Historical criticism (also known as the historical-critical method (HCM) or higher criticism,[1] in contrast to lower criticism or textual criticism[2]) is a branch of criticism that investigates the origins of ancient texts to understand "the world behind the text"[3] and emphasizes a process that "delays any assessment of scripture's truth and relevance until after the act of interpretation has been carried out". While often discussed in terms of ancient Jewish, Christian, and increasingly Islamic writings, historical criticism has also been applied to other religious and secular writings from various parts of the world and periods of history.[4]
The historian applying historical criticism has several goals in mind. One is to understand what the text itself is saying in the context of its own time and place, and as it would have been intended to and received by its original audience (sometimes called the sensus literalis sive historicus, i.e. the "historical sense" or the "intended sense" of the meaning of the text). The historian also seeks to understand the credibility and reliability of the sources in question, understanding sources as akin to witnesses to the past as opposed to straightforward narrations of it. In this process, it is important to understand the intentions, motivations, biases, prejudices, internal consistency, and even the truthfulness of the sources being studied. Involuntary witnesses that did not intend to transmit a piece of information or present it to an external audience, but end up doing so nonetheless, are considered greatly valuable. All possible explanations must be considered by the historian, and data and argumentation must be used in order to rule out various options. In the context of biblical studies, an appeal to canonical texts is insufficient to settle what actually happened in biblical history. A critical inspection of the canon, as well as extra-biblical literature, archaeology, and all other available sources, is also needed. Likewise, a "hermeneutical autonomy" of the text must be respected, insofar as the meaning of the text should be found within it as opposed to being imported into it, whether that is from one's conclusions, presuppositions, or something else.
The beginnings of historical criticism are often associated with the Age of Enlightenment, but it is more appropriately related to the Renaissance. Historical criticism began in the 17th century and gained popular recognition in the 19th and 20th centuries. The perspective of the early historical critic was influenced by the rejection of traditional interpretations that came about with the Protestant Reformation. With each passing century, historical criticism became refined into various methodologies used today: philology, textual criticism, literary criticism, source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, tradition criticism, canonical criticism, and related methodologies.
Historical-critical methods are the specific procedures[3] used to examine the text's historical origins, such as the time and place in which the text was written, its sources, and the events, dates, persons, places, things, and customs that are mentioned or implied in the text.[5] Investigations using the historical-critical method are open to being challenged and re-examined by other scholars, and so some conclusions may be probable or more likely than others, but not certain. This, nevertheless, enables a field to be self-correcting, as mistakes in earlier work can be corrected in subsequent work, and some have argued that this clarifies the level of confidence that someone today is capable of attaining when it comes to what happened in the past.
The sense of the historical-critical method involves an application of both a critical and a historical reading of a text. To read a text critically
means to suspend inherited presuppositions about its origin, transmission, and meaning, and to assess their adequacy in the light of a close reading of that text itself as well as other relevant sources ... This is not to say that scripture should conversely be assumed to be false and mortal, but it does open up the very real possibility that an interpreter may find scripture to contain statements that are, by his own standards, false, inconsistent, or trivial. Hence, a fully critical approach to the Bible, or to the Qur’an for that matter, is equivalent to the demand, frequently reiterated by Biblical scholars from the eighteenth century onwards, that the Bible is to be interpreted in the same manner as any other text.
By contrast, to read a text historically would mean to
require the meanings ascribed to it to have been humanly 'thinkable' or 'sayable' within the text's original historical environment, as far as the latter can be retrospectively reconstructed. At least for the mainstream of historical-critical scholarship, the notion of possibility underlying the words 'thinkable' and 'sayable' is informed by the principle of historical analogy – the assumption that past periods of history were constrained by the same natural laws as the present age, that the moral and intellectual abilities of human agents in the past were not radically different from ours, and that the behaviour of past agents, like that of contemporary ones, is at least partly explicable by recourse to certain social and economic factors.
Historical phenomena are accepted to be interrelated in a cause-and-effect relationship, and therefore modifications in putative causes will correlate to modifications in putative effects. In this context, an approach called historicism may be applied, where the historical interpretation of cause-and-effect relationships takes place under the framework of methodological naturalism. Methodological naturalism is an approach taken from the natural sciences that excludes supernatural or transcendental hypotheses from consideration as hypotheses. Nevertheless, the historical-critical method can also be pursued independently of methodological naturalism. Approaches that do not methodologically exclude supernatural causes may still take issue with instances of their use as hypotheses, as such hypotheses can take on the form of a deus ex machina or simply involve special pleading in the favor of a religious position. Likewise, present experience suggests that known events are associated with natural causes, and this in turn increases the weight of natural explanations for phenomena in the past when they are competed with supernatural explanations. Therefore, without being excluded, natural explanations may still be favored due to their being more in line with the regular scientific and historical understanding of reality.