The Historical Critical Method - Part 3 Form Criticism

THE FOUR SOURCE HYPOTHESIS & FORM CRITICISM

I last mentioned Holtzmann and his "two-source hypothesis" to explain the literary interrelationship of the three synoptic gospels. The concluding step in that development was the publication in 1924 of B. H. Streeter's The Four Gospels, in which he argues that Matthew and Luke each had an independent source (usually dubbed "M" and "L") which explains the material unique to both Matthew and Luke and rounds out the two source theory, and becomes known as the "four source hypothesis. The Four Source Hypothesis is still referred to today as the best way to explain the literary interrelationship of the three synoptic Gospels. (See Ehrman's textbook, page 60)

Scholars today do not spend a lot of time trying to reconstruct the sources of the Gospels (“source criticism”). Yet that was the focus of much study of the Gospels in the first half of the 20th century. At the same time as "source criticism" was in vogue, out of Germany came a major development in the historical critical method called "Form Criticism." Form Criticism arose from the realization that the Gospels are essential "episodic" literature, that is, they are comprised mostly of short compact episodes (that biblical scholars call by the Greek word "pericope"). Then the question arose, how did we get from Jesus to these episodes as we find them in the canonical Gospels?

The German scholar who is best known for advancing a viable explanation is Rudolf Bultmann. When he published his book, The History of the Synoptic Tradition in 1921, it became the major focal point in liberal biblical scholarship (it was not translated into English until 1963, when his views had already become the standard fare at mainline Protestant seminaries). This book became (and remains) the "standard" on this topic; and within this book we also find implicitly what becomes known as the criteria of authenticity (subject of my next Blog entry).

Bultmann did not coin the term Form Criticism, nor did he conceive of the concept. But he is the one who applied it to the synoptic Gospels in a thorough going fashion with the intention of covering most of the material in the Gospels, especially how the smaller pericopes were transmitted. The initial interest in Form Criticism was in categorizing the various pericopes according to the particular form in which they appeared (categorization seems to me to be a German scientific obsession during this period about everything). So Bultmann came up with names to categorize the sayings of Jesus. The large categories are: 1) Apophthegms (a Greek word meaning a pithy saying), 2) Dominical sayings (longer sayings of Jesus like the parables), 3) Miracle stories, and 4) Historical stories and legends.

My favorite example of how this process works for Bultmann is a "controversy dialogue," Mark 2:23-28 in which Jesus debates with the Pharisees about Jesus' disciples picking grain on the Sabbath while walking through a field. Bultmann concludes that the only piece of this passage that actually goes back to the historical Jesus is the pithy saying at the end: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." Bultmann surmises that the story as we find it was created to address the attempts for the earliest Jewish-Christians in a Jewish setting to define themselves over against Judaism (probably in the 40's CE). So a setting about an action on the Sabbath that was considered work by the Pharisees is created (by the Christians who passed on this memorable saying), and in typical Jewish fashion, an example from the scriptures is worked in (see Mark 2:26 & 1 Sam. 21:3-6), and the scene concludes with Jesus' memorable saying about the purpose of the Sabbath.

Bultmann, in the same fashion, reconstructs (or deconstructs) all of the sayings in the Gospels attributed to Jesus, thereby accomplishing in a systematic fashion what Strauss had attempted almost a hundred years before, which is, demonstrating (in a manner convincing to modern scholars) the validity of Strauss' conclusions about the "mythic" character of the Gospel accounts of Jesus.

What Bultmann provided the world of biblical scholarship was: 1) an analysis of the various pericopes in the gospels, and also, 2) a means of deciding what came first in the Jesus tradition and what was added later (without explicitly intending to do so). Implicit in Bultmann's work is a mean of determining what can be traced back to Jesus and what was created by the Christians who first transmitted his sayings, deeds, and stories to other Christians. While Bultmann never really defined the principles he was working with, on close examination one can discover the principles that guided his decisions on what was historical or what was legendary, and what can be traced back to Jesus and what cannot.

It was left to a student of Bultmann's, Norman Perrin, to formulate Bultmann's unstated principles into "criteria of authenticity." With the publication of Perrin's book, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus, in 1967 the source of innovative New Testament scholarship had clearly shifted from Germany to the United States. Next Blog entry: Criteria of Authenticity.