Confluence in UnTyped Higher-Order Theories by means of Critical Pairs

User-defined higher-order rewrite rules are becoming a standard in proof assistants based on intuitionistic type theory. This raises the question of proving that they preserve the properties of beta-reductions for the corresponding type systems. We develop here techniques that reduce confluence proofs to the checking of various forms of critical pairs for higher-order rewrite rules extending beta-reduction on pure lambda-terms. The present paper concentrates on the case where rewrite rules are left-linear and critical pairs can be joined without using beta-rewrite steps. The other two cases will be addressed in forthcoming papers