NEW TESTAMENT SCHOLARSHIP

Shortly after the First World War the application of the various form-critical methods to the New Testament by Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Martin dibelius and Rudolf bultmann led to a trend in New Testament exegesis in which particular attention was paid to the different literary genres of the 27 books of the New Testament. An intermingling of historico-literary study with philosophical and theological interpretation led some interpreters to be hesitant about adopting the new methods, but their hesitancy was generally overcome in subsequent years. Within Roman Catholicism pius xii's encyclical, divino afflante spiritu (1943), warmly endorsed the form-critical method of Biblical interpretation and supported the use of the method by Roman Catholic Biblical scholars. Shortly after World War II, within the Biblical guild itself, reservations began to be stressed about the ultimate utility of the new methods, particularly with regard to the synoptic gospels where their application was most heavily concentrated.

Historicity. Some of the early form critics had suggested that the oral tradition of the Church had become so fixed and stylized that it was impossible for the traditions to say very much about the historical Jesus himself. Some of Bultmann's disciples, the so-called post-Bultmannians, also expressed a real concern for the historical Jesus. In 1953, Tübingen's Ernst Käsemann raised the issue of "the continuity of the gospel in the discontinuity of the times and the variations of the kerygma." From this concern was born a "new quest for the historical Jesus." The new quest admitted that it was virtually impossible to recover the specific details of Jesus' life and ministry, but suggested that the application of newer methods pointed to realities in his life and ministry which served as the basis for the kerygma, the development of the oral tradition, and subsequent theological reflection.

In addition, the radical historical skepticism of some early form critics eventually gave rise to the development of a series of criteria for determining the basic historicity of events and realities relating to the historical Jesus. The law of dual exclusion implied that the narration of events which neither served the narrow interests of the later Church nor were part of the general Jewish culture must have occurred because of historical reminiscence. The criterion of multiple attestation invoked the attestation of a tradition in different sources or in different literary forms as an indication of the essential historicity of the tradition.

Redaction Criticism. In some form-critical analyses, the stress on the formative role of tradition and the internal constraints of the literary genres themselves almost reduced the synoptists to the role of being mere collectors of community traditions. Bultmann, for example, had not included a study of the Synoptic Gospels in his classic two-volume work on the theology of the New Testament. A reaction to the potential one-sidedness of the results of form-critical study developed with the emergence of redaction criticism.

The method essentially concentrates on the role that individual authors have in shaping the oral traditions which have been handed down, as well as the editorial work done on written source material. It deals with an author's selection of material from all that is available to him, the adaptations made on the material that is used, its arrangement, as well as the material that results from an author's own creativity. Since the method concerns how an author uses material that is received, both emendation criticism and compositional analysis are part of the discipline. Its application to a given text highlights the literary uniqueness and specific thought of the text and leads to the affirmation that it was written by a person who must be considered as a real author and a true thinker (theologian).

In the study of the Synoptic Gospels, the pathfinder in the application of the new method was Willi Marxsen. His 1954 doctoral thesis, presented at the University of Kiel, Germany, examined the Gospel of mark. Marxsen highlighted Mark's understanding of "gospel" as well as the fashion in which Mark used geographical categories (e.g., Galilee, the desert) with symbolic or theological reference. In the same year, a German professor at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, published a new study on luke. Translated into English, Hans Conzelmann's work had as a title The Theology of Saint Luke, but the literal translation of the German title was "the middle of time" (Die Mitte der Zeit ). Conzelmann's thesis held that it was inaccurate to consider Luke, the author of the Gospel and of the acts of the apostles, principally as an historian. Rather Luke should be considered as a theologian with a singular vision of history. According to this vision, jesus christ stands at the center of history, with the history of Israel as His precedent and the history of the Church unfolding in the period which follows.

Life Situation. In the study of the Gospels, the use of the tools of redaction criticism required scholars to examine three life-situations in the development of the gospel tradition: the life situation of Jesus, the life situation of the Church, and the life situation of the evangelists. The new and refined concern for the historicity of the Jesus-event led scholars to consider with particular seriousness such singular events as the Baptism and death of Jesus, as well as His typical activities, e.g., casting out demons and preaching in parables. Application and development of the form-critical method itself, along with a study of the history of traditions, further clarified the life situation of the Church as the milieu which was both conservative and formative with regard to the traditions about Jesus.

The proponents of redaction criticism concentrated their greatest attention on the life situation of the evangelists. While the Gospel writers were considered to be authors and theologians in their own right, the composition of their respective Gospels was not done in a vacuum. The situation of the local churches was the milieu in which the literary-theological works of matthew, Mark, and Luke were produced. Their respective Gospels were produced within specific communities, to whose problems the Gospels responded and whose theology was reflected in them.

Since redaction criticism focused on the manner in which an evangelist worked with his tradition and edited his sources, redaction critics needed to identify the literary sources utilized by the synoptists. The basic working hypothesis, even among Roman Catholic authors, who for the most part no longer held to the traditional view that Matthew was the first of the written Gospels, was that of Markan priority. Mark's Gospel was considered to be the major extant literary source for Matthew and Luke. Both of these evangelists also made use of a collection of Jesus' sayings. Q, the Sayings Source, is no longer extant, but it can be reconstituted on the basis of a comparative study of the discourse material in Matthew and Luke. Redaction criticism's interest in the editorial process thus led to a concentration of study on the Gospel of Mark and the Q source.

Perhaps the most significant features of the results of redaction-critical analyses of the Synoptic Gospels were the attention paid to the uniqueness of each Gospel and the specific theological insights of each of the evangelists. Ruled out of consideration are homogenized narratives which group together in a single construct two or more evangelical accounts of a tradition, thereby obscuring or passing over the singularly rich witness of each evangelist. In this way the traditional designation of the Synoptic Gospels, that is, "the Gospel according to Matthew (Mark or Luke)" took on a new significance.

Although the redaction-critical method was initially developed in the academic circles of the German Lutheran tradition, it was widely adopted in the world of Biblical scholarship. Within Roman Catholicism the use of the method was essentially endorsed by Sancta Mater ecclesia (April 21, 1964), the Instruction of the Pontifical Biblical Commission on the Historical Truth of the Gospels. The instruction spoke of the evangelists' selection of material, its adaptation, and placement in the respective Gospels. vatican council ii's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation likewise endorsed the method, especially when it stated that "the sacred authors wrote the four Gospels, selecting some things from the many which had been handed on by word of mouth or in writing, reducing some of them to a synthesis, explicating some things in view of the situation of their churches …" (Dei Verbum, n. 19).

The similarities that exist among the Synoptic Gospels point to some form of literary interdependence among them and provide a context for a comparative study of traditional materials. The absence of extant sources and the relative lack of possibilities for comparative study of the other New Testament texts have resulted in the methods of redaction-critical analysis being principally applied to the Synoptic Gospels among the New Testament texts.

Acts and Paul. In principle the redaction-critical method is not lacking in possibilities for fruitful analysis of the other New Testament books. The literary and historical insights gleaned from a study of Luke provide a key for a redaction-critical analysis of Acts. The possibility of comparing New Testament epistles with Hellenistic epistolary literature have highlighted the particularity of the Pauline letter and the development of an epistolary tradition, with dependence on paul, within the early Church.

Redaction criticism requires scholars to be particularly sensitive to the peculiarities of an individual author's thought, style, and vocabulary. Attention to these elements in the study of the Pauline corpus (Rom, 1–2 Cor, Gal, Eph, Col, Phil, 1–2 Thes, 1–2 Tim, Ti, Phlm) has led to significant developments in regard to the authorship of the epistles. The new trend is particularly apparent in the commentaries of the 1980s. Since that time a study of various thematic, stylistic, and linguistic considerations has led the majority of scholars to consider (in declining order according to the size of the majority) 1–2 Tim, Ti, Eph, Col, and 2 Thes as pseudepigraphal compositions. The remaining seven letters (Rom, 1–2 Cor, Gal, Phil, 1 Thes, Phlm) are commonly accepted as Pauline. These Pauline homologoumena constitute a critical Pauline corpus within the canonical collection of Pauline writings.

John. Elements of tradition and redaction are also to be discerned in the Johannine corpus (Jn, 1–2–3 Jn, Rv). Compositional analysis has also been usefully applied to both john and revelation. The relationship between each of these writings and their respective ecclesial situations, especially the separation between church and synagogue, has been a major focus of attention in recent scholarship.

Manuscripts and Text. Many of the recent developments in New Testament scholarship have therefore been due to refinements in the methods of literary analysis. Alongside the methods of textual criticism, source criticism, form criticism, and the history of traditions, redaction criticism is now an integral part of the historical-critical approach to the Biblical text. Further insights into the meaning of some New Testament texts, particularly John and Revelation, have come as a result of the discovery of two major groups of ancient manuscripts.

By providing scholars with significant comparative material, the discovery of manuscripts at Nag Hammadi in 1945 and of others at qumran and nearby Wadi Murabba’at in 1947 to 1956 has had significant influence on the understanding of the New Testament in recent years. The Nag Hammadi finds generally shed considerable light on the early gnosticism within which early Christianity developed and suggest possibilities as to how some Christian trajectories or trends of thought tended to develop. The Palestinian finds have clarified the real diversity of the religious situation of first century Palestine and have provided scholars with significant new insights into Jewish apocalyptic thought and eschatological expectations.

Since we do not possess any autograph copies of books of the New Testament, a first task in the historical-critical approach to the New Testament is the establishment of a Greek text of the different books. Nag Hammadi's Gospel of Thomas, a fourth-century Coptic manuscript of a text which dates from the second century, has proved to be a significant addition as a witness to the textual development of the sayings of Jesus. Other than the publication of the Bodmer papyri in the mid-20th century, there has been no discovery and publication of a New Testament manuscript to rival Tischendorf's discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus in the late 19th century.

One new development with regard to the Greek text of the New Testament has been the publication of a virtually standard edition of the text. An international committee, under the leadership of Kurt Aland of the Munster Institute for Textual Research, has produced a popular edition. The editors intended that this Greek text should serve as a basis for the various translations of the New Testament into the modern languages. Originally appearing as The Greek New Testament (London 1966) it has since been published as the fourth revised edition of The Greek New Testament (London 1993) and as the 27th edition of Nestle-Aland's Novum Testamentum Graece (Munster 1993), with but minor changes in later printings.

The historical-critical method of New Testament interpretation is the model within which most scholars work. These interpreters seek to make an "exegesis" of the text. They try to determine what an author said and meant within his own context as he wrote his texts. The several different methodologies subsumed under the historical-critical rubric attempt to elucidate an author's intended meaning by studying his language, his method of writing, and the historical, cultural, and literary circumstances within which he wrote.

The pontifical biblical commission's "The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church" (1993) endorsed the historical-critical method as "the indispensable method for the scientific study of the meaning…. its proper understanding not only admits the use of this method but actually requires it." This document also offered an overview, and occasionally some criticism, of various other approaches to the study of the New Testament including the history of the interpretation of the text, its Wirkuns-geshichte.

Rhetorical Criticism. Parallel with the development of the historical-critical method is the emergence of rhetorical criticism. Depending on one's point of view, rhetorical criticism can be identified as an adjunct to the classic historical-critical method or as a particular approach within the general category of specific disciplines belonging to the historical-critical method. Rhetorical criticism is an approach that is attentive to the fact that "it is the creative synthesis of the particular formulation of the pericope with the content that makes it the distinctive composition that it is" (James Muilenburg). It concentrates on the ability of New Testament passages to persuade or convince.

Most New Testament texts were intended to be read aloud to an audience (see 1 Thes 5:27). In rhetorical-critical analysis, three levels of style are typically distinguished, according to the author's intention in communicating with his audience. The orator teaches in plain style, praises or condemns in a middle style, and moves the audience in a grand style. One element of style is lexis, the author's choice of words and his use of various figures of speech. The other element is synthesis, composition. This is concerned with the way that words are formed into phrases, phrases into clauses, and clauses into sentences.

Many New Testament scholars believe that rhetorical criticism is of limited value since it seems to reduce the various New Testament texts to the level of one-time events, thereby obscuring their meaning for modern readers. Proponents of the method retort that this charge can be leveled against form-and redaction-criticism as well. Their use of the categories of Hellenistic rhetoric draws attention to an element of the various literary forms used in the New Testament generally neglected by classic form-critical analysis, namely its ability to make an impact upon the audience. Rhetorical criticism is applied to both the literary micro genres [the Magnificat, (Lk 1:46–55), for example, can be characterized as epideictic] and the literary macro genres found in the New Testament. By the turn of the millennium, rhetorical criticism has become a sine qua non for the study of Paul's letters.

Hermeneutics. While the various form-critical methods are generally employed in academic treatments of the New Testament Scriptures, considerable reaction to the exclusive use of the historical-critical method has developed in academic and other circles. Essentially the reaction focuses on a criticism that the historical-critical method concentrates too much on the past. Its approach is diachronical, that is, it indicates how a text came into existence. It indicates what a text meant in the past, but does not indicate what a text means at the present time. Indeed there are authors who question whether it is possible to speak at all about what a text means, as if there were but a single meaning of the text, and as if this meaning were the meaning intended by the author.

This criticism is voiced, among others, by those who approach the New Testament from the standpoint of the hermeneutical theories developed by Paul ricoeur and Hans-Georg gadamer. There are significant differences between the hermeneutics of each of these authors, especially between Ricoeur's theory of the nature of textuality and Gadamer's dialectical hermeneutics, but there is some significant similarity in their views. Ricoeur stresses that a text enjoys a certain semantic independence, especially vis-à-vis its author. Gadamer uses the dialogue as an important analogue for the interpretation of a text.

In the view of both authors the interpretation of a text is always an historical, linguistic event. Each of them considers that a text conveys meaning insofar as it opens up a world of meaning for the reader. The understanding of a text results from the coming together of the reader's own horizon and that of the text on the basis of a shared tradition of concerns. From this point of view, the real focus of New Testament scholarship is the contemporary meaning of the text, rather than the somewhat hypothetical rediscovery of what the text meant in the past. At the very least, one must distinguish various levels of meaning of the New Testament texts.

Structural Analysis. Other critics of the exclusive use of the historical-critical methods of New Testament interpretation proposed the method of structural analysis as a useful approach to the New Testament texts. In fact "structural analysis" is an umbrella term used to cover a variety of literary methods used in an attempt to understand how a text conveys meaning. "A text does not have meaning, a text is meaningful" is the premise of the structural analytic approach.

These various methods are akin to the methods used in the contemporary study of secular literature. One stress is on the identity of a text as anything that is written. Another is on the function of language as both informative and metaphorical. Still another is the importance of paradigms as tools useful for the understanding of texts. There is no single method of structural analysis, but significant structural analytic approaches to the New Testament have been developed in France, Germany and the United States. In France, concern with the function and nature of narrative has proved helpful for an understanding of the Gospels and parables of jesus. In the United States, the parables have frequently been studied with the aid of the newer literary methods, but Daniel Patte has demonstrated the broader applicability of the method with studies on Paul's epistles as well as the Gospel of Matthew. With the advent of the new millennium the use of structural analysis in New Testament study had receded in favor of literary approaches and various pointed readings of the text.

Narrative analysis has come to the fore as a useful method for understanding the New Testament, especially, Matthew, Mark, Luke-Acts (to be considered as a single two-part work), and John since these books are stories. As the method has been developed and used in the United States, narrative analysis draws the reader's attention to the plot, setting (time and place), and characterization that each of the New Testament authors employ. These elements serve to create a "narrative world" which the reader of the story is implicitly invited to adopt. The story conveys its meaning to the extent that a contemporary reader, the "real" reader can identify with the audience for whom the text was originally intended, the "intended" reader.

To some lesser degree narrative analysis is less fruitful for the study of the epistles, where epistolary criticism has come to the fore. Modern technology has allowed New Testament scholars to have access to many non-literary letters written about the same time as the epistles. Analysis of these letters enables scholars to better the form, function, and idiom of letters in the Hellenistic world. A. J. Malherbe's work has a major role to play in the development of epistolary criticism.

Sociological Reading. Other reactions to the historical-critical method have come from those who ask whether its presupposition that historical and literary categories provide the best entree to an understanding of the New Testament texts. Are not sociological categories equally useful? John G. Gager's Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (1975) was the first full-scale application of sociological concepts to early Christianity.

Contemporary sociological reading of the New Testament is quite different from the sociological approach to the Scriptures developed by the Chicago school during the early part of the 20th century. Elements of social theory and cultural anthropology are often incorporated into a sociological approach to the text. Some of the newer approaches are, even from the historian's viewpoint, relatively bias-free. Within this parameter can be considered the work of Gerd Theisse on Jesus and his disciples, using the sociological category of the wandering charismatic, and his social analysis of the church at Corinth, as well as Wayne Meeks' work on early urban Christians. What, for example, was the significance of the early Christian structural organization according to house churches? On the other hand, the Jesus Seminar has used sociological readings to portray what many scholars considered to be an extremely biased picture of Jesus.

Some sociological readings of the New Testament are, by design, engaged interpretations of the texts. To this category of sociological readings belong the materialistic, often Marxist, readings which point to elements of class struggle attested by the Scripture. Closely related would be the pastorally engaged reading of the text by proponents of liberation theology. Frequently this type of approach emphasizes the importance of the poor as a particularly significant group for whom the gospel of Jesus was intended.

Feminist Hermeneutics. During the 1980s, a feminist hermeneutic of the New Testament was developed. Drawing attention to the fact that the role of women seems to have been downplayed in the male-dominated cultural circumstances in which the New Testament was written, proponents of this approach take a variety of tacks. For some, the important thing is to develop a prophetic stance, thereby criticizing the neglect of women from within the Biblical tradition itself. For others (e.g., Phyllis Trible), it is a matter of drawing attention to texts overlooked or misinterpreted by male-dominated hermeneutics. A more radical, revisionist approach was taken by Elisabeth Schlusser-Fiorenza, especially in In Memory of Her (New York 1983). Schlusser-Fiorenza goes beyond the canon of the New Testament in an endeavor to show that the real situation of the early Christian faith allowed a greater role for women than the canonical New Testament texts seem to reflect. The most radical form of feminist hermeneutics rejects the authority of the Bible as the biased product of a patriarchal society.

Psychoanalytic Reading. From quite a different vantage point is the reading of the New Testament by those who approach the text from a psychoanalytic point of view. The psychoanalytic reading developed in French-speaking Europe in the 1970s and has remained basically confined to continental Europe since then. The underlying principle of the psychoanalytic reading is that nothing results from chance. Everything that is written proceeds from a definite motivation, even if this motivation lies at pre-and un-conscious levels.

The psychoanalytic reading essentially approaches a New Testament text with four different, but related, questions: How do the structures of an author's psyche relate to the production of the text at hand? What psychoanalytic categories are useful for portraying the characters, for example, in the narrative about Judas or that of the prodigal son? What is the relationship between a text and meaning, for example, in the passion and Resurrection narratives? Finally, how does the reader identify with the text; to which aspects of his psyche does the text appeal? Although the psychoanalytic reading of the New Testament has generally been limited to one or another relatively short pericope, some psychoanalytic readings of longer texts (e.g., Mk) have appeared.

Canonical Criticism. Yet another approach to New Testament scholarship is to be found in work of those who pronounce themselves in favor of canon criticism. The approach has principally developed in the United States, where a pioneering statement was made by Brevard Childs in The New Testament as Canon: an Introduction (Philadelphia 1984). The approach concentrates on a discernment of how the various materials contained in the individual books and the books themselves were rendered into Scripture. Of particular interest is a concern to deal with the effect of the canonical collection on the individual parts. It lays emphasis upon a holistic reading of the text in which the whole is the canonical collection as such.

In the hermeneutical circle of classic expositions of New Testament texts according to the historical-critical method, the whole which clarifies the parts is the entirety of an individual work or the collection of an individual author's work. In the hermeneutical circle of canonical criticism, it is the canonical collection which clarifies the significance of the parts (the individual books and their component parts). In turn, these parts help to clarify the meaning of the New Testament canon.

See Also: pastoral epistles; catholic epistles; new testament literature.

Bibliography: w. a. beardslee, Literary Criticism of the New Testament (Philadelphia 1970). r. f. collins, Introduction to the New Testament (Garden City 1983). w. g. doty, Letters in Primitive Christianity (Philadelphia 1973). h. y. gamble, The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning (Philadelphia 1985). c. osiek, What Are They Saying About the Social Setting of the New Testament? (New York/Mahwah 1984). d. patte, What Is Structural Analysis? (Philadelphia 1976). n. perrin, What Is Redaction Criticism? (Philadelphia 1971). n. r. petersen, Literary Criticism for New Testament Critics (Philadelphia 1978).

[r. f. collins]