The Birth and Death of the PreMarkan Passion Narrative: A History of Form Criticism's Most Assured Result

This thesis is the first intellectual history of the preMarkan passion narrative, the most “assured result” of form criticism, and traces the development of the hypothesis from its origins in the history of religions school to recent scholarship on the genre of Mark. The five chapters of the thesis demonstrate that the preMarkan passion narrative hypothesis is dependent of a form-critical conception of Jesus tradition and all attempts to reconstruct the source rely on this conception of Jesus tradition. The first chapter looks at source criticism and Markan priority and the absence of a premarkan passion narrative before turning to the understanding of Jesus tradition in the history of religions school and the ways that their works influenced the form critics. The second chapter details a form-critical conception of Jesus tradition from the works of Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Dibelius, and Karl Ludwig Schmidt, emphasizing its focus on the individual units of Jesus tradition in the preliterary stage of Jesus tradition. In this framework, the preMarkan passion narrative attained a preeminent status as the only piece of Jesus tradition that from its origin was a connected narrative. Thus, the preMarkan passion narrative is seen as a form-critical construction. The third chapter traces arrival of form criticism and the preMarkan passion narrative into British Gospel scholarship in the works of Vincent Taylor, C. H. Dodd, R. H. Lightfoot, and Dennis Nineham. The fourth chapter describes a “Golden Age” of the quest for the preMarkan passion narrative as the post-Bultmannians identified the death of Jesus as authentic tradition and the redaction critics developed the discipline of Markan redaction criticism in an effort to discern early tradition from Markan redaction. This chapter details the chaos that ensued, with scholars coming to no consensus on the scope, contents, or origin of a preMarkan passion narrative. The fifth chapter traces challenges to the preMarkan passion narrative hypothesis from within form criticism and challenges to the form-critical paradigm from orality studies, and redaction-critical studies. These studies overturn all of form criticism’s assumptions about the nature of Jesus tradition. The sixth chapter traces attempts to breathe new life into the preMarkan passion narrative through genre studies and the relationship between Mark and the Gospels of John and Peter. Critiques of form criticism and the preMarkan passion narrative also came through genre studies and the relation between the Markan and Johannine passion narrative. These combination of these critiques of form criticism and the preMarkan passion narrative is the demise of the form-critical paradigm.