Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§6.5 History, Hermeneutics and Faith
have is disciples effected by Jesus and the disciples thus 'effected' expressing
their 'effection' by formulating the tradition which effects. 105 The traditions
which lie behind the Gospels (for the moment we will leave aside the question of
what proportion of these traditions) began from the various encounters between
Jesus and those who by virtue of these encounters became disciples. The earliest
traditions are the product of disciple-response. There is not an objectified meaning
to be uncovered by stripping away the accretions of disciple faith. The tradition
itself in its earliest form is in a crucially important sense the creation of
faith; or to be more precise, it is the product of the encounters between Jesus and
the ones who became his disciples. The hearing and witnessing of the first disciples
was already a hermeneutical act, already caught in the hermeneutical circle.
The twenty-first-century exegetes and interpreters do not begin the hermeneutical
dialogue; they continue a dialogue which began in the initial formation of
the tradition. 106
The point for us now, therefore, is that the saying or account attests the impact
made by Jesus. 107 But that does not enable us to get behind that impact to a
Jesus who might have been heard otherwise. For the original impulse behind
these records was, to put the point more accurately, sayings of Jesus as heard and
received, and actions of Jesus as witnessed and retained in the memory (both
parts of each phrase being important). We have to add in both cases, and as reflected
on thereafter, of course. However, what we have in these traditions is not
just the end-product of that reflection. It is rather the faith-creating word/event,
105. Cf. Ricoeur's observation that the phenomenon of distance and difference refers
not simply to the modern reading of an ancient text: 'The distance is given at the beginning. It is
the very first distance between the hearer and the witness of the event' ('Preface to Bultmann'
56).
106. Watson seems to think only in terms of a significance seen retrospectively (Text and
Truth 52-53).
107. For want of a better way of describing it, in what follows I speak of the 'impact' of
Jesus. Similarly P. Barnett, Jesus and the Logic of History (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997)
speaks of 'the percussive impact of Jesus the Teacher' (56, 102, 127); cf. his Jesus and the Rise
of Early Christianity ch. 2. Patterson emphasises '(the original) impression' made by Jesus, the
'experience' 'created' by Jesus in his disciples (The God of Jesus 10, 46-50, 53-54, 56-58, 87,
90, 113, 118, 130-31); he cites Willi Marxsen, 'Christian faith began with the event of being
moved by Jesus' (56, n. 1). We should also recall that form-critical analysis of the Jesus tradition
was predicated on the assumption that the tradition was retained as live tradition, precisely
in that the tradition continued to influence and shape the lives of the earliest disciples and communities.
It is more or less self-evident that teaching like Matt. 7.24-27/Luke 6.47-49 and Mark
8.34-38 pars, must have made a faith-creating impact on those who passed on the teaching.
There are obvious links in all this to the hermeneutical conception of language as event
('language-event'); for discussion see Thiselton, Two Horizons 335-56; and on 'speech-act'
theory, New Horizons 283-312, 361-68.
129