Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§8.3 The Tradition
did lie behind them was indeed a 'common Gospel', but it was an oral gospel. 106
Herder's description of this material foreshadows later treatments, not least his
description of the orally transmitted material as 'an oral saga'. 107
In the case of a free, oral narrative, not everything is equally untrammeled.
Sentences, long sayings, parables are more likely to retain the same form of
expression than minor details of the narrative; transitional material and connecting
formulae the narrator himself supplies.... The common Gospel consisted
of individual units, narratives, parables, sayings, pericopes. This is
evident from the very appearance of the Gospels and from the different order
of this or that parable or saga. . . . The fact that it consists of such parts
vouches for the truth of the Gospel, for people such as most of the apostles
were, more easily recall a saying, a parable, an apothegm that they had found
striking than connected discourses.
Unfortunately these potentially fruitful insights were absorbed into and lost to
sight in the quest for sources of the Synoptic Gospels which became the dominant
concern of nineteenth-century Gospels research. 108
b. Rudolf Bultmann
It was not until the rise of form criticism early in the twentieth century that the
question of the earliest Jesus tradition's oral character reemerged. 109 In his Preface
to the 1962 publication of one of his essays on form criticism, Bultmann began
with a summary definition: 'The purpose of Form Criticism is to study the
history of the oral tradition behind the gospels'. 110 And in his summary description
of how oral tradition was transmitted he made an observation similar to that
of Herder: 'Whenever narratives pass from mouth to mouth the central point of
the narrative and general structure are well preserved; but in the incidental details
change takes place . . .'. in Unfortunately, once again, the possibilities of work-
106. I draw on Kümmel's abstract, despite his somewhat misleading description (New
Testament 79-82).
107. Extracts from J. G. Herder, Collected Works (ed. B. Suphan) Vol. XIX, in Kümmel,
New Testament 81-82. B. Reicke, The Roots of the Synoptic Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986)
11-12, makes special mention of J. C. L. Gieseler, Historisch-kritischer Versuch über die
Entstehung und diefrühesten Schicksale der schriftlichen Evangelien (Leipzig: Englemann, 1818).
108. Kümmel's own treatment represents the same priorities. See further below, chapter
10 n. 24.
109. Already signalled by Wellhausen (cited above, chapter 5 n. 30).
110. Form Criticism (with K. Kundsin) 1.
111. 'New Approach' 47.
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