title: Biblical criticism

text: Communications scholar James A. Herrick (b. 1954) says that even though most scholars agree that biblical criticism evolved out of the German Enlightenment, there are some historians of biblical criticism that have found "strong direct links" with British deism. Herrick references the German theologian Henning Graf Reventlow (1929–2010) as linking deism with the humanist world view, which has been significant in biblical criticism. Matthew Tindal (1657–1733), as part of British deism, asserted that Jesus taught an undogmatic natural religion that the Church later changed into its own dogmatic form. Tindal's view of Christianity as a "mere confirmation of natural religion and his resolute denial of the supernatural" led him to conclude that "revealed religion is superfluous". British deism was also an influence on the philosopher and writer Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) in developing his criticism of revelation.


title: Biblical criticism

text: The biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791) advocated the use of other Semitic languages in addition to Hebrew to understand the Old Testament, and in 1750, wrote the first modern critical introduction to the New Testament. Instead of interpreting the Bible historically, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827), Johann Philipp Gabler (1753–1826), and Georg Lorenz Bauer (1755–1806) used the concept of myth as a tool for interpreting the Bible. Rudolf Bultmann later used this approach, and it became particularly influential in the early twentieth century.


title: Biblical criticism

text: George Ricker Berry says the term "higher criticism", which is sometimes used as an alternate name for historical criticism, was first used by Eichhorn in his three-volume work "Einleitung ins Alte Testament" (Introduction to the Old Testament) published between 1780 and 1783. The term was originally used to differentiate higher criticism, the term for historical criticism, from lower, which was the term commonly used for textual criticism at the time. The importance of textual criticism means that the term 'lower criticism' is no longer used much in twenty-first century studies.


title: Biblical criticism

text: A twenty–first century view of biblical criticism's origins, that traces it to the Reformation, is a minority position, but the Reformation is the source of biblical criticism's advocacy of freedom from external authority imposing its views on biblical interpretation. Long before Richard Simon, the historical context of the biblical texts was important to Joachim Camerarius (1500–1574) who wrote a philological study of figures of speech in the biblical texts using their context to understand them. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) paved the way for comparative religion studies by analyzing New Testament texts in the light of Classical, Jewish and early Christian writings.


title: Biblical criticism

text: The first quest for the historical Jesus is also sometimes referred to as the "Old Quest." It began with the publication of Hermann Samuel Reimarus's work after his death. G. E. Lessing (1729–1781) claimed to have discovered copies of Reimarus's writings in the library at Wolfenbüttel when he was the librarian there. Reimarus had left permission for his work to be published after his death, and Lessing did so between 1774 and 1778, publishing them as "Die Fragmente eines unbekannten Autors" ("The Fragments of an Unknown Author"). Over time, they came to be known as the "Wolfenbüttel Fragments." Reimarus distinguished between what Jesus taught and how he is portrayed in the New Testament. According to Reimarus, Jesus was a political Messiah who failed at creating political change and was executed by the Roman state as a dissident. His disciples then stole the body and invented the story of the resurrection for personal gain.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Albert Schweitzer in "The Quest of the Historical Jesus," acknowledges that Reimarus's work "is a polemic, not an objective historical study", while also referring to it as "a masterpiece of world literature." According to Schweitzer, Reimarus was wrong in his assumption that Jesus's end-of-world eschatology was "earthly and political in character" but was right in viewing Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher, as evidenced by his repeated warnings about the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of time. This eschatological approach to understanding Jesus has since become universal in modern biblical criticism. Schweitzer also comments that, since Reimarus was a historian and not a theologian or a biblical scholar, he "had not the slightest inkling" that source criticism would provide the solution to the problems of literary consistency that Reimarus had raised.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Reimarus's controversial work garnered a response from Semler in 1779: "Beantwortung der Fragmente eines Ungenannten" (Answering the Fragments of an Unknown). Schweitzer records that Semler "rose up and slew Reimarus in the name of scientific theology". Respect for Semler temporarily repressed the dissemination and study of Reimarus's work, but Semler's response had no long-term effect. Reimarus's writings, on the other hand, did have a long-term effect. They made a lasting change in the practice of biblical criticism by making it clear it could exist independently of theology and faith. His work also showed biblical criticism could serve its own ends, be governed solely by rational criteria, and reject deference to religious tradition. Reimarus's central question, "How political was Jesus?", continues to be debated by theologians and historians such as , Gerd Theissen and Craig S. Keener.


title: Biblical criticism

text: In addition to overseeing the publication of Reimarus's work, Lessing made contributions of his own, arguing that the proper study of biblical texts requires knowing the context in which they were written. This is now the accepted scholarly view.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Professors Richard Soulen and Kendall Soulen write that biblical criticism reached "full flower" in the nineteenth century, becoming the "major transforming fact of biblical studies in the modern period". The height of biblical criticism's influence is represented by the history of religions school a group of German Protestant theologians associated with the University of Göttingen. In the late nineteenth century, they sought to understand Judaism and Christianity within the overall history of religion. Other Bible scholars outside the Göttingen school, such as Heinrich Julius Holtzmann (1832–1910), also used biblical criticism. Holtzmann developed the first listing of the chronological order of the New Testament texts based on critical scholarship.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Many insights in understanding the Bible that began in the nineteenth century continue to be discussed in the twenty-first; in some areas of study, such as linguistic tools, scholars merely appropriate earlier work, while in others they "continue to suppose they can produce something new and better". For example, some modern histories of Israel include historical biblical research from the nineteenth century. In 1835, and again in 1845, theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur postulated the apostles Peter and Paul had an argument that led to a split between them thereby influencing the mode of Christianity that followed. This still occasions widespread debate within topics such as Pauline studies, New Testament Studies, early-church studies, Jewish Law, the theology of grace, and the doctrine of justification. Albrecht Ritschl's challenge to orthodox atonement theory continues to influence Christian thought.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Nineteenth-century biblical critics "thought of themselves as continuing the aims of the Protestant Reformation". According to Robert M. Grant and David Tracy, "One of the most striking features of the development of biblical interpretation during the nineteenth century was the way in which philosophical presuppositions implicitly guided it". Michael Joseph Brown points out that biblical criticism operated according to principles grounded in a distinctively European rationalism. By the end of the nineteenth century, these principles were recognized by Ernst Troeltsch in an essay, "Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology," where he described three principles of biblical criticism: methodological doubt (a way of searching for certainty by doubting everything); analogy (the idea that we understand the past by relating it to our present); and mutual inter-dependence (every event is related to events that proceeded it).


title: Biblical criticism

text: Biblical criticism's focus on pure reason produced a paradigm shift that profoundly changed Christian theology concerning the Jews. uses the legal meaning of emancipation, as in free to be an adult on their own recognizance, when he says the "process of the from the Bible ... runs parallel with the emancipation of Christianity from the Jews". In the previous century, Semler had been the first Enlightenment Protestant to call for the "de-Judaizing" of Christianity. While taking a stand against discrimination in society, Semler also wrote theology that was strongly negative toward the Jews and Judaism. He saw Christianity as something that 'superseded' all that came before it. This stark contrast between Judaism and Christianity produced increasingly antisemitic sentiments. Supersessionism, instead of the more traditional millennialism, became a common theme in Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (1780–1849), Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), David Strauss (1808–1874), Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889), the history of religions school of the 1890s, and on into the form critics of the twentieth century until World War II.


title: Biblical criticism

text: The late-nineteenth century saw a renewed interest in the quest for the historical Jesus which primarily involved writing versions of the life of Jesus. Important scholars of this quest included David Strauss (1808–1874), whose "Life of Jesus" used a mythical interpretation of the gospels to undermine their historicity. The book was culturally significant because it contributed to weakening church authority, and it was theologically significant because it challenged the divinity of Christ. In "The Essence of Christianity" (1900), Adolf Von Harnack (1851–1930) described Jesus as a reformer. William Wrede (1859–1906) rejected all the theological aspects of Jesus and asserted that the "messianic secret" of Jesus as Messiah emerged only in the early community and did not come from Jesus himself. Ernst Renan (1823–1892) promoted the critical method and was opposed to orthodoxy. Wilhelm Bousset (1865–1920) attained honors in the history of religions school by contrasting what he called the joyful teachings of Jesus's and what Bousset saw as the gloomy call to repentance made by John the Baptist. While at Göttingen, Johannes Weiss (1863–1914) wrote his most influential work on the apocalyptic proclamations of Jesus.


title: Biblical criticism

text: In 1896, Martin Kähler (1835–1912) wrote "The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ". It critiqued the quest's methodology, with a reminder of the limits of historical inquiry, saying it is impossible to separate the historical Jesus from the Jesus of faith, since Jesus is only known through documents about him as Christ the Messiah.


title: Biblical criticism

text: The Old Quest was not considered closed until Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) wrote "Von Reimarus zu Wrede" which was published in English as "The Quest of the Historical Jesus" in 1910. In it, Schweitzer scathingly critiqued the various books on the life of Jesus that had been written in the late-nineteenth century as reflecting more of the lives of the authors than Jesus. Schweitzer revolutionized New Testament scholarship at the turn of the century by proving to most of that scholarly world that the teachings and actions of Jesus were determined by his eschatological outlook; he thereby finished the quest's pursuit of the apocalyptic Jesus. Schweitzer concluded that any future research on the historical Jesus was pointless.


title: Biblical criticism

text: In the early twentieth century, biblical criticism was shaped by two main factors and the clash between them. First, form criticism arose and turned the focus of biblical criticism from author to genre, and from individual to community. Next, a scholarly effort to reclaim the Bible's theological relevance began. Karl Barth (1886–1968), Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), and others moved away from concern over the historical Jesus and concentrated instead on the "kerygma": the message of the New Testament.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Most scholars agree that Bultmann is one of the "most influential theologians of the twentieth-century", but that he also had a "notorious reputation for his de-mythologizing" which was debated around the world. Demythologizing refers to the reinterpretation of the biblical myths (stories) in terms of the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Bultmann claimed myths are "true" anthropologically and existentially but not cosmologically. As a major proponent of form criticism, Bultmann "set the agenda for a subsequent generation of leading NT [New Testament] scholars".


title: Biblical criticism

text: Around the midcentury point the denominational composition of biblical critics began to change. This was due to a shift in perception of the critical effort as being possible on the basis of premises other than liberal Protestantism. Redaction criticism also began in the mid-twentieth century. While form criticism had divided the text into small units, redaction emphasized the literary integrity of the larger literary units instead.


title: Biblical criticism

text: The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran in 1948 renewed interest in archaeology's potential contributions to biblical studies, but it also posed challenges to biblical criticism. For example, the majority of the Dead Sea texts are closely related to the Masoretic Text that the Christian Old Testament is based upon, while other texts bear a closer resemblance to the Septuagint (the ancient Greek version of the Hebrew texts) and still others are closer to the Samaritan Pentateuch. This has raised the question of whether or not there is such a thing as an "original text". If there is no original text, the entire purpose of textual criticism is called into question.


title: Biblical criticism

text: New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias (1900–1979) used linguistics, and Jesus's first-century Jewish environment, to interpret the New Testament. The biblical theology movement of the 1950s produced debate between Old Testament and New Testament scholars over the unity of the Bible. The rise of redaction criticism closed this debate by bringing about a greater emphasis on diversity. The "New" quest for the historical Jesus began in 1953 and was so-named in 1959 by James M. Robinson.


title: Biblical criticism

text: After 1970, biblical criticism began to change radically and pervasively. New criticism, which developed as an adjunct to literary criticism, was concerned with the particulars of style. New historicism, a literary theory that views history through literature, also developed. Biblical criticism began to apply new literary approaches such as structuralism and rhetorical criticism, which concentrated less on history and more on the texts themselves. In the 1970s, the New Testament scholar E. P. Sanders (b. 1937) advanced the New Perspective on Paul, which has greatly influenced scholarly views on the relationship between Pauline Christianity and Jewish Christianity in the Pauline epistles. Sanders also advanced study of the historical Jesus by putting Jesus's life in the context of first-century Second-Temple Judaism. In 1974, the theologian Hans Frei published "The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative", which became a landmark work leading to the development of post-critical interpretation. The third period of focused study on the historical Jesus began in 1988.


title: Biblical criticism

text: By 1990, biblical criticism as a primarily historical discipline changed into a group of disciplines with often conflicting interests. New perspectives from different ethnicities, feminist theology, Catholicism and Judaism offered insights previously overlooked by the majority of white male Protestants who had dominated biblical criticism from its beginnings. Globalization also brought different worldviews, while other academic fields such as Near Eastern studies, sociology, and anthropology became active in expanding biblical criticism as well. These new points of view created awareness that the Bible can be rationally interpreted from many different perspectives. In turn, this awareness changed biblical criticism's central concept from the criteria of neutral judgment to that of beginning from a recognition of the various biases the reader brings to the study of the texts.


title: Biblical criticism

text: There is no general agreement among scholars on how to periodize the various quests for the historical Jesus. Most scholars agree the first quest began with Reimarus and ended with Schweitzer, that there was a "no-quest" period in the first half of the twentieth century, and that there was a second quest, known as the "New" quest that began in 1953 and lasted until 1988 when a third began. However, Stanley E. Porter (b. 1956) calls this periodization "untenable and belied by all of the pertinent facts", arguing that people were searching for the historical Jesus before Reimarus, and that there never has been a period when scholars weren't doing so.


title: Biblical criticism

text: In 1953, Ernst Käsemann (1906–1998), gave a famous lecture before the "Old Marburgers," his former colleagues at the University of Marburg, where he had studied under Bultmann. In this stronghold of support for Bultmann, Käsemann claimed "Bultmann's skepticism about what could be known about the historical Jesus had been too extreme". Bultmann had claimed that, since the gospel writers wrote theology, their writings could not be considered history, but Käsemann reasoned that one does not necessarily preclude the other. James M. Robinson named this the "New" quest in his 1959 essay "The New Quest for the Historical Jesus". This quest focused largely on the teachings of Jesus as interpreted by existentialist philosophy. Interest waned again by the 1970s.


title: Biblical criticism

text: N. T. Wright asserts that the third quest began with the Jesus Seminar in 1988. By then, it became necessary to acknowledge that "the upshot of the first two quests... was to reveal the frustrating limitations of the historical study of any ancient person". According to Ben Witherington, probability is all that is possible in this pursuit. Paul Montgomery in "The New York Times" writes that "Through the ages scholars and laymen have taken various positions on the life of Jesus, ranging from total acceptance of the Bible to assertions that Jesus of Nazareth is a creature of myth and never lived."


title: Biblical criticism

text: Sanders explains that, because of the desire to know everything about Jesus, including his thoughts and motivations, and because there are such varied conclusions about him, it seems to many scholars that it is impossible to be certain about anything. Yet according to Sanders, "we know quite a lot" about Jesus. While scholars rarely agree about what is known or unknown about the historical Jesus, according to Witherington, scholars do agree that "the historic questions should not be dodged".


title: Biblical criticism

text: Theologian David R. Law writes that biblical scholars usually employ textual, source, form, and redaction criticism together. The Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible), and the New Testament, as distinct bodies of literature, each raise their own problems of interpretation - the two are therefore generally studied separately. For purposes of discussion, these individual methods are separated here and the Bible is addressed as a whole, but this is an artificial approach that is used only for the purpose of description, and is not how biblical criticism is actually practiced.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Textual criticism involves examination of the text itself and all associated manuscripts with the aim of determining the original text. It is one of the largest areas of biblical criticism in terms of the sheer amount of information it addresses. The roughly 900 manuscripts found at Qumran include the oldest extant manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. They represent every book except Esther, though most books appear only in fragmentary form. The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work, having over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian texts. The dates of these manuscripts are generally accepted to range from c.110–125 (the papyrus) to the introduction of printing in Germany in the fifteenth century. There are also approximately a million direct New Testament quotations in the collected writings of the Church Fathers of the first four centuries. (As a comparison, the next best-sourced ancient text is the "Iliad", presumably written by the ancient Greek Homer in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, which survives in more than 1,900 manuscripts, though many are of a fragmentary nature.)


title: Biblical criticism

text: These texts were all written by hand, by copying from another handwritten text, so they are not alike in the manner of printed works. The differences between them are called variants. A variant is simply any variation between two texts. Many variants are simple misspellings or mis-copying. For example, a scribe might drop one or more letters, skip a word or line, write one letter for another, transpose letters, and so on. Some variants represent a scribal attempt to simplify or harmonize, by changing a word or a phrase.


title: Biblical criticism

text: The exact number of variants is disputed, but the more texts survive, the more likely there will be variants of some kind. Variants are not evenly distributed throughout any set of texts. Charting the variants in the New Testament shows it is 62.9 percent variant-free. The impact of variants on the reliability of a single text is usually tested by comparing it to a manuscript whose reliability has been long established. Though many new early manuscripts have been discovered since 1881, there are critical editions of the Greek New Testament, such as NA28 and UBS5, that "have gone virtually unchanged" from these discoveries. "It also means that the fourth century 'best texts', the 'Alexandrian' codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, have roots extending throughout the entire third century and even into the second".


title: Biblical criticism

text: Variants are classified into . Say scribe "<nowiki>'</nowiki>A<nowiki>'</nowiki>" makes a mistake and scribe "<nowiki>'</nowiki>B<nowiki>'</nowiki>" does not. Copies of scribe "<nowiki>'</nowiki>A<nowiki>'</nowiki>s" text with the mistake will thereafter contain that same mistake. Over time the texts descended from "<nowiki>'</nowiki>A<nowiki>'</nowiki>" that share the error, and those from "<nowiki>'</nowiki>B<nowiki>'</nowiki>" that do not share it, will diverge further, but later texts will still be identifiable as descended from one or the other because of the presence or absence of that original mistake. The multiple generations of texts that follow, containing the error, are referred to as a "family" of texts. Textual critics study the differences between these families to piece together what the original looked like. Sorting out the wealth of source material is complex, so textual families were sorted into categories tied to geographical areas. The divisions of the New Testament textual families were "Alexandrian" (also called the "Neutral text"), "Western" (Latin translations), and "Eastern" (used by churches centred on Antioch and Constantinople).


title: Biblical criticism

text: Forerunners of modern textual criticism can be found in both early Rabbinic Judaism and in the early church. Rabbis addressed variants in the Hebrew texts as early as 100CE. Tradition played a central role in their task of producing a standard version of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew text they produced stabilized by the end of the second century, and has come to be known as the Masoretic text, the source of the Christian Old Testament.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Jerome McGann says these methods innately introduce a subjective factor into textual criticism despite its attempt at objective rules. Alan Cooper discusses this difficulty using the example of Amos 6.12 which reads: "Does one plough with oxen?" The obvious answer is "yes", but the context of the passage seems to demand a "no". Cooper explains that a recombination of the consonants allows it to be read "Does one plough "the sea" with oxen?" The amendment has a basis in the text, which is believed to be corrupted, but is nevertheless a matter of personal judgment.


title: Biblical criticism

text: This contributes to textual criticism being one of the most contentious areas of biblical criticism, as well as the largest, with scholars such as Arthur Verrall referring to it as the "fine and contentious art". It uses specialized methodologies, enough specialized terms to create its own lexicon, and is guided by a number of principles. Yet any of these principles—and their conclusions—can be contested. For example, in the late 1700s, textual critic Johann Jacob Griesbach (1745 – 1812) developed fifteen critical principles for determining which texts are likely the oldest and closest to the original. One of Griesbach's rules is "lectio brevior praeferenda": "the shorter reading is to be preferred". This was based on the assumption that scribes were more likely to add to a text than omit from it, making shorter texts more likely to be older.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Latin scholar Albert C. Clark challenged Griesbach's view of shorter texts in 1914. Based on his study of Cicero, Clark argued omission was a more common scribal error than addition, saying "A text is like a traveler who goes from one inn to another losing an article of luggage at each halt". Clark's claims were criticized by those who supported Griesbach's principles. Clark responded, but disagreement continued. Nearly eighty years later, the theologian and priest James Royse took up the case. After close study of multiple New Testament papyri, he concluded Clark was right, and Griesbach's rule of measure was wrong. Some twenty-first century scholars have advocated abandoning these older approaches to textual criticism in favor of new computer-assisted methods for determining manuscript relationships in a more reliable way.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Source criticism is the search for the original sources that form the basis of biblical texts. In Old Testament studies, source criticism is generally focused on identifying sources of a single text. For example, the seventeenth-century French priest Richard Simon (1638–1712) was an early proponent of the theory that Moses could not have been the single source of the entire Pentateuch. According to Simon, parts of the Old Testament were not written by individuals at all, but by scribes recording the community's oral tradition. The French physician Jean Astruc presumed in 1753 that Moses had written the book of Genesis (the first book of the Pentateuch) using ancient documents; he attempted to identify these original sources and to separate them again. He did this by identifying repetitions of certain events, such as parts of the flood story that are repeated three times, indicating the possibility of three sources. He discovered that the alternation of two different names for God occurs in Genesis and up to Exodus 3 but not in the rest of the Pentateuch, and he also found apparent anachronisms: statements seemingly from a later time than that in which Genesis was set. This and similar evidence led Astruc to hypothesize that the sources of Genesis were originally separate materials that were later fused into a single unit that became the book of Genesis.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Examples of source criticism include its two most influential and well-known theories, the first concerning the origins of the Pentateuch in the Old Testament (Wellhausen's hypothesis); and the second tracing the sources of the four gospels of the New Testament (two-source hypothesis).


title: Biblical criticism

text: Source criticism's most influential work is Julius Wellhausen's "Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels" ("Prologue to the History of Israel", 1878) which sought to establish the sources of the first five books of the Old Testament - collectively known as the Pentateuch. Wellhausen correlated the history and development of those five books with the development of the Jewish faith. The Wellhausen hypothesis (also known as the "JEDP" theory, or the Documentary hypothesis, or the Graf–Wellhausen hypothesis) proposes that the Pentateuch was combined out of four separate and coherent (unified single) sources (not fragments).


title: Biblical criticism

text: J stands for the Yahwist source, ("Jahwist" in German), and was considered to be the most primitive in style and therefore the oldest. E (for Elohist) was thought to be a product of the Northern Kingdom before BCE 721; D (for Deuteronomist) was said to be written shortly before it was found in BCE 621 by King Josiah of Judah (). Old Testament scholar Karl Graf (1815–1869) suggested an additional priestly source in 1866; by 1878, Wellhausen had incorporated this source, P, into his theory, which is thereafter sometimes referred to as the Graf–Wellhausen hypothesis. Wellhausen argued that P had been composed during the exile of the 6th century BCE, under the influence of Ezekiel. These sources are supposed to have been edited together by a late final Redactor (R) who is only imprecisely understood.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Later scholars added to and refined Wellhausen's theory. For example, the "Newer Documentary Thesis" inferred more sources, with increasing information about their extent and inter-relationship. The "fragmentary theory" was a later understanding of Wellhausen produced by form criticism. This theory argues that fragments of documents — rather than continuous, coherent documents — are the sources for the Pentateuch. Alexander Geddes and Johann Vater proposed that some of these fragments were quite ancient, perhaps from the time of Moses, and were brought together only at a later time. This accounts for diversity but not structural and chronological consistency.


title: Biblical criticism

text: One can see the Supplementary hypothesis as yet another evolution of Wellhausen's theory that solidified in the 1970s. Proponents of this view assert three sources for the Pentateuch: the Deuteronomist as the oldest source, the Elohist as the central core document, with a number of fragments or independent sources as the third. Deuteronomy is seen as a single coherent document with a uniformity of style and language in spite of also having different literary strata. This observation led to the idea there was such a thing as a "Deuteronomist school" that had originally edited and kept the document updated. This meant the supplementary model became the literary model most widely agreed upon for Deuteronomy, which then supports its application to the remainder of the Pentateuch as well.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Advocates of Wellhausen's hypothesis contend it accounts well for the differences and duplication found in the Pentateuchal books. Furthermore, they argue, it provides an explanation for the peculiar character of the material labeled P, which reflects the perspective and concerns of Israel's priests. Wellhausen's theory went virtually unchallenged until the 1970s, when it began to be heavily criticized. By the end of the 1970s and into the 1990s, "one major study after another, like a series of hammer blows, has rejected the main claims of the Documentary theory, and the criteria on the basis of which they were argued". It has been criticized for its dating of the sources, and for assuming that the original sources were coherent or complete documents. Studies of the literary structure of the Pentateuch have shown J and P used the same structure, and that motifs and themes cross the boundaries of the various sources, which undermines arguments for their separate origins.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Problems and criticisms of the Documentary hypothesis have been brought on by literary analysts who point out the error of judging ancient Eastern writings as if they were the products of western European Protestants; and by advances in anthropology that undermined Wellhausen's assumptions about how cultures develop; and also by various archaeological findings showing the cultural environment of the early Hebrews was more advanced than Wellhausen thought. As a result, few biblical scholars of the twenty-first century hold to Wellhausen's Documentary hypothesis in its classical form. As Nicholson says: "it is in sharp decline—some would say in a state of advanced "rigor mortis"—and new solutions are being argued and urged in its place". Yet no replacement has so far been agreed upon: "the work of Wellhausen, for all that it needs revision and development in detail, remains the securest basis for understanding the Pentateuch".


title: Biblical criticism

text: In New Testament studies, source criticism has taken a slightly different approach from Old Testament studies by focusing on identifying the common sources of multiple texts instead of looking for the multiple sources of a single set of texts. This has revealed that the Gospels are both products of sources and sources themselves. As sources, Matthew, Mark and Luke are partially dependent on each other and partially independent of each other. This is called the synoptic problem, and explaining it is the single greatest dilemma of New Testament source criticism. Any explanation offered must "account for (a) what is common to all the Gospels; (b) what is common to any two of them; (c) what is peculiar to each". Multiple theories exist to address the dilemma, with none universally agreed upon, but two theories have become predominant: the two-source hypothesis and the four-source hypothesis.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Mark is the shortest of the four gospels with only 661 verses, but 600 of those verses are in Matthew and 350 of them are in Luke. Some of these verses are verbatim. Most scholars agree that this indicates Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke. There is also some verbatim agreement between Matthew and Luke of verses not found in Mark. In 1838, the religious philosopher Christian Hermann Weisse developed a theory about this. He postulated a hypothetical collection of the sayings of Jesus from an additional source called Q, taken from "Quelle", which is German for "source".


title: Biblical criticism

text: If this document existed, it has now been lost, but some of its material can be deduced indirectly. There are five highly detailed arguments in favor of Q's existence: the verbal agreement of Mark and Luke, the order of the parables, the doublets, a discrepancy in the priorities of each gospel, and each one's internal coherence. Q allowed the two-source hypothesis to emerge as the best supported of the various synoptic solutions. There is also material unique to each gospel. This indicates additional separate sources for Matthew and for Luke. Biblical scholar B. H. Streeter used this insight to refine and expand the two-source theory into a four-source theory in 1925.


title: Biblical criticism

text: While most scholars agree that the two-source theory offers the best explanation for the Synoptic problem, and some say it has been solved, others say it is not solved satisfactorily. Donald Guthrie says no single theory offers a complete solution as there are complex and important difficulties that create challenges to every theory. One example is Basil Christopher Butler's challenge to the legitimacy of two-source theory, arguing it contains a "Lachmann fallacy" that says the two-source theory loses cohesion when it is acknowledged that no source can be established for Mark. F. C. Grant posits multiple sources for the Gospels.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Form criticism began in the early twentieth century when theologian Karl Ludwig Schmidt observed that Mark's Gospel is composed of short units. Schmidt asserted these small units were remnants and evidence of the oral tradition that preceded the writing of the gospels. Bible scholar Richard Bauckham says this "most significant insight," which established the foundation of form criticism, has never been refuted. Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932) and Martin Dibelius (1883–1947) built from this insight and pioneered form criticism. By the 1950s and 1960s, Rudolf Bultmann and form criticism were the "center of the theological conversation in both Europe and North America".


title: Biblical criticism

text: Form criticism breaks the Bible down into its short units, called "pericopes", which are then classified by genre: prose or verse, letters, laws, court archives, war hymns, poems of lament, and so on. Form criticism then theorizes concerning the individual pericope's "Sitz im Leben" ("setting in life" or "place in life"). Based on their understanding of folklore, form critics believed the early Christian communities formed the sayings and teachings of Jesus themselves, according to their needs (their "situation in life"), and that each form could be identified by the situation in which it had been created and vice versa.


title: Biblical criticism

text: In the early to mid twentieth century, form critics thought finding oral "laws of development" within the New Testament would prove the form critic's assertions that the texts had evolved within the early Christian communities according to "sitz im leben". Since Mark was believed to be the first gospel, the form critics looked for the addition of proper names for anonymous characters, indirect discourse being turned into direct quotation, and the elimination of Aramaic terms and forms, with details becoming more concrete in Matthew, and then more so in Luke. Instead, in the 1970s, New Testament scholar E. P. Sanders wrote that: "There are no hard and fast laws of the development of the Synoptic tradition... On all counts the tradition developed in opposite directions. It became both longer and shorter, both more and less detailed, and both more and less Semitic".


title: Biblical criticism

text: Scholars from the 1970s and into the 1990s, produced an "explosion of studies" on structure, genre, text-type, setting and language that challenged several of form criticism's aspects and assumptions. For example, the period of the twentieth century dominated by form criticism is marked by Bultmann's extreme skepticism concerning what can be known about the historical Jesus and his sayings. Some form critics assumed these same skeptical presuppositions based largely on their understanding of oral transmission and folklore. During the latter half of the twentieth century, field studies of cultures with existing oral traditions directly impacted many of these presuppositions. In 1978, research by linguists Milman Parry and Albert Bates Lord was used to undermine Gunkel's belief that "short narratives evolved into longer cycles". Within these oral cultures, literacy did not replace memory in a natural evolution. Instead, writing was used to enhance memory in an overlap of written and oral tradition. Susan Niditch concluded from her orality studies that: "no longer are many scholars convinced ... that the most seemingly oral-traditional or formulaic pieces are earliest in date". In this manner, compelling evidence developed against the form critical belief that Jesus's sayings were formed by Christian communities. As John Niles indicates, the "older idea of 'an ideal folk community—an undifferentiated company of rustics, each of whom contributes equally to the process of oral tradition,' is no longer tenable". According to Eddy and Boyd, these various conclusions directly undermine assumptions about "Sitz im leben:" "In light of what we now know of oral traditions, no necessary correlation between [the literary] forms and "life situations" [sitz im leben] can be confidently drawn".


title: Biblical criticism

text: Form critics assumed the early Church was heavily influenced by the Hellenistic culture that surrounded first-century Palestine, but in the 1970s, Sanders, as well as Gerd Theissen, sparked new rounds of studies that included anthropological and sociological perspectives, reestablishing Judaism as the predominant influence on Jesus, Paul, and the New Testament. New Testament scholar N. T. Wright says, "The earliest traditions of Jesus reflected in the Gospels are written from the perspective of Second Temple Judaism [and] must be interpreted from the standpoint of Jewish eschatology and apocalypticism".


title: Biblical criticism

text: According to religion scholar Werner H. Kelber, form critics throughout the mid-twentieth century were so focused on finding each pericope's original form, that they were distracted from any serious consideration of memory as a dynamic force in the construction of the gospels or the early church community tradition. What Kelber refers to as the "astounding myopia" of the form critics has revived interest in memory as an analytical category within biblical criticism.


title: Biblical criticism

text: For some, the many challenges to form criticism mean its future is in doubt. Bible scholar Tony Campbell says:


title: Biblical criticism

text: Form criticism had a meteoric rise in the early part of the twentieth century and fell from favor toward its end. For some, the future of form criticism is not an issue: it has none. But if form criticism embodies an essential insight, it will continue. ... Two concerns ... give it its value: concern for the nature of the text and for its shape and structure. ... If the encrustations can be scraped away, the good stuff may still be there.


title: Biblical criticism

text: "Redaction" is the process of editing multiple sources, often with a similar theme, into a single document. It was derived from a combination of both source and form criticism. As in source criticism, it is necessary to identify the traditions before determining how the redactor used them. Form critics saw the synoptic writers as mere collectors and focused on the "Sitz im Leben" as the creator of the texts, whereas redaction critics have dealt more positively with the Gospel writers, asserting an understanding of them as theologians of the early church. Redaction critics reject source and form criticism's description of the Bible texts as mere collections of fragments. Where form critics fracture the biblical elements into smaller and smaller individual pieces, redaction critics attempt to interpret the whole literary unit.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Norman Perrin defines redaction criticism as "the study of the theological motivation of an author as it is revealed in the collection, arrangement, editing, and modification of traditional material, and in the composition of new material ... redaction criticism directs us to the author as editor." Redaction criticism developed after World War II in Germany and arrived in England and North America by the 1950s. It focuses on discovering how and why the literary units were originally edited—"redacted"—into their final forms.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Redaction critics assume an extreme skepticism toward the historicity of Jesus and the gospels, just as form critics do, which has been seen by some scholars as a bias. The process of redaction seeks the historical community of the final redactors of the gospels, though there are often no textual clues. Porter and Adams say the redactive method of finding the final editor's theology is flawed. In the New Testament, redaction critics attempt to discern the original author/evangelist's theology by focusing and relying upon the differences between the gospels, yet it is unclear whether every difference has theological meaning, how much meaning, or whether any given difference is a stylistic or even an accidental change. Further, it is not at all clear whether the difference was made by the evangelist, who could have used the already changed story when writing a gospel. The evangelist's theology more likely depends on what the gospels have in common as well as their differences. Harrington says, "over-theologizing, allegorizing, and psychologizing are the major pitfalls encountered" in redaction criticism.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Followers of other theories concerning the Synoptic problem, such as those who support the Greisbach hypothesis which says Matthew was written first, Luke second, and Mark third, have pointed to weaknesses in the redaction-based arguments for the existence of Q and Markan priority. Mark Goodacre says "Some scholars have used the success of redaction criticism as a means of supporting the existence of Q, but this will always tend toward circularity, particularly given the hypothetical nature of Q which itself is reconstructed by means of redaction criticism".


title: Biblical criticism

text: In the mid-twentieth century, literary criticism began to develop, shifting scholarly attention from historical and pre-compositional matters to the text itself, thereafter becoming the dominant form of biblical criticism in a relatively short period of about thirty years. It can be said to have begun in 1957 when literary critic Northrop Frye wrote an analysis of the Bible from the perspective of his literary background by using literary criticism to understand the Bible forms. Hans Frei proposed that "biblical narratives should be evaluated on their own terms" rather than by taking them apart in the manner we evaluate philosophy or historicity. Frei was one of several external influences that moved biblical criticism from a historical to a literary focus. New Testament scholar Paul R. House says the discipline of linguistics, new views of historiography, and the decline of older methods of criticism were also influential in that process.


title: Biblical criticism

text: By 1974, the two methodologies being used in literary criticism were rhetorical analysis and structuralism. Rhetorical analysis divides a passage into units, observes how a single unit shifts or breaks, taking special note of poetic devices, meter, parallelism, word play and so on. It then charts the writer's thought progression from one unit to the next, and finally, assembles the data in an attempt to explain the author's intentions behind the piece. Critics of rhetorical analysis say there is a "lack of a well-developed methodology" and that it has a "tendency to be nothing more than an exercise in stylistics".


title: Biblical criticism

text: Structuralism looks at the language to discern "layers of meaning" with the goal of uncovering a work's "deep structures" – the premises as well as the purposes of the author. In 1981 literature scholar Robert Alter also contributed to the development of biblical literary criticism by publishing an influential analysis of biblical themes from a literary perspective. The 1980s saw the rise of formalism, which focuses on plot, structure, character and themes and the development of reader-response criticism which focuses on the reader rather than the author.


title: Biblical criticism

text: New Testament scholar Donald Guthrie highlights a flaw in the literary critical approach to the Gospels: the genre of the Gospels has not been fully determined. No conclusive evidence has yet been produced to settle the question of genre, and without genre, no adequate parallels can be found, and without parallels "it must be considered to what extent the principles of literary criticism are applicable". The validity of using the same critical methods for novels and for the Gospels, without the assurance the Gospels are actually novels, must be questioned.


title: Biblical criticism

text: As a type of literary criticism, canonical criticism has both theological and literary roots. Its origins are found in the Church's views of the biblical writings as sacred, and in the secular literary critics who began to influence biblical scholarship in the 1940s and 1950s. By the mid-twentieth century, the high level of departmentalization in biblical criticism, with its large volume of data and absence of applicable theology, had begun to produce a level of dissatisfaction among both scholars and faith communities. Brevard S. Childs (1923–2007) proposed an approach to bridge that gap that came to be called canonical criticism. Canonical criticism "signaled a major and enduring shift in biblical studies". Canonical criticism does not reject historical criticism, but it does reject its claim to "unique validity". John Barton says that canonical criticism does not simply ask what the text might have originally meant, it asks what it means to the current believing community, and it does so in a manner different from any type of historical criticism.


title: Biblical criticism

text: John H. Hayes and Carl Holladay say "canonical criticism has several distinguishing features": (1) Canonical criticism is synchronic; it sees all biblical writings as standing together in time instead of focusing on the diachronic questions of the historical approach. (2) Canonical critics approach the books as whole units instead of focusing on pieces. They accept that many texts have been composed over long periods of time, but the canonical critic wishes "to interpret the "last edition" of a biblical book" and then relate books to each other. (3) Canonical criticism opposes form criticism's isolation of individual passages from their canonical setting. (4) Canonical criticism emphasizes the relationship between the text and its reader in an effort to reclaim the relationship between the texts and how they were used in the early believing communities. Canonical critics focus on reader interaction with the biblical writing. (5) "Canonical criticism is overtly theological in its approach". Critics are interested in what the text means for the community—"the community of faith whose predecessors produced the canon, that was called into existence by the canon, and seeks to live by the canon".


title: Biblical criticism

text: Rhetorical criticism is also a type of literary criticism. While James Muilenburg (1896–1974) is often referred to as "the prophet of rhetorical criticism", it is Herbert A. Wichelns who is credited with "creating the modern discipline of rhetorical criticism" with his 1925 essay ""The Literary Criticism of Oratory"." In that essay, Wichelns says that rhetorical criticism and other types of literary criticism differ from each other because rhetorical criticism is only concerned with "effect. It regards a speech as a communication to a specific audience, and holds its business to be the analysis and appreciation of the orator's method of imparting his ideas to his hearers". Rhetorical criticism is a qualitative analysis. This qualitative analysis involves three primary dimensions: (1) analyzing the act of criticism and what it does; (2) analyzing what goes on within the rhetoric being analyzed and what is created by that rhetoric; and (3) understanding the processes involved in all of it. Sonja K. Foss discusses ten different methods of rhetorical criticism in her book "Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice" saying that each method will produce different insights.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Biblical rhetorical criticism makes use of understanding the "forms, genres, structures, stylistic devices and rhetorical techniques" common to the Near Eastern literature of the different ages when the separate books of biblical literature were written. It attempts to discover and evaluate the rhetorical devices, language, and methods of communication used within the texts by focusing on the use of "repetition, parallelism, strophic structure, motifs, climax, chiasm and numerous other literary devices". Phyllis Trible, a student of Muilenburg, has become one of the leaders of rhetorical criticism and is known for her detailed literary analysis and her feminist critique of biblical interpretation.


title: Biblical criticism

text: In the last half of the twentieth century, historical critics began to recognize that being limited to the historical meant the Bible was not being studied in the manner of other ancient writings. In 1974, Hans Frei pointed out that a historical focus neglects the "narrative character" of the gospels. Critics began asking if these texts should be understood on their own terms before being used as evidence of something else. According to Mark Allen Powell the difficulty in understanding the gospels on their own terms is determining what those terms are: "The problem with treating the gospels 'just like any other book' is that the gospels are not like any other book". The New Critics, (whose views were absorbed by narrative criticism), rejected the idea that background information holds the key to the meaning of the text, and asserted that meaning and value reside within the text itself. It is now accepted as "axiomatic in literary circles that the meaning of literature transcends the historical intentions of the author".


title: Biblical criticism

text: As a form of literary criticism, narrative criticism approaches scripture as story. Christopher T. Paris says that, "narrative criticism admits the existence of sources and redactions but chooses to focus on the artistic weaving of these materials into a sustained narrative picture".


title: Biblical criticism

text: Narrative criticism was first used to study the New Testament in the 1970s, with the works of David Rhoads, Jack D. Kingsbury, R. Alan Culpepper, and Robert C. Tannehill. A decade later, this new approach in biblical criticism included the Old Testament as well. The first article labeled "narrative criticism" was "Narrative Criticism and the Gospel of Mark," published in 1982 by Bible scholar David Rhoads. Stephen D. Moore has written that "as a term, narrative criticism originated within biblical studies", but its method was borrowed from narratology. It was also influenced by New Criticism which saw each literary work as a freestanding whole with intrinsic meaning. Sharon Betsworth says Robert Alter's work is what adapted New Criticism to the Bible. Scholars such as Robert Alter and Frank Kermode sought to teach readers to "appreciate the Bible itself by training attention on its artfulness—how [the text] orchestrates sound, repetition, dialogue, allusion, and ambiguity to generate meaning and effect".


title: Biblical criticism

text: Ken and Richard Soulen say that "biblical criticism has permanently altered the way people understand the Bible". One way of understanding this change is to see it as a cultural enterprise. Jonathan Sheehan has argued that critical study meant the Bible had to become a primarily cultural instrument. It could no longer be a Catholic Bible or a Lutheran Bible but had to be divested of its scriptural character within specific confessional hermeneutics. As a result, the Bible is no longer thought of solely as a religious artifact, and its interpretation is no longer restricted to the community of believers. The Bible's cultural impact is studied in multiple academic fields, producing not only the cultural Bible, but the modern academic Bible as well. Soulen adds that biblical criticism's "leading practitioners ... have set standards of industry, acumen, and insight that remain pace-setting today."


title: Biblical criticism

text: Biblical criticism not only made study of the Bible secularized and scholarly, it also went in the other direction and made it more democratic. It began to be recognized that: "Literature was written not just for the dons of Oxford and Cambridge, but also for common folk... Opposition to authority, especially ecclesiastical [church authority], was widespread, and religious tolerance was on the increase". Old orthodoxies were questioned and radical views tolerated. Scholars began writing in their common languages making their works available to a larger public.


title: Biblical criticism

text: In this way, biblical criticism also led to conflict. Many like Roy A. Harrisville believe biblical criticism was created by those hostile to the Bible. There are aspects of biblical criticism that have not only been hostile to the Bible, but also to the religions whose scripture it is, in both intent and effect. So biblical criticism became, in the perception of many, an assault on religion, especially Christianity, through the "autonomy of reason" which it espoused. Part of the legacy of biblical criticism is that, as it rose, it led to the decline of biblical authority. J. W. Rogerson summarizes: By 1800 historical criticism in Germany had reached the point where Genesis had been divided into two or more sources, the unity of authorship of Isaiah and Daniel had been disputed, the interdependence of the first three gospels had been demonstrated, and miraculous elements in the OT and NT [Old and New Testaments] had been explained as resulting from the primitive or pre-scientific outlook of the biblical writers. Jeffrey Burton Russell describes it thus: "Faith was transferred from the words of scripture itself to those of influential biblical critics ... liberal Christianity retreated hastily before the advance of science and biblical criticism. By the end of the eighteenth century, advanced liberals had abandoned the core of Christian beliefs." This created an "intellectual crisis" in American Christianity of the early twentieth century which led to a backlash against the critical approach. This backlash produced a fierce internal battle for control of local churches, national denominations, divinity schools and seminaries.


title: Biblical criticism

text: On one hand, Rogerson says that "historical criticism is not inherently inimical to Christian belief". On the other hand, as Michael Fishbane frankly wrote in 1992, "No longer are we sustained within a biblical matrix... The labor of many centuries has expelled us from this edenic womb and its wellsprings of life and knowledge... [The] Bible has lost its ancient authority". The most profound legacy of the loss of biblical authority is the formation of the modern world itself, according to religion and ethics scholar Jeffrey Stout. "There are those who regard the desacralization of the Bible as the fortunate condition for the rise of new sensibilities and modes of imagination" that went into developing the modern world. For many, biblical criticism "released a host of threats" to the Christian faith. For others biblical criticism "proved to be a failure, due principally to the assumption that diachronic, linear research could master any and all of the questions and problems attendant on interpretation". Still others believed that biblical criticism, "shorn of its unwarranted arrogance," could be a reliable source of interpretation.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Fishbane asserts that the significant question for those who continue in any community of Jewish or Christian faith is, after 200 years of biblical criticism: can the text still be seen as sacred? "[T]his question affects our innermost cultural being and traces our relationship to the foundational text of our religious and cultural origins". He compares biblical criticism to Job, a prophet who destroyed "self-serving visions for the sake of a more honest crossing from the divine "textus" to the human one". Or as Rogerson says: biblical criticism has been liberating for those who want their faith "intelligently grounded and intellectually honest".


title: Biblical criticism

text: Fishbane writes: the traditional sacrality of the Bible is at once simple and symbolic, individual and communal, practical and paradoxical. But times have changed... [In the twenty-first century,] [c]an the notion of a sacred text be retrieved? ... It is arguably one of Judaism's greatest contributions to the history of religions to assert that the divine Reality is communicated to mankind through words... our hermeneutical hope is in the indissoluble link between the divine and human "textus"... It is at such points that the ancient theophanic power of illimitable divinity may yet breakthrough swollen words... Thus, ... we may say that the Bible itself may help to retrieve the notion of a sacred text.


title: Biblical criticism

text: By the end of the twentieth century, multiple new points of view changed biblical criticism's central concepts and its goals, leading to the development of a group of new and different biblical-critical disciplines.


title: Biblical criticism

text: One legacy of biblical criticism in American culture is the American fundamentalist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Fundamentalism began, at least partly, as a response to the biblical criticism of nineteenth century liberalism. Some fundamentalists believed liberal critics had invented an entirely new religion "completely at odds with the Christian faith". There have also been conservative Protestants who accepted biblical criticism, and this too is part of biblical criticism's legacy. William Robertson Smith (1846–1894) is an example of a nineteenth century evangelical who believed historical criticism was a legitimate outgrowth of the Protestant Reformation's focus on the biblical text. He saw it as a "necessary tool to enable intelligent churchgoers" to understand the Bible, and was a pioneer in establishing the final form of the supplementary hypothesis of the documentary hypothesis. A similar view was later advocated by the Primitive Methodist biblical scholar A. S. Peake (1865–1929). Conservative Protestant scholars have continued the tradition of contributing to critical scholarship. Mark Noll says that "in recent years, a steadily growing number of well qualified and widely published scholars have broadened and deepened the impact of evangelical scholarship". Edwin M. Yamauchi is a recognized expert on Gnosticism; Gordon Fee has done exemplary work in textual criticism; Richard Longenecker is a student of Jewish-Christianity and the theology of Paul. "[It] is safe to conclude that in many measurable features contemporary evangelical scholarship on the scriptures enjoys a considerable good health".


title: Biblical criticism

text: Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Catholic theology avoided biblical criticism because of its reliance on rationalism, preferring instead to engage in traditional exegesis, based on the works of the Church Fathers. Notable exceptions to this included Richard Simon, Ignaz von Döllinger and the Bollandist.


title: Biblical criticism

text: The Church showed strong opposition to biblical criticism during that period. Frequent political revolutions, bitter opposition of "liberalism" to the Church, and the expulsion of religious orders from France and Germany, made the church understandably suspicious of the new intellectual currents. In his 1829 encyclical "Traditi humilitati", Pope Pius VIII lashed against "those who publish the Bible with new interpretations contrary to the Church's laws", arguing that they were "skillfully distort[ing] the meaning by their own interpretation", in order to "ensure that the reader imbibes their lethal poison instead of the saving water of salvation". In 1864, Pope Pius IX promulgated the encyclical letter "Quanta cura" ("Condemning Current Errors"), which decried what the Pontiff considered significant errors afflicting the modern age. These he listed in an attachment called "Syllabus Errorum" ("Syllabus of Errors"), which, among other things, condemned rationalistic interpretations of the Bible. Similarly, the dogmatic constitution "Dei Filius" ("Son of God"), approved by the First Vatican Council in 1871, rejected biblical criticism, reaffirming that the Bible was written by God and that it was inerrant.


title: Biblical criticism

text: That began to change in the final decades of the nineteenth century when, in 1890, the French Dominican Marie-Joseph Lagrange (1855–1938) established a school in Jerusalem called the "École prátique d'études biblique", which became the "École Biblique" in 1920, to encourage study of the Bible using the historical-critical method. Two years later, Lagrange funded a journal ("Revue Biblique"), spoke at various conferences, wrote Bible commentaries that incorporated textual critical work of his own, did pioneering work on biblical genres and forms, and laid the path to overcoming resistance to the historical-critical method among his fellow scholars.


title: Biblical criticism

text: On 18 November 1893, Pope Leo XIII promulgated the encyclical letter "Providentissimus Deus" ('The most provident God'). The letter gave the first formal authorization for the use of critical methods in biblical scholarship. "Hence it is most proper that Professors of Sacred Scripture and theologians should master those tongues in which the sacred Books were originally written, and have a knowledge of natural science. He recommended that the student of scripture be first given a sound grounding in the interpretations of the Fathers such as Tertullian, Cyprian, Hilary, Ambrose, Leo the Great, Gregory the Great, Augustine and Jerome, and understand what they interpreted literally, and what allegorically; and note what they lay down as belonging to faith and what is opinion. Although "Providentissimus Deus" tried to encourage Catholic biblical studies, it created also problems. In the encyclical, Leo XIII excluded the possibility of restricting the inspiration and inerrancy of the bible to matters of faith and morals.


title: Biblical criticism

text: The situation precipitated after the election of Pope Pius X: a staunch traditionalist, Pius saw biblical criticism as part of a growing destructive modernist tendency in the Church. Thus, he explicitly condemned it in the papal syllabus "Lamentabili sane exitu" ("With truly lamentable results") and in his papal encyclical "Pascendi Dominici gregis" ("Feeding the Lord's Flock"), which labelled it as heretical. The École Biblique and the "Revue Biblique" were shut down and Lagrange was called back to France in 1912.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Following Pius's death, Pope Benedict XV once again condemned rationalistic biblical criticism in his papal encyclical "Spiritus Paraclitus" ("Paraclete Spirit")., but also took a more moderate line than his predecessor, allowing Lagrange to return to Jerusalem and reopen his school and journal.


title: Biblical criticism

text: In 1943, on the fiftieth anniversary of the "Providentissimus Deus", Pope Pius XII issued the papal encyclical "Divino Afflante Spiritu" ('Inspired by the Holy Spirit') sanctioning historical criticism, opening a new epoch in Catholic critical scholarship. The Jesuit Augustin Bea (1881–1968) had played a vital part in its publication. The dogmatic constitution "Dei verbum" ("Word of God"), approved by the Second Vatican Council and promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965 furtherly sanctioned biblical criticism.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer and Roland E. Murphy were the most famous Catholic scholars to apply biblical criticism and the historical-critical method in analyzing the Bible: together, they authored "The Jerome Biblical Commentary" and "The New Jerome Biblical Commentary" the later of which is still one of the most used textbooks in Catholic Seminaries of the United States. "The Jerome Biblical Commentary for the Twenty-First Century", a third fully revised edition, will be published in 2022 and will be edited by John J. Collins, Gina Hens-Piazza, Barbara Reid and Donald Senior.


title: Biblical criticism

text: This tradition is continued by Catholic scholars such as John P. Meier, and Conleth Kearns, who also worked with Reginald C. Fuller and Leonard Johnston preparing "A New Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture". Meier is also the author of a multi-volume work on the historical Jesus, "A Marginal Jew".


title: Biblical criticism

text: Biblical criticism posed unique difficulties for Judaism. Some Jewish scholars, such as rabbinicist Solomon Schechter, did not participate in biblical criticism because they saw criticism of the Pentateuch as a threat to Jewish identity. The growing anti-semitism in Germany of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the perception that higher criticism was an entirely Protestant Christian pursuit, and the sense that many Bible critics were not impartial academics but were proponents of supersessionism, prompted Schechter to describe "Higher Criticism as Higher Anti-semitism".


title: Biblical criticism

text: One of the earliest historical-critical Jewish scholars of Pentateuchal studies was M. M. Kalisch, who began work in the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, historical criticism of the Pentateuch became mainstream among Jewish scholars. In 1905, Rabbi David Zvi Hoffmann wrote an extensive, two-volume, philologically based critique of the Wellhausen theory, which supported Jewish orthodoxy. Bible professor Benjamin D. Sommer says it is "among the most precise and detailed commentaries on the legal texts <nowiki>[</nowiki>Leviticus and Deuteronomy<nowiki>]</nowiki> ever written". According to Aly Elrefaei, the strongest refutation of Wellhausen's Documentary theory came from Yehezkel Kaufmann in 1937. Kaufmann was the first Jewish scholar to fully exploit higher criticism to counter Wellhausen's theory. Wellhausen's and Kaufmann's methods were similar yet their conclusions were opposed. Mordechai Breuer, who branches out beyond most Jewish exegesis and explores the implications of historical criticism for multiple subjects, is an example of a twenty-first century Jewish biblical critical scholar.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Biblical criticism impacted feminism and was impacted by it. In the 1980s, Phyllis Trible and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza reframed biblical criticism by challenging the supposed disinterest and objectivity it claimed for itself and exposing how ideological-theological stances had played a critical role in interpretation. For example, the patriarchal model of ancient Israel became an aspect of biblical criticism through the anthropology of the nineteenth century. Feminist scholars of second-wave feminism appropriated it. Third wave feminists began raising concerns about its accuracy. Carol L. Meyers says feminist archaeology has shown "male dominance was real; but it was fragmentary, not hegemonic" leading to a change in the anthropological description of ancient Israel as heterarchy rather than patriarchy.


title: Biblical criticism

text: Feminist criticism is an aspect of the feminist theology movement which began in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the feminist movement in the United States. Three phases of feminist biblical interpretation are connected to the three phases, or 'waves', of the movement. Feminist theology has since responded to globalization, making itself less specifically Western, thereby moving beyond its original narrative "as a movement defined by the USA". Feminist criticism embraces the inter-disciplinary approach to biblical criticism, encouraging a reader-response approach to the text that includes an attitude of "dissent" or "resistance".


title: Biblical criticism

text: In the mid to late 1990s, a global response to the changes in biblical criticism began to coalesce as "Postcolonial biblical criticism". Fernando F. Segovia and Stephen D. Moore postulate that it emerged from "liberation hermeneutics, or extra-biblical Postcolonial studies, or even from historical biblical criticism, or from all three sources at once". It has a focus on the indigenous and local with an eye toward recovering those aspects of culture that Colonialism had erased or suppressed. The Postcolonial view is rooted in a consciousness of the geopolitical situation for all people, and is "transhistorical and transcultural". According to Laura E. Donaldson, postcolonial criticism is oppositional and "multidimensional in nature, keenly attentive to the intricacies of the colonial situation in terms of culture, race, class and gender".


title: Biblical criticism

text: Biblical criticism produced profound changes in African-American culture. Vaughn A. Booker writes that, "Such developments included the introduction of the varieties of American metaphysical theology in sermons and songs, liturgical modifications [to accommodate] Holy Spirit possession presences through shouting and dancing, and musical changes". These changes would both "complement and reconfigure conventional African American religious life".


title: Biblical criticism

text: Michael Joseph Brown writes that African Americans responded to the assumption of universality in biblical criticism by challenging it. He says all Bible readings are contextual, in that readers bring with them their own context: perceptions and experiences harvested from social and cultural situations. African-American biblical criticism is based on liberation theology and black theology, and looks for what is potentially liberating in the texts.


title: Biblical criticism

text: According to Episcopalian priest and queer theologian Patrick S. Cheng (Episcopal Divinity School): "Queer biblical hermeneutics is a way of looking at the sacred text through the eyes of queer people. It is important to understand the meaning of these terms in relation to the exegetical process."


title: Biblical criticism

text: "Social scientific criticism" is part of the wider trend in biblical criticism to reflect interdisciplinary methods and diversity. It grew out of form criticism's "Sitz im Leben" and the sense that historical form criticism had failed to adequately analyze the social and anthropological contexts which form critics claimed had formed the texts. Using the perspectives, theories, models, and research of the social sciences to determine what social norms may have influenced the growth of biblical tradition, it is similar to historical biblical criticism in its goals and methods and has less in common with literary critical approaches. It analyzes the social and cultural dimensions of the text and its environmental context.


title: Biblical criticism

text: "New historicism" emerged as traditional historical biblical criticism changed. Lois Tyson says this new form of historical criticism developed in the 1970s. It "rejects both traditional historicism's marginalization of literature and New Criticism's enshrinement of the literary text in a timeless dimension beyond history". Literary texts are seen as "cultural artifacts" that reveal context as well as content, and within New Historicism, the "literary text and the historical situation" are equally important".


title: Biblical criticism

text: "Postmodern biblical criticism" began after the 1940s and 1950s when the term "postmodern" came into use to signify a rejection of modern conventions. Many of these early postmodernist views came from France following World War II. Postmodernism has been associated with Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, radical politics, and arguments against metaphysics and ideology. It questions anything that claims "objectively secured foundations, universals, metaphysics, or analytical dualism". Biblical scholar A. K. M. Adam says postmodernism has three general features: 1) it denies any privileged starting point for truth; 2) it is critical of theories that attempt to explain the "totality of reality;" and 3) it attempts to show that all "ideals" are grounded in ideological, economic or political self-interest.


title: Biblical criticism

text: "Post-critical interpretation", according to Ken and Richard Soulen, "shares postmodernism's suspicion of modern claims to neutral standards of reason, but not its hostility toward theological interpretation". It begins with the understanding that biblical criticism's focus on historicity produced a distinction between the meaning of what the text says and what it is about (what it historically references). The biblical scholar Hans Frei wrote that what he refers to as the "realistic narratives" of literature, including the Bible, don't allow for such separation. Subject matter is identical to verbal meaning and is found in plot and nowhere else. "As Frei puts it, scripture 'simultaneously depicts and renders the reality (if any) of what it talks about'; its subject matter is 'constituted by, or identical with, its narrative".


title: Induced demand

text: In economics, induced demand – related to latent demand and generated demand – is the phenomenon whereby an increase in supply results in a decline in price and an increase in consumption. In other words, as a good or service becomes more readily available and mass produced, its price goes down and consumers are more likely to buy it, meaning that demand subsequently increases. This is consistent with the economic theory of supply and demand.


title: Induced demand

text: In transportation planning, induced demand, also called "induced traffic" or consumption of road capacity, has become important in the debate over the expansion of transportation systems, and is often used as an argument against increasing roadway traffic capacity as a cure for congestion. Induced traffic may be a contributing factor to urban sprawl. City planner Jeff Speck has called induced demand "the great intellectual black hole in city planning, the one professional certainty that every thoughtful person seems to acknowledge, yet almost no one is willing to act upon."


title: Induced demand

text: "Induced demand" and other terms were given economic definitions in a 1999 paper by Lee, Klein, and Camus. In the paper, "induced traffic" is defined as a change in traffic by movement along the "short-run" demand curve. This would include new trips made by existing residents, taken because driving on the road is now faster. Likewise, "induced demand" is defined as a change in traffic by movement along the "long-run" demand curve. This would include all trips made by new residents who moved to take advantage of the wider road.


title: Induced demand

text: Induced demand is a catch-all term used for a variety of interconnected effects that cause new roads to quickly fill to capacity. In rapidly growing areas where roads were not designed for the current population, there may be significant latent demand for new road capacity, which causes a flood of new drivers to immediately take to the freeway once the new lanes are open, quickly congesting them again. But these individuals were presumably already living nearby; how did they get around before the expansion? They may have taken alternative modes of transport, travelled at off-peak hours, or not made those trips at all. That’s why latent demand can be difficult to disentangle from generated demand—the new traffic that is a direct result of the new capacity. (Some researchers try to isolate generated demand as the sole effect of induced demand.)


title: Induced demand

text: The technical distinction between the two terms, which are often used interchangeably, is that latent demand is travel that cannot be realised because of constraints. It is thus "pent-up". Induced demand is demand that has been realised, or "generated", by improvements made to transportation infrastructure. Thus, induced demand generates the traffic that had been "pent-up" as latent demand.


title: Induced demand

text: Latent demand has been recognised by road traffic professionals for many decades, and was initially referred to as "traffic generation". In the simplest terms, latent demand is demand that exists, but, for any number of reasons, most having to do with human psychology, is suppressed by the inability of the system to handle it. Once additional capacity is added to the network, the demand that had been latent materialises as actual usage.


title: Induced demand

text: The effect was recognised as early as 1930, when an executive of a St. Louis, Missouri electric railway company told the Transportation Survey Commission that widening streets simply produces more traffic, and heavier congestion. In New York, it was clearly seen in the highway-building program of Robert Moses, the "master builder" of the New York City area. As described by Moses' biographer, Robert Caro, in "The Power Broker": During the last two or three years before [the entrance of the United States into World War II], a few planners had...begun to understand that, without a balanced system [of transportation], roads would not only not alleviate transportation congestion but would aggravate it. Watching Moses open the Triborough Bridge to ease congestion on the Queensborough Bridge, open the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge to ease congestion on the Triborough Bridge and then watching traffic counts on all three bridges mount until all three were as congested as one had been before, planners could hardly avoid the conclusion that "traffic generation" was no longer a theory but a proven fact: the more highways were built to alleviate congestion, the more automobiles would pour into them and congest them and thus force the building of more highways – which would generate more traffic and become congested in their turn in an ever-widening spiral that contained far-reaching implications for the future of New York and of all urban areas. The same effect had been seen earlier with the new parkways that Moses had built on Long Island in the 1930s and 40s, where ...every time a new parkway was built, it quickly became jammed with traffic, but the load on the old parkways was not significantly relieved. Similarly, the building of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel failed to ease congestion on the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and the three East River bridges, as Moses had expected it to. By 1942, Moses could no longer ignore the reality that his roads were not alleviating congestion in the way he expected them to, but his answer to the problem was not to invest in mass transit, it was to build even more roads, in a vast program which would expand or create of roads, including additional bridges, such as the Throgs Neck Bridge and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.


title: Induced demand

text: J. J. Leeming, a British road-traffic engineer and county surveyor between 1924 and 1964, described the phenomenon in his 1969 book, "Road Accidents: Prevent or Punish?": Motorways and bypasses generate traffic, that is, produce extra traffic, partly by inducing people to travel who would not otherwise have done so by making the new route more convenient than the old, partly by people who go out of their direct route to enjoy the greater convenience of the new road, and partly by people who use the towns bypassed because they are more convenient for shopping and visits when through traffic has been removed. Leeming went on to give an example of the observed effect following the opening of the Doncaster Bypass section of the A1(M) in 1961. By 1998, Donald Chen quoted the British Transport Minister as saying "The fact of the matter is that we cannot tackle our traffic problem by building more roads."


title: Induced demand

text: In Southern California, a study by the Southern California Association of Governments in 1989 concluded that steps taken to alleviate traffic congestion, such as adding lanes or turning freeways into double-decked roads, would have nothing but a cosmetic effect on the problem. Also, the University of California at Berkeley published a study of traffic in 30 California counties between 1973 and 1990 which showed that every 10 percent increase in roadway capacity, traffic increased by 9 percent within four years time. A 2004 meta-analysis, which took in dozens of previously published studies, confirmed this. It found that: ...on average, a 10 percent increase in lane miles induces an immediate 4 percent increase in vehicle miles travelled, which climbs to 10 percent – the entire new capacity – in a few years. An aphorism among some traffic engineers is "Trying to cure traffic congestion by adding more capacity is like trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt."


title: Induced demand

text: According to city planner Jeff Speck, the "seminal" text on induced demand is the 1993 book "The Elephant in the Bedroom: Automobile Dependence and Denial", written by Stanley I. Hart and Alvin L. Spivak.


title: Induced demand

text: A journey on a road can be considered as having an associated cost or "price" (the generalised cost, "g") which includes the out-of-pocket cost (e.g. fuel costs and tolls) and the opportunity cost of the time spent travelling, which is usually calculated as the product of travel time and the value of travellers' time. These cost determinants change often, and all have variable effects on demand for transport, which tends to be dependent on the reason(s) as well as method of travel.


title: Induced demand

text: When road capacity is increased, initially there is more road space per vehicle travelling than there was before, so congestion is reduced, and therefore the time spent travelling is reduced – reducing the generalised cost of every journey (by affecting the second "cost" mentioned in the previous paragraph). In fact, this is one of the key justifications for construction of new road capacity (the reduction in journey times).


title: Induced demand

text: A change in the cost (or price) of travel results in a change in the quantity consumed. Factors such as petrol prices, as well as fuel costs, are the most common variables that influence the quantity demanded for transport. This can be explained using the simple supply and demand theory, illustrated in this figure.


title: Induced demand

text: The economic concept of elasticity measures the change in quantity demanded relative to a change in another variable, most commonly price. For roads or highways, the supply relates to capacity and the quantity consumed refers to vehicle miles traveled. The size of the increase in quantity consumed depends on the elasticity of demand.


title: Induced demand

text: The elasticity of demand for transport differs significantly depending on the reason people are choosing to travel initially. The clearest example of inelastic demand in this area is commuting, as studies indicate that most people are going to commute to work, regardless of fluctuations in variables such as petrol prices, as it is a required activity to generate income. This exemplifies the fact that activities that yield a high economic benefit, in this case, financial gain in the form of income, tend to be inelastic. Whereas, travelling for recreational or social reasons have a high tolerance for price increases, and as such the demand for recreational travel when prices spike sees a sharp decline.


title: Induced demand

text: A review of transport research suggests that the elasticity of traffic demand with respect to travel time is around −0.5 in the short term and −1.0 in the long term. This indicates that a 1.0% saving in travel time will generate an additional 0.5% increase in traffic within the first year. In the longer term, a 1.0% saving in travel time will result in a 1.0% increase in traffic volume.


title: Induced demand

text: In the short term, increased travel on new road space can come from one of two sources: diverted travel and induced traffic. Diverted travel occurs when people divert their trip from another road (change in route) or reschedule their travel to avoid peak period congestion – but if road capacity is expanded, peak congestion is lower and they can travel at the time they prefer.


title: Induced demand

text: Induced traffic occurs when new automobile trips are generated. This can occur when people choose to travel by car instead of public transport, or decide to travel when they otherwise would not have.


title: Induced demand

text: Shortening travel times can also encourage longer trips as reduced travel costs encourage people to choose farther destinations. Although this may not increase the number of trips, it increases vehicle miles travelled. In the long term, this effect alters land use patterns as people choose homes and workplace locations farther away than they would have without the expanded road capacity. These development patterns encourage automobile dependency which contributes to the high long-term demand elasticities of road expansion.


title: Induced demand

text: Although planners take into account future traffic growth when planning new roads (this often being an apparently reasonable justification for new roads in itself – that traffic growth will mean more road capacity is required), this traffic growth is calculated from increases in car ownership and economic activity, and does not take into account traffic induced by the presence of the new road; that is, it is assumed that traffic will grow, regardless of whether a road is built or not.


title: Induced demand

text: In the UK, the idea of induced traffic was used as grounds for protests against government policy of road construction in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, until it became accepted as a given by the government as a result of their own Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment (SACTRA) study of 1994. However, despite the concept of induced traffic now being accepted, it is not always taken into consideration in planning.


title: Induced demand

text: A 1998 meta-analysis by the Surface Transportation Policy Project, which used data from the institute, stated that "Metro areas which invested heavily in road capacity expansion fared no better in easing congestion than metro areas that did not."


title: Induced demand

text: On the other hand, a comparison of congestion data from 1982 to 2011 by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute suggested that additional roadways reduced the rate of congestion increase. When increases in road capacity were matched to the increase demand, growth in congestion was found to be lower.


title: Induced demand

text: A study by Robert Cervero, a professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, found that "over a six-to eight-year period following freeway expansion, around twenty percent of added capacity is 'preserved,' and around eighty percent gets absorbed or depleted. Half of this absorption is due to external factors, like growing population and income. The other half is due to induced-demand effects, mostly higher speeds but also increased building activities. These represent California experiences from 1980 to 1994. Whether they hold true elsewhere is of course unknown."


title: Induced demand

text: And Mokhtarian et al. (2002) paired eighteen California state highway segments whose capacities had been improved in the early 1970s with control segments that matched the improved segments with regard to facility type, region, approximate size, and initial volumes & congestion levels. Taking annual data for average daily traffic (ADT) and design-hour-traffic-to-capacity (DTC) ratios during the 21 years 1976-1996, they found the growth rates between the two types of segments to be “statistically and practically indistinguishable, suggesting that the capacity expansions, in and of themselves, had a negligible effect on traffic growth”.


title: Induced demand

text: Film-induced demand, also referred to as film-induced tourism, is a relatively recent form of cultural tourism in which destinations that are included in media outlets such as television and films receive an increase in tourist visits. This is supported by several regression analyses that suggest a high correlation between destinations taking a proactive approach in order to encourage producers/studios to film at their location, and the tourism success in the area after the release of the movie. This is consistent with induced demand theory. When the supply increases, in the form of media exposure to areas that were not regarded as tourist hotspots, the number of visitors increases, even though the majority of these new visitors would not have necessarily visited these areas previously. This is exemplified by a Travelsat Competitive Index study that indicated that in 2017 alone, approximately 80 million tourists made the decision to travel to a destination based primarily on its featuring in a television series or film. This figure has doubled since 2015.


title: Induced demand

text: Just as increasing road capacity reduces the cost of travel and thus increases demand, the reverse is also observed – "decreasing" road capacity "increases" the cost of travel, so demand is reduced. This observation, for which there is much empirical evidence, has been called disappearing traffic, also traffic evaporation or traffic suppression, or, more generally, dissuaded demand. So the closure of a road or reduction in its capacity (e.g. reducing the number of available lanes) will result in the adjustment of traveler behavior to compensate – for example, people might stop making particular trips to patronize local businesses, condense multiple trips into one, re-time their trips to a less congested time, use online shopping with free shipping, or switch to public transport, carpooling, walking, bicycling or smaller motor vehicles less affected by road diets, such as motorcycles, depending upon the values of those trips or of the schedule delay they experience.


title: Induced demand

text: In 1994, the UK advisory committee SACTRA carried out a major review of the effect of increasing road capacity, and reported that the evidence suggested such increases often resulted in substantial increases in the volume of traffic. Following this, London Transport and the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions commissioned a study to see if the reverse also occurred, namely that when road capacity was reduced, there would be a reduction in traffic. This follow-up study was carried out by Sally Cairns, Carmen Hass-Klau and Phil Goodwin, with an Annex by Ryuichi Kitamura, Toshiyuki Yamamoto and Satoshi Fujii, and published as a book in 1998. A third study was carried out by Sally Cairns, Steve Atkins and Phil Goodwin, and published in the journal "Municipal Engineer" in 2002.


title: Induced demand

text: The 1998 study referred to about 150 sources of evidence, of which the most important were about 60 case studies in the UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, the US, Canada, Tasmania and Japan. They included major town centre traffic schemes to make pedestrian areas closed to traffic, bus priority measures (especially bus lanes), bridge and road closures for maintenance, and closures due to natural disasters, mostly earthquakes. The 2002 study added some extra case studies, including some involving cycle lanes. The Annex by Kitamura and his colleagues reported a detailed study of the effects of the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake in Japan.


title: Induced demand

text: Taking the results as a whole, there was an average reduction of 41% of the traffic flows on the roads whose capacity had been reduced, of which rather less than half could be detected as reappearing on alternative routes. Thus, on average, about 25% of the traffic disappeared. Analysis of surveys and traffic counts indicated that the disappearance was accounted for by between 15 and 20 different behavioural responses, including changing to other modes of transport, changing to other destinations, a reduction in the frequency of trips, and car-sharing. There was a large variation around these average results, with the biggest effects seen in large-scale pedestrianisation in German town centres, and the smallest seen in small-scale temporary closures with good alternative routes, and small reductions in capacity in uncongested streets. In a few cases, there was actually an increase in the volume of traffic, notably in towns which had closed some town centre roads at the same time as opening a new by-pass.


title: Induced demand

text: The European Union have produced a manual titled "Reclaiming city streets for people" that presents case studies and methodologies for traffic evaporation in urban areas.


title: Induced demand

text: An early example of the reduced demand effect was described by Jane Jacobs in her classic 1961 book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". Jacobs and others convinced New York City to close the street that split Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park in two, and also not to widen the surrounding streets to service the extra capacity they were expected to carry because of the closing of the street. The city's traffic engineers expected the result to be chaos, but, in fact, the extra traffic never appeared, as drivers instead avoided the area entirely.


title: Induced demand

text: Two widely known examples of reduced demand occurred in San Francisco, California and in Manhattan, New York City, where, respectively, the Embarcadero Freeway and the lower portion of the elevated West Side Highway were torn down after sections of them collapsed. Concerns were expressed that the traffic which had used these highways would overwhelm local streets, but, in fact, the traffic, instead of being displaced, for the most part disappeared entirely. A New York State Department of Transportation study showed that 93% of the traffic which had used the West Side Highway was not displaced, but simply vanished.


title: Induced demand

text: After these examples, other highways, including portions of Harbor Drive in Portland, Oregon, the Park East Freeway in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Central Freeway in San Francisco, and the Cheonggyecheon Freeway in Seoul, South Korea were torn down, with the same effect observed.