Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §8.6
the immediate recognition of the significance of what had been said or happened.
Thus established more or less immediately, these features would then be the constants,
the stable themes which successive retellings could elaborate and round
which different performances could build their variations, as judged appropriate
in the different circumstances. 269 Subsequently we may imagine a group of disciples
meeting and requesting, for example, to hear again about the centurion of
Capernaum, or about the widow and the treasury, or what it was that Jesus said
about the tunic and the cloak, or about who is greater, or about the brother who
sins. 270 In response to which a senior disciple would tell again the appropriate
story or teaching in whatever variant words and detail he or she judged appropriate
for the occasion, with sufficient corporate memory ready to protest if one of
the key elements was missed out or varied too much. All this is wholly consistent
with the character of the data reviewed above. 271
It also follows, second, that those accustomed to the prevalent individualism
of contemporary culture (and faith) need to make a conscious effort to appreciate
that the impact made by Jesus in the beginning was not a series of disparate
reactions of independent individuals. 272 Were that so we might well wonder how
any commonality of tradition could emerge as individuals began to share their
memories, perhaps only after a lengthy period. Postmodern pluralism would
have been rampant from the first! But tradition-forming is a communal process,
269. Funk agrees: under the heading 'Performance as gist; nucleus as core', he observes
the 'general rule in the study of folklore that oral storytellers reproduce the gist of stories in
their oral performances . . . [the Synoptic Evangelists] tend to reproduce the nucleus of a story
— the core event — with greater fidelity than the introduction or conclusion. ... As a consequence,
historical reminiscence is likely to be found in the nucleus of stories, if anywhere ...'
(Acts of Jesus 26). See also above, n. 262, and cf. B. Witherington, The Christology of Jesus
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990) 7-22.
270. It is hardly realistic to assume that the only initial memories were of Jesus' teaching,
and thus to deduce that stories about events during Jesus' ministry were not part of the Jesus
tradition from the first and only emerged as a subsequent 'narrativization' of themes from
the sayings tradition; pace W. Arnal, 'Major Episodes in the Biography of Jesus: An Assessment
of the Historicity of the Narrative Tradition', TJT 13 (1997) 201-26.
271. Crossan argues that the continuity between Jesus and his subsequent followers was
'not in mnemonics but in mimetics, not in remembrance but in imitation' ('Itinerants and
Householders' 16), as though the two formed an antithetical either-or, and as though the mimesis
recalled a lifestyle somehow independent of the teaching which had provided the theological
rationale for that lifestyle. There is more substance, however, in his subsequent observation
that 'it is the continuity of life-style between Jesus and itinerants that gives the oral tradition its
validity' (16).
272. Cf. Horsley's scathing critique of Liberalism's focus on the individual and of
Mack's Lost Gospel (Horsley and Draper, Whoever 15-22). Elsewhere Crossan (Birth of Christianity
49-93) and Funk (Honest 244) also seem to think of oral tradition solely in terms of individuals'
casual recollection.
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