Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Was the teaching of Jesus memorised by his disciples?

What happened before the gospels? Before the gospels were written down, how were the stories and teachings of Jesus passed on in the culture of classical antiquity?

That the ‘Jesus tradition’ was transmitted orally is widely agreed. First-century Palestine was largely illiterate, and the early followers of Jesus had little access to formal education. Yet this itself tells us very little. What we want to know is how the Jesus tradition was told. Was it handed on in a fluid way, with early Christians passing on tradition like hearsay, or were there constraints placed on the process?

In the first part of this series, I looked at a model of the Jesus tradition developed by the form critics. On their view, the gospel materials freely morphed over time to meet the needs and interests of the Jesus movement. Some of the oral tradition goes back to the disciples, but much of it was invented later in the Greek-speaking world.

In this piece, I look at a completely different model of the oral tradition, which developed in Scandinavian scholarship as a response to form-criticism. Advanced among others by Harald Riesenfeld and his student, Birger Gerhardsson, the so-called ‘Scandinavian school’ argued for a stricter, more controlled process of tradition.¹

On this view, Jesus’ teachings and deeds were learnt in much the same way as Jewish rabbis learnt their material: by committing it to memory. Jesus’ disciples memorised his teaching, and the Church did not seek to alter their materials freely – as the form critics supposed – but handled their master’s memory with attention and care.

I begin by fleshing out the evidence for this view and reflect on where it offers a helpful corrective to the form-critical position, before offering points of critique.

Jesus and the Rabbis

The form critics had supposed that the oral tradition emerged freely and anonymously like folklore. Yet the Scandinavian model takes as its starting point the fact that we must attend to how ancient Jews actually learnt. As Riesenfeld summarises:

“… in New Testament times the specifically Jewish tradition, at any rate, was not possessed and shaped by an unlimited and undefined anonymous multitude… [Rather, t]he bearer of the tradition and the teacher (rabbi) watched over its memorizing by his approved pupils (talmd) and what was passed on in this way was, in the matter both of content and form, a fixed body of material.”²

The Scandinavian model thus looks to the Jewish rabbis as an analogy for how Jesus and his followers would have learnt and preserved his teaching. In both elementary education (bet sefer) and more advanced education (bet hammidrash), Jews would commit material to memory before an attempt was made to grasp its meaning.

On this view, the process of learning was already underway within Jesus’ ministry. Before Jesus sent out his disciples on their mission, he would have to have ensured that they could repeat the essentials of his teaching. In total, Jesus’ teaching in the Synoptic tradition only amounted to 15,000 words. This was far less than the Torah and the ‘oral Torah’ – the Torah’s interpretations – which students memorised.³

By the time of Jesus’ death, a good deal of Jesus’ teaching was already stored in the memory of his disciples. Yet on this model those same disciples would have made an effort to control and preserve his teaching. In Gerhardsson’s view, the disciples formed a collegium, led by Peter, whose purpose was to preserve Jesus’ teaching.

In support of this view, we might note that Paul, who in some ways forged his own path from the apostles, nevertheless submitted to the disciples’ authority. In his epistles, he even uses the technical rabbinic language of ‘receiving’ and ‘passing on’ tradition. This may suggest that Paul had received an authoritative tradition (from the disciples) and committed it to memory before handing it on.

Before we move on, it is important to make two points of clarification. First, the Scandinavian school were well aware that Jesus was not a ‘rabbi’ in the formal sense of the rabbinic Judaism that emerged after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. Rather, the Scandinavians were proposing that rabbinic education provided an analogy for the kinds of learning which could have taken place in Jesus’ own time.

Second, while they believed that stories and events in Jesus’ life were handled with care, this did not preclude development and interpretation of the tradition. For example, Gerhardsson deemed the infancy, baptism and temptation narratives in the gospels as the product of later Christian scribes, in which literary license was taken.

Memory and the Gospels

What then are we to make of this Scandinavian model of the Jesus tradition?

I think there are a few advantages it has over the form critical view it was supplanting. For a start, I think the Scandinavian school rightly stresses the importance of memory. Whether or not one imagines the learning of material as analogous to rabbinic methods – a point we shall reason to doubt – it is clear that memorisation was a more central aspect of learning in antiquity than in modern, technological societies.

This is borne out by the materials we find in the gospels. Something that strikes me is just how memorable many of Jesus’ teachings are. I think not only of his parables, which are still learnt easily by children, but also his pithy aphorisms: “the last shall be first and the first shall be last,” “the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath” or “the harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few.”

Here is where things get interesting. There are 247 independent units which comprise Jesus’ teaching in the Synoptics. And of these, 42% are just a single verse long. Such terse sayings are typically recalled in verbatim memory, which is short-lived. But if they are continuously recited, they are likely to be recalled – and to be recalled accurately. This may offer some evidence for the repetition envisaged by this model.⁴

I also think there is some a priori plausibility to the idea that Jesus’ followers would want to commit their master’s teaching to memory. The form critics envisaged a model in which the early Church had little regard for the historical Jesus. Yet I take it as a basic assumption that the status of Jesus would have affected how traditions of Jesus were received and subsequently remembered. The early Church would have wanted to remember – and to tell accurately – their master’s teaching.

Qualms and Quibbles

The rabbinic model drew attention to the role of memory in the Jesus tradition missed by the form critics. But like the form-critics’ own model, it has faced its fair share of criticism. Here, I focus on two key problems: (1) the strength of the rabbinic tradition for the Jesus tradition; and (2) its weaknesses in explaining the NT data.

a. The Rabbinic Parallels

The biggest question for the Scandinavian school concerns how well the early Jesus movement can be likened to rabbinic education. Accepting that the rabbinic methods for learning the Torah and its interpretation (the oral Torah) only furnished an analogy for the Jesus tradition, how well does that analogy stand up?

E.P. Sanders points to a number of ways in which the Jesus tradition differs from the (later) rabbinic one.⁵ The Jesus tradition existed in two languages (Aramaic and Greek), and its period of transmission was relatively brief. Jesus’ followers also believed in him as the living Lord, not just as a past teacher. All of these factors may have encouraged a greater level of creativity and fluidity than the rabbinic tradition.

Others have highlighted the discrepancy between rabbinic education and the disciples’ formation. The rabbis were highly educated. Yet the gospels present the disciples as labourers, while Acts describes James and John as illiterate (agrammatoi). Given low literacy rates in Palestine, we might assume that most of Jesus’ disciples were unlettered labourers – not people who were used to formal learning.

This criticism takes on a greater force when we consider the rabbinic tradition itself. While the Scandinavian school stresses the role of orality and memory in rabbinic learning, Martin Jaffee has observed that rabbinic learning was never purely oral. There was always an interplay of the written text along with the spoken word.⁶ This is a further dissimilarity between the illiterate disciples and the rabbinic schools.

In response, it might be imagined that Jesus would have educated his own disciples. Yet it is perhaps notable that the gospels never describe the disciples as learning in the way that this model envisages.⁷ Perhaps Jesus’ disciples did sit at his feet and rehearse his teachings. But I wonder if a more informal method is more plausible. His disciples heard him on multiple occasions in different settings – often in crowds, rather than in a formal learning context – and the disciples remembered his teaching.

What they then did with this teaching is also up for debate. I take it for granted that the basics of Jesus’ message was protected by the authority of the Jerusalem Church. Yet the message of Jesus spread rapidly in diverse (Greek-speaking) settings, and by the time the gospels were written down, the original generation were mostly dead.⁸ I think this raises a problem for the control the disciples exercised over the tradition.

b. Does it Explain the Evidence?

We have had reason to question whether rabbinic learning provides a suitable analogy to the disciples’ transmission of tradition. Yet there is another way to assess whether the rabbinic model is compelling – and this is to question whether it makes sense of the data we find within early Christian sources. In brief, does it look like the material was handled in the way that the Scandinavian school suggests?

Perhaps the most intriguing piece of evidence in favour of the Scandinavian model is Paul’s language of ‘receiving’ and ‘handing’ on tradition. In 1 Corinthians 15, for example, Paul cites what appears to be a creed about Jesus’ death and resurrection. It has a repetitive structure, and elements which may indicate an Aramaic origin. For instance, Peter is not called Petros but goes by his Aramaic name, Cephas.

Yet it is important to handle this evidence with care. One issue is that Paul himself was a highly educated Pharisee. Thus, when Paul uses the technical terminology for ‘receiving’ and ‘handing on’ tradition, it may reflect his own learning, rather than the way material was always handed on at large in the Jesus movement. We might readily imagine that the kinds of information Paul cites in the creed were learnt by memory, but should we imagine the same is true for the Jesus tradition as a whole?

In my view, the evidence is mixed. As I pointed out above, it is certainly true that the sayings materials in the gospels have a memorable quality. It is partly for this reason that I think we can recover Jesus’ teaching. At the same time, even the synoptic gospels do not betray verbatim agreement. To see this point, one need only compare the different gospel versions of the Lord’s prayer, or the Beatitudes, or Jesus’ instructions about what his disciples should wear on their missionary journeys.

At the same time, these differences are ones that also obtain in the rabbinic material. As P.S. Alexander observes, when one compares different versions of the same rabbinic tradition, “it is at once obvious that the material has not remained stable but has changed over time.”⁹ In these rabbinic materials, what is stable is the ‘gist’ of the tradition, not the exact wording. This presents a problem for those who believe that the gospel texts preserve the exact wording of Jesus’ teaching, let alone his deeds.

Memorising the Jesus Tradition

Overall, there is much that is valuable to the Scandinavian model of oral tradition. Offering a helpful corrective to form criticism, it highlights the role that memory – and memorisation – must have played in the oral culture of classical antiquity. I believe that the echoes of this memory can still be felt within the gospel texts.

Yet I wonder whether this model is, in the end, too ambitious. The disciples were not formal students, sitting at the feet of their rabbi, nor were they in a position to control the tradition as it spread across the ancient world. This would explain why the gospel texts show not only signs of memory, but of adaptation and invention. Memorisation likely played a part – but only one part – in a more complex traditioning process.

1. See Harald Riesenfeld, The Gospel Tradition and Its Beginnings: A Study in the Limits of ‘Formgeschichte’ (London: A. R. Mowbray, 1957), 1–22; Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans/Dove: 1998; originally Lund: Gleerup, 1961), 288–91; idem., Tradition and Transmission in Early Christianity (originally Lund: Gleerup, 1964). For an overview and critical evaluation of the literature, on which I draw passim, see Eric Eve, Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014).

2. Riesenfeld, Gospel Tradition, 18.

3. See Baum, Armin D, Der mündliche Faktor und seine Bedeutung für die synoptische Frage. Tübingen: Francke, 2008), 404.

4. See Robert McIver, Memory, Jesus and the Synoptic Gospels (Atlanta: SBL, 2011), 176.

5. E. P. Sanders, The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition (SNTSMS, 9; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 27-28.

6. Martin S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE – 400 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

7. See Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul and Q (Voices in Performance and Text; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 14.

8. Cf. Sanders, Tendencies, 28, 294.

9. P. S. Alexander, “Orality in Pharisaic-Rabbinic Judaism at the Turn of the Eras” in Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, ed. Henry Wansbrough (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 159–84 (182).