While translating Dibelius’s book on John the Baptist (Die urchristliche Überlieferung von Johannes dem Täufer, 1911), I have been contemplating his discussions concerning methods of literary criticism. In particular, how do we identify bits of tradition from the later narrative framework in which they were placed?
Martin Dibelius (1883-1947)
The collectors’ additions are often clearly distinguishable from collected material: Information about changes in location and time,1 remarks of a pragmatic nature,2isolatedsayings of the Lord conveyed according to oral tradition, frequently added simply to insert a catchphrase, and finally, the so-called summary reports,3 with general information about healings.
(Dibelius 1911, p. 4, my translation, italics his)
Don’t imagine that Dibelius thought that separating out earlier tradition, layer by layer would be an easy task. Not at all, but at times the evangelists do reveal some obvious seams, and the “precious stones” stand out from the settings.
Hence, the religious nature of the gospel writings precludes an “objective” historical account in the modern sense. However, the non-literary character of the Gospels assures the likelihood that some elements of the ancient and original tradition could be preserved within the accounts. After all, the authors do not want to create literary works, but rather to preserve and reproduce the tradition that was handed down to them. The fact that they polish the stones, fit them together, and place them in a framework does not necessarily rule out their understanding of the innate properties of these stones. (Dibelius 1911, p. 2, my translation, bold emphasis mine)
Here we see Dibelius giving credit to the compilers of the Gospels. According to his way of thinking, they didn’t write non-literary books because they lacked ability or ambition. Instead, he believed they valued the preservation of tradition above all else.
The image of polished stones set within a frame reminded me of the largely misunderstood metaphor of pearls on a necklace, usually attributed to K. L. Schmidt. In actuality, he said the opposite of what most people think he said:
We could illustrate it with this metaphor: the Markan account is not a necklace made of loosely strung-together pearls between which we can squeeze one sometimes here, sometimes there, but rather a pile of unstrung pearls, even if some pearls will match up from time to time. (Schmidt, 1919, p. 281, emphasis mine)*
At the same time, I became interested in a term Dibelius used, “Sammelberichte,” usually rendered as “summary reports” in English. Obviously, the presence of a summary paragraph at the end of a set of stories indicates a joint or a seam in the narrative. And while searching for cases in which scholars talked about such literary breaks, I came across a truly wonderful analogy for bits of tradition within a later framework.
Soup with Large Croutons (Wikimedia)
Julius Wellhausen’s croûtons-in-the-soup simile aptly describes the evidence and data paradigm needed to re-examine the single authorship of Luke and Acts. While “joints and seams” form the literary intersections that unite segments of written material, they simultaneously define the boundaries where those segments have been linked. That is to say, functionally they both unite and divide. (Walters 2009, p. 43)
Scholars who study the historical Jesus will sometimes compile lists of minimal “secure facts” — the few things we can be reasonably certain “must be” true about the life of Christ. At the barest minimum, we have: “An itinerant Jewish teacher or preacher from Galilee who was crucified by Pilate.”
In the words of E. P. Sanders:
We have seen that the gospels depict Jesus and his disciples as itinerant. Some or all of them had homes and families, but they spent a lot of time on the road, and there is no mention of their working during Jesus’ active career. In part they were busy proclaiming the kingdom; in part the condition of the call of the close disciples was that they give up everything. (Sanders 1993, p. 107)
Bricks and mortar
The overwhelming number of NT scholars today would likely tell us that the reason the gospels portray a traveling Jesus is that such a portrayal reflects reality. But recently, while reading Redactional Style in the Marcan Gospel by E. J. Pryke, it struck me that many of the key redactional elements in Mark, our first narrative gospel, have to do with time and place. In other words, when Mark joined his stories together he needed some brief connecting language to create some sort of flow. Changing the time and place provides an implicit explanation for a change in subject and audience.
Mark, as you know, frequently didn’t care to elaborate on these shifts in place and time. In fact, quite often he barely takes the time to say Jesus and his cohorts “immediately” went from location A to location B.
And immediately after they came out of the synagogue, they came into the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. (Mark 1:29, NASB)
Redaction critics look for linguistic markers (peculiar usage, telltale vocabulary, etc.) that would tend to signify the parts of the gospels that are probably redactional. In other words, they look for indicators that help discriminate between the story-bricks and the redaction-mortar that holds them together.
Each evangelist had his own set of quirks. Pryke notes that Mark, for example, had a habit of using the genitive absolute when introducing a new pericope. In a nutshell, the genitive absolute is a short participial phrase unrelated to the main clause except, in Mark’s case, as a kind of introductory scene-setting device. In Mark 5:2, for example, we have: Continue reading “Is Jesus’ Itinerancy a Secure Fact or a Narrative Device?”
