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FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §5.6
textualizing' of the text which allows it to be 'recontextualized' in the act of
reading. 140
In study of the Gospels the equivalent response to the traditional historicalcritical
focus on the world behind the text came to expression in another new 'criticism'
(in sequence after source criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism),
namely 'narrative criticism', which emerged in the 1980s. 141 In twentieth-century
development of Gospel studies it was more a second phase of the reaction against
form criticism's fragmentation of the stuff of the Gospels, and a deliberate attempt
to go beyond the first phase of reaction, that is, redaction criticism, which focused
too narrowly on the points where the Evangelist had redacted his sources. Like the
New Criticism, narrative criticism emphasized the wholeness and unity of the
text/Gospel as such, with a similar emphasis on the autonomy of the text. Thus, in
what has been regarded as the first expression of 'narrative criticism', David
Rhoads speaks of the 'autonomous integrity' of Mark's story world. 'Narrative
criticism brackets . . . historical questions and looks at the closed universe of the
story-world'. 142 Significantly, in focusing thus on the text as such, narrative critics
have found it necessary to reintroduce the concept of 'author', but not the author
behind the text (the 'real author'), rather the 'implied author', that is, the author
inferred from the narrative itself, drawing on the concepts of 'implied author' and
'implied reader' introduced to the discussion by Wolfgang Iser. 143
More characteristic of postmodernism's impact on Gospel studies has been
140. P. Ricoeur, 'The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation', From Text to Action:
Essays in Hermeneutics II (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1991) 75-88 (here 83-84).
141. See particularly S. D. Moore, Literary Criticism and the Gospels (New Haven:
Yale University, 1989) Part I; M. A. Powell, What Is Narrative Criticism? (Minneapolis: Fortress,
1990); D. Rhoads and K. Syreeni, eds., Characterization in the Gospels: Reconceiving
Narrative Criticism (JSNTS 184; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999), including Rhoads's
concluding chapter, 'Narrative Criticism: Practices and Prospects' 264-85.
142. D. Rhoads, 'Narrative Criticism and the Gospel of Mark', JAAR 50 (1982) 411-34
(here 413), cited by Moore, Literary Criticism 8-9; though note Rhoads's later observation that
'there is no storyworld apart from social context, and there is no storyworld apart from the
reading experience' ('Narrative Criticism' 269). Particularly influential has been H. W. Frei,
The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics
(New Haven: Yale University, 1974).
143. Thiselton, New Horizons 516-22, referring to W. Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns
of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University, 1974); also The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University, 1978). The most influential narrative-critical exposition of a Gospel has
been R. A. Culpepper's Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1983; see, e.g., Morgan, Biblical Interpretation 230-34). Moore dialogues particularly
with R. C. Tannehill, The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts: A Literary Interpretation.
Vol. 1: The Gospel According to Luke (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986) (Literary Criticism, index
'Tannehill').
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