Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§8.7 The Tradition
too much uncritical credence in scholarly discussions on the Gospels and ought
to have been dismissed a lot sooner.
8.7. In Summary
This has been a lengthy chapter, so let me sum up what has emerged about the Jesus
tradition prior to its being written down.
First (§8.1), I noted the strong circumstantial case for the view that, from the
beginning, new converts would have wanted to know about Jesus, that no church
would have been established without its store of foundation (including Jesus) tradition,
and that the churches were organised to maintain and to pass on that tradition.
The importance of remembering Jesus and learning about him and of responsible
teachers is attested as early as we can reach back into earliest Christianity, in
Jewish as well as Gentile churches. The apparent silence of Paul and the character
of the Gospels themselves provide no substantive counter-argument.
Second (§8.2), the assumption that prophecy within the earliest churches
would have added substantial material to the Jesus tradition has been misleading.
It is not borne out to any great extent by what we know of early church prophetic
activity. On the contrary, recognition of the danger of false prophecy would almost
certainly have been as widespread as prophecy itself, and the first churches
would probably have been alert to the danger of accepting any prophetic utterance
which was out of harmony with the Jesus tradition already received.
When we turned, third (§8.3), to examine the relevance of oral tradition to
our quest, we noted the widespread recognition among specialists in orality of
the character of oral transmission as a mix of stable themes and flexibility, of
fixed and variable elements in oral retelling. But we also noted that such insights
have hardly begun to be exploited adequately in the treatment of Jesus tradition
as oral tradition. However, Bailey's observations, drawn from his experience of
oral traditioning processes in Middle Eastern village life, have highlighted points
of potential importance, particularly the rationale which, in the cases in point,
determined the distinction between the more fixed elements and constant themes
on the one hand, and the flexible and variable elements on the other. Where stories
or teaching was important for the community's identity and life there would
be a concern to maintain the core or key features, however varied other details
(less important to the story's or teaching's point) in successive retellings.
Our own examination, fourth (§§8.4, 5), of the Jesus tradition itself confirmed
the relevance of the oral paradigm and the danger of assuming (consciously
or otherwise) the literary paradigm. The findings did not call into serious
question the priority of Mark or the existence of a document Q. But, in each
of the examples marshalled, the degree of variation between clearly parallel tra-
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