Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §6.5
have suffered from the false idea that 'form criticism' is the translation of Formgeschichte,
in that study of the history of transmission of the tradition (from the
first) has been too often subverted into a study of the forms themselves. So too
the recognition that forms have a Sitz-im-Leben (life-setting) diverted attention
too much from the process of transmission to the communities which gave the
forms their shape. To these matters we will have to return in §§8.3-6.
The weakness of form criticism as a tool in the quest is illustrated by the
ease with which it succumbed to the same illusion that Kahler identified: the assumption
that there is a recoverable reality (an 'original' form) behind the text
untouched by faith. So it could include the working assumption that many of the
individual forms in effect were given their initial shape and had a vital life outside
the communities of faith, as though the forms were to be found in storytelling
round the campfires of travellers or in the casual conversations of the marketplace,
104 as though the Evangelists hunted out tales about Jesus in the way
that European composers in the first half of the twentieth century hunted out the
folksongs and folk tunes of their people for their own compositions. But again
we have to ask whether we have in the Synoptic tradition any data which are untouched
by faith from the outset.
d. Disciple-Response
It is at this point that we can draw further upon the insights of postmodern literary
criticism — that the meaning of a text is in some sense the product of a creative
encounter between text and reader. For though the point being made is usually
with regard to the present-day reader's reception of literary texts, it actually
applies also to the tradition process itself which lies behind the Synoptic Gospels.
Here Gadamer's concept of the Wirkungsgeschickte of a text or tradition is
also to the point, since it applies also to the moment in which the tradition was itself
created. There is in fact no gap to be bridged between a Jesus historically
conceived and the subsequent tradition which has effected consciousness; all we
104. Cf. particularly E. Trocmé, Jesus and His Contemporaries (London: SCM, 1973):
'the setting in which the miracle stories originated and were handed down for a time is not a
Christian one, but must be sought in ... the village society of north-eastern Galilee or the area
immediately surrounding Lake Tiberias. Story-tellers at markets and during winter evenings
found a ready audience for narratives with no literary pretensions, but too sensational to leave a
popular audience unmoved. . . . We owe to him [Mark] the introduction of these narratives into
a Christian setting' (104). The point is elaborated by G. Theissen, The Gospels in Context: Social
and Political History in the Synoptic Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) 97-112; see
also his stimulating novellistic treatment, The Shadow of the Galilean: The Quest of the Historical
Jesus in Narrative Form (London: SCM, 1987).
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