1. Historical Criticism: focus on events/social-historical settings (geography, language, culture, author's intent)

2. Form Criticism: focus on history of early Christian community

3. Redaction Criticism: focus on author/redactor

4. Literary Criticism: focus on text

• Structuralism: focus on the relationship of the parts to one another (e.g., plot elements, intertextuality)
• New Criticism: focus on text as artifact/work of art (texture, imagery, symbolism, structure)
• Rhetorical Criticism: focus on argumentation (rhetoric, style, logic) and impact on readers (information, persuasion, alienation, etc.)

5. Reader Response Criticism: focus on reader

R. Hays (MVNT 160):

New Testament ethics will find a more stable starting place if we begin with the moral visions of the individual texts than if we try to begin by reconstructing Jesus. . . . The theological function of the New Testament canon is to designate precisely these interpretations of Jesus as authoritative for the continuing life and practice of the community. Therefore, the historian's reimagining of Jesus, however informative and interesting, can never claim the same normative theological status as the four diverse canonical accounts. Consequently, in a work. . . that aims to read the New Testament as normative for the church's ethical reflection, it makes more sense to stay with the texts and to interpret the moral visions that confront us there, in the Jesus rendered by the individual evangelists.

S. McKnight (HCJL 11-12):

If we were to start with the assumption that Christian faith is first and foremost faith in Jesus, in the real historical Jesus who actually sat with sinners at table, who actually died on a cross, and who was actually raised by God from among the dead, what difference would it make and what significance is ther to such an assumption? . . . What we are talking about then is that Christian faith is faith in a person, in Jesus of Nazareth, and this in a preeminent sense. Only after one has faith in Jesus, and because one has faith in Jesus of Nazareth, does one have faith in the text of the NT, in the creeds of classic Christendom, and in the thology that expresses those creeds and that NT. . . . What our proposal offers is that Jesus himself. . . has both a prior place and prominent place in shaping theology and that what he said and what he did become the standard by which all other statements are measured.