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From Form-Critical Setting to Gospel Community and Beyond
The German expression Sitz im Leben celebrates 100 years of use in Biblical scholarship and continues to evoke scholarly attention and discussion. The growing interest in the social factors behind the formation of early Christian groups and their identities has its background in this century old notion. Gerd Theißen has repeatedly expressed the conviction that the sociological study of early Christianity is a way of shedding light on and expanding it. Already in his famous 1972 lecture concerning the wandering radicals and their influence on the transmission of Jesus sayings, he linked his work to the Siiz im Leben as a form-critical category:
Aus typischen Zügen von Texten schloß sie [die formgeschichtliche Methode] auf ebenso typische Züge zwischenmenschlichen Verhaltens, auf einen 'Sitz im Leben', innerhalb dessen ein Text immer wieder gebraucht und durch diesen Gebrauch geprägt wurde, etwa durch Verwendung in Unterweisung, Mission oder Kult.1
A similar connection between the idea of the Sitz im Leben and the sociological study of the NT applies to the more specific question of Gospel communities. In his 1987 dissertation Philip Esler pointed out that his socalled socio-redactional criticism in fact goes back to the analysis of the social context of the Sitz im Leben.2 It has evidently profound implications for the reconstruction of Gospel communities.
The debate issuing from Richard Bauckham's and his colleagues' questioning of a simple correlation between the Gospels and specific Christian communities is also, in a sense, a discussion about the Sitz im Leben.3 Francis Watson, in his contribution to the volume, realizes that there exists a connection between the recent interest in Gospel communities and the old form-critical paradigm:
One of the roots of more recent interest in the original communal setting of the Gospels is therefore redaction criticism's extension of form-critical concern with the Sitz im Leben of traditional material to the Gospel as a whole.4
Watson criticizes the idea of the Sitz im Leben as a theological construct. He does not discuss the methodological issues involved when scholars move from the Gospel text to the Gospel community in search for social realities and religious identities. The present debate calls for further reflection not only on the possibility that the Gospels were...