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Literary Criticism and Gospel Criticism
By Roland Mushat Frye

"A literary form is highly flexible, and even in that most rigorously structured of literary forms, the sonnet, it is subject to far greater variation than New Testament form criticism sometimes allows in its treatment of air apparently more flexible form such as the parable."

NO LITERARY historian could fail to be impressed by the intellectual energy that has characterized much New Testament scholarship and by the many brilliant critical arguments and interpretations that have resulted. It is a fact, however, that New Testament scholars have been accustomed to accepting certain approaches and techniques as adequate and productive, and the accepted methodology seems "natural." At this point, coming from outside the "system," as a representative of literary history in the secular fields, I must observe that few if any of the leading literary historians in secular fields would be comfortable with the widespread assumption among New Testament critics that it is possible, in the present state of the evidence, to move backwards in time from passages in the extant Gospel texts in such a way as to identify previous stages or forms through which the tradition has supposedly developed and, ultimately, to arrive at or near the original life and teachings of Jesus; or that it is possible, through a similar procedure, to explain the Synoptic redactions as we now have them. No one would deny the desirability of the objective, but the methods of pursuing it should be questioned, even though these methods are currently acceptable to many who work within the biblical and theological fields.

I

During the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, it was fashionable among literary critics to engage in what is known as

Roland Mushat Frye is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of several works on English literature, he has just recently published Milton's Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic Tradition in the Epic Poems (1978). This passage of comparative literary criticism is reprinted with permission from. "The Synoptic Problems and Analogies in Other Literatures," in The Relationships Among the Gospels An Interdisciplinary, Dialogue edited by William O. Walker, Jr. (Trinity University Press, 1978), pp 287-302.

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"disintegration." Looking at the available Shakespearian texts, for example, critics would suggest, for any of a number of plausible reasons, that certain passages did not represent what Shakespeare himself had written. Of course, in some cases the textus receptus may itself indicate garbling, or we may have external evidence of tampering with the text, but these types of cruces were not the concerns that characterized the disintegrators. Their aim was to rediscover the real Shakespeare by eliminating from the corpus "those lines, speeches, scenes, or whole plays which [were] aesthetically or morally unacceptable" to their best understanding of Shakespeare. ¹ Among the leading disintegrators were F.G. Fleay (1831-1909) and J.M. Robertson (1856-1933), both intelligent and learned men, whose views were reflected by a considerable number of enthusiastic students. No one can justly accuse these people of frivolity or willful chicanery, but it is now universally recognized that their detailed and impressive analyses moved from equivocal uses of evidence to subjective conclusions. They moved within what we might call a "Ptolemaic system," which is now thoroughly discredited.

Whenever some passage in the plays impressed Robertson and others as un-Shakespearian, they argued that it represented the detritus from an earlier writer, whom Shakespeare had only partially revised, or that it resulted from a later revision of Shakespeare by someone else. Of course, if and when we know objectively an earlier work that Shakespeare rewrote, this method can be put to impeccable uses, but alas the disintegrators were for the most part not objectively comparing known texts but rather hypothesizing lost earlier texts (of whose mere existence there is often no evidence) in order to account for elements in Shakespeare's canon that they found objectionable. An admirer of Robertson's method summarized it as follows because certain "passages leave on his aesthetic sense an unsatisfactory impression, he recalls his experience of previous or contemporary dramatists and assigns them to one or the other... The result is that Shakespeare is exalted, not belittled."² When a passage is thought to be "undignified or unworthy," then we are assured that we "are probably reading either alien work rewritten by Shakespeare or Shakespeare curtailed and interpolated by another." ³

All of this was presented with elaborate learning, with extensive critical apparatus and sophisticated arguments, often with statistical tables and charts, and with repeated appeals to "science." Adherents of this methodology thought that something had been proved when an intellectually impressive exercise led them to eliminate from the text

¹ Schoenbaum Internal Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship An Essay in Literary History and Method (Evanston Ill Northwestern University Press, 1966) 111.
² Augustus Ralli, A History of Shakespearean Criticism, 2 vol. (Oxford Oxford University Press 1932) 2:371.
³ Ralli, A History of Shakespearean Criticism 2: 416. For Ralli's praise of Robertson, see e. g. 123, 232, 371, 420-421.

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what they found distasteful or bothersome and reassured them with results that they found more pleasing. Robertson's aim here was as noble as that of certain New Testament scholars, whose methodology is so like his own as a follower summarized, he aimed "to trace the Master by his style, and reach a final vision of him, if at all, only when his real work [was] made fairly sure."⁴

Following this purpose, Robertson looked at the problems and mysteries of Hamlet (e.g. indecision, delay, violence, Machiavellian scheming) and postulated that Shakespeare was not responsible for such troublesome and puzzling elements, but that he had merely taken them over from an earlier play on the same story, the so-called Ur-Hamlet. In this case such an earlier play is known to have existed, but it is not preserved for us, thus, by an elaborate scissors-and-paste job, Robertson could ascribe to the earlier play everything that he wished to remove from Shakespeare. His long series of ingenious conjectures, salted with occasional pieces of objective evidence, was a fascinating and in many ways a brilliant exercise, but in the consensus of modern Shakespearian scholars, the result was "the almost total divorce of character from plot, of Hamlet from Hamlet, and, indeed, of Hamlet at one moment from Hamlet at another."⁵

New Testament scholars who wish to explore the relevance of such "disintegrating" criticism for the study of the Synoptic Gospels will enjoy a close reading of The Disintegration of Shakespeare by Sir Edmund K. Chambers.⁶ This compact essay, one of the landmarks in the development of literary history, originated as the Annual Shakespeare Lecture delivered in 1924 before the British Academy. In it, Chambers summarized many features of the disintegrating approach that can be seen as strikingly similar to much New Testament analysis, and he judged the approach inadequate for rigorous literary -historical scholarship. There was nothing simplistic in Chambers' approach. He freely admitted that "there are inconsistencies of narrative and time-sequence" in Shakespeare, that "analysis often reveals the coexistence in one and the same play of features belonging to different stages of development, and sometimes of features which it is difficult to place in the line of development at all," and that "an examination of the texts shows such eccentricities and dislocations as to raise a doubt whether they can have come to us just as Shakespeare left them." Chambers further recognized that the disintegrating critics were often men of "fertile and ingenious mind." After an unbiased analysis of their attempts to sort out within the texts"strata belonging to different dates" and to ascribe these variously according to systems that they

⁴ Ralli, A History of Shakespearean Criticism, 2:553.
⁵ Paul Gottschalk, The Meanings of Hamlet Modes: of Literary Interpretation Since Bradley (Albuquerque, N M University of New Mexico Press, 1972), 17.
⁶ E K Chambers, The Disintegration of Shakespeare, The British Academy The Annual Shakespeare Lecture 1924 (Oxford H Milford, Oxford University Press, 1924). Although Chambers does not mention New Testament criticism, scholars in this field will have no difficulty in identifying similarities in approach.

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claimed were scientific and inexorable, he concluded that disintegrating criticism approaches "the point where scholarship merges itself in romance."⁷

Attempts to separate "strata belonging to different dates" with the Gospels, so as to disclose the process of redaction or to identify the authentic earliest stratum, involve essentially the same modus operandi as that employed by the disintegrators, who led us from what we have in the best established texts of Shakespeare but instead of leading us closer to the authorial originals, substituted intricate new understandings, which, however subjectively satisfying for a time, have eventually been recognized as learned illusions. The same recognition is already overtaking comparable exercises in biblical studies As a contribution to this ongoing process, I shall now, in the light of comparable situations in secular literature, appraise certain representative examples of "disintegrating" the Gospels. Many other examples could have been chosen from the corpus of twentieth-century Gospel criticism, but these should suffice at least to show the nature of the problem and the weakness of such methodology.

II

Parables Followed by Aphorisms. In Luke 14:11, Jesus concludes the parable of the guest at a marriage feast with the chreia or aitia, "For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted," an expression that also occurs with only slight variation in the Greek of Matthew 23:12 Luke 18:14b records the same aphorism after the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector who went up to the Temple to pray. Some New Testament critics regard such concluding aphorisms as "secondary and expanded interpretations," evidences of "a strong tendency to add conclusions to the parables in the form of generalizing logia," as Joachim Jeremias put it. ⁸ But why, we may ask, should such expressions be regarded as additions? Two rationales operate here, the first having to do with repetition as such and the second with the parable as a form.

The first rationale apparently presupposes that Jesus said only once that "everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted," and that one or the other use of these words therefore derives from Luke the editor rather than from Jesus the teacher, as though a teacher would not repeat himself. But I wonder how many teachers really teach this way, I doubt that many do. Every "good line" (which Luke 14:11 and 18:14b certainly are) that also makes an important point tends to be repeated I have known a goodly number of great teachers, and they have all had certain favorite expressions that recur in their teaching, with or without variations. But my response thus far is only part of the answer, though an important

⁷ Chambers, The Disintegration of Shakespeare, 10, 3, 6, 7, 10.
⁸ Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, rev. ed , trans S.H. Hooke (New York Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963), 110; cf also 107-108.

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part. Literarily, what we have here is an example of incremental repetition, which usually signals that an important thematic development is at work. So, at least, it works with repetitions of this kind elsewhere in literature, and such repetitions are not unusual. Readily accessible examples can be found in Shakespeare, where two pairs occur in the same play. In Richard II, the Duke of York says of the impetuous young king that "all in vain comes counsel to his ear," and two dozen lines later he repeats the image as "all too late comes counsel to be heard."⁹ In another instance, the Duchess of York declares that her lord "sets the word itself against the word," while two scenes later Richard says that his thoughts "do set the word itself/Against the word."¹⁰ As the famous critic Kenneth Burke has written, "repetition itself is not a fault," and it may indeed be a sign that the narrator knows exactly what he wishes to emphasize.''¹¹

Another rationale for regarding the aphoristic conclusion to the parable as a secondary addition concerns the parable as a form, and this poses perhaps an even more basic problem. It is sometimes assumed that the parables told by Jesus were originally independent units and that such summarizing epigrams as follow the parable of the Pharisee and tax collector at prayer are "accumulated redactional additions" to the simple story, which Jesus told without comment of his own.¹² But why make such an assumption? Was there only one form of the parable that Jesus always used, and did he never add aphoristic comments at the end of the story told in the parable? On literary-historical grounds, there is no hard evidence that Jesus, as a first-century Palestinian rabbi, would not or could not or did not append to the parable of the seating arrangements at the wedding feast or to the parable of the two men praying in the Temple the admonition that "everyone who exalts himself will be humbled. "

Here the rabbinic parables are relevant, but surely these do not include all possible variations of the parable as a literary form. Every literary form that I know has been subject to alteration and development by its various practitioners, especially if these practitioners happen to have possessed originality (and at the very least Jesus would appear to have been original). The variations and embellishments or adaptations of the parable form that we find in the Gospels are entirely within the range of a single individual, even of an individual considerably less gifted than Jesus seems to have been. This should be clear from what is known, in literary history at large, of established literary forms and of the variations that are played upon them.

⁹ Shakespeare, Richard II act two, scene one, line four, and act two, scene one, line twenty-seven.
¹⁰ Shakespeare, RichardII act five, scene three, line one hundred twenty-two and act five, scene five, lines thirteen and fourteen.
¹¹ Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (New York Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), 125.
¹² Robert A. Spivey and D. Moody Smith, Jr., Anatomy of the New Testament: A Guide to its Structure and Meaning, 2d ed. (New York Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc. /London Collier Macmillan Publishers 1974), 205.

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As a case in point, consider the sonnet form. It is the most rigorously systematized literary form. It know, with its tightly structured fourteen lines and careful interlinear rhyming. Yet it has been adapted and shaped into a number of quite distinct types. Fortunately, these different types have been preserved in sufficient numbers so that we can trace the developments of the form without encountering those lacunas and gaps of evidence that can make New Testament criticism puzzling and allow it to become speculative.

But assume for our purposes of analysis that only a fraction of these sonnets have in fact been preserved and passed on to us, comparable in number to the preserved parables of Jesus and others. Assume further that we have sizable collections of the so-called Italian form of the sonnet, which originated with Petrarch and then spread all over Europe. In this type, the fourteen lines were divided into an initial eight lines called the octave (containing two quatrains) and a concluding six lines called the sestet. The structure of this Italian type precluded or at least restricted the opportunity to provide an aphoristic conclusion to the sonnet, because it is difficult to turn six intricately interrhymed lines into an aphorism. But then let us assume that we also have preserved a few instances of a very different type of sonnet, a type that progresses through three successive quatrains for four lines each and is climaxed by a brilliantly aphoristic couplet that summarizes or comments in two lines upon all that has gone before. What I have described, of course, is first the Italian sonnet (for example, Milton's "How Soon Hath Time" or Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer") and the later variation upon it known as the English sonnet, which was epitomized but not originated by William Shakespeare. To someone who did not have such prolific evidence of the sonnet's total development as is actually available to us, it might seem that Shakespeare's final couplet that passes judgment on the preceding twelve lines was as extraneous to the sonnet form as, in the judgment of some New Testament critics, are the concluding aphorisms to the parables upon which they comment.

Suppose, however, that we encountered a perfect Italian sonnet, for which an aphoristic comment had been supplied after the fourteenth line Should we regard the aphorism as a redactional addition? No, because here we have the sonetto caudato or tailed sonnet, in which the basic form is that of the Italian sonnet with octave and sestet, to which couplets or tercets or quatrains are added at will so that the author can provide whatever moral or other commentary he chooses. An example is Milton's "On the New Forcers of Conscience." These various subtypes of sonnet could and did exist at the same time in the same country and even in the works of a single writer.

A literary form is highly flexible, and even in that most rigorously structured of literary forms, the sonnet, it is subject to far greater variation than New Testament form criticism sometimes allows in its treatment of an apparently more flexible form such as the parable. From this brief account of the sonnet, it should be obvious that there are

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grave dangers in establishing a single prototype for a literary form and then assuming that variations from this norm are due to editorial manipulations or other intrusions upon the original words or the early tradition. To assume that an aphorism following a parable is inauthentic because it does not conform to an abstract literary form is to grant less flexibility to such forms than secular literary historians are accustomed to recognize.

Aphorisms.No scholar could object to the hypothesis that the aphorism, "For everyone who exalts himself..., "was not originally attached to the parable as told by Jesus or that it was not included in the earlier tradition preserving this parable, if the hypothesis were supported by solid evidence. Surely the Synoptic writers could and did on occasion ascribe words to Jesus that he did not speak in their present form. Every example of dramatic history that I know includes such ascriptions, for reasons that I have suggested elsewhere. ¹³ Acknowledging that there is growth and change within a tradition, we should recognize, however, that claims to reconstruct the stages of such growth and change will usually be speculative guesses, however much they may be overlayed with learned apparatus, unless one or more of the following types of evidence are available:

(1) There may be clear instances of changes within a text, of movement from an unaltered to an altered state. Such changes occur between the first edition of Paradise Lost in 1667 and the second edition of 1674, for example, and when two different names are assigned to a single character at various points within the single text of a Shakespeare play.

(2) There may be objective internal evidence within a text that correlates with objective external evidence in such a way that we know changes have taken place. Ben Jonson, for example, asserted that Shakespeare wrote of Julius Caesar, "Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause," and Jonson castigated this statement as ridiculous. In the preserved text of Shakespeare, however, we now, read, "Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause/Will he be satisfied." ¹⁴ Granting the well-attested accuracy of Jonson's verbal memory, we are justified in assuming that, under his stern critique, Shakespeare altered his own words from what Jonson says they were to what we find in the present text.

(3)There may be objective evidence entirely, external to a text that points to developments and alterations within the text. For example, Milton's notebooks record his earlier plan to write Paradise Lost not in

¹³ See Roland Mushat Frye, "A Literary Perspective for the Criticism of the Gospels" in Jesus and Vans Hope, vol. 2 ed. Donald G Miller and Dikram Y. Hadidian, A Perspective Book (Pittsburgh Pittsburgh Theological Seminary 1971), 193-221 and esp. 206-214; and "On the Historical Critical Method in New Testament Studies: A Reply to Professor Achtemeter," Perspective 14(1973) 28-33.
¹⁴ "Shakespeare Julius Caesar, act three scene one lines forty-seven and Forty-eight; cf. the notes in Dorsch, ed., Julius Caesar, 65.

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its present epic form, but as a drama. We do not know how far he progressed with this dramatic composition, but we do know that the famous soliloquy of Satan, which now occurs early in Book Four of the epic, had originally been composed to serve as the first speech in the play, and we know this because Milton's nephew tells us so in his life of his uncle."¹⁵

Of these three types of evidence for alteration of a tradition, we find famous examples of the first type in the Gospels, such as the obvious "early" ending of Mark (16:8), to which concluding material has been added, as attested by different manuscript editions. Still falling within this type is the case of the end of John, where the next to the last chapter concludes with verses appropriate to concluding the whole Gospel, and yet another chapter follows this "false conclusion." But for the other two types of evidence, we find little or nothing that can help us in an objective way in moving backwards through earlier stages of the tradition.

To focus upon a representative problem, let us consider the question of short, tersely worded statements that memorably summarize some truth or opinion. Akin to the proverb and adage, into which category such statements sometimes move as a result of popular acceptance and repetition, the literary form itself can variously be called epigram, aphorism, maxim, chreia, or mot. Under whatever name, expressions of this kind abound in the Gospels. Here, as elsewhere, certain readers may wish to speculate that some of these are redactional additions to the tradition or to Jesus' own words, but however couched in learned apparatus such speculations may be, it is hard to see how, in the present state of the evidence, these aphorisms in the Gospels can be discredited on anything approaching sound literary-historical grounds.

Given sufficient evidence, of course, the ascription of aphorisms can be discredited. Everyone has heard the Duke of Wellington quoted to the effect that "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton," and few people have doubted that he actually said it. It certainly sounds like Wellington, who was so famous for coining such phrases that the phrases were known among his contemporaries and among later history buffs as "Wellington's laconics," and there is nothing on stylistic grounds to throw doubt on the "playing fields of Eton" saying. In all probability, however, Wellington did not originate this most famous of his laconics, and we know this because of the careful tracing of extant evidence of growing tradition that we find in the authoritative two-volume biography of Wellington by Elizabeth Longford. Nothing approximating the epigram was associated with Wellington until three years after his death, and then it was introduced by a Frenchman, the Count de Montalembert, in 1855. According to his account, the Iron Duke returned to Eton late in his life, noted the vigor shown by the

¹⁵ Milton, Paradise Lost book four lines thirty-two to forty-one, see Edward Phillips, "The Life of Mr John Milton, " in The Early Lives of John Milton ed Helen Darbishire (London Constable & Co. Ltd, 1932), 72-73.

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students in the organized games, recalled his own days there, and commented "C'est ici qu' a ete gagnee la bataille de Waterloo." As Longford shows, however, there were no organized sports at Eton when Wellington attended it, and he shunned such impromptu games as were available. The specific detail about the playing fields was explicitly added some twenty years later when Sir Edward Creasey, in his Eminent Etonians, described the aged Duke who, as he passed the "playing fields" of Eton, paid tribute to the "manly character" they nurtured." There grows the stuff that won Waterloo." This version was the first to appear in English and it came from an unauthoritative source. From it there shortly developed the famous saying as we know it.¹⁶

Legends and legendary statements do indeed grow, and here we have a fine instance, readily traceable and documented over a period of a third of a century. But all of this involves masses of evidence, preserved and available to the scholar. For Wellington this kind of "form-critical" study will work. As for the Synoptics, alas, efforts to postulate similar developments will rest for the most part on sheer speculation. Such speculation may be fun for those who do it and interesting for those who read it, but it is not literary history as this discipline is widely known and practiced in secular fields.

The Great Supper and the Wedding Feast. Returning now to the parable form as such, let us consider the representative case of a single story situation cast into two different narrative formats the parable of the great supper in Luke 14:16-24 and that of the wedding feast in Matthew 22:1-14. Assuming as some do that these two passages are not two forms of the story as varied by Jesus on different occasions, but that they vary according to the redactional intent of the two Evangelists, it is possible (depending, of course, upon the chronology one accepts for the two Gospels) to chart a progressive adaptation of Jesus' original story in the course of influences playing upon each editor Jeremias, for example, thus sees Matthew's account as a reflection of historical circumstances after A D 70, including the Jewish rejection of Christian claims and the destruction of Jerusalem by Roman armies (Matthew 22:7:"The king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city"), as Matthew "transformed our parable into an outline of the plan of redemption from the appearance of the prophets, embracing the fall of Jerusalem, up to the Last Judgment." ¹⁷ But is all this necessary? Are we justified in assuming that the original teller of a story told it only once or told it invariably in only one form or that it was preserved in only one form? Surely this is not what we find with great storytellers other than Jesus or in other literary traditions.

¹⁶ Elizabeth Longford, Wellington: The Years of the Sword (New York Harper & Row, Publishers, 1969), 15-17.
¹⁷ Jeremias, The Parables of Jesu,s 69, see also 63-66, 67-69, 176-180.

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Two examples from secular literature illustrate the point, the first from the dramatic histories of William Shakespeare and the second from the purer invention of William Faulkner. In his sequence of four plays called the Great Tetralogy, Shakespeare traces English history from the feeble reign of King Richard II through the tumultuous times of usurping King Henry IV to a climax in the victorious exploits of King Henry V, the erstwhile Prince Ha.l In these plays, the following situation occurs successively on three different occasions: on the eve of a military confrontation a leader considers his prospects, his followers report that his forces are outnumbered by the enemy, and the leader reacts. In Shakespeare, the basic situations in the three accounts are no more dissimilar than are the basic situations in the great supper in Luke and the marriage feast in Matthew, where a host invites guests to a feast, finds that they do not come, and proceeds to provide himself with other guests. The difference is that Shakespeare tells the story not twice but three times first with Richard II as the outnumbered leader, second with Hotspur in this role, and third with Henry V, ¹⁸ and the basic situation is skillfully varied in each instance to convey a conception of each leader. Are we to assume that Shakespeare was responsible for only one of these accounts and that the other two represent "redactional additions?" Certainly not, and there is no more reason to make such an assumption about the two versions of the parable ascribed to Jesus in Matthew and Luke. The range of variation upon a single theme found in the two versions is easily within the scope of a skilled narrator, who adjusts a basic story to different situation. In other words there are no convincing literary-historical reasons for denying to Jesus. as narrator, the two divergent recountings of this story or for assuming that the differences are to be ascribed to Matthew or Luke as redactors rather than to Jesus as original narrator.

Or take the case of the late William Faulkner, who would write different accounts of the same fictional situation, with discrepancies between the accounts fully as marked as those between the two parables discussed above, but with the basic situation clearly the same. Faulkner's editor, Malcolm Cowley, once called certain of these variations to Faulkner's attention, and Faulkner replied that the story itself "was still alive and growing" in his mind and that the two versions should be allowed to stand as evidence of this fact. In Faulkner's mind such changes in a basic story pattern were inevitable if his work was to have life.¹⁹

Why should it be different with Jesus and with the traditions preserved about him? I Why must changes within two tellings of what is essentially the same story necessarily indicate editorial intervention? If

¹⁸ Shakespeare Richard II act three, scene two, I Henry IV act four scene one and Henry V act four scene three.
¹⁹ See James B Meriwether "'Notes on the Textual History of' The Sound and the Fury,'" Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 56 (1962), 311, where the references are not only to the work cited in the title but also to The Mansion.

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Jesus was at all comparable to other storytellers and to other teachers, as he surely must have been, then the similar practices of Shakespeare and Faulkner are clearly relevant to him. In terms of secular literary history, there is no reason to den), that Jesus cast the same story into two shapes, as preserved by Matthew and Luke. To assume otherwise, without strong external evidence is gratuitous And the same is true for other examples of similar parallels in the Gospels.

In none of the foregoing do I mean to assert that these Gospel passages provide the ipsissima verba of Jesus. Indeed, it seems natural to assume that some remarks attributed to Jesus in the Gospels originated after his death. Such attributions would not only be natural but insofar as they faithfully exemplified or summarized the principal emphases or the ipsissima vox of his teachings, they would be useful additions. What is questioned here is the practicability of separating what Jesus actually said from redactional additions ascribed to him, because, in the present state of the evidence, there is unfortunately no literary-historical methodology that can perform this separation with any assurance.

Historical Developments or Stages in Stories. For examples of literary traditions in which stages of development can be traced, I turn again to Shakespeare, not because there are not other examples, but because his works are most readily accessible. In or about the year 1599, Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar, and for his basic historical information he consulted Plutarch's Parallel Lives, where we can identify the precise source of his knowledge and often of the very words he used. His Plutarch was the English version of 1579, which Sir Thomas North had translated not from the original but from the 1559 French version of Jacques Amyot, who in turn had translated from the original, both translators introducing changes along the way Plutarch (b.A.D. 50, d + A.D. 120) in turn had himself mined various sources for his materials.

Here, we have a veritable gold mine for tracing stages and forms in the development of a literary-historical tradition. It can be both interesting and instructive to trace particular characterizations, speeches, and events through these stratified layers, moving from earliest to latest or reversing the direction and moving backward in time. But let us suppose that Shakespeare's Julius Caesar was all that we had, that all earlier versions were lost. Could we then move backwards to restore the tradition and identify stages of its development? This in essence is what is often attempted for the Gospels. Let us test a hypothesis. If it is possible, with any degree of assurance, to take the Synoptics as we have them and to move backwards in time so as to identify earlier forms of the traditions they record, then it should also be possible to apply the same procedure to Shakespeare. On these grounds, in other words, it should be possible to analyze Shakespeare's text taken by itself, just as though its sources were lost to us, and from it to deduce

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what he had found in North's Plutarch .If we wish to extend the range of this operation ad absurdum, we might even seek to postulate, not only how Shakespeare diverged from North's version, but also how North had changed Amyot, and how Amyot had altered the original Plutarch.

Or we might take a somewhat less complex problem, associated with Shakespeare's great cycle of English historical drama ranging from Richard II through Henry V. For these four plays, written between 1595 or 1597 and 1599, the magisterial source was Raphael Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland in its second edition of 1587, which enlarged the first edition of 1577 Shakespeare was even more careful to be essentially (though never literally or slavishly) faithful to the English history he knew than he was in comparable uses of Roman history. He made changes, of course, such as when he represented Hotspur as a contemporary of Prince Hat even though Hotspur had been old enough to be Hal's father, but the essential fidelity was there. Here we find three stages of a developing tradition, all of them preserved for our examination, all in English, and all fitting within a span of no more than twenty-two years, with the major transmission restricted to only twelve years. Surely, if it is possible to move backwards from synoptic texts to one or more earlier stages in the development of some speech or episode, it ought to be possible to do so in the comparable circumstances of Shakespeare's great histories. It should, in other words, be possible to employ the methodologies of form criticism or of the new hermeneutic in such a way as to concentrate only on Shakespeare and, in ignorance of his sources, deduce from his text the tradition lying only a dozen years earlier in Holinshed's revised second edition and perhaps also to go back ten more years and recover Holinshed's first edition. The results could then be compared with the preserved writings in order to see how well or how poorly the methodology operates.

Granted that there might be a number of accurate deductions as to what Holinshed or North's Plutarch had provided, is it not apparent that there surely would also be at least an equally large (and probably far larger) number of postulates far wide of the mark? How then could we distinguish the one set of deductions from the other? Without preserved records of the earlier tradition (which we have for the dramatic histories of Shakespeare but not for the Gospels), we should be at sea in a tempest of speculations and conjectures.

And this is what the methodologies in question yield not sound literary history, but a mass of speculations and conjectures, a labyrinth of pseudo-historical constructs. Efforts to move backwards from the written records of the Gospels through various stages of postulated developments so as to arrive at earlier phases of the traditions about Jesus, and to analyze these, may and often do constitute very impressive intellectual exercises, but they are not recognizable as literary history to one who represents this field in secular scholarship.

219 - Literary Criticism and Gospel Criticism

III

I do not wish to close on a negative note, for I do not see the problem as hopeless but only a particular methodology as deluding. What I see as immensely hopeful is the prospect that the Gospels should be analyzed with the standard techniques (both historical and critical) employed in the study of other literature. How do the symbols work? What patterns of symbols are present? How do various rhetorical devices operate, and what do these contribute to meaning? What themes are introduced, how, and how are they interrelated? What patterns of imagery are there, and how are these used and to what effect? How do incidents relate to each other? What is the meaning evident in patterns of succession and juxtaposition? Where are we being led by all these devices, and what do they "add up to?" What happens when we analyze the characterization of Jesus by the same techniques used in approaching Mark Anthony or King Richard II or Prince Hal? These are only hints of the rich possibilities that are available for making the Gospels come fully alive to modern readers When such possibilities are explored in sufficient depth, Jesus will become recognizably alive to people who have previously found him remote.

What I am advocating is not a closed door but an open door or rather a turning away from one door, which has only led us into a maze of mirrors, to another door, which offers good promises of leading us to Jesus. After my paper, "A Literary Perspective for the Criticism of the Gospels," was read at the Pittsburgh Festival on the Gospels in 1970, the African scholar E Bolaji Idowu commented that most New Testament criticism could be summed up in the words of Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb. "They have taken my Lord away, and I know not where they have laid him."²⁰ My proposal is that first we use the readily available techniques of secular literary-historical criticism for bringing the character of Jesus to life literarily, then we compare the figure (or figures) of Jesus emerging from the four Gospels (each with its distinctive presentations and emphases), and finally, we may be able better to assess the historical figure who lies behind the four characterizations and his relevance to us we can only get back to the Jesus of history through the Jesus of literature.

²⁰ Note, again, as an apposite parallel that the disintegrating criticism of Hamlet resulted in "the almost total divorce.... of Hamlet from Hamlet, and, indeed, of Hamlet at one moment from Hamlet at another" (Gottschalk, The Meanings of Hamlet 17).