Evaluation 26
Evaluation
The historical skepticism that characterizes many of the most prominent form critics has given form criticism itself the reputation of attacking the historicity of the Gospels. But as we have suggested above, this need not be the case. As a literary discipline, form criticism entails no a priori judgment about the historicity of the material that it analyzes. Moreover, many of the assumptions on which form criticism is based appear to be valid: there was indeed a period of mainly oral transmission of the gospel material; much of it was probably in small units; there probably was a tendency for this material to take on certain standard forms; and the early church has undoubtedly influenced the way in which this material was handed down. Defined narrowly in this way, there is undoubtedly a place for form criticism in the study of the Gospels.
Nevertheless, we must register certain cautions even about this narrow application of the discipline. First, it is probable that more of the gospel material than many form critics allow existed from very early periods in written form and that much of the rest of it may already have been connected together into larger literary units. 8Second, we must be careful not to impose a straitjacket of specified, clearly delineated forms on the material. The existence of so-called mixed forms suggests that any classification must be viewed as provisional and general at best. Third, the claims of form critics to be able to identify the setting in the life of the church from specific forms must be treated with healthy skepticism. Often—perhaps usually—we lack sufficient data for any such identification. Finally, and perhaps most damaging, the assumptions of many of the form critics about the nature of the transmission process are suspect. Several authors have argued that most form critics have not sufficiently appreciated the dynamics and nature of oral transmission and that far too little attention has been given to the role of individuals in shaping and handing down the material. 9
More serious criticisms must be directed against the antihistorical application of form criticism typified by Bultmann, Dibelius, and many of their heirs. First, the claim that the early church did not distinguish the earthly Jesus from the risen Lord, and thus felt free to place on the lips of the earthly Jesus sayings uttered by early Christian prophets, is unjustified. Bultmann claimed that verses such as 2 Corinthians 5:16b—"if, indeed, we have known Christ according to the flesh, we now no longer will know him in this way” (authors’ translation)—demonstrated that Paul and others in the early church had no interest in the earthly Jesus as such. But Paul is saying in this text not that he would no longer have any interest in a "fleshly” (i.e. earthly) Jesus but that he was determined no longer to regard Jesus "from a fleshly point of view.” In fact, nothing in the New Testament substantiates the notion that early Christians did not distinguish the earthly Jesus and the risen Lord, and the radical form critics have never come near to explaining how the utterance of a Christian prophet in, say, Antioch in A.D. 42 would have been put on the lips of Jesus as he taught in a specific locale in Galilee thirteen or so years earlier. That Christian prophecy actually functioned in this way is being questioned more and more. 10
Second, we must question whether the transmission of the gospel material over a period of twenty or so years can appropriately be compared with some of the other material that form critics use to draw conclusions about the Gospels. The rabbinic literature, for instance, with which both Bultmann and Dibelius compare the Gospels, was a very undefined body of material, being gathered over the course of centuries.
And the rabbis never produced anything remotely resembling a gospel.
Third, and related to this last point, are doubts about the validity of the so-called laws of transmission. E. P. Sanders and others have shown that oral transmission by no means always tends to lengthen material. 11The use of such laws, then, to attribute stories and sayings to the church rather than to Jesus is not valid. Particularly to be criticized is the criterion of authenticity. To be sure, the application of this criterion is often misunderstood: most who utilize it do not claim that only those sayings that it can isolate are authentic, but rather that these are the only ones we can be sure about. Nevertheless, its use has the tendency to focus attention on what was peculiar to Jesus over against both his Jewish environment and the early church. Its use thus tends to skew our view of Jesus. 12More conservative form critics insist that the criterion must not be used in isolation and only with the positive purpose of providing evidence of historicity rather than with the negative purpose of disproving historicity. 13Even so, the use of the criterion assumes a discontinuity in the process of transmission that needs to be questioned.
A fourth problem with radical form criticism is its failure to come to grips with the presence of eyewitnesses, some of them hostile, who were in a position to contest any wholesale creation of gospel incidents and sayings. As McNeile puts it, "Form-critics write as though the original eye-witnesses were all caught up to heaven at the Ascension and the Christian Church was put to live on a desert island.” 14Fifth, many form critics are guilty of underestimating the degree to which first-century Jews would have been able to remember and transmit accurately by word of mouth what Jesus had
said and done. The so-called Scandinavian School, represented particularly in the work of Birger Gerhardsson, 15looked to key authoritative figures in the early church as the transmitters of the gospel tradition and argued that the process would have been akin to the transmission of the rabbinic traditions, in which both written materials and careful memorization would have played key roles. Criticism that this particular approach assumes a similarity between the scholastic setting of the rabbis and the more popular setting of early Christianity is warranted. But the importance of memorization in first-century Jewish society is undeniable, and we are justified in thinking that this provides a sufficient basis for the careful and accurate oral transmission of gospel material. 16We have every reason to think, then, that the early Christians were both able and willing to hand down accurately the deeds and words of Jesus.