The Framework of the Story of Jesus
Literary-Critical Investigations of the Earliest Jesus Tradition
by Byron R. McCane and Karl Ludwig Schmidt
A new translation of a seminal work that helped establish form criticism in New Testament Studies.
Now available for the first time in English, Karl Ludwig Schmidt’s The Framework of the Story of Jesus (Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu) has been a foundation of New Testament studies. Through meticulous analysis, Schmidt demonstrates that the Synoptic Gospels are collections of individual stories that circulated orally and independently in the earliest Christian communities. Schmidt shows persuasively how, in their oral forms, most of these traditions existed apart from any sequence or specific temporal or geographic location, and that the chronology and locations now evident in the Gospels were applied by the evangelists while collecting and recording the oral traditions. Across much of the twentieth century and even into the present day, Schmidt’s thesis has undergirded Gospel interpretation. Yet as long as The Framework of the Story of Jesus remained untranslated, Schmidt’s ideas have been open to neglect and misinterpretation among Anglophone scholars. Discussion of the Synoptic Gospels and broader New Testament study will be enriched by engagement with the evidence and argument as originally presented.
Karl Ludwig Schmidt (1891-1956) helped establish form criticism, an influential method in New Testament studies. Schmidt opposed Nazism, left Germany in 1933, and settled in Basle, Switzerland, where he taught. Besides The Framework of the Story of Jesus, Schmidt also wrote The Place of the Gospels in the General History of Literature (2002). Byron R. McCane is Professor of Religion at Centre College (Danville, Kentucky). He is also codirector of the archaeological excavations at Horvat Kur in the Lower Galilee, Israel. His books include Roll Back the Stone (2003).
- By (author) Byron R McCane
- By (author) Karl Ludwig Schmidt
"Karl Ludwig Schmidt's revolutionary work helped transform the entire discipline of New Testament studies, but it has never been available to the English-reading public. Byron McCane has performed an enormous service to our field by producing an accessible and highly readable translation that reveals the true genius of this classic text." Bart D. Ehrman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "A century later, K.L. Schmidt's Framework still provides not only the basis for the story of Jesus, with its detailed argument that Gospel pericopae are stand-alone stories - but also for all Gospel studies ever since. I warmly welcome this English translation, and only wish that it had been available when I was doing my own doctorate on Gospel genre - for Schmidt's 'framework' is also true for many other ancient biographies." Richard A. Burridge, King's College London
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