Top Highlights

• Form criticism concentrates on defining the Sitz im Leben (setting in life) that individual units of tradition may have had before they came to he incorporated into the Gospels.
• To understand the plot of a narrative, it is also important to recognize elements of causality that link events to each other. Causal relationships between events may be subdivided into
• The dominant mode of biblical studies for more than a century has been the historical-critical method.3 Actually a conglomeration of approaches, this method seeks to reconstruct the life and thought of biblical times through an objective, scientific analysis of biblical material.
• Redaction criticism seeks to discern the theologies and intentions of the evangelists themselves by observing the manner in which they edited their sources and arranged the individual units of tradition.
• The major limitation of all these approaches, as documented by Hans Frei in 1974, is that they fail to take seriously the narrative character of the Gospels.'