Jesus Birth

REDACTION CRITICISM:

• Examines the way the gospel writers uses their sources

• Gospel may have taken shape in the three basic ‘settings’

  • Teaching of the historical Jesus

  • Early church

  • Thought of the evangelists

In the third setting, the Gospel writers’ own understanding and a new and decisive forward movement in the transmission of the Gospel tradition becomes apparent. From the moment the Gospels as such come to birth, the oral period of the Christian tradition fades out, and individual writers (perhaps in the context of a “school” or even church) take over from an otherwise anonymous community. By looking carefully at the individual comments of the evangelists, their editorial links and summaries, and generally at the selection, modification and expansion of the material they use (when Matthew or Luke, for example, is compared with Mark), it is possible to discover how each writer understood and interpreted (as well as edited) the tradition he received. This is redaction criticism.