Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§8.2 The Tradition
up to Jerusalem to lay his gospel before the leading apostles, iest somehow I
was running or had run in vain' (2.2). 102 Despite his confidence that he was
called by Christ, Paul recognized the necessity that his claim to exceptional revelation
(1.12) had to be tested and accepted by those who represented the temporal
continuity with Jesus. Which also implies that Paul's repeated insistence that he
was indeed an apostle was in effect a claim to belong to that body which had responsibility
to authenticate as well as to preach the gospel (1 Cor. 15.8-11). In
the light of all this, it must be judged unlikely that Paul for one would have accepted
any prophetic utterance as a word of Jesus simply because it was an inspired
(prophetic) utterance.
When this insight (the importance of testing prophecies by reference to the
already established tradition) is brought to the issue of prophetic utterances becoming
incorporated into the Jesus tradition, the results are quite far-reaching. For
it means, first, that any prophecy claiming to be from the exalted Christ would
have been tested by what was already known to be the sort ofthing Jesus had said.
This again implies the existence in most churches of such a canon (the word is not
inappropriate) of foundational Jesus tradition. 103 But it also implies, second, that
only prophetic utterances which cohered with that assured foundational material
were likely to have been accepted as sayings of Jesus. Which means, thirdly, that
— and the logic here needs to be thought through carefully — any distinctive saying
or motif within the Jesus tradition as we now have it is likely to have come
from the original teaching of Jesus, since otherwise, if it originated as a prophetic
utterance, it is unlikely to have been accepted as a saying of Jesus by the church in
which it was first uttered. 104 In other words, we have here emerging an interesting
and potentially important fresh criterion for recognizing original Jesus tradition
102. For fuller exposition of the delicate balance between his own sense of apostolic authority
and the authority of the Jerusalem leadership, see my 'The Relationship between Paul
and Jerusalem according to Galatians 1 and 2', NTS 28 (1982) 461-78, reprinted in Jesus, Paul
and the Law: Studies in Mark and Galatians (London: SPCK, 1990) 108-28; also The Epistle
to the Galatians (BNTC; London: Black, 1993) here 93-94.
103. Dibelius also envisaged collections of Jesus' sayings which acted as a 'regulatory'
control and prevented more than a few inspired words entering the Jesus tradition (Tradition
240-43) but never explained the rationale of what he had in view. Note also Boring's insistence
that tradition and Spirit went together in early Christianity, and his conclusion that Mark was
'suspicious of Christian prophecy' (Sayings 72, 79, 198).
104. As illustrations we may cite two of Boring's examples (Sayings 159-64, 173-74).
With reference to Luke 12.10, is it likely that the community would have accepted a prophetic
utterance which gave the prophet's or the community's own inspiration higher priority than the
exalted Jesus? (see also below §15.7h; cf. Aune's critique of Boring's key example of Mark
3.28-29 in Prophecy 240-42). With reference to Luke 16.17, if it is the case that Jesus was remembered
as relaxing the law, would a prophetic saying have been accepted which insisted on
the eternal validity of the letter of the law (see further below §14.4)?
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