A new way of thinking

I had always heard the words Source Criticism, Form Criticism and Redaction Criticism but never really knew what they were. I knew they had something to do with the Gospels and the way the text was formed, but beyond that I was pretty much ignorant. Monday's lecture opened my eyes to a whole new idea of how the text was constructed. When I was in middle school and even high school I always thought that God sat the biblical writers down and said "hey write this down," and 2000 years later we have the Bible. I had never really thought of the other possible factors (Mark used as an outline, Q, M, L).

Personally, as long as we remember that these ideas are not facts (hince the hypothesis title) I think that we can and should discuss the possibility of Source Criticism. During the entire lecture Monday I couldn't help but wonder as to what role the personalities of the writers (evangelists) and their audiences plays in the whole debate. For instance, are the things that are found only in Matthew (M) present because the letter was written primarily to Jews? Could the fact that Mark is smaller than Matthew and Luke not give evidence to the idea of Mark as an outline, but simply that Matthew and Luke had more to say than did Mark? Perhaps they had more to say because they were writing to a different group of people (see above argument on the intended audience of the gospel). I know that John had his own thing going on, but where does he fit into the whole picture? His gospel was written later than the others, maybe he had access to the prior three while writing. Since Luke also wrote Acts as a sort of continuation of his gospel, why should we not call the Book of Acts L? The actions of the Apostles are not present in the Gospels.

I think that we should all remember something that we learned relatively early in Bib-Interp. The Bible is written FOR us, but not originally TO us.

-Steven