Source Criticism - Article Example

This research tells that the Documentary Hypothesis of Julius Wellhausen is one of the most critical documentary scholarships relevant to source criticism because this theory can reconstruct the historical course of religious development. The significance of source criticism is that by dating sources, scholars can place materials in specific settings. Source criticism, along with form criticism, had ruled the study of the Scriptures for generations and it’s branch, redaction criticism, has been in vogue these recent years.

Source criticism was developed as a solution to the “synoptic problem” and is applied using what is known as the four-source hypothesis. Here, the synoptic problem is the question of how to correlate the works of Mark, Matthew, and Luke because they treat many of the same things such as the ministry of Jesus, his healings as well as the accounts on Jesus journey and the events that ensued. Source criticism emerged in the eighteenth century but it was then called as literary criticism.

Well into the modern period, they are still used interchangeably but it has become common to draw a distinction between the two. While both focus on the literary features of a text, stylistic characteristics, vocabulary usage, repetitions, contradictions or inconsistencies, and other literary traits, their respective goals are different. Through the years the theory has been modified and it has evolved to its present form. However, whatever the changes, it remained axiomatic that the final editor was not free to edit his sources and that he could arrange the material as he saw fit, either placing his sources one after another or intertwining them but he could not remove inconsistencies or contradictions.

Thus, according to Berlin, the present text of the Scriptures as a work of a redactor can be considered as an anthology of prefabricated texts.