Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§8.5 The Tradition
To sum up, our findings in regard to the traditions of Jesus' teaching accord
well with those regarding the narrative traditions. I have no wis,h to deny the existence
of a Q document, any more than to deny the priority of Mark. 260 But again
and again in the case of 'q'/'Q' material we are confronted with traditions within
different Synoptics which are clearly related (the same basic teaching), and
which were evidently remembered and valued as teaching of Jesus. At the same
time, in the cases examined above the relation is not obviously literary, each version
derived by editing some written predecessor. The relation is more obviously
to be conceived as happening at the oral level. That could mean that these traditions
were known to the Evangelists not (or not only) in a written form, but in the
living tradition of liturgy or communal celebration of the remembered Jesus. Or
it could mean that they knew the tradition from Q, but regarded Q as a form of
oral retelling (that is, they had heard Q material being read/performed), so that
their own retelling retained the oral characteristics of the traditioning process.
The two alternatives are not mutually exclusive, of course, but it can hardly be
denied that the consequences for the definition of the scope and content of the Q
document are considerable. It is important that future Q research should take
such considerations on board. 261
As with the narrative tradition, the sample of teaching tradition examined
above seems to confirm the implications drawn from the oral character of its formulation.
(1) There was teaching of Jesus which had made such an impact on his
first hearers that it was recalled, its key emphases crystallized in the overall
theme and/or in particular words and phrases, which remained constant in the
process of rehearsing and passing on that teaching in disciple gatherings and
churches. 262 All of the teaching reviewed would have been important to their
fails to consider the implications of oral transmission: a saying, like a story, could retain its
identity by constancy of theme and particular words or phrases, while at the same time being
adapted and reapplied to developing situations in the ongoing life of the earliest churches.
260. See above §8.4 conclusion.
261. It should not be assumed that the publication of The Critical Edition of Q (Robinson/Hoffmann/
Kloppenborg) has settled the content or scope of the Q document. And it should
certainly not be concluded that Q material existed solely in written or documentary form.
262. Cf. Crossan: 'the basic unit of transmission is never the ipsissima verba of an aphoristic
saying but, at best and at most, the ipsissima structura of an aphoristic core'; 'In oral sensibility
one speaks or writes an aphoristic saying, but one remembers and recalls an aphoristic
core' {Fragments 40, 67). Cf. also the concept of an 'originating structure' of a parable in B. B.
Scott, Hear Then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress,
1989): 'It is futile to seek the original words of a parable. The efforts of those who preserved
the parables should not be viewed as the efforts of librarians, archivists, or scribes preserving
the past, but of storytellers performing a parable's structure. We must distinguish between performance,
which exists at the level of parole, actual spoken or written language, and structure,
which exists at the level of langue, an abstract theoretical construction' (18-19).
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