John as Storyteller

The emergence of narrative criticism

Until the late 1970s, the traditional methods for the study of the gospels and Acts were form criticism, source criticism, historical criticism, tradition history, redaction criticism, and textual criticism. Broadly speaking, these methods were concerned to answer the following questions: (1) What forms of material were available to the evangelists, and how were they used in the earliest church? (form criticism). (2) What sources were available to the evangelists when they wrote their gospels? (source criticism). (3) How much do the gospels tell us about Jesus and about the churches for which they were written? (historical criticism). (4) How much did the words and works of Jesus change during the years before the gospels were composed? (tradition history). (5) What theological and sociological purposes lie behind the evangelist's selection and expression of Jesus material in the gospels? (redaction criticism), and (6) What variations exist in the manuscripts of the gospel texts, and which has the greatest claim to be correct? (textual criticism). In other words, traditional methods of interpretation were more concerned with what lay behind NT narratives than with their form and their literary, artistic features. Although most of these methods comprised meticulous exegesis of NT narrative, none of them sought to answer the question, ‘What artistry is there in these NT stories?’