Historical-Critical Exegesis

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.