Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §8.3
across the Nile, a boy on the far bank, and other villagers including the village
mayor. Each retelling included different details, but the climax of the story was
almost word for word:
Hanna [the bridegroom's friend] fired the gun. The gun did not go off. He
lowered the gun. The gun fired [passive form]. The bullet passed through the
stomach of Butrus [the bridegroom]. He died. He did not cry out, 'O my father',
nor 'O my mother' (meaning he died instantly without crying out).
When the police came we told them, 'A camel stepped on him'.
The point was that the community had quickly determined that the death was an
accident and the story had been crystallized to make this clear ('The gun fired',
not 'He fired the gun'). 184 By the time Bailey heard it (a week after the event) the
story had been given its definitive shape. 185
His other story is of his own experience of preaching. Often he would tell a
story new to the community. As soon as the story was finished the congregation
would enact 'a form of oral shorthand'.
The elder on the front row would shout across the church to a friend in a loud
voice, 'Did you hear what the preacher said? He said . . .' and then would
come a line or two of the story including the punch line. People all across the
church instinctively turned to their neighbours and repeated the central thrust
of the story twice and thrice to each other. They wanted to retell the story that
week across the village and they had to learn it on the spot.
184. The police accepted the community's version ('A camel stepped on him'), not because
they did not know what had happened but because they accepted the community's judgment
that the shooting was an accident. Vansina cites a case from his field research in the
Congo where a group testimony was rehearsed beforehand so that there would be no disagreement
when the testimony was given in public (Oral Tradition 28) — that is, a tradition preserved
by a group and under corporate control. The point is taken up by E. L. Abel, 'The Psychology
of Memory and Rumor Transmission and Their Bearing on Theories of Oral
Transmission in Early Christianity', JR 51 (1971) 270-81 (here 276).
185. Bailey notes that he had first heard the story some thirty years earlier, but the central
core was 'still indelibly fixed' in his mind because it was so firmly implanted in his memory
that first week ('Informal' 49). If I may add my own pennyworth, I met Kenneth Bailey in 1976,
when he told me the same two stories. They made such an impression on me that I have retold
them several times during the intervening years. When I eventually came across the article cited
(in 1998) I was fascinated to note that my own retelling had maintained the outline and the key
features of the core elements, although in my retelling the supporting details had been reshaped.
This oral transmission covered more than twenty years, after a single hearing of the
stories, by one who normally forgets a good joke almost as soon as he has heard it! Martin
Hengel gives two personal reminiscences where the 'oral tradition' stretches back over 55 and
more than 150 years (Studies in the Gospel of Mark 109-10).
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