Chapter 130 of 404

Traditional Form Criticism

As mentioned earlier, nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars investigated the gospels’ written sources. Because early Christians told and retold the stories about Jesus orally before writing Gospels, however, scholars also began to ask about the way early Christians transmitted them, and thus developed form criticism.²⁰²

Many form critics made observations difficult to dispute, for example, that Jesus used teaching forms popular among his contemporaries (such as parables and witty sayings), and that early Christians transmitted Jesus’ sayings and deeds in forms used by other biographers and storytellers of their day. They also identified characteristic forms of various narrative units, such as controversy stories.²⁰³

Many form critics, however, speculated about the preaching settings of the various forms, opining that we know more about the preaching communities (though they are not explicitly mentioned in our sources) than about Jesus (the subject of the sources)! In a post-Schweitzer period of skepticism about the historical Jesus, Bultmann and many other New Testament scholars focused on the early communities that transmitted reports about Jesus, which they thought might prove more fruitful historically. But this approach has proved ironic, for we in fact know far less about the earliest transmitting communities than we know about the historical Jesus.²⁰⁴ If pioneers in any discipline tend to exaggerate their discipline’s importance, such early form critics were no doubt among them!

Some form critics started with skeptical presuppositions and consequently produced studies with predictably skeptical conclusions (Bultmann being the best-known example);²⁰⁵ others started with less skeptical premises and accepted much more of the material as authentic to Jesus.²⁰⁶

The conclusions varied in part because of the varying premises with which different scholars started, and in part because flaws existed in the standard methodology.²⁰⁷ Some criteria for authenticity the form critics developed were, however, reasonable: for instance, a saying of Jesus attested in a variety of independent sources or that would not have been made up by the later church was probably authentic.²⁰⁸ At the same time, although these criteria could logically help to verify traditions, they could not logically help to falsify them. For example, one could hardly assume that a saying of Jesus preserved only once or that his followers agreed with is necessarily inauthentic! In other words, the best criteria of form criticism work much better to demonstrate the reliability of some material in the Gospels than to argue the reverse.²⁰⁹

The abuse of these criteria sometimes led to pure speculation grounded only in preexisting theories about the development of early Christianity.²¹⁰ Skepticism about the fidelity of oral tradition partly reflects the earlier form critics’ print culture, which can predispose us to bias against orality.²¹¹ If some early form critics were skeptical about what can be known about Jesus, their contrary confidence about their own ability to reconstruct the prehistory of traditions behind texts is widely viewed as eccentric by literary critics outside biblical studies.²¹²

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