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From: jwg@duke.UUCP (Jeffrey William Gillette)
Newsgroups: net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: An Introduction to Redaction Criticism
Message-ID: <6538@duke.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 4-Nov-85 17:45:49 EST
Article-I.D.: duke.6538
Posted: Mon Nov  4 17:45:49 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 8-Nov-85 04:29:00 EST
Organization: The Divinity School, Duke University
Lines: 79

[]

Dan Diaz brings up the question of redaction criticism.  He refers to an
article in "Christianity Today" which appears to be rather vague.  I
offer a few words of expansion, which I hope will prove helpful.

"Redaction criticism" is a technical term describing a methodology used
by theologians, primarily during the 1950s - 1960s.  It is the outgrowth
of one basic assumption which has guided biblical scholarship
throughout most of the 20th Century: that assumption is that the
Gospels of the New Testament are "folk" literature - not literary
creations, but short stories passed down from generation to generation,
until someone finally wrote them down.  The paradigm is very similar to
Levi-Strauss' folktale structuralism.  The "hidden adgenda" for this
assumption has been the feeling by many scholars that the laws governing
the oral transmission of popular stories somehow give greater historical
credibility to the Gospels than would have been true if an intelligent
(and thus creative) individual exercised decisive editorial authority.

In the early decades of the Century this assumption led to attempts at
sociological criticism of the Gospels: what type of person was Jesus,
and what type of church did he found?  Shortly after WWI "form
criticism" gained wide attention.  Form criticism viewed the Gospels as
a collection of short traditional stories in which the final editor did
little more than provide plausible transitions from one story to the
next.  The individual traditions could be divided among several "forms"
(e.g. pronouncement stories, miracle stories, confrontation stories);
each form arouse out of a particular situation in the life of the church
(e.g. pronouncement stories came from the preaching of the first
apostles, miracle stories from a later generation concerned with
apologetic details, confrontation stories from persecuted churches).
The best known form critics were Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann.

After the Second World War, several disciples of Bultmann began to
question the importance of the evangelists (the final editors - or
redactors - of the Gospels).  Bornkamm, Conzelmann, Marxen, etc. agreed
that the Gospels were collections of traditional stories, but their real
interest was not in the traditions themselves (and their possible
historical value), but in the way the evangelists related traditional
material to the contemporary life of the church.  This new approach to
the Gospels became known as redaction criticism.  Its concern was with
the theological stance of the churches (for whom the evangelists acted
as spokesmen).  This method (probably better described as a focus of
interest) gained wide acceptance because it provided more "historical"
material (the text itself as opposed to hypothetical reconstructions of
tradition), and because it gave conclusions that were relevant for the
modern church (by showing how authoritative sayings of and about Jesus
could be interpreted and applied).

I probably ought to say that redaction criticism was/is neither more 
"liberal" nor more "conservative" than any other approach to the
Gospels.  While most of the New Hermeneutics followers (whose "new quest
for the historical Jesus" defined "historical" in a sense rather
different from modern fundamentalists) embraced redaction criticism, so
did some prominent evangelical biblical scholars (e.g. Earle Ellis, I.
Howard Marshall, and Grant Osborne).

I close with a word on more recent trends in biblical study.  The
primary assumption of form and redaction criticism has come into
increasing disfavor since 1971.  The obvious literary qualities of the
Gospels (both in form and in content) spawned a return to interest in
the Gospels as literature.  First called "composition criticism", the
latest fad is literary criticism, which can include any type of literary
investigation from existential phenomenology to narrative theory to
post-structuralism.  Perhaps in reaction to this emphasis on the texts
themselves, the Society of Biblical Literature annual convention has
seen a rise the past few years of papers addressing sociological and
psychological questions.  In which direction(s) the future of
professional biblical scholarship lie, only providence knows.

Jeffrey William Gillette		uucp: duke!phys!lisa
The Divinity School
Duke University




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