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Jesus Traditions |
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Contents of Jesus
Traditions
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For almost a generation before our earliest written sources, in the
period between
A.D. 30 and 65, the gospel material circulated by word of mouth. We may be
surprised, given the high esteem in which Jesus was held by his earliest
followers, that they did not very soon in the post-Easter period begin to
commit their recollections to writing. That they were not busy writing
gospels in those early days may be accounted for by the following
considerations:
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His disciples (as we may refer to the community of early believers)
were living in an atmosphere of intense expectation of the
end-of-time, when Christ would return on clouds of glory; hence there
was little incentive to record their memories for generations to
follow. |
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Since apostles and others who had been close to Jesus were a ready
source of information about episodes in his life, these believers had
no need to consult written records; indeed, Christians in the first
century seem to have preferred the living tradition to writings, even
when gospels became available. |
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The urgency of proclaiming the gospel may well have crowded out any
literary inclinations there might have been among the apostles, who
were in any case more accustomed to casting a net than wielding a pen. |
That gospels were eventually written is likewise accounted for by a
change in the foregoing factors: the continued delay of the Second Coming;
the death of the apostles and others close to Jesus; and the presence of
people with literary inclinations, who were led to proclaim the good news
of Jesus in writing.
But in the pre-literary stage of the gospel tradition, there were
various reasons for the existence of a lively tradition of Jesus’ deeds
and sayings.
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The early Christians kept alive their memories of him because they
were busy making converts to the community, and Jesus was the subject
of their preaching; see 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, for an early stage
of the message, a message which focused on his death and resurrection;
click on Beginnings (1). Mark, our earliest gospel, is from one
point of view an expanded version of the passion narrative, with an
extended introduction. |
| From probably a quite early time, end-of-time
expectations figured prominently in early Christian proclamation (1
Thessalonians 1:9-10;
5:9-10; cp. Galatians 1:1-5);
that is, within the second decade after the death of Jesus. |
| In these early years, the Christian community was also busy
assimilating these new converts into the Christian way; they would be
made familiar with recollections of what Jesus had taught about God as
Father, about duties to neighbors in the spirit of love (Greek, agapê),
about prayer, about possessions, and other themes. In the course of
time, these teachings came to be written down, and gathered into
collections, one of the most important of which is the source
Q . |
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During these same early decades of the church’s life, it was
likely engaged in disputes with the synagogue over questions such as
diet, Sabbath observance, and divorce. What Jesus had taught, how he
and his disciples had lived, and his arguments in controversies with
the Pharisees would have been useful for early Christians too. |
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The Forms the Material Took
Recognizing that, for the better part of a generation after his death, the gospel
material circulated not in written form but by word of mouth, we begin
with the basic insight of form criticism (Formgeschichte)
that the
sayings of Jesus or episodes in his life circulated as separate units, or pericopes. Only later would these units be
collected into the literary sources from which the synoptic gospels were
fashioned.
| Thus, so far as the sayings material is concerned, the discourses which we encounter in these
gospels, such as the “Sermon”
on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) or the Sermon on
the Plain (Luke 6:17-49), are compilations of individual sayings by the gospel writers or their
sources, originating perhaps as manuals of instruction for the early
Christians. |
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So far as the narrative material is concerned, the reader of the gospels needs to
appreciate the fact that the apparent continuity of the narrative we find
in the gospels is provided by the writers, in the absence of a sequential narrative
surviving during the period of oral transmission. An illustration of this
process is to be found in Mark 2:1–3:6, where several controversy
stories are arranged topically; i.e. logically rather than
chronologically. |
In the absence of a connected
account in the oral tradition of what Jesus had done and said, the gospel writers did their
best: the final
journey to Jerusalem, his death and his resurrection they would know to
place at the end, and his baptism at the beginning. Most of the rest of
the material was connected with vague time designations. The study of the
ways in which the authors of Matthew, Mark and Luke went about
incorporating these oral traditions into their gospels is called redaction
criticism (Redaktionsgeschichte). Of particular interest are
the editorial interests and habits of the author of Matthew, for which
special pages are provided here; click on Matthew’s Tendencies (1).
As the gospel material circulated orally, for the most part as separate units,
it
would quite naturally be passed down in certain forms: narrative episodes;
brief pithy sayings, or
proverbs; parables of various sorts; stories
of healings or some other wonder performed by Jesus; and pronouncement
stories, which are brief episodes coming to a climax with a saying of
Jesus.
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What Happened Along the Transmission Way?
Inevitably the question arises as to how reliably the gospel material
was transmitted during the pre-literary period. Memory can be tenacious,
and sometimes fragile; it is usually selective. Not surprisingly,
the gospel material suffered
various fates.
Remembered: In a time and culture when learning and recollection were less dependent upon
a written (or electronic!) record than is the case today, the Christian
community was able to hand down much valuable material from
Jesus’ public activity in relatively reliable form.
Forgotten: Human memory being what it
is, much was lost, especially (as we have noted) the overall sequential
structure,
which may have been of
little interest or utility in the church’s life. Furthermore, while parables
were relatively easy to remember, the occasions or life situations in which
they originated were seldom transmitted, so that their meaning was
sometimes puzzling to the gospel writer, as it still is to the modern reader (the
parable of the Corrupt
Estate Manager, in Luke 16:1-8a, is a useful example).
Extra Baggage: The point the Christian
teacher was trying to make sometimes became part of the unit of tradition,
and was transmitted along with the original Jesus material; as in the
early Christian sermon in Mark 4:13-20, on the text of the Parable of the
Sower, Mark 4:1-9. In some cases the sayings of inspired teachers or
prophets in the early church may have found their way into the gospel
tradition during a period when few were inclined to distinguish them from
authentic sayings of Jesus.
Admiration Becoming Extension:
We find examples of heightening the miraculous element in narratives, an
understandable process when we consider the high esteem in which Jesus was
held by the early Christians. In the
so-called cursing of the fig tree, we may compare Matthew 21:18-19 with the earlier
Mark 11:12-14, 20-21 (click on heightening). Such heightening may have taken place in other
instances during the pre-literary period also.
With this summary survey, we may appreciate the fact that the material
does not exist for writing a life of Jesus. Though the synoptic gospels
provide significant samplings of the kinds of
things Jesus did and said, we need to keep our expectations within
reasonable limits.
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| Revised
July 24, 2003
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