Q&A Home > B > Biblical Criticisms

• What are views of Higher Biblical criticism such as Redaction criticism, Historical criticism, Source criticism and such. Higher criticism basically questions the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and instead claims that they were composed by communities bearing the name under those names. An example is how they view the Gospel of St. John, for which they say that John invented the sayings of the 'I Am' statements of Christ which are not present in the other Gospels for a Theological agenda to battle a gnostic heresy at his time. They also claim that revelation and the gospel of John are written by separate Johns; John the elder wrote revelation, the 2nd and the 3rd epistles and John son of Zebedee wrote the gospel and the 1st epistle. They doubt the authorship of the epistle of 2 Peter and state it's pseudonymous or bearing the name of Peter falsely because the lack of linguistic similarity between the 1st epistle. their conclusions are based off comparing the linguistic similarities between one book under one author with another book of the supposed same author, and see if they are of the same origin. Since these hypothesis are based off evidenced research, how would the Church respond to such claims and how does the Church respond to the evidence laid out.