Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Wrede helped invent "the community"

As Stephen mentioned in these comments, Richard Bauckham has suggested that Streeter (The Four Gospels: A Story of Origins, 1924) was one of the first scholars to read the Gospels as if they were written for insular communities, a shift which led to the contemporary notion that the Gospels are, in part at least, about these communities.

It appears that William Wrede was an earlier, more important precursor to the "community" approach.

In The Messianic Secret (1901), Wrede criticizes his contemporaries for forgetting that the Gospels are "just a later narrator's conception of Jesus' life." Coming to grips with this fact, Wrede argues, entails paying more attention to the way the Gospels served the needs of their communities:

I should never for an instant lose sight of my awareness that I have before me descriptions, the authors of which are later - albeit relatively early - Christians. These Christians could only look at the life of Jesus with the eyes of their own time and describe it on the basis of the belief of the community, with all the viewpoints of the community, and with the needs of the community in mind. (Introduction, emphasis added)

Of course, this assumption is essential for Wrede's explanation of the messianic secret as an attempt by Mark and his precursors to make non-messianic Jesus traditions conform to a growing belief that Jesus was the messiah, not just after his resurrection, but during his earthly ministry as well.

Given the influence that The Messianic Secret had on form criticism, I think we should look here when assigning blame or credit for the looming presence of "the community" in our exegetical imaginations.


10 comments:

  1. The German is: "Das Bewusstsein, dass ich Darstellungen vor mir habe, deren Autoren spätere -- wenn auch noch so frühe -- Christen sind, Christen, die das Leben Jesu nur mit den Augen ihrer Zeit ansehen konnten, die es aus dem Glauben der Gemeinde, mit allen Anschauungen der Gemeinde, für die Bedürfnisse der Gemeinde beschrieben -- dies Bewusstsein darf mich keinen Augenblick verlassen." (emphasis as Nathan's)

    The key word here is Gemeinde, "community" or "(local) church." I wonder why English-language scholarship would go on to prefer "community" over "church" (as it did by the time of the 1971 translation of Wrede).

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  2. good question.

    I should mention, since you provided the German, that I tweaked the published translation a bit in light of the original.

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  3. Henry Owen in 1764 made a similar argument.

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  4. Instead of saying something substantive as part of this conversation, I'll just cast my vote for "credit" rather than "blame".

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  5. Peter - fantastic! could you point us to the reference? I would like to look that up.

    Mr. Kirk: good to hear from you.

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  6. E.g.: "St. Matthew wrote his Gospel for the use of the Churches in Palestine, then composed of Jewish converts, and adapted it to the condition of the times, and the nature of their circumstances. ... When the Gentiles were admitted into the Christian Church, St. Luke, as the exigencies of their state required, strengthened their faith by another Gospel, accommodated to their special use."
    H. Owen, Observations on the Four Gospels; Tending chiefly to ascertain the Times of their Publication; and to illustrate the Form and Manner of their Composition (London, 1764), 106f.

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  7. Interesting that Owen connects this especially with Eusebius: "we have four Gospels: all of them composed, as Eusebius observes, on special and urgent occasions. (Hist. Eccl. iii,c.24)"
    This obviously connects with Margaret Mitchell's response to Richard Bauckham on the patristic perspectives on the settings of the gospels.

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  8. I'd say that Owen is more similar to the some of the patristic writer in that he was looking at larger regions (e.g. "Churches in Palestine"), whereas Wrede and modern commentators seem to focus more on the local church or community.

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  9. I think there is something in that Stephen. Owen in fact is more interested in their setting in time and relative chronology than anything else - he certainly doesn't think o the evangelists as isolated/sectarian writers. I think perhaps his emphasis on the situational nature of the gospel texts and his advocacy of a comparative approach to synoptic relations does go way beyond the patristic testimonies.

    Two more quotes:

    "IN PENNING THEIR GOSPELS, THE SACRED HISTORIANS HAD A CONSTANT REGARD, AS WELL TO THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE PERSONS, FOR WHOSE USE THEY WROTE: AS TO THE SEVERAL PARTICULARS OF CHRIST'S LIFE, WHICH THEY WERE THEN WRITING(P15)"

    The gospels were "modelled ... to the state, temper, and disposition of the times in which they were written" (p16).

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  10. Thanks Peter, this is illuminating, especially the last two.

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