FORM CRITICISM
Form Critics argue that before the Gospels were written down, there was an 'oral period' where stories about Jesus and sayings (logia) attributed to him were passed around by believers. Martin Dibelius (1919) suggests there are at least five FORMS of text in the Gospels:
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Paradigm: In Mark 2: 18-22, Jesus is questioned about why his Disciples aren't fasting and Jesus answers with famous images of a wedding and wine being poured into new wineskins. This is a paradigm: it's brief and memorable and it emphasizes Jesus' special teachings. Dibelius thinks it may preserve an actual thing Jesus said: his ipsissima verba. However, the Sitz im Leben is that early Christians were trying to workout whether they had to follow the Jewish Law or not. This text (which suggests Christians don't have to follow the Law) may have been changed or even invented to support an argument going on in the early years of Christianity.
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Myth: In Matthew 4: 1-11, Jesus fasts in the desert and is tempted by the Devil. This story contains many deep issues about faith, moral choices and evil. Many Christian artists have described it, painted it and dramatised it; Fyodor Dostoevsky devotes a wonderful chapter of The Brothers Karamazov (1880) to exploring it. But according to Dibelius and Bultmann, it didn't happen and is fiction. Bultmann suggests a Sitz im Leben, that the early Christians were criticized for worshiping a magician, so they compose this myth to refute that criticism (because it shows Jesus refusing to perform miracles for popularity); another Sitz im Leben could be that early Christians were encouraged to join the Zealot movement but this myth was created to reject that course of action (because Jesus refuses worldly power offered by the Devil).
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Exhortations: These are wise proverbs, often fairly general in character, that don't have any particular context. Some may not even be Jesus' own teachings. For example, the Jewish teacher Hillel the Elder (died 10 CE) summarised the Jewish Law with this phrase:
What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah - Hillel the Elder This is known as the GOLDEN RULE in Ethics and Jesus repeats it:
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do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets - Matthew 7: 12
YES
Form Criticism recognises that the Gospels are made up of units with different genres: there are myths and legends as well as memories of the actual words of Jesus. Form Criticism helps separate the IPSISSIMA VERBA (true words) of the Historical Jesus from the fictional stuff.
The Gospels can be relevant to today, but first they have to be DE-MYTHOLOGIZED. The Gospel-writers misunderstood a lot of the material they used and took supernatural events at face value. When stripped of these supernatural elements, the original preaching (kerygma) of Jesus can be found. For example, the Feeding of the 5000 is really a message about the importance of sharing.
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NO
Form Criticism goes even further than Source Criticism in breaking up the unity and coherence of the Gospels, carving them up into stand-alone units that only meant something to a particular group in the past. This gives the Bible little relevance to today.
The interpretations Form Critics offer are utterly subjective and reflect their own atheist assumptions and prejudices. They assume that miracles don't happen and that Jesus was just an ordinary moral philosopher, then 'discover' that anything striking about Jesus' teaching or life is really just a commonplace bit of ethical advice. This makes the Bible less interesting and influential, not more.
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