Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE CLIMAX OF JESUS' MISSION §19.2
nuities and variations in the performances/retellings of the tradition. In the stabilities
we see the identity of the tradition; in the diversities its vitality. The written
Gospels are frozen (and extended) performances which commanded such assent,
and such widening assent among the first churches, that they count as
normative forms of the tradition. But initially, the Gospels were little different in
character from the countless oral performances which had preceded them.
The two perspectives come together in the hypothesis that the tradition's
continuing identity was given in the first formation of the tradition and is to be
seen as evidence of the impact made by the words or events thus recalled.
c. I believe that the method followed in the above pages has confirmed the
value of these perspectives. In the first place, the elements of the portrayal of the
remembered Jesus have been drawn consistently from regular emphases and motifs
in the Jesus tradition. A working rule of thumb has been that a characteristic
and relatively distinctive feature of the Jesus tradition is most likely to go back to
the consistent and distinctive character of the impact made by Jesus himself. In
contrast, jarring and widespread features are unlikely to have been drawn into the
tradition at a later stage precisely because they jarred and were thus unlikely to
have received widespread acceptance among the communities that cherished the
tradition.
In the second place, by regularly setting out the Jesus tradition synoptically
I believe I have demonstrated the strength of the model of oral traditioning proposed.
For again and again it has been clear that there is no consistency of interdependence
between the parallel texts, some parts being closely parallel, others
quite remote in vocabulary used. At the same time, again and again it has been
clear that there is a stability of subject matter and of structure, and often of some
core element (usually something said by Jesus), while the supporting details and
particular applications demonstrate a considerable diversity. Such regularly recurring
phenomena are not best explained by a uniform conception of literary
dependency and redaction. They are best explained, in my view, in terms of the
oral character of the tradition and/or the oral mode of transmission (even of
read/heard written texts), where concern was for theme and core and where subsidiary
details were treated as subject to the freedom of performance variation.
19.2. What Can We Say about Jesus' Aim(s)?
If the above methodological considerations are to the point, then, of course, the
crucial question becomes What picture of Jesus emerges from this enquiry?
What did the remembered Jesus look like? From the relatively clear outlines of
the impact made by Jesus during his mission, as still sufficiently evident in the
Jesus tradition, what can we say about the one who made the impact?
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