Over the last century, historical criticism, literary criticism, and social-scientific criticism have played a critical role in biblical studies. From methodological perspectives, these critical approaches can be categorized into two types of inquiries. The first inquiry views the biblical texts as windows to see the historical societies behind the Scripture (historical criticism and social-scientific criticism). The second inquiry uses the biblical texts as mirrors reflecting the authors’ messages to their intended readers (literary criticism). The weakness of these critical approaches lies in the hypothetical reconstruction of historical communities based on the limited available data. Due to the lack of data, previous scholars’ assumptions of Christianity heavily rely on their logical inference.
This study proposes historical sociolinguistic approaches to biblical studies. It consists of two parts. The first part demonstrates the fundamental tenet of historical sociolinguistics with a uniformitarian principle. The uniformitarian principle is not unique to historical sociolinguistics, but it is one of the most widely used principles in scientific endeavors, including the so-called “hard” sciences. The merit of sociolinguistics is to offer the uniformitarian principle on the basis of linguistic patterns of communicative competence, namely the ability to understand and use language appropriately to communicate successfully in light of the general norms and rules for language usages in the society. The social patterns for language usages are changeable since the social, political, and cultural elements are varied and ever-changing. Therefore, reconstruing the social patterns of communities based on the uniformitarian principles of previous critical approaches is not reliable. However, the linguistic patterns for communication remain unchanged because human beings inherently have communicative competence. Therefore, historical sociolinguistics provides robust methodological frameworks that investigate biblical texts based not on the hypothetical reconstruction of communities but on the writers’ communicative competence in linguistic patterns.
In the second part, I will suggest historical sociolinguistics as an alternative discipline to formulate contemporary theories of sociology, variationism, critical constructivism, and linguistic ethnography for the inquiry of the relationship between language and society presented in biblical texts. Specifically, Nicolas Coupland’s style model provides a methodological framework that identifies the processes by which the writers choose their language in light of its social meanings within the macro, meso, and micro contexts: (1) macro contexts: linguistic ideologies which are shaped, managed, and controlled by authorities, (2) meso contexts: the general norms and rules about the use of language within particular communities, and (3) micro contexts: common sense of language uses within the interpersonal relationship between the speaker and listener. In light of Coupland’s model, this study will introduce macro sociolinguistics (sociology of language and critical constructivism), meso sociolinguistics (variationism), and micro sociolinguistics (linguistic ethnography).