Power In His Presence

FORM CRITICISM

Form criticism is a method of biblical criticism adopted as a means of analyzing the typical features of texts, especially their conventional forms or structures, in order to relate them to their sociological contexts.

Form criticism is the Biblical method which seeks to discover the type of literature which is contained in the Bible

In the OT, form criticism is a method of study that identifies and classifies the smaller compositional units of biblical texts, and seeks to discover the social setting within which units of these types or literary genres were originally used.

A. History and Development

B. Stages of Form Critical Analysis

1. Form

2. Gattung

3. Sitz im Leben

4. Form and Function

A. History and Development

OT form criticism is usually held to have begun with the work of Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932), who wrote major studies of the stories in Genesis (Gunkel 1964) and of the Psalms (Gunkel 1967).

Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932) was a German Protestant Old Testament scholar. He was born in Springe, Germany (near Hannover, Lower Saxony).

Gunkel was the a son of a Lutheran pastor. He studied theology in Göttingen and Hanover.

In 1895 Gunkel became a professor of Old Testament in Berlin. In the same year his book Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Creation and Chaos) was published. In 1901 the first edition of his Genesis commentary appeared. In 1926 he published another standard work, his commentary on the book of Psalms (Die Psalmen).

For health reasons Gunkel retired and became professor emeritus in 1927. His Einleitung in die Psalmen (Introduction to the Psalms) was his last major project, which was brought to completion with the help of Joachim Begrich, who was both his former student and his son-in-law.

Gunkel had become an outstanding representative of the “History of Religion School” (die religionsgeschichtliche Schule). This was a circle of scholars from Göttingen, who shared assumptions regarding the analysis of the development of religion. In addition to Gunkel, the original group also included Albert Eichhorn, William Wrede, Wilhelm Bousset, Johannes Weiss, Ernst Troeltsch, Wilhelm Heitmüller, and P. Wernle. In the beginning, they were primarily concerned with the origins of Christianity. But this interest eventually broadened to include the historical backgrounds of ancient Israelite religion and other ancient Near Eastern religions.

He is sometimes called the father of form criticism and of tradition history, critical methodologies that his work had helped develop.

Earlier work on the oral literature of other nations formed the basis of Gunkel’s work. He was the first to suggest that it was possible to penetrate behind even the earliest-written source material in the Pentateuch to a preliterary stage at which the individual stories were transmitted by word of mouth. Many of them, he suggested, owed their origins to the need to explain particular local customs, institutions, or natural phenomena, and so were aetiological legends.

For example, the story of Jacob’s dream at Bethel (Gen 28:10–17) was originally a legend explaining the existence of a sanctuary there (“Bethel” = “house of El”) taken over by the Israelites from the Canaanites. In his study of the Psalms, Gunkel proposed that the present Psalms derived from earlier prototypes which were not (as he believed the present Psalms to be) personal lyric poems, but liturgical texts actually used in the cultic life of Israel.

Gunkel’s classification of the Psalms into 5 basic types (hymns, communal laments, royal psalms, individual laments, and individual songs of thanksgiving) is the basis of all modern study of the Psalter.

Sigmund Mowinckel developed Gunkel’s theories about the Psalms further and simplified them by proposing that many of the Psalms in the present Psalter were themselves cultic texts (Mowinckel 1962). With the aid of comparative material from other Near Eastern cultures he then sought to reconstruct the worship of the preexilic Temple by suggesting occasions on which the Psalms might have been used, adding rubrics to the Psalms to account for the changes of form within a single Psalm (see below) and hypothesizing an annual “Festival of Yahweh’s Enthronement” as the setting for many Psalms. Subsequent scholarship has been skeptical of the more speculative parts of Mowinckel’s work (see Kraus 1966). For example, it is not clear that all the Psalms can be fitted into a single festival; while many of Mowinckel’s suggestions rest more on comparisons with other cultures of the ancient Near East than on form criticism, in any case.

B. Stages of Form Critical Analysis

Form criticism is concerned with texts that contain material belonging to different genres, whether or not they are by a single author. For example, prophetic books often contain passages belonging to different genres within a single chapter. Thus Isaiah 5 begins (vv 1–7) with a poem which is generically a love song, but then continues with several oracles beginning “Woe to . . . ,” which are probably modeled on funeral dirges.

In vv 24–5 the text shifts to a proclamation of divine judgment, and in vv 26–30 it concludes with a poetic description of the Assyrian army. To understand this chapter, it is obviously essential first to break it up into its separate parts and then to identify the genre of each.

The word “genre” perhaps suggests to a modern reader the categories of written literature (novels, lyric poems, etc.); but many of the genres we can identify in the OT, though now fixed in writing, probably go back to a time of oral composition, as Gunkel was among the first to recognize (see above). In any culture where literature is transmitted by word of mouth, different genres have different social contexts: Indeed, this is still true even in our own society of such genres as the sermon, the political speech, and the popular song. In societies such as ancient Israel, many types of utterance were strictly tied to particular settings, and followed highly stereotyped patterns.

Consequently it is sometimes possible to learn about the social and religious life of ancient Israel by paying attention to the various oral and literary forms of speech encountered in OT texts. It is a feature of the OT, however, that one genre is often embedded in another. In the example from Isaiah, a poem in the form of a love song is set within the larger context of a collection of oracles, and this collection in turn forms part of a prophetic book. Detailed critical work may be needed before the various genres to be studied can be disentangled. Furthermore, even the term “genre” is too imprecise.

Form critics distinguish 2 categories, known by the German terms Form and Gattung. Analysis of a text begins by identifying each Form within it, grouping them together to identify the Gattung, and then asking about the text’s Sitz im Leben and its function.

1. Form: Confusingly, the English word “form” is used to render 2 of these technical terms of German form criticism, Form and Gattung. The first, the “form” properly so called, is the structure or shape of an individual passage or unit, as in this may be described without regard to the content of the passage. For example, in studying the Psalms we can begin by describing each Psalm in terms of its meter, the number of stanzas or strophes it contains, whether the speaker is singular or plural, whether it is addressed to God or (as in Psalm 37) to the reader, and so on. Formal description at this level is an important method of breaking a text up into its component parts, and is essential in studying the OT because as it now stands the text lacks the kind of section divisions we are familiar with in modern books.

In a prophetic book such as Hosea, for example, a reader who tries to read the text as a coherent and continuous whole is soon frustrated by the lack of overall shape, and begins to feel that the book needs to be broken up into shorter sections. Modern translations indicate such divisions by leaving blank lines, and sometimes by introducing subheadings. The criteria for these divisions are often connected with formal features of the text: for example, a change of speaker (e.g., between Hosea 5:15 and 6:1); a new start with a different audience addressed (5:1); a shift from a prediction of judgment (13:16) to an exhortation to repentance, introduced with an imperative (14:1).

In the same way the Psalms sometimes “change gear” in a disconcerting way, but the change can be precisely described in formal terms. Thus in Psalm 118, vv 1–18 are a hymn of praise, but v 19 is a request (“open to me the gates of righteousness”); v 25 a prayer for deliverance (“Save us, we beseech thee, O Lord”); v 26 a blessing (“We bless you from the house of the Lord”); and v 27b perhaps a rubric (“Bind the festal procession with branches up to the horns of the altar”) in imperative form. Formal description at this level does not tell us much that is new about the text, but it does help us to analyze it and, in some cases, to understand at a more theoretical level why it is intuitively puzzling.

2. Gattung. Once a number of passages have been analyzed from a formal point of view, it may be possible to see them as belonging to a general class or genre, and it is for this that the German term Gattung is used. Thus there is a large number of Psalms that begin with a call to worship God and go on to extol God’s mighty acts (e.g., Psalms 29, 33, 47, 66, 96, 98, 100); there are many laws in the Pentateuch that begin “If a man . . .” (e.g., Exodus 22:1, 5, 7, 10, 14 [Heb 21:37; 22:4, 6, 9, 14]); there are many prophetic oracles that run “Because . . . therefore thus says the LORD . . .” (e.g., Isa 7:5–8; 29:13–14; Amos 1:3–5). Having discerned the presence of such repeated structures and phrases, we are justified in concluding that Israel’s literature (written or oral) included such stereotyped forms as standard types of which the particular cases we encounter in the OT are examples.

Once scholars are convinced that a passage they have analyzed formally belongs to a more general class, they usually devise a shorthand title for the Gattung, and these results in many technical terms. In Psalm-study, common Gattungen are the hymn, the lament, and the thanksgiving, all of which may be further subdivided (individual laments, thanksgiving for victory in battle, etc.); legal sections of the Pentateuch yield “apodeictic” and “casuistic” laws; wisdom literature contains proverbs, riddles, fables, and rhetorical questions; and prophetic books are made up of such forms as the oracle of judgment (Drohwort), the accusation (Scheltwort), the “woe,” and the taunt.

There is obviously a danger in inferring the existence of a Gattung from very few examples, since it is always possible that a single text is anomalous. If the book of Psalms contained only one “lament,” it would be hazardous to say very much about laments in general. Nevertheless, a culture which values tradition more highly than creativity is likely to be very conservative in the way it uses its traditional forms, and so even a few examples of a Gattung may give us quite a clear impression of the conventions governing its composition. For instance, the OT records only a few cases of legal procedures, but they are enough to give us some idea of the conventional formulas used in the practice of law—for example, acquittal was probably accomplished by the stereotyped formula “He/she is righteous (s\addiq)” (see Gen 38:26; Psalm 51:5; Isa 41:26).

Already in moving from Form to Gattung considerations of content begin to arise. Though form critics have sometimes maintained that form criticism should appeal only to strictly formal features (grammatical, syntactical, and metrical features of the text), most, in practice, regard the subject matter as relevant in establishing the Gattung to which a text belongs. In some cases, for example the category “royal psalms,” subject matter is expressly the criterion used; more often, however, subject matter is one among a number of factors. Oracles of judgment in the prophets can be identified both by formal features (e.g., first person address by God, often with “Thus says the LORD” or “oracle of the LORD” attached) and by their distinctive content, concerning the future of Israel or of other nations. This mixture of form and content as criteria for assigning a text to a particular Gattung is no different in principle from what happens in classifying modern literature, where to call a work a tragedy, for example, is to say both that it has the formal features of a play—with acts, scenes, dialogue, and so on—and that it has a certain kind of theme and plot.

3. Sitz im Leben. In saying that a text belongs to a particular Gattung we are already saying something about the context in the life of Israel in which the text originated. If a text is a hymn, then people must have sung hymns, and there must have been occasions on which hymns could be sung; if there are laws in the OT, then Israel must have had a legal system of some kind in which these laws were used. The occasion or social setting for a given form is known as its Sitz im Leben (German, “setting-in-life”), a term for which no adequate English equivalent exists.

The Sitz im Leben must be carefully distinguished from the historical occasion that may have led to the production of any particular text. Thus, it is possible that certain Psalms can be dated to a particular period in Israel’s history, perhaps even to a space of a few years—Psalm 74, for instance, seems to reflect the situation of Israel in the early years of the Babylonian Exile (6th century b.c.). The Sitz im Leben of the Psalm, however, is not the period, but whatever context (presumably a liturgical context) it was composed to be used in. In the nature of the case, a Sitz im Leben is a general, and in principle repeatable occasion, not a single historical event. In the study of the Psalms, form criticism has been particularly useful, since the Psalms are the clearest case in the OT of texts intended for public use on many repeated occasions. Psalm 74 is rather an exception in being dateable to one particular period. Most of the other lament Psalms are so general in their description of the plight of the worshippers that they could come from almost any period. Indeed, the essential form-critical insight is that the question of their date is in many ways less interesting and important than the question of their intended use as conventional liturgical texts on any and every occasion of public lamentation.

Although liturgy is one of the clearest examples of the kind of Sitz im Leben the form critic can reconstruct, other spheres of Israelite life also had their distinctive forms, and by paying attention to them we can understand many OT texts better, and in turn derive from the texts more information about the spheres concerned. An example already mentioned is the law court. The OT provides only one clear account of proceedings in court, in 1 Kgs 21 (the trial of Naboth), though there are frequent passing allusions to the institution. Form criticism, however, can throw considerably more light on the subject. For example, the prophets frequently use a form in which God (or his prophet) is portrayed as pleading a case in court (e.g., Isa 1:2; Mic 6:1–5)—the so-called rîb or controversy form—and they also describe visions of courtroom scenes in the heavenly world which are probably modelled on earthly legal processes (e.g., Zech 3:1–5). From these it is possible to form a fair idea of procedures in the courts: for example, to infer that Israelite courts knew of counsel for the plaintiff and for the defendant and those cases were heard by a panel of judges. These conclusions in turn help us to understand such passages more clearly—to see that God is cast variously in the role of judge (Zech 3), plaintiff (Isa 1), and defendant (Micah 6), thereby gaining a sharper focus on these important texts.

Other spheres of life which form criticism can illuminate have proved to be education, commercial practice, and the life of the royal court. Interest in recent years in the sociology of ancient Israel will both contribute to and benefit from form-critical studies of OT texts.

4. Form and Function. Form criticism of the prophetic books raises some particularly interesting issues. As we have just seen, some of our information about certain spheres of life in Israel—for example, the procedures in law courts—derives from the use of legal forms by the prophets; but this use is at one remove from the primary or original use of legal forms, since the prophets are deliberately adopting forms from a sphere of activity other than their own in order to communicate their message more vividly. Whereas descriptions in the first person of a vision (as in 1 Kgs 22:19–23 or Amos 9:1–4) may be regarded as characteristically prophetic forms, with their Sitz im Leben in public prophesying, forms from the law court, the world of the popular singer (Isa 5:1–7), or the priestly call to worship (Amos 4:4) represent a deliberate use (or rather misuse) by the prophets of forms from other spheres of life. Amos, in effect, pretends to be a priest in order to utter sentiments that no priest would have accepted: that God no longer requires the worship of the sanctuaries. A form-critical study, by showing us the original and proper function of the forms used by the prophets, helps us to see more sharply the originality with which they contradicted the people’s expectations.

This does not in any way diminish the historical value of form criticism in elucidating Israelite institutions; for the prophets’ words can only have been effective if the forms they used did indeed have a proper sphere of life in which they were completely familiar to people at large. But it does urge us to be cautious in thinking that form criticism can tell us exactly how a given text was actually used in ancient Israel; for clearly it would be illegitimate to argue from Amos 4:4 that the prophet was a priest, or from Isa 5:1–7 that Isaiah was a popular singer, simply because they use forms properly belonging to these spheres. The form of the popular song could not have existed to be exploited by Isaiah if no one in Israel sang songs; but it does not follow from this that any given text which we can classify as belonging to the Gattung of the popular song really was used as one, and Isa 5:1–7 provides a clear example of one such text that is transparently not a real song.

This has implications also for the form criticism of the Psalms. Once certain genres of text exist, it is always possible for them to be imitated in a purely literary way, or even parodied—and parody is perhaps the best description of the use made of a variety of forms by the great prophets. The fact that a form has a proper or normal function in a particular society must not be allowed to lead us to the hasty conclusion that any given example of the form represents a primary case: It may be a secondary imitation or use of the form for some other purpose.

Form critics believe that the Gospels are loose collections of short, easily-memorized narrative snippets, compiled and rearranged in a way that served each evangelist’s agenda. In the Bible, each of these snippets is called a pericope. Bultmann believed that most of the pericopes found in the New Testament could be categorized as belonging to one of a limited number of forms (hence the name “forms criticism”). The most important of these forms are the following:

1. Pronouncement Stories, also known as paradigms or apothegms.
These are brief stories which culminate in an authoritative saying. For example, when the Pharisees complain about the fact that Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners in Mark 2:15-16, Jesus silences them by announcing, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” Jesus’ point is made pithily and memorably; if he is in conflict with some sort of opponent, he is always made to look wittier and more composed than they are. The pronouncement story is related to the classical Greek rhetorical technique known as the chreia.

2. Miracle Stories.
These are self-contained, highly descriptive stories about a healing (e.g. Mark 2:3-5), an exorcism (e.g. Mark 5:1-13), or some other type of miracle. Miracles that are difficult to categorize — such as the feeding of the five thousand, the only miracle that appears in all four gospels — are often given the catch-all name “nature miracle.” There are dozens of miracle stories in the New Testament; often they have some point to make about Christology, the kingdom of God, the meaning of true discipleship, or some such.

3. Logia, also known as dominical sayings. The word logion simply means “saying” (logia is plural). Bultmann classified Jesus’ sayings into a number of specific types, including:

1. • Wisdom saying or proverb, such as “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20).
   • Prophetic or apocalyptic utterances, such as “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom…” (Mark 13:7-8).
   • “I” sayings, sometimes known by the Greek phrase ego eimi “I am”. These are statements in which Jesus makes a memorable observation about his own nature, especially popular in John’s gospel. e.g., “I am the bread of life” (John 6:48); “I am the door” (John 10:9).
   • Legal sayings and church rules
     These are not always “legal” in the sense that we might think of the word in modern English. Rather, they are quotations from the Torah or creative interpretations of it. For instance, “You have heard it said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgement.’ But I say to you: everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgement” (Matthew 5:21-22).

4. Parables, which is to say short metaphorical or allegorical narratives with startling and sometimes counter-intuitive conclusions.
Sometimes these are further subdivided into “similitudes,” “example stories“, and “parables” proper, but I personally can’t be bothered with worrying about details like whether or not the story’s in the past tense. Anyway, Jesus is famous for his parables, even among people who are not Christian. “The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed…” (Mark 4:30-32 and parallels).

5. Myths and Legends.
These are stories with a supernatural element, such as can be found in the baptism or the Transfiguration of Jesus. Despite the name, it is not necessary to assume these stories are false; however, Bultmann often did.

6. Speeches.
Quite a few characters deliver speeches in the New Testament, not only in the Gospels but also in Acts. However, since this entire categorization system arose out of the desire to find the Historical Jesus, it is Jesus’ speeches that usually get the closest attention. Speeches in this sense tend to be significantly longer than both logia and parables, though Bultmann believed that they were originally made up of shorter bits that once circulated independently before being crammed together by the evangelists. An example of a speech would be the lengthy “farewell discourse” that fills John 14-17.

The driving assumption behind form criticism is that these small narrative units were rearranged and rewritten by the evangelists in ways that often obscured the original historical saying or event that lay behind them. Bultmann, despite being a committed Christian and serious theologian, was notoriously skeptical regarding the reliability of the gospels. He applied what we might call a “guilty until proven innocent” hermeneutic to most of the texts he studied. He (and the form critics who followed him) tended to see the evangelists as thoughtlessly cutting and pasting the traditions they inherited in artificial ways, cheerfully adding misleading “interpretations” of their own to Jesus’ words. For instance, a form critic would argue that the parable of the sower in Mark 4:1-9 was originally delivered without any explanation at all; it was the evangelist, not Jesus, who added the secondary interpretation of the story’s symbolism in 4:13-20. Needless to say, this angered a lot of traditional Christians who maintained the inerrancy of the Bible.

Today, form criticism is not as fashionable as it once was, but its insights have served as the building blocks for newer, more sophisticated theories. After the Second World War, form criticism was replaced with other interpretive techniques, particularly redaction criticism. However, even though some of Bultmann’s assumptions have been rejected in recent years, is nevertheless impossible to engage in serious study of the New Testament without understanding his analyses.

Form criticism is sometimes known by its German name, formgeschichte, even among English speakers, since the technique was designed and promoted primarily by scholars in Germany.

Let me conclude by listing some benefits of form criticism and some potential problems.

Benefits:

1. Gets us to look closely and in detail at a small portion of the text
2. Encourages us to ask certain questions of the text
3. Helps us discover other passages that we can use effectively in comparison
4. Encourages us to discover, if possible, how a text has been used in various settings
5. Helps us block off a subsection of text and to find its function in a larger passage

Dangers:

1. It’s a tree method rather than a forest method, i.e. it gets you to focus on a small portion of the text, and then often you won’t look more broadly. Avoid this by first surveying a larging scripture portion before looking at the individual passage.
2. It tends to focus us back on the original setting and purpose of a passage. For example, the form critic is first interested in why a proverb or parable would have originated in oral use. It’s final use, such as by Ezekiel or Paul can be ignored. Avoid this by continuing your study after identifying and working with an individual passage as a form using other methods, especially using redaction, literary, and canonical criticism.

In NT, Form criticism study was spearheaded by a trio of German scholars who were busily researching the oral prehistory of the Gospels. They are K. L. Schmidt, M. Dibelius and most notably Rudolf Bultmann; they pioneered the form criticism of the NT. The earliest form critics based their study on several foundational presuppositions. All agreed that the teachings of Jesus and the narratives about his life which comprise the Gospels were transmitted orally over a considerable period of time before they were ever written down. They believed that these units of material for the most part circulated independently of one another. They affirmed that the closest parallels to the transmission of the gospel tradition could be found in the oral and folk literature of other ancient.

They concluded that comparison with these parallels made it highly likely that the final form in which the Gospels appeared could not be trusted to supply a reliable account of what Jesus actually said and did. Rather one had to work backward and remove various accretions and embellishments which had crept into the tradition and so try to recover the original, pure forms. These forms, they believed, were originally short, streamlined and unadorned, and very Jewish in style and milieu.

Their Objectives

The original form-critical agenda included three main tasks: classifying the individual pericopes (self-contained units of teaching or narrative) according to form, assigning each form to a Sitz im Leben («life-situation») in the early church and reconstructing the history of the tradition.

Use in the Early Church

The form critic next tries to determine in which contexts in the life of the early Christian community each of these forms would have been most valued. For example, it is widely accepted that pronouncement stories would have been most used in popular preaching. Miracle stories were probably most significant in Christian apologetic against Greco-Roman beliefs in other divine men or primeval heroes. Legends, it is often maintained, were created primarily out of a desire to glorify and exalt Jesus. Sentences of holy law were probably most relevant in settling church disputes. Parables may well have been transmitted during times of popular storytelling. Many forms are not readily associated with just one Sitz im Leben, and most critics agree that this objective is the most speculative of the three.

Writing the Tradition-History

Finally, each form is studied in light of what kinds of changes it most likely underwent during the transmission of the oral tradition. For example, it is usually affirmed that the bulk of the parables was well preserved, but introductions and conclusions were commonly altered as they were applied to new contexts. The pronouncement stories carefully preserved the pronouncements (comparable to the punch line of a joke), but the historical trappings in which they were encased might be altered greatly. Legends usually formed around a historical kernel which was then significantly embellished. Prophetic sayings (and various other forms) were often first spoken by early Christian prophets in the name of the risen Lord and later read back onto the lips of the earthly Jesus.

Form critics also believe that various tendencies of the developing tradition were widely applicable, irrespective of the given form of a pericope. Most of these can be summarized under what Bultmann termed «the law of increasing distinctness»: stories became longer, incidental details were added, nameless characters were identified and place names were included. Additional dialog, interpretation, expansion and contemporization all appeared. Reapplication from a Palestinian-Jewish to a Hellenistic-Jewish and eventually to a Hellenistic-Gentile context also greatly transformed the form and content of much of the tradition.

Aids to Interpretation

Form criticism can provide guidelines to interpreting individual pericopes. This objective is probably the most significant and manageable of the three. The Gospels are not monolithic narratives; each section cannot be treated like every other. Interpretation is genre-bound, that is, there are often distinct hermeneutical rules for distinct literary forms. Recognizing that the emphasis in a pronouncement story is on the pronouncement helps the interpreter to avoid stressing peripheral details. For example, the focus of Mark 3:31-35 is not on Jesus’ apparent neglect of his family but on his embracing his followers as part of his family. This approach also reveals how often Jesus’ pronouncements focused on the radical newness of the kingdom vis-à-vis the prevailing forms of Judaism of the day (e.g., Mk 2:23-28).

Recent form criticism of the miracle stories has demonstrated how they usually focus on Christology and the kingdom–demonstrating who Jesus was and what was the nature of the new society he envisioned. Thus the cursing of the fig tree (Mk 11:12-14, 20-25) was no petulant outburst, nor even primarily a lesson about faith, but a symbolic demonstration of God’s impending judgment on Israel (comparable to the cleansing of the Temple around which Mark sandwiches this miracle-story–see w. 15-19). So too Jesus’ walking on the water (Mk 6:45-52) was neither a convenient way to get across the lake nor an arbitrary demonstration of his gravity defying power but a revelation of himself as the Lord of the wind and waves (cf. Ps 107:23-32) and the very «I am» (Yahweh) of Exodus 3:14.

Parable research has probably benefited the most from form criticism. Only about half of the passages in the Gospels usually called parables are specifically labeled as such by the Evangelists. Sometimes those, which are not so labeled, are treated differently. For example, the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Lk 16:19 31) has often been viewed as a true story, or at least as giving an accurate description of the afterlife.

In light of the structural parallels between this passage and many which are explicitly labeled parallels, both of these views are doubtful. One dare not derive doctrine from the details of a parable unless it can be corroborated by less

Keys to Gospel Outlines

Classification of the Gospel pericopes by form also enables one to discern the types of structures and outlines which the four Evangelists used. Sometimes they arrange material in chronological order, sometimes in topical order. In several instances they seem to have grouped a series of like forms together. Thus Mark 2:1–3:6 collects together a group of pronouncement stories; 4:35– 6:6a comprises a collection of miracles (as does most of Mt 8–9); and Matthew 13:1-52 is made up primarily of parable (as is most of Luke 14–16).

Ambiguities

Many passages, however, do not easily fall into one of the primary form-critical categories. Many seem to mix together several forms. For example, Mark 2:1-12 shares features of both a healing miracle and a pronouncement story. Early form critics usually assumed that mixed forms had undergone more complex development and that their historical kernel was therefore less recoverable. But in the ancient world students of rhetoric regularly claimed that mixed forms were aesthetically pleasing so it is likely that many such forms appeared right at the start of the Gospel tradition. Other form critical categories seem to combine form and content. An example-story is largely indistinguishable from a parable in form; so too a myth and a historical narrative. Interpretive presuppositions unrelated to pure literary form seem to have influenced several of the form critics’ classifications.

Use in the Early Church

In principle the attempt to assign a Sitz im Leben to each form is well motivated and potentially helpful. If one can discern how the early church used a certain aspect of the Gospel tradition, one may better understand in what contexts today it may be most useful. Occasionally comparative data permit reasonable inferences; Paul’s knowledge of Jesus’ «words of institution» (I Cor 11:23-25) suggests that part or all of the story of the Last Supper (Lk 22:13-38) may have been read or recited during celebrations of the Eucharist, much as it often is today. But in most cases such reconstructions are highly speculative because they are based on what other ancient cultures did in settings that are not always closely parallel to the rise of Christianity.

 

Bibliography

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