Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§8.5 The Tradition
a. Aramaic Tradition
We may start by recalling that the tradition as it has come down to us has already
been translated once, from Aramaic to Greek. Here is another curious
blind spot in most work on Jesus' teaching, in all phases of the 'quest for the
historical Jesus'. I refer to the repeated failure to ask about the Aramaic form
which Jesus' teaching presumably took. 220 Without such inquiry any assertions
about earliest forms of the teaching tradition are bound to be suspect in some
measure. Not that such a criterion (Can this saying be retrojected back into Aramaic?)
should be applied woodenly; translation aimed to achieve dynamic
equivalence could easily produce a Greek idiom quite different from the nearest
Aramaic equivalent. 221 What is of more immediate importance for us here are
the important observations by Aramaic experts with regard to the character of
the teaching tradition. All have noted that the tradition, even in its Greek state,
bears several marks of oral transmission in Aramaic. Already in 1925 C. F.
Burney had drawn attention to the various kinds of parallelism (synonymous,
antithetic, synthetic) 222 and rhythm (four-beat, three-beat, kina metre) characteristic
of Hebrew poetry. 223 And Matthew Black noted many examples of alliteration,
assonance, and paronomasia. 224 This is all the stuff of oral tradition, as
we noted above (§8.3f). Joachim Jeremias climaxed a lifetime's scholarship by
summarising the indications that many of the words appearing in Jesus' teaching
had an Aramaic origin, and that the speech involved had many characteristic
features, including 'divine passive', as well as the features already noted by
Burney and Black. 225
220. See below §9.9b and n. 287.
221. Note the warning of M. Casey, 'The Original Aramaic Form of Jesus' Interpretation
of the Cup', JTS 41 (1990) 1-12, particularly 11-12; repeated in Aramaic Sources of Mark's
Gospel (SNTSMS 102; Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1998) 241. G. Schwarz, 'Und Jesus
sprach': Untersuchungen zur aramäischen Urgestalt der Worte Jesu (BWANT 118; Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 2 1987) is vulnerable to criticism at this point.
222. Riesner estimates 'about 80 per cent of the separate saying units are formulated in
some kind of parallelismus membrorum' ('Jesus as Preacher and Teacher' 202).
223. C. F. Burney, The Poetry of Our Lord (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925); see also Manson,
Teaching 50-56.
224. M. Black, An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Oxford: Clarendon,
3 1967) 160-85; though note J. A. Fitzmyer's strictures (The Study of the Aramaic Background
of the New Testament', A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic Essays [Missoula:
Scholars, 1979] 1-27 [here 16-17]). See also Riesner, Jesus als Lehrer 392-404.
225. Jeremias, Proclamation 3-29. Still valuable is the classic study by G. Dalman, Die
Worte Jesu mit Berücksichtigung des nachkanonischen jüdischen Schriftums und der aramäischen
Sprache (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1898); ET The Words of Jesus Considered in the Light of
Post-Biblical Jewish Writings and the Aramaic Language (Edinburgh: Clark, 1902).
225