The Twelve Apostles — An Essay in Redaction Criticism

Abstract

Of the many possible historical and theological questions dealing with the Twelve I have chosen one which may serve as a sequel to Fr Harrington's paper on modem trends in Gospel studies.2 Following the outline of the 1964 Instruction he showed that in the final stage of Gospel formation the Evangelists have acted as genuine authors expressing their own theological viewpoints through the medium of the material at their disposal. It is the aim of this paper to show that a study of a theme as the Twelve can help in discovering what those individual viewpoints are, and in fact provides a useful approach to a study of the Gospels as a whole.