Finding the Shards #21
After the war scholars began to turn their attention to the gospels as larger units of composition. It was time for putting the pieces back together. Now the point about the evangelists being responsible for the larger narrative frameworks of the gospels could finally be turned to advantage. At first the authors of the gospels were called redactors, or editors, in keeping with the observation that they composed their gospels by arranging and changing earlier written material. But in spite of the desire not to give the evangelists too much credit as creative writers, real composition was finally acknowledged, naive assumptions about reporting history vanished, and the authorial intention of the evangelists came to be called a theology. Seeing how an evangelist arranged the pieces for his gospel, and thus ex- pressed his theology, was called redaction criticism. Scholars learned how to do it, but everyone knew that redaction criticism did not satisfy either the quest for Christian origins or the search for a hermeneutical key to the essence of the Christian message. Redaction criticism merely underscored the fact that early Christians had produced many theologies.