Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE CLIMAX OF JESUS' MISSION §17.1
pars, is of a story, stable in overall structure, with closer agreement at specific
points signalling the core elements for the tradents. 17 That each performer of the
tradition, including the Evangelists, should be free with less consequential details
or should elaborate matters of greater consequence, is no surprise. 18 Their
respect for the tradition, which is also evident, was manifestly not expressed in
slavish 'copying'. Even with the most sacred tradition, the degree of fixity was
still only relative and subject to individual elaboration — as the traditions of the
last supper clearly indicate. 19
Of course, with this body of tradition in particular, we can have no doubt
that it was first formulated after the events of Good Friday and Easter. So, more
clearly than with most of the tradition of Jesus' earlier doings and teachings, we
can be sure that its initial telling was from a post-Easter perspective. That perspective
is apparent at various places, as we shall see. But even so, there is little
cause to doubt the historical character of the broad structure and sequence of the
narrative or of its principal elements as initially formulated, presumably, by eyewitness
participants. Without such continuity it would be difficult to explain how
the 'gospel', which focused on the significance of the events narrated, became so
quickly established as the foundation of all the churches known to Paul.
Turning to that detail, we have already covered most of the key elements
and can refer simply to the earlier discussion 20 — particularly the entry into Jerusalem
(Mark 11.1-10 pars.), the symbolical protest in the Temple (Mark 11.15-
17 pars.), the various disputations thereafter (Mark 11.27—12.37), 21 the eschatological
discourse and parables (Mark 13 pars.), 22 the Gethsemane prayer (Mark
the Kyrios Christos', Harvard Divinity Bulletin 24 [1995] 13-18 [here 18]). Funk disagrees: the
Passion narrative 'cannot be based on the oral transmission of discrete scenes loosely connected.
... It was probably a written narrative from its inception' whose 'full development...
may not have begun until after the fall of Jerusalem' {Honest 238). But his inability to envisage
how Koester's 'hypothetical [oral] narrative was transmitted during the oral period' (239) simply
attests how limited is his own conception of the oral Jesus tradition.
17. Brown's own conclusion is that at the pre-Gospel level 'there existed at least a sequence
of the principal stages in the death of Jesus, along with some stories about episodes or
figures in that death. There may have been one or more preGospel narratives of the passion
composed from this material, but neither the fact nor the wording of the contents of such a narrative
can be established persuasively' {Death 92). The conclusion still works too much with
the model of a literary narrative.
18. See further Dschulnigg's discussion of Pesch's argument for an extended pre-
Markan Passion narrative {Sprache 323-31) and Brown's discussion of the special features of
Matthew's and John's Passion narratives {Death 59-63, 75-92).
19. See again §8.5c above.
20. Apart from those indicated, reference is all to §15.3a.
21. See above, §15.3b-e.
22. See above, §12.4d.
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