Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§8.6 The Tradition
not least because such tradition is often constitutive of the community as community.
273 As it was a shared experience of the impact made by Jesus which first
drew individuals into discipleship, so it was the formulation of these impacts in
shared words which no doubt helped bond them together as a community of disciples.
274 'Already the pre-Easter circle of disciples was a "confessing community"
(Bekenntnisgemeinschaft) of committed disciples (nachfolgenden
Jüngern), who confessed Jesus as the final revealer and interpreter of the word of
God'. 275
At the same time, the points made in §6.5 should not be forgotten. The
character of the tradition as shared memory means that in many instances we do
not know precisely what it was that Jesus did or said. What we have in the Jesus
tradition is the consistent and coherent features of the shared impact made by his
deeds and words, not the objective deeds and words of Jesus as such. What we
have are examples of oral retelling of that shared tradition, retellings which
evince the flexibility and elaboration of oral performances. There is surely a Jesus
who made such impact, the remembered Jesus, but not an original pure
form, 276 not a single original impact to which the historian has to try to reach
273. Strecker reminds us that the concept 'Sitz im Leben' ('setting in life') is primarily a
sociological category: 'The "Sitz im Leben" of a text is generally to be sought in the life of the
community, especially in the worship and in the catechetical instruction. In distinction to the
literary tradition (Tradition), the oral tradition (Überlieferung) is primarily prescribed for performance
in the Christian community and structured accordingly' ('Schriftlichkeit' 163; also
169); cf. Kloppenborg's recognition that the concerns of Q were community-oriented ('Literary
Convention' 86-91).
274. This is not to deny that stories about Jesus would have circulated outside the early
Christian communities. But I reject the implication of Trocme and Theissen (chapter 6 n. 104)
that Mark or others had to go outside the Christian storytelling and traditioning processes in order
to find miracle stories about Jesus; so explicitly Theissen — 'Their "tellers" are not a special
group within the Christian community, but people in the community at large . . .' (Gospels
in Context 103). But absence of 'specifically Christian motifs' need indicate only that the tradition
was maintained without 'specifically Christian' elaboration through the time that it was
written down.
275. Schürmann, Jesus 429; followed by Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie 44-45. In his
most recent contribution on Q, Kloppenborg Verbin explicitly accepts 'the fundamental conservatism
of the compositional process' (in debate with Kelber and Schröter), agrees that ancient
composition was 'consistently oral and collaborative' (citing Downing), and speaks of 'the
"canon" of what was sayable of Jesus' ('Discursive Practices in the Sayings Gospel Q and the
Quest of the Historical Jesus', in Lindemann, ed., Sayings Source Q 149-90 [here 169-74]).
276. If Jesus told at least some of his parables and delivered some of his teaching on
more than one occasion, then neither was there a single original context for such teaching.
J. Liebenberg, The Language of the Kingdom and Jesus (BZNW 102; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001)
points out that the polyvalency of the parables subverts all attempts to identify an original
meaning or context (508-13); see also his earlier crtitique of Bultmann's concept of an original
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