However, books like the Bible or the Qur’an, are believed to be of divine origin. They should not be interpreted randomly, and not be subjected to personal opinions. Islam has always resisted a critical study of the Qur’an. Christians, with a much older and also more extensive Scripture, were and are very conscientious not only to preserve the old manuscripts physically, but also the original meaning of the words, idioms and phrases that make little sense when only the words are known.
What is called textual critique is the science, which is established to determine the exact text of an original document, and to sift out any possible corruption of a given text or any copy mistakes that might have slipped in over the many centuries in which these manuscripts have been copied by hand.
Just imagine how a linguist in two thousand years from now will be baffled when he discovers an old letter in which the writer tells his friends that yesterday it was raining cats and dogs, and now he feels a bit under the weather. His cousin was first beating around the bush, and when he attempted to steal his thunder, he was barking up the wrong tree. Fortunately, that happens only once in a blue moon. A dictionary would offer little help here.
In addition, words change their meaning. When just a hundred years ago a young man would say that he is gay, it meant that he was happy. What it means today I do not need to explain to you. Some words ‘died out’. They are unknown today, like the Hebrew word ‘selah’ in the Psalms of David, which was likely to be a musical term, for the Psalms were also sung.
But during the last two centuries other, liberal, scholars attempted to ‘reinterpret’ the Bible.
The so called ‘historical critical method’ is of quite a different nature. It attempts to ‘correct’ a text by assessing its feasibility, if I may put it this way. The Bible teaches, for instance, that the Jews went through the Red Sea on dry foot, or that Jesus was born of a virgin, that He walked on a lake and raised dead people to life. Since that is [humanly] impossible, reason the critics, one has to classify such a text as a myth. By various ways and means their pens have censored the Bible of anything that could be classified as supernatural.
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