An ironic circle: Wellhausen and the rise of redaction criticism

Zeitschrift fur die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

Volumn 115, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 487-500

  Van Seters, John ^a  

^a NONE   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950606446     PISSN: 00442526     EISSN: 16130103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1515/zatw.2003.031     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. J. Barton, Redaction Criticism (Old Testament), AncBD 5, 644
2. See also idem, Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study, 1984, 45-60
3. R.H. Stein, Redaction Criticism (New Testament), AncBD 5, 647
4. R. Fortna, Redaction Criticism, NT, IDBSup, 733
5. N.Perrin, What is Redaction Criticism, 1969, 1
6. The term Redaktion is used in two different senses. On the one hand it can have the passive sense of »edition« as in the edition of a book or periodical. Such a use implies nothing about the activity of an editor in its production. But Redaktion is also used in an active sense in which it means editorial activity. This is the sense in which it is most commonly used in Redaktionsgeschichte. Yet there remains a certain ambiguity in the term Redaktionsgeschichte. In its basic, and what I believe to be its oldest sense, it could simply mean the history of the various recensions of a text, its »edition-history«. This relates to the field of textual criticism and has to do with the history of the text after its composition and its circulation as a finished work. Only in the eighteenth century when the notion arose in classical studies that redactors or editors intervened in an active way to change texts in the course of their transmission did Redaktion take on the active sense of editorial activity within the study of a text's Redaktionsgeschichte, its »editorial history«. See J. Van Seters, The Redactor in Biblical Studies: A Nineteenth Century Anachronism, JNSL 29/1 (2003), 1-19
7. W. Marxsen, Mark The Evangelist: Studies on the Redaction History of the Gospel, 1969, 15-29
8. Quoted from M. Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel, trans. B.L. Woolf, 1935, 3
9. H. Gunkel, Genesis (English translation by M.E. Biddle), 1997, lxix-lxxix
10. G. von Rad (The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch, in: The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, 1966, 1-78) objected to Gunkel's characterization of J as a mere collector and regarded this as Gunkel's big mistake (1). Von Rad himself defended the notion of J as an author and historian, not a redactor
11. Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel, 4
12. Mark The Evangelist, 21 n.17
13. See E. Haenchen, Der Weg Jesu, 1966. In his introduction he discusses the work of Marxsen on Mark and is particularly critical of his use of the term Redaktionsgeschichte for the second stage of Formgeschichte (24). He regards the idea of Redaktor as quite inappropriate and Marxsen's justification for continual use of this term as contradictory. His own term for the evangelist is Schriftsteller
14. R. Bultmann, The Study of the Synoptic Gospels, in Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research, trans. F.C. Grant, 1962, 1-76
15. The History of the Synoptic Tradition, trans. J. Marsh, 1963, 2
16. N.A. Dahl, Wellhausen on the New Testament, in Julius Wellhausen and His Prolegomena to the History of Israel, Semeia 25 (1982), 89-110
17. See R.H. Lightfoot, History and Interpretation in the Gospels: The Bampton Lectures 1934, 1934, 28
18. R. Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, 321
19. M. Noth, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien, 1957, 89
20. T. Römer/A. de Pury, L'historiographie deutéronomiste (HD), in Israèl construit son histoire, ed. A. de Pury/T. Römer/J.-D. Macchi, 1996, 9