Form Criticism

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Form Criticism The English translation for the German Formgeschichte. This technique was developed by a group of German biblical scholars shortly after the First World War. It assumed the widely agreed conclusion of source criticism of the priority of Mark and the view that the Gospel of John was later than the other three but the aim was to penetrate into the period of Church life before even the earliest sources had been written. ‘Form Criticism’ had been used in Germany since about 1900 to explore some of the OT narratives and Jewish and Hellenistic literature. The literary classifications of prose and poetry were subdivided into (prose) history, legends, and myths; and (poetry) hymns, psalms, and prophetic oracles. It was claimed that in the course of oral transmission these types had developed according to a regular process. Form Criticism, however, is best known in Britain and America as a NT tool since it was introduced by the NT scholars R. H. Lightfoot and Vincent Taylor in the 1930s.

Form Critics generally accepted the theory of W. Wrede that Mark's gospel was not a straightforward, though unliterary, reproduction of the reminiscences of Peter but was permeated with a strong apologetic interest: why had ' Messiahship not been recognized by his contemporaries? Because Jesus made efforts to keep it a secret. So, according to Wrede, the gospels, beginning with Mark, were constructed as supports for the early Church. But what was happening to the memories about Jesus in the thirty years or so before anything was committed to writing? There was preaching and teaching and controversies with the Jews, and Christian leaders had a fund of stories to draw on as need arose and inevitably their stories developed into characteristic shapes. The audiences needed advice and reassurance, information and answers to problems just as much as the readers for whom Mark was shortly to write his gospel. Indeed Mark's gospel consisted, according to the Form Critics, of precisely all those fragments and isolated units that were used by Christian evangelists to get their message across in a persuasive form. Mark's gospel is not so much a connected, chronological narrative (think of the geography of ' journeys rapidly made from one place to another, from the hills of Galilee to the Lake, from somewhere to Capernaum, from Galilee to the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, and eventually to Jerusalem) as a series of incidents, miracles, parables, and injunctions strung together with a minimum of linkage.

These units circulated in isolation during the ‘oral’ period; Form Critics called them pericopae, and scrutinized them independently and classified them into ‘forms’. Their original historical situation in the ministry of Jesus has been for ever lost: what is discernible is the way the pericopae reveal the influence of the needs and outlook of the Church. A particular example would be the interpretation and explanation of the parable of the Sower (Mark 4: 10–20) which related more to the life of the Church than to the ministry of Jesus.

After assigning a pericope to the appropriate category or type (e.g. apophthegm, chria, paradigm), the Form Critic next relates it to its social setting or circumstances (in German Sitz im Leben, life situation) which explains how a story has been adapted to fit changes in the development of the Church, such as the expanding gentile mission. Or there may be additions to a parable (e.g. Luke 19: 27) which reflect growing hostility to the Jews. Several Form Critics eliminated genuine history from some of the pericopae altogether, especially that group of events, such as the Transfiguration, which have a strong supernatural element, and regarded them as creations of the Church in the light of its belief in the Resurrection. Rudolf Bultmann, a leading Form Critic, was held by other scholars to be excessively sceptical and did not allow for factors which controlled any extravagant growth of legendary embroidery. It is for example noticeable that some sayings are accurately preserved (e.g. Matt. 11: 12) which clearly the Church did not understand. But some had remembered!

In due course the detailed concerns of Form Criticism were succeeded by those of Redaction Criticism, which recognized the theological interests of the evangelists but gave them greater credit as authors. They did more than string together isolated units of tradition. The Form Critics had in a way anticipated Redaction Criticism by recognizing that there is one section—the Passion Narrative—which is a unity, with reliable topographical and chronological details, but with variations (e.g. in the words of Jesus from the cross) which illustrate the special theological interest of each author.

Form Criticism. As applied especially to the Bible, the attempt to discover the origin and trace the history of particular passages by analysis of their structural forms. It entails three distinct processes: (1) the analysis of the material into their separate units, the form of which is held to have been generally fixed in the process of transmission from mouth to mouth; (2) the recovery of the earlier history of these forms; and (3) the ascertainment of the historical setting which determined the various forms.

The method was developed in connection with the OT but its most notable use has been upon the oral traditions behind the Synoptic Gospels. The main classes of form which emerge are: (1) Paradigms (i.e. models for preachers). These are short stories culminating in a saying of Jesus; (2) Miracle Stories; (3) Sayings; and (4) Historical Narratives and Legends (i.e. narrative material). It is widely agreed that the needs of the Church helped to mould the traditions about Jesus; more controversial is the claim that they were created in this context or that their use in the Church can be inferred from their literary form.

Form criticism. A method of analysing a text in terms of its pre-history in oral tradition. It was first applied (1901) by H. Gunkel to the narratives of Genesis, and has been most significantly used since then in studying the Gospels, as well as the Psalms and Pentateuch. The term (Germ., Formgeschichte) comes from the preoccupation of the pioneer critics with the forms of oral material.