What Happened Before The Gospels?

The Form-Critical View of Oral Tradition

Jan 11, 2026

Behind the writing of the first Gospel lies a black box – a period of almost forty years in which the teaching and stories of Jesus were shared among his early followers.

But what went on in this time? That much of the activity was oral is largely agreed. Classical societies were oral societies, in which few people were highly literate. But can we say anything more about how this oral tradition actually functioned?

Over the last century, a number of models of oral tradition in the early Church have emerged, each telling a very different story of how the Jesus tradition got underway. Some accounts are highly fluid, seeing the Church as heavily involved in the invention of proto-gospel material. Others are more regulated, viewing the oral materials as more or less controlled by apostles or early Christian communities.

To get to grips with what we might call the ‘traditioning’ process, I want to unpack some of the key models scholars have devised to think about it. In a series of posts, I will introduce each model, before unpacking some of their strengths and weaknesses.

But before we come to that, we must ask: why do scholars speak of ‘models’ of oral tradition, and by what criteria would we judge a model to be more or less compelling?

When thinking about the origins of the Jesus tradition, I am tempted by a parallel with debates in physics about the origins of the Universe. Of course, none of us can directly observe what went on in the early Universe. It is, strictly speaking, lost to us. But just because we cannot observe the early Universe does not mean we can know nothing about it.

Physicists do not throw up their arms in surrender at the mystery. Rather, they create models – simplified representations – of what could have gone on. And while these models are to some extent conjectural, they are all not all equally valid. A good model is going to be one that make sense of the evidence we do see. Yet it will also be coherent: it will be hopefully align with the best of maths and physics.

When it comes to the Jesus tradition, we are faced with a similar situation. We cannot recover the early Jesus tradition. Yet a good model of what went on in this period is going to account for the data we find in the gospels. It is also going to cohere with what we know about how oral tradition and memory works more broadly.

We begin, then, where the twentieth century began: with a model of the tradition encoded in a school of thought known as ‘form criticism.’ While form criticism is widely rejected today, it was once the way that the game of gospel studies was played.I will begin by laying out what it is, before unpacking why it was eventually rejected.

Form Criticism

The form critics worked from the basic insight that the gospel materials are comprised of a series of short units. These units are often called pericopae, from the Greek meaning to ‘cut around’, since they can effectively be ‘cut out’ of the story and placed where they are needed. Moreover, the form critics noticed that these units take on familiar sub-genres or ‘forms’, such as healings, parables, and sayings.

The idea that the gospel is made up of short anecdotes (chreiai), which follow more or less the same narrative structure, is obvious. Yet it is what the form-critics did with this information which is more controversial and fascinating. In German, the method is called formgeschichte (‘form history’), since the form critics believed it was possible to plot the history of these forms prior to their inclusion in the gospels.

To get behind the gospels from the insight that they are comprised of ‘forms’ may seem like a peculiar task. To understand the form-critics’ modus operandi then, we need to take stock of three three key critical assumptions they made about the forms.

The first is related to what they called the forms’ Sitz im Leben: their ‘setting in life’. Once the form had been identified, the form-critics believed they could infer a particular setting (Sitz) that would generate the form. For example, a parable might be used for teaching, while a healing story might have been used in evangelism.

The second assumption is that the ‘forms’ followed more or less regular processes of development. This allowed the form-critics to ‘work back’ from the form as it finds itself in the gospels to the ‘pure’ form as it originated. Believing, for example, that shorter forms were more primitive, one could work back to an earlier version.

The third assumption is that some gospel material can be attributed to the Aramaic-speaking church in Palestine, while others can be attributed to the Greek-speaking world of early Christianity. For example, parables with semitic imagery might be attributed to the Palestinian speaking Church, while expanded miracle accounts, or the “I” sayings of Jesus, could be attributed to Hellenistic Christianity.

On the whole, scholars have often characterised form criticism as an “informal” and “uncontrolled" model of the traditioning process. Perhaps the best modern analogy is to Bart Ehrman’s view that the Jesus tradition can be likened to a telephone game. As the Jesus tradition evolved, it do so in a free-form way to meet the needs of the early Christian community. Like folklore, the stories in the gospels evolved over time.

What Form Criticism Got Right

Today, scholars often look back at form criticism as an abject failure. Yet before we come to their criticisms: we must ask, is there anything the form critics got right?

The basic judgement that the form-critics got correct is that the early Church did not have a purely antiquarian interest in Jesus. They were not remembering details about Jesus out of pure historical or biographical curiosity. They were recollecting material which served, broadly speaking, the needs and purposes of the early Church.

This aligns very well with more recent theory about how groups remembers the past. In collective memory theory, a group will not remember details which are incidental to their communal identity. They remember – and re-write – the past, according to the needs of the present. This explains why much of the material in the gospels does not concern Jesus’ personal foibles but rather his relevance for the present.

In my view, the form-critics were also right to posit a view of the oral tradition which was not strictly controlled. The form critics view the oral tradition as fluid and evolving – and while I would question the extent of its fluidity – it seems to make a good deal of intuitive sense of the human limits of containing the Jesus tradition.

Even within the synoptics, we find different versions of the same saying or story. It seems at least plausible, then, that this flexibility was inherent in the oral period from the start, in which the stories of sayings were being passed down. I find this view more compelling than the idea that the tradition was rigorously controlled.

Where Form Criticism Went Wrong

We have seen that form criticism was not entirely misguided. Why then was it widely abandoned by the end of the 20th century?

It is no understatement to say that each of its key assumptions about how the tradition operated has been called into question. Here I focus on five key criticisms.

(a) The ‘Sitz im Leben’

A fundamental assumption of form criticism is that the forms could be paired to particular Sitze im Leben (‘settings in life’) which revealed the origins of a tradition. One can see how this would work with particular modern forms. For example, an obituary would be written for a funeral; a recipe for use in a kitchen.

Yet beyond such obvious examples, any close link between ‘form’ and Sitz im Leben breaks down. Eric Eve offers the counter-example a short oral form like a joke.1 A joke could be made between friends, but it could also be used in a novel, a sermon, an after-dinner speech, essay or stand-up show. To take a short ‘form’ like a job and infer its Sitz im Leben would be absurd.

The problem is that the gospels are made up of precisely such forms. They are a series of short anecdotes and isolated sayings whose original settings could have been diverse. Yes, a particular unit might have been useful in evangelism or teaching or preaching. The difficulty is that the particular setting of a form is impossible to trace.

A related problem is the assumption that because one can attach a Sitz im Leben to a ‘form’, the form was invented for that purpose. This simply does not follow, for it confuses the (possible) use of a tradition with its origins. As T.W. Manson pointed out long ago: “We can list these stories in the Gospels. We can label them…. But a paragraph in Mark is not a penny the better or the worse as historical evidence for being labeled, ‘Apophthegm,’ or ‘Pronouncement Story’ or ‘Paradigm.’”2

(b) Working back to a pure form?

A second problem for the form-critical model is that it assumes that the forms followed a linear process of development. This gave the form critics confidence to work back to the ‘primitive’ form, since the forms evolved along predictable lines.

The difficulty is that, even among the form-critics, there was no agreement or proof of how the forms evolved. For example, Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Dibelius imagined that the tradition would expand and become more elaborate over time, while Vincent Taylor thought that the forms had a tendency to become shorter and abbreviated. As evidence for this, the form critics pointed to developments in the gospel texts.

Yet there is a two-fold problem with this view. The first is that it assumes that the pre-gospel oral tradition functioned in the same way as literary development. Rather than seeing oral tradition as a dynamic series of performances, each of which contain natural variations, the form critics saw the tradition as building on a series of layers.

Yet the second problem is that the textual evidence did not support the ‘regular’ patterns of development which the form-critics imagined. This was shown in a landmark study by E.P. Sanders, The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition. Through a careful analysis of the gospels, Sanders showed that there was no particular pattern for how material evolved. Sometimes it was abbreviated; sometimes expanded. Sanders concludes, “The form critics were right in thinking that the material changed; they were wrong in thinking that they knew how it changed.”3

(c) Folklore and Literary Composition

A third problem is one that we will return to time and again: what is the best analogy for how oral tradition worked in the period before the gospels?

In thinking about an analogy for the Jesus tradition, the form critics sometimes appealed to folklore – an image of communal transmission derived from 19th century German romanticism. On this view, the gospel materials were the collective and unconscious product of the Volk, the lower-class illiterate peasantry. This mean that the gospels themselves were not serious works of literature at all, but rather a collection of traditions strung together like beads on a string.

As Robyn Faith Walsh has documented, this romanticist picture of oral tradition has had a surprisingly long legacy in New Testament studies.4 Yet it is one largely idiosyncratic to gospel scholarship. When confronted with similar written texts, classicists and ancient historians do not tend to characterise them as the product of an extended process of oral tradition. Whether or not one sees the gospels, with Walsh, as the work of elite literary producers, they are clearly of literature.

A major reasons why scholars moved away from the form-critical view was the ‘literary turn’ in late 20th century. Studying the gospels with the tools of literary theory, it became impossible to ignore that each of the gospels have their own distinct theological interests and internal narrative structure. Rather than viewing the gospels as the product of the Volk, they are now seen as a kind of ancient life-writing, or bíoi.

(d) The Hellenistic-Palestinian Distinction

A fourth problem relates to the way that the form-critics saw the development of the Jesus tradition. As we have seen, the form-critics viewed some of the tradition as originating in the Palestinian Aramaic-speaking Church, while other material was quickly added to by the Greek-speaking diaspora. One of the tasks of the form-critics, then, was to separate the wheat of the Palestinian Church from the chaff of the Greek.

The flaw with this view is that there is no easy separation of ‘Greek’ and ‘Aramaic’ tiers in the early Church. As Martin Hengel and others have demonstrated, it is not possible to pry apart a Palestinian Judaism from Hellenistic Judaism.5 By the first century, the Jerusalem Church and Judea was itself Hellenised. Aramaic speakers existing alongside Greek ones in the early Church, and the gospels themselves exhibit a strong familiarity with both Jewish and Greek custom and language.

Complicating this view further is the size of the Church. Scholars have had a tendency to speak of different ‘communities’ behind the gospels, as though the Church was a series of isolated sects. Yet this obscures the fact that the early Church was a small, tightly-connected network, populated by missionaries. According to some estimates, there were no more than 8,000 Christians by the end of the first-century.6 In practical terms, this may have meant that Christians were only one-person remove from anyone else.

All of this makes it difficult to maintain the form-critical view of an Aramaic-speaking Church isolated from its Greek counterparts. To attribute parts of the tradition to “Hellenistic Christianity” is to speak of a Church which did not exist.

(e) An Uncontrolled Process?

A final problem with the form critics’ model concerns the role of the disciples of Jesus in the traditioning process. Michael Bird puts the problem tongue-in-cheek: “If the form critics are right, the eyewitnesses of Jesus must have been raptured away not long after the resurrection, and all teachers about the Jesus tradition must have been swallowed up by the earth soon after the Day of Pentecost.”7

To sustain the extreme fluidity envisaged by the form critics, it is necessary that eyewitnesses drop out of the picture quickly. There are elements of truth to this idea. By the time that the gospels were written, the vast majority of the earliest witnesses of Jesus had passed away. I have written on why I am unconvinced that eyewitnesses were closely involved in the writing the gospels (see my pieces on Matthew and John).

At the same time, we are concerned with the period before the gospels. In this time, I find it unconvincing that the memory of Jesus’ early disciples, like Peter, was completely neglected by the Church. We see flashes of eyewitnesses sources and connections within the gospels themselves, and much of the material – to the extent we can judge it historical – would have had its origins in the eyewitnesses.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that eyewitnesses were ubiquitous to control every aspect of the tradition. Nor I am I suggesting that legends of Jesus did not emerge – I have argued they did, here and here. As we will come to see, communities can invent material about eyewitnesses even during the life-time and remit of those witnesses.

What I am suggesting that the shape of the Jesus tradition was informed by eyewitnesses. And the “living memory” of those witnesses – people who knew eyewitnesses or had heard their personal memories –would have lasted long after their death.8 By conservative estimates, the gospels were written only 40 to 90 years after Jesus’ resurrection, placing natural limits on what could be written about him.

The End of Form Criticism

Form criticism was once the dominant model of ‘oral tradition’ in gospel studies. Yet we have seen that almost all of its key assumptions have been called into question.

To summarise the key points of contention:

The form critics were overconfident in attaching the ‘forms’ to particular Sitze im Leben, and in using these settings to explain the origin of the Jesus tradition.
They were wrong in thinking that the oral tradition followed particular laws, which would allow them to work back to the ‘pure’ or ‘primitive’ form.
They were incorrect in their assumption that the gospels were unliterary works, the product of a ‘collective unconscious’ akin to the oral poetry of folklore.
They erred in positing a strong divide between ‘Palestinian’ and ‘Hellenistic’ Christianities and believing that gospel material could be assigned to each.
Their model did not account for the ongoing living memory of the eyewitnesses.

For these and other reasons, form criticism cannot adequately explain the tradition behind the gospels. As we continue our quest for the ways in which material was passed on orally, we will need a model which does not make the same mistakes.

Thank you for reading this post! If you enjoyed this one, you might also like:

Get 25% off for 1 year

Behind the Gospels

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?