THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM (Part 3)

AN ORAL TRADITION

The Gospels as we have them are written documents. We take it for granted that writing is the best way to preserve and pass on traditions.  However in the first century we find that it was predominantly an oral culture. People memorised the stories about Jesus for only a fraction of the people could read or write. We live in a visual culture but people who have an oral culture are more sensitive to word-plays. They were alert for the sequence of events and the repetition of events in narrative recitation. Brief allusions to other traditions cause them to recall unmentioned details of those traditions and relate them to the story being told. The rabbis trained their students to commit to memory large portions of the Scriptures, as well as collections of commentaries on those Scriptures. The early Christians committed to memory and passed on the teachings and stories of Jesus in a similar. Oral preaching accompanied by stories of Jesus worked very well, for few people could read of write.

VARIOUS KINDS OF ORAL TRADITIONS

Oral cultures develop patterns or forms with which they preserve and pass on those traditions that are significant to that culture. Ordinarily, these patterns are brief units or story-forms that are easy to remember. The result of all this that various forms developed that are suitable to different occasions, funerals, weddings, coronations, victories, defeats, worship, instruction etc..  The occasion for which the story developed shaped the kind of account we have in the form. Since the early Church originated in an oral culture it also employed forms for remembering and passing on stories about Jesus. We have access to those oral forms through the New Testaments Gospels, which are written documents that included and sometimes adapted stories about Jesus from the oral traditions. However, we must not forget that much had happen in early Christianity before the Gospels were written. We have to assume that most of the stories of Jesus were first told by the Jewish Christians who belonged to the Church in Palestine and these stories would have been told in Aramaic. But as we have seen, before the stories were written down, Christianity had moved its direction of growth and was a mainly Greek-speaking Gentile oriented Church. So the stories of Jesus were not only translated from Aramaic to Greek but also had been translated from a Semitic to a Hellenistic cultural background.

A second complication which confuses our understanding of the stories of Jesus even more is that in the early Church there was not just one set of beliefs or theology about Jesus which everyone accepted. There were many. It took years of conversation before a consensus of acceptance of some particular belief could be defined, in fact in some cases hundred of years. Such a diversity of theologies profoundly affected the Church’s uses of the stories. For example , the story of the cleansing of the Temple (Mark 11: 15 - 19) meant one thing if you thought Jesus was a prophet like the prophet of the Jewish Scriptures (it meant that he was trying to restore purity to Jewish religious worship). However, if you wished to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, then he was preparing the outer Temple area for the people of all nations who were to come streaming to Zion at the end of the world. (Have a look at the various levels of meaning in the Marriage feast of Cana.)

A third complicating difficulty must be considered. The early Church used the stories of Jesus with great freedom. The same story could well be useful in a number of different settings. The account of the Baptism of Jesus in Mark 1: 9 - 11 not only helped to clarify the divine source of Jesus’ authority, not only did it show Jesus’ identification with the sinner,  but it was also useful in instructing new converts about the meaning of baptism. It also helped to explain the Church’s belief that Christians also received the Holy Spirit at Baptism. Note that the Church still uses this story in all of these ways today. But also the early Church used such a text in its struggles with a competitive sect made up of the followers of John the Baptism. This accounts for some of differences in Matthew’s version compared with Mark’s. (Matthew 3: 13 - 17). The conflict with John the Baptism’s disciples is even more evident in John 1: 24 - 34.

The purposes for which the Church found the stories of Jesus to be useful and meaningful moulded its memory of those stories. The convictions that Jesus was the Messiah sent by God coloured the stories about Jesus that were told.  We have to notice that at any given moment in early Christianity it was the condition of the contemporary Christian community and the challenges it was facing at that time that determined the context from which Jesus was viewed and to which the Jesus tradition was adapted. (Redactionism and Sitz im leben). Gunther Bornkamm observes in his book The New Testament that “the particular situation of the community, its specific traditions, views, and modes of thought in various places, had a strong effect on the Jesus tradition....The community incorporated its own experiences, questions, and insights into the tradition”.(40)

The forces we have just been considering which affected the transmission of the stories about Jesus are not sufficient grounds for extreme scepticism about the accuracy of the Jesus stories. The conservatism of the earliest Jewish Christian disciples played  a role in protecting the stories from radical change. The endurance of easily remembered oral forms also retarded tendencies to alter the stories.

But we do have to raise the question with each Jesus tradition whether that story reflects influences that came out of the life settings of early Christianity. In the stories of Jesus which have been preserved for us in the Gospels there is an intermingling of valued remembrances with the impact of situation of the community which has remembered the stories for specific purposes. The result is an original blend of recollection and witness, of narrative and confession.

FORMS OF ORAL TRADITIONS

Source Criticism
Source Criticism was the signal achievement of the nineteenth century. As we shall see later Among its most important contributions were the establishment of the priority of Mark, the identification of Q, and the use of these sources in Matthew and Luke. The questions raised by this form of criticism are, “Can we get behind the events the written documents to the period between the events and the first written records ( circa CE 30 - 60), when the stories of the words and works of Jesus were circulated in Aramaic?

Form Criticism
The answer to these questions was the aim of form criticism or Formgeschichte. We saw before that oral cultures developed brief, easily remembered forms or patterns for transmitting meaningful traditions. The purposes for which the traditions were remembered shaped the forms in which they were passed on. When several traditions were remembered for the sake of the same kind of occasion or purpose their forms ere similar. By examining a number of examples one can discover the form common to all of them. Any other tradition which betrays that same form may be suspected to have been handed on for the same occasion or purpose.

 In the nineteenth century scholars began to recognise the similarities in oral traditions and to define the forms or patterns by which they were passed on. At first this methodology was applied to folk lore and fairy stories but Herman Gunkel, a famous Biblical scholar, applied this method which we now call form criticism to his study of the stories in the Book of Genesis. Encouraged by his success three other German scholars adapted the method to study the oral traditions included in the New Testament. This method began to be called “formgeschichte”. Some people were alarmed by the use of the term “criticism” for it implied severe judgement or censure or even fault-finding. However it began to be seen that the word “criticism” can be applied to any method of studying literary documents so as to understand them better.

The growth of the method of Formgeschichte began to play a major importance in the interpretation of the New Testament. This form of analysis seeks to sort out the stories about Jesus and to classify them according to their oral forms. It tries to identify the concern or purpose or situation which gave the impetus to early Christians to cast a tradition in a particular form. It also tries to construct the previous form of the story before it was cast in a particular form. It also tries to reconstruct the previous history of the story as oral tradition before it was fixed as part of written Gospel narrative. Thus it raised the question as to the probable historical accuracy of tradition. Did Jesus really say or do what the story says he did? Or was an insight out of the early Church enshrined in an artificial story of Jesus context.

Form criticism attempts to investigate and analyse the origin and history of the preliterary, oral tradition behind our written Gospels. The premise is that the Gospels are composed of many smaller pericopes that circulated as separate units in early Christian communities before the Gospels were written. Form criticism is concerned with the forms or patterns of these stories and sayings and the reasons for their preservation in the Gospels. Form criticism is concerned with the forms or patterns of these stories and sayings and the reasons for their preservation in the Gospels. Just as Gunkel tried to establish the underlying oral traditions behind the documents and the Sitz im Lebem (Life situation) of Genesis, so the New Testament Scholars developed Gunkel’s insight with regard to form criticism. New Testament form criticism developed Gunkel’s insight and we may distinguish three levels in the formation and preservation of the Gospel material.

· The Sitz im Lebem Jesu (the situation in the life of Jesus) is the context and meaning of an individual story or saying in the earthly life of Jesus whenever such a context is recoverable.

· The Sitz im Leben der Kirche (the situation in the life of the Church) is the situation or context of a particular story or saying of Jesus in the life of the early Church. What prompted the early community to preserve this particular reminiscence from the life of Jesus and what meaning did the community five to it?

· The Sitz im Evangelism (the situation in the Gospel) is the context of a saying or story of the lord in the Gospel itself. What did the evangelist mean to teach by recording this particular event in this particular setting? (This latter question marks a transition from Formgeschichte to Redaktionsgeschichte.)

(to be continued)