Form criticism is a method of biblical criticism that classifies units of scripture by literary pattern and that attempts to trace each type to its period of oral transmission.[1] Form criticism seeks to determine a unit's original form and the historical context of the literary tradition.[1] Hermann Gunkel originally developed form criticism to analyze the Hebrew Bible. It has since been used to supplement the documentary hypothesis explaining the origin of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament) and to study the Christian New Testament.
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Most scholars agree that both Jews and Jewish Christians had a strong Oral Tradition up to destruction of the temple. Form criticism operates on the premise that our biblical texts are derived from this oral tradition. It claims that the creative process has produced a number of layers, each with a particular meaning. First, there was the original 'historical material', a saying or an event that may have occurred in some manner and was witnessed.
In telling and retelling, midrash was added or removed. Finally, the tradition was incorporated into a written account. However, the author inevitably had his own agenda, and the assembly of traditional material was crafted into a narrative that sought to underline a particular theological point of view. Not all of these written accounts survive to the present. Sometimes only fragments are discovered in various languages from different locations and different times in the ancient world. Preliterate oral teachers were suspicious of written accounts because a written account became "the story" and oral traditions disappeared. Only literates had the final word.[2][3][4][5]
It was in this cultural context or Sitz im Leben that the Christian Oral Tradition had its roots, as Jesus and later Christian 'Rabbis' developed the oral "Gospel" to interpret the written Law given to Moses by God.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12]
Scholars believe the oral traditions were what the Evangelists drew upon when composing the first gospels. This oral tradition consisted of several distinct components. Parables and aphorisms are the "bedrock of the tradition." Pronouncement stories, scenes that culminate with a saying of Jesus, are more plausible historically than other kinds of stories about Jesus. Other sorts of stories include controversy stories, in which Jesus is in conflict with religious authorities; miracles stories, including healings, exorcisms, and nature wonders; call and commissioning stories; and legends.
[13][14][15] The oral model developed by the form critics drew heavily on contemporary theory of Jewish folkloric transmission of oral material, and as a result of this form criticism one can trace the development of the early gospel tradition.[16] However, "Today it is no exaggeration to claim that a whole spectrum of main assumptions underlying Bultmann's Synoptic Tradition must be considered suspect."[17]
As developed by Rudolf Bultmann and others, form criticism might be seen as a form of literary deconstruction in an attempt to rediscover the original kernel of meaning. This process has been described as 'demythologising', although the word must be used with caution. 'Myth' is not intended to convey a sense of 'untrue', but the significance of an event in the narrator's agenda. What, ultimately, does the writer mean by it?
In the case of the Canonical gospels, this deconstruction or demythologising is intended to reveal the underlying kerygma or 'message' that is to be conveyed. What does the Gospel say about the nature and significance of Christ and his teaching? Form criticism is thus an attempt to reconstruct the theological opinions of the primitive church and pre-talmudic Judaism.
Form criticism begins by identifying a text's genre or conventional literary form, such as parables, proverbs, epistles, or love poems. It goes on to seek the sociological setting for each text's genre, its "situation in life" (German: Sitz im Leben). For example, the sociological setting of a law is a court, or the sociological setting of a psalm of praise (hymn) is a worship context, or that of a proverb might be a father-to-son admonition. Having identified and analyzed the text's genre-pericopes, form criticism goes on to ask how these smaller genre-pericopes contribute to the purpose of the text as a whole.
Form criticism was originally developed for Old Testament studies by Hermann Gunkel. Martin Noth, Gerhard von Rad, and other scholars, who used it to supplement the documentary hypothesis with reference to its oral foundations.[18] It later came to be applied to the Gospels by Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann, among others.
Over the past few decades, form criticism's emphasis on oral tradition has waned in Old Testament studies. This is largely because scholars are increasing skeptical about our ability to distinguish the "original" oral traditions from the literary sources that preserve them. As a result, the method as applied to the Old Testament now focuses on the Bible's literary genres, becoming virtually synonymous with genre criticism.