A careful study of the history of Biblical Criticism will demonstrate that this discipline has its roots in attempts to overthrow the authority of the Bible in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly in France, where the libertines challenged the Christian consensus that prevailed almost universally in Europe at that time.1 For example, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), in his Tractatus-theologico-politicus (1670), sought to find contradictions in the Pentateuch in order to undermine the prevailing viewpoint of the Bible as infallible.
He also stated that the Pentateuch could not have been written by Moses because it refers to him in the third person, and it records his own death. These arguments are still used by those who adhere to the Documentary hypothesis, and had their origin in Spinoza's work.
Spinoza and others began asserting that reason, not revelation, is the principal criterion to be used in the determination of truth, and that reason should therefore be used to sift what was truthful out of the Bible.
Another early father of Biblical criticism was Hugo Grotius, who attempted to examine the Biblical documents in their appropriate historical contexts in the light of "reason," and to conjecture about their emendation, with very little concern for the Biblical claims themselves. In the latter portion of the seventeenth century, Jean LeClerc used these ideas for his more radical criticism of the Biblical texts. LeClerc stated that, except for the prophetical writings of the Bible and the teachings of Christ, the Bible consisted of historical accounts or moral lessons, but were not inspired by God. The Gospels, for example, although not inspired, were reliable historical documents. These ideas became very prevalent during the Enlightenment and were the foundation upon which modern higher Biblical criticism was built. Yet, as we have seen, they are incompatible with the claims of the Scriptures themselves.
1 John D. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Corporation, 1982), pp. 85-86.
