Description 24
Description
Form criticism was first applied to the Old Testament by scholars such as Hermann Gunkel and was then brought into New Testament studies in the second and third decades of this century by a trio of men who had come to recognize that the source-critical approach, pursued rigorously for several decades, had exhausted its potential. These men were Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Martin Dibelius, and Rudolf Bultmann. 3Though differing at several important points, these pioneers of form criticism had in common at least six assumptions and beliefs that came to be the basis for form criticism.
1. The stories and sayings of Jesus circulated in small independent units. The early form critics saw an exception in the passion narrative, which they thought was a selfcontained literary unit from a very early period. 4Even this exception is not admitted by many contemporary form critics.
2. The transmission of the gospel material can be compared to the transmission of other folk and religious traditions. Responsibility for this transmission rests not with individuals but with the community, within which the material takes shape and is handed down. Certain laws of transmission, generally observable in such instances of oral transmission, can be applied to the transmission of the Gospels.
3. The stories and sayings of Jesus took on certain standard forms (hence "form” criticism, or "the history of forms”), for the most part still readily visible in the Gospels. Form critics have not agreed on the number and exact nature of these forms. Table 1 presents three influential schemes. 5
Table 1
Terminology of Form Criticism
Form
Dibelius
Bultmann
Taylor5
Brief sayings of Jesus set in a context (e.g., Mark 12:13-17, which climaxes in Jesus’ saying “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”)
Paradigms
Apophthegms
Pronouncement Stories
Stories about Jesus’ miraculous deeds (e.g., the feeding of the 5000)
Tales
Miracle Stories
Miracle Stories
Stories that magnify Jesus as a “hero” (e.g., Luke’s story about Jesus in the temple at twelve years of age [2:41-52])
Legends
Historical Stories & Legends
Stories about Jesus
Teaching of Jesus which docs not climax in a single saying (e.g., the Lord’s Prayer)
Parancsis
Dominical Sayings
Sayings and Parables
4. The form of a specific story or saying makes it possible to determine its Sitz im Leben ("setting in life”), or setting in the life of the early church. According to Bultmann, "The proper understanding of form-criticism rests upon the judgement that the literature in which the life of a given community, even the primitive Christian community, has taken shape, springs out of quite definite conditions and wants of life from which grows up a quite definite style and quite specific forms and categories. Thus, every literary category has its ‘life situation.’”
5. As it passed down the sayings and stories of Jesus, the early Christian community not only put the material into certain forms, it modified it under the impetus of its own needs and situations. With this point we move from what may be called form criticism proper (a literary enterprise) into a broader conception of the discipline in which historical judgments that by and large do not grow out of the discipline as such are being rendered.
Form critics differ widely over the degree to which the early church modified and created gospel material. Bultmann, for instance, thinks the influence was huge, attributing most of the gospel material to the early church and finding relatively little that can be reliably considered to have come from the earthly ministry of Jesus. He can attribute so much of the material to the early church because he, with many other form critics, believes that the early church was not concerned to distinguish between things Jesus said while on earth and things that he was continuing to say through prophets in the life of the church. As Norman Perrin puts it, "The modern distinction between historical Jesus and risen Lord is quite foreign to the early church.” 7 Radical historical judgments such as these are not intrinsic to form criticism, and many form critics are much more conservative in their historical assessments. Vincent Taylor is one, and there are others still more conservative who confine the influence of the early church mainly to the arrangement of material (e.g., the series of controversy stories in Mark 2:1-3:6 and parallels). But these are exceptions to the rule, and it must be said that the great majority of form critics have viewed their enterprise as including a good measure of historical skepticism.
6. Classic form critics have typically utilized various criteria to enable them to determine the age and historical trustworthiness of particular pericopes. These criteria are based on certain laws of transmission that are thought to hold good for any orally transmitted material. According to these so-called laws, people tend to (1) lengthen their stories, (2) add details to them, (3) conform them more and more to their own language, and (4) generally preserve and create only what fits their own needs and beliefs. On the basis of these laws, many form critics have declared that gospel material that is shorter, lacks details, contains Semitisms, and does not fit with the interests of the early church or first-century Judaism is earlier and thus more likely to be historical. The last criterion, which we might call the criterion of dissimilarity, is especially important for the more radical form critics. By eliminating anything that was likely to have been introduced by the early church or that could have been picked up from the Jewish milieu, it is able to secure a "critically assured” minimum number of sayings and activities on which a supposedly historical understanding of Jesus can be based. This criterion, for instance, suggests that Mark 13:32—"No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father”—may well be original with Jesus, since it uses language not typical of Judaism ("the Son”) and contains a premise (Jesus’ ignorance) that runs counter to a view in the early church. A fifth criterion is a by-product of this one, holding material to be authentic that agrees with material isolated by a "criterion of dissimilarity,” while a sixth criterion, "multiple attestation,” gives preference to material found in more than one stream of tradition (e.g., Mark and "Q”).