Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §8.4
The crucial question, of course, is whether such an understanding of oral
tradition provides an explanatory model for the Jesus tradition, and in particular,
whether we can find the marks of such 'informal, controlled oral tradition' in the
Synoptic tradition itself. I believe it does and think we can.
8.4. The Synoptic Tradition as Oral Tradition: Narratives
We certainly do not know enough about oral traditioning in the ancient world to
draw from that knowledge clear guidelines for our understanding of how the Jesus
tradition was passed down in its oral stage. Any inquiry on this subject is
bound to turn to the Jesus tradition itself to ask whether there is sufficient evidence
of oral transmission and what the tradition itself tells us about the
traditioning process. We need to bear in mind, of course, that the only evidence
we have is already literary (the Synoptic Gospels) and therefore also the possibility
that the mode of transmission has been altered. On the other hand, Kelber
readily acknowledges the oral character of much of Mark's material, and the
boundaries between oral Q and written Q seem to be rather fluid, as we shall
see. We shall therefore focus on Mark and Q material in the next two sections
(§§8.4-5).
For convenience we will look first at the narrative traditions. Here at least
we do not have the problem of deciding whether such traditions came from Jesus
(as we inevitably ask in respect of sayings attributed to Jesus). At best such traditions
derive from those who were with Jesus and who witnessed things he did
and said.
a. The Conversion of Saul
The first example comes not from the Synoptics themselves, but from Luke's
second volume, Acts. All that is necessary for the example to be relevant for an
inquiry into Jesus tradition is the assumption that Luke handled such a tradition
in Acts in the same way that he handled traditions in his Gospel. 189 The value of
the example is threefold, (i) The three accounts (Acts 9.1-22; 22.1-21; 26.9-23)
all come from a single author (Luke), so we avoid some of the unknowns opera-
189. The three accounts of Paul's conversion in Acts are occasionally treated synoptically
(e.g., C. W. Hedrick, 'Paul's Conversion/Call: A Comparative Analysis of the Three Reports
in Acts', JBL 100 [1981] 415-32; C. K. Barrett, Acts 1-14 [ICC; Edinburgh: Clark, 1994]
439-45), but their value as examples of the way oral tradition functioned has thus far not really
been appreciated.
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