external evidence is also very helpful, especially where date is concerned. If the document under consideration is unmistakably quoted in another composition, for example, that quotation forms a terminus ante quem (later limiting point in time) for dating purposes. If, on the other hand, the document is clearly dependent on another document that can be dated on independent grounds, the date of the earlier document provides a terminus post quem (earlier limiting point in time).

Proven dependence on such an earlier document may also throw light on the structure of the work being studied. But much of the evidence for the history of its structure is internal. The evaluation of such evidence is the province of what used to be called the higher criticism, a term first employed with a biblical reference by the German biblical scholar and orientalist Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827):

I have been obliged to bestow the greatest amount of labour on a hitherto entirely unworked field, the investigation of the inner constitution of the separate books of the Old Testament by the aid of the higher criticism (a new name to no humanist).

Eichhorn paid special attention to the Pentateuch; his work marks an important step forward in Pentateuchal criticism. The chronological arrangement of the successive law codes contained in the Pentateuch, or of the successive editions of one fundamental law code, has been related to the history of Israelite culture and religion recorded in the other Old Testament books—histories, prophecies, and psalms—with the mounting aid supplied by contemporary non-Israelite documents. The development of some Old Testament books is indicated expressly in their contents: one can note the composition of the first and second editions of the Book of Jeremiah in Jeremiah 36:4, 32; and scholars can reach some conclusions about later editions by a comparison of the longer edition in the Masoretic text with the shorter edition in the Septuagint (now also attested in a fragmentary Hebrew text from Qumrān). In the absence of such explicit evidence, conclusions about the structure of other prophetic books, such as Isaiah and Ezekiel, must be more tentative.

In the New Testament, literary criticism has centred principally on the Gospels. In the Synoptic Gospels (that is, those having a common source—i.e., Matthew, Mark, and Luke) indicators as to source and composition are provided by the presence of so much material common to two or to all three of them. The majority opinion since the mid-19th century has been that Mark served as a source for Matthew and Luke and that the two latter had a further common source, generally labelled Q (for Quelle, the German term for “source”), comprising mainly sayings of Jesus. Aspects of the Gospel problem that literary criticism leaves unsolved are more likely to be illuminated by other critical approaches. The Fourth Gospel (John), having much less in common with the Synoptic Gospels than the latter three have among themselves, presents an independent line of transmission, and a comparative study of those areas where the Johannine and Synoptic traditions touch each other yields valuable conclusions for the beginnings of the gospel story.

In the second half of the 20th century, some biblical scholars began applying the critical methods developed in secular literary criticism to the study of the Old and New Testaments. During the 1960s New Criticism, an approach that views literary texts as coherent units of meaning and focuses on technique and form, began to attract scholars who were interested in preserving a sense of the integrity of biblical texts in the face of archaeological research that raised questions of historical authorship. Other scholars, however, have insisted that New Criticism favours certain notions of what constitutes a scripture—e.g., that it is the finished and unified product of a divinely inspired author, prophet, scribe, or scribal community—and emphasizes texts to the neglect of historical context. Some detractors of New Criticism have adopted a contrasting approach, known as New Historicism, which treats texts as historical artifacts that emerge among particular social, intellectual, and economic circumstances. Since the late 20th century, similar perspectives have drawn upon postmodern theoretical movements—e.g., feminism, deconstruction, and postcolonial studies. What New Historicism and related movements have in common is a tendency to emphasize the “voices”—the perspectives and existential concerns—of people or groups who were marginalized or unrepresented within biblical narratives or discriminated against because of their gender, ethnicity, or social class. Some scholars within or influenced by these movements also have emphasized the widely discussed intertextuality of the Bible—the ways in which different biblical texts are related and even refer to each other—and explored the ways in which popular ostensibly secular authors and artists have drawn inspiration or source material from biblical texts—e.g., the English poet John Milton’s use of Genesis in Paradise Lost (1667) and the American novelist William Faulkner’s use of Psalms in The Wild Palms (1939).

Tradition criticism

Tradition criticism takes up where literary criticism leaves off; it goes behind the written sources to trace the development of oral tradition, where there is reason to believe that this preceded the earliest documentary stages, and attempts to trace the development of the tradition, phase by phase, from its primary life setting to its literary presentation. The development of the tradition might cover a lengthy period, as in the Old Testament narratives of the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and the judges, such as Deborah and Samuel, many of which were originally attached to particular sanctuaries. The recognition of the life setting of each successive phase is necessary to the interpretation of the material received and delivered by one generation after another.

In the New Testament too, special attention has been paid to the oral stage of the Gospel tradition, though here the preliterary period is measured in decades, not (as in the Old Testament) in generations and centuries. Not only the record of the ministry of Jesus but the development of Christian theology in the short preliterary stage has formed the subject matter of this study.

Form criticism

Form criticism has become one of the most valuable tools for the reconstruction of the preliterary tradition. This discipline classifies the literary material according to the principal “forms”—such as legal, poetic, and other forms—represented in its contents, and examines these in order to discover how they were handed down and what their successive life settings were until they assumed their present shape and position. In their various ways laws, narratives, psalms, and prophecies are amenable to this approach. By this means some scholars have undertaken to recover the ipsissima verba (“very own words”) of Jesus by removing the accretions attached to them in the course of transmission. The exegetical task assumes a threefold shape as scholars work back from (1) interpretation of the present Gospels through (2) interpretation of the tradition lying behind them to (3) reconstruction of the proclamation of Jesus.

Scholars are not left completely to speculation as they attempt to reconstruct the stages by which the Gospel tradition attained its final form: here and there in the New Testament letters, and in some of the speeches included in Acts (which convey the general sense of what was said and should not be regarded as the author’s free creations), there are fragments and outlines of the story of Jesus and of his teaching. Sometimes the characteristic terminology of tradition (“I received…I delivered”) is used when such fragments are introduced, a decade or so before the composition of the earliest Gospel (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:23; 15:3).