Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§8.3 The Tradition
The hypothesis which Bailey offers on the basis of his reflections on these
experiences is that informal, controlled oral tradition is the best explanation for
the oral transmission of the Jesus tradition. Up until the upheaval of the first Jewish
revolt (66-73) informal controlled oral tradition would have been able to
function in the villages of Palestine. But even then, anyone twenty years and
older in the 60s could have been 'an authentic reciter of that tradition'. 186
To say it again, Bailey's essay is anecdotal and not the result of scientific
research. 187 Even so, the character of oral tradition which it illustrates accords
well with the findings of other investigations of oral tradition and is selfevidently
far closer to the sort of oral traditioning which must be posited for the
Jesus tradition than the studies on which Kelber has been able to draw. Bailey's
experience also confirms that the previous paradigms offered by Bultmann and
Gerhardsson are inadequate for our own understanding of the oral transmission
of the Jesus tradition. In particular, the paradigm of literary editing is confirmed
as wholly inappropriate: in oral tradition one telling of a story is in no sense an
editing of a previous telling; rather, each telling starts with the same subject and
theme, but the retellings are different; each telling is a performance of the tradition
itself, not of the first, or third, or twenty-third 'edition' of the tradition. Our
expectation, accordingly, should be of the oral transmission of Jesus tradition as
a sequence of retellings, each starting from the same storehouse of communally
remembered events and teaching, and each weaving the common stock together
in different patterns for different contexts.
Of special interest is the degree to which Bailey's thesis both informs and
refines the general recognition among students of the subject that oral tradition is
typically flexible, with constant themes, recognizable versions of the same story,
some word-for-word repetition, and both fixed and variable formulaic elements
depending on the context of the performance. What he adds is significant; in particular
the recognition of the likelihood that (1) a community would be concerned
enough to exercise some control over its traditions; (2) the degree of control
exercised would vary both in regard to form and in regard to the relative
importance of the tradition for its own identity; and (3) the element in the story
regarded as its core or key to its meaning would be its most firmly fixed element.
188
186. Bailey, 'Informal' 50; similarly 'Oral Tradition' 367.
187. T. M. Derico hopes to carry out more scientifically controlled fieldwork (On the Selection
of Oral-Traditional Data: Methodological Prolegomena for the Construction of a New
Modelof Early Christian Oral Tradition [St. Andrews MPhil, 2001], though the advent of television
into the village communities of the Middle East may mean that the generations-old pattern
of oral tradition is already being lost beyond recall.
188. Cf. Lord's examples of songs with a 'more or less stable core' (The Singer Resumes
the Tale [Ithaca: Cornell University, 1995] 44, 47, 61-62).
209