Twentieth-century biblical scholarship has sought the Jesus of history by the modern critical method. This approach is now challenged by a number of contemporary scholars. The joint editor of The Oxford Bible Commentary describes the competing approaches.

THERE was a time when serious study of the Bible was for Protestants, and there were hardly any Catholic Scripture scholars. That time is long past. Permitted to engage in critical Bible study by Pope Pius XII?s encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu of 1943, and massively encouraged by the Second Vatican Council, Catholics are now involved in what has become a fully ecumenical and international field. My colleague John Muddiman and I (both Anglicans) have just completed the editing of a new single-volume commentary on the whole Bible, The Oxford Bible Commentary, and it was obvious to us that to represent the best in modern international biblical study we must recruit commentators from across the Catholic?Protestant divide.

It was equally obvious that we must include Jewish scholars. Jews and Christians engage in dialogue about the Bible as equal partners nowadays and do not line up behind prearranged confessional standpoints. Nor would it be right to perpetuate the Protestant exclusion of the deuterocanonical books such as Sirach, Maccabees and Tobit. Indeed, we have gone further and included some entirely non-canonical works: excerpts from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and early Christian texts such as the Gospel of Thomas. These texts are not part of anyone?s Scriptures, but they are vital to the task of understanding the world of the Bible.

Critical study of Scripture is under question today. Essentially it is a style of reading the Bible that tries to understand these texts within their own original cultural and religious context, and avoids asking anachronistic questions about them (for this reason, it is sometimes called historical criticism or even the historical-critical method). Biblical critics want to know what the text actually says and means, not simply what tradition ? Jewish or Christian ? has taken it to mean.

Historical criticism has been dominant in academic study of the Bible for more than a century, and provides a common ground on which scholars can meet, irrespective of their religious affiliations. It requires expertise in biblical languages, in the history and archaeology of the ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean worlds, and in the analysis of complex texts; and above all, the ability to think oneself back into cultures that are in many ways alien to the modern Western mind.

There have been many challenges to this established approach in recent years. Opposition to biblical criticism used to come mainly from fundamentalists (within Protestantism) and from conservative believers (among Catholics and Jews). But in the past few years biblical scholars themselves have begun to ask whether they should not be more interested in traditional pre-critical readings of Scripture ? for example, those of the Fathers or the Reformers or the rabbis.

A movement has grown up, especially in the United States, known as the canonical approach, which asks whether critical scholars have not begun to lose the plot by fastidiously looking away from questions about the abiding religious claims of the canonical texts. Along with this attitude goes a sense that biblical critics have been too interested in the origins of the Bible, sometimes in the process dividing the material up into supposedly original source-documents, and not concerned enough with their final form as the Church?s Scriptures. The canonical approach comes from American Presbyterian circles and is associated with the Yale scholar Brevard Childs, but it might well strike a chord with Catholics.

At the same time, there has been much new input from those working in the social sciences. Social anthropology has long been of interest to biblical scholars, but newer social-scientific models have raised fresh questions about the social setting of, for example, St Paul?s letters. These texts can yield a surprising amount of information about the social, religious, and liturgical life of the early Churches. Students of the gospels take an interest in what can be known of the communities in which those who handed on the stories of Jesus lived and worked. They try to reconstruct the Christian communities that first received, but also partly shaped, the traditions about Jesus.

To know something of the way in which these traditions, including Jesus? teaching, were transmitted may help in a traditional critical task: discovering the historical truth about what he did and said. It has been realised since ancient times that the four gospels present a partly inconsistent picture, since each has its own slant on the historical facts. Much early gospel criticism in the nineteenth century was driven by the desire to get back to the real Jesus. Despite powerful voices insisting that it is the Jesus of the Church?s proclamation that is authoritative for Christians, rather than a scholarly reconstruction of the historical Jesus, New Testament scholars continue to be fascinated by this quest.

The American Jesus Seminar has become somewhat notorious for the fact that its members actually vote on whether this or that saying can truly be attributed to Jesus. But in a less crass way most New Testament critics continue to be concerned with the history underlying the text ? even if there are as many presentations of Jesus as there are scholars.

Traditional biblical criticism sets aside the question of the truth of the Bible while it gets on with the task of discerning its meaning, and justifies this procedure as sound historical practice. This does not mean that most biblical critics are non-believers. Modern biblical study has moved from theology departments into arts faculties in many universities, and this means that there is a growing body of biblical scholars without a personal religious commitment. But it is still very much a minority: most biblical study is undertaken by Christians and Jews committed to faith, as it always has been.

One of the new features of the current scene in biblical studies is a persistent challenge to any exclusion of personal commitment. This can be seen in what are often called advocacy readings of Scripture, most commonly by liberation or feminist theologians. Both groups characteristically argue that the neutrality claimed by historical critics was always a front for a deep unacknowledged commitment, usually to conservative religious and political positions. It would be better, they maintain, to be candid about one?s commitment, and best of all for it to be a commitment to the liberation of the oppressed: only those who understand God?s preferential option for the poor and commitment to human equality across the sexes will be able to read the Bible aright. What matters, they contend, is not scholarly expertise, but openness to God?s transforming power. For this task many poor people across the world are better equipped than most professors of theology.

Biblical studies are thus in a ferment. Old certainties have been lost, and biblical scholars face challenges that go to the roots of their enterprise. Many (and I am among them) remain committed to the task of biblical criticism as traditionally defined. But we are bound to be, as John Muddiman puts it in The Oxford Bible Commentary, chastened by new approaches. Biblical criticism has lost its naive confidence in its ability to conquer the text by detached scholarship, and has become aware that it must listen to voices, both inside and outside the Church, that insist on calling it to account. If biblical critics ever lived in an ivory tower, they can do so no longer.

John Barton is Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture in the University of Oxford.

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