Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives

1-Form Criticism

21 Christopher Tuckett Form Criticism Chapter 1 Birger Gerhardsson is well known throughout the international New Testament scholarly world as a scholar of the highest repute. He has been accorded many honors, including being elected president of the international Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas in 1990.1 His major scholarly work, Memory and Manuscript, was first published in 1961,2 and since then he has published a series of other books, articles, and essays over a long and productive scholarly career. His Memory and Manuscript constituted a highly significant challenge to many of the presuppositions and arguments of the discipline of form criticism, which was at the time a (if not the) dominant approach in gospel studies. In 1961, Gerhardsson was something of a lone voice (and as such a highly courageous one) in challenging many of the accepted scholarly norms of the day. But certainly since 1961, many other critical voices have been raised against several key aspects of the form-critical enterprise, and Gerhardsson ’s work was in a real sense seminal in opening up and generating debate and discussion in important areas. Gerhardsson himself has also returned to many of the subjects raised in his early book, especially as they relate to the alleged “results” of form criticism, in his further publications .3 In this essay, I consider Gerhardsson’s significant contributions in the discussions about form criticism and related topics, and then seek to analyze some other aspects of the discipline of form criticism, taking 22 B Christopher Tuckett into account too Gerhardsson’s own counterproposals to some of the suggestions put forward by the form critics. The Work of Birger Gerhardsson The discipline known as “form criticism” is a multifaceted enterprise with a number of different—and distinguishable—aspects. Over the years it has generated a great deal of discussion and debate, and perhaps no one has done more to invigorate and enrich that debate than Birger Gerhardsson. Gerhardsson’s early magnum opus, Memory and Manuscript , makes it clear in the introduction that his study arises in a significant way out of the work of the early form critics (Martin Dibelius, Rudolf Bultmann) and, whilst acknowledging the great importance of their work, raises some critical questions about key aspects of the whole enterprise of form criticism.4 Gerhardsson’s great contribution has been above all to force New Testament scholars, and especially New Testament form critics, to think about the concrete process of transmission of traditions in early Christianity and especially of traditions about Jesus.5 In order to appreciate Gerhardsson’s contributions fully, we should first consider briefly some aspects of the work of the early form critics to which, in part at least, Gerhardsson’s work provides an important response and possible correction. The classic works of form criticism have generally been seen in the contributions of three German scholars—Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Martin Dibelius, and Rudolf Bultmann—working in the early part of the twentieth century.6 As developed especially in the work of Dibelius and Bultmann, the main aim of form criticism as applied to the Gospels is to attempt to reach behind the present form of the Gospel stories about Jesus to identify the way(s) in which the traditions about Jesus circulated prior to the writing of our present Gospel accounts. In addition, the attempt is made to deduce how far the material might go back in the history of the tradition, in particular whether and how far it could confidently be traced back to Jesus himself.7 In this approach, a number of basic assumptions were, and are, made. The first of these is that prior to the writing of the Gospels the tradition consisted of individual separable units (stories, sayings, etc.), which may have been separated from each other at an earlier stage. The task of joining them all together into a connected whole was generally that of the evangelists themselves. This was above all the main thesis in the Form Criticism B 23 work of Schmidt. More significant, and certainly more debatable, were then the further moves made by Dibelius and Bultmann. Both went on to argue that many of the individual units of the tradition showed significant similarity with each other in terms of their structure or “form.” Another fundamental assumption, taken almost as axiomatic, was that the traditions about Jesus were preserved and handed on because they were found to be useful in...