Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

PREFACE
mediate colleagues, Stephen Barton, Loren Stuckenbruck, Crispin Fletcher
Louis, and (as with my Theology of Paul] especially Walter Moberly. Charlene
Moss saved me from several British English idioms which would have been unfamiliar
to speakers of American English. Of my own postgraduates, the overlap
of interest, above all with Marta Cserhati, researching 'the third quest of the historical
Jesus', and Terence Mournet, researching oral tradition in the Gospels,
has been highly instructive and productive. I am grateful not least to Jeffrey Gibson,
who persuaded me to post my 'Jesus in Oral Memory' in his XTalk on-line
Seminar. The two-week daily dialogue with other members of the Seminar focused
not so much on the 'nitty-gritty' issues of the Synoptic data, as I had
hoped, but more on the implications of my understanding of the oral traditioning
process for subsequent church formation and the emergence of the Gospels. So
the benefits of the dialogue will extend into the second volume of the projected
three-volume study of Christianity's beginnings. But I found that the experience
helped recharge the little grey cells and several of the contributions were very
pertinent, especially those of Mark Goodacre, Brian McCarthy, Bob Schacht and
Ted Weeden.
I also consulted or sent various parts of the manuscript in first or second draft
to friends and colleagues and found their feedback invariably helpful: in Durham
itself, Richard Britnell, David Brown, Joe Cassidy, Colin Crowder, Sheridan
Gilley, Margaret Harvey and Robert Hayward; elsewhere in the UK, Richard
Bauckham, Bob Morgan, Ron Piper, Graham Stanton and Anthony Thiselton; and
in North America, Jim Charlesworth, Helmut Koester, John Kloppenborg, and particularly
John Meier and Scot McKnight. Many individual points have been
nuanced more appropriately as a result, and for that I am very grateful, though at
other points, after further consideration, I have restated my earlier view. Needless
to say, the remaining misjudgments and infelicities are my own.
Any who have worked in this field will be well aware that each of the following
Parts of volume 1 could have been expanded into full-length monographs.
It was clear enough to me from the beginning that I could not seriously
hope to review all exegetical options or to provide extensive bibliographical documentation
of the various opinions even for key texts and motifs. That would
have made the volume impossibly long and even more unwieldy than it now is.
My primary concern has been rather to draw attention to the principal (mainly
textual) data which have to be taken into account when considering whether a
tradition can be traced back to Jesus, or as I would prefer to say, to the initial impact
made by Jesus' teaching and activity. For both reasons I have made no attempt
to consult the immense range of commentaries on the Gospels now available
to us, but have concentrated principally on those which go into some detail
on the tradition history behind the Gospels and do not hesitate to ask historical
questions regarding the origin of these traditions. Questions on how the individ-
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