Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §8.3
tradition. As Kelber himself noted, 175 however helpful the lessons learned from
the study of Homeric epics and Yugoslavian sagas, we cannot simply assume that
they provide the pattern for oral transmission of Jesus tradition within the thirty
or so years between Jesus and the first written Gospel. The nearest we have to fill
the gap are the anecdotal essays by Kenneth Bailey in which he has reflected on
more than thirty years experience of Middle East village life. 176 These villages
have retained their identity over many generations, so that, arguably, their oral
culture is as close as we will ever be able to find to the village culture of firstcentury
Galilee. Bailey puts forward the idea of 'informal controlled tradition',
to distinguish it from the models used by both Bultmann ('informal, uncontrolled
tradition') and Gerhardsson ('formal controlled tradition'). In informal controlled
tradition the story can be retold in the setting of a gathering of the village
by any member of the village present, but usually the elders, and the community
itself exercises the 'control'. 177
Bailey characterizes the types of material thus preserved under various
headings. (1) Pithy proverbs; he describes 'a community that can create (over the
centuries) and sustain in current usage up to 6,000 wisdom sayings'. (2) Story
riddles; 'in that story the hero is presented with an unsolvable problem and
comes up with a wise answer'. (3) Poetry, both classical and popular. (4) Parable
or story; 'Once there was a rich man who . . .', or 'a priest who . . .', and so on.
(5) Well-told accounts of the important figures in the history of the village or
community; 'if there is a central figure critical to the history of the village, stories
of this central figure will abound'. 178
Particularly valuable are Bailey's notes on how the community controlled
its tradition. He distinguishes different levels of control, (i) No flexibility — po-
175. Kelber, Oral 78-79.
176. K. E. Bailey, 'Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels', Asia
Journal of Theology 5 (1991) 34-54; also 'Middle Eastern Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels',
ExpT 106 (1995) 363-67. I describe these as anecdotal, but will note several points at
which Vansina's ethno-historical researches in Africa (Oral Tradition as History and his earlier
Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1965]) bear out Bailey's findings. Terence Mournet refers me also to I. Okpewho, African Oral
Literature: Backgrounds, Character and Continuity (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1992).
Wright is one of very few scholars to have taken note of Bailey's work (Jesus 133-37).
177. Bailey, 'Informal' 35-40; 'Oral Tradition' 364. Bailey had already made the point
in his Poet and Peasant: 'Not only is the life of such [Middle Eastern] peasants remarkably archaic
but their intellectual life is in the form of poems and stories preserved from the past. Men
gather nightly in the village for what is called "haflat samar" (social gathering for samar),
which is cognate with the Hebrew shamar, "to preserve". They are gathering to preserve the intellectual
life of their community by the recitation of poems and the retelling of stories ...'(31-
32).
178. Bailey, 'Informal' 41-42; 'Oral Tradition' 365.
206