Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§7.6 The Sources
One is that the Matthean and Lukan Sondergut (distinctive material) attests
a much richer body of Jesus tradition than any single Synoptic Evangelist
used or was able to use. That itself tells us something about the traditioning
process: that not every church knew or thought it necessary to know all there
was to know about Jesus; and that the Evangelists were probably at least in
some measure selective in their use of Jesus tradition. Would that we knew
how wide was the 'pool' of Jesus tradition and how widely known. But we
don't. At least, however, we need to be conscious of the likely breadth and dispersal
of the Jesus tradition and suspicious of the too simplistic rule of thumb
that tradition only once attested is therefore necessarily of less value as a remembrance
of Jesus. 102
The other point is once again a plea to avoid thinking of the Matthean and
Lukan Sondergut solely in literary terms, as though Matthew and Luke depended
for their knowledge of Jesus tradition exclusively on written sources. 103 Such a
way of envisioning the traditioning process simply attests the failure of historical
imagination to accept instruction from history. Scholars of the twenty-first century
must take more seriously than their twentieth-century predecessors the fact
that first-century Israel was an oral culture and the probability that the Jesus tradition
was processed in oral form through the first two generations of Christians
(and beyond), prior to, including Q, and alongside the written Gospels. The importance
of this observation will become clearer in chapter 8.
7.6. The Gospel of Thomas
The amount of credibility invested in the Gospel of Thomas by Koester and the
neo-Liberal questers makes the issue of Thomas's, value as a source for the teaching
of Jesus particularly sensitive. 104 From early days following its initial publi-
102. With reference particularly to Crossan, Historical Jesus; and though he does not
need to be reminded of the point (xxxi-xxxiii), nevertheless his working criterion (use only if
attested more than once) is bound to skew the portrayal of Jesus in at least some degree.
103. Despite his frequent warnings not to regard Q material solely as written tradition,
Streeter seems to fall into the trap he warns against elsewhere of regarding the material unique
to Matthew (M) and Luke (L) as separate documents; hence his 'Four Document Hypothesis'
(Four Gospels ch. 9). See further below, chapter 10, n. 24.
104. Translation from the Coptic by H. Koester and T. O. Lambdin in J. M. Robinson,
ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English (Leiden: Brill, 3 1988) 124-38; by B. Blatz in
W. Schneemelcher and R. McL. Wilson, New Testament Apocrypha (Cambridge: James Clarke,
revised edition 1991) 110-33; and by J. K. Elliott, Apocryphal New Testament 123-47 (with extensive
bibliography). Also R. Cameron, The Other Gospels: Non-Canonical Gospel Texts
(Guildford: Lutterworth, 1983) 23-37; Miller, ed., Complete Gospels 301-22; Funk, ed., Five
Gospels 471-532.
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