Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §8.6
identity as disciples and communities of disciples and for the character of their
shared life. Such teaching would no doubt have been treasured and meditated
upon in the communal gatherings, much as Bailey has suggested.
(2) The variations in the reteaching indicate a readiness to group material
differently, to adapt or develop it, and to draw further lessons from it, consistent
with the tradition of initial impact made by Jesus himself and in the light of the developing
circumstances of the churches which treasured the teaching. Once again
the point is that the tradition was living tradition, celebrated in the communal
gatherings of the earliest churches. There was no concern to recall all the exact
words of Jesus; in many cases the precise circumstances in which the teaching
was given were irrelevant to its continuing value. But neither is there any indication
in the material reviewed that these were sayings interjected into the tradition
by prophets or free (literary) creation, or that the development of particular teachings
subverted their original impact. 263 These were remembered as teaching given
by Jesus while he was still with his disciples, and treasured both as such and because
of its continuing importance for their own community life and witness.
8.6. Oral Transmission
In the light of the above we can begin to sketch in the likely process of traditioning
in the case of the Jesus tradition. 264 The fact that it coheres so well with the 'in
principle' sketch of §6.5 and the a priori considerations of §§8.1-2 is significant.
263. Draper also argues that the thesis of some of Jesus' sayings 'created entirely de
novo . . . conflicts with the processes of oral transmission. Such entirely innovative "words of
the Risen Jesus" are inherently unlikely' (Horsley and Draper, Whoever 183). Horsley however
assumes that prophets would have been responsible for the celebration of the tradition (Whoever
300-310) without enquiring what the role of teachers might have been.
264. B. W. Henaut, Oral Tradition and the Gospels: The Problem of Mark 4 (JSNTS 82;
Sheffield: JSOT, 1993) is tendentiously concerned to argue the virtual impossibility of recovering
any oral tradition behind the Gospels: all differences, no matter how great, can be explained
in terms of literary redaction, and oral tradition was wholly fluid and contingent on the particularities
of each performance. But his conception of the oral tradition process is questionable —
as though it were a matter of recovering a history of tradition through a set of sequential performances
(e.g., 118; here we see the problem in talking of 'oral transmission' — above §8.3f at
n. 162). And he gives too little thought to what the stabilities of oral remembrances of Jesus
might be as distinct from those in the epics and sagas studied by Parry and Lord. H. W. Hollander,
'The Words of Jesus: From Oral Tradition to Written Record in Paul and Q', NovT 42
(2000) 340-57, follows Henaut uncritically (351-55): he has no conception of tradition as reflecting/embodying
the impact of anything Jesus said or did; and he thinks of oral tradition as
essentially casual, without any conception that tradition could have a role in forming community
identity and thus be important to such communities.
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