Radical Form Criticism-Modern Myth?

The writing of the Gospels was a process in three stages. Jesus ministered, and then, before and after Pentecost, disciples and apostles recounted his words and deeds. Some years later the evangelists compiled and edited in accordance with their own aims.

The analysis of these three steps is called “form criticism.” Some scholars would say that the record is generally historically correct, but radical form critics have maintained that the Christ it presents bears little resemblance to the historic Christ. They work from two presuppositions: first, that the primitive Christian community invented legends, and second, that the early Church selected, adapted, and elaborated what it received from the first disciples and, if necessary, created new material to illustrate faith—to produce teaching illustrations, i.e., myth.

Radical form criticism tries to show that, as William Neil describes it, although “Jesus had said and done things that are remembered, the Church had had such a big hand in shaping the sayings and stories we find in the Gospels that we cannot really talk, in any sense, of a Jesus of history, or hope to form a picture of what Jesus said and did that corresponds with the facts. All we can get is a picture of what the early Church believed about Jesus” (“The Jesus of History,” The Expository Times, June, 1964, p. 261).

If the Gospels are not to a reasonable degree historic, then Christianity is a “mystery” religion, and we should in all honesty say so. Radical form criticism sees the founder of our religion as a phantom, and so reduces the foundations to a series of question marks that will not bear the weight traditional Christianity puts upon them. Ambivalent talk about secular history and salvation history as two separate things is sleight-of-hand that satisfies neither traditionalists nor modern man. Unacceptable, too, is the advice, “Trust the Church.” To speak of the Church’s theological interpretation of historic fact is one thing, but to posit the manufacture of “historic fact” for a theological purpose is quite another. The Exodus can be legitimately interpreted as God’s action, but to manufacture an account of an empty tomb to produce a basis for the coming of the Spirit of Truth is something else.

There is one history, and faith rests upon the certainty of what God did in it (Luke 1:1–4). And the Jesus of the Gospels was no phantom; he was of the flesh and bone of history.

The case made by radical form criticism is a broken cistern that will not hold water. There is no proof that the community colored Jesus, rather than that Jesus colored the community. There are no secret sources to say that the evangelists compiled manufactured anecdotes. If a historian applies personal color to his material, does this make the basis unhistorical? And if there is no certainty about Christ’s words, how can we know that the gospel accounts of them differ basically from the original? Form criticism taken to its logical conclusions seems to destroy its own presuppositions.

Bultmann’s account of Jesus is utterly at variance with His impact. Did the Church build upon the “rock” of an insignificant Christ, or did Christ create the Church? If the latter, then Jesus was a person of extraordinary power who bequeathed to us more than a handful of bons mots. If the former, then the history of Christianity is incomprehensible.

One may ask why, if the community imagination is so fertile, major religions do not spring up every century under the stimulus of some character with popular ideas and an aura. Why not with Gandhi? Or why didn’t the legends about Robin Hood get him off the ground? And if the Jewish community already had a dreamed-up conception of the Messiah, why didn’t the folklore about the Jesus-Messiah follow its pattern? Why was the political-military figure of the Messiah transcended by the almost spontaneous and unanimous tangent of the spiritual figure unless there was reason to derail the traditional concept? Bar Cochba, dying sword in hand, was a far better candidate for the popular imaginings about the Messiah than Jesus ever was. No Jew, as long as he remained a Jew, could believe in Jesus as the Messiah after his shameful death.

“The New Testament knows nothing of this creative role,” Clark Pinnock has pointed out. “Paul, for example, kept clear in his mind the distinction between his own words and the words of Jesus (1 Cor. 7:10, 12, 25)” (“The Case Against Form Criticism,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, July 16, 1965, p. 13).

Also, Second Peter states, “For we did not follow cleverly designed myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (1:16). If this is a fraudulent statement, made soon after the writer exhorted his readers to “make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue” (1:5), then we must surely have here a naïve form of insanity.

First Timothy 6:20 and 21 is interesting. “O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you.” From creative additions, as well as false teaching? And what is the criterion for “false” when all around “apothegms,” “wonder tales,” “sayings,” “legends,” and “myths” are springing up like mushrooms for the gospel writers to pick?

The verse continues, “Avoid the godless chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge, for by professing it some have missed the mark as regards the faith.” “Contradictions” and “knowledge” are worth looking at among the form critics.

Dibelius, Bultmann, Schweizer, Bornkamm, Conzelmann, Fuller, Nineham, and Käsemann (who admits, “We simply do not have formal criteria to find out which aspects can be genuinely attributed to Jesus Himself”) all differ in their estimates of which gospel material is “original.” The “science” of form criticism is based upon subjectivism and the personal presuppositions of the investigators.

Is this a valid method for historians? Is it valid to declare that gospel material is not original but is carefully embroidered to make it look original, but provide no proof of the assertion? What is the mentality behind believing that if there are no details in a gospel incident, then there are no eyewitnesses, and therefore it is not original; and if there are details, then these have been added to give, as a line in The Mikado says, “verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing narrative”? Is it possible to edit out the supernatural and pull the rug from under the Holy Spirit’s authorship of the Scriptures on the basis of subjective supposition and not “have missed the mark as regards the faith”? Is it logical to declare at the same time that Jesus Christ is a positive revelation of God and that the Gospels from which we derive that impression consist of legendary and untrustworthy matter? Did Paul have tongue in cheek when he testified to the facts and teaching of the Gospels by his claims to work miracles in the power Christ bestowed?

Note that the Christian community had little time to embroider substantially the forty genuine sayings of Jesus that Bultmann, apparently gifted with almost supernatural discernment, sifts from the Gospels. Dibelius himself suggests a chronology of the New Testament that gives little latitude for the creation of Christian folklore: Jesus crucified about A.D. 30; Paul converted A.D. 32–35 and checking his doctrine with the apostolic council of A.D. 49–50. Paul in First Corinthians 11:2 and 15:3 speaks of the teaching tradition he had received and passed on to them four or five years previously. This letter is usually dated A.D. 55–56. So Dibelius can say, “Hence, we may assert that the weighty elements of the tradition had become fixed in the first twenty years after Jesus died … while eyewitnesses still lived, and when the events were only about a generation old” (From Tradition to Gospel, 1934). The formative period was relatively short, and written records could have come under the scrutiny of the apostles and eyewitnesses. There is no proof that such records did not circulate very early.

PARABLE

riding easily

on the bright

unbroken sea—

bursting with a diversity

of lives—

a remnant salvaged

from a universal debris—

lifted by water above

the world’s dark

muddy floor—

washed clean—

expecting the dove

and the sign of green

and light

from an opening door—

God’s biggest parable:

the ark

LUCI SHAW

Even if they did not, would the integrity of the oral tradition have disintegrated in this short time? These form critics assume so, but it is not our bounden duty to follow them. Oriental oral tradition has usually survived intact for far longer than the oral material for the Synoptic Gospels is supposed to have circulated. Also, rabbinic teaching set a pattern of good memory work in contrast to our reliance on books—and a parable is a hard form to alter fundamentally by repetition.

The allegation is that the early Church historicized its ideas and practices by making up appropriate stories and attributing them to Jesus. We know from the rest of the New Testament that some contentious church issues arose—where do we find these dealt with in the Gospels? It just doesn’t add up. Humphrey Palmer comments: “Were the first Christians adept at thinking up stories of Jesus to suit a situation in their church? Form critics do not show this but take it for granted in all their reasonings. These reasonings do, however, show how adept form critics are at thinking up early church situations to suit stories of Jesus” (The Logic of Gospel Criticism, 1968, p. 185).

The idea of “witness” or “testimony” appears in various forms more than one hundred and fifty times in the New Testament. This is further evidence that the apostles were concerned with history, with faithful reporting of words and deeds. John claims in his concluding gospel verses that the testimony of the witness is true. As John is the only writer mentioning the “Spirit of truth,” he must have had some interest in fidelity. And there is evidence that Mark had Peter breathing down his neck as he wrote.

The four gospel writers do not differ radically in their portrayals of Christ. There are different emphases, but they are in basic harmony. It is as though the four form a circle around Jesus, seeing different aspects of the one Christ. This unity is consistent with the portraits’ being the delineation of a historic reality, and is a challenge to the theory that would have the Gospels a jumble of myths, legends, and ideal creations. The two factors in the character, the divine and the human, are inseparably united; moral teaching springs as easily from one as from the other.

Could such a harmony of character, teaching, and deeds be produced by the creative membership of many scattered churches? Could the Christian community have produced something new and harmonious when it consisted of peasants, priests, and Pharisees, Samaritans, Hellenists, and Gentiles, all in tension over leadership and various controversial issues? Can we separate the Christ of the Judaizers’ legends from that of Hellenist or Gentile legends? Differences of culture should project themselves.

The Passion narrative is a unit and is too extensive an area of dramatized action to be made up piecemeal.

In fact, the whole form-criticism theory of piecemeal creativity is like asking hundreds of groups of people to submit a paragraph and then, on putting them together, finding a literary masterpiece qualitatively above the creative imagination of the people concerned. A masterpiece of near-fiction that dominated the Roman Empire in three hundred years! It is like saying that the audience of the Globe Theatre created Shakespeare’s plays! To appreciate and admire works of genius is one thing, but for the populace to create them is another.

Another area of potential disharmony is the contrast between the alleged teaching myths of the early Church, which would be conscious, artistic creations of dogmatic purpose, and the legendary material that is supposed to have grown out of the unconscious workings of the community mind in its efforts to impart reality to its hopes. It is remarkable that the two cannot be delineated.

If, as the sociologist of religion would claim, belief was so manufactured in order to satisfy deep needs and relieve guilt feelings, then it may be pertinent to inquire whether there is not a converse process. Could the form critic’s doubts be subconsciously fabricated so as to relieve the conscience and preserve the ego by removing from the Gospels the divine element of Christ’s standards, and thus submission to his lordship attested by the supernatural and the miraculous?

In sum, Christians can safely refute the claim that the Gospels are the idealized inventions of numerous and varied mythologists. If God has not moved in living history, we must look for proof of it elsewhere than in the tight-rope expertise of radical form criticism. Those “holding the form of religion but denying the power of it” (2 Tim. 3:5) should note the incoming tide that appears to be God’s outpouring of his Spirit upon the Church to undo the damage of this modernism.

One residue of the outgoing tide of radical form criticism is the uneasy submission of laymen to a new type of “specialist” priesthood. “Scientific” mumbo-jumbo issues from the workshops of the world-church, and the bewildered but conditioned layman accepts it as sanctified and knowledgeable. Progress!—now he places more confidence in scholars than in the Word of God! In this way the faith in Christ gives way to faith in speculations about Christ.

Modern scholarship is a wonderful thing, but the lesson of radical form criticism is that its logical and intelligent application is a goal that may still be ahead of us.

the care and feeding of shepherds

Our parsonage was a rented two-story farmhouse with no plumbing and no central heat. The church my father served in rural Illinois needed but could not support a full-time shepherd. So he also drove school buses and sold men’s clothing at Ward’s.

Christmas could have been a cold and hungry time had it not been for the Christian love and sharing of our parishioners. It was their practice to bring forty or fifty bushels of food to the church the Sunday night just before Christmas. Our whole family would stand in the front of the sanctuary and receive these love-gifts with tears of appreciation streaming down our faces. That annual event was the care and feeding of their shepherd.

Years later, with an unmistakable call to serve as a committed layman, I found myself in a position to minister to the needs of spiritual shepherds. And I discovered that there was much to learn about this responsibility.

It was a significant step when I learned that the shepherd-flock analogy had its limitations. Correcting this to the concept of co-workers in Christ freed me to minister to my pastor’s needs as well as to be ministered to by him. This co-worker had been given specialized functions or “gifts” to be used in the Body of Christ, just as the Lord had given some to me. Each of us was called to a particular role. The pastor serves as an equipper and enabler of co-workers who carry out the ministry in various ways.

I realized that this co-worker was also a co-struggler. His condition of redeemed sinner was no different than mine. Both of us stood before the grace of God—trying, failing, sometimes succeeding in being faithful to our calling. This realization enabled me to treat him as a fellow human being, rather than as a “house Christian” to be called upon to say grace at special functions.

Accepting my pastor as a fellow struggler meant that I tried to treat him the way I wanted him to treat me. I avoided condemning him when he did not live up to my high expectations of him. I did not expect him to be more than I was willing to be myself. And, most importantly, I sought to minister to him rather than merely waiting for him to minister to me. Here are some of the forms my ministry to him took (not listed in any order):

1. occasionally inviting him to play tennis, or to sit around and talk;

2. believing in him, his potential, his promise, and thanking God for what He has done and is going to do in the pastor’s life;

3. believing in other Christians and affirming God’s grace in their lives (this serves as food to the pastor, because he finds meaning in his life by the spiritual growth he observes in his congregation);

4. trying to sense his needs before they become pressing (for example, suggesting that he be given a raise before he has to ask for it);

5. following through in my responsibility or finding a fellow layman to do it rather than dumping a job on the pastor;

6. insisting that he spend times of rest and vacation with his family, and not with members of the congregation;

7. listening to him and meeting him where he is by extending myself as I really am, not as I want him to think I am;

8. realizing that he has hundreds of names to remember when he stumbles over mine;

9. being aware that there are moments when he needs the truth, not tact—the truth spoken in love, not hostility, and motivated by his need, not by my insecurities;

10. expecting him to be a student of God’s Word;

11. trying to turn his vision and thoughts to Jesus Christ when he is discouraged and cynical or overburdened and weary;

12. facilitating reconciliation between him and any in the congregation with whom he is estranged;

13. forgetting the weight and burden of his schedule when he can be used, for that is his life-blood.

If he is a husband and father, I can minister further to him:

1. Realize that the congregation did not hire his wife and children. She does not have to be an officer of any group or even a member of it. She does not have to teach Sunday school or sing in the choir just because she is the pastor’s wife.

2. Treat their children as I treat the other children in the congregation, with neither more nor less deference, no more critical an attitude.

3. Honor the privacy of their personal lives. How his wife keeps their house and spends her time is their business. Where they go on vacation and how much it costs is their business. How often they mow the grass and trim the hedge is their business.

4. Pray for them always.

It is exciting to discover ways of taking part in the care and feeding of shepherds. The love, affirmation, and ministry of parishioners may lead a pastor to feel as Paul did toward the congregation at Philippi: “I thank my God for you all every time I think of you; and every time I pray for you, I pray with joy, because of the way in which you have helped me in the work of the gospel, from the very first day until now” (Phil. 1:3–5, Good News for Modern Man).—CLIFF STABLER, consultant for church renewal, Evangelistic Association of New England, Boston, Massachusetts.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

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