The Stage of Oral Traditions: Form Criticism 24
The Stage of Oral Traditions: Form Criticism
In the course of the investigation into the origins of the Gospels, several distinct approaches have emerged over the last two centuries, each of them emphasizing different aspects or stages of the problem. Three approaches in particular have made distinct and significant contributions to the problem of gospel origins and development: form criticism (Formgeschichte), which focuses on the period of oral transmission; source criticism, which focuses on the way different literary units were put together to make up the Gospels; and redaction criticism ( Redaktionsgeschichte), which focuses on the literary and theological contributions of the authors of the Gospels. These methods correspond generally to the three stages mentioned by Luke in his introduction. Yet they are not mutually exclusive; most contemporary gospel critics employ all three simultaneously in what is called traditions analysis or tradition criticism (Traditionsgeschichte). Nevertheless, these three approaches are both historically and methodologically distinct, and we examine each in turn.
We begin with form criticism because, though arising only after the heyday of source criticism, it concentrates on the earliest stage in the process by which the Gospels came into being: the oral stage. This was the period of time before any substantial written accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus existed, during which the material that has become our Gospels was transmitted by word of mouth. If we date Mark at the earliest in the mid-50s, with other possible written gospel sources not much earlier, this stage of mainly oral transmission must have lasted at least twenty years.