Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §8.3
— a reverse criterion of coherence: the less closely a saying or motif within the Jesus
tradition coheres with the rest of the Jesus tradition, the more likely is it that
the saying or motif goes back to Jesus himself!
In short, Bultmann's assumption of a vigorous prophetic activity in the earliest
churches adding substantially to the Jesus tradition is hardly borne out by
what we know about such prophetic activity. And our knowledge of how prophecies
were received in the earliest churches raises a substantial question mark
against any claim that distinctive or characteristic features of the Jesus tradition
originated in prophetic activity. On the contrary, the likelihood is that the first
Christian churches would have been alert to the danger of diluting or contaminating
their vital foundational tradition by incorporating into it any material incoherent
with its principal emphases.
8.3. Oral Tradition
Does what we know about the traditioning processes within earliest Christianity
bear the weight of inferences being drawn from the above considerations? On
this point all participants in the discussion are agreed that the acid test has to be
the evidence of the Jesus tradition itself. That said, however, there has been a
huge and persisting gap in the analysis of that evidence. I refer to the repeated
failure to take seriously the fact that in the initial stages of the traditioning process
the tradition must have been oral tradition; 105 and thus also the failure to investigate
the character of the tradition in its oral phase, and to ask what its orality
must have meant for the transmission of that material. I do not deny that the subject
has been raised during the period covered by the various quests of the 'historical
Jesus'. Unfortunately, however, when it has been raised, the issue has usually
been sidetracked into other questions and its significance for our
understanding of the tradition history of the Jesus tradition lost to sight.
a. J. G. Herder
Within the history reviewed above, J. G. Herder (1744-1803) is usually given the
credit for first raising the issue. Herder was unhappy with Lessing's idea that behind
the Synoptic Gospels lay an original Aramaic gospel of the Nazarenes:
'Neither apostolic nor church history knows of any such Primal Gospel'. What
105. W. Schmithals is a lone voice in his highly implausible view, recently repeated, that
the Synoptic tradition was literary from the first ('Vom Ursprung der synoptischen Tradition',
ZTK9A [1997] 288-316).
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