Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§8.3 The Tradition
e. Birger Gerhardsson
The third response to Bultmann deserving of special note has attracted much
more attention. It is the protest by Harald Riesenfeld and his pupil Birger
Gerhardsson that Bultmann had indeed ignored the most obvious precedents for
the transmission of tradition in Palestine.
Riesenfeld noted that the technical terms used for transmission of rabbinic
tradition underlie the Greek terms used in the NT for the same process
(paralambanein and paradidonai) and deduced that the early Christian
traditioning process, like the rabbinic, was a 'rigidly controlled transmission' of
words and deeds of Jesus, 'memorized and recited as holy word'. The idea of a
community-shaped tradition was too inaccurate. Rather we must think of tradition
derived directly from Jesus and transmitted by authorised teachers 'in a far
more rigid and fixed form'. 128
Gerhardsson developed Riesenfeld's central claim by a careful study of
rabbinic tradition transmission, as the nearest parallel for the Palestinian Jesus
tradition, and reinforced his teacher's main claim. 129 Unlike the form critics,
Gerhardsson recognized the need to investigate the actual techniques of oral
transmission. The key word, he confirmed, is 'memorization', 130 memorization
by means of constant repetition, the basic technique of all education then and
since (in fact, until relatively recently in the West). 131 In Rabbinic Judaism the
pupil had the duty 'to maintain his teacher's exact words', as the basis for any
subsequent comment(ary) of his own. 132 Principally on the basis of the importance
of 'the word of the Lord' in earliest Christianity, as attested by Luke and
suraed process; in its red, pink, grey, and black designations of particular sayings the Jesus
Seminar also has shown too little interest in and empathy with the dynamic of the process.
128. H. Riesenfeld, 'The Gospel Tradition and Its Beginning' (1957), The Gospel Tradition
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970) 1-29 (here 16, 26, 24).
129. B. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission
in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Lund: Gleerup, 1961), refined in a succession
of further publications: Tradition and Transmission in Early Christianity (Lund: Gleerup,
1964); The Origins of the Gospel Traditions (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979); The Gospel Tradition
(Lund: Gleerup, 1986); the last two are reprinted in The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition
(Peabody: Hendrickson, 2001); also 'Illuminating the Kingdom: Narrative Meshalim in the
Synoptic Gospels', in Wansbrough, ed., Jesus 266-309.
130. E.g., 'The general attitude was that words and items of knowledge must be memorized:
tantum scimus, quantum memoria tenemus [we know only as much as we retain in our
memory]' (Memory 124).
131. 'Cicero's saying was applied to its fullest extent in Rabbinic Judaism: repetitio est
mater studiorum. Knowledge is gained by repetition, passed on by repetition, kept alive by repetition.
A Rabbi's life is one continual repetition' (Memory 168).
132. Gerhardsson, Memory 130-36 (here 133); also chs. 9-10.
197