Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §8.3
of the tradition (by the Synoptic authors), how much more can we infer it to have
been true of the earlier retelling of the tradition on which Mark, Matthew and
Luke were dependent.
Second, in his too little regarded Birth of the New Testament, Moule attempted
to highlight the vitality of the form-history process in the life of the
churches, and 'to place in their setting in life and thought the processes which led
up to the writing of early Christian books'. 122 Here again, however, his concern
was primarily to explain the genesis of Christian literature, not the character and
processes of oral tradition, though some of his observations are entirely relevant
to our inquiry. 123
d. Helmut Koester
The second significant development beyond Bultmann was that of Bultmann's
last doctoral pupil. From the outset of his academic career Koester has emphasized
the fact that the Jesus tradition existed in oral streams ('free tradition') well
into the second century. 124 And the insight has been maintained consistently in
his subsequent work until the present, 125 repeatedly cautioning against the assumption
of a purely literary and linear development of the tradition. All this
time, however, his voice, like Moule's, has been too little heeded on this point, to
the discipline's loss, partly, no doubt, because he himself has never given it the
prominence which the insight deserved. 126 More to the point, he has not developed
a model of oral transmission, and has paid too little attention to the dynamic
of the oral traditioning process beyond the support it gives to his thesis that other
(later) Gospels contain early forms of the tradition. 127
122. Moule, Birth 3.
123. See particularly his recognition that Papias (Eusebius, HE 3.39.15) conceived of
Peter retelling the teaching of Jesus ' ''pros tas chreias, with reference to the needs" (i.e. as occasion
demanded, as need arose)' (Birth 108, 120-21); his observation on 'the more fluid interchange
of forms (in worship), such that snatches of prayer and hymnody flow in and out of the
texture of pastoral exhortation' (270), also parallels the recognition among folklorists of the
fluidity of oral performances (below §8.3f).
124. H. Koester, Synoptische Überlieferung bei den apostolischen Vätern (Berlin:
Akademie-Verlag, 1957).
125. See, e.g., H. Koester, 'Written Gospels or Oral Traditions?', JBL 113 (1994) 293-
97.
126. One indication is the fact that none of the contributors to his Festschrift (Pearson,
ed., Future of Early Christianity) pays much attention to this important aspect of his scholarly
work.
127. See above §§7.6, 8. The same criticism can be pressed more strongly against
Funk's Five Gospels in that the volume has focused too much on the end product of the as-
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