"Astonished at his teaching": The structure and authority of
Jesus' sayings in the Gospel of Mark Since the first half of the
twentieth century, form critics have identified small,
independent units in the Synoptic gospels and categorized them
according to specific forms. The application of form criticism
to the smallest unit of Jesus' speech, the saying, raises
significant questions about the relationships between the form,
content, and function of a saying. Jesus' sayings have been
classified by form critics according to their content and
function. However, these types of classifications do not
consider the formal syntactic structure of the sayings.
Tradition historians, literary critics, and scholars applying
rhetorical analysis also have made significant contributions to
an understanding of the content and function of Jesus' sayings.
However, except for the work of Ernst Käsemann and Richard A.
Edwards, there has been little interest in the structure of
Jesus' sayings and their function. This is surprisin