Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§8.6 The Tradition
Aramaic to Greek not make any difference, then? Yes, of course it did. Easter
shaped the perspective within which this first tradition was remembered. The
transition from village to city shaped the tradition for changing circumstances.
The transition from Aramaic to Greek (already implied by the description of
'Hellenists' = Greek-speakers in Acts 6.1) would introduce the shifts in nuance
which any translation involves. 288 But the oral Jesus tradition itself provided the
continuity, the living link back to the ministry of Jesus, and it was no doubt treasured
for that very reason; the very character of the tradition, retaining as it does
so many of its Galilean village 289 and pre-Easter themes, 290 not to mention its
Aramaic resonances (§8.5a), makes that point clear enough. Here again we may
learn from postmodernism's emphasis on the reception rather than the composition
of text. If it is indeed the case that the hearer fills in the 'gaps in signification'
from the tradition (Iser), that an audience interprets a particular performance
from their shared knowledge (Foley), then we can be fairly confident that
the Jesus tradition was an essential part of that shared knowledge, enabling the
hearers in church gatherings to 'plug in' to particular performances of the oral
tradition and to exercise some control over its development. We see this happening,
I have already suggested, in the variations Paul plays upon several elements
in the Jesus tradition which he echoes in his letters (§8.1e above).
b. Tradition Sequences
Another questionable assumption which has dominated the discussion since the
early form critics is that in the initial stage of the traditioning process the tradition
consisted of individual units. 291 That may indeed have been the case for the
288. It is not necessary to assume that the 'Hellenists' emerged only after Easter; there
may have been Greek-speaking disciples during Jesus' Galilean and Jerusalem missions (cf.
Mark 7.26; John 12.20-22) and traditions already being transposed into Greek. The only formal
difference in the traditioning process itself seems to have been the emergence of the recognized
role of teacher (§8. lb), with the implication of a more structured ordering of the tradition as indicated
in §8.6b below.
289. A repeated emphasis of Horsley and Draper, Whoever; see also G. Theissen, Lokalkolorit
und Zeitgeschichte in den Evangelien: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition
(NTOA 8; Freiburg, Schweiz: Universitätsverlag, 1989), who, as the subtitle implies, explores
the issue as a way of illuminating the period of oral tradition (1-16, and ch. 1); see also
below §9.7.
290. See again Schürmann, 'vorösterlichen Anfänge'.
291. Kloppenborg, following in the train of successive form-critical analyses, perceives
the composition process as 'the juxtaposition of originally independent units' (Formation 98).
Similarly E. P. Sanders takes it for granted that in the beginning 'preachers and teachers used a
small unit of material' (The Historical Figure of Jesus [London: Penguin, 1993] 59). Funk as-
245