Form criticism
Form criticism has become one of the most valuable tools for the reconstruction of the preliterary tradition. This discipline classifies the literary material according to the principal “forms”—such as legal, poetic, and other forms—represented in its contents, and examines these in order to discover how they were handed down and what their successive life settings were until they assumed their present shape and position. In their various ways laws, narratives, psalms, and prophecies are amenable to this approach. By this means some scholars have undertaken to recover the ipsissima verba (“very own words”) of Jesus by removing the accretions attached to them in the course of transmission. The exegetical task assumes a threefold shape as scholars work back from (1) interpretation of the present Gospels through (2) interpretation of the tradition lying behind them to (3) reconstruction of the proclamation of Jesus.
Scholars are not left completely to speculation as they attempt to reconstruct the stages by which the Gospel tradition attained its final form: here and there in the New Testament letters, and in some of the speeches included in Acts (which convey the general sense of what was said and should not be regarded as the author’s free creations), there are fragments and outlines of the story of Jesus and of his teaching. Sometimes the characteristic terminology of tradition (“I received . . . I delivered”) is used when such fragments are introduced, a decade or so before the composition of the earliest Gospel (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:23; 15:3).