Module 1: Lesson Three - Historical Criticism

Module 1: Lesson Three - Historical Criticism

• Objectives: Students should learn to distinguish historical criticism, critique historical text credibility and authenticity, and appreciate the value of checking credibility and authenticity.

Introduction

• This lesson builds on the previous module on historical sources.
• It discusses how to assess the credibility of historical sources.

Activity: Authenticity Check

• Abigail needs authentic products due to a lockdown.
• This is an exercise to learn how to critique information from the internet.
• Online shopping can have issues with fake products.
• It's important to check for authenticity.

Analysis

• Checking products or information from social media is important.
• Online information can be unreliable, and proper inspection is crucial.

Historical Criticism - Abstraction

• Historical criticism examines the genesis of early texts to understand context.
• Two primary goals of historical criticism: discover the initial meaning and reconstruct the historical context surrounding a text.
• Two parts of Historical Criticism:
  • Provenance/Source: Determining if a source is authentic.
  • Higher Criticism: Weighing the testimony of a source to know the truth.

Types of Historical Criticism

• External criticism:
  • Assesses source authenticity to find forgeries, fabrications or misrepresentations.
  • It evaluates through methods like
    • Paleography (deciphering and dating manuscripts)
    • Diplomatics (understanding how a document came to be)

Tests of Authenticity

• Determining Authenticity:
  • Dates/Time Periods, is a document's date believable in its context?
  • Author: Is the author credible? Are their statements consistent?
  • Style: Analyze language, writing style, etc. Are those characteristics consistent with the author/time period?
  • Anachronisms (things out of time): look for references to people, events, or objects that aren't possible at the date of the document.

Internal Criticism

• Determining credibility: Assess the credibility of factual claims and details within a document without checking its authenticity.
• Tests of Credibility:
  • Author Identification: Who is the author, and what is their reputation/background?
  • Date Determination: When was the document written?
  • Truthfulness: Is the document consistent with other reliable sources?

Historical Criticism Methodologies

• Five methods of historical criticism:
  • Source Criticism: Analyse the source material by historians
  • Form Criticism: identify an original form or historical context
  • Redaction Criticism: examine an author's editing of sources
  • Tradition Criticism: trace the development of traditions
  • Canonical Criticism: interpret the text through understanding the canon itself

Application

• Apply these methods to evaluate the authenticity and credibility of historical sources.
• Focus specifically on the first mass event.