Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§10.3 Through the Gospels to Jesus
biographies of the great and the good have found it ever so. But the broad picture
of Jesus can still be sound, even if much of the detail remains vague. 22 And the
tradition will provide at least a number of specific features which illuminate the
quality of personal encounter that caused them first to be recorded.
In short, there is a 'historical Jesus', or better, a historic Jesus, who is the
legitimate and possible goal of further questing. Not a quasi-objective Jesus,
Cynic or otherwise, who may or may not be significant for Christian faith. But
the Jesus who historically speaking was significant for the first flowering of
Christian faith. Such a quest, I believe, has good hope of success.
10.3. Thesis and Method
In sum, the basic argument of this book can be summed up in a number of propositions.
(1) The only realistic objective for any 'quest of the historical Jesus' is
Jesus remembered. (2) The Jesus tradition of the Gospels confirms that there was
a concern within earliest Christianity to remember Jesus. (3) The Jesus tradition
shows us how Jesus was remembered; its character strongly suggests again and
again a tradition given its essential shape by regular use and reuse in oral mode.
(4) This suggests in turn that that essential shape was given by the original and
immediate impact made by Jesus as that was first put into words by and among
those involved or eyewitnesses of what Jesus said and did. In that key sense, the
Jesus tradition is Jesus remembered. And the Jesus thus remembered is Jesus, or
as close as we will ever be able to reach back to him.
The consequences for my procedure in the following chapters should be
noted. (1) I will focus attention on characteristic features/themes in the Jesus tradition
and not linger long over particular sayings or episodes or make an emerging
portrayal of an aspect of Jesus' mission overly dependent on one or two pericopes.
At times the treatment will appear rather cursory, though I attempt to counter such
an impression by fuller documentation in the footnotes. My hope is that those who
want to see only the broader picture will find the main text sufficiently uncluttered
as to speed them on their way. At the same time, the footnotes will go into some
detail on particular points and provide sufficient (even if far from complete) indication
of the scope of the debate on different specific questions.
(2) My concern is always with the Gospel (primarily Synoptic) tradition
and what its enduring forms tell us about the tradition's history and its origins.
For those long accustomed to studying the Synoptic problem and Synoptic parallels
as a purely literary problem (one written document drawing from another),
the procedure adopted in the following chapters may look no different from those
22. See again Dahl, 'Problem' 95 (cited above, n. 13).
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