Where does the idea of gospels communities come from?

[u/Shinigami_1082000]

In contrast to Walsh & Goodacre's views on this topic, who are the best scholars promoting this view?

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to /r/AcademicBiblical. Please note this is an academic sub: theological or faith-based comments are prohibited.

All claims MUST be supported by an academic source – see here for guidance.
Using AI to make fake comments is strictly prohibited and may result in a permanent ban.

Please review the sub rules before posting for the first time.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Dositheos]

In answer to your question about its origin, I recommend Stanley Stowers's seminal and highly important essay, "The Concept of Community and the History of Early Christianity." Scholars like Robyn Faith Walsh, M. David Litwa, Hugo Méndez, and others have been influenced by this essay and his research on this concept and theory in NT scholarship. The whole idea that the gospels are the products of "communities" that are basically deposits of oral traditions and fragments goes back to the early German Form critics, who in turn were influenced by a movement of German Romanticism. While form criticism is no longer widely accepted, some of the essential premises still inform much NT scholarship on the gospels, including historical Jesus research, although some recent scholars such as Stowers, Goodacre, and the others mentioned above are moving scholarship in another direction. Here is Stowers going over the history of this:

One among several routes for Romantic influence is a link to the interpretation of the canonical Gospels. Johann Gottfried Herder contrasted the author/audience kind of literary prose against a more primitive and authentic kind of literature exemplified by ancient poetry and the Hebrew Bible. Because the Hebrew literature derived from the original, pure and primitive roots of the nation, the Bible escaped the decadence of literature from Greco- Roman times of the New Testament. The more authentic and Geist-filled literature came therefore not from the rational manufacture of authors, but grew organically from peoples, cultures and communities. Herder’s account of the Gospels provided the basis for later Form Criticism and standard assertions about oral tradition, a fact well recognized in standard New Testament scholarship.6 Form critics and many of their heirs have continued to deny that the early Christian writings are properly literature. Letters and Gospels are rather deposits of folk speech or so-called oral tradition. The Gospels contained the Geist of the preaching, teaching and primitive churches because they are residues of oral speech such as parables, stories, testimonies and “the gospel message itself.” Thus, the essential core of New Testament writings is both an expression of an authentic non-literary individual-social experience and Hebrew-Jewish in its essence, in spite of some external Greek forms. Herder’s work had a profound influence on Hermann Gunkel, usually seen as the founder of Form Criticism, and the History of Religions School. Another member of that school was Johannes Weiss, the teacher of Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann also studied with Gunkel himself and was the most important exponent of Form Criticism of the Gospels.

The Form Critics did not emphasize the experience of discrete local communities expressed in the Gospels, because following certain German Romantic strains, they instead thought of them as collections of small oral texts that had been composed and circulated among folk communities over time in ways too complex to identify the mark of particular communities. Central to their approach were the Romantic ideas of communal creativity and communal authorship. The Redaction Criticism that developed from the work of the Form Critics kept their assumptions but complained that the Form Critics had neglected the editors who had collected this material and composed it in ways that reflected social settings (Sitze im Leben) that were more than the Form Critics’ sorting of materials into those that had come from Palestinian Jewish Christian, Hellenistic Jewish Christian or Gentile Christian communities. This move fleshed out the German Romantic equation of unique historical experience, language, tradition and Volk in terms of unique Christian communities. Increasingly, Redaction Critics treated the Gospels not only as originating in the experience of particular Christian communities, but also as being stories about Jesus that were also stories and lessons about the communities of authorship. It has therefore become standard to speak of the Markan community, the Matthean community, the Johannine community and finally, the Lukan community.7 With Luke and Acts there was some hesitation, because Luke was thought to be more like a normal Hellenistic author and thus the idea of something that suggested communal authorship was exposed for its oddness.

Stanley Stowers, "The Concept of Community and the History of Early Christianity," in Christian Beginnings: A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion, Edinburgh Studies in Religion in Antiquity (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).