Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§8.3 The Tradition
At the same time, it is true that only with a written text can we begin to speak of an
editing process, such as Bultmann envisaged; prior to that, in repeated oral performances
the dynamics are different, more of the order of 'theme and variations'
than of Gerhardsson's 'memorization'. 161 This is why talk of 'sources', appropriate
in considering the origin of a written text, can be inappropriate with oral tradition.
It is also why, I may add, even talk of 'oral transmission' can mislead such
discussions, since it envisages oral performance as intended primarily to transmit
(transfer) rather than, say, to celebrate tradition. 162
However, Kelber pushes on to argue that Mark's textualizing of the tradition
amounts to an 'indictment of oral process and authorities', an 'emancipation
from oral norms', an objection to 'the oral metaphysics of presence'. Thus
Mark repudiates the first disciples, Jesus' family, and ongoing prophetic activity
as oral authorities to be discredited; the first disciples are 'effectively eliminated
as apostolic representatives of the risen Lord'. 163 Kelber calls in Paul as apostle
of orality and sets him over against Mark's Gospel as written text, with the classic
gospel/law antithesis reworked as an antithesis between oral gospel and written
law, spirit and (written) letter, 'under the law' as under textuality. 164 In all
this a different Christology is at stake: the Passion narrative as a literary phenomenon
implies a distanciation from an oral Christology; Q, with its 'fundamentally
oral disposition' and inclusion of prophetic utterances, maintains the
living voice of Jesus, whereas Mark elevates 'the earthly Jesus at the price of silencing
the living Lord' by 'relegating all sayings to the former while silencing
the voice of the latter'. 165
Here is a thesis too quickly gone to seed. To find Paul as apostle of
orality lumped with Q is a refreshing change. But Paul himself would almost
certainly have been baffled by the thrust of such an argument. As one who vividly
recalls his preaching in his letters (e.g. Gal. 3.1) and who both preached
the kerygma of the first witnesses (1 Cor. 15.1-11) and depended on the
Spirit's inspiration for the effect of his preaching of the crucified Christ (1 Cor.
161. The more serious danger in writing down a tradition, as Lord observed, is 'when
the singer believes that they [the written versions] are the way in which the song should be presented'
(Singer 79).
162. For this reason I often use the inelegant verbal noun formation 'traditioning' to indicate
a process of which 'transmission' per se may be only a part.
163. Kelber, Oral 96-105, 129 (quotations from 98, 99-100, 129).
164. Kelber, Oral 141-51, 151-68.
165. Kelber, Oral 185-99, 199-207 (quotations from 201, 207). In the 'Introduction' to
the republication of his Oral (Indiana University, 1996), Kelber concedes some ground to his
critics: he forced 'the polarity of orality versus textuality' (xxi); he has become more aware of
'composition in dictation' and 'cultural memory', essentially oral processes (xxii-xxiii). But he
still maintains 'Mark's polemic against the disciples ... as an estrangement from the standardbearers
of oral tradition' (xxv).
203