Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§6.5 History, Hermeneutics and Faith
It should not go unobserved that if this insight is justified it provides some
sort of solution to the long-perceived gulf between history and faith. For in the
historical moment(s) of creation of the Jesus tradition we have historical faith.
The problem of history and faith, we might say, has been occasioned by the fact
that further down the stream of faith and history the two have seemed so difficult
to reconcile. But if it is in fact possible to trace the two streams, history and faith,
back to the origins of the Jesus tradition, we find that we can step back and forth
across the rivulets (pressing the analogy of a river's sources) with much less difficulty.
Of course we are only at the beginning of faith at this point; but it is the
beginning of faith. And nothing that has been so far said is intended to deny or
discount the fact that the tradition developed, that there were accretions of faith,
that post-Easter retellings conveyed post-Easter faith, that the tradition was elaborated
in the passing on. All I am saying at this point is that the actual Synoptic
tradition, with its record of things Jesus did and said, bears witness to a continuity
between pre-Easter memory and post-Easter proclamation, a continuity of
faith. However great the shock of Good Friday and Easter for the first disciples, it
would be unjustified to assume that these events marked a discontinuity with
their initial disciple-response, that they brought about complete disruption of
their earlier disciple faith and that the traditioning process began only from that
point on. 117 The mechanics of this process will occupy us later (§8.3-6).
g. The Diversity of Faith
Another aspect of postmodern criticism should not be ignored, namely the pluralism
endemic to the recognition that readers respond differently to texts and so
produce multiple meanings. Applied to the beginnings of the Jesus tradition, that
insight reminds us that Jesus would have impacted variously on different individuals.
118 Or in terms of the present discussion, there would have been diversity of
faith from the very first. 119 That is not, or should not be, a problem. For the evidence
of the Synoptic tradition is of a homogeneity of impression made by Jesus
on those who first created and then transmitted that tradition. As with the claim
117. Wellhausen already expressed the presupposition which became characteristic of
the form-critical approach to the gospel tradition: 'Without this later influence (Nachwirkung)
in the community we can visualize nothing of the religious personality of Jesus. It always appears
only in a reflection (Reflex), broken (gebrochen) by the medium of the Christian faith'
(Einleitung 114, my emphasis).
118. On the diversity of discipleship/disciple response to Jesus see further below, chapter
13.
119. 'Theological diversity in primitive Christianity is not a secondary phenomenon but
a primary one' (Kloppenborg, 'Sayings Gospel Q' 320).
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