Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§8.6 The Tradition
of only one community, and that the tensions within and among documents indicate
rival camps and already different Christianities. The assumption derives
again from the first insights of form criticism: that the forms of the tradition reflect
the interests of the churches which used them. This was reinforced by the
sociological perspective of the final quarter of the twentieth century: literature as
the expression not so much of a single mind as of a social context. But these insights
have been narrowed (and distorted) in a quite extraordinary way, to claim
in effect that each text was written by and for a particular community — a Q
community, a Mark community, a Matthean community, and so on. 307 I have already
challenged this assumption with regard to Q (§7.4b), and by implication
for the Gospels generally. But the assumption covers also the streams of tradition
which entered into the Gospels. The assumption, in other words, is of differing
and conflicting streams of tradition more or less from the first, celebrating in effect
different Jesuses — a prophetic and/or apocalyptic Jesus, Jesus the wisdom
teacher, the Jesus of aretalogies (divine man), and so on. 308
307. R. Bauckham, 'For Whom Were the Gospels Written?', in R. Bauckham, ed., The
Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998),
provides a number of examples (13-22). He suspects that 'those who no longer think it possible
to use the Gospels to reconstruct the historical Jesus compensate for this loss by using them to
reconstruct the communities that produced the Gospels' (20). See also S. C. Barton's strictures
in the same volume ('Can We Identify the Gospel Audiences?', Gospels for All 173-94) on the
use of 'community' and on our ability to identify beyond generalizations the social context in
which the Gospels were written.
308. Cf. particularly Koester, 'One Jesus and Four Primitive Gospels'; also 'The Structure
and Criteria of Early Christian Beliefs', in Robinson and Koester, Trajectories 205-31;
Lührmann, Redaktion 95-96; Mack, Myth 83-97. Koester's reflections on 'The Historical Jesus
and the Historical Situation of the Quest: An Epilogue', in Chilton and Evans, eds., Studying
the Historical Jesus 535-45, exemplifies how dubious the reasoning has become: (1) 'The history
of Christian beginnings demonstrates that it was most effective to establish and to nurture
the community of the new age without any recourse to the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth'
('Historical Jesus' 535, my emphasis). Assumption: 'the community of the new age' did not
know or value any Jesus tradition. (2) 'There were followers of Jesus, who were not included in
the circle of those churches for which the central ritual and the story of Jesus' suffering and
death was the unifying principle. Instead, they believed that their salvation was mediated
through the words of wisdom that Jesus had spoken. In the Synoptic Sayings Source a community
appears that had combined this belief in Jesus with the expectation of his return as the Son
of Man' ('Historical Jesus' 537). Assumptions: one document per church; silence regarding
means ignorance of or opposition to; differing emphases are irreconcilable in a single document.
(3) Some of those addressed in 1 Corinthians seem to have understood Jesus' sayings 'as
the saving message of a great wisdom teacher'; the earliest compositional strata of Q seem to
have understood 'Jesus' words of wisdom as a revelation providing life and freedom' ('Historical
Jesus' 540). Assumptions: Corinthian 'wisdom' was based on Jesus' teaching, and implies a
Christology; 1 Corinthians 1—4 requires more than a rhetorical and socio-political understanding
of that wisdom; Q wisdom was soteriological rather than paraenetic.
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