So who was the first redaction critic? Normally, I would have pointed to Günther Bornkamm, Hans Conzelmann, or Willi Marxsen who are generally credited as the founders of redaction criticism. However, Norman Perrin argues that R. H. Lightfoot was really the first to use the tools of redaction some twenty years before the Germans. This came as a little bit of a surprise, but then again, I haven’t read much of R. H. Lightfoot except for his commentary on John. The actual term redaction criticism (German: Redaktionsgeschichte) was coined by Marxsen, but according to Perrin the methodology described by Lightfoot was redaction criticism.

Lightfoot stands all by himself as a pioneering scholar who understood what form criticism had to offer and took it and used it; in so doing he actually reached a new frontier beyond that reached by Dibelius and Bultmann. Although he does not use the term, Lightfoot was actually the first redaction critic…. (Perrin, 21-22)

In the first two Bampton Lectures Lightfoot reviews critical work on the synoptic Gospels, with special reference to Wrede and Wellhausen, and, relying mainly on Dibelius, presents the main tenets of Formgeschichte (Lightfoot does not use “form criticism” but retains the German term) as they would apply to the Gospel of Mark. It is the third lecture that is most interesting in our particular context because here Lightfoot attempts “to examine the doctrine set forth in this gospel (Mark)” in light of the discipline of form criticism and finds “interpretation continually present in a book most of us were taught to regard as almost exclusively historical.”³⁴ To all intents and purposes, this lecture is an exercise in redaction criticism. For example, Lightfoot argues that the introduction to the Gospel (1:1-13) reveals the evangelist’s theological purposes and that the presentation of John the Baptist—designed as it is by the evangelist to explain who Jesus is—has a christological purpose. This latter point was to be a major emphasis in the work of Marxsen twenty years later!

But the fourth lecture also exhibits the kind of concerns that are prevalent today because in it Lightfoot explains “the content and structure of the gospel of St. Mark”; however, he does this “in the light of its main purpose,” which purpose is clearly to be recognized as theological: “We have found reason to believe that, rightly regarded it [Mark's Gospel] may be called the book of the (secret) Messiahship of Jesus.”³⁵ Over and over again narrative features of the Gospel, or aspects of the arrangement of the material, or evident selection of transitional material is explained in terms of the evangelist’s theological purpose just as they would be by a redaction critic today. All in all, History and Interpretation in the Gospels can be read with as much profit today as it could have been at the time of its first publication; indeed, it can be read with more profit now because the discussion has at last caught up with Lightfoot, and is concerned with the same problems and issues that concerned him twenty years ago, and is using the same methodology to approach them! (Perrin, 23-24)

³⁴Lightfoot, History and Interpretation, p. 57.

³⁴Ibid., p. 98.

• Norman Perrin, What is Redaction Criticism? (Guides to Biblical Scholarship; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969).

As I mentioned before, I haven’t read much of R. H. Lightfoot, so I hope to at least look at his History and Interpretation. Scholars after Perrin have reevaluated Lightfoot’s contribution in History and Interpretation, although I wasn’t able to access online any of the essays listed in ATLA. At least I found the abstract to the following essay by Powley very interesting since it disagrees with Perrin’s analysis:

Brian G. Powley, “The place of R H Lightfoot in British New Testament scholarship,” Expository Times 93.3 (1981): 72-75.

The article disputes Perrin’s assessment of R H Lightfoot as a strikingly original writer, a redaction critic before his time. In fact, History and Interpretation in the Gospel borrows heavily from Dibelius. Lightfoot’s true importance is that, alone among British scholars of his generation, he understood that the gospels are “presentations of a revelation”. They are narratives into which a theological interpretation has been absorbed. But as late as the 1950s it was still the prevailing view in Britain that the gospels are primarily historical documents. Only in the 1960s was Lightfoot vindicated, not least in the work of some of his own pupils.

If the New Testament writings emerged in the course of a history and are the witnesses and documentation of this history, then we are faced with a question: why should our discipline be concerned just with these and no other writings? The normal answer is that only these belong to the canon. But that is not a satisfactory answer. Where the doctrine of inspiration has been discarded, it is impossible to continue to maintain the dogmatic conception of the canon.

No New Testament writing was born with the predicate ‘canonical’ attached. The statement that a writing is canonical signifies in the first place only that it was pronounced canonical afterwards by the authorities of the second- to fourth-century church, in some cases only after all kinds of hesitation and disagreement. The history of the canon is sufficiently instructive in this respect.

So anyone who accepts without question the idea of the canon places himself under the authority of the bishops and theologians of those centuries. Anyone who does not recognize their authority in other matters — and no Protestant theologian does — is being consistent if he questions it here, too. (70-71)

That last paragraph is particularly spicy.

Now Wrede is not interested in how the church reads the New Testament; he leaves that task to the dogmatic theologians. Rather Wrede’s interest is in the religion and theology of the first Christians. Since Childs there has been a resurgence of canon criticism and as a result a more nuanced view toward the canon has emerged, so unlike Wrede, I don’t think we should throw the baby out with the bath water. However, I still agree with Wrede’s point that as students we should be as inclusive as possible concerning the early Christian writings. Why not pay significant attention to texts such as the Didache, which actually predate some NT writings?

I could write more on this topic about how many of us approach the Bible from multiple angles. As students or scholars, we want to know as much as possible about the first Christians and find that the canonical restraint is unnecessary. We obviously care about the issues, but we don’t want our biases to interfere with our view of the text because that’s what being a good scholar is all about, right? But then some of us also view the text within the context of our religious history and topics like canon become very important. Of course it sounds like I’m rehearsing the old Jesus-of-history-versus-Christ-of-faith dichotomy, since that is usually where this road leads. This means that there’s not much a reason to traverse it, is there?

• Wrede, William. “The Task and Methods of ‘New Testament Theology.’” Pages 68-116. The Nature of New Testament Theology: The Contribution of William Wrede and Adolf Schlatter. Edited and Translated by R. Morgan. Naperville, IL: Allenson, 1973.

Samuel Byrskog has written a helpful survey of how the term Sitz im Leben is used in gospel studies, but he also offers his own definition of the term in relation to the Jesus tradition:

Is there a future for the Sitz im Leben? Is it possible to maintain a feasible minimum definition of what it stands for and use it as a heuristic label for the study of tradition and the formation of early Christian groups and their identities? This is difficult to say. In conclusion, I propose we think of it as that recurrent type of mnemonic occasion within the life of early Christian communities when certain people cared about the Jesus tradition in a special way and performed and narrated it orally and in writing. This is, to be sure, a tentative definition in need of further reflection and testing. It seeks to synthesize the various tendencies of earlier research, while at the same time avoiding the impasses of its previous use. (20; italics original)

He unpacks the definition a little more in the last seven pages or so of his article, which I recommend to anyone interested in the term.

• Byrskog, Samuel. “A Century with the Sitz im Leben: From Form-Critical Setting to Gospel Community and Beyond.” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche 98.1 (2007): 1-27.