Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§6.5 History, Hermeneutics and Faith
of the first disciples — not Jesus himself, but the remembered Jesus. 111 The idea
that we can get back to an objective historical reality, which we can wholly separate
and disentangle from the disciples' memories and then use as a check and
control over the way the tradition was developed during the oral and earliest written
transmission, is simply unrealistic. 112 This observation would have been
more obvious had more attention been given to the narrative tradition, as distinct
from the sayings tradition, over the past 150 years. For narratives about Jesus
never began with Jesus; at best they began with eyewitnesses. From the first we
are confronted not so much with Jesus but with how he was perceived. And the
same is actually true of the sayings tradition: at best what we have are the teachings
of Jesus as they impacted on the individuals who stored them in their memories
and began the process of oral transmission.
In one sense, of course, we are simply recognizing the nature of the evidence
which any biographer has to weigh who has no access to any writings of
the biography's subject. That is to say, a portrayal of Jesus as seen through the
eyes and heard through the ears of his first disciples is neither an illegitimate nor
an impossible task, and such a portrayal, carefully drawn in terms of the evidence
available, should not be dismissed or disparaged as inadmissible. As Lee Keck
observes: 'the perception of Jesus that he catalyzed is part of who Jesus was'. 113
After all, it is precisely the impact which Jesus made and which resulted in the
emergence of Christianity which we (not just Christians) want to recover. Of
course it would be wonderful and intriguing if we could portray Jesus as seen by
Pilate or Herod, by Caiaphas or the house of Shammai. But we simply do not
have sufficient evidence for that, and even if we had, what would it tell us about
111. 'We do not escape the fact that we know Jesus only as the disciples remembered
him' (Dahl, 'Problem' 94). 'An act of remembrance — the remembrance of a real and wellknown
person — is a built-in feature of the faith that inspired the writing of the gospels' (Dodd,
Founder 28-29). Meyer also emphasises 'the overarching fact. . . that Palestinian Christianity
was nourished on the memory of Jesus' (Aims 69,72-73). Others who recognize the importance
of disciples' recollection in the traditioning process include, e.g., Schillebeeckx, Jesus 45-47,
72, 226-29; Goppelt (Theology 1.6); and Charlesworth (Jesus 24). John Knox frequently referred
to the Church's memory of Jesus, but in too broad and ill-defined a manner to be helpful
here; see the critique of P. Carnley, The Structure of Resurrection Belief (Oxford: Clarendon,
1987) 268-75, 280-94. As the title of the present volume indicates, the remembered Jesus will
be a leitmotif of the present study.
112. Dahl continues (in the passage quoted in n. Ill): 'Whoever thinks that the disciples
completely misunderstood their Master or even consciously falsified his picture may give fantasy
free reign (sic)' ('Problem' 94).
113. Keck, Who Is Jesus? 20. Worth pondering also is his further comment: 'All too often
historians of early Christianity use Jesus' words about what is to be done as evidence of
what early Christians did, instead of using it as evidence for the norm from which they were deviating
but needed to be brought back into alignment' (165).
131