Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §8.2
surprise us. As Richard Burridge points out: 'biography is a type of writing
which occurs naturally among groups of people who have formed around a certain
charismatic teacher or leader, seeking to follow after him'. And later on he
quotes Momigliano's comment that 'The educated man of the Hellenistic world
was curious about the lives of famous people'. 70 Which brings us back more or
less to where we started (chapter 2, §6.2).
To sum up, there is substantial circumstantial evidence on two points. First,
that the earliest churches would have wanted to remember and actually did remember
and refer to Jesus tradition, provided for them as foundational tradition
by their founding apostle(s). And second, that the Gospels attest to a lively interest
among the first Christians in knowing about Jesus, in preserving, promoting,
and defending the memory of his mission and in learning from his example.
8.2. The Influence of Prophecy
The picture which is emerging from the above survey is of church-founding
apostles passing on Jesus tradition, of teachers reinforcing their church's corporate
memory of Jesus tradition, and of early letter writers alluding to and evoking
that Jesus tradition in their paraenesis. This picture is most seriously challenged
by the common assumption that prophetic utterances in the early churches were
often added to the Jesus tradition. The claim is not simply that earlier tradition
was modified, radically or otherwise, by church teaching. It is also that prophetic
utterances were heard as words of Jesus, accepted as such and included in the
church's store of Jesus tradition, to be spread about more widely in due course,
no one thinking it necessary to continue to identify them as prophecies (words of
the exalted Jesus). Thus Bultmann:
The Church drew no distinction between such utterances by Christian prophets
and the sayings of Jesus in the tradition, for the reason that even
dominical sayings in the tradition were not the pronouncements of a past authority,
but sayings of the risen Lord, who is always a contemporary for the
Church. 71
Context for Q: Comparing Sorts of Similarities with Sets of Differences', JSNT 55 [ 1994] 3-26,
reprinted in Downing, Doing Things with Words 95-117). Kloppenborg Verbin is sympathetic
(Excavating Q 161-62, 380); in Aune's terms, 'Q would have strong biographical tendencies'
(406 n. 74).
70. Burridge, Gospels 80-81, 150-51.
71. Bultmann, History 127-28. 'In the primitive community at Jerusalem the spirit of Jesus
continued to be active, and his ethical teaching was progressively elaborated and expressed
in utterances which were then transmitted as the sayings of Jesus himself ('New Approach' 42).
186