Form Criticism

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.