Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§8.4 The Tradition
sumption that variations between parallel accounts can or need be explained only in
terms of literary redaction. After all, it can hardly be assumed that the first time
-Matthew and Luke heard many of these stories was when they first came across
Mark's Gospel. The claim that there were churches in the mainstream(s) represented
by Matthew and Luke who did not know any Jesus tradition until they received
Mark (or Q) as documents simply beggars belief and merely exemplifies the
blinkered perspective imposed by the literary paradigm. To repeat: the assumption,
almost innate to those trained within western (that is, literary) culture, that the Synoptic
traditions have to be analysed in terms of a linear sequence of written editions,
where each successive version can be conceived only as an editing of its predecessor,
simply distorts critical perception and skews the resultant analysis. The
transmission of the narrative tradition has too many oral features to be ignored. 215
The more appropriate conclusions are twofold. (1) The variations between
the different versions of the same story in the tradition do not indicate a cavalier
attitude to or lack of historical interest in the events narrated. In almost every
case examined or cited above it is clearly the same story which is being retold.
Rather, the variations exemplify the character of oral retelling. 216 In such oral
transmission the concern to remember Jesus is clear from the key elements which
give the tradition its stable identity, 217 just as the vitality of the tradition is indicated
by the performance variants. These were not traditions carried around in a
casket like some sacred relic of the increasingly distant past, their elements long
rigid by textual rigor mortis. But neither were they the free creation of teachers
or prophets with some theological axe to grind. Rather they were the lifeblood of
215. To evoke Occam's razor here, on the ground that direct literary interdependence of
a limited number of written documents is the simplest solution, is to forget the complex hypotheses
which have to be evoked to explain why the later author should depart so freely from the
detail of a tradition already fixed in writing. The hypothesis of performance of tradition in oral
mode, rather than transmission of tradition in literary mode, is actually the simpler explanation
of the Synoptic data, even though it is much more difficult (impossible) to trace any sequence
of performances apart from those attested by the Gospel tradition itself (which is presumably
why the hypothesis has never been given much consideration). See also §10.3 below.
216. It should be noted that this deduction from the tradition itself coheres with Papias's
account both of Peter's preaching and of Mark's composition: that Peter 'gave/adapted
(epoieito — could we say 'performed') his teaching with a view to the needs (pros tas chreias
— that is, presumably, of the audiences), but not as making an orderly account (suntaxin) of the
Lord's sayings, so that Mark did no wrong in thus writing down some things (enia) as he recalled
them' (Eusebius, HE 3.39.15).
217. 'The different versions [of a scene] generally agree rather closely in the report of
what Jesus said, but use more freedom in telling the story which provides the occasion for it'
(Dodd, Founder 35-36); cf. Vansina, who notes that 'the stability of the message' is likely to be
as great or greater in the case of narratives than in the case of epics (Oral Tradition as History
53-54).
223