Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §6.5
as itself a force shaping faith and as retained and rehearsed by the faith thus created
and being created. In other words, the Jesus tradition gives immediate access
not to a dispassionately recorded word or deed, nor only to the end product
(the faith of the 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s), but also to the process between the two, to
the tradition which began with the initial impact of Jesus' word or deed and
which continued to influence intermediate retellers of the tradition until crystallized
in Mark's or Matthew's or Luke's account. 108 In short, we must take seriously
the character of the tradition as disciple-response, and the depth of the tradition
as well as its final form. 109
e. The Remembered Jesus
We can therefore press Kähler's point still further to one of fundamental principle.
The Synoptic tradition provides evidence not so much for what Jesus did or
said in itself, but for what Jesus was remembered as doing or saying by his first
disciples, or as we might say, for the impact of what he did and said on his first
disciples. Bearing in mind the point just made, we may say that it is precisely the
process of 'remembering' which fuses the horizons of past and present, by making
the past present again (Vergegenwärtigung). 110 What we actually have in the
earliest retellings of what is now the Synoptic tradition, then, are the memories
108. Cf. particularly the repeated emphasis of H. Schürmann on the pre-Easter beginnings
of the Synoptic tradition — 'Die vorösterlichen Anfänge der Logientradition: Versuch
eines formgeschichtlichen Zugangs zum Leben Jesu', in H. Ristow and K. Matthiae, eds., Der
historische Jesus und der kerygmatische Christus [Berlin: Evangelische, 1961] 342-70); also
Jesus: Gestalt und Geheimnis (Paderborn: Bonifatius, 1994) 85-104, 380-97: 'With the help of
form-critical principles it can be shown . . . that the beginnings of the logia tradition must lie in
the pre-Easter circle of disciples, and therewith in Jesus himself. Therewith would a formcritical
access be opened to the "historical Jesus", for the "historical Jesus" is now himself a
factor in the history of the tradition (as its initiator)' (103).
109. The argument here is similar to that between J. A. Sanders and B. S. Childs on 'canonical
criticism', in which I side with Sanders; see my 'Levels of Canonical Authority', HBT
4 (1982) 13-60 (particularly 15 and n. 14), reprinted in The Living Word (London: SCM, 1987)
141-74, 186-92 (particularly 142-43 and n. 14).
110. Cf. particularly J. Schröter, Erinnerung an Jesu Worte: Studien zur Rezeption der
Logienüberlieferung in Markus, Q und Thomas (WMANT 76; Neukirchen-Vluyn:
Neukirchener, 1997) 3-4; 'Recall of the Jesus tradition can be understood accordingly as a selective
process by which the actual present becomes meaningful by reference to the person of
Jesus' (463-64). See further Schröter's 'Markus, Q und der historische Jesus', ZNW 89 (1998)
173-200; also 'Die Frage nach dem historischen Jesus und der Charakter historischer
Erkenntnis', in A. Lindemann, ed., The Sayings Source Q and the Historical Jesus (Leuven:
Leuven University, 2001) 207-54, where the overlap of our programmatic concerns is clear (especially
213-34, 252-53).
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