Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§8.6 The Tradition
ing. In oral transmission a tradition is performed, not edited. And as we have
seen, performance includes both elements of stability and elements of variability
— stability of subject and theme, of key details or core exchanges, variability in
the supporting details and the particular emphases to be drawn out. That is a very
different perspective. And it allows, indeed requires, rather different conclusions.
These include the likelihood that the stabilities of the tradition were sufficiently
maintained and the variabilities of the retellings subject to sufficient control for
the substance of the tradition, and often actual words of Jesus which made the
first tradition-forming impact, to continue as integral parts of the living tradition,
for at least as long as it took for the Synoptic tradition to be written down. In
other words, whereas the concept of literary layers implies increasing remoteness
from an 'original', 'pure', or 'authentic' layer, the concept of performance
allows a directness, even an immediacy of interaction, with a living theme and
core even when variously embroidered in various retellings. 304
The concept of oral transmission, as illustrated from the Synoptic tradition
itself, therefore, does not encourage either the scepticism which has come to afflict
the 'quest of the historical Jesus' or the lopsided findings of the neo-Liberal
questers. Rather it points a clear middle way between a model of memorization
by rote on the one hand and any impression of oral transmission as a series of evanescent
reminiscences of some or several retellings on the other. It encourages
neither those who are content with nothing short of the historicity of every detail
and word of the text nor those who can see and hear nothing other than the faith
of the early churches. It encourages us rather to see and hear the Synoptic tradition
as the repertoire of the early churches when they recalled the Jesus who had
called their first leaders and predecessors to discipleship and celebrated again the
powerful impact of his life and teaching.
d. Oral Tradition to Written Gospel
We need not follow the course of oral transmission beyond the transition from
oral tradition to written Gospel. The significance of that transition can be exaggerated,
as we noted above in reviewing the work of Kelber (§8.3f): Jesus tradi-
304.1 have struggled to find a suitable image to replace that of 'layers' (edited editions),
and played with the model of forms somewhat like space satellites circling round the remembered
Jesus, with the forms of the 60s and 70s not necessarily further from Jesus than those of
the 40s and 50s. The image is not very good, but it can be elaborated to depict John's Gospel as
on a higher orbit, or to include the possibility of forms drifting out of the gravity of the remembered
Jesus or being caught by a countervailing gravity. The earlier image of a trajectory could
be fitted to this also — e.g., Q material on a trajectory leading to a Gospel of Thomas no longer
held within the original gravity field.
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