Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §8.3
Paul, Gerhardsson went on to deduce that Jesus 'must have made his disciples
learn certain sayings off by heart; if he taught, he must have required his disciples
to memorize'; 'his sayings must have been accorded even greater authority
and sanctity than that accorded by the Rabbis' disciples to the words of their
teachers'. Consequently, when the Evangelists edited their Gospels they were
able to work 'on a basis of a fixed, distinct tradition from, and about, Jesus'. 133
Unfortunately these contributions were widely dismissed, in large part because
the appeal to rabbinic precedent was deemed (unfairly) to be anachronistic.
134 More to the point, unlike the rabbinic tradition, the Gospel tradition does
not depict Jesus teaching by repetition. 135 And more important for present purposes,
the claims of both Riesenfeld and Gerhardsson seem to envisage a far
more rigid and fixed tradition than could readily explain the obvious disparities
between the same tradition as used by the Evangelists. 136 Of course, there was
bound to be at least an element of memorization in Jesus' teaching technique and
in the disciples' remembering; the aphorisms characteristic of Jesus' teaching
lent themselves to such memorization. Still, the question remains whether Jesus
intended to initiate a chain of teaching maintained by the process of memorization.
And even when we allow for the evidence marshalled above (particularly
§8.1b and d), the process envisaged for the transmission of the Jesus tradition
seems to be too controlled and formal to explain the divergencies in the tradition
as it has come down to us. 137 The possibility of finding the key to the tradition
history from Jesus to the Synoptics in the processes of oral transmission had
once again eluded scholarly grasp. 138
133. Gerhardsson, Memory 328, 332, 335; similarly Origins 19-20, 72-73; Gospel 39-
42. Riesner also emphasizes the role of learning by heart (Auswendiglernen) in Jesus' teaching
(Jesus 365-67, 440-53; also 'Jesus' in Wansbrough, ed., Jesus 203-204). D. L. Balch, 'The
Canon: Adaptable and Stable, Oral and Written. Critical Questions for Kelber and Riesner', Forum
7.3/4 (1991) 183-205, criticizes Riesner for assuming 'a print mentality' which was not
true of 'passing on tradition of great philosophers' teachings' (196-99).
134. Cf. J. Neusner's apology for his earlier review in his Foreword to the recent reprint
of Memory and Tradition (Reliability of the Gospel Tradition).
135. Kelber, Oral 14. Note also Hengel's criticism referred to below (chapter 14 n. 64).
136. Schröter, Erinnerung 29-30. Gerhardsson did not examine the Synoptic tradition itself
in Memory, though he went a considerable way towards filling the gap twenty-five years
later in his Gospel.
137. Gerhardsson could speak of 'a logos fixed by the college of Apostles', with reference
to the tradition of 1 Cor. 15.3ff. (Memory 297). As his later work shows, Gerhardsson
hardly needed to be reminded of the differences between accounts of the same material in the
Synoptics. But the key point remains that the model of 'memorization' is not well fitted to account
for such differences.
138. Byrskog, a pupil of Gerhardsson, has developed a different model to bridge the gap
between original events and Gospel accounts — the model of oral history (Story as History,
198