Origins 43
Origins
William Wrede, though not a redaction critic in the sense defined above, was something of a precursor of the emphasis typical of redaction criticism. Wrede wrote at a time when the Markan hypothesis reigned in scholarly study of the Gospels. This hypothesis was so named not just because it maintained Markan priority but because it also claimed that Mark gave a generally untheological, historically reliable portrait of Jesus. Wrede destroyed this assumption by demonstrating that Mark was as thoroughly theological as the other gospels. Specifically, Wrede argued that Mark had added the many references where Jesus urged silence about his messiahship. This "messianic secret” was designed to explain how it came about that so few people recognized Jesus to be the Messiah during his lifetime. 62While Wrede’s specific thesis is now generally discredited, his contention that Mark is as much theologian as historian (or theologian instead of historian) has been widely accepted.
The implications of Wrede’s understanding of the evangelists as creative theologians were not immediately appropriated. Redaction criticism as an identifiable discipline did not develop until the 1950s. Three German critics were the pioneers in the field. 63GQnther Bornkamm’s essay on the stilling of the storm, in which he sought to uncover Matthew’s theological point by comparing his account with Mark’s, was the earliest redaction-critical work. 64More significant were two monographs that appeared later in the decade. Hans Conzelmann, in The Theology of St. Luke, 65analyzed the theological standpoint of Luke, arguing that the evangelist imposed a threefold periodization of salvation history on the gospel material—the time of Israel, the time of Jesus, and the time of the church. In doing so, according to Conzelmann, Luke provided a basis for a continuing role of the Christian community in history, thereby defusing early Christian disappointment about the delay of the parousia, namely, the failure of Jesus to return as soon as expected. Willi Marxsen did for Mark what Conzelmann did for Luke. Mark, according to Marxsen, was also motivated by concern about the parousia, but Mark believed that the parousia was imminent and wrote his gospel with the overarching purpose of gathering together Christians in Galilee to await the Lord. 66
It would be impossible to select even the most outstanding redaction-critical works since these initial studies. The conclusions reached by Bornkamm, Marxsen, and Conzelmann are not widely held anymore, but the methodology they pioneered has won a secure place in the field of gospel studies. 67Countless monographs, dissertations, and articles using redaction criticism analyze themes within a gospel or the gospel as a whole, or they compare and contrast the contribution of two or more evangelists to a theme. Hardly any serious study of the Gospels proceeds without considerable utilization of redaction criticism. This is not to say that redaction criticism has ousted form criticism or source criticism; contemporary scholars employ all three together as they seek to understand the final product, the Gospels (the redactional stage), in terms of the raw material that has gone into them (the stage of tradition).