A Critique of Form Criticism of the Gospels скачать в хорошем качестве

A Critique of Form Criticism of the Gospels

How should evangelicals respond to the charge that the gospels are based on faulty oral traditions? Dr. Richard J. Bauckham Most 20th century study of the Gospels was indebted to people who were form critics, who were working at the beginning of the 20th century, and who had certain very definite ideas about how the traditions and the stories of Jesus, were transmitted orally until they reached the writers of the Gospels. But simply, the communities kind of owned these traditions and passed them on. So, there was a period, as it were, in which all sorts of things could have happened to the transmission. Many gospel scholars took that basic picture but argued that the transmission was fairly conservative, that the traditions were preserved fairly accurately, but others allowed all sorts of creative developments in that period of oral transmission. Now, I would say perhaps two main critical points about that picture of how the traditions were transmitted. One is, that the form critics ignored the very simple fact that the eyewitnesses, who were there at the beginning of the transmission of the traditions, were still there throughout the period when the traditions were circulating orally. So, it wasn't as though, you know, these things happened independently. The eyewitnesses were there and they continued to tell their stories and report the teachings of Jesus. They were the, sort of, authoritative guarantors to which one would go, really, if one wanted to know, authoritatively, the traditions about Jesus. And I think by the time that Mark, for example, is writing, probably, the first of the gospels, it would be natural for a gospel writer to turn to the eyewitnesses who were still around to get his material for the gospel. So, I think the continuing role of the eyewitnesses, who weren't simply superseded by this anonymous tradition, is a very important fact. The second point is that the form critics at the beginning of the 20th century were working with probably the best models of oral tradition that were around at the time. But we now know a great deal more about oral tradition. Folk tales were also, by definition, fictional material, and people who passed on fictional material were often interested in creative development of it. They didn't feel bound to transmit material accurately. But we now know far more about oral tradition. The way oral traditions are preserved and passed on and treated, there is very much from society to society. And we have to know something about the particular society. But what we do know is that if an oral society wants to preserve its traditions faithfully, because it regards them as historical — and many oral societies do have a distinction between historical traditions and stories and will treat them differently — but if they have historical traditions that they want to preserve accurately, then they have ways of doing so. For example, they may have techniques of memorization so that, sometimes, things are memorized very closely and in detail. But also, they would have people to whose care the preservation of traditions was committed. So, traditions aren't necessarily, you know, at the mercy of how anybody might pass them on. There were people who are, kind of, authorized to preserve them.. We know a lot more about oral tradition, and there's no reason to think that it worked in the way the form critics proposed. Learn more at http://thirdmill.org.