Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§8.4 The Tradition
tive when two or three different authors deal with the same episode; there is no
need to hypothesize different sources, (ii) They are manifestly all accounts of the
same event (Saul's conversion), so the harmoniser's hypothesis of different episodes
to explain differences between parallel accounts is not open to us. (iii) And
yet they are strikingly different in their detail; so if the same author can tell the
same story in such different ways, it must tell us much about his own attitude to
re-telling traditional material, and possibly about the early Christian traditioning
process more generally. 190
When we examine the three accounts more closely there quickly becomes
evident a striking parallel to the patterns of oral tradition observed above
(§§8.3f-h). There are several constants: the chief character — Saul; the setting
— a journey to Damascus to persecute followers of Jesus; the circumstances —
a (bright) light from heaven, Saul fallen to the ground, Saul's companions; the
heavenly voice. But beyond that the details vary considerably. Did Saul's companions
all fall to the ground (26.14), or only Saul himself (9.4, 1)1 Did they
hear the voice of Jesus (9.7), or not (22.9)? Saul's blindness, so prominent in
chs. 9 and 22, is not mentioned in ch. 26. Likewise, Ananias has considerable
prominence in chs. 9 and 22, but is nowhere mentioned in ch. 26. The other constant,
the commission to go to the Gentiles, comes once to Saul directly on the
road (26.16-18), once through Ananias (9.15-17), and once later in Jerusalem
(22.16-18). Most striking of all is the fact that what was evidently accounted the
core of the story, the exchange between Saul and the exalted Jesus, is word for
word the same in each account, after which each telling of the story goes its
own distinctive way: 191
190. The passages are thus a good example of Lord's observation that even from the
same singer, stability from one performance to another is likely to lie not at the word for word
level of the text, but at the levels of theme and story pattern (Singer ch. 5). Similarly Finnegan:
'that variability is not just a feature of lengthy oral transmission through time and space but is
inherent both in different renderings of one literary piece within the same group and period and
even in texts by the same person delivered at no great interval in time. In such cases, memorisation
of basic themes or plots is involved, but a generalised explanation of the oral poetry in
terms of particular texts exactly memorised does not easily fit the abundant variability demonstrated
in tape-recorded (as well as dictated) texts' (Oral Poetry 57).
191. In the following extracts I will underline the verbal agreements between the different
versions. The degree of agreement would be clearer if I used Greek, but that would reduce
the wider usefulness of the documentation. To bring out the closeness of the Greek I have used
my own translations.
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