Transferencia de Conocimiento

Many influences converged to produce this movement, and the main ones may fairly easily be discerned.

1. The first is the weakness of source criticism. Although form criticism is not an alternative for, but a supplement to, source criticism, it owed much of its origin to certain basic weaknesses in current source-critical speculations. Source criticism claimed to be a literary discipline and accordingly confined itself to the documents to hand. In the case of Matthew and Luke, the basic assumptions, as has been shown, centred around the use of Mark and Q. But source criticism could not push the study behind these documents. The most it could do was to suggest an earlier form of Mark (Ur-Markus) which proved unsatisfactory, or a multiplication of Q’s which increasingly weakened the whole structure of the hypothesis.

The form critic, however, proposed to study the origins of both Mark and Q and this appeared to be a laudable objective. The fact that the source critic could produce no documentary theory of Mark’s origin offered a carte blanche to the form critic to suggest methods by which the original tradition was fixed.

The source critic had left a gap of some twenty to thirty years after the death of Jesus before any written documents had appeared and it was only natural that some attempt should be made to fill in the deficiency. However speculative the attempt, it must be made, and form criticism is the result. In some respects form criticism was traversing the same tracks as the earlier oral tradition theory, although there was little recognition of this fact, for the methods employed were very different, as indeed were the results.

The very fact that our historical data for the first thirty years of Christian history are so limited means that form critics inevitably had to draw a good deal on imagination, although not all of them were conscious of doing so. Indeed, the attempt to classify the gospel material into various literary forms was considered to be wholly scientific in scope and in fact a continuation of the best traditions of source criticism. But the large measure of conjecture will become apparent when the various types of theory are outlined.

1 For general works on form criticism, E. V. McKnight, What is Form Criticism? (1969), provides a brief  survey of theories. Cf. also G. B. Caird, ‘The Study of the Gospels. II. Form Criticism’, ET 87 (1975–6),  pp. 137–141; and the article by W. G. Doty, ‘The Discipline and Literature of NT Form Criticism’, ATR  51 (1969), pp. 257–321, which contains references to 238 works on the subject. Cf. also S.S. 

Smalley’s article in New Testament Interpretation (1977), pp. 188–195; and C. Blomberg, The  Historical Reliability of the Gospels (1987), pp. 35–43. In the third edition of his book, The Growth of  the Biblical Tradition: The Form‐Critical Method (1974), K. Koch has added an epilogue on ‘Linguistik  und Formgeschicte’, in which he comments on the approach of W. Richter and E. Guttgemanns to  form criticism in the light of linguistic theory. 

2. Secondly, form criticism resulted from the challenge to the historicity of the Marcan account of Jesus. The way was prepared by W. Wrede’s ¹ theory that the framework of Mark’s gospel was the author’s own creation in the interests of what he called ‘the Messianic Secret’. He maintained that Jesus did not reveal his Messiahship until the resurrection, which meant that Mark’s account of Peter’s confession was not historical. The author of Mark, according to this view, has imposed his own framework on what were previously independently circulating units. In spite of the fact that Wrede’s theory was strongly

criticized,¹ it undoubtedly exerted a powerful influence on early form critics who turned their attention to the units of tradition and assumed as a valid presupposition that the framework of the gospel narrative was suspect and the context of stories and sayings consequently of little importance.

Akin to Wrede’s view was that of J. Wellhausen,² who claimed that the primitive tradition was overlaid with editorial additions which were influenced by contemporary Christian theology. This theory gave impetus to those form-critical theories which attribute much of the shaping of the material, and even its origin, to the Christian community (see discussion below).

K. L. Schmidt ³ examined the framework of Mark more thoroughly and concluded that the gospel is chronologically and also geographically unreliable. No biographical

reconstruction of the life of Jesus is now possible, on this theory.

Such challenges to the historicity of Mark drew attention to the need for a careful sifting of the evidence for the reliability of Mark’s material, and this need the form critics claimed to meet. Nevertheless some of the theories proposed actually undermined still further the

historical veracity of the gospel narratives as a whole (see comments on Bultmann’s theories below).⁴

1 Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien (1901; reprinted Gottingen, 1963). It is significant that  interest has revived in Wrede’s theory, particularly because of its kinship with the approach of the  Redaktionsgeschichte school. To Wrede the ‘secret’ was attributable to Mark’s own theology. Cf. G. 

M. de Tilesse, Le Secret Messianique dansl’Evangile deMarc (1968)and C. Maurer, NTS 14 (1968), pp. 

516–526. W. Barclay (The First Three Gospels, 1966, pp. 184 ff.) gives a useful brief survey of  Wrede’s position. J. L. Blevens, ‘Seventy‐two Years of the Messianic Secret’, Persp Rel Studies 2  (1974), pp. 17–194, points out the lack of information about the origin of the Messianic Secret. More  scholars are now recognizing that it had its roots in the plan of Jesus himself. 

1 Cf. J. Weiss, Das älteste Evangelium (1903); A. E. J. Rawlinson, The Gospel according to St. Mark  (1949), pp. 258–262. 

2 Das Evangelium Marci (1903). 

3 Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu (1919). 

4 That the views of Wrede and Wellhausen exercised a powerful influence on Bultmann is clear from  his own works; cf. ‘The Study of the Synoptic Gospels’ in Form Criticism (two essays by R. Bultmann  and K. Kundsin, 1962), pp. 22 ff Cf. also idem, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, pp. 1 ff. A useful  brief critique of Bultmann’s position and an assessment of the influence of the work of Wrede and  others upon him can be found in H. G Wood’s Jesus in the Twentieth Century (1960), pp. 78 ff. Cf. 

also T. W. Manson’s essay in The Background of the New Testament and its Eschatology (ed. Davies  and Daube), pp. 211–221. 

3. Another factor which helped to promote form criticism was the desire to modernize the gospels. The assumption that much of the material in the canonical gospels was couched in first-century conceptions of the world of nature and of men which are quite outdated by modern scientific knowledge gave birth to the movement for restating the gospel in concepts acceptable to twentieth-century thought. This naturally focused attention upon the original literary forms and led, among some form critics, to the quest for the essence of the gospel apart from these ‘forms’ (e.g. miracle stories). In other words, interest in the forms was mainly in order to reinterpret them, and to recast in modern dress the material which could be salvaged from them. This was the approach of Bultmann, in particular, whose purpose was governed by his philosophical presuppositions. The movement to which it led, known as

‘demythologization’,¹ is the attempt to interpret the gospels stripped of all elements which form analysis have shown to belong to the first-century environment of the early church. Not surprisingly the movement reached its climax in historical scepticism.² It would be wrong however to suppose that all form criticism was motivated by such apologetic considerations.

4. A further reason for form criticism was the urge to place the literary materials in the gospels in their historical situation, i.e. the Sitz im Leben, or life-situation. This historical quest appealed strongly to the modern tendency to emphasize the background of the gospels.

It was a legitimate quest, but it contained within it a hidden snare. It was inclined to assume without adequate proof that the material owed its present shape to the practical needs of the community. A good deal of the life-situations proposed for isolated units of tradition is purely speculative. This important factor must not be lost sight of when assessing the rise and

achievements of form criticism. What began with a perfectly legitimate motive has tended to develop along unhistorical lines.³

This latter tendency arises very largely from the basic assumption of most form criticism that the Sitz im Leben must be found in the post-Easter period and could not have existed in the pre-Easter period. Such an assumption excludes any possibility of a continuation between the two periods, and leads to the inevitable concentration of attention on the Christ of faith rather than the Jesus of history. But, as has been argued by H. Schurmann,¹ form-critical       

1 For a discussion of this movement, cf. I. Henderson, Myth in the New Testament (1952); P. E. 

Hughes, Scripture and Myth (1956); D. M. Baillie, God was in Christ (1955), pp. 211–227. For R. 

Bultmann’s own comments on demythologization, cf. his article in New Testament Issues (ed. Batey),  pp. 35–44. 

2 Bultmann himself denies that complete scepticism is the result, although he admits ‘considerable  uncertainty’ (cf. his essay in Form Criticism, p. 60). 

3 E. Fascher (Die formegeschichtliche Methode, 1924), in his survey and criticism of various form‐

critical theories (those of Dibelius, Bultmann, Albertz and Bertram), points out that all the theories  under review postulate at times a different Sitz im Leben for the same form, which shows that form  and history are distinct and that the latter cannot be safely inferred from the former (cf. especially  pp. 212 ff.) It is significant that all the scholars mentioned were desirous of making such an  inference. 

1 Cf. his essay in Der historiche Jesus und der kerygmatische Christus (ed. H. Ristow and K. Matthiae,  1962), pp. 342–370. Schurmann maintains that since Jesus sent out his disciples to preach during his  own ministry, this would have provided a Sitz im Leben for many of the sayings preserved in the  gospels, since the disciples would have needed teaching materials themselves and would also have  required instruction for the undertaking of the task. 

enquiries need not and should not be confined to the post-Easter Sitz im Leben. The recognition of this fact puts the Sitz im Leben motive on a firmer footing.