Redaction Criticism
Redaction Criticism
We will treat the history of “form criticism” more in our next chapter, but must offer a few comments about “redaction criticism” here. While source and form criticism were sometimes helpful in understanding the nature of Jesus’ teachings and the way the Gospels are written, scholars asked these questions mainly to test the Gospel stories’ reliability, not to understand the Gospels’ message. Inevitably scholars began to ask, “Given that Matthew and Luke used Mark and Q, why do they edit them the way they do?” This question became the focus of the editorial critics, generally called redaction critics.121
More sober controls eventually checked the early excesses of some redaction critics. Some redaction critics assumed that any material Matthew or Luke added to their main sources was not historical. This view stemmed not from careful observations, but from some unlikely presuppositions: namely, that Matthew and Luke had no other information available except in Mark and Q, and that editing a source for literary style or theological emphasis renders one’s information unhistorical.122 Yet ancient writers often followed a main source that they checked or supplemented with other sources.123
Various other weaknesses characterize these assumptions. For example, the probable presence of substantial traditional material in Matthew besides Mark and Q weakens these premises.124 (Certainly it is unreasonable to suppose that Matthew and Luke used historical sources only where we happen to be able to check them.) Further, characteristic diction or style do not make elements ahistorical;125 indeed, writers could openly acknowledge their stylistic editing of earlier sources even for purely aesthetic reasons.126 Some variation may simply reflect the sorts of adaptation familiar in “oral performance,” for dramatic or phonetic purposes rather than theological ones.127 Some note that, given the emphasis on memory in antiquity, many early Christians could have known sources like Mark by heart, and Matthew and Luke can be “redacting” more freely based on memory rather than a rigid text in front of them.128 Current scholarship thus practices its redaction criticism more carefully, though it would be a mistake to abandon the method’s insights altogether.129
I noticed a fairly consistent rhetorical pattern when I was working on my Matthew commentary. Where possible, Matthew has underlined Jesus’ Jewish character more emphatically than Mark did. That is, where Mark adapted Jesus to a broader (more “universal”) Greco-Roman audience, Matthew has fairly consistently re-Judaized Jesus. In some cases, Matthew may have been following the rhetorical practices of speech-in-character and historical verisimilitude, 130 making Jesus fit what was known about him in general (e.g., as a Jewish teacher, he should have introduced parables with the sorts of formulas used by Jewish teachers; he may have used “kingdom of heaven”). If Matthew lacked tradition on any of these points, his guesses are nevertheless more apt to be correct than ours, given his proximity to Jesus’ situation. Sometimes Matthew also demonstrates a more sensitive understanding of Palestinian Jewish nuances than does Luke or his tradition.131
In other cases, however, I am reasonably sure that Matthew has re-Judaized Jesus based on solid traditions available to him. If the Didache is not dependent on Matthew, it may often cite some of this pre-Matthean tradition.132 As we have noted, Matthew elsewhere “corrects” Mark’s adaptations for Gentile readers to better accord with historical data available to him.133 In any case, Vermes is correct to argue that Matthew has preserved much of the special Jewish coloring of Jesus, which fits with our picture of Jesus in undeniably authentic traditions134 (as we shall see in some subsequent chapters).
For historical questions, redaction criticism remains useful in inviting us to observe the patterns of how writers adapt their material to make a particular point. This observation in turn helps us recognize both the extent to which they viewed adaptation as a legitimate part of their biographic task and which of our sources preserves the likeliest original tradition in particular cases.
It also helps us recognize that the Gospel writers we can test (Matthew and Luke) employed their sources in ways similar to those of other historical writers. If anything, a synopsis of the Gospels convinces us that they tended to be more conservative than many other historians writing about the recent past (the past two or three generations), and much more conservative than those writing about the distant past of earlier centuries. If this is true of the Gospels that we can test, and they trusted Mark, the earlier source, the burden of proof should rest on one arguing that Mark composed more in a novelistic way than based on tradition.
What we know of how historical writers composed their works (above) is relevant to how we should expect the Gospel writers to have employed their sources.135 Historians frequently followed an earlier historian in the first draft;136 2 Maccabees, for example, abridges an earlier work by Jason of Cyrene (2 Macc 2:23). Such observations do fit the Gospel writers that we can concretely test, Matthew and Luke. Like other Greek writers, Luke mostly follows one source at a time, at least in his Gospel, where he incorporates a large block of Q material into Mark;137 both he and Matthew make Mark the backbone and supplement this work from other sources.138
Some people viewed use of preexisting lines as plagiarism; yet even writers who regarded failure to credit sources as dishonest note that most ancient authors did so, frequently verbatim.139 Even in elite circles, if one alluded to well-known works the hearers might recognize, the thought was not plagiarism but literary sophistication that flattered the source;140 if one could assume one’s audience’s knowledge, one did not need to state the source of one’s quotes. Given the pervasiveness of oral traditions about Jesus, the Gospels probably functioned as common property of the apostolic church, so that borrowing from an earlier one would sound more like flattering the source than like plagiarism. If much gospel tradition was “common property” of the early churches (cf. Lk 1:4), audiences might not expect particular identification.141 (As noted above, even elite writers sometimes cited sources especially where they conflicted.)142