Karl Ludwig Schmidt

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.

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. In their oral forms, most of these traditions existed apart from any sequence or specific temporal or geographic location. The chronology and locations now evident in the Gospels, Schmidt argues, are frameworks that the evangelists applied to the stories while collecting and recording the oral traditions. Across much of the twentieth century and even into the present day, this argument has undergirded Gospel interpretation. But given that The Framework of the Story of Jesus remained untranslated, Schmidt's ideas have been sometimes ignored and often misunderstood. Synoptic Gospels discussion and study will surely be enriched by engagement with the evidence and argument of this classic.

Karl Ludwig Schmidt's classic Die Stellung der Evangelien der allgemeinen Literaturgeschichte was one of a handful of twentieth-century essays on the New Testament to set the agenda for an entire generation of New Testament scholars. First published in 1923, the text laid out Schmidt's contention that the gospels represent a literary genre that does not derive from others in the ancient world. In portraying the gospels as the written record of an oral tradition rather than as biographical or historical text, the German scholar found points of comparison with Sayings of the Desert Fathers and the later collections of Faust legends. Schmidt's powerful argument has commanded attention in Germany for decades but has never before been fully available in English. In recent years the question of gospel genre has reemerged as an issue of debate. With this translation, Byron R. McCane enables a new generation of English-speaking scholars to engage with Schmidt's classic perspective on an enduring question. In an introduction to the volume, John Riches places Schmidt's landmark study in its context. He locates the text among the writings of the form critics, with whom Schmidt allied himself, and relates it to Schmidt's own still untranslated study of the topography and chronology of the gospels. He documents the essay's reception in the English-speaking world and critically examines the way Schmidt is understood in present-day discussion of the genre of the gospels. Riches also explores how recent efforts to classify the gospels as ancient biographies have in many ways misread and misrepresented Schmidt's views - errors that this translation will help rectify.