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
