INT.Chapter 2. Part 3.docx

The Stage of Final Composition: Redaction Criticism In our account of gospel origins thus far, we have paid but scant attention to the evangelists themselves. We have looked at the earliest, mainly oral stage of transmission, where the apostles and other unknown Christian preachers and teachers pres...

The Stage of Final Composition: Redaction Criticism In our account of gospel origins thus far, we have paid but scant attention to the evangelists themselves. We have looked at the earliest, mainly oral stage of transmission, where the apostles and other unknown Christian preachers and teachers preserved Jesus’ teachings and the stories about him. And we have examined the written sources, known and unknown, that the evangelists used in composing their gospels. The evangelist Mark, we have argued, is the author of one of those basic sources. But our interest in Mark from a source-critical standpoint is not in his work as an author but in his gospel as a source for Matthew and Luke. So in both form criticism and source criticism, interest in the evangelists themselves recedes into the background. It is redaction criticism that brings the evangelists back onto center stage. Description. Redaction criticism seeks to describe the theological purposes of the evangelists by analyzing the way they use their sources. Without denying the need for form critics to study the oral traditions or for source critics to scrutinize written sources, redaction critics insist that the evangelists must be given their rightful place as authors: people who, however dependent on sources and traditions, have creatively and purposefully molded that tradition into a literary whole with a theology of its own. The evangelists have not simply collected traditions and sources and pasted them together. They have added their own modifications to those traditions, and in doing so, they have brought their own particular emphases to the story of Jesus. Redaction criticism is therefore one method of gospel study, and it includes five basic elements. 1. Redaction criticism distinguishes between tradition and redaction. “Tradition,” in this sense, is everything—from long written sources to brief orally transmitted stories and sayings—that the evangelist had before him as he wrote his gospel. “Redaction” refers to the process of modifying that tradition as the gospel was actually written. Because redaction criticism depends on our ability to identify the traditions on which the evangelist worked (so we can know what changes he made), it is accomplished most successfully on Matthew and Luke. We can compare their final edition with two extensive sources they have used: Mark and Q (albeit, a Q reconstructed from Matthew and Luke). For the same reason, redaction criticism of Mark is a much more difficult procedure, since we do not possess any sources that he has used. 2. The redactional, or editorial activity of the evangelists can be seen in several areas: The material they have chosen to include and exclude. For instance, it is generally agreed that the roughly parallel sermons recorded by Matthew in chapters 5–7 and Luke in 6:20–49 are taken from Q. Luke’s, however, is less than one-third the length of Matthew’s, and it is evident that Luke has omitted almost all reference to the Old Testament and the law (e.g., Matt. 5:17–19, and the antitheses of Matt. 5:21–48). This suggests that Matthew has a serious interest in teaching the church in his day about Jesus’ relationship to the law, while Luke does not. The arrangement of the material. It can be seen from table 4 above that Matthew differs from Mark and Luke in the placement of three significant miracle stories: the stilling of the storm (8:18, 23–27), the healing of the Gerasene demoniac(s) (8:28–34), and the intertwined accounts of the raising of Jairus’s daughter and the healing of the woman with a flow of blood (9:18–26). Since Mark is probably Matthew’s main source for these stories, it is evident that Matthew has chosen to put them in a different order. When we find him doing the same thing with other miracle stories that end up in Matthew 8–9, we are justified in concluding that Matthew is deliberately arranging the material to make a point about Jesus as miracle worker. Such rearrangement takes place within pericopes also: Does the change in order of the temptations (Matt. 4:1–11 = Luke 4:1–12) reveal different emphases of the respective evangelists? The “seams” that the evangelist uses to stitch his tradition together. In order to fashion a continuous narrative from diverse sources, an evangelist has to supply transitions. These transitions, or seams, often reveal important concerns of the author. Matthew, for instance, alternates teaching and narrative in a very effective manner, signaling the transition at the end of discourses with a repeated formula: “when Jesus had finished saying these things” (7:28; 19:1; see also 11:1; 13:53; 26:1). Additions to the material. In Luke’s account of Jesus’ healing ministry and call of the Twelve (6:12–19), which appears to depend on Mark 3:7–18, he mentions the fact, not found in Mark, that “Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God” (Luke 6:12). Here, perhaps, we find evidence of a Lukan concern. Omission of material. Where the redaction critic can be pretty sure that an evangelist has had access to a tradition that he does not include, it is important to ask whether the omission serves a theological interest. For instance, it is frequently argued that Luke has omitted the reference to Jesus “coming on the clouds of heaven” (found in both Mark and Matthew) in his reply to the high priest (22:69) because he wants to avoid the idea of an imminent parousia. Change of wording. In a well-known beatitude, Jesus, according to Matthew, pronounces a blessing on “the poor in spirit” (5:3); according to Luke, on the “poor” (6:20). The redaction critic would note this difference as perhaps indicating Luke’s relatively greater interest in socioeconomic issues. 3. Redaction critics look for patterns in these kinds of changes within a gospel. Where such a pattern emerges, we may conclude that we are dealing with a theological concern of the author. For instance, the addition of reference to Jesus praying (noted above) is of a piece with similar additions about prayer that Luke makes throughout his gospel. Prayer, we can surmise, was a theological concern of Luke. Following this procedure, a general picture of the theological stance of a particular gospel is eventually built up. 4. On the basis of this general theological picture, the redaction critic then seeks to establish a setting for the production of the gospel. Luke’s alleged omission of references to an imminent parousia, for instance, is said to show that he was writing in a setting where the delay of the parousia had become a problem. To “the setting in the life of Jesus” and “the setting in the life of the church” (the form-critical concern) is added “the setting in the life of the evangelist and his community.” 5. Some include within redaction criticism not only the study of the evangelists’ modification of tradition but the literary and theological characteristics of the gospels, however discerned—that is, what is sometimes called composition criticism. To some extent, this is a fruitless semantic quarrel, but it is perhaps better to maintain the narrower definition of redaction criticism so as to differentiate it from the composition criticism that good exegetes have always done. Origins. William Wrede, though not a redaction critic in the sense defined above, was something of a precursor of the emphasis typical of redaction criticism. Wrede wrote at a time when the “Markan hypothesis” reigned in scholarly study of the gospels. This hypothesis was so named, not just because it maintained Markan priority, but because it also claimed that Mark gave a generally untheological, historically reliable portrait of Jesus. Wrede destroyed this assumption by demonstrating that Mark was as thoroughly theological as the other gospels. Specifically, Wrede argued that Mark had added the many references where Jesus urged silence about his messiahship. This “messianic secret” was designed to explain how it came about that so few people recognized Jesus to be the Messiah during his lifetime. While Wrede’s specific thesis is now generally discredited, his contention that Mark is as much theologian as historian (or theologian instead of historian) has been widely accepted. The implications of Wrede’s understanding of the evangelists as creative theologians were not immediately appropriated. Redaction criticism as an identifiable discipline did not develop until the 1950s. Three German critics were the pioneers in the field. Günther Bornkamm’s essay on the stilling of the storm, in which he sought to uncover Matthew’s theological point by comparing his account with Mark’s, was the earliest redaction-critical work.77 More significant were two monographs that appeared later in the decade. Hans Conzelmann, in The Theology of St. Luke, analyzed the theological standpoint of Luke, arguing that the evangelist imposed a threefold periodization of salvation history on the gospel material: the time of Israel, the time of Jesus, and the time of the church. In doing so, according to Conzelmann, Luke provided a basis for a continuing role of the Christian community in history, thereby defusing early Christian disappointment about the delay of the parousia, namely, the failure of Jesus to return as soon as expected. Willi Marxsen did for Mark what Conzelmann did for Luke. Mark, according to Marxsen, was also motivated by concern about the parousia, but Mark believed that the parousia was imminent and wrote his gospel with the overarching purpose of gathering together Christians in Galilee to await the Lord.79 It would be impossible to select even the most outstanding redaction-critical works since these initial studies. The conclusions reached by Bornkamm, Marxsen, and Conzelmann are not widely held anymore, but the methodology they pioneered has won a secure place in the field of gospel studies. Countless monographs, dissertations, and articles using redaction criticism analyze themes within a gospel or the gospel as a whole, or they compare and contrast the contribution of two or more evangelists to a theme. Hardly any serious study of the gospels proceeds without considerable utilization of redaction criticism. This is not to say that redaction criticism has ousted form criticism or source criticism; contemporary scholars employ all three together as they seek to understand the final product, the gospels (the redactional stage), in terms of the raw material that has gone into them (the stage of tradition). Evaluation. Popularity does not make anything right. As with any other method, we must take a critical look at redaction criticism before we endorse it as a method of gospel study. We begin with five criticisms of the discipline. 1. Redaction criticism depends for its validity on our ability to distinguish tradition and redaction. We must have a rather clear idea about the sources that a given evangelist has used before we can begin speaking about his modifications to those sources. Almost all redaction critics have assumed the validity of the two-source hypothesis in their research—that is, that Matthew and Luke both used Mark and another source, Q, in writing their gospels. Those who question the accuracy of that hypothesis will also, of course, have to establish a different basis on which to do redaction criticism. Advocates of the two-gospel hypothesis, for instance, will have to speak about Mark’s modifications of Matthew and Luke rather than Matthew’s modifications of Mark, and they will be able to do redaction criticism of Matthew only with great difficulty. But even if we assume the general reliability of the two-source hypothesis, our difficulties for redaction criticism are not eliminated. First, as we have argued, in some places the direction of dependence hypothesized with the two-source theory may be reversed. Some places in Mark, let us say, may depend on a version of a story that found its way eventually almost intact into Matthew’s gospel. In such a situation we would have to speak of Mark’s changes of “Matthew” rather than Matthew’s changes of Mark. Second, Matthew or Luke may sometimes depend on a version of a story independent of, but parallel to, Mark. Again, then, what a redaction critic would label “Matthean redaction” (of Mark) may be a tradition that Matthew is simply passing on. Third, since we do not possess a copy of Q, arguments about whether Matthew or Luke has redacted Q are necessarily uncertain. Scholars generally think that they can identify, by various factors, what the original of Q probably was, and they base their redactional judgments on that supposition. But the process is necessarily subjective and leaves room for much disagreement. For instance, with respect to the difference between “poor” (Luke) and “poor in spirit” (Matthew) already mentioned, can we be sure that Luke has socialized Q, rather than Matthew spiritualizing it? In this case, perhaps we can suspect that Luke is the one responsible, since his change conforms to an obvious emphasis in his gospel. But the decision is often much more difficult and is fraught with possibilities for error. All this goes to say that redaction critics often need to be much more cautious about claiming that an evangelist has changed his source. We may not be able to identify redactional elements as often as, or as certainly as, we might like. 2. Redaction critics too often assume that all the changes an evangelist makes to his tradition are theologically motivated. Many no doubt are; but many others, and particularly minor changes affecting one or two words, are stylistic in nature. In other cases, even major additions may be due not to theological concerns but to historical interest. We cannot omit simple historical purposes from the intentions of the evangelists. 3. Redaction critics have sometimes equated “redactional emphases” with the evangelist’s theology. What is determined to be redaction shows us what is distinct about a particular gospel in comparison with the others or with its sources. We may often legitimately conclude that what is redactional, since it is what an evangelist has deliberately changed, is particularly significant to that evangelist. But it is certainly not the whole of, or perhaps even representative of, his theology. To assume so would be to assume that the tradition an evangelist takes over is not of interest to him or part of his theology. This is manifestly absurd. It would be as if, in comparing the writings of Calvin and Beza, the theologies of each of these men were determined only on the basis of what was unique in each one. The common emphases of Matthew, Mark, and Luke far outweigh their distinctives, and a holistic picture of what each teaches must take both into account. 4. The identification of the setting of a particular gospel on the basis of the author’s theology is often far more specific than the data allow. That the additions of Matthew to both Mark and Q involving the Mosaic law and Old Testament quotations demonstrate that Matthew was writing in a setting and to an audience that needed teaching on this matter is evident. And that the tenor of these additions may even allow us to make some guesses about the particular problems of the community in which Matthew was writing is also clear. But the details of setting that some redaction critics hypothesize are often castles built on sand. They usually depend on only part of the evidence (hence, different critics working on the same gospel come up with conflicting settings) and draw conclusions far more specific than the evidence allows. Even the tendency of redaction critics to draw inferences about the nature of the communities to which the evangelists were writing may have to be given up if the argument of Richard Bauckham—that the gospels were written to the general Christian public and not to specific communities—is accepted. 5. Redaction criticism is often pursued in such a way that the historical trustworthiness of the gospel material is called into question. It is not so much that redaction criticism seeks to prove the unhistorical nature of the changes introduced by the evangelists. Rather, many redaction critics assume that the evangelists would have little concern about it. Thus, as Marxsen puts it, “Within this approach, the question as to what really happened is excluded from the outset.” In this sense, redaction criticism is a true descendent of radical form criticism. Mark, Matthew, and Luke, according to many redaction critics, had no more interest in historical accuracy than did the early Christian community as reconstructed by Bultmann and Dibelius. So typical is the antihistorical bias of many of the best-known redaction critics that redaction criticism, like form criticism, has earned for itself the reputation of being a method that attacks the historical reliability of the gospels. But it is unfair to generalize from the way many pursue redaction criticism to the method itself. Nothing about redaction criticism per se is antihistorical. Indeed, as we will argue below, redaction criticism has some very positive contributions to make to our interpretation of the Synoptic Gospels. Why, then, do so many redaction critics come to conclusions that question the historical credibility of the gospels? One major reason is an assumption among many redaction critics that an evangelist cannot be both theologically motivated and historically accurate. We are often presented, explicitly or implicitly, with the choice between history and theology. Yet there is no reason why an evangelist cannot have both concerns. That Matthew, Mark, and Luke have redacted the gospel traditions that came to them is beyond doubt. And for some redaction critics, it appears, this is enough to justify the conclusion that, in tampering with the tradition, the evangelists have tampered with history. But this is not necessary. Rearranging, adding, omitting, and rewording need not detract from the historicity of the event or teaching concerned. For instance, newspapers will frequently rewrite for their own readers news-service reports that they receive, but their rewrites need not affect the accuracy of the report. Major speeches will sometimes be summarized in a few words, or excerpts will be taken from them. In doing so, different newspapers may focus on different emphases in the same speech. We do not accuse these newspapers of inaccuracy in doing this, nor should we accuse the evangelists of historical inaccuracies if they summarize, excerpt, or reword Jesus’ own sayings. That they have done so seems clear, as a comparison among the evangelists at almost any page in a synopsis shows. But their failure to preserve the ipsissima verba Jesu (the authentic words of Jesus) does not mean that they have tampered with the ipsissima vox Jesu (the authentic voice of Jesus). As long as the evangelists’ redactional modifications are consistent with what actually happened or with what Jesus actually said—even if they select, summarize, and reword—historical integrity is maintained. The question, then, boils down to the intentions of the evangelists as these can be determined from their express statements and their actual redactional work. Did they intend to write their gospels with a concern for historical accuracy? Or did they theologize the message of Jesus with little interest in whether it really happened that way or not? Redaction criticism, in itself, cannot answer these questions. And redaction critics themselves come to radically different conclusions about this matter. Some are convinced that a careful study of the modifications introduced by the evangelists shows no tampering with historicity. They separate redaction from tradition in order to understand the message of the gospels better, without supposing that the redaction has any less historical foundation than the tradition. Thus, for instance, they may conclude that Luke has redacted Jesus’ beatitude “Blessed are the poor” to include an economic focus by pairing it with his “Woe to you rich,” while Matthew has redacted the same saying as “Blessed are the poor in spirit” to emphasize the spiritual dimension. But as long as Jesus intended both—and it is quite likely that he did, given the Old Testament concept of “poor”—then it would be unfair to accuse either evangelist of an unhistorical tampering with the words of Jesus. Many instances are of course more difficult, and only a text-by-text scrutiny of the data is finally adequate to demonstrate the case one way or the other. Our point here is simply that redaction criticism need not be destructive to the historical accuracy of the gospels and that redaction critics who assume that the evangelists had no concern for history in their redactional activity have not proven their point. The problems of redaction criticism, then, are problems of exaggerated claims, false assumptions, and inappropriate applications. Pursued properly, redaction criticism offers the promise of real help in interpreting the gospels. Specifically, the discipline of redaction criticism has several positive elements. 1. By focusing on the final, authorial stage in the production of the gospels, it offers immediate help to the interpreter and theologian. In this respect it contrasts favorably with both form and source criticism, which, in their concern with the prehistory of the gospel tradition, are important for the historian of early Christianity but of only minimal help to the interpreter. Redaction criticism looks at the level that deserves most of our attention: the final literary product, the gospel. 2. Redaction criticism reminds us that the evangelists wrote with more than (though not less than) historical interest. They were preachers and teachers, concerned to apply the truths of Jesus’ life and teaching to specific communities in their own day. This theological purpose of the evangelists has sometimes been missed, with a consequent loss of appreciation for the significance and application of the history that the evangelists narrate. 3. Redaction criticism recognizes, and increases our appreciation of, the multiplicity of the gospels. The story of Jesus has come to us, not in one super-gospel, but in four gospels, each with its own distinct and important contribution to make to our understanding of Jesus. While creating occasional problems at the historical level, this fourfold gospel should be appreciated for the richness of perspective it brings. “Jesus is such a gigantic figure that we need all four portraits to discern him,” and redaction criticism helps us to appreciate the artistry and meaning of each of those portraits. THE GOSPELS AS WORKS OF LITERATURE We have sketched the process by which the gospels have come into being. We now turn our attention to the final products, considered on their own as works of literature. Two matters call for specific consideration: the question of the gospel genre, and the new literary criticism. The Genre of the Gospels Nowhere in the New Testament is any of the four accounts of Jesus’ ministry called a gospel (εὐαγγέλιον [euangelion]; on Mark 1:1, see the introduction to Mark). “Gospel” and the cognate verb “preach the gospel” (εὐαγγελίζομαι [euangelizomai]) are used in the New Testament, and especially frequently in Paul, to denote the message of God’s saving act in his Son (e.g., in Mark 1:14–15; Rom. 1:16; 1 Cor. 15:1; Gal. 1:6–7). Probably at some time toward the end of the first century or early in the second, titles were added to the church’s authoritative accounts of Jesus’ ministry. Certainly this was when “gospel” was first used to denote a work of literature.90 These titles preserve the stress on the singleness of the gospel by the way they are phrased: not “the gospel by Mark,” but “the [one] gospel, according to [the version of] Mark” (and Matthew and Luke and John). Justin, in the middle of the second century, is the first author to use the word gospel of the canonical accounts of Jesus’ ministry (Apol. 1.66; Dial. 10.2). It was probably Mark’s use of the word in prominent places in his gospel (e.g., 1:1, 14) that led to its use as a literary designation. No books before our gospels had ever been given this designation. What implications does this hold for the literary genre of the gospels? The question is an important one for the reader of the gospels because accurate interpretation depends to some extent on accurate decisions about genre. The phrase “red rose” will signify something quite different in a botanical treatise than it does in Robert Burns’s line “O, my luve is like a red, red rose.” Similarly, Jesus’ walking on the water will mean one thing for the reader who takes the gospels to be straightforward history and a very different thing for the reader who is convinced that he or she is reading a myth or a midrash. Modern study of the genre of the gospels began with K. L. Schmidt’s decision to classify them as “popular literature” (Kleinliteratur) rather than “literary works” (Hochliteratur). As popular literature, they could be expected to follow the rules of transmission typical of such literature—an important point for Schmidt, who was one of the pioneers of form criticism. This classification also meant that the gospels were to be viewed as distinct from the more literary biographies of various types prevalent in the ancient Greco-Roman world. From a slightly different perspective, C. H. Dodd viewed the gospels (and especially Mark) as mirroring the early Christian preaching (kerygma) about Christ. As expansions of this kerygma, the gospels were viewed more as the last stage in a continuous oral tradition than as self-conscious literary creations. These approaches to the gospels led to the view that they could be fitted into no ancient literary genre but were unique. Without necessarily subscribing to either Schmidt’s or Dodd’s view of gospel origins, many (perhaps even a majority of) contemporary scholars think that the gospels do not fit into any established literary category.94 But others are convinced that, while possessing some unique features, the gospels share enough features with other works of the ancient world to be placed in the genre of these works. A number of specific genre identifications have been proposed, from Greek aretalogy (stories of the miraculous deeds of a godlike hero) to Jewish midrash. But the most popular suggestion, as well as the most defensible, is that the gospels are biographies. True, they are quite different from the standard modern biography: they lack accounts of Jesus’ childhood development and education, his character and motivations, and chronological precision. But ancient Greco-Roman biographies did not always contain such features either. Indeed, the genre of biography was a very broad one in antiquity, encompassing works of considerable diversity. It was certainly broad enough, it is argued, to include the Synoptic Gospels. Our decision about how to classify the gospels will depend considerably on how much flexibility we give to the concept of genre. Most modern literary critics emphasize that genre does not impose a rigid set of requirements but creates the presumption of “a flexible set of expectations.” Moreover, they argue that there can really be no such thing as a “unique” book. To be understood at all, a book would have to conform to certain generic conventions. We should probably, therefore, place the gospels into the category of the ancient Greco-Roman bios, the biography. Even the Gospel of Luke, which might be classified as historiography because of its ties to the Acts of the Apostles, can be accomodated within the boundaries of the ancient biography. But we should at the same time recognize the genuinely unique features of the gospels. Unlike most other ancient biographies, the gospels are anonymous; they lack the literary pretensions characteristic of most biographies; and, most of all, they combine teaching and action in a preaching-oriented work that stands apart from anything else in the ancient world. This latter point is especially important in view of the tendency among some scholars to expand the concept of “gospel” to include such documents as Q, The Gospel of Thomas, and The Gospel of Truth. As Philip Jenkins has shown, this tendency owes more to contemporary ideological trends than it does to serious scholarship.99 In any case, these documents lack the narrative and kerygmatic mixture that seems to be intrinsic to the canonical gospel genre.