What is Redaction Criticism? (Guides to Biblical Scholarship)

r:\~T-----------------"""--"':"";:;:;;::;:::;:;;>..iii.

What Is Redaction Criticism? by Norman Perrin Guides to Biblical Scholarship Dan O. Via, Ir., Editor, New Testament Series Volumes Now Available What Is Form Criticism? by Edgar V. McKnight What Is Redaction Criticism? by Norman Perrin Volume Forthcoming Literary Criticism of the New Testam t by William A. Beardslee en

Fortress Press Philadelphia

•

Editor's Foreword

COPYRIGHT © 1969 BY FORTRESS PRESS

Biblical quotations from the Revised Standard V . o! the Bible, copyrighted 1946 and 1952 by th e;;~o~ SJt~hf ~hristian Education of the National ~o~:i o UTe es, are used by permission.

Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 72-81529 1096C69

Printed in the U.S.A.

1-181

In New Testament scholarship insights, concerns, and positions may not change as much or as fast as they do in the natural sciences. But over the years they do change, and change a great deal, and they are changing with increasing rapidity. At an earlier period in the history of New Testament scholarship the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) were thought to be relatively uncomplicated documents which had been put together without careful planning and which told a rather straightforward story. Today the synoptics are understood to be enormously intricate products containing subtle and ingenious literary patterns and highly developed theological interpretations. The three volumes in this series deal respectively with literary criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism, and their purpose is to disclose something of the process whereby these disciplines have gained an enlarged understanding of the complex historical, literary, and theological factors which lie both behind and within the synoptic Gospels. The volumes on form and redaction criticism will deal exclusively with the synoptic Gospels, while the one on literary criticism will deal selectively with all the areas of the New Testament. Literary criticism has traditionally concerned itself with such matters as the authorship of the various New Testament books, the possible composite nature of a given work, and the identity and extent of sources which may lie behind a certain document. More recently, however, biblical scholars have been paying attention to the criticism of fiction and poetry and to aesthetics and philosophy of language. Therefore the tl

WHAT IS REDACTION CRITICISM?

literary criticism of the New Testament has begun to reflect an interest in questions such as the relationship of content to form, the significance of structure or form for meaning, and the capacity of language to direct thought and to mold existence itself. The volume on literary criticism in this series will be sensitive to both the older and the newer aspects of the discipline. The purpose of form criticism has been to get behind the SOurceswhich literary criticism might identify and to describe what was happening as the tradition about Jesus was handed on o~ally from pe~s?~ to person and from community to commUllity. Form criticism has been especially concerned with the modi?cation~ ';'hich the life and thought of the churchboth jewish-Christian and gentile-Christian-have introduced into the tradition, and form critics have worked out criteria for distinguishing those strata in the Gospels which reflect the concerns of the church from the stratum that might be thought to go back to the historical Jesus, It has been shown that the church's vital life not only exerted a creative influence on the content of the tradition but also contributed formal charae:eristics, making it possible to classify much of the material m the synoptics according to literary form. Form criticism ha~ conce~ed itself largel~ with investigating the individual Ullits-stones and saymgs-m the synoptic Gospels. Redaction criticism is the most recent of the three disciplines to have become a self-conscious method of inquirv It a t f f iti '