Tradition history or tradition criticism is a methodology of biblical criticism that situates a text within a stream of a specific tradition in history and attempts to describe the development of the tradition over the course of time. Tradition criticism was developed by Hermann Gunkel. Tradition history seeks to analyze biblical literature in terms of the process by which biblical traditions passed from stage to stage into their final form, especially how they passed from oral tradition to written form. Tradition history/criticism is a sister discipline of form criticism—also associated with Gunkel, who used the results of source and form criticism to develop the history of tradition interpretation. Form criticism and tradition criticism thus overlap, though the former is more narrow in f