A New Formalist approach to narrative Christology: Returning to the structure of the Synoptic Gospels

HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies

 
 
Field Value
 
Title A New Formalist approach to narrative Christology: Returning to the structure of the Synoptic Gospels
 
Creator Dinkler, Michal Beth
 
Subject — —
Description Today, scholars employ the label ‘narrative Christology’ with relative frequency, though they mean different things when they do so. In this article, I argue that to date, narrative Christology has not yet fully explored the parameters of what it means to attend closely to the narrative form of the Gospels’ presentations of Jesus. I propose, further, that recent developments in literary theory’s so-called ‘New Formalism’ offer useful tools and concepts for moving in that direction. The first part of the article briefly outlines previous scholarship, identifying similarities and differences between various approaches labelled ‘narrative Christology’. The second section introduces the major concepts of New Formalism and how they might extend narrative Christology’s capacity to take narrative form seriously as an object of analysis. The third section of the article offers a case study of a passage that appears in the triple tradition – the intercalated healing stories of Jairus’ daughter and the haemorrhaging woman in Mark 5.21–43; Luke 8.40–56; and Matthew 9.18–26 – in order to explore narrative structure on the micro-level. My ultimate goal is to show how New Formalism can contribute to a more robust narrative Christology and, in so doing, advance our understanding of the distinctive ways in which the Synoptic Gospels construct the figure of Jesus.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor
Date 2017-10-31
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — —
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/hts.v73i1.4801
 
Source HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies; Vol 73, No 1 (2017); 11 pages 2072-8050 0259-9422
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://hts.org.za/index.php/hts/article/view/4801/10442 https://hts.org.za/index.php/hts/article/view/4801/10441 https://hts.org.za/index.php/hts/article/view/4801/10443 https://hts.org.za/index.php/hts/article/view/4801/10440
 
Coverage — — —
Rights Copyright (c) 2017 Michal Beth Dinkler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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