diaz@aecom.UUCP (Daniel Diaz) (11/01/85)
***********
As Christians involved in our own fields of specialty, we are often ignorant
of the battles raging in theological circles. Although some of the ranting
involves matters of doubtful interest to laymen, the debate over Redaction
Criticism is one which theologically serious laymen may want to look into.
The recent 'Christianity Today' (vol 29,no 15, 10.18.85) is a good place to
start with a well-written assessment of this controversial theological tool.
In brief, Redaction Criticism (RC) involves an attempt to reconstruct the
mindset of a Biblical author by observing the manner in which he edited his
source materials. We know, for example, that Luke's Gospel records some of the
words and actions of Jesus in a slightly different way than the other three
Gospel writers. Biblical scholarship also tells us that the Gospel writers
sometimes used the same sources in composing their narratives. RC attempts to
understand WHY an author chose to report what he did in the way he did.
So why the battle? Well, it seems that some scholars are using RC to 'show'
how some Biblical authors used 'theological fiction' in their accounts.
In making a theological point, they invented a non-historical event to
convey their thought. Some say Matthew did this in his account of the
slaughter of the young boys by a terrified Herod the Great. This has made
some Evangelical theologians nervous, causing them to discard RC altogether.
Other conservatives, while rejecting some of the conclusions of more
'liberal' thinkers, have seen value in RC as part of appreciating the
way the Holy Spirit used human creativity in the construction of the
scripture.
I think serious students of the Bible would appreciate the way RC helps
us steer away from homogenizing the Gospels into a single account to
appreciating the fact that they tell the same story in different ways.
Luke had a different theological purpose than John, and their use of their
sources was therefore 'purposeful'. If anything, this increases
rather than lowers my appreciation of the scripture. The article is a useful
introduction to this controversial area of Biblical scholarship.
--
Dan Diaz, Department of Biochemistry
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Bronx, New York [..!philabs!aecom!diaz ]jwg@duke.UUCP (Jeffrey William Gillette) (11/05/85)
[] 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 -- SUPERCHICKEN