Compare methods

	Form Criticism	Historical-Critical Exegesis
Field	Religious Studies	Religious Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1921	1975
Originator	Hermann Gunkel (Old Testament); Rudolf Bultmann & Martin Dibelius (New Testament)	Enlightenment biblical scholarship; methodized by Krentz, surveyed by Barton
Type	Genre-classification and tradition-history pipeline for oral pre-literary units	Integrative exegetical pipeline establishing a text's original historical meaning
Seminal source	Bultmann, R. (1963). The History of the Synoptic Tradition (trans. J. Marsh). New York: Harper & Row. [German original 1921]. ISBN: 9780060611729	Krentz, E. (1975). The Historical-Critical Method. Philadelphia: Fortress Press (Guides to Biblical Scholarship). ISBN: 9780800604608
Aliases	Formgeschichte, Form-Critical Analysis, Genre Criticism of Scripture, Tradition History	Historical-Critical Method, Grammatico-Historical Method, Biblical Criticism, Critical Exegesis
Related	4	4
Summary	Form criticism (Formgeschichte) studies the small, originally oral units that make up the biblical text, asking what genre each unit belongs to, what social setting gave rise to it, and how it developed before reaching written form. Hermann Gunkel pioneered the approach for the Hebrew Bible, treating the narratives of Genesis and the Psalms as folk forms shaped by communal use, while Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Dibelius applied it to the Gospels, analyzing the sayings and stories about Jesus as units that circulated and were shaped by the early church before the evangelists wrote. Bultmann's 1921 History of the Synoptic Tradition is the method's most systematic statement. The core conviction is that form and function are linked: a unit's genre points to the recurring life-setting, the Sitz im Leben, in which the community used it.	Historical-critical exegesis is the dominant scholarly approach to interpreting the Bible: it reads each text in its original language, genre, and historical setting in order to recover what its author meant and what its first audience would have understood. Rather than reading scripture through later doctrine or present concerns, it asks the historical question first. The method is not one technique but an integrated family that draws on textual, source, form, and redaction criticism, applying them within a grammatico-historical reading. Edgar Krentz's compact 1975 The Historical-Critical Method describes its rise, goals, and procedures, while John Barton's 2007 The Nature of Biblical Criticism offers a philosophical defense, arguing that biblical criticism is at heart a disciplined attention to what the text means in its literary and historical context.