Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §8.6
tion did not cease to circulate in oral form simply because it had been written
down; hearings of a Gospel being read would be part of the oral/aural transmission,
to be retold in further circles of orality; 305 the written text was still fluid,
still living tradition. 306 But there are two other aspects, misleading impressions
or unexamined assumptions, which have encouraged false perspectives on the
subject and which should be highlighted here.
One is the impression that the oral Jesus tradition was like two (or several)
narrow streams which were wholly absorbed into the written Gospels through
their sources. So much of the focus in Gospel research has been on the question of
sources for the Gospels that it has been natural, I suppose, for oral tradition to be
conceived simply as source material for the Gospels, without any real attempt being
made to conceptualize what oral communities were like and how the oral tradition
functioned prior to and independently of written collections and Gospels.
As already noted, some narrative criticism and some discussions of Synoptic pericopes
at times almost seem to assume that when a copy of Mark or Matthew or
Luke was initially received by any church, that was the first time the church had
heard the Jesus tradition contained therein. But this is to ignore or forget one of
the key insights of form criticism in the beginning, namely the recognition that the
tradition took various forms because the forms reflected the way the tradition was
being used in the first churches. In fact, it is almost self-evident that the Synoptists
proceeded by gathering and ordering Jesus tradition which had already been in
circulation, that is, had already been well enough known to various churches, for
at least some years if not decades. Where else did the Evangelists find the tradition?
Stored up, unused, in an old box at the back of some teacher's house? Stored
up, unrehearsed, in the failing memory of an old apostle? Hardly! On the contrary,
it is much more likely that when the Synoptic Gospels were first received by various
churches, these churches already possessed (in communal oral memory or in
written form) their own versions of much of the material. They would be able to
compare the Evangelist's version of much of the tradition with their own versions.
This conclusion ties in well with the considerations adduced above (§8.1). And as
we have seen above, the divergences between different versions of the Synoptic
tradition imply a lively and flexible oral tradition known to the Evangelists and
presumably also to the churches with which they were associated.
This line of thought links in with the other assumption which has become
debilitatingly pervasive: that each document belongs to and represents the views
305. As Koester was already pointing out in his first monograph (Synoptische Überlieferung).
306. See particularly D. C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1997), whose warning against searching for an original text mirrors the
warning of specialists in oral tradition against searching for an original form.
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