Achievement
Gunkel became an outstanding representative of the "History of Religions School" (die religionsgeschichtliche Schule), which addressed the history of traditions behind the biblical text. In addition to Gunkel, the original group also included Albert Eichhorn, William Wrede, Wilhelm Bousset, Johannes Weiss, Ernst Troeltsch, Wilhelm Heitmüller, and Paul Wernle. In the beginning they were primarily concerned with the origins of Christianity, but this interest eventually broadened to include the historical backgrounds of ancient Israelite and other Near Eastern religions.
His "Creation and Chaos in the Beginning and at the End of Time"( 1895) compared the biblical creation/destruction myths from Genesis 1 to Revelation 12. His most important work was probably his commentary on Genesis (1901), in which he applied to that book the new critical methodology of form criticism (German, Formgeschichte). Form criticism examined the genres used in the biblical text to identify the Sitz im Leben ('setting in life') that produced the text. This approach was based on the assumption that each genre is organically associated with a particular social and/or historical situation. Gunkel and his circle believed that this was an improvement upon source criticism. Nineteenth-century source criticism had examined the biblical text (especially the Pentateuch) on the basis of style, vocabulary, theology, and other criteria to identify the basic literary sources used to create the text. To give one example, the source critics argued that the Pentateuch—the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—was created by combining four basic literary works known by the sigla J, E, D, and P. Form criticism allowed scholars to go behind these larger literary sources by identifying the smaller and older sources used by their authors. Because of its utility, form criticism became immensely influential in Germany and Europe during the 20th century, being applied and developed by important scholars like Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth. By the end of the 20th century, however, scholars commonly identified flaws in the approach and called for adjustments to it (such as one finds in Rhetorical Criticism) or total replacements of it (such as postmodern Genre Criticism).
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