Compare methods

	Redaction Criticism	Historical-Critical Exegesis
Field	Religious Studies	Religious Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1969	1975
Originator	Günther Bornkamm, Hans Conzelmann, Willi Marxsen; introduced to English by Norman Perrin	Enlightenment biblical scholarship; methodized by Krentz, surveyed by Barton
Type	Editorial-analysis pipeline recovering the final author's theology	Integrative exegetical pipeline establishing a text's original historical meaning
Seminal source	Perrin, N. (1969). What Is Redaction Criticism? Philadelphia: Fortress Press. ISBN: 9780800601812	Krentz, E. (1975). The Historical-Critical Method. Philadelphia: Fortress Press (Guides to Biblical Scholarship). ISBN: 9780800604608
Aliases	Redaktionsgeschichte, Composition Criticism, Editorial Criticism, Redaction-Critical Analysis	Historical-Critical Method, Grammatico-Historical Method, Biblical Criticism, Critical Exegesis
Related	4	4
Summary	Redaction criticism (Redaktionsgeschichte) studies the biblical authors not as passive collectors of tradition but as genuine authors and theologians who shaped their inherited material to make a point. Where form criticism dissolved the Gospels into independent oral units, redaction criticism puts the spotlight back on the evangelist who selected, arranged, and edited those units. By comparing the final text with the sources and traditions behind it, the critic isolates the changes the author made, looks for a consistent pattern in those changes, and reads off the theological program that motivated them. Hans Conzelmann's 1953 study of Luke is the classic example, and Norman Perrin's 1969 primer What Is Redaction Criticism? introduced the method to English readers and articulated its logic.	Historical-critical exegesis is the dominant scholarly approach to interpreting the Bible: it reads each text in its original language, genre, and historical setting in order to recover what its author meant and what its first audience would have understood. Rather than reading scripture through later doctrine or present concerns, it asks the historical question first. The method is not one technique but an integrated family that draws on textual, source, form, and redaction criticism, applying them within a grammatico-historical reading. Edgar Krentz's compact 1975 The Historical-Critical Method describes its rise, goals, and procedures, while John Barton's 2007 The Nature of Biblical Criticism offers a philosophical defense, arguing that biblical criticism is at heart a disciplined attention to what the text means in its literary and historical context.