Memory and the Jesus Tradition 9780567663467, 9780567663474, 9780567663481

Citation preview

THE RECEPTION OF JESUS IN THE FIRST THREE CENTURIES

2 Editors Chris Keith, Helen Bond and Jens Schröter

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Alan Kirk

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Alan Kirk, 2018 Alan Kirk has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: The Good Shepherd, fresco (3rd century) in the Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome, Lazio, Italy © De Agostini/G. Cargagna/Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-6346-7 PB: 978-0-5676-9003-6 ePDF: 978-0-5676-6348-1 eBook: 978-0-5676-8024-2 Series: The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries, volume 2 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Dedicated to the memory of my sister:

Dorothy Tran 1969–2008

CONTENTS ix xii

Abbreviations Preface

Chapter 1 MEMORY AND MEDIA: TOWARDS A NEW HISTORY OF THE TRADITION

1

Part I FORMATION OF THE JESUS TRADITION Chapter 2 SOCIAL AND CULTURAL MEMORY

11

Chapter 3 MEMORY THEORY: CULTURAL AND COGNITIVE APPROACHES TO THE GOSPEL TRADITION

37

Chapter 4 THE MEMORY–TRADITION NEXUS IN THE SYNOPTIC TRADITION: MEMORY, MEDIA AND SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION

48

Chapter 5 THE FORMATION OF THE SYNOPTIC TRADITION: COGNITIVE AND CULTURAL APPROACHES TO AN OLD PROBLEM

71

Part II MEMORY AND MANUSCRIPT Chapter 6 MEMORY AND MANUSCRIPT: GERHARDSSON REVISITED

93

Chapter 7 MANUSCRIPT TRADITION AS A TERTIUM QUID: ORALITY AND MEMORY IN SCRIBAL PRACTICES

114

Chapter 8 MEMORY, SCRIBAL MEDIA AND THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM

138

viii

Contents

Part III MEMORY AND HISTORICAL JESUS RESEARCH Chapter 9 THE MEMORY OF VIOLENCE AND THE DEATH OF JESUS IN Q

163

Chapter 10 MEMORY THEORY AND JESUS RESEARCH

179

Chapter 11 COGNITION, COMMEMORATION AND TRADITION: MEMORY AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF JESUS RESEARCH

207

Part IV MEMORY IN SECOND-CENTURY GOSPEL WRITING Chapter 12 THE JOHANNINE JESUS IN THE GOSPEL OF PETER: A SOCIAL MEMORY APPROACH

233

Chapter 13 TRADITION AND MEMORY IN THE GOSPEL OF PETER

244

Work Cited Index of References Index of Authors

267 292 293

ABBREVIATIONS AB AJS AmAnthropol AnOr AnRevPsych ARA ARS BETL BJRL BJS BSIH BTB CBQ CEQ CognPsych Comm ConBNT ContempRev CPh CQ CritStMassComm CSASE CSML CSOLC CSSH CultPsych DJD EastEurJewAff EC ETL Hist&Anth HSPh HTR HUCA IntJPolCulSoc JAmFolk JANESCU

Anchor Bible American Journal of Sociology American Anthropologist Analecta Orientalia Annual Review of Psychology Annual Review of Anthropology Annual Review of Sociology Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum lovaniensium Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Brown Judaic Studies Brill Studies in Intellectual History Biblical Theology Bulletin Catholic Biblical Quarterly Critical Edition of Q Cognitive Psychology Communication Coniectanea Biblica, New Testament Contemporary Review Classical Philology Classical Quarterly Critical Studies in Mass Communication Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture Comparative Studies in Society and History Culture and Psychology Discoveries in the Judaean Desert East European Jewish Affairs Early Christianity Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanieses History and Anthropology Harvard Studies in Classical Philology Harvard Theological Review Hebrew Union College Annual International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society Journal of American Folklore Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University

x

JAOS JBL JComm JExpPsych JFBT JHS JJewThPhil JPrag JPhil JRA JRASup JSHJ JSJ JSNT JSNTSup JSRC JTS LangCommun LNTS MemCogn MemSt MTV Neot NewGerCrit NLH NovTSup NTOA NTS OLAW OT PastPresent Phenom&CogSci PhilForum PhilPsych QualSoc RevQ RGRW SBLRBS SCAN SciAm SEÅ SHC SO SocForces

Abbreviations

Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Communication Journal of Experimental Psychology Jahrbuch für biblische Theologie Journal of Hellenic Studies Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy Journal of Pragmatics Journal of Philosophy Journal of Roman Archaeology Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian Hellenistic, and Roman Period Journal for the Study of the New Testament Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Supplements Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture Journal of Theological Studies Language & Communication Library of New Testament Studies Memory and Cognition Memory Studies Münstersche Theologische Vorträge Neotestamentica New German Critique New Literary History Novum Testamentum, Supplements Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus New Testament Studies Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World Oral Tradition Past & Present Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Philosophical Forum Philosophical Psychology Qualitative Sociology Revue de Qumran Religions in the Graeco-Roman World SBL Resources for Biblical Study Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience Scientific American Svensk exegetisk årsbok Studies in Hellenistic Civilization Symbolae Osloenses Social Forces

Abbreviations

SocPsychQ ST STDJ TAPA THL TJT TrendsCogSci TSAJ TSK TSMEMJ VigChr WMANT WUNT YJC ZNW

Social Psychology Quarterly Sociological Theory Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judea Transactions of the American Philological Association Theory and History of Literature Toronto Journal of Theology Trends in Cognitive Sciences Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum Theologische Studien und Kritiken Tests and Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Judaism Vigiliae Christianae Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Wissenschaftliche Untersuchunen zum Neuen Testament Yale Journal of Criticism Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft

xi

PREFACE This book consists of twelve essays on memory and the Jesus tradition published between 2001 and 2016. The first chapter is an introductory essay written for this book. The essays were originally conceived and produced as self-contained probes and not as elements of an overarching analysis. Each originated contingently, in response to invitations to contribute to a book or to present a paper at a conference or workshop. Naturally I had no idea when writing the first essay in 2001 on the reception of Johannine tradition in the Gospel of Peter that in 2016 I would be writing on the interface of cognition and cultural media in tradition formation. As the list of essays lengthened, however, it became evident that what was emerging under the aegis of memory analysis was a comprehensive account of the formation of the Jesus tradition and its history, from its origins and continuing on its arc towards canon-formation. At that point it began to make sense to pull them together into a single book. The same idea occurred to Chris Keith, one of the editors of the Bloomsbury/Clark ‘Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries’ series, and I am grateful for his support in realizing the project. Bringing originally separate essays into a single book presented certain challenges. One problem was redundancy – surveys of key methodological principles recurred in several essays, as did certain lines of analysis. I have eliminated as much redundancy as is possible without compromising an essay’s internal coherence. In looking at them with a fresh eye it was also evident that some of the earlier essays in particular suffered from my trying to shoehorn in too much theory and analysis. This has therefore been a golden opportunity to make all the essays more streamlined, analytically leaner, and I hope at the same time clearer and more readable. I have sharpened up a number of the arguments, made stylistic improvements where warranted and translated all German and French quotations, except where the English equivalent is obvious. None of the essays is changed in its essentials, and some are modified hardly at all, but the redaction is such that each should be viewed as superseding its original. The introductory chapter shows how the collection coheres and makes the case that memory provides the unifying principle for a new history of the tradition. The chapters are not organized chronologically but under the following rubrics: Part I: ‘Formation of the Jesus Tradition’; Part II: ‘Memory and Manuscript’; Part III: ‘Memory and Historical Jesus Research’; and Part IV: ‘Memory in Second-Century Gospel Writing’. Since each chapter can be consulted as a self-contained piece, full citations are repeated for works cited at their first occurrence in each chapter. In addition to Chris Keith for facilitating the project, I want to acknowledge the following publishers for permission to reproduce the essays now appearing as

Preface

xiii

chapters in this book: SBL Press; Mohr-Siebeck; Peeters; de Gruyter; Routledge; Brill; Baylor University Press; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. I also want to express my profound gratitude to Professor Barry Schwartz (University of Georgia) for his generous mentorship in memory studies and invaluable friendship over the years. In addition, I owe a great obligation to Tom Thatcher. We were early collaborators, and he first noticed and pointed out to me the connections between memory dynamics and behaviour of tradition. Full recognition is also due to Werner Kelber, our muse and the pioneer of the ‘memory approach’ in gospel scholarship.

Chapter 1 MEMORY AND MEDIA: TOWARDS A NEW HISTORY OF THE TRADITION

Memory approaches, long applied elsewhere in the social sciences and humanities, while generally enjoying a good reception in gospels scholarship, have also provoked controversy in some quarters and had their value questioned in others. The suspicion that memory analysis is a covert attempt to smuggle in a priori claims about the reliability of the Jesus tradition perhaps accounts for some of the concerns. But it is also natural to suppose that it is yet another trendy critical approach jostling for attention in an already crowded field of proliferating critical approaches pursued by correspondingly balkanized subgroups of scholars. Alternatively, it may be viewed as a minor addition to the scholarly toolbox, useful for adding some nuance to our standard tradition-history and redactionhistory analyses. These are mistaken characterizations. Memory theory is not just another critical approach. Rather, it supplies the grounds for a comprehensively revised account of the history of the Jesus tradition, one capable of displacing the moribund formcritical model while incorporating – indeed, giving a better account of – the latter’s enduring insights. By the same token, it entails a revised historiography for historical Jesus research.

Form Criticism and the Memory Factor Form criticism got certain big things right. It recognized that the tradition was mediated in a repertoire of small-scale cultural genres. It recognized the powerful effects of present community realities and concerns – the Sitz im Leben – upon the tradition and its representation of the past. It recognized the autonomy of the tradition, that is, its remarkable tendency to run its own course as it interacted with the contingent historical and social realities of its tradent communities. But form criticism profoundly misunderstood the relationship between memory and the tradition. It posited a disconnect, a categorical distinction, between the two. It regarded memory for all practical purposes as a null factor in the history of the tradition. Both Bultmann and Dibelius opposed eschatological

2

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

consciousness to historical consciousness. Orientation to the past arose only secondarily, Bultmann believed, after exhaustion of the early communities’ eschatological enthusiasm.1 ‘It is perfectly clear’, he observed, ‘that it was not the historical interest that dominated [the history of the tradition], but the needs of Christian faith and life.’2 The gospel tradition was regarded as the product of the present, enthusiastic life of the eschatological communities. To the extent that memory even came into view in form criticism it was conceived narrowly and individualistically, as reminiscence, as personal eyewitness recollection. Since the profile of individual eyewitness recollection manifestly does not correspond to the generic, impersonal forms of the Synoptic tradition, the form critics and their followers assumed that memory and the tradition were incommensurable; they were different kinds. David Nineham, in a two-part essay published in 1958 and 1960, was most explicit about this.3 To be sure, it was acknowledged that some early contact with eyewitness memory was likely. This is what accounted for the residual traces of historically authentic elements in the tradition. Bultmann was not without awareness of the memory factor and its effect upon the tradition. He acknowledged (in a footnote) that ‘memories of Jesus, his words and deeds, played their part in the literary productions of the early Church’. 4 The pervasiveness of stories of Jesus as rabbi (teacher of the law) in the tradition, he stated elsewhere, shows that this authentic image ‘must have been firmly impressed upon their [early Christians’] memory’ (before being overwritten by Messianic attributions).5 Further, ‘the certainty with which the Christian community puts the eschatological preaching into the mouth of Jesus is hard to understand if he did not really preach it’.6 But he consigned these memory elements to the primitive ‘eschatological stratum’,7 subsequently thickly overlaid by other developments in the tradition, generated by other factors. He

1. Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology (Edinburgh: At the University Press, 1975), pp. 37–9. 2. Rudolf Bultmann, ‘The Study of the Synoptic Gospels’, in Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Kundsin, Form Criticism (trans. F. C. Grant; New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 7–78 (64); in a similar vein Martin Dibelius, Die Formgeschichte des Evangelium (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 6th ed., 1971), p. 10. Dibelius nevertheless conceived a greater role for memory in the origins of the tradition; see below. 3. D. E. Nineham, ‘Eyewitness Testimony and the Gospel Tradition’, JTS n.s. 9 (1958), 13–25, 243–52; JTS n.s. 11 (1960), 253–64. 4. Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (trans. John Marsh; New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, rev. 3rd ed., 1968 (from 2nd German edition, 1931)), p. 48, n. 2. 5. Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (trans. Louise Pettibone Smith and Erminie Huntress Lantero; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), p. 126. 6. Ibid., p. 124. 7. Ibid.

Memory and Media: Towards a New History of the Tradition

3

did not include memory among the forces that were responsible for driving the formation of the tradition and its development. Curiously, the nature of even this initial contact with memory, and how it came to leave authentic residues in the tradition, was left completely untheorized by the form critics. To be sure, Bultmann recognized that the tradition required cultural mediation for its existence; primitive Christianity’s contact with genres of ancient Judaism, he said, was essential to the ‘relatively rapid precipitation of a somewhat fixed tradition’.8 But for Bultmann and to a lesser extent Dibelius, the tradition itself and its forms were largely the product of contemporary sociological and theological forces immanent in the various community Sitze im Leben. Observing the often close fit of the tradition and its characteristic forms with the developing social realities and theological concerns of the early communities, form critics inferred that the tradition was mostly invented, an enterprise of legitimizing the contemporary practices and doctrines of the early communities by projecting these back into the sacred past.9 Notably, the form critics also posited a second factor operating in the tradition and driving its history: innate ‘laws’ of development. These included evolution from simple to complex forms, a trajectory from pure original forms to mixed forms; a corresponding trajectory from single units to aggregates of units; a tendency of apophthegms to differentiate into variants; a trend from anonymous to named individuals; development from sayings to narrative, and the like. Bultmann put a great deal of effort into specifying these laws, for isolating the auto-operations propelling the tradition’s ‘immanent urge to development’10 gave him additional tools for recovering its oral history prior to its fixation in the written sources. We see that the discounting of the memory factor is not an inconsequential feature of form criticism; rather, it is essential to its entire account of the tradition, one of its master premises. The formation and history of the tradition was not driven by the salient past but by sociological and religionsgeschichtliche forces on the one hand and by innate laws of tradition development on the other. Neither of these posited factors, however, has stood up to criticism. Starting with the latter, one is hard put today to find anyone defending or resting their case on the notion that the tradition’s development is controlled by any of Bultmann’s posited laws of development (though as late as some works published in the 1990s one can still occasionally find it operating as a residual, probably habituated assumption). The tradition’s history is contingent, driven by its interaction with historical, social and cultural variables that intersect with its various enactment settings. Martin Buss points out that Gunkel’s assumption

8. Bultmann, History, p. 368. 9. Ibid., p. 105. Dibelius writes: ‘Genre [Gattung] permits the inference to the so-called Sitz im Leben, that is, to the socio-historical situation in which these genres were formed and shaped … . The ultimate factor giving shape to the forms of the tradition was the life of the primitive community’ (Formgeschichte, pp. 7–8). 10. Bultmann, History, p. 373.

4

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

(taken over by Bultmann) of a developmental trajectory from ‘simple and “pure” forms’ to complex structures ‘is largely unfounded’.11 Bultmann’s interest in innate laws of development echoes theories prominent in the latter half of the nineteenth century among historians of language who, as James Turner puts it, searched for ‘unvarying “laws” governing linguistic change’ that would allow them to work back through the history of a language group and its growth to its primitive stages.12 One also detects in Bultmann’s evolutionary trajectory from a somewhat inchoate, enthusiastic Palestinian community to the cultically, doctrinally and narratively developed Hellenistic church echoes of the nineteenth-century opposition between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’, the former denoting ‘early phases of human society’, and the schema itself deriving ‘from theories of the “progress of civilization” through universal stages’.13 The form-critical account of the tradition might be able to survive the discrediting of the innate laws principle. But its most fundamental premise – the generative correlation of the tradition and its forms to sociological forces immanent in community Sitze im Leben – likewise has foundered under criticism. Buss points out that ‘the idea … that a genre [or a form] arises from a typical spatio-temporal setting [Sitz im Leben] is largely mistaken’.14 The notion that an indissoluble connection exists between sociological setting and the forms of the tradition was another error of Gunkel’s – the ‘correlation of content, linguistic form, and “seat in life”’15 – that Bultmann took over into his account of the formation of the tradition. To be sure, a conventional suitability match frequently exists between a genre and a particular situation (a dirge at a funeral, for example, or the citing of a precedent in a court proceeding), but a cultural repertoire of genres exists distinct from any Sitz im Leben in which these genres might find application. Moreover a given genre might be suitable for enactment in different settings while another may not be paired with any prescribed setting(s) in particular.16 Curiously, this lack of a

11. Martin J. Buss, The Changing Shape of Form Criticism: A Relational Approach (ed. Nicki M. Stipe; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2010), p. 122. 12. James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 252. A major factor at work in this positing natural ‘laws’ of development was the concern during the latter half of the nineteenth century to connect certain humanistic lines of enquiry to the methods and hence to the prestige of the natural sciences (pp. 246–7). 13. Ibid., p. 329. 14. Buss, Changing Shape of Form Criticism, p. 58. 15. Ibid., pp. 101–2. ‘That notion, however, was not based on any empirical observation and was, on the whole, simply mistaken’ (p. 102). 16. Ibid., pp. 34–5, 58; John Frow, Genre (London and New York: Routledge, 2nd ed., 2015), p. 17; Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 41, 95; also Christopher Tuckett, ‘Form Criticism’, in Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (ed. Werner H. Kelber and Samuel Byrskog; Waco, TX: Baylor, 2009), pp. 21–38 (32–5).

Memory and Media: Towards a New History of the Tradition

5

‘precise match between oral speech forms and concrete settings had been [pointed out] by … folklorists … to biblical scholars in 1926, but it was largely ignored’.17 The corollary homeostatic, reductionist conception of the tradition – the view, as Jan Vansina puts it, ‘that the total content of the oral tradition is only a social product of the present’18 – has likewise been roundly criticized. Geertz and Vansina both point out that a cultural tradition and the social realities of its tradent community are in fact distinct, interdependent variables that more often than not exist in some tension with each other.19 These criticisms are hardly new. What is less often remarked, however, is that severing the generative connection between sociological Sitz and forms of the tradition leaves form criticism bereft of any viable explanation, any viable mechanism, for the origin and history of the tradition. Form-critical assumptions nevertheless continue to operate in different spheres of scholarship on the gospels. This attests to its remarkable power as a cognitive paradigm, an episteme: not so much itself an object of reflection as a cognitive framework that controls the production of knowledge in scholarship.

Memory and the Jesus Tradition Memory, completely marginalized in form criticism, in its cognitive, social and cultural dimensions is in fact the vital principle that drives the formation of the tradition and its history. Sensitive observer of the tradition that he was, Bultmann intuited the presence of a force connecting the whole history of the tradition to its historical origins: Though we cannot now define with certainty the extent of the authentic words of Jesus, we are nevertheless able to distinguish the various levels of tradition; and when, by a process of careful historical investigation, we distinguish the secondary layers of the tradition, what results is not, like the peeling of an onion, a reduction to nothingness – since the farther one goes the nearer one comes to the center, which holds the secret of its historical power. The layers which lie about this center may be viewed as its historical results, either as its direct consequence or as a partial effect due to its contact with religious material of another kind.20

17. Buss, Changing Shape of Form Criticism, p. 193. 18. Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, p. 94. 19. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 143–4; Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, pp. xii, 114–16, 121–3. Vansina is particularly emphatic in his rejection of the homeostatic, functionalist view of tradition, pointing out that empirical evidence (i.e. actual fieldwork on oral traditions) unequivocally falsifies it. 20. Bultmann, ‘Study of the Synoptic Gospels’, p. 60.

6

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

His discounting of the memory factor, however, left him unable to be any more precise than this. Dibelius on the other hand went quite a bit further than Bultmann in conceiving a role for memory in the origins of the tradition. He argued that in the powerful impulse of the primitive communities towards mission, and hence preaching, early Christian memory as a matter of course flowed into the artefactual form of the Paradigms.21 In other words, in Dibelius we find incipient reflection on the  problem of the transmutation of early Christian memory into the forms of the tradition, and in this connection, the recognition that memory, to achieve the desired communicative effects, of necessity must find expression in public genres. That this formative process likely occurred very early, in the early enthusiasm for mission, and accordingly coincided with the presence of eyewitnesses, accounts for Dibelius’s qualified confidence in ‘the general reliability’ of the Paradigms (i.e. the apophthegm tradition).22 Form criticism as a movement, however, did not follow Dibelius’s lead on this point but instead Bultmann in his more radical severation of memory from the tradition. Samuel Byrskog points out that form criticism erred in disconnecting early Christian identity from a formative past, for cultural identity is the product of a negotiation of past and present; identity arises out of the ongoing engagement with memory within the temporal and social horizons of the present.23 The Sitze im Leben of the early communities, the incubators of the tradition, are not the memory-free zones of form criticism but the exact inverse: zones of memory (Gedächtnisorte)24 where the normative past and present exigencies encounter one another. This encounter with memory is mediated by the tradition. The tradition at the same time participates in this encounter; it is the product of this encounter. Memory theory therefore should be capable of delivering a comprehensive account of the tradition, something that form criticism purported to do but failed. The grounds for a memory-based account of the tradition lie in the reality that memory requires cultural mediation in a repertoire of genres and narrative forms. Narrative, for example, is a basic cognitive organizing structure for memory, ‘the fundamental schema for the processing [Verarbeitung] and mediation of the

21. Dibelius, Formgeschichte, pp. 12–13. 22. Ibid., p. 59. 23. Samuel Byrskog, ‘Theißen, Form-Criticism and Social Memory: Ways to Reconfigure Jesus the Galilean’, in Jesus – Gestalt und Gestaltungen: Rezeptionen des Galiläers in Wissenschaft, Kirche und Gesellschaft (FS Gerd Theißen; ed. Petra von Gemünden et al.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 499–513 (509). 24. Ruben Zimmermann, ‘Formen und Gattungen als Medien der Jesus-Erinnerung: Zur Rückgewinnung der Diachronie in der Formgeschichte des Neuen Testaments’, in Die Macht der Erinnerung (ed. O. Fuchs and B. Janowski; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2008), pp. 131–67 (149–50); also Samuel Byrskog, ‘A Century with the Sitz im Leben: From Form-Critical Setting to Gospel Community and Beyond’, ZNW 98 (2007), pp. 1–27 (22).

Memory and Media: Towards a New History of the Tradition

7

past’.25 Bultmann could hardly have been more mistaken in assigning primacy to sayings in his evolutionary history of the tradition. Memory organizes the past in meaningful narrative patterns; it ‘acts to organize what might otherwise be a mere assemblage of contingently connected events’.26 Through narrative, moreover, memory interprets, it signifies, the past. To this end it draws upon a repertoire of existing narrative patterns and genres with culturally symbolic status.27 These symbolically dense narrative patterns catalyse identity formation for the groups that tell and retell the story.28 They serve as the narrative core of a body of culturally normative tradition, circulating in a repertoire of forms. Memory-grounded analysis is able to deliver a coherent account, not only of the tradition’s origins, but also of its history through analysis of how the tradition mediates the salient past into contemporary contexts of reception. Here it intersects with source criticism and redaction criticism. In other words, a memory-based account of the tradition neither displaces standard redaction-critical, tradition-history and source-critical approaches nor does it merely supplement them. Rather, it integrates them into a more comprehensive account of cultural formation and history, providing a kind of unified field theory for various lines of enquiry. As regards its significance for historiography, memory analysis does not give privileged access to the historical Jesus. It does not pre-authenticate the historicity of the Jesus tradition. What it does is clarify how the tradition mediates the past and in so doing clarifies for Jesus research what it is actually presented with in its basic datum, the tradition. It overcomes the form-critical bifurcation of the tradition, its dualism of ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ elements, while at the same time sharpening the exercise of critical historical judgement. It is able, moreover, to give a historical account of the relation of the various elements of the tradition to one another. Conventional historical Jesus approaches, grounded in a sharply bifurcated model for the tradition, have difficulty clarifying the relationship

25. Ruben Zimmermann, ‘Geschichtstheorien und Neues Testament: Gedächtnis, Diskurs, Kultur und Narration in der historiographischen Diskussion’, EC 2 (2011), pp. 417–44 (427); also Samuel Byrskog, ‘The Transmission of the Jesus Tradition’, in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, vol. 2 (ed. Thomas Holmén and Stanley E. Porter; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), pp. 1465–94 (1478–9). 26. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 291. 27. Ruben Zimmermann, ‘Gleichnisse als Medien der Jesuserinnerung: Die Historizität der Jesusparabeln im Horizont der Gedächtnisforschung’, in Hermeneutik der Gleichnisse Jesu: Methodische Neuansätze zum Verstehen urchristlicher Parabeltexte (ed. Ruben Zimmerman; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2008), pp. 87–121 (108). 28. Ibid., p. 121; Byrskog, ‘Century with the Sitz im Leben’, pp. 26–7; idem, ‘From Memory to Memoirs: Tracing the Background of a Literary Genre’, in The Making of Christianity: Conflicts, Contacts, and Constructions: Essays in Honor of Bengt Holmberg (ed. M. Zetterholm and S. Byrskog; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012), pp. 1–21 (19).

8

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

of so-called authentic and inauthentic elements in the tradition.29 Moreover, in putting the question categorically – did Jesus do or not do, did he say or not say, some reported deed or saying – they do not reckon with the complex relationship of any unit of the tradition to historical realities. Memory-based historiography is able to give a causal historical account of the connections among the elements of the tradition. It is able to exploit the tradition as a whole to form historical judgements.30

Conclusion The chapters that follow in this book are an attempt to flesh out precisely how memory provides the basis for a comprehensive, unified account of the history of the Jesus tradition – from its initial formation to its ultimate canonization. The four chapters in Part I describe the basic elements of memory theory, show the essential interface memory and cultural media, and apply these principles to problems in the origins of the tradition. Part II (three chapters) discusses the three-way intersection of memory, manuscript medium and scribal practices, with applications to the scribal transmission of the gospel tradition and to Synoptic source-critical debates. The three chapters in Part III in various ways deal with the import of memory approaches for historical Jesus research. Finally, Part IV comprises two chapters on the Gospel of Peter, both of which explore cultural memory forces at work in the reception of gospel tradition and trends towards canonization in second-century gospel writing.

29. Chris Keith, ‘Memory and Authenticity: Jesus Tradition and What Really Happened’, ZNW 102 (2011), pp. 155–77 (171–3). 30. An exemplary case of this is Zimmermann’s discussion of historical inferences that can be drawn from the parables: ‘Parables are a literary form of memory of the socio-historical roots of the Jesus movement. … Moreover, they amount to the literary subsuming and mediation of certain historical events. The Parable of the Vineyard (Mk 12.1-12), for example, memorializes the killing of Jesus and at the same time interprets it. … Another way that the parables mediate the memory of Jesus is in his activity as a teller of parables’ (‘Formen und Gattungen’, p. 164; emphases original).

Part I F ORMATION OF THE J ESUS T RADITION

Chapter 2 SOCIAL AND CULTURAL MEMORY*

INTRODUCTION

The significance of memory for virtually all research domains relating to emergent Christianity has been gaining at best only slow recognition. Social memory studies are less than a century old, having originated in the writings of Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945), a disciple of Émile Durkheim. A recent state-of-the-question essay shows their wide diffusion into the social sciences and humanities.1 Bibliographic surveys of the relevant literature reveal that the vast majority of focused studies in social memory have been published within the last two decades. In many ways, then, social memory is a new and emerging field. But while memory studies have burgeoned in the humanities and social sciences, no comparable effect can be noticed in New Testament scholarship,2 even though a glance at the anamnesis passage, 1 Cor. 11.23-26, shows memorializing practices of early Christian communities implicated in ritual and ethics, in issues of oral tradition and transmission, and accordingly in historical Jesus questions as well. That this myopia is a problem almost uniquely of New Testament scholarship is due in large part to the continuing influence of classical form criticism, which in the wake of the failure of the nineteenth-century quests for the historical Jesus reconstructed the category ‘tradition’ in such a way as to marginalize memory. Corresponding to this inattention to memory is the absence of analytical approaches able to conceptualize the operations of memory and assess its effects.

* First published in Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity (ed. Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher; Semeia Studies 52; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2005), pp. 1–24; used by permission. 1. Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices’, ARS 24 (1988), pp. 105–40. 2. Werner H. Kelber, ‘The Case of the Gospels: Memory’s Desire and the Limits of Historical Criticism’, OT 17 (2002), pp. 55–86 (58–9).

12

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

This chapter will outline analytical approaches that are emerging within memory studies and introduce the work of leading theorists.3 Contemporary memory studies are diffuse, spread across many disciplines, and so they resist simple systematization. The focus in what follows will be upon major elements from this diverse body of theory that appear to have direct implications for research problems in Christian origins.

Social Frameworks of Memory Maurice Halbwachs showed that memory is in determinative respects a social phenomenon: ‘[Halbwachs] was interested in memory as a social reality, as a function of the individual’s membership in various social groups.’4 Traditionally, memory has been taken to be the most purely individual of human faculties, the ‘product of an isolated mind’, a view, however, that ‘overemphasizes the isolation of the individual in social life’.5 Memory is in fact ‘intersubjectively constituted’; it is inseparable from ‘the social world … in which remembering occurs’.6 Halbwachs argued that memory is constituted by social frameworks, which is to say he focused on the way the structure and inner workings of specific groups shape memory for the people belonging to those groups. Social frameworks of memory are indispensable for the very possibility of remembering, for they give coherence and legibility to memories, arranging them within dominant cultural systems of meaning.7 Halbwachs identified and analysed a number of these frameworks. Here we shall limit ourselves to spelling out, first, how the patterns impressed upon

3. ‘Social memory’ is largely the term used in Anglo-American scholarship, while ‘cultural memory’ predominates in German scholarship associated with Aleida and Jan Assmann. Though clearly embodying differences of approach and focus, ‘social memory’ and ‘cultural memory’ analyses have a great deal in common, and this chapter will show a number of their points of intersection. 4. Jan Assmann, ‘Égypte ancienne – la mémoire monumentale’, in La commémoration (ed. Philippe Gignoux; Paris: Peeters, 1988), pp. 47–56 (47–8). 5. Jeffrey Prager, Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 59–60. 6. Prager, Presenting the Past, pp. 213–14. 7. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (trans. and ed. Lewis A. Coser; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire; Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1952]), pp. 38–43; idem, The Collective Memory (trans. Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter; New York: Harper & Row, 1980 [La mémoire collective; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950]), p. 54; Gérard Namer, Mémoire et société (Paris: Méridiens Lincksieck, 1987), pp. 37, 56–7; Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitiät in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992), p. 35; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis: zehn Studien (Munich: Beck, 2000), p. 114.

Social and Cultural Memory

13

space and time by the social configurations of discrete groups act as mnemonic frameworks, and, second, the role communicative practices of groups play in giving substance to memory. Spatio-temporal frameworks are crucial, for it is not possible to remember apart from memories fastening to definite places and times.8 Time and locale act as economizing, organizing principles that condense and render into emblematic composites the memories associated with them.9 Memory attaches to places and landscapes, and likewise it survives, erodes, or perishes along with them.10 The space within which memory is plotted is a social framework because space is conceptualized, organized and shaped by the group inhabiting it.11 The same holds true of the framework of time. Calendar organizes duration, and so it is the essential scaffolding both for situating and reconstituting memories. There are, however, as many calendars as there are groups. A community organizes its calendar in accordance with group-specific commemorative concerns and activities, and so freights it with religious, political and social meanings.12 In villages  the rhythms and recurrences of the agricultural cycle (marked calendrically), bisected by the ritually marked biographical trajectory of the life cycle, specific to individual households and their constituent members, act as accretion points and organizing grids for memory, while reciprocity networks among households connect individual household memory into the communal memory of a village.13 Calendrical innovations in a community may, on the one hand, be driven by memorializing concerns and, on the other, obliterate memories

8. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, pp. 134–40, 157; Gérard Namer, Halbwachs et la mémoire sociale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), pp. 50–1; Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 189. 9. Casey, Remembering, pp. 72–5; Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 61; idem, The Collective Memory, p. 70. 10. Sarah Bennett Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 101– 103, 199–205; Jun Jing, The Temple of Memories: History, Power, and Morality in a Chinese Village (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 170–3. 11. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, pp. 156–7; James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 80; Namer, Halbwachs, p. 230; John R. Gillis, ‘Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship’, in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (ed. John R. Gillis; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 3–24 (6). 12. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, pp. 88–9, 111–12; also Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (trans. John Raffan; Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), pp. 225–6. 13. Françoise Zonabend, The Enduring Memory: Time and History in a French Village (trans. Anthony Forster; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 142, 197–200; Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, pp. 63–73; Dorthe Berntsen and David C. Rubin, ‘Cultural Life Scripts Structure Recall from Autobiographical Memory’, MemCogn 32 (2004), pp. 427–42.

14

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

accumulated upon the obsolescent calendar. With time as with space, memory is enframed within the social and cultural dynamics of groups. The mnemonic effects of social frameworks, however, do not entail cryogenic preservation of discrete memoires. Rather, ‘all memory transmutes experience, distils the past rather than simply reflecting it’.14 Communication is essential to the formation of memory. Memory emerges in coherent, durable form to the extent remembrances find articulation and reinforcement in communicative interaction within a group, and conversely, a person’s remembrances fade to the extent they are not taken up in the groups with which he or she is affiliated.15 It is through communicative discourse that otherwise ephemeral, disconnected remembrances are given connectedness, coherence and a stable form.16 Gérard Namer refers to this as ‘a sociability of speech that permits the discontinuities of remembering [souvenir] to be woven into a living memory [mémoire vécue]’.17 Concentration camp survivors (by way of a diagnostic example) constructed a coherent memory of their experiences, so horrible as to be incommunicables, only through the formation of survivor groups. In these groups was forged the collective discourse that integrated fragmented, individualized remembrances into a coherent, communicable memory of the camps.18 Articulation of memories through discourse in a community is simultaneously the urgent working out of the meaning of those memories, which if left in fragmentary form would be at best ambiguous as regards their significance.19 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, in a major survey of popular uses of memory, report of their respondents that ‘with individuals they trusted … they probed experiences and constructed the traditions they wanted to sustain. In these relationships they … shaped and reshaped memories into trajectories … and generally created the perceptual world they wanted to inhabit.’20 On the basis of her fieldwork in Hutu refugee camps in Tanzania, Liisa Malkki characterizes this face-to-face discussion of remembrances as ‘an intensively signifying context’, the effect of which is to weave memory into semantically dense narrative patterns.21

14. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 204. 15. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 53. 16. Ibid., p. 173. 17. Namer, Mémoire et société, pp. 142–3; emphasis in the original. 18. Ibid., pp. 140–57. 19. Ibid., pp. 154–5; Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 73. 20. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 196. 21. Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 140.

Social and Cultural Memory

15

Memory and Collective Identity ‘Memory is embedded … the rememberer remembers in a contemporary world, peopled by others who collectively contribute to the construction of memory and help determine the importance that the past holds for an individual in the present.’22 For its part, a community bears a complex of memories constitutive of its very existence.23 Accordingly, ‘genuine communities are communities of memory that constantly tell and retell their constitutive memories’.24 Individuals come to participate in these memories by virtue of their incorporation into the group, a process Eviatar Zerubavel describes as the ‘existential fusion of our own personal biography with the history of the groups or communities to which we belong’.25 Indeed, he continues, ‘familiarizing new members with its past is an important part of a community’s effort to incorporate them’.26 Ritual and other commemorative activities bring individuals into vital connection with that memory and its associated norms.27 The locus of the collective memory is the memory of individuals whose identity is bound up in the group.28 ‘Memory’, says Prager, ‘is produced by an individual, but it is always produced in relation to the larger interpersonal and cultural world in which that individual lives’.29 Individual identity is ‘constituted by a train of events and experiences’,30 constantly being linked together in meaningful narrative patterns by the work of

22. Prager, Presenting the Past, pp. 70–1. 23. Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘Collective Memory: The Two Cultures’, ST 17 (1999), pp. 333–48 (342). 24. Olick, ‘Collective Memory’, p. 344; also Eviatar Zerubavel, ‘Social Memories: Steps to a Sociology of the Past’, QualSoc 19 (1996), pp. 238–99 (289); Barry Schwartz, ‘Postmodernity and Historical Reputation: Abraham Lincoln in Late Twentieth-Century American Memory’, SocForces 77 (1998), pp. 63–103 (67); Zonabend, The Enduring Memory, p. 203. 25. Zerubavel, ‘Social Memories’, p. 290; see also Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, pp. 51–3, 68; Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 294; Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 51, 212; Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country, pp. 196–7; Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, p. 198; and Jing, Temple of Memories, pp. 78–9. 26. Zerubavel, ‘Social Memories’, p. 290; also Michael Schudson, ‘The Present in the Past versus the Past in the Present’, Comm 11 (1989), pp. 105–13 (111); Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 108. 27. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 16; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, pp. 22–3. 28. Aleida and Jan Assmann, ‘Schrift, Tradition, und Kultur’, in Zwischen Festtag und Alltag: zehn Beträge zum Thema Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit (ed. Paul Goetsch et al.; Tübingen: Narr, 1988), pp. 25–49 (27); Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 19. 29. Prager, Presenting the Past, p. 70. 30. Schudson, ‘Present in the Past’, p. 111.

16

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

memory.31 This process never reaches stasis; rather, it is a matter of constantly correlating past, present and the anticipated future to achieve a sense of personal coherence and continuity. Social memory exercises a role analogous to that played by individual memory: ‘Social memory defines a group, giving it a sense of its past and defining its aspirations for the future.’32 A community marks certain elements of its past as being of constitutive significance. Both identity and continuity, indeed, the very survival of a community, depend upon its constant reactivation of these memories.33 These are memories of the community’s origins – ‘the event that marks the group’s emergence as an independent social entity’ – and other landmark events in its history.34 These memories are shaped into a community’s master commemorative narrative; moreover, through recitation of its master narrative a group continually reconstitutes itself as a coherent community, and as it moves forward through its history it aligns its fresh experiences with this master narrative (and vice versa).35

Communicative Memory and Cultural Memory We can better grasp the dynamics of social memory by focusing on emergent communities still close to their origins. Jan Assmann uses the term ‘communicative memory’ (kommunikatives Gedächtnis) for this period, characterized as it is by face-to-face circulation of foundational memories.36 These memories are biographically vested in those who experienced originating events; it is the time of ‘eyewitness and living memory’.37 Lowenthal points out that the period after the American War of Independence was characterized by ‘the prolonged survival of the actual fathers, living memorials to their own splendid deeds for half a century beyond the Revolution’.38 The outer limit of ‘communicative memory’ is

31. Casey, Remembering, p. 290; Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country, pp. 41, 197; Olick and Robbins, ‘Social Memory Studies’, pp. 133–4; Prager, Presenting the Past, pp. 91, 123–5; Shils, Tradition, p. 50. 32. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 25; also Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country, p. 198; Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 89; Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 83; idem, The Collective Memory, p. 126; Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, 172. 33. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 30, 132–3; Schwartz, ‘Postmodernity and Historical Reputation’, p. 67. 34. Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 4–9; also Zonabend, Enduring Memory, p. x; Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, p. 172. 35. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, p. 7. 36. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 50–6. 37. Ibid., p. 32; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 88. 38. Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country, p. 118.

Social and Cultural Memory

17

the passing of those able to claim living contact with the original generation, hence three to four generations, that is, eighty to one hundred years.39 Bodnar uses the term ‘vernacular memory’ for this phenomenon and observes that ‘much of the power of vernacular memory [is] derived from the lived or shared experiences of small groups. … Vernacular interests [lose] intensity with the death and demise of individuals who participated in historic events’.40 Thus, communicative memory cannot sustain group-constitutive remembrances beyond the three to four generations able to claim living contact with the generation of origins.41 Assmann argues that the limitations of communicative memory force themselves upon an emergent community as a crisis of memory at approximately the forty-year threshold, the point at which it becomes apparent that the cohort of living carriers of memory is disappearing.42 It is at this threshold that the community, if it is not itself to dissolve along with its memory, must turn towards more enduring media capable of carrying memory in a vital manner across generations, that is, towards what Assmann refers to as the forms of ‘cultural memory’ (kulturelles Gedächtnis),43 though lineaments of such forms may begin to appear even during the high period of communicative memory.44 ‘If we conceive the typical three-generation time framework as a synchronic space of memory,’ he says, ‘then cultural memory forms a diachronic axis, by virtue of a tradition which extends far into the past’.45 Assmann isolates this phenomenon – transition from communicative to cultural memory – to secure an analytical standpoint from which he can gain a broad perspective on the dynamics of culture, viewed as the constellation of the ‘means of collective mnemo-technique’.46

39. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 56; idem, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, NewGerCrit 65 (1995), pp. 125–33 (127); idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, pp. 37–8. 40. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 247. 41. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 50. 42. Ibid., p. 11; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 29; also Farmer, Martyred Village, pp. 197–213. 43. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 218–21; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, pp. 53–4. Assmann draws the distinction between ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural’ memory too sharply: the forms of an oral tradition that emerge in the period of ‘communicative memory’ are themselves cultural artefacts that bear essential cultural meanings. 44. Farmer, Martyred Village, pp. 100–23. A case in point is the formation of ‘master commemorative narratives’, which on the one hand are forged in group communicative contexts, and on the other operate as durable cultural artefacts. 45. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 30 (Assmann draws here upon Aleida Assmann’s Zeit und Tradition: kulturelle Strategien der Dauer (Cologne: Böulau, 1999)). 46. Ibid., p. 117; idem, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 218; idem, ‘Collective Memory’, 129.

18

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

This brings us into touch with the cultural media of memory. Assmann identifies writing as ‘an extraordinary efficient medium of symbolic objectification’.47 In societies with scribal technology, writing takes on particular importance in the event of a ‘breakdown in tradition’ (Traditionsbruch). For emergent groups, this refers to the point of serious breakdown of communicative memory. Analogously, at the level of long-established societies and cultures, it indicates crisis times when historical disruptions and changes suddenly problematize the immanent, organic connections of a society with its past, as well as the adequate functioning of the usual forms (including oral) of transmission. In such cases a society is confronted with loss of connection to memory and so turns more intensively to writing as a means of stabilizing group memory, of working out connections to the past in the midst of drastically altered circumstances.48

Commemoration Discussion of the artefactual forms of cultural memory leads on to the practices of commemoration. Viable communities are at pains to commemorate their pasts. Commemoration, in Savage’s apt characterization, is the ‘effort to fix the meaning and purpose [of crucial memories] … in an enduring form’.49 Commemoration renders constitutive memories into durable forms; it creates what Namer calls ‘the material basis of memory’.50 In public monuments, for example, ‘the very hardness and hardiness of granite and marble’ evidences the concern to fix and make constitutive memories constantly and enduringly present.51 Commemoration is a culture-formative impulse that ramifies into a wide range of cultural media, artefacts, commemorative narratives and ritual practices.52 These densely sedimentize memory into various material and visible formats that function to make the past immanent in the present.53 Commemorative practice of all sorts attempts to counteract the danger of rupture, the possibility of a fatal disconnect between a community and its past, the loss of memory that spells unravelling of identity in the present and future. It seeks to bridge the problematic, everwidening gap that opens up between formative events and a community’s ongoing

47. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 54. 48. Ibid., pp. 87–8; idem, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 165. 49. Kirk Savage, ‘The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Movement’, in Gillis, ed., Commemorations, pp. 127–49 (127). 50. Namer, Halbwachs, p. 157. 51. Casey, Remembering, p. 227. 52. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, p. 5; Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, pp. 19–20; idem, ‘Collective Memory’, pp. 130–1; Casey, Remembering, p. 218. 53. Savage, ‘Politics of Memory’, p. 132; Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 19; Casey, Remembering, pp. 218–19; Farmer, Martyred Village, p. 123.

Social and Cultural Memory

19

historical existence.54 As a ‘making-present of the founding past’, commemoration aims to ensure the continued vitality of collective memory. It ‘has the goal of rendering collective identity visible and stabilizing it by presenting it in symbolic and dramatic form’.55 Conversely, elites wanting to socially reengineer a society with revisionist accounts of its past must try to seize control of its practices of commemoration. Remembering together in common commemoranda, present in mediating artefacts and practices, serves also to incorporate new members through their inculcation in a group’s constitutive memories and socialization into the corollary norms – what Assmann refers to as the ‘formative and normative’ dimensions of cultural memory.56 In other words, the past is exemplary for the group that commemorates it. Commemoration, Schwartz says, ‘lifts from an ordinary historical sequence those extraordinary events which embody our deepest and most fundamental values’.57 This in turn means that commemoration has a mobilizing effect, or stated differently, is oriented towards the future as well as the past.58 At its core, commemoration is a hermeneutical activity: to return to Savage’s definition, it is the ‘effort to fix the meaning and purpose’ of the past.59 Commemoration picks up ‘bedrock events experienced with powerful immediacy’ but whose meaning and significance must be discerned, precisely through commemorative activities.60 This entails, though, that (as Schwartz puts it) ‘commemoration is a way of forming its object in the process of representing it’.61

54. Assmann, ‘Égypte ancienne’, p. 55 ; Lewis Coser, ‘Introduction: Maurice Halbwachs’, in Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, pp. 1–34 (25); Casey, Remembering, pp. 224–5, 237; Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. 94; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 70. 55. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 28. 56. Ibid., p. 20; see also Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. 10; Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, ‘La commemoration: Temps retrouvé temps aboli’, in Gignoux, ed., La commémoration, pp. 13–20 (19); Stella Georgoudi, ‘Commémoration et célébration des morts dans les cites grecques: les rites annuels’, in Gignoux, ed., La commémoration, pp. 73–89 (89); Casey, Remembering, pp. 247–51; Lloyd W. Warner, The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 279, 305–306; Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, p. 45. 57. Barry Schwartz, ‘The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory’, SocForces 61 (1982), pp. 374–402 (377). 58. Namer, Mémoire et société, p. 211; Casey, Remembering, p. 256; Duchesne-Guillemin, ‘La commémoration’, p. 13. 59. Savage, ‘Politics of Memory’, p. 127, emphasis added; also Farmer, Martyred Village, p. 78. 60. Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, p. 67. 61. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. 306.

20

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

By the same token, commemoration shapes memory, for a community impresses its present identity upon its ‘collective re-presentations’ of its past.62 To adapt Warner’s characterization, in commemoration a community states symbolically what it believes and wants itself to be.63 Social tensions erupt in struggles over defining and interpreting a salient past, which is to say, in Farmer’s words, that ‘commemorative efforts are often punctuated as much by conflict as consensus’.64 Commemorative ritual sustains memory by reenacting a community’s master narrative, itself the product of commemorative impulses.65 Farmer notes in the case of the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre by the SS that ‘the events … had to be removed from their historical context and dramatized, visually and in narrative, to be rendered suitable for telling the archetypal story of innocence and victimization’.66 Translation into ritual transfigures the way salient events are represented. Meaning and significance are distilled out and concentrated into sacralized, highly symbolic words, gestures and objects.67 Historical detail recedes to the minimum required to support the symbolic appropriation, with this remainder conformed to the tight structure of the ritual,68 and with historical recitation itself coming to be affected by the contours of the ritual. A complex, diffuse history is thereby precipitated out into a stable ritual artefact, bearer of dense symbolic meaning, with enormous capacity to perdure in multiple enactments through time.69 In the creation of a commemorative calendar, events deemed memorable are extracted from their historical context and replotted within a cyclical commemorative sequence that foregrounds the symbolic significance that these events bear for the identity of the community. Calendrical transposition reflects the way group-formative events have come to be arranged within the master commemorative narrative, now traversed cyclically throughout the course of the year.70 ‘Historical time is thus transformed into commemorative time.’71 The mnemonic effect of ritual lies not just in its concentration of meaning in material signs and gestures that stimulate recollection, but also in its incorporation of the kinetic, affective and sensory capacities of the bodies of the participations

62. Peter Burke, ‘History as Social Memory’, in Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind (ed. Thomas Butler; New York: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 97–113 (101). 63. Warner, Living and the Dead, p. 107; also Assmann, ‘Égypte ancienne’, pp. 55–6. 64. Farmer, Martyred Village, p. 4. 65. Connerton, How Societies Remember, p. 70; Casey, Remembering, pp. 224–5. 66. Farmer, Martyred Village, p. 55. 67. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 116. 68. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, p. 40. 69. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 116; Yerushalmi, Zakhor, pp. 40, 51–2. 70. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, pp. 218–19. 71. Ibid., p. 25; also Yerushalmi, Zakhor, pp. 11, 41–2; Lucette Valensi, ‘From Sacred History to Historical Memory and Back: The Jewish Past’, Hist&Anth 2 (1986), pp. 283–305 (286).

Social and Cultural Memory

21

into the ritualized act of remembering.72 The community is literally incorporated – as it were, fused – with the constitutive past during the time frame of the ceremonialized action through participation in its representation. Simultaneously, the community as ‘conjoined participants acting together’ is dramatically reconstituted and manifests its identity and solidarity.73 ‘Memory flowed [in Judiasm] … through two channels: ritual and recital.’74 Both along with and independent of rituals and material artefacts groups make use of the verbal arts, oral or written, for commemorative ends. Commemorative ritual draws the community together on a regular basis, which in turn supplies the context for utterance of group memory in genres appropriate to a given setting.75 Verbal elements may occur either correlated with the choreography of the ritual, or in genres less directly implicated in the ritual enactment itself but nevertheless appropriate to the commemorative, incorporative objectives of the ritual setting. One example is the ‘logos épitaphaios’, a genre that emerged in fourth-century bce Greece ‘to commemorate combatants who had died in battle and which was pronounced at their tombs in the course of public funerals’.76 Instruction, drawing upon the normative elements of the salient past, will be an essential dimension of rituals that initiate new members into a community.77 It is only a step to the emergence of texts themselves as autonomous commemorative artefacts.78 Oral tradition has great tenacity, but written texts possess material ingrediency that enables diffusion and storage if not permanency and accordingly are less dependent upon ritual settings for their transmission, though they may initially have been produced for such settings.79 Connerton points out that ‘whatever is written, and more generally whatever is inscribed, demonstrates, by the fact of being inscribed, a will to be remembered’.80 Text may be a strategic response to the crisis of memory arising in the wake of a Traditionsbruch as described by Assmann, which leads to the articulation of memory in durable

72. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 21. 73. Casey, Remembering, p. 227; also Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 21, 143; Zerubavel, ‘Social Memories’, p. 294; Warner, Living and the Dead, p. 432. 74. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, p. 11. 75. Aleida and Jan Assmann, ‘Schrift und Gedächtnis’, in Schrift und Gedächtnis: Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation (ed. Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, and Christoph Hardmeier; Munich: Fink, 1983), pp. 265–84 (274); Casey, Remembering, p. 235; Warner, Living and the Dead, pp. 114–16. 76. M. Simondon, ‘Les modes du discours commémoratif en Grèce ancienne’, in Gignoux, ed., La commémoration, pp. 91–105 (99). 77. Nachman ben Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 152–3. 78. Simondon, ‘Modes du discours’, p. 105. 79. Casey, Remembering, p. 227; Shils, Tradition, p. 91. 80. Connerton, How Societies Remember, p. 102; also Assmann and Assmann, ‘Schrift, Tradition, und Kultur’, p. 48.

22

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

cultural artefacts and practices.81 Biographical and historiographical writing are obvious cases, but a community ‘arranges its social memory into different genres’,82 and non-history genres may in fact be suffused with memory.83 We see confirmed Halbwachs’s point that memory takes coherent shape to the extent that it finds articulation in typical social practices and aligned genres of discourse.

Memory as Construction That memory is constructive activity should now be clear, but it needs emphasis to counter what Casey labels the ‘passivist’ model for memory, namely, ‘the view that all memories of necessity repeat the past in a strictly replicative manner [and that] the contribution of the remembering subject … is nugatory’.84 We have already seen that memories are products of coherence-bestowing activities such as conceptualization, schematization and interpretative articulation in shared forms of discourse. Memory ‘acts to organize what might otherwise be a mere assemblage of contingently connected events’.85 Memory configurations, however, do not thereby assume static, immobile forms. The activity of memory in articulating the past is dynamic, unceasing, because it is wired into the ever-shifting present. The remembering subject, from his or her situatedness in the present, interacts with a formative past to relate it meaningfully to contemporary exigencies and to the ongoing project of negotiating continuity and change in personal identity.86 In Prager’s words, ‘it becomes nearly impossible to parse out memories of the past from the categories of experience available in the present’.87 Precisely the same holds true for collective memory of communities, where ‘to remember is to place a part of the past in the service of the needs and conceptions of the present’.88 Halbwachs claimed that to remember is not to retrouver but to reconstruire, to align the image of the past with present social realities89: a group will conform its past to

81. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 218–21. 82. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 78; also Simondon, ‘Modes du discours’, p. 105; Namer, Mémoire et société, pp. 157–8. 83. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, pp. 14–15, 31, 45–6. 84. Casey, Remembering, p. 269. 85. Ibid., p. 291. 86. Ibid., p. 292; also Prager, Presenting the Past, pp. 11–12, 214–15; Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country, p. 206; Gillis, ‘Memory and Identity’, p. 3; Barbie Zelizer, ‘Reading the Past against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies’, CritStMassComm 12 (1995), pp. 214–39 (218). 87. Prager, Presenting the Past, p. 5. 88. Schwartz, ‘Social Context of Commemoration’, p. 5. 89. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 40. ‘Les cadres collectifs de la mémoire … sont … les instruments dont la mémoire collective se sert pour recomposer une image du passé qui s’accorde à chaque époque avec les pensées dominantes de la société’ (cited from Namer, Mémoire et société, p. 34).

Social and Cultural Memory

23

shifts in its present realities, group morphology and self-conceptions.90 Differential attribution of meaning to the past, a basic operation of memory, proceeds from and serves the conditions of the present. Present social realities and ‘the dominant conceptions of society’ act therefore as semantic frames of memory.91 We have seen that a community situates its past, self-constitutively, in its present. Frameworks of memory are current social and conceptual structures through which the past is retrieved and interpreted in a community’s incessant activity of self-constitution. Current needs and preoccupations affect what elements of a community’s past are awarded prominence, that is, commemorated, or, conversely, are ‘forgotten’ in the unceasing construction of the past that is a community’s social memory. The present itself is hardly static; memory frameworks are thus themselves constantly subject to renovation, gradual or radical, as external and internal factors in a group’s existence change. Accordingly, the way a community ‘remembers’ and ‘forgets’ its past changes as well.92 Research in social memory ‘shows how beliefs about the past are shaped by the circumstances and problems of current society and how different elements of the past become more or less relevant as these circumstances and problems change. Memory thus becomes a social fact as it is made and remade to serve changing societal interests and needs’.93 Hence immutability in representation of the past is never achieved; rather, ‘the past is continually being reorganized by the constantly changing frames of reference of the ever-evolving present’.94 Or stated differently, ‘a charismatic epoch is not a fixed entity which imposes itself on the present; it is a continuously evolving product of social definition’.95 It is by constantly bringing its salient past into alignment with its open-ended series of ‘presents’, however, that a community maintains continuity of identity across time, its vitalizing connection to its past.96 In some cases the past reflects with particular clarity a community’s contemporary perspectives. Joan of Arc, for example, was viewed as an ‘unfortunate idiot’ by Voltaire, by nineteenth-century French republicanism as prefiguring ‘the heroic rising of the Third Estate’, and by French socialists as a proto-proletarian ‘born into

90. Namer, Mémoire et société, p. 53; Prager, Presenting the Past, p. 82. 91. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 183; Jan Assmann, ‘Ancient Egyptian Antijudaism: A Case of Distorted Memory’, in Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past (ed. Daniel Schacter; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 365–76 (366); Richard Handler, and Jocelyn Linnekin, ‘Tradition, Genuine or Spurious’, JAmFolk 97 (1984), pp. 273–90 (288). 92. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, pp. 114–15, 123–4, 172–3, 188–9; Namer, Mémoire et société, pp. 41, 74–5; also Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 73; Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country, p. 362; Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 224. 93. Barry Schwartz, ‘Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II’, ASR 61 (1996), pp. 908–27 (909). 94. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 41–2. 95. Schwartz, ‘Social Context of Commemoration’, p. 390. 96. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 40, 88; Namer, Mémoire et société, 224.

24

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

the poorest class of society’, while Vichy France commemorated Joan’s resistance to the English.97 In John Thompson’s words, traditions can ‘become increasingly remote from their contexts of origin and increasingly interwoven with symbolic contexts derived from the new circumstances in which they are enacted’.98

Politics of Memory The malleability of memory requires us to be more specific about the nature of the powerful forces at work in the present to shape particular versions of the past. The past is appropriated to legitimize particular sociopolitical goals and to mobilize action in accord with goals. Yael Zerubavel puts the point bluntly: ‘The power of collective memory does not lie in its accurate, systematic, or sophisticated mapping of the past, but in establishing basic images that articulate and reinforce a particular ideological stance.’99 Hence, says Schwartz, ‘interpretations of the past … are, in important respects, political acts’.100 Zionist commemoration of ancient Jewish resistance movements such as the Zealots, for example, was aimed at legitimating the Zionist political programme as well as promoting activist countermodels for Jewish identity, while its breathtaking diminution of the exile to a point of virtually no magnitude signified its repudiation of the stereotypically passive, sighing Jew of the Galut. Zionist memory, in other words, was a matter of the ‘ideological classification of the past’.101 A number of theorists of the social-constructionist type go so far as to suggest that constructions of the past may in all important respects be understood as projections of the political struggles and ideological contests of the present. In this view, ‘public memory speaks primarily about the structure of power in society’.102 Memory is shaped – and contested – by moral entrepreneurs, identified with particular interests, focused in a programmatic fashion upon shaping values

97. Michael Winock, ‘Joan of Arc’, in Realms of Memory, vol. 3 (ed. Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Dritzman; trans. Arthur Goldhammer; New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–98), pp. 433–80. 98. John B. Thompson, ‘Tradition and Self in a Mediated World’, in De-traditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity in a Time of Uncertainty (ed. Paul Heelas et al.; Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 89–108 (103). 99. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, p. 8; also Connerton, How Societies Remember, p. 3; David Lowenthal, ‘Conclusion: Archaeologists and Others’, in The Politics of the Past (ed. Peter Gathercole and David Lowenthal; Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), pp. 302–14 (302); Bodnar, Remaking America, pp. 134–7. 100. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. 12. 101. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, pp. 32–3; also Ben Yehuda, Masada Myth, p. 139. 102. Bodnar, Remaking America, p. 15.

Social and Cultural Memory

25

and maintaining or achieving power.103 The task this kind of analysis sets itself is to deconstruct given versions of the past by exposing the ideological, hegemonic interests that inhere in them. The ideological appropriation of the past becomes visible in commemorative activities and artefacts. As a hermeneutical act commemoration attempts, in Burke’s words, ‘to impose interpretations of the past, to shape memory’,104 but from the perspective of the strong constructionist view, as articulated by Warner, ‘the facts of history become symbolic products of present meanings’.105 Halbwachs observed that monumental commemoration of constitutive Christian memories in the physical features of the Holy Land was always reflective of ‘the needs of the contemporary belief system’.106 The same forces are influential in a community’s creation of its master commemorative narrative – its ‘molding the past into certain types of symbolic texts’ – that selectively assigns importance to certain parts of the past, while leaving others ‘unmarked’.107 This brings in its wake a corresponding set of commemorative projects that give these memories substance and visibility. The converse effect of this movement, however, is to marginalize memories of groups allotted either no place or a negatively signed place in the master narrative.108

Limits of Constructionism Though ‘invention of tradition’ analysis and its close relative, the ‘radical social constructionist’109 view of social memory, are to be sure often helpful tools for assessing appeals to the past, it is doubtful that they can be generalized into paradigmatic models for tradition and memory. Handler and Linnekin, representatives of the radical constructionist view, indiscriminately use with respect to the past the terms ‘invention’, ‘reinvention’, ‘reinterpretation’, ‘interpretation’ and ‘reconstruction’ as though self-evidently conceptual equivalents, when in fact these terms pose a number of complex questions about

103. Joan Gero and Delores Root, ‘Public Presentations and Private Concerns: Archaeology in the Pages of National Geographic’, in Gathercole and Lowenthal, eds, Politics of the Past, pp. 19–37 (19). 104. Burke, ‘History as Social Memory’, p. 101. 105. Warner, Living and the Dead, p. 159. 106. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 234. 107. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, pp. 8, 216. 108. Savage, ‘Politics of Memory’, p. 43; Namer, Halbwachs, p. 156; Adrzej Mikolajczyk, ‘Didactic Presentations of the Past: Some Retrospective Considerations in Relation to the Archaeological and Ethnographical Museum, Lódz, Poland’, in Gathercole and Lowenthal, eds, Politics of the Past, pp. 247–56 (250); Joanna Michnic-Coren, ‘The Troubling Past: The Polish Collective Memory of the Holocaust’, EastEurJewAff 29 (1999), pp. 74–84 (75). 109. Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1992), pp. 54–5.

26

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

the relation of past to present. Their discounting the importance of tracing the trajectory of the Quebecois and Hawaiian traditions they analyse backward into the past, focusing instead on the transformation of these traditions for contemporary nationalistic purposes, and then concluding that tradition can be understood in all important respects as a symbolic creation of the present, is a textbook case of circular reasoning. It has been pointed out that the radical constructionist approach often is less argued for than it is taken as an axiomatic point of departure. What have the appearance of corroborating results are products of a theoretical perspective fixated on the synchronic factors of the present, and that a priori excludes reciprocal enquiry into the diachronic question, namely, how the depth of the past might inform, shape, support, not to say constrain, the dispositions, interests and actions of those situated in the present.110 This tendency to locate all decisive causal variables in social life in the present may owe something to a theoretical perspective in which ‘attitudes [are] seen as epiphenomenal, as merely expressions of (or at the very least, tools for) the more real – that is, objective – social structure’.111

Memory as a Social Frame Schwartz argues that with their exclusive focus on change, radical constructionist theorists have difficulties delivering a satisfactory account of how a society establishes the continuity indispensable to its cohesion and survival as it traverses time.112 Constructionists would argue that the sense of continuity with the past is itself fabricated by the ideological and hegemonic interests that produce the constructed past.113 But as Yael Zerubavel notes, ‘invented tradition can be successful only as long as it passes as tradition’.114 Hence constructionists must assume that most members of society, save the elites, are victims of a false consciousness manifest in naïve acceptance of a fabricated social memory, a view that if for no other reason founders on the fact that subordinated groups are demonstrably and robustly (if discreetly) capable of contesting elite constructions of the past and shaping alternatives.115

110. Schwartz, ‘Memory as a Cultural System’, p. 910; idem, Abraham Lincoln, p. ix. 111. Jeffrey K. Olick and Daniel Levy, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Constraint: Holocaust Myth and Rationality in German Politics’, ASR 62 (1997), pp. 921–36 (922). 112. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. 20; also Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 94; Coser, ‘Introduction’, pp. 25–8; Connerton, How Societies Remember, p. 103. 113. Handler and Linnekin, ‘Tradition, Genuine or Spurious’, pp. 286–7. 114. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, p. 232. 115. Barry Schwartz, ‘Frame Image: Towards a Semiotics of Collective Memory’, Semiotica 121 (1998), pp. 1–38 (23); idem, Abraham Lincoln, p. 204.

Social and Cultural Memory

27

Accordingly, we turn now to memory theories that – without falling back on the indefensible view that ‘the past’ refers to an objective something that exists apart from its perception and interpretation – take stock of the ‘present in the past’ in the midst of constructive, fluid, open-ended social milieux. Strong constructionists acknowledge that ideological interests work with debris from the past to fabricate their syntheses. So even in this modest respect the past supplies the materials and thus sets some limits and terms for its appropriation.116 But the past is not just ‘a limitless and plastic symbolic resource, infinitely susceptible to the whims of contemporary interests and the distortions of contemporary ideology’.117 The fact that ‘no strict correspondence exists between the conditions of any era and the objects of its memory’ shows that the past cannot be reduced to a mythical projection of the present.118 Moreover, ‘as the Holocaust makes evident’119  – a case that ‘levers us quickly back into a reality without quotation marks’120 – competing versions of the past are hardly to be placed on the same level, treated cynically as though each is indifferently nothing more than a successful or less successful strategy for political advantage. Hegemonic memory falsifies, fabricates a past, whereas anti-hegemonic memory exposes this mendacity, and it is antihegemonic precisely because it utters a true past. ‘Secret graves in Yugoslavia’, says Vera Schwarz, ‘could not be lit by private candles without dimming the bright light of socialist optimism’,121 and ‘spontaneously erected vernacular memorials labelling the Katyn massacre of Polish army officers in 1940 a Russian atrocity are regularly replaced by official plaques designating the Germans as villains, only to surface elsewhere’.122 Its fluidity and contingency notwithstanding, the present is always emerging from its own past. A number of memory theorists, therefore, reverse the variables and explore ways in which the past affects the present. It is true that present identity is the perspective from which individuals and groups view and shape the past. But present identity configurations are always emerging from the variegated experiences of ever-deepening pasts. Fentress and Wickham note that ‘if Welsh

116. Schudson, ‘Present in the Past’, pp. 107–108. 117. Arjun Appadurai, ‘The Past as a Scarce Resource’, Man n.s. (1981), pp. 201–19 (201). 118. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, pp. 6, 297; also Schudson, Watergate in American Memory, p. 218. 119. Zelizer, ‘Reading the Past against the Grain’, p. 224. 120. Robin Wagner-Pacifici, ‘Memories in the Making: The Shape of Things That Went’, QualSoc (1996), pp. 301–21 (302); also Malkki, Purity and Exile, pp. 239–40. 121. Vera Schwarz, Bridge across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 9; also Jing, Temple of Memories, pp. 73–4, 168–71. 122. Lowenthal, ‘Conclusion’, p. 307; also Robert M. Hayden, ‘Recounting the Dead: The Rediscovery and Redefinition of Wartime Massacres in Late- and Post-Communist Yugoslavia’, in Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism (ed. Rubie S. Watson; Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1994), pp. 167–84.

28

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

miners remember past struggle so clearly, it is because they define themselves through it’.123 It is this identity, understood as a diachronic process, that orients to the experiences of the present, and that encompasses the predispositions for the continual reassessment of its own past. Memory, in other words, is itself a social frame.124 We might express this state of affairs as follows: the past, itself constellated by the work of social memory, provides the framework for cognition, organization and interpretation of the experiences of the present. The salient past (the past as it has been marked by a community through commemoration), immanent in the narrative patterns in which it has become engrained in the social memory, provides the cognitive and linguistic habits by which a group perceives, orients itself and has its being in the world.125 Master commemorative narratives that have achieved secure status in the cultural memory are not inert, museum-piece representations of the past; rather, they vitally shape perception and organization of reality. They are cognitive schemata, ‘nuclear scripts’ for interpreting and processing streams of experience.126 It is precisely because of the orienting, stabilizing effect of memory that free, innovative action in the present becomes possible.127 But if the past is not inert, nor is it impermeable: present events and experiences have the capacity to affect decisively the configurations the salient past assumes in the cultural memory.128 ‘“Frame” … is a shorthand reference to the way invocations of the past confer meaning on present experience.’129 Social memory makes available the moral and symbolic resources for making sense of the present through ‘keying’ present experiences and predicaments to archetypal images and narrative representations of the commemorated past. These semiotic connections, Schwartz says, ‘define the meaning of present events by linking them to great and defining events of the past’.130 Further, ‘frame images are in this sense pictorial counterparts of

123. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 126; also Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, p. 66. 124. Schwartz, ‘Memory as a Cultural System’, p. 908; idem, ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Past’, QualSoc 18 (1995), pp. 263–70 (266). 125. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 51; Connerton, How Societies Remember, p. 2; Jan Hjärpe, ‘La commémoration religieuse comme légitimation politique dans le monde muselman contemporain’ in Gignoux, ed., La commémoration, pp. 333–41 (333–4); Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, pp. 225–30; Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, p. 229; Schudson, Watergate in American Memory, p. 2; idem, ‘Present in the Past’, p. 112; Casey, Remembering, pp. 284–5; Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, p. 68; Burke, ‘History as Social Memory’, p. 103. 126. George A. Bonanno, ‘Remembering and Psychotherapy’, Psychotherapy 27 (1990), pp. 175–86; also Prager, Presenting the Past, pp. 200–9; Malkki, Purity and Exile, pp. 53, 105. 127. Casey, Remembering, pp. 150–3. 128. Malkki, Purity and Exile, pp. 241–2; Prager, Presenting the Past, pp. 186–7. 129. Schwartz, ‘Frame Image’, p. 1; also Zonabend, The Enduring Memory, p. 2. 130. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. 232.

Social and Cultural Memory

29

“emplotment”, defining the meaning of problematic events by depicting them as episodes in a narrative that precedes and transcends them’.131 This means, in contrast to extreme constructionist position, that both present social realities and the salient past are potent variables in these semiotic configurations constantly occurring in social memory. A traumatic past in particular projects decisive influence into the present, acting as what Schudson calls a ‘pre-emptive metaphor’, that is, ‘a past, traumatic experience so compelling that it forces itself as the frame for understanding new experiences’.132 Olick and Levy draw attention to the effect of traumatic memory upon post-war Germany: ‘Powerful images of the Nazi past have shaped West Germany. Virtually every institutional arrangement and substantive policy is a response, in some sense, to German’s memory of those fateful years.’133 Medieval Jewish chronicles resorted to an archetypal cultural memory pattern – the binding of Isaac – to interpret the mass suicides in the eleventh-century Rhineland.134 In many cases the archetypal past so dominates perception of the present that social memory makes the latter virtually isomorphic with features of the former.135 Yerushalmi points out that ‘on the whole, medieval Jewish chronicles tend to assimilate events to old and established conceptual frameworks … there is a pronounced tendency to subsume even major new events to familiar archetypes, for even the most terrible events are somehow less terrifying when viewed within old patterns rather than in their bewildering specificity.’136 Fentress and Wickham cite the case of ‘the inhabitants of the coalfields of South Wales and Durham [who] have a very clear sense of the past as struggle. … The General Strike of 1926 is a common touchstone, and for many miners the strikes of 1972, 1974, and 1984–85 simply replayed the experiences of 1926, with the same dramatis personae in each: the community, and employers, and the police’.137 Events of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran were assimilated in a recapitulative manner to the archetypal Shiite narrative of the martyrdom of Husayn, Muhammad’s grandson, at Karbala in 680 ce, at the hand of Yazid, an evil Umayyad caliph.138 It is the reactualization of memory, of ‘master narratives’, in commemorative rituals and artefacts that cognitively engrains this salient past and gives it power to affect a community’s perceptions of its experiences.139

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139.

Schwartz, ‘Frame Image’, p. 8; also Malkki, Purity and Exile, pp. 107, 134–43. Schudson, Watergate in American Memory, p. 167. Olick and Levy, ‘Collective Memory’, p. 921. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, pp. 38–9. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 201. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, p. 36. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, pp. 115–16. Hjärpe, ‘La commémoration religieuse’, pp. 335–6. Ibid., p. 334; Yerushalmi, Zakhor, p. 49; Valensi, ‘Sacred History’, p. 298.

30

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

An important aspect of the past’s frameworking function is its capacity to mobilize action in the present.140 Through incorporative activities and artefacts of commemoration the salient past is existentially sedimentized into the identities of persons who are simultaneously actors in the present.141 Memorialization shapes dispositions and norms for action, in terms of both possibility and constraint.142 Schwartz observes that ‘collective memory … shapes reality by providing people with a program in terms of which their present lines of conduct can be formulated and enacted’.143 Constitutive events of origin, as well as memorialized landmark events in a group’s subsequent history, possess an exemplary, monitory character that enables them to exert this kind of influence.144 Assmann points to the ‘Mythomotorik’ effect of ‘founding narratives’, by which he means that constitutive memories are dynamos that drive a society’s social and cultural development.145 Commemorations of significant pasts are  able to generate political programmes and mobilize action accordingly.146 Subjugated groups cultivate memories of ideal pasts characterized by freedom, memories that have the potential to inspire resistance to oppressive conditions. Theissen designates these ‘kontrapräsentische’ uses of memory.147 Olick and Levy note that claim-making by actors in political contexts is conditioned by significant pasts as well as by meaningful presents; it is always path-dependent, though not necessarily in obvious ways. This point calls our attention to historical events of definitive importance to how broad parameters are fixed at particular moments, and to how those moments manifest themselves or are invoked differently in subsequent contexts.148

140. Schudson, ‘Present in the Past’, p. 111; idem, Watergate in American Memory, p. 3; Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 296; Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, p. 75. 141. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, p. 44. 142. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, pp. 51; Olick and Levy, ‘Collective Memory’, pp. 923–5. 143. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. 18; also Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 43. 144. Schudson, ‘Present in the Past’, p. 111; Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, p. 174; Shils, Tradition, 206. 145. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 168–9, 296. 146. Schudson, Watergate in American Memory, p. 217; Hjärpe, ‘La commémoration religeuse’, p. 334; Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, pp. 243–4. 147. Gerd Theissen, ‘Tradition und Entscheidung: Der Beitrag des biblischen Glaubens zum kulturellen Gedächtnis’, in Kultur und Gedächtnis (ed. Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), pp. 170–98 (174–5); also Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 72–80, 294–7; Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, pp. 108–109; Schwartz, ‘Memory as a Cultural System’, p. 924. 148. Olick and Levy, ‘Collective Memory’, p. 923.

Social and Cultural Memory

31

Normative Dimensions of Social Memory We have referred several times to the exemplary, normative force of a community’s salient past. Halbwachs called attention to the fact that the memory of foundational persons and events bears the ethos formative of the group’s identity: ‘But these memories … consist not only of a series of individual images of the past. They are the same time models, examples, and elements of teaching.’149 In short, the social memory has an indelible ethical colouration; its images of archetypal persons and events embody a community’s moral order.150 Master commemorative narratives recast the past in ‘fundamentally moral terms’; they are ‘moral and cosmological ordering stories’.151 The images that exist in the social memory are thus a mnemonic of the group-defining norms thereby embodied.152 It is by virtue of its normativity that the past makes programmatic, urgent moral claims upon a community.153 The salient past, with its corollary virtues, is a ‘model for society’, which is to say that it ‘shap[es] the moral character [of its members] and orient[s] the way they interpret and engage the world’.154 The normative critical mass of the past is central to the ‘mythomotorik’ effect of the cultural memory – energizing and driving a community’s continual articulation of itself along the lines of its constitutive ethos, in the midst of changing realities and in the face of merging crises.155 But this is hardly uni-directional. Present social realities drive the enterprise of seeking moral guidance and legitimacy from the salient past. Political and social movements must claim authorization from the past; they must find and, if necessary, conform the normative profile of past events to current ideological and identity-formation goals.156 Exploitation of the moral resources of the past is a project of moral entrepreneurship, though, as we have seen, hardly an unconstrained one.

149. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 59. 150. Barry Schwartz and Eugene Miller ‘The Icon and the Word: A Study of the Visual Depiction of Moral Character’, Semiotica 61 (1986), pp. 69–99 (96). 151. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 54. ‘The narratives of the camp [Hutu] refugees were centrally concerned with the ordering and reordering of sociopolitical and moral categories; with the construction of a collective self in opposition and enmity against an “other”; and ultimately, with good and evil. Thus, the mythico-historical narratives ingested events, processes, and relationships from the past and from the lived conditions of the present and transformed them within a fundamentally moral scheme of good and evil. These were moral ordering stories on a cosmological level. In the mythico-history, all protagonists are categorical, and they are attributed essential, constitutive characteristics, much as in other classifying schemes’ (p. 244). 152. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 59; Namer, Mémoire et société, p. 58; Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 16–17; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, pp. 127–8. 153. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 76–80. 154. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. xi. 155. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 79–80, 168–9. 156. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, p. 68; Ben Yehuda, Masada Myth, pp. 264–5.

32

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Halbwachs went so far as to suggest that the social memory ‘retains only those events that are of a pedagogic character’.157 It is through inculcation of its distinctive norms that a community incorporates its members and that it forms, or as the case may be, transforms their identities.158 The normative dimension of social memory is, accordingly, brought to bear in a community’s instructional Sitze im Leben, distilled into various commemorative artefacts – the paraenetic genres and media appropriate to the socialization goals of those settings.159 Hence a synergistic connection exists between commemorative and instructional ends. Ceremonial holidays frequently are instituted precisely for purposes of inculcating the ethic viewed as inhering in the heroic persons and events commemorated, and to mobilize people to act in accordance with those norms.160 Monuments may bear exhortative inscriptions making their moral lessons explicit, for example, ancient funerary epigrams calling attention to the virtues of the departed.161 Ritual enacts a close identification of the participants with the commemoranda. Participants absorb at the deepest existential level of identity the normative elements that are immanent in the commemoration. Deaths of significant persons call forth commemorative activities focused in a particularly intense way upon the virtues these individuals embodied in life and in their death. Halbwachs noted that society ‘pronounces judgment on people while they are alive and on the day of their death’.162 Martyrs, by definition heroic persons who have displayed steadfast commitment – to the death – to a set of emblematic virtues, attract intense cults of commemoration. The martyr’s death itself is instrumental in establishing the urgent normative claims of the virtues he or she embodied and died exemplifying, and in mobilizing a social movement cohering around those norms. A community’s ritualized activities commemorating martyrs, accordingly, become occasions not just for narrative recitations of the martyr’s life and death, but also for instructional activities aimed at inculcating and securing commitment to those emblematic norms.163 Narrative and instructional

157. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 223; also Gary Alan Fine, ‘Reputational Entrepreneurs and the Memory of Incompetence’, AJS 191 (1996), pp. 1169–93 (1176). 158. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 17; also Yael Zerubavel, ‘The Historic, the Legendary, and the Incredible: Invented Tradition and Collective Memory in Israel’, in Gillis, ed., Commemorations, pp. 105–23 (111); Ben Yehuda, Masada Myth, pp. 238–30. 159. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. 249; Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, pp. 138–42; Simondon, ‘Les modes du discours’, pp. 102–104; Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 141–2; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 127. 160. Bodnar, Remaking America, pp. 121, 153, 173; Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, p. 139; Hjärpe, ‘La commémoration religieuse’, p. 340. 161. Simondon, ‘Les modes du discours’, p. 100. 162. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 175; see also Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, pp. 147–8. 163. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, pp. 28–9, 41, 91, 108, 148; Connerton, How Societies Remember, p. 43; Warner, Living and the Dead, pp. 265–8.

Social and Cultural Memory

33

impulses that converge around cults of commemoration find expression in respectively differentiated genres. Assmann captures this phenomenon with his rubric Formative and Normative Texte. Formative texts refer to narrative genres of constitutive histories and myths, while Normative refer to instructional genres calibrated to inculcate the cognate ethos.164

Memory and Culture Commemorative activities are central to the formation of culture, the latter understood as ‘an organization of symbolic patterns on which people rely to make sense of their experience’.165 Social memory fashions a ‘Symbolsystem’, which is to say that in commemorated persons, commemorative narratives and related artefacts and practices, it objectifies a community’s archetypal, axiomatic meanings and ethos.166 Through commemorative transposition (we might say, apotheosis) social memory elevates to symbolic, culture-constitutive status marked elements of a community’s past. The ‘symbolische Figuren’ of culture are in effect ‘Erinnerungsfiguren’ (memory configurations).167 Lincoln and Washington, for example, ‘have become national symbols which embody the values, virtues, and ideals of American democracy’.168 What Zerubavel refers to as ‘master commemorative narrative’ is a case of the transfiguration of the past into ‘certain kinds of symbolic texts’.169 Rituals reenacting and recitations recounting these events, for example, the Passover Sedar, affect the entire stance of a culture.170 These symbolic patterns are connected meaningfully to the experiences of the present through the unceasing operations of ‘framing’ and ‘keying’ discussed above.171

164. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 141–2; idem, ‘Collective Memory’, p. 132; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, pp. 53, 127. 165. Schwartz, ‘Memory as a Cultural System’, pp. 908–909. 166. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 58–9, 139–40; Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, pp. 17–18, 252; Farmer, Martyred Village, pp. 78–83. 167. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 52, 168; also Assmann and Assmann, ‘Schrift und Gedächtnis’, pp. 266–7; Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, pp. x–xi; idem, ‘Frame Image’, pp. 25–6; Jeffrey Olick, ‘Genre Memories and Memory Genres: A Dialogical Analysis of May 8, 1945 Commemorations in the Federal Republic of Germany’, ASR 64 (1999), pp. 381–42 (400); Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 59; Warner, Living and the Dead, p. 4; Halb-wachs, On Collective Memory, pp. 188–9. 168. Warner, Living and the Dead, p. 268. 169. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, pp. 8–9, 216; also Connerton, How Societies Remember, p. 42; Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 52; Burke, ‘History as Social Memory’, pp. 103–104. 170. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, p. 44. 171. Schwartz, ‘Memory as a Cultural System’, pp. 910–11.

34

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

The semiotizing dynamic of memory is energized by the present realities and crises of the commemorating community. As deep reservoirs of meaning,172 commemorative symbols seem inexhaustibly responsive hermeneutically to complexity and change in a community’s social realities.173 The revisionist and socialist camps within early Zionism, for example, debated fiercely whether the martyrdom of the settler Trumpeldor authorized the sword or the plough, armed resistance or settlement and agriculture, as a programme for national revitalization. ‘It was not the historical event per se, but rather the encoding of its symbolic meaning, that provided fuel to this controversy.’174 It is this hermeneutical responsiveness of commemorative symbols that gives rise to the sentiment that salient pasts are little more than ideological projections of the present. Commemorative projects, however, are dependent upon the core realities they take up, though the nature of this dependence from case to case cannot be a priori prescribed. Robin Wagner-Pacifici points out that it is ‘ordering’ persons and events, ‘fraught with conflict and significance’ on the larger social scale, that is, crisis persons and events that have broken into ‘“normal time” by stopping the flow of the everyday’, that ignite memorializing activities.175 Persons and events of this kind form the ‘adamantine core’ of commemorative interpretation, generating and shaping the interpretations that can be produced upon them across time.176 As the history of the memory of Confucius shows, these salient persons and events are resistant to whimsical makeovers into the image of shifting ideological forces.177 Wagner-Pacifici argues that the operations of social memory may be understood as the interaction among three factors: ‘the social realities of empirical events, the cultural realities of modes of generic encodings, and the political and aesthetic realities of the work of translators’, the latter being those who effect the transformation of empirical realities into the various forms of cultural memory.178 Schwartz points out that ‘Lincoln was a credible model for the [Progressive] era because his life, as it was imagined, was rooted in his life as

172. Connerton, How Societies Remember, p. 56. 173. Barry Schwartz, ‘Rereading the Gettysburg Address: Social Change and Collective Memory’, QualSoc 19 (1996), pp. 395–422. 174. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, p. 1995. See also Yoram Peri, ‘The Media and Collective Memory of Yitzhak Rabin’s Remembrance’, JComm 49 (1999), pp. 106–24. 175. Wagner-Pacifici, ‘Memories in the Making’, pp. 301–309. 176. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. 309; idem, ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Past’, p. 270; idem, ‘The Reconstruction of Abraham Lincoln’, in Collective Remembering (ed. David Middleton and Derek Edwards; London: Sage, 1990), pp. 81–107 (103–104); idem, ‘Social Context of Commemoration’, p. 396; Casey, Remembering, p. 286; Peri, ‘Media and Collective Memory’, p. 113. 177. Tong Zhang and Barry Schwartz, ‘Confucius and the Cultural Revolution: A Study in Collective Memory’, IntJPolCulSoc 11 (1997), pp. 189–212. 178. Wagner-Pacifici, ‘Memories in the Making’, pp. 308–309.

Social and Cultural Memory

35

it was actually lived’.179 Furthermore, the complexity of the commemorandum is itself a factor in the emergence of multiple meanings in commemoration. ‘Lincoln himself was ambiguous, complex, and many-sided, and … different communities, according to their experiences and their interests, saw on side more clearly than others.’180 In short, ‘the real Lincoln could not determine, but did limit, the range and quality of his representations’.181 Social memory, therefore, to borrow Arjun Appadurai’s phrase, is the ‘symbolic negotiation between “ritual” pasts and the contingencies of the present’.182 Olick and Levy express this principle as follows: ‘Collective memory is this negotiation, rather than pure constraint by, or contemporary strategic manipulation of, the past. … The relationship between remembered pasts and constructed presents is one of perpetual but differentiated constraint and renegotiation over time, rather than pure strategic invention in the present or fidelity to (or inability to escape from) a monolithic legacy.’183 Schwartz uses the imagery of ‘mirror’ and ‘lamp’ to encompass the work of social memory: ‘As a model of society, collective memory reflects past events in terms of the needs, interests, fears, and aspirations of the present. As a model for society, collective memory … embodies a template that organizes and animates behavior and a frame within which people locate and find meaning for their present experience.’184 Moreover, the distinction between memory as a ‘model of ’ and ‘model for’ society is an analytic, not empirical distinction; both aspects of it are realized in every act of remembrance. Memories must express current problems before they can program ways to deal with them. We cannot be oriented by a past in which we fail to see ourselves. On the other hand, it is memory’s programmatic relevance that makes its expressive function significant: We have no reason to look for ourselves in a past that does not already orient our lives. Still, that analytic distinction is important because it underscores memory’s intrinsic dualism. In its reflective (model of) aspect, memory is an expressive symbol – a language, as it were, for articulating present predicaments; in its second (model for) aspect, memory is an orienting symbol – a map that gets us through these predicaments by relating where we are to where we have been.185

Jeffrey Olick points out that this interaction between the salient past and the present stands in vital, though not necessarily slavish, relation to the ever-lengthening

179. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, pp. 174, also p. 254. 180. Ibid., p. 223; also Connerton, How Societies Remember, pp. 55–7. 181. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. 187; also idem, ‘Memory as a Cultural System’, p. 922; idem, ‘Reconstruction of Abraham Lincoln’, p. 104; Ben Yehuda, Masada Myth, pp. 278–306. 182. Appadurai, ‘Past as a Scarce Resource’, p. 218; also Valensi, ‘Sacred History’, p. 291. 183. Olick and Levy, ‘Collective Memory’, p. 934; also Prager, Presenting the Past, pp. 186–7. 184. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. 218. 185. Schwartz, ‘Memory as a Cultural System’, p. 910.

36

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

tradition, we might say regress, of prior hermeneutical transactions of this nature under differing circumstances, that is, the community’s ‘history of representations over time. … Images of the past depend not only on the relationship between past and present but also on the accumulation of previous such relationships and their ongoing constitution and reconstitution.’186 Thus the past, both generating and absorbed into resilient commemorative images, narratives and texts, flows with its own energy into the ongoing, creative formation of the life of the community.

Conclusion Clearly, memory theory supplies multiple points of departure for fresh examination of a wide range of research problems in the field of New Testament studies and Christian origins. These points of departure constitute a research agenda for memory-oriented analysis of the beginnings of Christianity and its literature. Perhaps most importantly, they force a reassessment of the account of the Jesus tradition and its history inherited from the classical form critics and still influential in gospels research. By the same token, memory theory has important implications for the historiography of historical Jesus research. The chapters that follow in this book begin the process of applying this body of theory to these classic research problems.

186. Olick, ‘Genre Memories’, p. 382.

Chapter 3 MEMORY THEORY: CULTURAL AND COGNITIVE APPROACHES TO THE GOSPEL TRADITION*

In the past two decades analytical approaches drawing upon memory theory have made major inroads into the social sciences and the humanities. These approaches have been slow, however, to leave a mark upon New Testament scholarship. Their neglect is especially problematic when it comes to examining the origins and history of the gospel tradition, arguably the most basic issue in the study of early Christianity and its literature. In what follows we shall see that the emergence of the gospel tradition is closely bound up in the cognitive, social and cultural operations of memory. This cuts against the conventional wisdom. Scholarship on the gospels typically has regarded memory and tradition as incommensurable. This view derives from the form critics, who were active in the first half of the twentieth century. They understood memory narrowly as ‘reminiscence’, personal recollections like those of an eyewitness trying to recall details of events. Obviously the gospel tradition did not fit that profile at all, for it lacked the particularity of detail and idiosyncratic perspectives of the sort one finds in individual recollection. Instead, the gospel materials were formal and impersonal, they appeared in certain standardized forms, or genres, and they gave expression to general community concerns. Moreover, the different versions of a story or saying found in the tradition often diverged from one another, sometimes quite dramatically. All this seemed proof that memory (so understood) was a nugatory factor in the origins and history of the tradition, and, accordingly, that the tradition had developed independently of determinative connections to the past. Though ostensibly referring to Jesus and events of origin, in fact the tradition was largely the projection of the contemporary social realities and experiences of the early communities. Any so-called authentic memory traces were residual and inert, increasingly buried under multiple layers of tradition, the latter for its part mostly the product of the developing interests, doctrines and conflicts of the early churches. * Originally published in Understanding the Social World of the New Testament (ed. Dietmar Neufeld and Richard DeMaris; London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 157–67, used by permission.

38

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Memory theory raises significant challenges to this view. It does not authorize any sharp distinction between memory and tradition. Maurice Halbwachs, the pioneer of social memory studies, showed that memory is not at all the isolated, individual faculty of personal recollection it is often taken to be. On the contrary, it is a thoroughly social phenomenon: it is in the framework of the social realities and communicative interactions within groups (family, village, church, voluntary associations) that the memories of the individuals belonging to those groups receive substance, coherence and duration.1 Moreover, cognitive science is now showing that the neural processes in the human brain are highly ‘enculturated’, tightly networked, that is, into the external matrix of cultural tradition, the latter constituting ‘an external memory field’ indispensable for the brain’s formation of memory in its conceptual and symbolic fullness.2 This cognitive/cultural interface will direct our discussion.

The Nature of Human Memory Human memory is not so much a passive faculty of storage and recall as it is an actively constructive cognitive faculty that condenses and compounds elements from the flux of experience into economical memory artefacts, creating cognitive scripts that give individuals and the groups to which they belong dispositional orientation to the world.3 This is more than just a matter of efficiency – the shedding of the massive amounts of detail that otherwise would paralyse memory’s cognitive operations. Rather, from the raw material of experience, memory abstracts patterns and concepts, and out of similar events it compounds generic memories with representational, emblematic functions. Squire and Kandel write: We are best at generalizing, abstracting, and assembling general knowledge, not at retaining a literal record of particular events. We forget the particulars,

1. Maurice Halbwachs’s analyses of the social dimensions of memory can be found in On Collective Memory (trans. and ed. Lewis A. Coser; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 (Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire; Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1952)); idem, The Collective Memory (trans. Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter; New York: Harper & Row, 1980 (La mémoire collective ; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950)). 2. Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York and London: Norton, 2001), pp. 150, 311. 3. F. C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (London: Cambridge University Press, 1995 (reprint 1932)), pp. 126–7; George Bonanno, ‘Remembering and Psychotherapy’, Psychotherapy 27 (1990), pp. 175–86 (177); Jeffrey Prager, Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 207; David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-Out Rhymes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 7; Larry R. Squire and Eric R. Kandel, Memory: From Mind to Molecules (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999), p. 46.

Memory Theory: Cultural and Cognitive Approaches to the Gospel Tradition

39

and by our forgetfulness gain the possibility of abstracting and retaining the main points.  … We can forget the details, and we can therefore form concepts and gradually absorb knowledge by adding up the lessons from different kinds of experiences.4

The corollary cognitive operation, likewise an element of this large-scale reduction in complexity, is the conforming of memories to genre types and narrative patterns that have achieved conventional status within a culture. Besides bestowing durability and mnemonic efficiency, this encoding in conventional forms renders memories communicable, able to be externalized into the social world. Here we see with particular clarity the convergence of cognitive, social and cultural dimensions of memory. As Halbwachs showed, communicative interaction within groups is the medium through which persons form and absorb durable memories. It is to render memories communicable that memory work draws upon the cultural repertoire of communication genres and narrative schemata. This repertoire forms the bridge, accordingly, between the cognitive operations of memory and publicly shared tradition.5 This accounts for emblematic features of the gospel tradition, for instance, its existence in certain genres or forms, such as chreias and healing stories. While the emergence of a comprehensive, normative body of tradition (such as the gospel tradition) entails a number of special factors and circumstances, the operative memory dynamics are the same. An emergent community marks and commemorates certain elements of its past as being of constitutive significance to its existence and identity, typically events and persons foundational to its origins and embodying its constitutive values.6 It fashions and cultivates its foundational

4. Squire and Kandel, Memory, p. 206; also Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, p. 111; Edward Sapir, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir (ed. David G. Mandelbaum; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949), p. 14; Ian Tattersall, The Monkey in the Mirror: Essays on the Science of What Makes Us Human (New York: Harcourt, 2002), p. 153. 5. Jerome Brunner and Carol Fleisher Feldman, ‘Group Narrative as a Cultural Context of Autobiography’, in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (ed. David C. Rubin; New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 291–317 (293); also Bartlett, Remembering, pp. 53–4; James Fentress and Christopher Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 47–8, 72–4; Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 140; Gérard Namer, Mémoire et société (Paris: Méridiens Lincksieck, 187), pp. 140–57; Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 196; Robin Wagner-Pacifici, ‘Memories in the Making: The Shape of Things that Went’, QualSoc 19 (1996), pp. 301–21 (308). 6. Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘Collective Memory: The Two Cultures’, ST 17 (1999), pp. 333–48 (342–4); Barry Schwartz, ‘The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory’, SocForces 61 (1982), pp. 374–402 (377); Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective

40

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

memories collaboratively, in face-to-face communication, casting these in culturally shared narrative and instructional genres.7

Memory as Symbolic Representation The next step of our inquiry is to analyse memory as symbolic representation and to observe how this plays out in the formation and history of tradition. Memory’s condensing, compounding and encoding activity, we have seen, is geared towards distilling out the meaning, the significance of experienced events for the rememberers.8 Memory artefacts, therefore, fit the classic definition of cultural symbols: they are ‘condensations’ of meaning,9 or in Clifford Geertz’s fuller formulation, ‘vehicle[s] for a conception … abstractions from experience fixed in perceptible forms, concrete embodiments of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs’.10 The cognitive impulse of the human faculty of memory towards symbolic representation is far more than just a closed-circuit neurobiological activity of the brain. Rather, it occurs across the active interface of the neural processes of the mind with the ‘vast and diverse’ external field of the symbolic artefacts of culture (epic narratives, texts, law codes, material objects, rituals, images) that constitute the accumulated cultural memory of a society.11 A community’s traditions form along this continuum. The master narratives and moral codes that coalesce as a community’s deposit of tradition are distillations of essential meanings and norms perceived to be immanent in foundational events, with historical details receding to support the normative appropriation.12 As with any symbolic artefact (linguistic, ritual, or material), the forms of the tradition into which memory material is transmuted render the community’s norms ‘visible,

Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 4–7. 7. Mary Susan Weldon and Krystal D. Belliinger, ‘Collective Memory: Collaborative and Individual Processes in Remembering’, JExpPsych 23 (1997), pp. 1160–75 (1167–73); Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 106; also Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (Munich: Beck, 1992), pp. 141–2. 8. Bruner and Feldman, ‘Group Narrative’, pp. 291–3; Barry Schwartz, ‘Jesus in FirstCentury Memory: A Response’, in Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity (ed. Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher; Semeia Studies 52; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), pp. 249–61 (252); Squire and Kandel, Memory, p. 78. 9. Sapir, Selected Writings, 564. 10. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 91. 11. Donald, Mind So Rare, p. 150. 12. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 95; Sarah Bennett Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Ouradour sur Glane (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), p. 29; David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 204.

Memory Theory: Cultural and Cognitive Approaches to the Gospel Tradition

41

permanent, and transmittable’.13 As with the cognitive operations described above, this symbolic refinement of a community’s memory materials nourishes itself upon the resources of the established, more ancient cultural tradition. Among other things, this accounts for the pronounced moral complexion of the gospel tradition, visible especially in its density in dominical sayings and pronouncement stories, its Christological focus, and also for its framing and deep tincturing by older biblical traditions. Jesus’s own actions and words were, of course, ‘deeply symbolic’.14 Before considering specific examples, however, we must enquire into the functional autonomy of the tradition vis-à-vis the empirical realities of the past that it purports to describe, its taking on what seems an independent, self-organizing, constantly morphing life of its own. This is what induced the form critics to think that the tradition had more to do with present than past realities, but the real reasons for it should now be clear. Memory work, we have seen, is not concerned for exact redescription but for abstracting salient elements and patterns of meaning from the flux of raw experience and configuring these in symbolically concentrated tradition artefacts.15 The effect, as Terrence Deacon puts it, is an ‘increasingly indirect linkage between symbolic mental representation and its grounds of reference’.16 The autonomy of the tradition is due to the fact that, as with any symbolic entity, tradition stands in a representational relationship to the past that Casey describes as ‘intensified remembering’.17 So powerful are the representation effects of enacted tradition that it seems to participate in, even to mediate tangibility and reality to what it represents.18 It is by virtue of its autonomy, moreover, its loosening of ties to the specifics of the concrete events that are its ultimate grounds, that tradition is able to operate, much like language itself, as an internally ordered, ‘superordinate’ system of symbols, as a living cognitive system, the elements of which are capable of being brought into new combinations and new applications.19 This is what enables tradition to function as a memory system, as a dynamic, living basis for cultural identity. Though it seems paradoxical, it is the tradition’s autonomy, its coalescing in mnemonically efficient, durable linguistic forms

13. Jan Assmann, ‘Form as Mnemonic Device: Cultural Texts and Cultural Memory’, in Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark (ed. Richard A. Horsley et al.; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), pp. 67–82 (70); also Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 443–4. 14. Ben F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1979), p. 250. 15. See Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, p. 91. 16. Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York and London: Norton, 1997), p. 454. 17. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 280; also Tattersall, Monkey in the Mirror, p. 153; Judy S. DeLoache, ‘Becoming Symbol-Minded’, TrendsCogSci 8 (2004), pp. 66–70 (66). 18. Sapir, Selected Writings, pp. 10–11; Donald, Mind So Rare, pp. 153–6. 19. Deacon, Symbolic Species, pp. 87–99, 451; also Tattersall, Monkey in the Mirror, p. 154; Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 72.

42

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

loosened from originating historical contexts and from individual expressions of eyewitness memory, that makes it possible for the community to remember its normative past, to mobilize its tradition within ever-changing historical and social contexts. Tradition operates as a cultural symbol system, objectifying a community’s axiomatic meanings and norms, thereby giving moral intelligibility and dispositional orientation to the world.20 In the gospel tradition, the past is marked and represented in such a way as to enable it to exercise this sort of culture-symbolic power for the Jesus communities. Their rehearsal of the tradition constantly reconstitutes them in their identity as moral communities. The resolving of the salient past into the symbolically dense, autonomous forms of the tradition also renders it – and hence cultural identity – transmissible, and thus replicable from one historical or social context to another, indeed, from one generation to another. Just as with language (likewise an external symbol system that grounds a specific cultural identity), tradition also enables the inter-mnemonic appropriation and transmission of the salient past, which is to say that all members of the community carry about mental representations of the tradition.21

Preservation of Traditions and Memory We have seen that the gospel tradition, far from being a collection of museum pieces that statically preserves the past, in fact operates as an autonomous, and we can add, highly versatile system of symbols. This is what makes tradition so efficient in solving new problems of cultural identity that constantly arise out of the changes and crises in a community’s social and historical realities. Like language, and like the faculty of memory itself, tradition as an autonomous, configurable symbol system makes possible higher-order cognitive reflection on present predicaments.22 It makes available the conceptual and moral resources for comprehending and mastering present experiences. Tradition and its contemporary social frameworks of reception, it must be emphasized, affect each other reciprocally. ‘To remember’, says Barry Schwartz, ‘is to place a part of the past in the service of the needs and conceptions of the present.’23 Present realities constitute ‘the human context in which words about

20. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 95–7, 363–7. 21. Ward Parks, ‘The Textualization of Orality in Literary Criticism’, in Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages (ed. A. N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternak; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 46–61 (57); James R. Hurford, ‘Review of Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species’, Times Literary Supplement (October 23, 1998), p. 34; Donald, Mind So Rare, p. 150. 22. Bartlett, Remembering, pp. 225–7; Casey, Remembering, p. 286; Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 48; Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, p. 214. 23. Schwartz, ‘Social Context’, p. 374.

Memory Theory: Cultural and Cognitive Approaches to the Gospel Tradition

43

the past become meaningful’.24 Like memory, tradition is refracted through the contemporary social realities of the communities in which it is enacted, such that it comes in important respects to reflect, even to signify those realities. Tradition has the ‘intrinsic double aspect’ of a cultural symbol system: it naturalizes itself to its social contexts of enactment in the course of exerting its normative power in those contexts.25 On the one hand, tradition is ‘an expressive symbol – a language, as it were, for articulating present predicaments’, and, on the other, ‘an orienting symbol – a map that gets us through these predicaments by relating where we are to where we have been’.26 This interactive relationship between the salient past and the exigencies of the present accounts for the rich multiformity of the tradition, its transformations in different social contexts, a dynamic that allows the community to anchor itself to its core cultural and moral identity in ever-changing circumstances and in the face of contemporary crises. As with any cultural object, tradition leads a cultural life of its own as it constantly reacts with the historical contingencies of its tradent communities. Representations of the past unresponsive to contemporary realities fall into irrelevance, then into oblivion, and no living culture is formed and perpetuated. This is where the older but still influential conceptions of the gospel tradition went off the rails. Memory for many gospels scholars was a peripheral factor hardly worth mentioning, not the powerful cultural force that it truly is. Rightly observing the often close fit of the tradition with the social realities and preoccupations of the early churches, critics wrongly inferred that the tradition was mostly invention, the attempt by the early communities to legitimize their present practices and teachings by projecting them back into the sacred past. They erred in regarding culture as a ‘mere reflex’ of social structure.27 To the contrary, Geertz argues, cultural symbol systems and social structures are better understood as distinct, interdependent variables. More often than not, a certain level of tension exists between a society’s contemporary social realities and its formative cultural traditions.28

Gospels as Memory Sites An important memory site for the early Christians was the Eucharist, and in Paul’s discussion of it in 1 Corinthians 10 and 11 we see memory not just articulated in

24. Tom Thatcher, ‘Beyond Texts and Traditions: Werner Kelber’s Media History of Christian Origins’, in Jesus, The Voice and the Text: Beyond the Oral and the Written Gospel (ed. Tom Thatcher; Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008), pp. 1–28 (11). 25. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, p. 93; see John B. Thompson, ‘Tradition and Self in a Mediated World’, in De-traditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity in a Time of Uncertainty (ed. Paul Heelas et al.; Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 89–108 (103). 26. Barry Schwartz, ‘Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II’, ASR 61 (1996), pp. 908–27 (910). 27. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, p. 169. 28. Ibid., pp. 143–4.

44

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

gestural, linguistic, ritual and material media, but also ramifying into questions of ethics and community life. But for case studies we will turn to the gospels, where the tradition is concentrated and thus where the dynamics discussed above are most easily observed. Mt. 5.38-42/Lk. 6.27-30: The Cloak and the Shirt Mt. 5.38-42

Lk. 6.27-30

38

27 But I say unto you that listen. Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 29If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat (himation) do not withhold even your shirt (chiton). 30Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.

You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39But I say unto you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; 40and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat (chiton), give your cloak (himation) as well; 41and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. 42Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

This chain of admonitions illustrates the heavy investment of the gospel tradition in inculcating moral norms. Of the numerous differences between the two versions, the one we will focus on is the reversed order in which one’s garments are lost. Matthew describes first the confiscation of the inner garment (chiton), then the giving of the outer garment (himation). Luke describes first the loss of the outer garment (himation), then the inner garment (chiton). We can account for these transformations by approaching the gospel tradition as a highly versatile symbol system, the activation of which makes possible the reproduction and dissemination of cultural identity, grounded in the normative past, in quite different social and cultural environments. When in class students are asked to point out some of the differences between the two, they quickly figure out that Luke appears to have in view a more general situation of robbery or confiscation, whereas Matthew depicts quite specifically a court setting in which a poor man is being sued and forced to give up his chiton, probably for a bad debt. They also note that Luke’s order seems more intelligible than Matthew’s – when someone takes your outer garment, make him the gift of your inner garment as well (Luke). It seems curious that the inner garment would be taken first (Matthew). In fact Matthew’s version, and in particular the reverse order in which the items of clothing are stripped off, makes full sense only to an audience with knowledge of Jewish laws governing loans to the poor, spelled out in Exod. 22.25-27 and Deut. 24.10-13. These stipulate that the cloak of a poor man, taken in pledge for a loan, be returned to the poor man every night so that he can stay warm. Seen in this light, Matthew’s version emerges as a biting satire of the powerful, who conform to the letter of Torah by leaving the poor man with his cloak (himation), but use their control of the courts to confiscate, quite literally, the shirt (chiton) off the poor man’s back. Matthew’s Jesus, addressing the poor of Palestine suffering this and other degrading forms of exploitation, tells the poor man to cast off his

Memory Theory: Cultural and Cognitive Approaches to the Gospel Tradition

45

cloak in the court assembly, thereby provocatively exposing the hypocrisy of the powerful, their transgression of the Torah’s demand that the poor be treated with justice.29 These finer points would be lost on the inhabitants of Luke’s Greco-Roman, urban world. Luke transforms the tradition to render it more directly intelligible to the people in his immediate social and cultural environment. Under his hand the Torah-defined framework of this tradition becomes a general situation of robbery and confiscation. What might seem the illogical order in which the garments are taken away (inner-outer) is rectified (outer-inner). While not unintelligible, without these adaptations what is likely the more original Matthean tradition presents some difficulties for Luke’s audience. It loses something of its forcefulness, and a specifically Christian moral identity takes root with greater difficulty outside the narrowly confined cultural environment of Jewish Palestine. Conversely, Luke’s changes bring to light the rich symbolic potential of the tradition, its capacity to unfold its meaning in fresh ways in new situations, to spring to life in different cultural environments. It reenacts the memory of Jesus’s teaching such that it continues to shape the moral identity of this community in its distinct historical and cultural situation. Lk. 10.38-42: Mary and Martha The Cloak and the Shirt shows the symbolic range of a single unit of tradition invoked in different social and cultural contexts, and accordingly, how tradition functions as a ‘model for’ and a ‘model of ’ the community that treasures it. Mary and Martha illustrates how the gospel tradition, taken in aggregate, functions as a system of autonomous symbols, configurable in all sorts of arrangements and patterns to advance context-specific projects of moral and cultural formation. This accounts for the freedom the gospel writers exercised in arranging the materials at their disposal. The Mary-Martha episode (Lk. 10.38–42) is located near the beginning of Luke’s Journey Narrative. Luke gathers an enormous amount of Jesus’s teaching material into this long section of his gospel (9.51–19.44), punctuating it with occasional references to Jesus’s journeying ‘on the way’ from Galilee to Jerusalem for the Passover: Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was

29. Frederick Dale Bruner, Matthew: A Commentary, vol. 1, The Christbook: Matthew 1–12 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, rev. ed., 2004), p. 251; Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1–7: A Commentary (trans. James E. Crouch; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), p. 274; Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), pp. 177–9.

46

Memory and the Jesus Tradition distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’

Curiously, Luke assigns this episode a geographical and chronological location early in Jesus’s journey south from Galilee to Judea, identifying the village of Mary and Martha with studied vagueness as a ‘certain village’. But according to Jn 11.1-7, 18 and 12.3, Mary and Martha are from Bethany, in Judea, on the outskirts of Jerusalem. John identifies Mary as ‘the one who anointed Jesus’ (Jn 11.2), a detail that links Jn 11–12 to the Bethany of the Mk 14.3, where the incident of anointing occurs at the home of Simon the Leper. Bethany was the last station on the pilgrim road from Jericho to Jerusalem, and nine chapters later Luke correctly depicts Jesus reaching Bethany (19.29). What reason could Luke have had for substituting the vague ‘certain village’ for what was quite possibly, in an earlier form of the tradition, a reference to Bethany, and positioning the episode in the early stages of Jesus’s journey? To account for this, it is necessary to look at the arrangement of materials within which Luke places this episode. We observe the following three-unit sequence: 1. Lawyer’s Question and Answer (10.25-28) Love God Love Neighbor 2. Parable of the Good Samaritan (10.29-37) 3. Mary and Martha (10.38-42) In the first unit a lawyer asks Jesus, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Responding to Jesus’s counter-question about what the Law says, the lawyer cites what are known as the two great commandments of the Torah: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart … and your neighbor as yourself.’ He then asks Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’ In response to the lawyer’s question, Jesus tells the Parable of the Good Samaritan (second unit), and in so doing he explains how a person fulfils the second of the two greatest commandments. But the Parable does not address how a person fulfils the first of the two greatest commandments. Luke then has the Mary-Martha episode immediately follow the Parable of the Good Samaritan. In this position, it interprets the first of the two greatest commandments: Mary’s devotion to Jesus and to Jesus’s word is exemplary of how one fulfils the commandment to love God with all one’s heart.30 In both cases, moreover, Luke selects persons of lower status – a despised Samaritan, and

30. I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978), p. 450.

Memory Theory: Cultural and Cognitive Approaches to the Gospel Tradition

47

a woman – to model fulfilment of the two greatest Torah commandments. In putting this sequence together, Luke takes up the two greatest commandments in reverse order. We can plot the symbolic relationships that Luke configures among the units of tradition as follows: A1 Love God with all your heart B1 Love your neighbor B2 Parable of Good Samaritan A2 Mary sits at Jesus’s feet listening to his word Luke’s overriding concern, therefore, is for the moral formation of the community. To this end he moves this unit of tradition to this location in sequence following the Lawyer’s Question and the Parable of the Good Samaritan. He depicts it as occurring long before Jesus reaches Judea (and Bethany), and to make the fit as smooth as possible, he gives it his vague geographical location: ‘a certain village’. Luke has another reason for his placement of this episode. For Luke the Journey Narrative is a metaphor for following Jesus in the way of discipleship, and he signals this by placing three discipleship ‘call-stories’ right at its beginning (9.57-62). Within this framework, the Good Samaritan and Mary provide vivid examples of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. Mary’s position ‘at the Lord’s feet’ is in fact the conventional posture of the disciple, sitting at the feet of the rabbi. Consistently with his symbolic usage of the journey motif, therefore, Luke places materials exemplifying discipleship, including the Mary-Martha episode, along the journey route.

Conclusion In this and in the first case study we observe the freedom in arrangement and development of traditional materials evident in the gospels that expresses the tradition’s autonomy, its existence as a superordinate system of normative symbolic units capable of being brought into fresh combinations with one another in the furtherance of some project of moral formation and cultural identity. Yet it cannot be overstated that the tradition’s autonomy is not an autonomy from memory (as the form critics thought) but the very expression of its function as cultural memory: the tradition is the artefact of memory, existing at the intersection of the cognitive and cultural operations of memory and retaining – in the gospels at any rate – a historical and geographical frame of reference. This is the case even for the Gospel of John, with its bold exploration of the symbolic potential of the tradition. Itself the product of these memory forces, the tradition becomes in its turn the most important cultural memory resource for early Christianity and its literature.

Chapter 4 THE MEMORY–TRADITION NEXUS IN THE SYNOPTIC TRADITION: MEMORY, MEDIA AND SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION*

Tradition and memory are distinct yet somehow cognate phenomena, and Synoptic scholarship going back to the form critics has struggled with how properly to construe their relationship. The work of Barry Schwartz and Jan Assmann on social and cultural aspects of memory and the work of experimental psychologists on its cognitive aspects provide a framework for resolving the vexed problem of the memory–tradition nexus. The exploitation of memory research in gospels scholarship, however, has been scattershot and fragmentary, often ill-informed or a matter of selective employment. In English-language scholarship the discussion seems to have settled out into stagnating and in fact irrelevant disputes over the reliability of eye-witness recollection. Reading through current research on the topic, one usually finds only perfunctory attention given to the basic problem of where and how memory and tradition intersect. To a significant extent this is because certain assumptions the form critics made about the tradition–memory nexus are still taken for granted. After clarifying the older form-critical view, we will review new contributions to the discussion of this problem from Bauckham, McIver, Wedderburn, Allison, Byrskog, Dunn and Bockmuehl. We will argue that the conceptual models advanced in these newer studies still do not deal satisfactorily, or in some cases fully, with the dual problem of the nexus and the tension between memory and tradition. We will then consider how the memory–tradition relationship might be conceived with greater precision. Drawing upon a number of authorities in the field of memory studies, and with particular reference to Barry Schwartz’s essay ‘Collective Forgetting and the Symbolic Power of Oneness: the Strange Apotheosis of Rosa Parks’,1 we will

* Originally published in Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity: A Conversation with Barry Schwartz (ed. Tom Thatcher; Semeia Studies 78; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014), pp. 129–57, used by permission. 1. Schwartz, ‘Collective Forgetting and the Symbolic Power of Oneness: The Strange Apotheosis of Rosa Parks’, SocPsychQ 72 (2009), pp. 123–42.

The Memory–Tradition Nexus in the Synoptic Tradition

49

argue that tradition is a product of cultural practices of commemoration; more precisely, that it is a media-based artefact that emerges and is transmitted at the interface of the cognitive, social and cultural operations of memory. While our discussion will move mostly at the theoretical level, we will conclude by indicating some lines of application to the Synoptic tradition.

Tradition and Memory in Form Criticism The widespread (if not uncontested) institutional confidence the classical formcritical account of the Synoptic tradition enjoyed in the middle decades of the twentieth century eventually broke down and gave way to uncertainty. Nevertheless, with no consensus forming around any alternative approach, important aspects of the form-critical account have continued to operate as default premises for the analytical enterprises for which a working model for the origins and history of the tradition is indispensable: historical Jesus research, source and redaction criticism, tradition histories, and the like. The form-critical model was predicated on a strong distinction between memory and tradition. For all practical purposes the form critics and their followers eliminated memory as a factor in the history of the tradition. By ‘memory’ they understood the individual faculty of personal recollection, or ‘reminiscence’. While memory traces of this sort lay at the origins of the tradition, they were a residuum, mostly inert with respect to developments in the tradition itself. Though far from denying continuity between historical realities and developments in the tradition (in fact, affirming it),2 Bultmann located the springs of the tradition in recurrent settings in the life of the early communities. Correlating form to social function, and holding that the eschatological communities lacked a constitutive orientation to the past, he inferred that contemporary social and theological interests were the leading factors generating the tradition, the expansion of which was also driven by innate laws of development and religionsgeschichtliche forces.3 The gospel tradition was a bifurcated entity: a growing mass of tradition coming to overlay diminishing residues of memory. Dennis Nineham articulated this with particular clarity in a

2. ‘For stories to be told of him as a rabbi, the picture of his actual work as a teacher of the Law must have been firmly impressed upon their memory’ (Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and The Word (trans. Louise Pettibone Smith and Ermine Huntress Lantero; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), p. 126). 3. Rudolf Bultmann, The Presence of Eternity: History and Eschatology (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1975), pp. 37–9. According to Amos Wilder, the ‘naïve eschatological immediacy’ of primitive Christianity ‘exclude[d] conscious concern with mnemonics, catechetical purpose or halakic procedure’ and entailed ‘radical disallowance of existing culture and its forms’ (‘Form History and the Oldest Tradition’, in Neotestamentica et Patristica: Eine Freundesgabe Herrn Professor Dr. Oscar Cullmann zu seinem 60. Geburtstag überreicht (ed. W. C. van Unnik; NovTSup, 6; Leiden: Brill, 1962), pp. 3–13 (13)).

50

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

two-part essay published in 1958 and 1960. For Nineham, memory and tradition are distinct, even incommensurable entities. He associates memory with individual eyewitness testimony such as might be given in court and thus characterizes it as ‘knowledge of the particular, inclusion of the merely memorable, as opposed to the edifying’, as displaying ‘exact biographical and topographical precision and the like’.4 These traits are conspicuous by their absence from the Synoptic tradition, which is formal, stereotyped, restrained in descriptive detail, edifying, and thus, Nineham concludes, the product not of memory but ‘the impersonal needs and forces of the community’.5 Nineham acknowledges that some early interface between memory and the nascent tradition was likely; this would account for traces of authentic recollections of Jesus in the tradition. But since this ‘initial stage’ the tradition has followed an autonomous course of development, for otherwise individual eyewitness testimony, with its distinguishing properties, should be visible within it as foreign matter. Indeed, ‘if the Gospel material derives from two very different types of source we should expect it to show signs of its double origin’.6 As Nineham’s comments illustrate, form-critical analysis disconnected memory from the developing tradition. Compensating for the weak agency accorded to memory – its inert, trace-like existence and marginalization vis-à-vis other forces acting upon the tradition – were the generative forces of the Sitze im Leben and the creative impulses of the primitive communities, the outcome being the large-scale production of inauthentic materials within the tradition. The categories ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ are therefore entailed by the formcritical model, according to which the tradition is an admixture of mutually alien elements. This dualism is expressed with particular sharpness in Funk and Hoover’s Manichaean characterization of ‘the authentic words of Jesus’ as ‘“traces that cry out for recognition and liberation from the firm grip of those whose faith overpowered their memories”’.7 Funk and Hoover conceive memory as individual eyewitness recollection such as might be given in court or passed along chains of individuals in the form of ‘hearsay evidence’. Since the forensic standard against which eyewitness testimony is measured is exactness of correspondence to original occurrences, and since eyewitness testimony is demonstrably inefficient in this regard (in this case exacerbated by its second-hand transmission), Funk and Hoover rate the quality of the memory element in the tradition quite low. The tradition must therefore be filtered through forensic ‘rules of evidence’, as one would in a court, to identify materials useful for historical reconstruction.8

4. D. E. Nineham, ‘Eyewitness Testimony and the Gospel Tradition’, Part 1, JTS NS 9 (1958), pp. 13–25, 243–52 (13). 5. Nineham, ‘Eyewitness Testimony’, p. 13. 6. Ibid., p. 17; emphasis added. 7. Robert W. Funk and Roy W. Hoover, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993), p. 4. 8. Funk and Hoover, Five Gospels, p. 16. Bart Ehrman similarly construes memory, in its relation to the tradition, on the model of individual recollection that becomes increasingly

The Memory–Tradition Nexus in the Synoptic Tradition

51

Funk and Hoover’s understanding of memory as a faculty of rather weak retentive capacities is also evident in their assigning a higher probability of authenticity to short sayings and stories.9 In reflecting upon Nineham and Funk/Hoover (and others similarly influenced by the form-critical model), it is noteworthy that while memory is associated with a residual, so-called authentic element in the tradition, when it comes to analysis this element is not treated as ontologically different from the tradition. Rather, what is ‘memory’ in the tradition is identified over against fabricated tradition through application of authenticity criteria. This indicates that the form-critical model does not deliver a viable account of the memory–tradition nexus and of how memory is mediated in the tradition. It is important to emphasize that certain features of form criticism are of enduring value. The form critics – Bultmann in particular – recognized that the history of the tradition is inseparable from the historical situatedness of its tradent communities. They recognized, in other words, that present frameworks affect appropriations of the past; thereby they anticipated key aspects of social and cultural memory theory. In giving attention to recurring genres, they recognized that the tradition is a media-based entity.10 But the form critics did not have an adequate working conception of memory. Consequently they looked elsewhere for the forces driving the tradition’s formation and development.

The Memory-Tradition Nexus in Recent Scholarship The problem of memory and the Synoptic tradition has received renewed attention in scholarship. We will review some important recent contributions to

corrupt as the multiple links in its second-hand transmission down serial chains of individuals increase in distance from the original eyewitness versions of stories; he likens the transmission of the tradition to the children’s game ‘telephone’ (Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 51–2; idem, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edn, 2004), pp. 48–53). 9. Funk and Hoover, Five Gospels, p. 289. 10. On this point, see Ruben Zimmermann: ‘The act of remembering is always mediated, not only by language but also by form – something that classical form-criticism correctly recognized, its erroneous inferences notwithstanding’ (‘Formen und Gattungen als Medien der Jesus-Erinnerung: Zur Rückgewinnung der Diachronie in der Formgeschichte des Neuen Testament’, in Die Macht der Erinnerung (ed. Ottmar Fuchs and Bernd Janowski; JFBT, 22; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2008), p. 104; also idem, ‘Memory and Form Criticism: The Typicality of Memory as a Bridge between Orality and Literality in the Early Christian Remembering Process’, in The Interface of Orality and Writing: Speaking, Seeing, Writing in the Shaping of New Genres (ed. Annette Weissenrieder and Robert B. Coote; WUNT, 260; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2010), pp. 137–43).

52

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

the discussion, focusing upon how the tradition/memory nexus is conceived in each case. Richard Bauckham Bauckham completely inverts the form-critical model for the relationship of memory to the tradition, assigning the dominant role to eyewitness memory: the chief agents in the formation and transmission of the Synoptic tradition were the eyewitnesses. Moreover, the genres of tradition are direct products of eyewitness memory, for research shows that memories form through cognitive processes of selection, condensation, narrative scripting and schematic representation in cultural genres.11 To get around the difficulty that the distinguishing marks of eyewitness recollection correspond poorly to the profile of the tradition, Bauckham proposes that the eyewitnesses refined their memory artefacts into ‘manageable units of tradition that could be passed on to others’; the eyewitnesses, in other words, were also those who shaped the tradition.12 Its subsequent transmission also occurred under their formal control.13 Bauckham resists, as an unnecessary concession to form criticism, giving anonymous communities much of a role in the formation of the tradition beyond receiving it from the eyewitnesses. But his attempt to contain the tradition within these eyewitness boundaries comes under impossible strain. This is because the schemata and narrative scripts activated in the cognitive formation of memory are widely available cultural genres; moreover, the subsuming of shared memory in these forms occurs in social rehearsal. Though Bauckham argues that these factors are only ‘the necessarily social context of an individual’s remembering’,14 their effect is the formation of a body of publicly available tradition capable of circulating free of the individual memory of any eyewitness. The effect is also to bring the tradition into the ambit of social and cultural memory forces. To escape this predicament, Bauckham asserts the autonomy of individual ‘recollective’ memory over against ‘collective’ memory. Then, in what seems a question-begging manoeuvre, he contends that the formal role accorded the eyewitnesses in primitive Christianity ensured the privileging of individual eyewitness memory in the

11. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), pp. 331–55. Bauckham justly complains that the critical response to his book overlooked this element of his argument; see ‘In Response to My Respondents: Jesus and the Eyewitnesses in Review’, JSHJ 6 (2008), pp. 225–53 (252). (For analysis of the second edition of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2017, see Alan Kirk, ‘Ehrman, Bauckham, and Bird on Memory and the Jesus Tradition’, JSHJ 15 (2017), pp. 88–114.) 12. Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, p. 343. 13. Ibid., pp. 228–9, 249. 14. Ibid., p. 337. His claim is belied by his having to posit an institutionalized role for the Twelve in the formation and transmission of the tradition.

The Memory–Tradition Nexus in the Synoptic Tradition

53

tradition and therefore the tradition’s isolation from social memory forces.15 This serves to buffer the tradition from external forces in the crucial first phase of its formulation and transmission. But having reduced the tradition so completely to the eyewitness testimony of a limited circle of individuals, Bauckham has difficulty giving a satisfactory explanation of its patterns of variation and agreement. The eyewitness testimony paradigm is a model of static memory transmission that puts a premium on exactness of correspondence with witnessed events. This is difficult to square with the evident dynamism of the tradition. The factors causing variation that Bauckham proposes accord with his individualistic, stasis model for the tradition: translation variants; different original versions of sayings; formulations by different eyewitnesses; interpretative interventions by eyewitnesses; literary modifications by the Evangelists.16 The difficulties for this account continue to mount. In Bauckham’s scenario the tradition is directly formulated by eyewitnesses, indeed, precipitated virtually right out of eyewitness memory, but as a thereby externalized artefact it has an existence separate from eyewitness memory, and as such it is susceptible of autonomous development. Accordingly, he must bring the tradition’s transmission under the institutionalized control of the eyewitnesses until it makes its way into the written gospels. The tradition is transmitted ‘as the eyewitnesses’ testimony’,17 reaching the Evangelists, therefore, ‘not [as] oral tradition but eyewitness testimony’.18 But then on the other hand, under the influence of the Papias fragment, Bauckham depicts the Evangelists treating their materials as ‘tradition’, construed as an entity distinct from, and inferior to, personal eyewitness memory, for like Papias they seek out direct eyewitness verification of their received traditions.19 This incoherence in Bauckham’s account of the tradition is mirrored in his attribution of conflicting procedures to the Evangelists. On the one hand the Evangelists are tradents who consolidate a tradition formed and transmitted by eyewitnesses, adjusting it skilfully to narrative contexts. On the other hand they are oral historians who prefer the living voice of eyewitness memory over mere tradition, who seek out ‘named informants’, going ‘either to eyewitnesses or to the most reliable sources that had direct personal links with the eyewitnesses’, and for whom ‘collective tradition as such would not have been their preferred source’.20 To  resolve this conflict, Bauckham hypothesizes that in the named individuals in the tradition, the Evangelists obliquely identify their eyewitness sources.

15. Ibid., pp. 33–4, 315–18. 16. Ibid., pp. 285–7; idem, ‘Response to My Respondents’, pp. 229–40. Bauckham appeals in addition to the Greek historians’ practice of varying the wording of their sources (Eyewitnesses, p. 237), but the historians strove for homogeneous stylistic variation quite unlike the heterogeneous Synoptic patterns. 17. Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, p. 293; emphasis original. 18. Ibid., p. 8. 19. Ibid., pp. 19–34, 292. 20. Ibid., p. 34, also p. 479.

54

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Ironically, he ends up in the company of Funk and Hoover, depreciating a tradition transmitted through a ‘chain of informants’ and depicting the Evangelists as Jesusquesters in the Funk and Hoover mould, ‘cross-examin[ing] their witnesses in a way somewhat similar to legal practice in a court’.21 Robert McIver Drawing upon numerous studies in experimental psychology, McIver mounts a robust defence of the general reliability of eyewitness testimony. But to an even greater extent than Bauckham he attempts to associate characteristic features of the Synoptic tradition directly with the profile of individual memory, as the latter is described in the experimental studies. This leads him, like Nineham, to search through the tradition for survivals and outcroppings of personal episodic memory.22 The results are meagre, and McIver ends up making the more modest claim that the Synoptic materials are ‘consistent with eyewitness accounts’, though they ‘are not presently formulated as direct eyewitness reports’.23 He therefore locates the contribution of eyewitness memory at the initial formation of the tradition and falls back, like Bauckham, on the expedient that eyewitness memory, institutionalized in the Twelve, acted as an external control on the formation and transmission of the tradition. Nevertheless he continues to experiment with superimposing the functional profile of individual recollection directly upon the Synoptic tradition. He weighs the effects, on the transmission of the tradition, of the ‘forgetting curve’ for earlieracquired but seldom-rehearsed knowledge (e.g. of a foreign language studied in high school), and he argues that much Synoptic variation arises from memory’s experimentally verified inefficiency in the recollection of details. Inconsistencies such as whether there were one or two Gerasene demoniacs or one or two blind men outside Jericho ‘are precisely the type of variations one might expect of various eyewitness reports of the same event’.24 As noted, McIver acknowledges that the respective profiles of eyewitness recollection and the Synoptic tradition actually do not match up very well, but further questions may be raised about the relevance of the experimental research on individual recollection he adduces. Most of these studies feature randomly selected, isolated subjects recollecting unrehearsed

21. Ibid., 479. 22. Robert K. McIver, Memory, Jesus, and the Synoptic Gospels (SBLRBS, 59; Atlanta: SBL, 2011), p. 123. 23. Ibid., pp. 130, 147. 24. Ibid., p. 156. Armin D. Baum also proposes that the experimentally verified error range in reproduction of information in individual recollection helps explain Synoptic patterns of variation (Der mündliche Faktor und seine Bedeutung für die synoptische Frage (Tübingen: Franke, 2008), pp. 268–9). Baum’s interest, however, is not the eyewitness/tradition problematic but in memory as the transmission and enactment medium for oral tradition, and how this might contribute to a solution to the Synoptic Problem.

The Memory–Tradition Nexus in the Synoptic Tradition

55

information of no significance or, at best, transitory significance to their lives. This is hardly analogous to commemorative practices in a community. Research on the cognitive operations of memory has much to contribute to our understanding of the formation of the tradition, but the complex media profile and cultural history of tradition cannot be transposed onto graphs of individual memory functionality. This cuts both ways, of course. It is not uncommon for detractors of the historical reliability of the tradition also to make simple correlations between eyewitness testimony (emphasizing its limitations) and the tradition.25 Andrew Wedderburn and Dale Allison Wedderburn and Allison’s primary interest is in assessing the significance of memory research for work on the historical Jesus. Both understand their task, as critical historians, as being to distinguish, in the tradition, a body of secure historical facts about Jesus. They come at the memory–tradition problematic from that angle. For Wedderburn, it is a matter of sound historical method that the materials most useful for historical reconstruction are the recollections of eyewitnesses. Eyewitness memories of Jesus, however, were distorted, owing to the inefficiency and situational contingency of individual recollection.26 Memory, insofar as it is of use for historical reconstruction, equates to this personal episodic memory, and it is therefore something attributable uniquely to the individual eyewitnesses. The wider circles of believers to whom they recounted their memories, accordingly, are not truly ‘remembering’ the events of Jesus’s life.27 ‘What they remember’, Wedderburn says, ‘are no longer the events of Jesus’ life but the recitation of traditions about them.’28 As for the form critics so also for Wedderburn: memory

25. Judith Redman, for example, in her critique of Bauckham associates the variation profile of the Synoptic tradition directly with ‘the eyewitness effect’, that is, with experimentally documented inefficiencies of eyewitness recollection (‘How Accurate Are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research’, JBL 129 (2010), pp. 177–97). 26. Alexander J. M. Wedderburn, Jesus and the Historians (WUNT, 269; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2010), p. 217. 27. Ibid., pp. 200–4. The ironic quotation marks around ‘remembering’ are Wedderburn’s. 28. Ibid., p. 201. This corresponds to the distinction cognitive psychologists make between personal episodic memory (personally experienced) and semantic memory (acquired). Wedderburn, however, overdraws the distinction. Gerald Echterhoff notes that ‘semantic and episodic memory, far from functioning independently of each other, actually interact with one another in many ways’ (‘Das Außen des Erinnerns: Was vermittelt individuelles und kollektives Gedächtnis?’ in Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses: Konstruktivität – Historizität – Kulturspezifität (ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning; Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2004), pp. 61–82 (72)). Similarly, David Manier and William Hirst: ‘Many

56

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

and tradition are distinct from each other in kind and sequence. The existence of the tradition depends upon memory, but as a sort of secondary effect. Tradition is successor to memory; it appears when living memory is not extant owing to the absence or death of eyewitnesses.29 Tradition roughly corresponds to the derivative memories of the wider circles of believers, those who received their accounts at second hand from the eyewitnesses.30 Though it retains an imprint left by the eyewitnesses’ memories, it is now susceptible to all the formative, postEaster interests at work in the communities. Wedderburn does not explain how the tangible media forms of the tradition emerge from these derivative memories – likely because, in his view, what is relevant for critical historical Jesus work is the testimony of eyewitness informants, traces of which he thinks can be recovered by applying criteria of historical criticism to the tradition. This analytical gap, however, appears in the first part of his account as well: he does not consider the question of how the personal memories of eyewitnesses were mediated. Allison’s concern, as a Jesus historian, is the precision with which early Christian memories correspond to the original occurrences. He seeks the answer in the scientific research on memory but, like McIver, predominantly in the experimental studies on individual recollection, paired with no critical reflection, moreover, on the question of the nexus between memory and the tradition. This leads him, again like McIver, simply to impute the properties of individual memory to the tradition. Accordingly, given that experimental studies show that individual memory when it comes to exactness of recall over intervals is quite inefficient, Allison’s characterization of memory in the Synoptic tradition has a strikingly gloomy tone, featuring frequent references to ‘the sins of memory’, ‘the sins of ecclesiastical recall’, and the like.31 Similarly, he correlates variation in the Synoptic tradition to inefficiencies in individual recollection: discrepancies in the parallel equipment instructions, for example, are of the sort that occur in different eyewitness reports of an event.32 In his view, the tradition likely had its beginnings in eyewitnesses recalling their memories, but ‘those memories must have been subject to all the failures and biases that modern science has so helpfully if disturbingly exposed’.33 Yet Allison offers no account of how the forms of the

semantic memories begin as episodic memories. But the episodic memory often fades, leaving behind only the semantic memory of what was learned’ (‘A Cognitive Taxonomy of Collective Memories’, in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning; Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 253–61 (254)). 29. Wedderburn, Jesus and the Historians, p. 223. 30. ‘A later generation or a wider circle might have no personal memories of Jesus themselves and be wholly dependent on what others had imparted to them; here to speak of “Jesus traditions” may be more fitting’ (ibid., p. 200). 31. Dale C. Allison Jr., Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2010), pp. 23, 27, 164, and elsewhere. 32. Allison Jr., Constructing Jesus, pp. 12–13. 33. Ibid., p. 30.

The Memory–Tradition Nexus in the Synoptic Tradition

57

tradition emerged from these activities of recollection; he simply takes over the form-critical model for memory and tradition, according to which reminiscences are present in the tradition like traces of an alien substance.34 The historiography of Jesus research, grounded in form-critical assumptions, classifies these traces as the ‘authentic’ elements of the tradition. Allison’s scientifically informed insight into the inefficiencies of individual recollection has affected his opinion of even these materials: ‘Even where the Gospels preserve memories, those memories cannot be miraculously pristine; rather, they must often be dim or muddled or just plain wrong.’35 This accounts for the tone of disenchantment in his book (Allison is a veteran and distinguished Jesus scholar), but his reasoning is based on certain unexamined, problematic assumptions about memory, tradition and their relationship. Samuel Byrskog Samuel Byrskog seeks to correct form criticism’s one-sidedly homeostatic,36 collectivist conception of the tradition with an account that is grounded in verifiable mnemonic practices of the ancient world and that, correspondingly, restores individual remembering to its rightful place within social processes of memory. To this end he analyses gospel origins in the light of ancient oral history practices, taking cues from Paul Thompson’s theoretical work on oral history.37 Oral history as practised by ancient historians combined history (investigation) and narrative (interpretation). This gives Byrskog leverage on the analogous problem of the interaction of past with present, of history with story, in the Synoptic tradition.38 Ancient historians valued eyewitness informants; accordingly, Byrskog argues that the testimony of eyewitness informants is a memory practice pertinent to the Synoptic tradition and the work of the Evangelists.39 Circles of Jesus’s followers likely would have formed ‘a decisive body of eyewitnesses and informants, to be questioned and interrogated as the gospel tradition eventually took shape and

34. ‘Recollections must be mixed with much else’ (p. 10); ‘reminiscence lies within a text’ (p. 436); ‘previous chapters have mined the Jesus tradition for memory’ (p. 435). 35. Ibid., p. 9; emphasis added. 36. A homeostatic theory of tradition reduces the elements of a tradition at each moment in its history to contemporary community conditions (see Samuel Byrskog, ‘A Century with the Sitz im Leben: From Form-Critical Setting to Gospel Community and Beyond’, ZNW 98 (2007), pp. 1–27 (11)). 37. See Paul Thompson, Voices of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edn, 2000). 38. Samuel Byrskog, Story as History – History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History (WUNT, 123; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2000), pp. 44–5, 254–65; idem, ‘The Eyewitnesses as Interpreters of the Past: Reflections on Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses’, JSHJ 6 (2008), pp. 157–68 (158). 39. Byrskog, Story as History, pp. 18–28.

58

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

developed’.40 Byrskog judiciously rejects the positivist understanding of eyewitness recollection, namely, that it is direct factual recall (depending on the critic either basically reliable or hopelessly flawed). Rather, research on oral history indicates that eyewitness memory and oral tradition share important features. The informants’ remembering of Jesus was subjectively filtered; it was a reconfiguring act of interpretation by persons living in the existential tension of past with present; it was their story proclaimed to others.41 Of particular interest for our purposes is Byrskog’s account of how the oral histories of eyewitnesses, and the work of the Evangelists as oral historians, intersect with the tradition. Here Byrskog struggles to close a gap between oral history practices on the one hand and the formation of the tradition on the other, between ancient historiographical, authorial practices and practices associated with cultivation of tradition, more often than not by anonymous tradents (the Gospel writers being a case in point). While taking the view that eyewitness oral histories and oral tradition share important properties, on occasion Byrskog imputes different modes of transmission to each: oral histories of eyewitnesses are transmitted to other individuals on the pattern of Peter to Mark, Polycarp to Irenaeus; oral tradition is transmitted through community rehearsal.42 Oral history transmission, he suggests, is living and interpretative, whereas tradition is the preserve of official tradents whose activity, while not excluding interpretative work, is a matter of the faithful transmission of materials in which the ‘visions and experiences of the eyewitnesses have … become stylized into fixed patterns of tradition’.43 Byrskog’s difficulty bringing oral history memory practices and the tradition together into a fully integrated account reappears in his depiction of the Evangelists as oral historians that in accordance with ancient practices seeks material from informant testimony and – failing access to this living memory – from tradition.44 Living memory is the preferred of these sources, for eyewitness voices are susceptible of becoming indistinct in traditioning processes, of being heard ‘only vaguely and indirectly’ in the tradition.45 On the other hand, however,

40. Ibid., p. 69. 41. Ibid., pp. 28, 106–107, 254–5; idem, ‘A New Perspective on the Jesus Tradition: Reflections on James D. G. Dunn’s Jesus Remembered’, JSNT 26 (2004), pp. 459–71 (463); idem, ‘Eyewitnesses as Interpreters’, p. 159; idem, ‘When Eyewitness Testimony and Oral Tradition Become Written Text’, SEÅ 74 (2009), pp. 41–3 (42–3); idem, ‘From Memory to Memoirs: Tracing the Background of a Literary Genre’, in The Making of Christianity: Conflicts, Contacts and Constructions. Essays in Honor of Bengt Holmberg (ed. Magnus Zetterholm and Samuel Byrskog; ConBNT, 47; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012), pp. 1–21 (19). 42. Byrskog, Story as History, pp. 106, 288; idem, ‘New Perspective’, pp. 466–7. 43. Byrskog, Story as History, p. 157. 44. Ibid., pp. 267–74, 288. Byrskog argues that Papias’s procedures, including Papias’s preference for the ‘living voice’, are relevant for understanding the work of the Evangelists. 45. Ibid., pp. 267–8, 272.

The Memory–Tradition Nexus in the Synoptic Tradition

59

he asserts that tradition mediates memory. In the Passion narrative, ‘oral history had been narrativized already in the tradition; it was mediated to the evangelist through a narrating text’.46 Oral tradition, he says, is the communications medium for memory; ‘the observation of an eyewitness’, he writes, ‘becomes, in a sense, tradition as soon as it is communicated from one person to another’.47 In the Markan chreia genre one finds the narrativizing impulse of memory fine-tuned for performance and transmission.48 The convergence of memory and tradition is entailed in the teacher-disciple relationship.49 Byrskog’s essays on the Sitz im Leben construe the tradition itself as the primary mnemonic entity and its cultivation as a memory event, a negotiation between the ‘two temporal horizons’ of past and present.50 The transmission of tradition is not a matter of ‘passive reproduction and copying’ but of ‘oral and re-oralized moments of remembrance’,51 and the tradents themselves are the active memory agents. In short, oral history, while delivering essential insights into early Christian memory practices, does not provide a completely satisfactory model for the intersection of those practices with the formation of the tradition. James D. G. Dunn Dunn posits a direct causal connection of memory with tradition but does not offer an account of how memory is subsumed in the media of the tradition; indeed, he dismisses the need for any such account, claiming that the matter is ‘self-evident’.52

46. Ibid., p. 272. 47. Byrskog, ‘Eyewitness Testimony’, p. 42. 48. Samuel Byrskog, ‘The Transmission of the Jesus Tradition: Old and New Insights’, EC 1 (2010), pp. 1–28 (17–20); idem, ‘Eyewitness Testimony’, p. 50. 49. Samuel Byrskog, ‘Introduction’, in Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (ed. Werner H. Kelber and Samuel Byrskog; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), pp. 1–20 (5); idem, ‘The Transmission of the Jesus Tradition’, in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, vol. 1 (ed. Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter; Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 1465–94 (1477–8). 50. Byrskog, ‘Century with the Sitz im Leben’, p. 22; also idem, ‘A New Quest for the Sitz im Leben: Social Memory, the Jesus Tradition, and the Gospel of Matthew’, NTS 52 (2006), pp. 319–26 (323, 335–6); idem, ‘Memory and Identity in the Gospels: A New Perspective’, in Exploring Early Christian Identity (ed. Bengt Holmberg; WUNT, 226; Tübingen: MohrSiebeck, 2008), pp. 33–57 (43–4). 51. Byrskog, ‘Memory to Memoirs’, p. 21. 52. ‘That, for me, was self-evidently how the memories of the first disciples worked. I did not see a need to provide a theoretical model of how memory works. … The Synoptic tradition was for me … the evidence and proof of how the first disciples’ memories worked’ (‘In Grateful Dialogue: A Response to My Interlocutors’, in Memories of Jesus; A Critical Appraisal of James D. G. Dunn’s Jesus Remembered (ed. Robert B. Stewart and Gary R. Habermas; Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2010), pp. 287–323 (291)).

60

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

He simply couples memory and tradition together with words such as ‘impact’ and ‘impression’, as in the following: ‘the impacting word or event became the tradition of that word or event’53; ‘that impact-expressed-in-verbal-formulation was itself the beginning of the Jesus tradition’54; from the ‘put[ting] of memories into words’ during gatherings of the disciples, ‘the oral tradition … would thus begin to take shape’.55 One gathers from this that Dunn conceives tradition as verbal formulations generated by the direct ‘imprint’, or ‘impression’, of memory, in its turn a medium that bears the ‘impression’ of the ‘impact’ made by Jesus on individual disciples. Variation in the tradition, for example, is traceable in part to differential ‘impacts’ of Jesus on the memories of different disciples.56 Dunn rejects the positivistic notion that isolating memories in the tradition brings one into touch with a historical reality unfiltered by perception and interpretation; in fact, he uses the term ‘impact’ in recognition of reception factors in remembering.57 But as critics have noted, his model does not reckon with the complex relationship between empirical realities and memory on the one hand and between memory and tradition on the other.58 The notion of memory as a static entity – an imprint – carries into Dunn’s tendency to locate the ‘remembering’ of Jesus in the stable, ‘core’ elements of a tradition, and conversely, to regard its variant elements (those not owing to differential originating ‘impacts’ or to plural original formulations) as embroidery, as superficial performance variants.59 The form critics looked for authentic memory elements beneath the layers of the tradition; Dunn locates them in the stable elements of the tradition. It is hardly surprising that he regards social and cultural memory approaches, which see in Synoptic variation the present-past dialectic of memory, to be a ‘challenge’ to his thesis.60 To be sure, Dunn’s reading in memory theory is perfunctory; accordingly his understanding of social and cultural memory is a ‘presentist’ caricature  – it

53. James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 239; emphasis in the original. 54. Ibid., p. 883; emphasis in the original. 55. James D. G. Dunn, ‘Remembering Jesus: How the Quest for the Historical Jesus Lost Its Way’, in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, vol. 2 (ed. Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter; Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 183–205 (p. 198). 56. James D. G. Dunn, ‘Social Memory and the Oral Jesus Tradition’, in Memory in the Bible and Antiquity (ed. Stephen C. Barton et al.; WUNT, 212; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2007), pp. 179–94 (191); idem, ‘Remembering Jesus’, p. 198. 57. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, pp. 130–3. 58. Byrskog, ‘New Perspective’, pp. 462–3; Gerd Häfner, ‘Das End der Kriterien? Jesusforschung angesichts der geschichtstheoretischen Diskussion’, in Historiographie und fiktionales Erzählen: Zur Konstruktivität in Geschichtstheorie und Exegese (ed. Knut Backhaus and Gerd Häfner; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2007), pp. 97–130 (107). 59. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, pp. 203, 233–4, 240, 246. 60. Dunn, ‘Social Memory’, p. 181.

The Memory–Tradition Nexus in the Synoptic Tradition

61

exaggerates the impact of the present upon reconstructions of the past.61 Nevertheless, a line of analysis that takes memory as an active rather than static presence in the tradition cuts against Dunn’s approach. Dunn concedes that memory forces of this sort are evident in the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of John and to an extent the Gospel of Matthew. He therefore adopts a strategy similar to Bauckham’s, arguing that during the first two generations of its transmission the Synoptic tradition was insulated from these forces by countervailing constraints ‘which operated to maintain the impact and character of the original remembering of Jesus’.62 The irony is that Dunn’s dismissal of social and cultural memory analysis prevents him from recognizing important ways that the tradition actually sustains vital connections to the past. Markus Bockmuehl Bockmuehl associates memory with individual eyewitness recollection while giving particular weight to the principle of the three-generation lifespan of ‘living memory’. This generationally defined span of living memory lasts about 150 years: it begins with apostolic eyewitnesses and ends with the passing of the generation able to claim direct acquaintance with those who were disciples of the apostles. It equates to ‘an unbroken … chain of personal recollection reaching back to the apostles themselves’; its corresponding mode of transmission is the passing of individual memories from master to disciple.63 The intergenerational framework of living memory that Bockmuehl appeals to here is significant, and its importance has been recognized by other theorists.64 It is well grounded in demographic and social realities; according to Bas van Os, the survival of numbers of eyewitnesses, including Jesus’s family members, into the late first century is, statistically speaking, highly probable.65 Moreover, this living memory framework is a topos found in early Christian traditions that connect Mark to Peter, Irenaeus to John through Polycarp, Valentinus to Paul

61. Ibid., p. 180. 62. Ibid., p. 192. 63. Markus Bockmuehl, Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006), p. 184; emphasis original. 64. For example, Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992), pp. 50–6, 218–21; Harald Welzer et al., Opa war kein Nazi: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002). As Bockmuehl points out, people who as children had extensive contact with their grandparents will be familiar with this intergenerational memory span. For example, had I ever bothered to ask her, my grandmother, who grew up just south of Ottawa, likely could have related childhood memories of Sir John A. MacDonald (first prime minister of Canada, d. 1891). 65. Bas van Os, Psychological Analyses and the Historical Jesus: New Ways to Explore Christian Origins (LNTS, 432; London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2011), pp. 57, 83.

62

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

through Theudas, in Papias’s enquiries after the ‘living voice’, and the like.66 The difficulty, however, is that Bockmuehl’s account fails to connect this generational memory framework with the Synoptic and Johannine tradition; he treats it as a stand-alone transmission of personal memories from individual to individual down the three-generation span. Moreover, though he assumes, in connection with Justin’s reference to the ‘memoirs of the apostles’, that ‘personal memory’ has been transmitted in the gospels,67 his interest lies more in the post-200 ce shape of memories transmitted down the generational chain than in the memorytradition nexus.68

Tradition, Commemoration and Symbolic Representation Each of the accounts above, including the form-critical account, posit or assume a nexus of some sort between memory and tradition, but each runs up against the problem of connecting memory to the distinctive phenomenology of tradition. Not coincidentally, in most of them, memory is regarded as something uniquely individual – ‘personal recollection’, ‘reminiscence’, ‘eyewitness testimony’, ‘informant testimony’ and the like. Correspondingly, one occasionally observes a tendency to take exactitude of recollection as the standard against which to define memory’s functionality. There is something intuitively appealing about conceiving memory this way. We experience memory as the quintessential individual faculty, as an interior mental phenomenon and cognitive reflex that reliably connects us to our past experiences. This is what gives rise to the memory–tradition problematic, for tradition seems to be something quite different: an aggregate of cultural genres publicly cultivated in various media and prone to follow its own autonomous, often highly kinetic, course of development. Yet, like memory, tradition is representational of past events, at least ostensibly; moreover, memory is instrumental in its transmission and its reenactment. In the scholarship surveyed above, the term ‘tradition’ often appeared as little more than a vague placeholder; with some exceptions little consideration was given to tradition as a cultural medium with a distinctive phenomenology. In what follows, we will see that tradition is in fact the ‘form of memory’,69 an artefact of commemorative practices, that emerges at the interface of the cognitive, social and cultural operations of memory.

66. Bockmuehl, Seeing the Word, pp. 178–84. 67. Ibid., p. 185. 68. Ibid., p. 179 (other than suggesting that the generational memory framework would have acted as an external control upon the tradition (p. 172)). 69. Jan Assmann, ‘Form as a Mnemonic Device: Cultural Texts and Cultural Memory’, in Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark (ed. Richard A. Horsley et al.; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), pp. 67–82 (72).

The Memory–Tradition Nexus in the Synoptic Tradition

63

Cognition and Culture in Memory Formation Experimental studies on the cognitive formation of memory show that memory is not so much a faculty of passive recall as an active faculty that condenses and compounds elements from the diffuse flux of experience into economical scripts that take the form of neurologically encoded information networks called engrams. This selection and condensation is a practical matter of achieving mnemonic efficiency and functionality – shedding the surfeits of detail that under conditions of exact recall would induce cognitive paralysis. But it is much more than that: out of experiences memory abstracts patterns and concepts, and out of similar events it compounds generic memories with representational, emblematic functions, fashioning cognitive scripts that give individuals and the groups to which they belong dispositional orientation to the world.70 Jan Assmann comments that ‘those who remember everything are unable to orient themselves in time and society in the same way as those who notice everything are unable to orient themselves in space. Orientation requires selection. The function of memory is orientation.’71 An essential cognitive operation in this large-scale reduction in complexity is the conforming of memories to formulaic types drawn from the cultural repertoire of genres and narrative schemata. Here we see the intersection of neural with cultural processes, the co-option of cultural media in neural-biological memory function.72 The encoding of memories in formulaic types and schemata with cultural resonance has a massive mnemonic pay-off: it stabilizes memories, gives them simplicity and coherence, and makes them capable of classification, all of which facilitates their recollection. At the same time, it renders memories intelligible and communicable into the social realm: genres and narrative schemas are not ideal-type abstractions but instrumental media for communication. The effect, however, is not only to shape memories to these representational types. Because these genres and narrative scripts are interpretative schemas, their effect is to summon up the existential and moral significance of a memory for

70. Larry R. Squire and Eric R. Kandel, Memory: From Mind to Molecules (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999), pp. 46, 206; Frederic C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 (reprint 1932)), pp. 53–4, 63, 83, 126–7; George A. Bonanno, ‘Remembering and Psychotherapy’, Psychotherapy 27 (1990), pp. 175–86 (177); David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-Out Rhymes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 7; Jürgen Straub, ‘Psychology, Narrative, and Cultural Memory: Past and Present’, in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 215–28 (221); Schwartz, ‘Collective Forgetting’, p. 139. 71. Assmann, ‘Form as a Mnemonic Device’, p. 68. 72. See Ruben Zimmermann, ‘Gleichnisse als Medien der Jesuserinnerung: Die Historizität der Jesusparabeln im Horizont der Gedächtnisforschung’, in Hermeneutik der Gleichnisse Jesu: Methodische Neuansätze zum Verstehen urchristlicher Parabeltexte (ed. Ruben Zimmermann; WUNT, 231; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2008), pp. 87–21 (106).

64

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

the rememberer.73 In short, memory–encoding entails some distancing, some abstracting, from originating experiences. It must be stressed though that this very distancing is a mnemonic strategy: the products of these complex cognitive syntheses are memory artefacts, representations of the past that exchange exact recall for enormous mnemonic advantage. The essential connection that exists between memory formation and a cultural repertoire of genres and narrative scripts indicates that human memory is more than just a neurobiological matter. Memory forms at the interface of cognition with culture. The neural processes of the human brain are ‘enculturated’, wired, that is, into the vast external matrix of a cultural tradition that comprises the symbolic resources of a culture. These resources constitute the accumulated cultural memory of a society, the ‘external memory field’ indispensable for the brain’s formation of memory in its conceptual and symbolic fullness.74 Jürgen Straub writes that memory and recollection ‘depend on cultural resources, tools, and templates. In this way, they represent cultural psychic structures’.75 Sherry Ortner points out that cultural symbols serve as the essential coordinates for cognitive and affective orientation; they supply normative ordering categories that enable thought and render experience intelligible. Absent a field of orienting cultural symbols, concept formation and meaningful action would be impossible.76 Merlin Donald aptly describes the external cultural symbol network, wired into the processes of the human mind, as ‘a distributed cognitive system’.77 More to our point, it is at this interface of cognition with culture that tradition takes shape. ‘As the media for memory’, says Zimmermann, ‘genres give tradition its substance and form.’78 Memory is articulated in cultural genres and narrative scripts that give it not merely an external formal structure but also connect it deeply into the symbolic resources of the encompassing cultural memory. ‘We are dealing here’, notes Straub, ‘not with “media” as variable instances of transmission, but with constitutive symbolic forms without which memory and recollection would be unthinkable.’79

73. See Rubin, Memory in Oral Tradition, pp. 280–1; Straub, ‘Psychology’, p. 216; Anthony Le Donne, ‘Theological Memory Distortion in the Jesus Tradition: A Study in Social Memory Theory’, in Barton et al., eds, Memory in the Bible, pp. 162–77 (169); idem, The Historiographical Jesus: Memory, Typology, and the Son of David (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), pp. 72–80. 74. Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: Norton, 2001), pp. 150, 311; Hans J. Markowitsch, ‘Cultural Memory and the Neurosciences’, in Erll and Nünning, eds, Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, pp. 275–83 (280). 75. Straub, ‘Psychology’, p. 222. 76. Sherry B. Ortner, ‘On Key Symbols’, AmAnthropol N.S. 75 (1973), pp. 1338–46. 77. Donald, Mind So Rare, p. 318. 78. Zimmermann, ‘Gleichnisse’, p. 109 (‘eine traditionsstiftende Funktion’); also idem, ‘Formen und Gattungen’, p. 144. 79. Straub, ‘Psychology’, p. 220 (emphasis original).

The Memory–Tradition Nexus in the Synoptic Tradition

65

Tradition and Commemoration The shaping of memory into the lineaments of cultural genres and scripts renders it communicable. It is in the course of sharing and rehearsing memories in the groups for which they hold salience that they come into sharper relief as standardized forms of a shared tradition bearing the shared meanings and norms of a community. Liisa Malkki observed this occurring in real time in refugee camps in Tanzania, among the Hutu who had just fled genocide in Burundi: Accounts of these key events [the genocide] very quickly circulated among the refugees, and, often, in a matter of days, acquired what can be characterized as ‘standard versions’ in the telling and retelling. … They were accounts which, while becoming increasingly formulaic, also became more didactic and progressively more implicated in, and indicative of, something beyond them. … The ‘standard versions’ acted as diagnostic and mnemonic allegories connecting events of everyday life with wider historical processes impinging on the Hutu refugees.80

These narratives became ‘moral ordering stories’ in the post-genocide moral universe of the refugees.81 Jan Vansina sums up this phenomenon: ‘Group traditions can be created quite rapidly after the events and acquire a form which strikingly makes such a tradition part of a complex of traditions.’82 Loveday Alexander identifies a similar line of development in the ἀπομνημονεύματα traditions of Xenophon and Lynceus: ‘At the heart of this process is the formalized oral activity of ἀπομνημόνευσις, “recounting” or “commemoration”, in which personal memories are shaped and processed (μελετᾶν) into ἀπομνημονεύματα, “reminiscences”. … These are the basic building blocks of oral tradition, which can become relatively stable within a short time and can then survive transmission across many generations.’83 Notably, these externalized entities come to serve as the cognitive basis for memory even for contemporaries of the persons and events commemorated. ‘Xenophon’, Alexander writes, ‘could justly claim to be writing on the basis of his own personal recollection of Socrates. But a glance at Xenophon’s work makes it clear … that even within one generation, memory, however personal in origin, is already molded by the literary forms and expectations of the larger society.’84 The tradition that thus forms is not a complete cultural novum. Memory’s enabling repertoire of genres and narrative interpretative schemas is by

80. Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 106. 81. Ibid., p. 244. 82. Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 20. 83. Loveday Alexander, ‘Memory and Tradition in the Hellenistic Schools’, in Kelber and Byrskog, eds, Jesus in Memory, pp. 113–53 (143). 84. Ibid., p. 121. On the chreia and apophthegma as narrative memory media, see Byrskog, ‘Eyewitness Testimony’, p. 48.

66

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

definition already a cultural tradition.85 An emergent tradition forms within an encompassing cultural memory matrix; without its being semiotically tuned to the defining narratives, persons, texts, and motifs of the epic past it would be neither intelligible, nor memorable – nor historical.86 Tradition as Symbolic Representation Memory formation occurs where cognition meets culture. Memory formation and tradition formation exist on a continuum. It goes without saying that not all memory formation issues in a normative body of tradition.87 To grasp the conditions for the emergence of the latter, we can refer back to our description of cognitive condensation, the massive reduction of detail essential to memory formation. We saw that this selectivity and simplification is a functional matter of achieving mnemonic efficiency, that is, of turning what seem superficially to be memory’s cognitive deficits (its loss of details) into advantages. But selectivity and simplification has a value-added side: it is simultaneously a distillation of the meaning, the significance, of events for the rememberer(s). The effect is to give memories normative density and existential salience.88 Memory formation, that is to say, is symbolic representation. As Sapir defines them, symbols are condensations of meaning,89 or in Geertz’s fuller formulation, ‘vehicles for a conception … abstractions from experience fixed in perceptible forms, concrete embodiments of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs’.90 Here we find ourselves again at the boundary with cultural memory, where under certain conditions the cognitive processes of selection, condensation and schematization have the potential to be taken up into wider moral-formation projects and their various media. Barry Schwartz, in his analysis of radical historical simplification and selectivity in the commemoration of the civil rights heroine Rosa Parks,91 expresses this principle

85. Zimmermann, ‘Formen und Gattungen’, p. 145. 86. See Barry Schwartz, ‘Frame Image: Towards a Semiotics of Collective Memory’, Semiotica 121 (1998), pp. 1–38. 87. Even here the distinction should not be overdrawn. A person’s store of individual memories functions as a sort of constitutive personal tradition, and family memories are also a cultivated tradition. 88. Squire and Kandel, Memory, p. 78; Jerome Bruner and Carol Fleisher Feldman, ‘Group Narrative as a Cultural Context of Autobiography’, in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (ed. David C. Rubin; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 291–317 (291–3). 89. Edward Sapir, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir (ed. David G. Mandelbaum; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), p. 564. 90. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 91. 91. Rosa Parks (1913–2005) was an African American seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama. In December 1955 she was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white

The Memory–Tradition Nexus in the Synoptic Tradition

67

succinctly: ‘Cognitive deficit … reinforces rather than creates society’s need to represent its ideals with unique symbols.’92 More precisely, it is in the social processes of commemoration that memory is transmuted into bodies of normative tradition. Commemoration, Schwartz says, ‘is the lifting from the historical record of events that best symbolize society’s ideals … commemoration … is selective, highlighting an event’s most significant moral feature’.93 Tradition, as a form- and media-based entity, is the outcome of this memorializing drive. Assmann observes that, not unlike material artefacts, tradition forms are ‘devices of stabilization meant to render permanent the volatile words in the flow of time … [to] render … a text definable in space and time’.94 Moreover, the form-giving genres and abstracting narrative scripts – in the case of Rosa Parks the script of the ‘wronged innocent’ – are themselves bearers of intrinsic meaning that, together with their powerful mnemonic effects, contribute to the symbolizing operations of tradition.95 Zimmermann describes this as the merging of ‘Medium und Botschaft’ (‘medium and message’).96 Cognitive-neuronal systems of representation take corresponding expression in external, cultural systems of representation that encode information tangibly in texts, monuments, songs, ritual practices and other media.97 Casey characterizes commemoration, in the external media in which it is realized, aptly as ‘intensified remembering’ (emphasis original): One way to intensify something is to give it a thicker consistency so as to help it last or to remain more substantively. Such thickening is surely the point of any memorialization, whether it be ceremonial, sculptural, scriptural, or psychical. Every kind of commemoration can be considered an effort to create a lasting ‘remanence’ for what we wish to honor in memory – where ‘remanence’ signifies a perduring remainder or residuum (as in the literally thick stone of war memorials or grave markers).98

In her analysis of the ἀπομνημόνευμα genre, Alexander observes the arc of development from ‘remembering’ to media-based ‘memorializing’ of exemplary

passenger. Her act of civil disobedience was a catalyzing factor leading to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a milestone in the American Civil Rights Movement. 92. Schwartz, ‘Collective Forgetting’, p. 139. 93. Ibid., p. 132; similarly Vansina: ‘History performs an exemplary function and traditions tend over a number of performances to reflect ideal types’ (Oral Tradition as History, pp. 105–106). 94. Assmann, ‘Form as Mnemonic Device: Cultural Texts and Cultural Memory’, in Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark (ed. Richard A. Horsley et al.; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), p. 72. 95. Schwartz, ‘Collective Forgetting’, p. 136. 96. Zimmermann, ‘Formen und Gattungen’, p. 165. 97. Echterhoff, ‘Das Außen des Erinnerns’, p. 65. 98. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomsburg: University of Indiana Press, 1987), p. 273.

68

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

individuals (the memorializing of Socrates by Xenophon, Demonax by Lucian and Epicurus by the Epicureans). She notes, moreover, that μνημονεύω and its cognates ἀπομνημονεύω and διαμνημονεύω cover, in her words, ‘the full range of “remembering” as a mental act, through “making mention” as a verbal act, to “memorial” as a physical or textual record’.99 Autonomy of the Tradition This puts us in a position to account for the autonomy of the tradition vis-àvis the historical events and occurrences that are its grounds. We have seen that memory work is neither concerned for nor cognitively capable of exact, mechanical redescription. Rather, it amounts to the abstraction of salient elements and patterns of meaning from the flux of experience and the configuration of these elements and patterns in mnemonically efficient, symbolically concentrated memory scripts that are mediated in various genres and schemas. The effect, as Terrence Deacon puts it, is an ‘increasingly indirect linkage between symbolic mental representation and its grounds of reference’.100 The autonomy of the tradition, in other words, is due to the reality that, as with any symbolic, commemorative artefact, it stands in a representational relationship to the foundational past. The mnemonic pay-off is considerable. The Rosa Parks narrative again illustrates the point: ‘People who cannot remember the [thirteen-month, episodically diffuse] bus boycott as a whole’, says Schwartz, ‘can retrieve the [Rosa Parks] schema in which its elements are stored’. At the same time the narrative serves as a concentrated mnemonic script of the ideals and moral norms driving the Civil Rights Movement, one that aligns the Montgomery protests ‘with the classical stories of oppressed people’s struggle for justice’.101 In fact a community is able to remember, inculcate and transmit its formative past only to the extent that that past has been mnemonically consolidated in the schematic forms of a tradition. Tradition artefacts are media-borne symbolic entities that objectify, or as Assmann expresses it, make ‘visible … permanent, and transmittable’ (and, we should add, replicable) the elements of a community’s moral universe.102 Much like language itself, tradition operates as a superordinate system of normative symbols, as a versatile cognitive system, the elements of which are capable of being brought into new configurations and applications and mobilized to meet new challenges that arise with shifts in a community’s historical and social horizons.103 Tradition fulfils these vital functions in virtue of its autonomy  – its

99. Alexander, ‘Memory and Tradition’, p. 188; see also pp. 140–2. 100. Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 424. 101. Schwartz, ‘Collective Forgetting’, p. 136. 102. Assmann, ‘Form as Mnemonic Device’, p. 70; also Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 95–7, 363–7. 103. Deacon, Symbolic Species, pp. 87–99, 451; also Bartlett, Remembering, pp. 225–7; Casey, Remembering, p. 286.

The Memory–Tradition Nexus in the Synoptic Tradition

69

abstraction from, and thus representational relationship to, the foundational historical events that are its grounds. But this is the autonomy of a symbol: a symbol’s existence is a function of the realities it represents. What Casey says of memory can be predicated of tradition: it remains ‘enmeshed in its origins even when it seems to be functioning independently of them’.104 It is an autonomy that is largely driven, moreover, by the internal resources and symbolic potential of the tradition itself. This active memory function of tradition helps explain its tendency to multiformity (its property of variability). Tradition – the significant past – is refracted through the contemporary realities of its tradent community. Conversely, a community refracts and cognitively apprehends its contemporary realities through the lens of its tradition. To borrow Schwartz’s words, tradition is ‘an expressive symbol – a language, as it were, for articulating present predicaments’, but it is also ‘an orienting symbol – a map that gets us through these predicaments by relating where we are to where we have been’.105 By means of this ‘intrinsic double aspect’ of tradition, the normative force of the past is continuously brought to bear upon present exigencies and crises.106 This accounts for a tradition’s characteristic multiformity, its transformation in different contexts as a tradent community anchors itself to its core identity and ethos in changing circumstances and in the face of new challenges. As with any cultural object, tradition in its various media realizations leads a cultural life of its own as it reacts with the historical contingencies of its tradent communities. In this regard the profoundly existential qualities of memory also carry over into the enactment of tradition. So powerful and concentrated are the latter’s representational effects that tradition seems to participate in, even mediate tangibility and reality to, what it represents, while drawing the participants into that reality such that it forms them at a deep level. Schwartz observes that the Rosa Parks narrative ‘represent[s] morally and emotionally what the civil rights movement meant to its beneficiaries’; it ‘promot[es] attachment’ and ‘encourage[s] commitment’.107 We might refer to this as the ‘sacramental’ dimension of tradition; it is the effect of tradition’s memory function.

104. Casey, Remembering, p. 280. 105. Barry Schwartz, ‘Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II’, ASR 61 (1996), pp. 908–27 (910); also Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, p. xii; Byrskog, ‘Transmission of the Jesus Tradition’, pp. 27–8. 106. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, p. 93. See also Zimmermann’s discussion of the ‘Vergangenheitsbezug und Gegenwartswirkung’ (‘referentiality to the past and effect upon the present’) of the parables as memory genres (‘Gleichnisse als Medien’, p. 119): ‘Seen against the background of a literary and to an even greater degree oral memory culture, divergent traditions reflect a memorializing conservation of earlier forms of the tradition by means of contemporizing enactment of those traditions’ (pp. 113–14). 107. Schwartz, ‘Collective Forgetting’, p. 133; see also Zimmermann, ‘Gleichnisse als Medien’, p. 210; Edward Sapir, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir (ed. David G. Mandelbaum; Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949), pp. 10–11; Donald, Mind So Rare, pp. 153–6.

70

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Conclusion: Memory and the Jesus Tradition Though the model for memory and tradition sketched out above attempts a broad description of cultural processes of tradition formation and cultivation, it is of course intended to contribute to work on the history of the Synoptic and Johannine tradition, to put the history of the tradition on more solid theoretical grounds after the collapse of the form-critical consensus. It needs to be emphasized, however, that this approach incorporates key elements of form criticism: small forms and genres as constitutive media of the tradition; recognition of the tradition’s autonomy; correlation of the history of the tradition to the history of the tradent communities. On the other hand, it breaks radically with form criticism by shifting memory – understood as the principal culture-formative force – from being a peripheral factor to the primary factor in the origins and history of the tradition. This approach accounts for prominent features of the Synoptic tradition, such as its deep tincturing by the older biblical tradition and its pronounced normative complexion, visible in its density in dominical sayings and pronouncement stories, in which non-normative elements have receded almost to a vanishing point. In this connection it should also be noted that the formation of the tradition at the cognitive-cultural interface is not a solely post hoc operation upon the raw, amorphous matter of experience. Jesus’s words drew upon cultural forms and meanings and his significant actions enacted cultural scripts before these ever took their commemorated form in the tradition. Patterns of agreement and variation in the Synoptic tradition likewise can be analysed with reference to the memory function of tradition, and source-critical questions can be re-evaluated in light of the work of scribal tradents as cultivators of a memory-based chirographic tradition. As an approach attuned to ancient media realities, memory-based analysis has the potential to elucidate important inflection points in the history of the tradition such as the shift from oral to written media, and in this same vein also to clarify how canonization trajectories might be latent in the cultural memory function of tradition. Finally, this approach has obvious relevance for historical Jesus research. Historical Jesus scholarship, not recognizing the extent to which the tradition is the artefact of commemorative processes, often treats the gospels as garden-variety archival materials, for example, regarding them in their relative brevity as very incomplete records preserving just traces of events rather than being symbolically concentrated mediations of the aggregate of events. The model worked out in this chapter raises the question of what sort of historiography is required to deal with tradition – a media-based artefact with a commemorative and representational relationship to historical realities.

Chapter 5 THE FORMATION OF THE SYNOPTIC TRADITION: COGNITIVE AND CULTURAL APPROACHES TO AN OLD PROBLEM*

Research on the cognitive and cultural aspects of memory calls in question the sharp distinction that the form critics made between memory and tradition. Conceiving memory as individual ‘reminiscence’, Bultmann and his followers seemed to have good grounds for ruling out any significant role for memory in the history of the tradition: the observable features of the tradition have little in common with individual eyewitness recollection. Form criticism shared in the widespread conceptual paradigm that separated the ‘individual’ and the ‘psychological’ from the ‘social’ and the ‘cultural’. Wang and Brockmeier note that ever since Durkheim distinguished between ‘collective’ and ‘individual’ representations, thereby separating the sociological from the psychological, ‘memory has been seen as either individual (i.e. mental, neuro-cognitive) or collective (social, historical, cultural)’.1 Though hardly influenced by French sociology, form criticism was similarly predicated on this split between the individual and the sociological. The tradition was emergent in the sociological forces of the Sitze; its existence had only tangentially to do with memory. Cognitive science and experimental psychology continue to study mental and neurological processes in isolation from social and cultural factors, while sociology and anthropology continue to resist encroachment by biology and psychology into their explanations of social and cultural phenomena.2 Nevertheless, criticisms of * Originally published in Social Memory and Social Identity in the Study of Early Judaism and Early Christianity (ed. Samuel Byrskog, Raimo Hakola and Jutta Jokiranta; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), pp. 49–67. Used by permission. 1. Qi Wang and Jens Brockmeier, ‘Autobiographical Remembering as Cultural Practice: Understanding the Interplay between Memory, Self, and Culture’, CultPsych 8 (2002), pp. 45–64 (59–60). See Émile Durkheim, ‘Individual and Collective Representations’, in Sociology and Philosophy (ed. Émile Durkheim; London: Cohen and West, 1953 (French original 1898)), pp. 1–34. 2. Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 253; Wang and Brockmeier, ‘Autobiographical Remembering’, p. 60.

72

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

this divide have been advanced and efforts made to replace it with more integrative approaches. According to anthropologists Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn, ‘the private/public (i.e. inner/outer or subject/world) divide … is problematic. … We think that the inner world or psyche and the world outside of persons are not isolated realms and that too large a gulf has been posited between them in current theorizing.’3 Philosopher and cognitive scientist John Sutton laments ‘the ongoing and damaging lack of contact between the cognitive and the social sciences’, arguing that ‘the time is ripe for integrative work to close these gaps’ – first and foremost in the field of memory.4 This chapter is an effort in that direction, clarifying how the Synoptic tradition, a cultural artefact, emerges at the interface of the cognitive and cultural operations of memory. It explores the interface and interpenetration of cognitive and cultural factors along a spectrum that runs from neurobiological memory at one end to a fully externalized cultural tradition at the other. This interface accounts for the formation of the Synoptic tradition and for its emblematic features.

Mental Schemas, Cultural Schemas and Memory Formation Lambros Malafouris urges us to ‘see culture as the enactive process that brings forth, envelops and partially constitutes human cognitive and emotional lives’.5 Culture penetrates right down into the neural encoding of memories. This is evident in the cognitive operations that filter salient elements out of the diffuse flux of perceptual experience, encoding these elements in neural networks, called ‘engrams’, organized in accord with a set of economical patterns, or ‘schemas’. This large-scale reduction of complexity to simple schematic forms is a practical

3. Strauss and Quinn, Cognitive Theory, p. 8; similarly Ara Norenzayan, Incheol Choi, and Kaiping Pen, ‘Perception and Cognition’, in Handbook of Cultural Psychology (ed. Shinobu Kitayama and Dov Cohen; New York: Guilford, 2007), pp. 569–644 (607). In a 1975 essay Daniel Sperber expressed concerns about the pernicious split between psychology and anthropology (‘Anthropology and Psychology: Towards and Epidemiology of Representations’, Man 20 (1975), pp. 73–89). 4. John Sutton, ‘Remembering’, in The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (ed. Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 217– 35 (224). Elsewhere he writes: ‘We must find a general framework for the sciences of memory in which the concepts of social or “collective” memory … will be integral parts of cognitive science, rather than social constructionist myths’ (‘Representation, Reduction, and Interdisciplinarity in the Sciences of Memory’, in Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation (ed. H. Clapin, P. Staines, and P. Slezak; London: Elsevier, 2004), pp. 187–216 (204)). 5. Lambros Malafouris, ‘The Brain-Artefact Interface (BAI): A Challenge for Archaeology and Cultural Neuro-science’, SCAN 5 (2010), pp. 264–73 (264).

The Formation of the Synoptic Tradition

73

matter of efficiency – shedding the vast amounts of detail that under conditions of total recall would induce cognitive paralysis.6 It delivers, in Conway’s words, ‘the optimum amount of information for the minimal amount of cognitive effort’.7 The schematic patterns that organize memories exist as neural networks constituted of conventionalized sequences, or ‘nodes’. These ‘are so strongly interlinked that activating any one of them necessarily activates them all’.8 In memory encoding, elements filtered from the flow of incoming perceptual information are conformed to the representational structure of the schema. When the thus encoded memory is recollected, schematic elements perhaps not present in the originally experienced realities may be filled by default through activation of the conventional nodes of the schema. The supplied elements are therefore conventional, or ‘typical’. Experiences unfold in unpredictable, diffuse ways, rarely schematically, but in memory they will be organized and recalled as such.9 Cognitive schemas are already operative in perception: one perceives a ‘tree’ schematically, as a cognitive unity, not all the branches and leaves individually. It would be perverse to regard this as a defect in perception; similarly, it is perverse to regard the consolidation of memories in cognitive schemas as a defect of memory. It is through their filtering and mediation into schematic patterns that remembered experiences receive intelligibility.10 Cognitive schemas and scripts possess an innate conceptual or sequential logic, but they also filter experiential input for salience, directing perceptual attention to elements that are significant.11 Sub-schematic elements of a situation – details irrelevant to the operative schema or lacking salience – have a low probability of being encoded in memory. In

6. Siegfried J. Schmidt and Siegfried Weischenberg, ‘Mediengattungen, Berichterstattungsmuster, Darstellungsformen’, in Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaft (ed. Klaus Merton et al.; Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994), pp. 212–36 (213). 7. Martin A. Conway, ‘Remembering: A Process and a State’, in Science of Memory: Concepts (ed. Henry L. Roediger III et al.; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 237–41 (241); similarly, Siegfried J. Schmidt, Kognitive Autonomie und soziale Orientierung: konstruktivistische Bemerkungen zum Zusammenhang von Kognition, Kommunikation, Medien und Kultur (Münster: Lit Verlag, 3rd edn, 2003), p. 173. 8. Eliot R. Smith and Sarah Queller, ‘Mental Representations’, in Social Cognition (ed. Marilynn B. Brewer and Miles Hewstone; Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 5–27 (21). 9. Jean M. Mandler and Nancy S. Johnson, ‘Remembrance of Things Parsed: Story Structure and Recall’, CognPsych 9 (1977), pp. 111–51 (134, 149); Jean M. Mandler, Stories, Scripts, and Scenes: Aspects of Schema Theory (Hillsdale, NJ and London: Erlbaum, 1984), pp. 47–8; Smith and Queller, ‘Mental Representations’, p. 17. See also Frederic C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 (reprint 1932)), pp. 52–4, 312–13. 10. Harald Welzer, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis: Eine Theorie der Erinnerung (Munich: Beck, 2002), p. 30. 11. Mandler and Johnson, ‘Remembrance’, p. 112; Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 172.

74

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Mandler’s words, ‘The schema prepares the person to see certain kinds of things; consequently, little attention need be paid to those things that match expectations, leaving attentional resources free to devote to the more unusual, and therefore, more informative, items.’12 Schematically similar memories might over time blend into a generic memory. These operations bring us back to the mass shedding of detail in the conforming of memories to mental schemas: the drive towards cognitive efficiency is at the same time a drive towards maximum intelligibility. Koriat and his colleagues describe this as achieving ‘maximal compactness within a [neural] trace system while suffering only a minimal loss of information’.13 Memory encoding, therefore, amounts to abstracting from originating occurrences. The effect is to give memories a representational relationship to the experiential realities that are their grounds.14 An example of a cognitive schema is the ‘life script’, analysed by Berntsen and Rubin, that organizes autobiographical memories. The life script is a ‘shared cognitive structure’, more precisely, ‘culturally shared expectations as to the order and timing of life events in a prototypical life course’.15 It accounts for the ‘reminiscence bump’, the curious concentration of autobiographical memories into the period between a person’s late adolescence and his or her thirties – it is in this period that most of the significant life-transitions and rites of passage that make up the ‘life script’ occur. ‘Life scripts structure retrieval’, Berntsen and Rubin observe, ‘and for this reason events that fit into the life script are more easily recalled than events that do not.’16 Notably, the life script is both a cognitive and a cultural schema. The cognitive schemas that mediate memory formation are drawn from a cultural repertoire of schemas and scripts that have been internalized through socialization. ‘The storage and then recollection of memories’, Welzer explains, ‘unfolds in accordance with cultural schemata; in other words, mental processes of remembering are themselves culturally organized.’17

12. Mandler, Stories, Scripts, and Scenes, p. 105. She gives the example of the script, ‘ordering in a restaurant’: schema-accordant features include being seated, scanning a menu, the appearance of the waiter after a decent interval, and so forth. These schematic aspects would be encoded by default, while ‘low level details’ such as ‘where the waiter parts his hair’ would not be noticed nor remembered. But an unusual feature of the scene, for example, ‘a ten foot tall waiter’, would be noticed and encoded (pp. 102–3). 13. Asher Koriat, Morris Goldsmith, and Ainat Pansky, ‘Toward a Psychology of Memory Accuracy’, AnRevPsych 51 (2000), pp. 431–587 (489). 14. Larry R. Squire and Eric R. Kandel, Memory: From Mind to Molecules (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999), p. 206. 15. Dorthe Berntsen and David C. Rubin, ‘Cultural Life Scripts Structure Recall from Autobiographical Memory’, MemCog 32 (2004), pp. 427–42 (427). 16. Berntsen and Rubin, ‘Cultural Life Scripts’, p. 440. 17. Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 146; also Strauss and Quinn, Cognitive Theory, p. 49; Schmidt, Kognitive Autonomie, p. 169.

The Formation of the Synoptic Tradition

75

Here we see hints of the cognitive and cultural interface that will be implicated in the formation of tradition. Cognitive schemas and the forms of a tradition overlap in a number of respects. Both are schematic, mnemonically efficient formats, culturally grounded, that stabilize content and facilitate retrieval and reenactment. Both ‘give stabilizing cohesion [Festigkeit] and qualities of duration [Dauer] to our representations’.18 Schema-supplied organization gives to memories as well as to tradition a good measure of typical elements. Both exhibit economy, converging on high-salience elements. Both reduce diffuse phenomena to unitary cognitive entities. Both are significance-laden, symbolically dense entities. Cognitive schemas and scripts are culturally transmitted and acquired: they are already a form of tradition.19 We will have more to say about this convergence of memory and tradition in due course. Schematic encoding does not entail that memories are static entities, like files retrieved from a computer hard drive. The activation of any memory is matter of approximate pattern re-creation across a network of neuronal connections that are dynamically open to associative connections with other memory networks. The strength of these neural connections – what cognitive scientists call their ‘weight’ – is a variable that depends upon conditions affecting initial encoding, and then by the history of subsequent activations. None of the neural activations of a specific memory is precisely identical to any other activation of that memory: each activation is sensitive to immediate contextual cues that have stimulated the recollection and also to other, concurrent patterns of activation.20 Smith and Queller note that memories ‘are not explicitly “stored” anywhere. Instead, the network stores connection strengths that allow a range of patterns to be reproduced given the right cues.’21 In other words, remembering is situated: memories are activated in response to cues of immediate contexts, while nevertheless persisting in their existence as neuronal entities distinct from those contexts. Strauss and Quinn describe this as the ‘distinction between relatively stable cognitive networks and the ever-changing reactions that are the response of these networks to particular

18. Schmidt and Weischenberg, ‘Mediengattungen’, p. 213. 19. Berntsen and Rubin, ‘Cultural Life Scripts’, p. 430; see also Ruben Zimmermann, ‘Formen und Gattungen als Medien der Jesus-Erinnerung: Zur Rückgewinnung der Diachronie in der Formgeschichte des Neuen Testament’, in Die Macht der Erinnerung (ed. O. Fuchs and B. Janowski; JBTh, 22; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2008), pp. 131–67 (145). 20. Smith and Queller, ‘Mental Representations’, pp. 10–13; Sutton, ‘Remembering’, pp. 219–20; Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 20; Fergus I. M. Craik, ‘On the Making of Episodes’, in Varieties of Memory and Consciousness: Essays in Honour of Endel Tulving (ed. Henry L. Roediger III and Fergus I. M. Craik; Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1989), pp. 43–57 (43); Daniel L. Schacter, Kenneth A. Norman and Wilma Koutstaal, ‘The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory’, AnRevPsych 49 (1998), pp. 289–318 (312); Squire and Kandel, Memory, pp. 73–4. 21. Smith and Queller, ‘Mental Representations’, p. 10.

76

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

events’.22 It is by connecting present experience to stable schematic patterns laid down in memory that memory carries out its indispensable function of rendering present experience intelligible.23 The stability of memories is a function of the connection strengths of their neural networks.24 What are the factors that affect encoding strength? The leading variable in strong as opposed to weak encoding is the motivational state of the subject, which determines the attentional resources devoted to the task.25 Not surprisingly, subjects are more highly motivated to encode information that is salient – that matters – to them, and conversely, to filter out the many details of perceptual input that do not.26 Affect level frequently correlates to salience: ‘emotionally arousing’ events will be more durably encoded, and recollecting them will re-excite the affective response.27 Likewise, what DiMaggio calls moral salience is a leading factor in differential encoding: elements of experiences charged with moral significance, hence that excite evaluative attention and affective response (itself an evaluative reflex), have a higher probability of being selected out of the morass of details and deeply encoded, together with the accompanying moral judgements and emotional colouration.28 Morally signified and affectively signified memories

22. Strauss and Quinn, Cognitive Theory, p. 54; similarly Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 203, and John Sutton, Celia B. Harris and Paul G. Keil, ‘The Psychology of Memory, Extended Cognition, and Socially Distributed Remembering’, PhenomCogSci 9 (2010), pp. 521–60 (544). 23. Memory pioneer Frederic Bartlett referred to this as ‘utilization of the past in the solution of difficulties set by the present’ (Remembering, p. 225); see also Smith and Queller, ‘Mental Representations’, p. 10; Sutton, ‘Remembering’, pp. 219–20; Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 20; Craik, ‘On the Making of Episodes’, p. 43l. 24. Norman E. Spear, ‘Retrieval: Properties and Effects’, in Roediger et al., eds, Science of Memory, pp. 215–19 (216–17); Smith and Queller, ‘Mental Representations’, pp. 13–14. 25. Craik, ‘On the Making of Episodes’, pp. 55–6; Strauss and Quinn, Cognitive Theory, p. 47; Koriat, Goldsmith, and Pansky, ‘Memory Accuracy’, p. 496. Koriat et al. quote S. T. Fiske: the rememberer is ‘a motivational tactician, choosing among a number of possible strategies, depending on current goals’ (‘Social Cognition and Social Perception’, AnRevPsych 44 (1993), pp. 155–94 (172)). 26. Craik, ‘On the Making of Episodes’, p. 55. Paul DiMaggio labels this phenomenon ‘deliberative cognition’ (‘Culture and Cognition’, ARS 23 (1997), pp. 263–87 (271)). Paul Thompson says that ‘accurate memory is much more likely when it meets a social interest and need’ (The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edn, 2000), p. 132). 27. Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), p. 179; also Craik, ‘On the Making of Episodes’, pp. 53–4; Strauss and Quinn, Cognitive Theory, p. 93. 28. DiMaggio, ‘Culture and Cognition’, p. 271; also Welzer: ‘Emotions are key operators in memory formation; with their help experiences are evaluated as good, bad, neutral etc., and correspondingly encoded in memory’ (Gedächtnis, p. 136). See also Schmidt on the emotional, affective dimension of cognitive schemas (Kognitive Autonomie, p. 170).

The Formation of the Synoptic Tradition

77

will be more frequently recollected and ruminated, further strengthening the connections of the schematic patterns in which they are encoded.29 Let us pause to take stock. Rather than getting caught in the trap of talking about ‘individual memory’ we have looked at the cognitive aspects of memory formation. Thus we have avoided dead-end dichotomies and seen ways that the cognitive operations of memory intersect with cultural media. Though we are still a long way from being able to talk about the formation of a tradition, we have begun to see overlap between memories as cognitive artefacts and tradition forms as a cultural artefacts: schematic, scripted structure; the filtering out of masses of detail; convergence upon salient elements within generic spatio-temporal contexts. Both memories and tradition are economical bearers of judgements, evaluations and affects. The enactment of tradition and the recollection of memories occur in and for present contexts. We will see now that when memories are externalized into the social realm through communication, they rise to a still more tangible level of culturally mediated, narrative expression.

Memory in Communications Media: Genres, Gattungen, Forms Memories are socially mediated through communication. To this end, memories are conformed to formulaic and narrative patterns drawn from the repertoire of genres cognitively absorbed from the ambient culture. Genres are ‘simultaneously cognitive and communicative schemata’ that serve as ‘supra-individual organizational prototypes, cognitive programs that function inter-subjectively’. By mediating between the cognitive realm and the social realm, genres make successful social interaction and communication possible.30 Moreover, genres act back upon cognition: memory encoding and consolidation occur in and through communication.31 Memory, Brunner and Feldman explain, ‘become[s] public by being based on narrative properties such as genre and plot type that are widely shared within a culture. … In this way private experiences … are constituted

29. Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 21. 30. Schmidt, Kognitive Autonomie, p. 170; also Strauss and Quinn, Cognitive Theory, p. 49, and Astrid Erll and Klaudia Seibel, ‘Gattungen, Formtraditionen und kulturelles Gedächtnis’, in Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies (ed. V. Nünning and A. Nünning; Weimar: Metzler, 2004), pp. 180–208 (189). 31. Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 98; William Hirst and David Manier, ‘Remembering as Communication: A Family Recounts Its Past’, in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (ed. David C. Rubin; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 271– 90 (271); similarly Qi Wang and Michael Ross, ‘Culture and Memory’, in Kitayama and Cohen, eds, Handbook of Cultural Psychology, pp. 645–67 (661), noting how pre-linguistic children fail to form enduring memories.

78

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

meaningfully into a public and communicable form.’32 Welzer puts the point as follows: ‘Interpersonal conversations act as filters, helping to select out from the diffuse elements of perception what gets encoded in memory and later recalled. It is in inter-personal communication that perceptions receive a structured, cohering form in memory – a form that also facilitates recollection.’33 As internalized cognitive schemas, genres contribute to reducing diffuse experience to mnemonically efficient organization. They filter for salience and contribute to the distillation of affective, moral and conceptual signification.34 Oral historian Paul Thompson cites the example of retired Turinese workers who had been active in socialist movements. When sharing their memories, they ‘adopted the traditional form of a life-story similar to that used for saints … and some of them even referred to this “self-hagiography” as “my confession”’.35 Input to cognition from the social world frequently is already shaped by cultural patterns, scripts and genres; hence this is not a matter of cognition impressing cultural and conceptual form upon wholly amorphous perceptual data. Cultural genres stabilize unstable cognitive processes, and owing to their dedicated communicative functions they give memories intelligible and durable form.36 Ruben Zimmermann points out the obvious connection to tradition formation: ‘Genres, as the cultural media of memory, fulfill a key function in tradition-formation [eine traditionsstiftende Funktion].’37 The communication genres implicated in the cognitive formation and articulation of memory belong

32. Jerome Bruner and Carol Fleisher Feldman, ‘Group Narrative as a Cultural Context of Autobiography’, in Rubin, ed., Remembering Our Past, pp. 291–317 (293). 33. Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 98. 34. Schmidt, Kognitive Autonomie, p. 168; Carol Fleisher Feldman, ‘Genres as Mental Models’, in Psychoanalysis and Development: Representations and Narratives (ed. Massimo Ammaniti and Daniel Stern; New York: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 111–22 (117); also Erll and Seibel, ‘Gattungen’, pp. 190–1. 35. Thompson, Voice of the Past, pp. 277–8; also Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 86. 36. Schmidt, Kognitive Autonomie, p. 168. ‘Memory latency’ refers to memory in an unactualized state. As Vittoria Borsò points out, there is more to memory than what is brought to a public, communicable form (‘Gedächtnis und Medialität: Die Herausforderung der Alterität. Eine medienphilosophische und medienhistorische Perspektivierung des GedächtnisBegriffs’, in Medialität und Gedächtnis: interdisziplinäre Beiträge zur kulturellen Verarbeitung europäischer Krisen (ed. Vittoria Borsò et al.; Weimar: Metzler, 2001), pp. 23–54 (53)). See also Aleida and Jan Assmann’s distinction between ‘lived-in’ and ‘un-lived-in (unbewohnte) memories’ (‘Das Gestern im Heute: Medien und soziales Gedächtnis’, in Merton et al., eds, Wirklichkeit der Medien, pp. 114–40 (122). 37. Ruben Zimmermann, ‘Gleichnisse als Medien der Jesuserinnerung: Die Historizität der Jesusparabeln im Horizont der Gedächtnisforschung’, Hermeneutik der Gleichnisse Jesu: Methodische Neuansätze zum Verstehen urchristlicher Parabeltexte (ed. Ruben Zimmerman; WUNT, 231; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2008), pp. 87–121 (109).

The Formation of the Synoptic Tradition

79

to the repertoire of cultural genres and narrative scripts one also finds in a body of tradition. Naturally, we are still some way from describing the emergence of a normative body of tradition. Our next step, therefore, is to discover something about the emergence of shared memories within groups.

From ‘Collaborative Remembering’ to Tradition Artefacts Researchers increasingly take the view that what is called ‘collaborative remembering’ is best studied in genuine communities and not in nominal subject groups constituted ad hoc for lab experiments.38 Analysis has shown, for example, that when collaborative remembering occurs in actual communities, the problem of social contagion – false memories of one member infecting the memories of all the members – ‘is greatly reduced or even eliminated’.39 Community identity, moreover, is grounded in a shared past. Remembering is therefore a high-stakes activity: commemoration.40 Family memory is a diagnostic case. Welzer explains: ‘The actualization, in the present, of a family’s past is no superficial relating of experiences and events. Rather, it is always a common praxis that serves to mark out the family as a group defined by its special history.’41 The social and emotional bonds that constitute communities, Wang points out, are particularly dependent upon commemorative practices.42 Groups therefore employ specific strategies to subsume individual recollections into shared representations.43 These representations, however, display emergent rather than additive properties. That is, rather than just being an aggregate of individual recollections, they distil out the existential and moral significance of experienced events into integral, shared representations that give expression to distinguishing ethos of the commemorating community.44 By the same token, emergent representations therefore overcome the limitations of unreflective, notoriously unstable eyewitness recollections with their fragmented, episodic, idiosyncratic perspectives. Commemorative remembering converges on elements salient to the moral and cultural (or subcultural) identity of the community; hence it is a simple

38. C. B. Harris, H. M. Paterson and R. I. Kemp, ‘Collaborative Recall and Collective Memory: What Happens When We Remember Together’, Memory 16 (2008), pp. 213–30 (223). 39. Sutton, Harris and Keil, ‘Psychology of Memory’, pp. 548–9. 40. Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 151. 41. Ibid. 42. Qi Wang, ‘On the Cultural Constitution of Collective Memory’, Memory 16 (2008), pp. 305–17 (309). 43. Sutton, Harris and Keil, ‘Psychology of Memory’, pp. 547–8; see Lyn M. van Swol, ‘Performance and Process in Collective and Individual Memory: The Role of Social Decision Schemes and Memory Bias in Collective Memory’, Memory 16 (2008), pp. 274–87 (275). 44. Sutton, Harris and Keil, ‘Psychology of Memory’, pp. 547–8.

80

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

matter of course that discrete individual recollections with their particularistic, episodic elements get filtered out.45 Commemorative remembering interacts, moreover, with the wider cultural field of symbols, master narratives, genres and topoi. These shape emergent representations, deeply infusing them with cultural signification and intelligibility.46 Here we are coming within view of a normative tradition, mediated in conventional cultural forms, emerging out of commemorative remembering. In the anthropological literature one occasionally finds real-time descriptions of this process. Maurice Bloch’s sudden return to his adoptive Madagascar village after an absence of three years triggered an explanatory crisis for the community: his unexplained absence had to be given moral intelligibility in a culturally scripted way. Shortly after his return, his adoptive village family hosted a series of formal social calls by individual residents of the village, during which Bloch recounted the story of his departure and return. He found that members of the family were actively coaxing his iterations of the narrative into a stereotyped, condensed and increasingly invariable form. He explains: At every repetition what I could say and could not say became clearer and clearer.  … This [emergent narrative] transformed the total arbitrariness of my coming … into an apparently inevitable and morally appropriate sequence. … The narrative was very poor on information but very strong on the reestablishment of order. … The construction of the narrative abolished the specificity of time by reordering and making the past follow a predefined pattern [and] it did this by dissolving the specificity of events into a prototypical present.47

The script enacted by the narrative conformed to the Tantara genre, a story that emphasizes morally significant elements of a past event at the expense of specific details and thus takes on timeless, exemplary qualities.48 Elizabeth Tonkin notes that the harrowing experiences of the British paratrooper William Deakin, who

45. Harris, Paterson and Kemp, ‘Collaborative Recall’, pp. 225–6; DiMaggio, ‘Culture and Cognition’, p. 271. Rosalind Thomas (Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989)) analyzes how in ancient Athens family tradition ‘grows up from the reminiscences of one relative to another’ (97). Along the way, ‘casual reminiscences’ related to the salient event fall away as those aspects of the memories that resonate with the moral traditions of the polis move to the fore (118). 46. Elaine Reese and Robyn Fivush, ‘The Development of Collective Remembering’, Memory 16 (2008), pp. 201–12 (202); also Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts, p. 60; and Erll, Memory in Culture, p. 106: ‘The creation of collective-autobiographical memories always takes place against the backdrop of existing cultural semantics.’ 47. Maurice E. F. Bloch, How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), pp. 104–5. 48. Bloch, How We Think They Think, p. 108: ‘What the Malagasy stress most about Tantara is its categorical “truth” which also conveys its moral value.’

The Formation of the Synoptic Tradition

81

parachuted into Montenegro to assist Yugoslav partisans, were cast by the locals into the ‘existing rhetoric’ of the ‘local epic tradition’.49 The anthropologist Liisa Malkki observed tradition formation occurring in real time in refugee camps in Tanzania, among Hutu who had just fled from the genocide in Burundi: Accounts of these key events very quickly circulated among the refugees, and, often, in a matter of days, acquired what can be characterized as ‘standard versions’ in the telling and retelling. … They were accounts which, while becoming increasingly formulaic, also became more didactic and progressively more implicated in, and indicative of, something beyond them.50

These became ‘moral ordering stories’ in the post-genocide moral universe of the refugees.51 We see that tradition artefacts, emerging out of commemorative enterprises, function as cultural symbols: dense concentrations of social and moral signification, freed of all but the barest historical contextualization, stabilized in expressive media forms. Symbols – to use Sapir’s definition – are ‘condensations’ of meaning, or in Geertz’s fuller formulation, ‘vehicles for a conception … abstractions from experience fixed in perceptible forms, concrete embodiments of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs’.52 Tradition artefacts are symbolic entities that express and disseminate, or as Jan Assmann puts it, make ‘visible … permanent, and transmittable’, the defining elements of a community’s moral universe.53 Here let us pause again to take stock. Evolutionary biologist Merlin Donald remarks on the apparent ‘simplicity’ of the ‘underlying cognitive processes that support the emergence of complex human cultural features’.54 Having started with cognitive processes in the formation of memory we find ourselves, without crossing

49. Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts, p. 60: ‘The teller “codes” memories or reports of remembered events into existent stereotopic forms.’ 50. Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 106. Jan Vansina writes, ‘Group traditions can be created quite rapidly after the events and acquire a form which strikingly makes such a tradition part of a complex of traditions’ (Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 20). 51. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 244. See also Wang, ‘Cultural Constitution’, p. 309. 52. Edward Sapir, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949), p. 564; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 91. 53. Jan Assmann, ‘Form as Mnemonic Device: Cultural Texts and Cultural Memory’, in Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark (ed. Richard A. Horsley et al.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), pp. 67–82 (70). 54. Merlin Donald, ‘Hominid Enculturation and Cognitive Evolution’, in Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage (ed. Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre; Cambridge: MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998), pp. 7–18 (13).

82

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

any great divide, in the external realm of cultural artefacts, and more precisely, of a normative tradition. We are now in a position to enquire more fully into the converse effects of mediated cultural artefacts back upon cognitive processes.

Cognitive-Cultural Coupling: Tradition as Cybernetic Memory ‘Cognitive-cultural coupling’ is shorthand for the ways in which neurobiological cognition co-opts cultural artefacts to greatly extend its capacities. ‘Brain-artefact interface’ is Malafouris’s term for the phenomenon.55 ‘The very simplest cases [of cognitive-cultural coupling]’, writes Andy Clark, ‘are those that involve the use of external symbolic media to offload memory onto the world’.56 Consolidating memory representationally in external media – ‘exograms’, in Merlin Donald’s coinage57 – drastically reduces the cognitive load on the brain. These symbolic artefacts in turn are cycled right into the internal cognitive apparatus: they take on a cognitive existence and functionality. The case of language, a symbolic cultural artefact, nicely illustrates this phenomenon. Clark explains: Understanding language … involves getting to grips with a special kind of coordination dynamics: one in which the actual material structures of public language … play a key and irreducible role … involving a complex interplay between internal biological resources and external non-biological resources. Language … occupies a wonderfully ambiguous position on any hybrid cognitive stage, since it seems to straddle the internal-external borderline itself, looking one moment like any other piece of biological equipment, and at the next like a particularly potent piece of external cognitive scaffolding.58

This is a matter of ‘the complementary action of actual material symbols (and the image-like encodings of such symbols) and more biologically basic modes of internal representation’.59

55. Malafouris, ‘Brain-Artefact Interface’, pp. 264–73. 56. Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 201. 57. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 315–16. 58. Andy Clark, ‘Material Symbols’, PhilPsych 19 (2006), pp. 291–307 (293). 59. Clark, ‘Material Symbols’, p. 304; John Sutton makes a similar point: ‘Neither … must artefacts operate in precisely the same way as brains do nor exactly mimic neural processing profiles’ (‘Material Agency, Skills, and History: Distributed Cognition and the Archeology of Memory’, in Material Agency: Toward a Non-anthropocentric Approach (ed. C. Knappett and L. Malafouris; New York: Springer, 2007), pp. 37–55 (41)).

The Formation of the Synoptic Tradition

83

Tradition is likewise a symbolically dense cultural artefact, emerging out of cognitive processes, and circulating in oral, written, ritual and material media. In its rehearsal and enactment it acts recursively back upon the neural plasticity of the brain. This brings about, as Malafouris describes it, an ‘extensive structural rewiring either by fine-tuning of existing brain pathways or by generating new connections within brain regions’.60 The cognitive effect, Clark explains, is to ‘drive, sculpt, and discipline the internal representational regime’.61 Memory engrams are relatively unstable: a matter of reconstructive pattern completion across plastic and associative neural networks constituted by variable connection weights. These connection weights, however, can be strengthened. Encounters with external memory representations, mediated in stable cultural formats, shape and stabilize the corresponding neurobiological memory networks.62 The result is enduring modifications to one’s cognitive apparatus.63 In fact the commemorative production and dissemination of tradition artefacts is a cultural strategy for stabilizing and thereby ensuring the transmission of salient memory. These materials, moreover, are now immanent to cognitive operations in the stabilized representational format afforded by their cultural mediation.64 Tradition is an exemplary case of cognitivecultural coupling. It emerges as a set of meaning-laden forms out of cognitive

60. Malafouris, ‘Brain-Artefact Interface’, p. 266; similarly Sutton, ‘Material Agency’, pp. 37–8; Andy Clark, ‘Word, Niche, and Super-Niche: How Language Makes Minds Matter More’, Theoria 54 (2005), pp. 655–68 (264). 61. Clark, ‘Word, Niche, and Super-Niche’, p. 264. A word should be said here about the contemporary debate among cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind (with members of both disciplines found on both sides of the debate) over the problems of ‘cognitivism’. Cognitivism is the attempt to explain meaning, abstraction and symbolic capacities reductively as neurological states (‘embodied cognition’). The problem is how meaning, that is, symbolic representation, which involves abstraction and intentionality, can be grounded in neurological, physical, states. A good introduction to this debate is Antoni Gomila, ‘Mending or Abandoning Cognitivism?’, in Meaning and Cognition (ed. Manuel de Vega; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 357–74. Closely related is the running debate between Clark, Sutton and others who take the ‘extended mind’ position, and critics such as Adams and Aizawa who question whether external artefacts can bear the ‘mark of the cognitive’, and to what extent posited cognitive-cultural couplings are empirically tractable (Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa, ‘Defending the Bounds of Cognition’, in The Extended Mind (ed. Richard Menary; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), pp. 67–81). 62. John Sutton, ‘Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process’, in Menary, ed., The Extended Mind, pp. 189–225 (205). 63. Sutton, ‘Remembering’, p. 229; also Clark, Being There, pp. 61, 198–9; Edwin Hutchins, ‘Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends’, JPrag 37 (2005), pp. 1555–77 (1575). 64. Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew, ‘The Cognitive Life of Things: Archaeology, Material Engagement, and the Extended Mind’, in The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind (ed. Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew; Cambridge: MacDonald Institute of Archaeology, 2010), pp. 1–12 (6–7).

84

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

memory processes and circulates externally in various media forms apt for cycling back into cognition. Tradition can with justice be called cybernetic memory.

Whatever Happened to the Eyewitness Memories? Our discussion thus far has been carried out very much at the theoretical level. We can pause here to look at a problem that directly connects our theorizing to the Synoptic tradition: the absence in the tradition of recognizable traces of individual eyewitness testimony, an issue in recent years taken up again in studies by R. Bauckham, R. McIver, and others.65 This absence seems to confirm the categorical distinction that form criticism made between memory and the tradition, between the individual and the social.66 Cognitive-cultural coupling allows us to give an economical explanation of this absence and at the same time confirms the sound intuition that, in some manner, memory must have been a principal factor in the origins of the tradition. The reason is that tradition, through its neural assimilation, displaces individual eyewitness memory; in other words, tradition becomes the cognitive basis for individual recollection. This displacement effect, or more accurately, inhibition effect, has been observed in empirical studies. In one, a group was given the task of collaborative remembering of shared experiences. In subsequent individual recall the participants easily retrieved the collaboratively reconstructed memories. But now they had difficulty retrieving their personal recollections that had not been taken up into these shared representations. In other words, individual recollection converges on shared representations.67 Subjects in another experiment learned information from two domains but then rehearsed the information from just one of those domains. Unsurprisingly, they best recalled information from the rehearsed domain. But the ‘surprising and robust finding’ was that memory for ‘unrehearsed information from the same domain as the information that was rehearsed is now worse than the information from the (other) domain that wasn’t rehearsed at all’. In other words, ‘retrieving some information … induces forgetting of associated information … as a result of either interference or inhibition’.68 Commemorative remembering in a community is a powerful means of reinforcement; it has ‘enduring and transformative effects on the participants’ individual memories, which converge on the same shared representation of the

65. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, MI; and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2006); R. McIver, Memory, Jesus, and the Synoptic Gospels (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2011). (For analysis of these and other recent discussions of memory in the Synoptic tradition, see the preceding chapter in this book.) 66. See, for example, Dennis E. Nineham, ‘Eyewitness Testimony and the Gospel Tradition’, JTS n.s. 9 (1958), pp. 13–25, 243–52; JTS n.s. 11 (1960), pp. 253–64. 67. Harris, Paterson and Kemp, ‘Collaborative Recall’, p. 220. 68. Sutton, Harris, and Keil, ‘Psychology of Memory’, p. 545.

The Formation of the Synoptic Tradition

85

past’.69 Through commemorative rehearsal, tradition artefacts take on a stable cognitive existence, displacing, overwriting or fine-tuning an individual’s unstable and less integrated personal memory traces.70 This cognitive phenomenon has a value-added cultural effect. It clears away the clutter of a person’s less relevant individual memory traces. Conversely, it selects for salience: the constitutive elements of shared representations are those that are highly salient to the identity of the groups that rehearse them.71 Tradition becomes the cognitive basis for memory, and in becoming the cognitive basis for memory, tradition becomes the cognitive basis of an individual’s cultural identity.72 Solitary individual remembering is exchanged for participation in a moral community formed by a shared past. Culturally acquired schemas are already active in the formation of individual memories, so the distinction between the two is already indistinct. Moreover, the transmutation and eliding of individual memories in commemorative remembering, and then the assimilation of the shared representations back into individual cognition, confirms the symbiotic relationship between episodic memory (recollection of specific events, times, places) and semantic memory (generalized, acquired knowledge). It shows how memory and tradition can be intimately connected; at the same time it accounts for why the Synoptic tradition displays none of the properties of individual episodic memory.73 Cognitive displacement does not mean that an eyewitness’s personal memories are erased. Under other conditions, not regulated by the commemorative Sitz, and with the appropriate cues, such individuals might well be capable of remembering in the genre of an ad hoc personal account.74 But the latter has little cultural value. It does not carry in itself the symbolic weight and significance of events. It is transient, except as it has been taken up into the tradition of the community.

69. Ibid., p. 546; see also Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 99. 70. Loveday Alexander points to this phenomenon in Xenophon’s Life of Socrates: ‘Xenophon could justly claim to be writing on the basis of his own personal recollection of Socrates. But a glance at Xenophon’s work makes it clear … that even within one generation, memory, however personal in origin, is already molded by the literary forms and expectations of the larger society’ (‘Memory and Tradition in the Hellenistic Schools’, in Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (ed. Werner H. Kelber and Samuel Byrskog; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), pp. 113–53 (121)). 71. Lynn Hasher, ‘Inhibition: Attentional Regulation of Cognition’, in Roediger et al., eds, Science of Memory, pp. 291–4 (292). 72. Strauss and Quinn, Cognitive Theory, p. 123. 73. Moreover, if the history of the Synoptic tradition proceeded, as form criticism supposed, without a vital connection to memory, but was formed by extensive de novo creation and importation of materials, the absence in it of traces of eyewitness recollection would on cognitive grounds be inexplicable, for such a tradition would not be capable of displacing individual memory. 74. Bloch, How We Think They Think, 107–8.

86

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Hence eyewitnesses themselves might not attribute much importance to their personal memories.

Tradition as an Autonomous Cognitive System The media forms of a tradition, cognitively internalized, stabilize and shape neurobiological memory processes. We have seen that tradition artefacts are meaning-laden symbolic entities. The assimilation of tradition into memory creates the conditions for higher-order cognitive operations (conceptual and moral reasoning) utilizing this internalized system of symbols.75 Stability of mental representations is essential to advanced cognition.76 Tradition formation is a process of abstracting normative elements and patterns from originating realities and resolving these into simple representational wholes, in turn cycled back into memory. The effect, as Terrence Deacon puts it, is an ‘increasingly indirect linkage between symbolic mental representation and its grounds of reference’.77 Clark describes this as ‘fix[ing] the ideas at a high level of abstraction from the idiosyncratic details of their proximal origins in sensory input’.78 The indirect, representational relationship of the tradition to its historical grounds vastly reduces the load on memory and by the same token greatly extends the scope for cognitive operations – now directly with the tradition. As symbolic entities, tradition artefacts operate at two levels of reference: indirectly and implicitly to their empirical (i.e. historical) referents, but directly with one another as a configurable system of symbols.79 This is the much-remarked autonomy of the tradition. Tradition maintains its indexical reference to historical realities but operates free from them, at what Deacon calls a ‘superordinate’ level. Tradition amounts to symbolic mediation of the past: it subsumes normative elements of the past freed of all but barest spatio-temporal contextualization. This intensifies the cultural effects of the formative historical realities exponentially. Tradition’s decoupling from its originating contexts is what renders it capable of ongoing normative engagement with the shifting historical and social horizons of its tradent communities. It frees cognition from being tied down to laborious and pointless recapitulation of past events in all their diffuse detail. Higher-order

75. Clark, ‘Word, Niche, and Super-niche’, pp. 263–4; Clark, Being There, p. 209. 76. Edwin Hutchins, ‘Material Anchors’, p. 1557. E. J. Lowe argues that symbols are artefacts that represent and embody concepts, and thus enable abstract thought and analysis (‘Personal Experience and Belief: the Significance of External Symbolic Storage for the Emergence of Modern Human Cognition’, in Renfrew and Scarre, eds, Cognition and Material Culture, pp. 89–96). 77. Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York and London: Norton, 1997), p. 454. 78. Clark, Being There, p. 210. 79. Deacon, Symbolic Species, pp. 301–2.

The Formation of the Synoptic Tradition

87

cognitive operations can now be performed with this stable yet versatile system of symbolic representations.80 In short, it is by virtue of its autonomy, its coalescing in mnemonically efficient, durable representational forms loosened from originating historical contexts, and made proof against the vagaries of individual memory, that tradition is able to operate, much like language itself, as an internally ordered, superordinate system of symbols, as a living cognitive system, the elements of which are capable of being brought into new combinations and mobilized to meet new challenges that arise with shifts in a community’s historical and social horizons. Tradition makes it possible for a community to engage in higherorder cognitive reflection on present predicaments. It makes available the moral resources for comprehending and mastering present realities; thereby it ensures the transmission of a cultural identity.

Oral and Written Cultural Media The oral medium and the written medium extend cognition in overlapping but different ways. Rubin has shown that the genres of an oral tradition are mnemonic systems of cues and constraints that exploit memory’s cognitive efficiencies for ease of mental encoding and activation.81 The stabilization afforded when a tradition is disseminated in a material, visual medium – such as writing – opens it up to a more complex range of cognitive operations. ‘Problems that are too complex to hold in mind as a cultural model’, Hutchins states, ‘can be expressed and manipulated in material structure.’82 Clark elaborates on the effects of writing on cognition: By writing down our ideas we generate a trace in a format that opens up a range of new possibilities. We can then inspect and re-inspect the same ideas. … We can hold the original ideas steady … and safely experiment with subtle alterations. We can store them in ways that allow us to compare and combine them with other complexes of ideas. … The real properties of the physical text transform the space of possible thoughts.83

80. Hutchins, ‘Material Anchors’, pp. 1573–4. 81. David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-Out Rhymes (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995): ‘Oral tradition must, therefore, have developed forms of organization (i.e., rules, redundancies, constraints) and strategies to decrease the changes that human memory imposes on the more casual transmission of verbal material’ (p. 10). 82. Hutchins, ‘Material Anchors’, p. 1574. 83. Clark, Being There, p. 208; similarly Robert A. Wilson and Andy Clark, ‘How to Situate Cognition: Letting Nature Take Its Course’, in Robbins and Aydede, eds, Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, pp. 55–77 (64).

88

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Even here though a still deeper level of cognitive interface with material artefacts becomes possible. Hutchins continues: A final turn in this path is that when a material structure becomes very familiar, it may be possible to imagine the material structure when it is not present in the environment. It is even possible to imagine systematic transformations applied to such a representation. … Beginning as external representations physically embodied and operated on with manual skills, we learn to imagine them and to operate on the imagined structures.84

In other words, written artefacts can themselves be internalized and operationalized in memory. For those interested in the written transmission of the Jesus tradition this brings to mind scribal competencies and practices, though we cannot pursue that line of enquiry here.85

Making Sense of the Synoptic Tradition We have approached the formation of the Synoptic tradition by stepping back and reflecting upon tradition as a cognitive and cultural phenomenon. Naturally, we cannot go back and observe the emergence of the tradition. But its profile indicates that it owes its formation to the cognitive and cultural operations just described. We have been able to account for two of its most striking features – its lack of traces of eyewitness testimony, and its remarkable autonomy (recognized but misunderstood by the form critics). The cognitive/cultural model would also predict that the forms of the tradition correspond to different Jewish and Hellenistic genres, such as the chreia, and also its shaping and deep colouring by the ‘Great Tradition’, that is, its permeation by the ambient biblical (and ancient Jewish) narrative and moral tradition. Commemorative remembering, the matrix for an emergent tradition, always occurs within the wider field of cultural signification, a cognitive process facilitated by the dynamism of neurological networks: the rapid forming of associative connections between new memory patterns and established ones. Indeed, the Jesus tradition is so deeply networked into scriptural and related cultural tradition that the boundaries between them are often difficult to draw. Cognitive analysis calls into question one-sidedly homeostatic views of the tradition – of the sort that make out the Synoptic tradition to be largely the product of contemporizing theological and social interests and its connection to the past little more than an ideological construct. Cultural schemas, artefacts and

84. Hutchins, ‘Material Anchors’, p. 1575; also Clark, Being There, pp. 198–9; Malafouris, ‘Cognitive Basis of Material Engagement’, p. 57. 85. See Alan Kirk, Q in Matthew: Ancient Media, Memory, and Early Scribal Transmission of the Jesus Tradition (LNTS 564; London: Bloomsbury/Clark, 2016).

The Formation of the Synoptic Tradition

89

representations shape cognition at a deep level. These cultural patterns take on a deep-seated neuronal existence.86 Innovation can only occur along the lines of these existing cognitive patterns; otherwise it will fail to get any cognitive traction, any cognitive foothold for intelligibility, in the tradent group. ‘Even when intent on reinventing themselves’, Strauss and Quinn observe, ‘people do not pluck new cultural forms out of the air. … New forms are still always incorporated, rejected and remade in terms of previous schemas.’87 Present realities are only cognizable through existing cultural schemas: tradent communities think and act through their tradition. The Synoptic tradition can therefore scarcely be reduced to a byproduct of sociological processes at work in community Sitze. The cognitive/cultural model also helps account for the tradition’s curious patterns of variation and agreement. The stabilization that tradition affords to memory does not cancel the context sensitivity of memory activation. Rather, it disciplines and channels it. What Clark says of the cognitive effect of language can similarly be stipulated of the cultural language of tradition: Streams of words act as reliable signposts to recovered meanings, while still allowing those meanings to shift and color according to context. Sustaining this balance between rote retrieval and anarchic context-sensitivity is … the key trick that public language performs for minds like ours.88

Strauss and Quinn characterize neural network activity grounded in cultural schemas as ‘regulated improvisation’: improvisational because reactivations of neural patterns are always context-sensitive; regulated because these activations ‘are guided by previously learned patterns of associations’.89 This nicely describes how tradition brings the normative weight of the past to bear upon contemporary exigencies of the tradent community, and it is a principal factor for the rise of patterns of variation and agreement in the tradition. A cognitive and cultural approach to the history of the tradition also gives new leverage on source-critical problems. We noted briefly that the cognitive assimilation of written artefacts, and their operationalization as memory artefacts, connects to well-attested scribal practices. This suggests that Synoptic sourcecritical problems might become more tractable if reframed within a scribal Sitz. Finally, when Luke or Matthew transpose the order of Markan episodes, or when John displaces the Temple Cleansing from the end to the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry, they are treating their tradition as a configurable, autonomous system of symbols. At the same time, it is the connection of this system of symbols to its grounds in the formative past that licenses actions of this sort and indeed makes them possible.

86. 87. 88. 89.

Strauss and Quinn, Cognitive Theory, p. 90. Ibid., pp. 25–6. Clark, ‘Word, Niche, and Super-Niche’, p. 264. Strauss and Quinn, Cognitive Theory, p. 54.

90

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Conclusion We began by noting initiatives in a number of disciplines to overcome the dichotomy of the individual and the social, the cognitive and the cultural, a dichotomy that has also been a defining feature of the form-critical model for the history of the tradition. The Synoptic tradition is a paradigm case of cognitivecultural interface, ‘a privileged area’ (to borrow Bloch’s words) ‘for seeing how public, historically created cultural representations join private representations’.90 Without gainsaying the enduring importance of many of the insights of form criticism, it is hoped that this analysis has contributed to putting our models for the origins and history of the tradition on more solid theoretical ground.

90. Bloch, How We Think They Think, p. 82. In this respect the analysis has contributed, I hope, something to the critique of the much-in-vogue neurobiological reductionist programme, what Sutton describes as the ‘narrower forms of evolutionary psychology’ (‘Exograms’, p. 192), and Malafouris as the ‘sterile neurocentrism’ that reduces cultural and cognitive phenomena to neuroimaging scans of brain activity (‘Brain-Artefact Interface’, p. 270).

Part II M EMORY AND M ANUSCRIPT

Chapter 6 MEMORY AND MANUSCRIPT: GERHARDSSON REVISITED*

Birger Gerhardsson’s concern was for a history of the tradition grounded ancient cultural practices. This in turn led him to assign memory the crucial operational role in the tradition’s origins and transmission. In so doing he anticipated important contemporary developments in the humanities and social sciences, where memory has become a dominant research paradigm.1 This is all the more remarkable given that Memory and Manuscript appeared a time when scholarship, dominated by form criticism, had all but discounted the memory factor. Gerhardsson criticized the form critics and their followers, sometimes to the point of exasperation, for failing to ground their account of the tradition adequately in ancient cultural practices.2 In fact, the form critics’ lack of interest in locating their model for the tradition plausibly in ancient milieus and the absence of memory from their theorizing were closely connected. Opposing eschatological to historical consciousness, Bultmann held that orientation to the past arose in the primitive Christian communities only secondarily, in consequence of the exhaustion of eschatological enthusiasm. Orientation to the past, and with it conscious traditioning activities, were therefore not significant factors in the formative period of the gospel tradition.3 It followed that the gospel tradition was mostly the reflection of the present, enthusiastic life of the eschatological communities. The form critics and their followers could assume, moreover, that the Umwelt offered few points of contact with early Christian traditioning activities;

* Originally published in Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (ed. Samuel Byrskog and Werner H. Kelber; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press,  2008), pp. 155–72. Used by permission. 1. Werner H. Kelber, ‘The Works of Memory: Christian Origins as Mnemo-History – a Response’, in Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity (ed. Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher; Semeia Studies 52; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2005), pp. 221–48 (222). 2. Birger Gerhardsson, Tradition and Transmission in Early Christianity (ConBNT, 20; Lund and Copenhagen: Gleerup and Munksgaard, 1964), pp. 6–7, 47; idem, The Origins of the Gospel Traditions (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), pp. 8–9. 3. Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology (Edinburgh: At the University Press, 1975), pp. 37–9.

94

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

the gospel tradition had to be approached as virtually sui generis, as Kleinliteratur, by definition lacking significant analogies in ancient cultural practices. This model, which became a cognitive schema in gospel scholarship, explains not just the striking absence of memory from contemporary theorizing on the history of the tradition, but also the curious indifference of scholarship influenced by form criticism, in the face of challenges such as Gerhardsson’s, to provide historical and cultural grounding for its views.4 Gerhardsson’s recognition that memory – that is, orientation to a normative past – and the corresponding cultivation of tradition are constitutive of viable communities is now axiomatic in studies on the social and cultural aspects of memory. Gerhardsson’s original working conception of memory is also due, however, for some critical reassessment in the light of advances in the research. We will work through Gerhardsson’s understanding of the operations of memory in the cultivation of tradition, identify its limitations, in particular its weak grasp of ancient media realities, while showing how memory in its cultural, social and cognitive dimensions is indeed the principal factor in the formation and transmission of the gospel tradition.

Rethinking the Framework: Memory in Ancient Education Gerhardsson’s model for the memory factor in tradition is memorization of more or less fixed texts through repetition, the latter also being the mechanism of transmission.5 This model is reminiscent of the replication of fixed texts associated with the written medium, and Gerhardsson in fact will defend taking the paradigm of written fixation as his point of departure. Though the focus of his discussion is rabbinic practices, Gerhardsson argues that similar practices may be predicated more generally of Jewish Palestine in the Second Temple period. Contrary to the way his work has sometimes been caricatured, Gerhardsson develops a reasoned justification for the rabbinic analogy, namely, by locating rabbinic techniques in their essentials within ancient educational practices in general: The learning by heart of basic texts; the principle that ‘learning comes before understanding’; the attempt to memorize the teacher’s ipsissima verba; the

4. Morton Smith’s review of Memory and Manuscript is a case in point. After criticizing Gerhardsson’s reasoned analogy with rabbinic traditioning practices, Smith, oblivious to the irony, posits ‘the sermon’ as the origins of the tradition without any attempt to describe, concretely and historically, how tradition as a tangible cultural artefact might have coalesced out of preaching (‘A Comparison of Early Christian and Early Rabbinic Tradition’, JBL 82 (1963), pp. 169–76 (174). 5. Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI; and Livonia: Eerdmans and Dove, 1998 (reprint 1961)), pp. 81, 144.

Memory and Manuscript: Gerhardsson Revisited

95

condensation of material into short, pregnant texts; the use of mnemonic technique … the frequent repetition of memorized material. … In almost every case the basis is provided by … popular educational practice.6

In other words, rabbinic memory practice is a plausible analogy for Jesus’s own practice and for early Christian cultivation of tradition because it was simply a permutation of educational techniques widespread in the ancient world. Drilled memorization of written works with classic status and their recitation from memory was the central pedagogical feature of Hellenistic education from the elementary level to the advanced rhetorical level.7 Moreover, Gerhardsson argues, there is little evidence of any alternative model; these were ‘the ancient forms of oral instruction and oral transmission’.8 Hellenistic education, he claims, was widely diffused, with schools attested for Palestine ‘centuries before Christ’.9 This parallel and ‘highly organised school system’ of Jewish schools developed in Palestine from the time of the Maccabees.10 Though attendance was not universal, ‘we may be quite sure that at the time of the fall of the Temple there were private elementary schools in all the Jewish towns of Palestine’.11 These schools mirrored the Hellenistic curriculum, Gerhardsson argues, with less qualified soferim, which he takes to be the counterparts of the Hellenistic grammatici, providing elementary education based on Torah-memorization to children in synagogue congregations in the bet sofer, with higher rabbinic education in the bet hammidrash corresponding to the advanced Hellenistic rhetorical education.12 Though Gerhardsson admits that most evidence for this is from the rabbinic sources themselves, he argues that the widespread existence of schools and literacy in the period of the Second Temple that they depict is nonetheless probable.13

6. Gerhardsson, Tradition and Transmission, p. 17; also idem, Memory and Manuscript, pp. 76, 100. This is likely the basis for his claim that similar techniques are likely for the Pharisees and their oral Torah, and that Pharisaic practices were ‘representative of the methods common among Palestinian teachers’ (Tradition and Transmission, p. 21). He nevertheless concedes it was probable ‘that written transmission played a more prominent role in these groups (Sadducees, Essenes, apocalyptic circles) than in Rabbinic Judaism’ (Memory and Manuscript, p. 30). 7. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, p. 125; idem, Origins, p. 21. 8. Birger Gerhardsson, ‘The Path of the Gospel Tradition’, in The Gospel and the Gospels (ed. Peter Stuhlmacher; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), p. 81; emphasis added. 9. Gerhardsson, Tradition and Transmission, p. 16. 10. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, p. 25; also idem, Origins, p. 15. 11. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, p. 59. 12. Ibid., pp. 50–1, 63–5, 74–5, 83. 13. Ibid., pp. 58–9; idem, The Gospel Tradition (ConBNT, 15; Lund: Gleerup, 1986), pp. 32–3. Gerhardsson’s most recent statements on the extent of literacy in Jewish Palestine are considerably more qualified; see ‘The Secret of the Transmission of the Unwritten Jesus Tradition’, NTS 51 (2005), pp. 1–18 (13–14).

96

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

The postulated existence of this wider educational milieu with its associated practices is Gerhardsson’s crucial premise for generalizing rabbinic memorization techniques to Jesus and primitive Christianity. Jesus in his role as teacher would have had his disciples memorize his teachings by repetition, which once fixed in memory might become objects for interpretation. His disciples would have perpetuated his practice, constituting with their ‘service in the word’ an apostolic collegium analogous to the ‘persistent occupation with the study of Torah’ of the rabbinic associations.14 Though Gerhardsson’s argument cogently reflects scholarship on education and literacy in the ancient world current until even quite recently, it is now vulnerable on both those points, and with the weakening of this premise is weakened the justification for extrapolating from rabbinic to early Christian traditioning practices.15 It is increasingly clear that access to Hellenistic education, and the cultural literacy that it inculcated, was largely limited to elite circles and their retainers.16 Few even of these progressed beyond the elementary to the secondary level and even fewer to rhetorical training, the level at which the ability to use the repertoire of memorized cultural texts in interpretative, creative ways was acquired.17 Correspondingly, literacy rates in the Roman world were quite low. In his study of ancient literacy William Harris estimates overall illiteracy at 90 per cent, with somewhat higher literacy for the cities.18 Teresa Morgan says of Egypt, ‘Since those who acquired any form of literacy were already a small proportion of the population as a whole, grammar [secondary education] was the preserve of a very small minority indeed.’19 Raymond Starr points out that books for the most part circulated among friends in literate social networks and that bookshops catered mostly to these groups.20 To be sure, literacy was diffused outside elite

14. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, pp. 240–4, 334; idem, Tradition and Transmission, p. 22; idem, Gospel Tradition, pp. 32–3. 15. See Werner H. Kelber, ‘The Generative Force of Memory: Early Christian Tradition as a Process of Remembering’, BTB 36 (2006), pp. 15–22 (16–17). 16. Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 23–33, 45–6, 162–3; idem, ‘Literate Education in Classical Athens’, CQ N.S. 49 (1999), pp. 46–61 (60); Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 3, 53–6, 75–6, 249. Both Morgan and Cribiore work from the papyrus evidence of school exercises and point out the elite orientation of the educational handbooks and treatises. 17. Morgan, Literate Education, pp. 56–7, 72; Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 187, 205. 18. William Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 22. 19. Morgan, Literate Education, p. 163. 20. Raymond Starr, ‘The Circulation of Literary Texts in the Roman World’, CQ N.S. 37 (1987), pp. 213–23.

Memory and Manuscript: Gerhardsson Revisited

97

circles across a broad range of applications although in steep gradations of competence. Many might have possessed signature literacy, that is, the ability to sign one’s name; others phonetic literacy, the ability to sound out the syllables of, say, an inscription; still others a rudimentary ‘craft literacy’ adequate for carrying on one’s trade.21 For the non-literate majority, access to the written word was brokered by the ‘relatively small number of functional literates’.22 Restricted access to education and literacy was therefore also the reality in Jewish Palestine, likely even more so given its comparatively low levels of urbanization.23 Catherine Hezser in her recent analysis rejects the picture of the widespread existence of schools in Jewish Palestine in the Second Temple period as a retrojection of Amoraic ideals and developments: ‘Later Talmudic texts … are not only anachronistic in associating the educational institutions of the amoraic period with pre-70 times, but also vastly exaggerate with regard to the number of education establishments likely to have existed at either time.’24 Moreover, ‘although some Pharisees as well as other Jewish leaders before 70 CE may well have recommended a basic Torah education for children, they never enforced this view by actually establishing schools’.25 Literate education was the preserve of elites, and as with Hellenistic education few would have advanced beyond basic and intermediate levels to the high level of cultural expertise in Torah characteristic of the rabbis and their disciples.26 That Palestinian Judaism was a Torah-centred religion is not incongruous with these realities. Written Torah would have been appropriated by the non-literate population orally and aurally.27

21. Morgan, Literate Education, p. 16; Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, p. 168. 22. Morgan, Literate Education, p. 2; also Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 60–1. 23. Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (TSAJ, 81; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), p. 496; Meir Bar Ilan, ‘Scribes and Books in the Late Second Commonwealth and Rabbinic Period’, in Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (ed. Martin Jan Mulder; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004), pp. 21–38 (33–4); idem, ‘Illiteracy in the Land of Israel in the First Centuries C.E’, in Essays in the Social Scientific Study of Judaism and Jewish Society, vol. 2 (ed. S. Fishbane et al.; New York: Ktav, 1992), pp. 46–61 (54–6); David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 115–16. 24. Hezser, Jewish Literacy, p. 39. 25. Ibid., p. 69. 26. Ibid., p. 95; Carr, Writing, pp. 204–208. Carr notes that Josephus’s claim for universal Jewish literacy does not reflect the reality (p. 247). 27. Bar Ilan (‘Illiteracy’, p. 47) points out that Egypt and Turkey, both Quran-centred societies, in the first half of the twentieth century had illiteracy rates of 88 per cent and 92 per cent, respectively. On oral and aural reception of the Bible in many contemporary African churches, see Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 26.

98

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

It is difficult, therefore, to follow Gerhardsson and take a general educational Sitz as the bridge from rabbinic to early Christian traditioning practices. More to the point, the fixed-text memorization model, belonging as it does to the highly literate, elite educational Sitz, cannot serve plausibly as the model for memory in the cultivation and transmission of early Christian oral tradition (though it must certainly become pertinent when the gospel tradition moves into the written medium of the gospels and under the control of scribal tradents). Yet Gerhardsson is surely right that an indissoluble relationship of some sort exists between memory and tradition. The key lies in grasping the dynamics of memory and tradition in contexts of pervasive orality.

Memory, Tradition and the Problem of Medium In developing his phenomenology of the tradition, Gerhardsson is influenced by the rabbinic context, the most pertinent cultural permutation of the educational Sitz. Hence he takes Amoraic practices attaching to Oral Torah, specifically, the oral cultivation of the memorized text of the Mishnah (as well as other rabbinic works), as prototypical.28 This accounts for his construal of early Christian oral tradition and its transmission on the model of textual fixation and vocalized memorization practices associated with the properties of the written medium.29 ‘In reality,’ he claims, ‘there was hardly a great difference between memorized written texts and memorized oral texts of the same type.’30 The effects of this analogue with written texts are also felt in his distinguishing of interpretation and commentary cleanly from the memorization and transmission tradition artefact itself.31 In developing this view of early Christian oral tradition, Gerhardsson is influenced not only by practices associated with the cultivation of the Mishnah but

28. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, pp. 76, 159–60, 333. In later writings, Gerhardsson gravitates towards taking the transmission of rabbinic haggadah as the analogy for the cultivation of the gospel tradition. 29. Ibid., p. 100; idem, Origins, pp. 21, 68, 86. Gerhardsson frequently applies the modifiers ‘fixed’ or ‘relatively fixed’ to tradition, for example, Tradition and Transmission, p. 44. On this point, see Werner H. Kelber, Introduction to The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997 (reprint 1993)), pp. 9–10. 30. Birger Gerhardsson, ‘Illuminating the Kingdom: Narrative Meshalim in the Synoptic Gospels’, in Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition (ed. Henry Wansbrough; JSNTSup, 64; Sheffield: JSOT, 1991), pp. 266–309 (307–308). 31. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, pp. 94–9, 110–11, 124–6; idem, Origins, p. 20. The rabbinic context included designated memorization specialists, the tannaim, able to repeat passages of Oral Torah in the authorized wording for deliberative treatment by the rabbis.

Memory and Manuscript: Gerhardsson Revisited

99

also by the corollary assumption that in a society of pervasive literacy and literate education such as he believes Jewish Palestine to have been, the written medium becomes normative for oral traditioning and the cognate memory practices.32 In consequence, he is not inclined to concede the relevance of research on orality in predominantly oral societies. In fact, Gerhardsson mischaracterizes unalloyed orality as an extremely fluid medium, as weak in stabilizing forces and hence marked by an uncontrolled, shapeless variability, as standing, in other words, in virtually categorical opposition to the fixity characteristic of writing. Any sign of genre-mediated stability in the tradition, therefore, is for Gerhardsson an indicator of the fixating effects of the written medium and of memorization-based and at times even writing-assisted transmission. Gospel genres such as the mashal are ‘texts’, or more precisely, memorized texts.33 This is to say that Gerhardsson does not have an adequate working conception of oral genres, of variable yet stable speech forms adapted to the exigencies of oral communication and transmission. In his view, variable oral retellings would eventually have produced a homogenized body of tradition lacking genre distinctions, in other words, a complete levelling of ‘the different text types within the gospel tradition’.34 It is true that applications of orality theory in gospels scholarship have not infrequently been guilty of exaggerating the fluidity of oral tradition and also of egregiously overextending the reach of the orality model, to the point at times of dissolving the written gospels into oral dynamics. Doubtless Gerhardsson is at least in part reacting against these extremes. A model for memory and tradition centred upon multiple oral genres is, however, not just requisite but easily reconcilable with important aspects of Gerhardsson’s work: as we shall see later in this chapter, oral genres are grounded in memory dynamics.35 Joseph Russo analyses the

32. Gerhardsson, Origins, pp. 37–8; idem, Gospel Tradition, pp. 12–13; idem, ‘Illuminating the Kingdom’, pp. 307–308. In his most recent essay Gerhardsson has begun to reconsider this stance (‘Secret of the Transmission’, pp. 13–14). 33. Gerhardsson, ‘Illuminating the Kingdom’, pp. 298–9; idem, Origins, p. 86; idem, Gospel Tradition, p. 36; idem, ‘Secret of the Transmission’, pp. 7–8, 12. Gerhardsson views his memorization-based approach as itself a model of oral transmission. 34. Gerhardsson, ‘Secret of the Transmission’, p. 18; also idem, Gospel Tradition, pp. 30–7; idem, ‘Illuminating the Kingdom’, p. 303; idem, ‘Path of the Gospel Tradition’, pp.  94–5; emphasis original. 35. Without it, Gerhardsson’s writing-oriented approach runs up against the sort of dilemma that emerges in his most recent essay, where his recognition of limited literacy and widespread orality in Palestine forces him to identify early Christian traditionists with scribes (‘Secret of the Transmission’, p. 14). An unintended consequence of this scenario, as well as of strict application of the rabbinic model (see Martin Jaffee, ‘Gender and Otherness in Rabbinic Oral Culture: On Gentiles, Undisciplined Jews, and their Women’, in Performing the Gospel. Orality, Memory, and Mark (ed. Richard A. Horsley et al.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), pp. 21–43 (42)), would be that early Christian tradition becomes largely an enterprise of a restricted circle of literate males.

100

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

proverb (paroimia), maxim (gnōmē) and the apothegma, Greek counterparts of the gospel mashal and pronouncement story, as oral wisdom genres. Their utterance was ‘essentially emergent and responsive to specific contexts’, and they might be transmitted orally and anecdotally ‘for centuries before attaining formal documentation in the highly literate postclassical era’.36 Elizabeth Tonkin observes that traditional societies preside over a repertoire of oral genres, the formal features of which are calibrated for oral communication as well as memorability for oral transmission.37 Collectively these genres incorporate a community’s moral norms (instructional genres) and its foundational stories (narrative genres), constituting what Jan Assmann terms its cultural memory.38 The formal features of such genres ensure stability and thus continuity across many oral enactments. On the other hand, through their equally core property of variability, or better, multiformity, the tradition is brought to expression in ways responsive to the different social and historical contexts in which it is enacted.39 Oral genres, in other words, though stable are not fixed in the way that the written medium fixes a text. To fix them would be to impair their capacity for oral (as opposed to written) transmission, for loss of adaptability to different social and historical settings entails erosion of relevance and hence survivability. Oral genres thus both limit variation and allow it expression, though it is important to emphasize that they fall on a spectrum running from quite marked stability, that is, minimal change from enactment to enactment (proverbs, for example), to extempore freedom in retelling (some narrative genres). Media distinctions, therefore, are indeed pertinent factors in the intersection of memory with tradition. Interpretation occurs in oral tradition by virtue of its multiformity and accordingly ‘internal to the text’.40 In other words, interpretation and transmission, rather than being distinct operations as Gerhardsson conceived

36. Joseph Russo, ‘Prose Genres for Performance of Traditional Wisdom in Ancient Greece: Proverb, Maxim, Apothegm’, in Poet, Public, and Performance in Ancient Greece (ed. Lowell Edmunds and Robert W. Wallace; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 49–64 (50, 57). 37. Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (CSOLC, 22; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 3, 53. 38. Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992). 39. Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 140–1; idem, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 88; Jack Goody, The Power of the Written Tradition (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), p. 126; A. N. Doane, ‘Oral Texts, Intertexts, and Intratexts: Editing Old English’, in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 75–113 (103). 40. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 295.

Memory and Manuscript: Gerhardsson Revisited

101

them, are inseparably connected to each other.41 Shifting the tradition into writing – its transformation into manuscript tradition – marks a major change in the mode of its cultivation. By virtue of its material and visual properties, writing more securely stabilizes wording. As a result, interpretation becomes increasingly extrinsic to the tradition itself, eventually taking the form of citation and commentary.42 This places the rabbinic memory practices that Gerhardsson delineated in a different light. The salient point is Oral Torah’s close association with the written medium. Unlike primitive Christian tradition, or oral tradition conceived more generally, Oral Torah existed in symbiosis with Written Torah. Mishnah tractates stood in different sorts of direct or indirect relationships to Scripture, and Midrash collections stood in an explicit commentary relationship to Scripture.43 In other words, ‘both the midrashic and in large part the halakhic tradition … are … supported by a base text’.44 In rabbinic circles, cultivation of Oral and Written Torah moved in tandem. Steven Fraade writes that ‘the performative study of the Oral Torah, intertwined as it is with the ritual recitation of the Written Torah, is a reenactment and extension of the originary revelation at Sinai’.45 Martin Jaffee points out similarly that Oral Torah ‘guaranteed the continuity of rabbinic knowledge and authority with the founding revelations recorded in the Hebrew scriptures’.46 More to our point, however, is that through intricate mnemonics, Oral Torah received a level of fixation such that it emulated the properties of the written medium. Rabbinic mnemonics in the Mishnah were intended to facilitate its memorization and, accordingly, its recitation from memory as a text made up of lengthy and composite blocks of material. In antiquity, complex mnemonic techniques of this sort were in fact typical of highly literate settings. Jocelyn Penny Small characterizes them as ‘very much an art of literacy for the highly literate’.47 ‘They are devised to deal with written texts’, David Olson explains, ‘memory arts are not devices for remembering just what someone says but primarily for preserving

41. Ibid., p. 175. 42. Ibid., p. 295; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis: zehn Studien (Munich: Beck, 2000), p. 59. 43. H. L. Strack and Günter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2nd edn, 1996), pp. 128–9. Cf. also Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, p. 90. 44. Strack and Stemberger, Introduction, p. 38. 45. Steven D. Fraade, ‘Literary Composition and Oral Performance in Early Midrashim’, OT 14 (1999), pp. 33–51 (45). 46. Jaffee, ‘Gender and Otherness’, p. 21. 47. Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 100. See also Goody, Power of the Written Tradition, p. 43; Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (CSML 10; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 9–12, 83–5, 111–21.

102

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

written documents in memory.’48 In the scholarly discussion the question of the origins of the Mishnah is usually framed in terms of its ‘redaction and publication’, and its official memorizers, the tannaim, are characterized in both the rabbinic literature and in scholarship as ‘living books’ or ‘living editions’.49 It may indeed be possible to view the Mishnah (as well as other works in the rabbinic corpus) as a cultural project consisting in a consolidation of rabbinic tradition comparable to a written consolidation.50 In any case, Oral Torah was not a paradigm of oral cultivation of tradition. The orality of Oral Torah was prescribed, strategic and ideological. While present inchoately in the Tannaitic period, the concept of Oral Torah as the rubric for rabbinic tradition emerged only after the redaction of the Mishnah, in the Amoraic period. Its orality was prescriptive, the effect of the stipulation that in the study circles it was to be held in and recited from memory, not like Written Torah from a scroll.51 Strategically and ideologically, Oral Torah’s orality secured Israel’s claim against usurpers of its written scripture (the Christians) to exclusive possession of God’s covenant revelation.52 As Jaffee points out further, this strategy also served to distinguish the rabbis as an elite circle within Israel.53 The doctrine of Oral Torah thus may be seen as a permutation of the elitist scribal ethos that had its basis in the memory competence scribes exercised in the cultural texts of their respective societies.54 This effectively calls into question the direct applicability of rabbinic memory practices to early Christian traditioning. Nevertheless, Gerhardsson has put his finger on a critical aspect of ancient memory practice. Rabbinic mastery of Oral Torah through memorization is a case of manuscript memory, a defining feature of what Armin Sweeny identifies as ‘oral manuscript culture’.55 Jaffee points out that ‘what rabbinic disciples encountered as oral tradition was the performative embodiment of memorized rabbinic manuscript’.56 In antiquity and the medieval world, manuscript was adjunct to memory. The manuscript version of a cultural

48. David Olson, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 63; emphasis original. 49. Strack and Stemberger, Introduction, p. 138. 50. See ibid., pp. 138–9; Martin S. Jaffee, ‘Writing and Rabbinic Oral Tradition: On Mishnaic Narrative, Lists and Mnemonics’, JJewThPhil 4 (1994), pp. 123–46; Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, ‘The Fixing of Oral Mishnah and the Displacement of Meaning’, OT 14 (1999), pp. 100–39; Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 32–8, 50–6, 218–21. 51. Fraade, ‘Literary Composition’, pp. 35–6; Martin S. Jaffee, ‘Oral Tradition in the Writings of Rabbinic Oral Torah: On Theorizing Rabbinic Orality’, OT 14 (1999), pp. 3–32 (9). 52. Jaffee, ‘Gender and Otherness’, p. 26; also Strack and Stemberger, Introduction, p. 37. 53. Jaffee, ‘Gender and Otherness’, pp. 27, 42. 54. See Carr, Writing, pp. 82–104. 55. Armin Sweeny, A Full Hearing: Orality and Literacy in the Malay World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), p. 73. 56. Jaffee, ‘Writing’, p. 144; emphasis original.

Memory and Manuscript: Gerhardsson Revisited

103

text was largely ancillary to a work’s operative existence as a memory artefact.57 At one level this was simply pragmatic: the formidable difficulties the scroll format presented for random access made memory control of a text requisite for its actual utilization. This is certainly the case for Oral Torah; in their debates rabbis could not be constantly scrolling around to locate pertinent passages.58 Memory also functioned, however, as the major support for the oral enactment of a written work that constituted the primary mode of the latter’s cultural existence.59 Oral Torah may therefore be a case of the typical marginality of manuscript relative to memory pushed programmatically to its extreme. In rabbinic practice and ideology its manuscript embodiment recedes, virtually to a vanishing point, in favour of the prominence of the memory artefact. It may not even be necessary to postulate the presence of manuscript at its redaction (scholars debate this question), for in antiquity memory was also instrumental in literary composition.60 Because the mnemonic formalization of the Mishnah was quite methodical and its memorization and recitation the focused concern of the rabbinic discipleship circles, there may have been little need for accessory written versions to support its transmission.61 We have clarified that Gerhardsson’s working concept of memory and tradition is modelled on literate, manuscript memory. There is some reason to believe that prior to the redaction of the Mishnah, rabbinic tradition was to some extent itself cultivated in the mode of oral-traditional multiformity and not fixedtext memorization. Elizabeth Shanks Alexander and Martin Jaffee isolate predocumentary clusters of rabbinic oral tradition in the Tannaitic collections. A comparison of parallel units, they argue, reveals the emblematic multiformity of oral tradition: stability and flexibility in equilibrium, and meaning generated not through external commentary but by reconfigurations of the tradition artefact itself.62 Whatever the case may be, our point is that fixed-text memorization

57. Jaffee, ‘Oral Tradition’, p. 9; idem, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism 200 B.C.E.–400 C.E. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 16–17; Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 136; Carr, Writing, p. 9; Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 101, 156; Small, Wax Tablets, pp. 154, 220; Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 91–2; Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, p. 149. 58. Jaffee, ‘Writing’, p. 126. 59. Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 122; Fraade, ‘Literary Composition’, p. 46; Jaffee, ‘Writing’, pp. 125–6, 145–6. 60. Small, Wax Tablets, p. 71; Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 194. 61. See Strack and Stemberger, Introduction, p. 38; Eliezer Segal, ‘Anthological Dimensions of the Babylonian Talmud’, in The Anthology in Jewish Literature (ed. David Stern; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 81–107 (82). 62. Alexander, ‘The Fixing of Oral Mishnah’, pp. 107–24; Jaffee, ‘Oral Tradition’, pp. 12–15.

104

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

cannot be taken as normative for the formation and transmission of oral tradition prior to the latter’s programmatic embodiment in writing.63

Memory and the Origins of Tradition The nature of the relationship of memory and early Christian tradition therefore needs further clarification. The form critics, as noted, largely eliminated the factor of memory from their account of the tradition. They conceived of memory narrowly as a matter of individual recollections by eyewitnesses. This manifestly did not match the profile of the gospel tradition. Dennis Nineham, writing just prior to the publication of Memory and Manuscript, gives articulate expression to this view. For Nineham it seems selfevident that memory and tradition are distinct, even incommensurable entities. In his view memory equates to personal eyewitness testimony such as might be elicited in court; it is marked by ‘knowledge of the particular, inclusion of the merely memorable, as opposed to the edifying, exact biographical and topographical precision and the like’.64 These traits are conspicuous by their absence from the Synoptic tradition, which is formal, stereotyped, restrained in descriptive detail, and hence clearly the product not of memory (as Nineham conceives it) but ‘the impersonal needs and forces of the community’.65 To be sure, Nineham acknowledges, some very early interface with eyewitness memory was likely; such would account for the residual presence in the tradition of authentic recollections of Jesus. Since this ‘initial stage’, however, the tradition obviously has followed an independent course of development, for otherwise individual eyewitness testimony

63. It is increasingly recognized that manuscript tradition itself is not characterized by textual fixation, as with print, but displays in some measure the dynamic properties usually associated with oral tradition. John Dagenais refers to this as manuscript mouvance (The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen Amor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 130). Mouvance has been observed in the transmission of works in the rabbinic corpus, including the Mishnah. See Peter Schäfer, ‘Research into Rabbinic Literature: An Attempt to Define the Status Quaestionis’, JJS 37 (1986), pp. 139–52; idem, ‘Once Again the Status Quaestionis of Research in Rabbinic Literature: An Answer to Chaim Milikowsky’, JJS 40 (1989), pp. 89–94; Yaakov Elman, Authority and Tradition: Toseftan Baraitot in Talmudic Babylonia (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1994); Paul Mandel, ‘Between Byzantium and Islam: The Transmission of a Jewish Book in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods’, in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion (ed. Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 74–106. 64. Dennis E. Nineham, ‘Eyewitness Testimony and the Gospel Tradition’, JTS n.s. 9 (1958), pp. 13–25, 243–52; JTS n.s. 11 (1960), pp. 253–64 (13). 65. Ibid., p. 13.

Memory and Manuscript: Gerhardsson Revisited

105

would have come to be visible within it as foreign matter: ‘If the Gospel material derives from two very different types of source we should expect it to show signs of its double origin.’66 Thus, while memories were ingredient in some under-theorized manner, in the ‘initial’ formation of the tradition, they were residues, inert with respect to subsequent developments in the tradition. Memory so conceived was of such inconsequence that the form critics were markedly uncurious even about the nature of its postulated initial contact with the tradition. This had all the force of a cognitive paradigm; in retrospect it is not surprising that Gerhardsson’s programme for a convergence of memory with tradition was received with incomprehension. Gerhardsson challenged the form critics on a number of points. Against the notion that the forms of the tradition emerged from the social forces of various ecclesiastical Sitze, he argued that from its origins the gospel tradition was a distinct, in his word ‘isolated’ entity, and correspondingly that its cultivation was itself a Sitz autonomous from its uses in preaching and exhortation. Likewise, the forms of the tradition were conventional genres circulating in the cultural environment. Though differing from one another in pragmatic function, these genres were capable of utilization across different social settings.67 Research on the phenomenology of tradition supports Gerhardsson on these points. Tradition is ‘marked’ speech, that is, dedicated speech, with the shift from ordinary discourse into tradition enactment signalled by linguistic cues and formulas of various sorts.68 ‘The speaker’, Russo says, ‘momentarily ceases to use a personal voice in the here and now and instead uses the voice of the shared cultural tradition.’69 Similarly, the genres of a tradition are cultural entities distinguishable from the social structure and dynamics of the groups that make use of them.70 The difficult problem that Gerhardsson faced, however, was to give an account of how memory might be implicated in the formation of the tradition, an account reconcilable, moreover, with the observable traits of the Synoptic tradition. Form criticism claimed to give such an account. Gerhardsson pointed out that the origins of much of the sayings and parabolic material is not problematic: these materials would have originated in Jesus’s own practice as a teacher of memorable meshalim in the context of the master-disciple relationship, a historically grounded Sitz for

66. Ibid., p. 17; emphases added. 67. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, pp. 332–3; idem, Origins, pp. 38–9, 67–8; idem, ‘Illuminating the Kingdom’, p. 266; idem, ‘Path of the Gospel Tradition’, pp. 78–84, 93. 68. John Miles Foley, ‘Memory in Oral Tradition’, in Horsley et al., eds, Performing the Gospel, pp. 83–96 (87–90); Carol Fleisher Feldman, ‘Oral Metalanguage’, in Literacy and Orality (ed. D. R. Olson and N. Torrance; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 47–65 (50–1); Paul Zumthor, Oral Poetry: An Introduction (THL, 70; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 102–103; Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts, p. 53. 69. Russo, ‘Prose Genres’, p. 53. 70. Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts, pp. 15, 37.

106

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

the cultivation and transmission of tradition in sapiential and prophet circles.71 That narrative elements should come to exist in the tradition is not surprising, Gerhardsson argued, for in antiquity the bios of the master was as important as his logos. The quest of his followers for comprehensive sets of norms was doubtless the major impetus for efforts at remembering Jesus. This is evident in the strong normative, that is, moral charge carried by the narrative gospel genres, the pronouncement stories in particular.72 Gerhardsson still had to provide an answer, however, to the question of how this memory work issued in the artefactual forms of the tradition. He argued that the raw materials of eyewitness memories were fashioned into tradition artefacts by an apostolic collegium in Jerusalem dedicated to this activity as its ‘work with the word’ (analogous to the activities of the rabbinic circles). All members of the community were active in remembering Jesus, but it was the collegium, comprising the Twelve and hence the most authoritative eyewitnesses, that did the specialized work of collecting remembrances and converting them into or, as Gerhardsson puts it, ‘fixing’ them in the transmissible forms of the tradition.73 The difficulty with this account is not its close coordination of memory with the formation of the tradition but its understanding of the memory factor as memorization of fixed texts, or stated differently, its overdetermination by the properties of the written medium – a problem that runs through the whole of Gerhardsson’s analysis. Gerhardsson’s apostolic collegium, in its work on the Scriptures and its creation of collections of traditions, has a pronounced scribal complexion, analogous in its activities to the Qumran scribal community and to rabbinic circles.74 Gerhardsson describes tradition formation in the collegium in terms redolent of literary operations: the collegium’s members are like individual authors (depicted at desks), crafting, editing and revising their work in consultation with others. Adverting to the literary model entails, moreover, that in a manner incongruous with the actual dynamics of oral tradition Gerhardsson separates the formation of a tradition artefact almost categorically from its subsequent usage in

71. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, pp. 326–29; idem, Origins, p. 70; ‘Illuminating the Kingdom’, p. 303; ‘Path of the Gospel Tradition’, pp. 87–9. 72. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, pp. 184–8, 328; Origins, pp. 73–4; ‘The Path of the Gospel Tradition’, p. 91. 73. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, pp. 12–13, 282–3, 296–7, 330–1; see also idem, Tradition and Transmission, p. 40; idem, Gospel Tradition, pp. 25–9. For Gerhardsson, a key piece of evidence is 1 Cor. 15.3-7, a tradition that prominently features the motif of eyewitness testimony. Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006) is reminiscent of Gerhardsson on a number of these points. 74. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, p. 330; idem, Tradition and Transmission, p. 40.

Memory and Manuscript: Gerhardsson Revisited

107

various social settings.75 If the form critics exaggerated the ontological convergence of tradition with social contexts of its enactment, Gerhardsson is induced by his literary assumptions to overdraw the extent of its autonomy from those contexts. Tradition artefacts, in his view, are first formulated as fixed texts that are then memorized for subsequent transmission, recitation and commentary in various social settings.76

Memory and the Formation of Tradition Gerhardsson’s explanation of the formation of the tradition thus fails as an alternative to the form-critical model. The appropriate response, however, is not scepticism with regard to Gerhardsson’s essential point – memory as the principal agent in the formation and cultivation of tradition – but to describe that relationship more comprehensively in light of the cognitive, social and cultural aspects of memory. Tradition emerges from such an analysis as indeed nothing less than the artefact of memory. The transmutation of memory into tradition has an important cognitive dimension. Research on the cognitive operations of memory indicates that memory is not so much a passive faculty of storage and recall as it is an active artificer that condenses and schematizes raw perceptual input from experiences, creating efficient memory scripts that give cognitive orientation to the world.77 Memory economizes and condenses, selecting from the undifferentiated flux of experience what is most salient. Though frequently construed negatively as memory’s major limitation, this large-scale ‘forgetting’ of particulars is in fact an expression of memory’s efficiency, its capacity to distil out the essential from the non-essential, to generalize and analyse, and by the same token to avoid the cognitive overload that would result from total recall. Larry Squire and Eric Kandel comment: We are best at generalizing, abstracting, and assembling general knowledge, not at retaining a literal record of particular events. We forget the particulars, and by our forgetfulness gain the possibility of abstracting and retaining the main points. Normal memory is not overwhelmed by the individual and separate

75. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, pp. 142, 335; idem, Gospel Tradition, pp. 43–4; ‘Path of the Gospel Tradition’, pp. 80, 91–3. 76. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, p. 328; idem, Gospel Tradition, pp. 43–4; idem, ‘Illuminating the Kingdom’, p. 303. 77. F. C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 44–5, 200–25; George Bonanno, ‘Remembering and Psychotherapy’, Psychotherapy 27 (1990), pp. 175–86 (175–7); Jeffrey Prager, Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 207.

108

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

details that fill each moment of experience. We can forget the details, and we can therefore form concepts and gradually absorb knowledge by adding up the lessons from different kinds of experiences.78

Along these same lines, memory blurs distinctions among memories of similar events, compounding them into generic memories with representational, emblematic functions.79 A corollary cognitive operation is the rapid conforming of memories to generic types, schemas and conventional narrative patterns. In addition to giving the resulting memory artefacts durability and mnemonic properties, these bestow memories with a structure of intelligibility, that is, give them coherence and foreground their existential, normative significance for the remembering subjects.80 These schematizing operations bring memory’s agency in the formation of tradition into especially clear relief. Cognitive memory work draws upon the cultural repertoire of genres, symbols and narrative schemata to mediate memory formation.81 The schematic types, the cultural genres to which memories are conformed, mediate between memory and publicly available tradition, particularly in virtue of their core function to render memories coherent and communicable. Memory, Bruner and Feldman state, becomes public ‘by being based on narrative properties like genre and plot type that are widely shared within a culture, shared in a way that permits others to construe meaning as the narrator has. In this way private experiences … are constituted meaningfully into a public and communicable form’.82 In Tonkin’s words, the past comes to be ‘represent[ed] in a variety of genres’, and ‘different genres will render and amplify different aspects of the “same” events’.83

78. Larry R. Squire and Eric Kandel, Memory: From Mind to Molocules (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999), p. 206. See also Alan D. Baddeley, Essentials of Human Memory (East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press, 1999), p. 191; Bartlett, Remembering, pp. 126– 7; Martin A. Conway, ‘Autobiographical Knowledge and Autobiographical Memories’, in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (ed. David C. Rubin; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 67–93 (88). 79. William F. Brewer, ‘What Is Recollective Memory?’ in Rubin, ed., Remembering Our Past, pp. 19–66 (51–60); Squire and Kandel, Memory, p. 46; David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-Out Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 111. 80. Jerome Bruner and Carol Fleisher Feldman, ‘Group Narrative as a Cultural Context of Autobiography’, in Rubin, ed., Remembering Our Past, pp. 291–317 (291–3); Craig R. Barclay, ‘Autobiographical Remembering: Narrative Constraints on Objectified Selves’, in Rubin, ed., Remembering Our Past, pp. 94–125 (95–7); Squire and Kandel, Memory, p. 78. 81. Robin Wagner-Pacifici, ‘Memories in the Making: The Shape of Things That Went’, QualSoc 19 (1996), pp. 301–21 (308). 82. Bruner and Feldman, ‘Group Narrative’, p. 293. 83. Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts, pp. 60, 133.

Memory and Manuscript: Gerhardsson Revisited

109

Maurice Halbwachs, the founder of modern social and cultural memory studies, showed that it is in the context of the social realities and communicative practices of communities that the memories of the individuals belonging to those groups receive substance, coherence and duration.84 Communities for their part fashion and cultivate their foundational memories collaboratively, in face-to-face communication, processes that are not insulated, moreover, from impinging social realities.85 This enterprise has a number of features that distinguish it from the individual eyewitness recollection model for memory that dominates discussion of the topic in gospels scholarship. Studies show that such collaboratively formed memories are ‘more richly recollected’ than those constructed by individuals alone.86 Community members prompt and monitor one another’s recollections of past events and contribute collectively to bestowing coherence upon the emerging memory artefacts. These shared memories bring to expression, moreover, the community’s foundational norms; conversely, individual remembering in such contexts is guided by the shared norms of the community.87 As Weldon and Bellinger observe, persons involved in these processes tend increasingly to conform their individual memories to, and therefore to share, the memories that are collaboratively shaped. Most pertinently for the emergence of tradition, memories forged within the communicative dynamics of a community receive collectively held, formal representations that render them more stable over time than individual memories.88 Liisa Malkki observed this phenomenon in camps in Tanzania for Hutu refugees escaping from the 1972 genocide in Burundi. ‘Accounts of key events’, she notes, ‘very quickly circulated among the refugees and, often in a matter of days, acquired what can be characterized as “standard versions” in the telling and retelling.’89 This description neatly captures the real-time formation and cultivation of durable tradition artefacts at the intersection of social context, communication and memory.

84. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (ed. Lewis A. Coser; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); idem, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). 85. Gérard Namer, Mémoire et société (Paris: Méridiens Lincksieck, 1987), pp. 140–57; Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 196. 86. William Hirst and David Manier, ‘Remembering as Communication: A Family Recounts Its Past’, in Rubin, ed., Remembering Our Past, pp. 271–90 (273). See also Mary Susan Weldon and Krystal D. Bellinger, ‘Collective Memory: Collaborative and Individual Processes in Remembering’, JExpPsych 23 (1997), pp. 1160–75 (1161, 1167). 87. Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts, p. 27; Bruner and Feldman, ‘Group Narrative’, p. 302; Weldon and Bellinger, ‘Collective Memory’, p. 1161; Hirst and Manier, ‘Remembering as Communication’, p. 276. 88. Weldon and Bellinger, ‘Collective Memory’, pp. 1167, 1173. 89. Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 106.

110

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

This sort of memory work is a normative enterprise, which is to say essential to constituting the commemorating group as a moral community.90 A community marks and commemorates certain elements of its past as being of fundamental significance to its identity, typically events and persons foundational to its origins and embodying its ethos. ‘Memory work’, says Barry Schwartz, ‘like a lens, filters extraneous materials the better for us to see the kind of recollecting relevant to our purposes. … Memory work is a limiting concept against which real situations are scanned for cultural significance.’91 These elements are configured in commemorative narratives and instructional genres which distil the norms perceived to be explicitly or implicitly immanent in the events. This accounts for the pronounced normative complexion of the gospel tradition, visible particularly in its density in dominical sayings and pronouncement stories. In the ritual rehearsal of this tradition the community relates itself to its cultural identity and the cognate norms in ever-changing historical circumstances. As with any commemorative symbol, the forms of the tradition into which memory material is transmuted render the community’s norms ‘visible, permanent and transmittable’.92 Critical to this semiotic intensification is the internal keying and tuning of the tradition to archetypal narratives, persons and motifs of the epic past, that is, to established bodies of authoritative cultural tradition.93 In short, the foundational memory material of a community coalesces in culturally available genres and narrative patterns that ground its identity deeply in the past, constitute it as a moral community, and enable transmission of cultural identity across time.94 In the gospel tradition the diffuse actualities of foundational events have been converted into transmissible linguistic artefacts that bear the axiomatic meanings and norms of the Jesus communities. This body of tradition is the product of cultural forces at work in the formation of any community; without ruling out intentionality and formalized activity in the enterprise, one need not invoke, and be forced to defend, the tenuous, ad hoc hypothesis of an eyewitness apostolic collegium to account for its formation. This memory work has produced finely wrought, autonomous representations, or stated differently, refinements of the past, symbolically and normatively concentrated, and given them artefactual

90. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 59; Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 16–17, 76–80, 141–2; Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. xi; Malkki, Purity and Exile, pp. 54–6, 140. 91. Barry Schwartz, ‘Jesus in First-Century Memory – A Response’, in Kirk and Thatcher, eds, Memory, Tradition, and Text, pp. 249–61 (251). 92. Jan Assmann, ‘Form as a Mnemonic Device: Cultural Texts and Cultural Memory’, in Horsley et al., eds, Performing the Gospel, pp. 67–82 (70). 93. Barry Schwartz, ‘Frame Image: Towards a Semiotics of Collective Memory’, Semiotica 121 (1998), pp. 1–38; Foley, ‘Memory’, p. 88. 94. Kelber, Oral and Written Gospel, p. 56; Bruner and Feldman, ‘Group Narrative’, p. 295; Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts, pp. 44, 60, 112; Squire and Kandel, Memory, pp. 76–8; Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 58–9, 139–40; Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 96.

Memory and Manuscript: Gerhardsson Revisited

111

form in various genres. As with any cultural object, these tradition artefacts lead a cultural life of their own as they reciprocally react with the social and historical contingencies of their tradent communities.95

Memory and Tradition Variability The patterns of variation and agreement that are such a conspicuous feature of the gospel tradition are likewise intelligible as a memory phenomenon. Given the hold of the written-medium paradigm on his thinking, Gerhardsson struggled to explain the tradition’s property of variability. David Rubin shows that oraltraditional genres are mnemonic strategies for transmission of tradition and its reenactment in pervasively oral communication environments.96 ‘A formalized utterance’, Assmann says, ‘is a carrier of memory, a mnemonic mark in being both an element of tradition (which is in itself a form of memory) and memorable for future recourse.’97 Memory’s cognitive artificing of material into oral genres has the mnemonic pay-off of shedding the surfeits of detail that human memory is so inefficient at retaining. Conversely, the recurrent formal features of oral genres strongly enhance the memorability of the tradition they encode. Despite the fact that oral genres frequently enable close replication from utterance to utterance, they are nevertheless not calibrated for verbatim memorization, which is a transmission strategy predicated on the fixing properties of written texts.98 Rather, oral genres operate as what Rubin calls ‘systems of multiple constraints’ that cue memory in a non-rote manner and constrain variation by limiting its possible range.99 Memory as a factor in the transmission of oral tradition, accordingly, does not signify rote mastery and recitation but accurate recall through competence in a system of constraints and cues that eliminate the burden of carrying a verbatim version of a tradition in one’s head as a condition for reproducing it from occasion to occasion.100 Multiformity is the emblematic feature of oral tradition because genre-embodied configurations of constraints and cues permit a range of possible

95. See Assmann, ‘Form as a Mnemonic Device’, p. 69. 96. David Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, pp. 6–10, 88–109. 97. Assmann, ‘Form as a Mnemonic Device’, p. 72; also Kelber, ‘Generative Force of Memory’, p. 17; Ward Parks, ‘Orality and Poetics: Synchrony, Diachrony, and the Axes of Narrative Transmission’, in Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry (ed. John Miles Foley; Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1987), pp. 511–32 (522). 98. Ian M. L. Hunter, ‘Lengthy Verbatim Recall: The Role of Text’, in Progress in the Psychology of Language, vol. 1 (ed. Andrew W. Ellis; London and Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1985), pp. 207–34 (207). 99. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, pp. 119, 300. 100. Ibid., pp. 90, 101, 143, 293.

112

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

realizations of a given tradition.101 It is itself a mnemonic strategy indispensable for remembering the tradition, its transmission from enactment to enactment. This is because tradition that is inflexibly unreactive to the changing historical and cultural contexts of a tradent community is unable to engage its moral, normative authority with the exigencies of contemporary situations and falls into oblivion and with it the distinctive moral identity of the community. In the multiformity of the gospel tradition, that is to say, mnemonic and normative concerns converge. In this connection it is possible to see why the patterns of variation in the Synoptic tradition have been widely regarded as raising difficulties for Gerhardsson’s model for tradition. Gerhardsson in fact takes full cognizance of the phenomenon of variation, but in accord with the influence of the written-medium paradigm upon his basic conception of the tradition his tendency is to account for it by appealing to scribal modifications of texts or by reflecting on ways that fixed texts might vary in a system of memorization.102 Jesus, he suggests, may have had his disciples memorize more than one version of a given saying, while other variants may have arisen from imperfect memorization of an original.103 Some may be translation variants and others may have been introduced in Matthew’s and Luke’s redaction of Mark.104 Gerhardsson conceives much tradition variation in the pre-Gospels period similarly as a matter of editorial alterations of fixed texts by teacher-tradents whose authorship of the tradition extends to its continued interpretation, their interpretive work in effect producing new fixed editions of the traditions to be committed to memory alongside the other versions.105 Along similar lines he posits the ‘flexible interpretation’ of ‘fixed texts’ of the tradition, a binary predicated upon the categorical distinction between scriptural text and commentary as with miqra-targum.106 While Gerhardsson rightly insists on the moderate scale of variation, his model forces him to approach it as a difficulty to be explained and marginalized rather than embraced as a core property of the tradition. Consequently his explanations strain to encompass the phenomenon. It is difficult, for example, to square the Evangelists’ often wide-ranging transformations of their sources with an ethos of fixed-text transmission, that is, to countenance for the Evangelists, tradents in their own right, a free hand with the tradition programmatically ruled out from its oral transmission. Likewise, the ‘fixed text, flexible interpretation’ rubric, fitting as it is for commentary practices vis-à-vis written texts, is hard to square with the gospel

101. Ibid., p. 300. 102. Gerhardsson, Gospel Tradition, p. 45. 103. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, p. 335. 104. Gerhardsson, Origins, p. 82; idem, ‘Illuminating the Kingdom’, pp. 293–4. 105. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, p. 98; idem, Origins, pp. 85–6; idem, Gospel Tradition, p. 41; idem, ‘Illuminating the Kingdom’, pp. 289–93; idem, ‘The Path of the Gospel Tradition’, pp. 84–96; idem, ‘The Secret of the Transmission’, pp. 15–16. 106. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, pp. 65–6, 82, 113, 329; idem, Origins, p. 82; idem, Gospel Tradition, pp. 36–7.

Memory and Manuscript: Gerhardsson Revisited

113

materials where it is the base traditions themselves that are subject to variation. As Gerhardsson acknowledges for the targum analogy, the base text miqra, ‘the fixed and uncompromising holy word of Scripture’, remains impermeable.107 Gerhardsson in fact observes that the gospel traditions have in numerous cases undergone adaptation and reformulation.108 While he is correct that this largely occurs within the stable linguistic configuration of the tradition, this form of transmission (likewise for the haggadic tradition he adduces as analogy) is not commensurate with a fixed-text memorization model. This difficulty becomes visible in Gerhardsson’s marginalization of variation in such cases by ascribing greater importance to the ‘firm elements’ of such traditions and in his equivocating assertion that such were ‘in principle memorized’.109

Conclusion While identifying problems in Gerhardsson’s account of memory and the gospel tradition, in particular its overdetermination by the paradigm of the written medium, we have been able to integrate memory dynamics into the formation and transmission of the tradition perhaps even more thoroughly than Gerhardsson countenanced. Curiously enough, memory – which for him means memorization – seems to play a rather ancillary, external role for Gerhardsson: in his account memorization functions to maintain a closeness of correspondence between the gospel tradition and memories of Jesus.110 We have explored the likelihood of an even fuller convergence of memory with the tradition, that the tradition is, in fact, the artefact of social, cultural and cognitive processes of memory. These would carry over, moreover, into the written gospel medium, where the features of manuscript memory delineated by Gerhardsson become particularly salient to explicating the further history of the gospel tradition.

107. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, p. 70. 108. Gerhardsson, Tradition and Transmission, pp. 44–5; idem, Origins, p. 48; idem, ‘Illuminating the Kingdom’, pp. 292–8; idem, ‘Path of the Gospel Tradition’, pp. 89–90; ‘idem, Secret of the Transmission’, p. 6. 109. Gerhardsson, Gospel Tradition, p. 40; idem, ‘Secret of the Transmission’, p. 18. 110. Gerhardsson, Tradition and Transmission, p. 43. Gerhardsson sometimes associates variants in Jesus-sayings with ‘errors in memory’ (‘Path of the Gospel Tradition’, p. 90).

Chapter 7 MANUSCRIPT TRADITION AS A TERTIUM QUID: ORALITY AND MEMORY IN SCRIBAL PRACTICES*

Scholarship on the gospel tradition tends to engage its major research problems with the cognitive habits of print culture. This is a point that Werner Kelber has frequently reiterated in his influential analyses of the distinctiveness of oral visà-vis written media and the ramifications of this distinctiveness for the history of the tradition. This chapter will take its cue, however, from the increasing attention Kelber has given to the interface of orality, writing and memory. It will argue that this interface entails a distinctive phenomenology for manuscript tradition. From this sharpened analytical perspective it will identify certain respects in which work by Vernon Robbins, David Parker and Bart Ehrman on the written gospel tradition and its manuscript transmission continues to show the effects of print conceptions.

Orality and Writing at the Interface Oral tradition comes to tangible expression in live utterance, or ‘performance’, that taps into what John Miles Foley refers to as the oral-traditional register, the body of tradition carried by a community ‘inter-mnemonically’ and constitutive of its cultural identity.1 A tradent community’s contemporary social and historical realities contribute to the reconstitution of the tradition in these face-to-face enactments, a dynamic W. F. Hanks describes as ‘internalizing reception into the

* Originally published in Jesus, the Voice and the Text: Beyond the Oral and the Written Gospel (ed. Tom Thatcher; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008), pp. 215–34. Used by permission. 1. Ward Parks, ‘The Textualization of Orality in Literary Criticism’, in Vox Intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages (ed. A. N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternak; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 46–66 (57); also John Miles Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 26–31.

Manuscript Tradition as a Tertium Quid

115

production process itself ’.2 Performance is therefore essential to transmission, which is a matter of actualizing normative tradition within a community’s ever-shifting contemporary frameworks. This entails that variability, or better, multiformity, will be an index feature of oral tradition, each multiform being, to a significant extent, a response to the exigencies of particular enactment contexts.3 In other words, interpretation in oral tradition occurs internally to the text.4 By the same token, multiformity is the mark of the tradition’s authority. Kelber’s work is notable for its attention to the effects of media properties upon the cultivation and transmission of the gospel tradition. Shifting the tradition into writing – its externalization as chirographic tradition – stabilizes it dramatically. In Assmann’s words, the programmatic shifting of tradition to the written medium amounts to an external ‘solidification’ (Verfestigung) that secures its preservation (Sicherung); it amounts to a vital strategy, in the face of far-reaching historical and social change, to secure the transmission and reproduction of cultural identity.5 This operation shifts tradition from its primary expression in oral-mnemonic utterance in contingent enactment settings into self-contained complexes of literarily realized, ordered textual arrangements existing externally in material artefacts. Nissinen says of the inscription of neo-Assyrian prophecies that they ‘no longer belong to concrete contexts in time and space; instead they have become part of textual contexts created by the craftsmen of the literary works and inscriptions’.6 Suspended in spatial extension in the materiality of the written medium, tradition takes on a ‘thicker consistency’.7 It receives a more durable representation as a

2. W. F. Hanks, ‘Texts and Textuality’, ARA 18 (1989), pp. 95–127 (112). 3. A. N. Doane, ‘Oral Texts, Intertexts, and Intratexts: Editing Old English’, in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 75–113 (103); Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 69. 4. Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992), p. 295. Elsewhere he states that ‘tradition and interpretation are inseparably interconnected’ (p. 175). 5. Ibid., p. 165. 6. Martti Nissinen, ‘Spoken, Written, Quoted, and Invented: Orality and Writtenness in Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy’, in Writing and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy (ed. Ehud Ben Zvi and Michael H. Floyd; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2000), pp. 235–71 (268); also Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997 (reprint 1983)), p. 111; David R. Olson, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 121–2; Parks, ‘Textualization of Orality’, p. 58. 7. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 273; also John Miles Foley, The Singer of Tales in Performance (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 57.

116

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

visually perceptible script; thereby it becomes an increasingly normative reference point for the tradition’s enactment and hence its transmission.8 Notwithstanding their distinctive properties, the boundary between orality and writing in the ancient world was both indistinct and highly active. These media stood in a charged interfacial relationship. ‘Scholarship over the past twenty years’, Foley says, ‘has taught us to distrust the false dichotomy of “oral versus written” and to expect complex inventories and interactions of oral and literate in the same culture and even in the very same individual.’9 In antiquity and the medieval world, writing occurred within pervasively oral and aural communications environments. Accordingly, oral phenomenology was, in crucial respects, determinative of utilization practices with respect to written artefacts. A written work was published and diffused through oral recitation; it depended for its reception and transmission upon its constant re-entry into the oral and aural register.10 A principal concern of Greco-Roman literate sensibility was for effective oral utterance. Medieval literature as well, Crosby points out, ‘is filled with expressions which indicate the author’s intention that his work shall be read aloud, shall be heard’,11 and the same may be said of the major genres in the

8. Doane, ‘Oral Texts, Intertexts, and Intratexts’, p. 78; Foley, Singer of Tales, p. 157; Martin S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism 200 B.C.E–400 C.E. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 6; Kelber, Oral and Written Gospel, pp. xxiv, 31–4, 105; Ward Parks, ‘Orality and Poetics: Synchrony, Diachrony, and the Axes of Narrative Transmission’, in Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry (ed. John Miles Foley: Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1987), pp. 511–32 (512–13); H. Vanstiphout, ‘Memory and Literacy in Ancient Western Asia’, in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, vol. 4 (ed. Jack M. Sasson; New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995), pp. 2181–96 (2181–2); Paul Zumthor, Oral Poetry: An Introduction (trans. Kathryn Murphy-Judy; THL, 70; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 196. 9. Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, p. 3; also Loveday Alexander, ‘Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of the Gospels’, in The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (ed. Richard Bauckham; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 71–11 (95); Finnegan, Literacy and Orality, p. 72; idem, Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 178–9; Kelber, Oral and Written Gospel, p. xxiv; Teresa J. Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 11–12. 10. H. G. Chaytor, From Script to Print: An Introduction to Medieval Vernacular Literature (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1966 (reprint 1945)), pp. 10–11; Ruth Crosby, ‘Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages’, Speculum 11 (1936), pp. 88–110 (88–9); Elaine Fantham, ‘Two Levels of Orality in the Genesis of Pliny’s Panegyricus’, in Signs of Orality: the Oral Tradition and Its Influence in the Greek and Roman World (ed. E. Anne Mackay; MnemosyneSup, 288; Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 221–37 (222); W. B. Sedgwick, ‘Reading and Writing in Classical Antiquity’, ContempRev 135 (1990), pp. 90–4 (90). 11. Crosby, ‘Oral Delivery’, p. 98.

Manuscript Tradition as a Tertium Quid

117

classical polis.12 Written texts found their actualization, their telos, in conversion into oral enactment. The medieval scholar Richard de Fournival viewed his escrit as visible depiction (painture), signifying and enabling reconstitution of what was primarily auditory (parole).13 The sensory register tuned to the reception and cognition of the manuscript work was as much aural as it was visual, if not more so; according to Clanchy medieval reading was ‘primarily oral rather than visual’.14 The ‘instinctive question’ of a medieval person, Chaytor says, ‘when deciphering a text, was not whether he had seen, but whether he had heard this or that word before; he brought not a visual but an auditory memory to his task’.15 Small notes that the reification of the written word distinct from its embodiment in speech, ‘the separation of the visual and aural aspects of the text that enable us to treat print and speech differently’, was not so pronounced in antiquity. 16 In sum, written artefacts, in Jaffee’s words, ‘enjoyed an essentially oral cultural life’.17 In utilization and transmission they existed as ‘performative tradition’, open to some extent to the transformations and multiformity characteristic of oral tradition.18 Nevertheless it would be wrong simply to dissolve ancient writing into orality. As Kelber has stressed, the irreducible media properties of writing remain wholly pertinent. Though not able to fix tradition, the written – more precisely, the chirographic – medium gave it a level of stabilization impossible

12. Rosalind Thomas, ‘Prose Performance Texts: Epideixis and Written Publication in the Late Fifth and Early Fourth Centuries’, in Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece (ed. Harvey Yunis; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 162–88 (162–3); also Karel Van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 11–12. 13. M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn, 1993), p. 284. 14. Ibid., p. 267; also David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 72–83, 160; Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, pp. 17–18; Kelber, Oral and Written Gospel, p. xxii; Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 14–15; Armin Sweeny, A Full Hearing: Orality and Literacy in the Malay World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 7–8. 15. Chaytor, Script to Print, p. 14. 16. Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 20; also Mireille Corbier, ‘L’écriture en quête de lecteurs’, in Literacy in the Roman World (ed. J. H. Humphrey; JRASup, 3; Ann Arbor: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1991), pp. 99–118 (113); Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 174; Olson, World on Paper, p. 196. 17. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, p. 125. 18. Ibid., pp. 25–7; also Doane, ‘Oral Texts, Intertexts’, p. 82; van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, 233–4.

118

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

in the oral medium, as well as a corollary material and visual existence distinct from, and inassimilable into, any act of performance.19 Assmann argues that the programmatic inscription of tradition marked a strategic shift in transmission, a cultural memory project to secure a community’s normative tradition in response to breakdowns in the social frameworks for its oral cultivation.20 Written cultural artefacts of this sort naturally possessed heightened normativity,21 and in their function as scripts they exerted strong effects upon the ambient oral tradition. Foley uses the term ‘inertia’ to describe the effect of manuscript text upon the oral performance tradition of Homer.22 The issue for analysis, therefore, is the interaction along the oral and written axes that is definitive of what Armin Sweeny terms ‘oral manuscript culture’.23

Scribal Memory It is in this connection that the factor of memory becomes especially pertinent. In contrast to its total inconsequence in print culture, in the literate practices of antiquity memory played a major operational role. Memory was ‘the classical means of cognitively organizing and, most significantly, retrieving words’.24 Oral manuscript culture was a memory culture, Carruthers comments, ‘to the same profound degree that modern culture in the West is documentary’.25 Committal of cultural texts to memory was a principal element of ancient scribal and literaterhetorical education, a competence gained and expressed through their oral recitation.26 In ancient and medieval pedagogy, reading and memorizing were regarded as undifferentiated activities.27 Memory ingestion of this sort was directed towards the repertoire of cultural texts, namely, the narrative and instructional

19. Kelber, Oral and Written Gospel, p. xxiv. 20. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 159–65, 218–21; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis: zehn Studien (Munich: Beck, 2000), pp. 29–37, 53–4, 87–8. 21. Jan Assmann, Fünf Stufen auf dem Wege zum Kanon: Tradition und Schriftkultur im frühen Judentum und seiner Umwelt (MTV, 1; Münster: Lit, 1999), p. 27. 22. John Miles Foley, Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), p. 27. 23. Sweeny, A Full Hearing, p. 73. 24. Small, Wax Tablets, p. 71, emphasis original; see van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, pp. 21–2. 25. Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (CSMT, 10; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 8. 26. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, pp. 29–30; Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 213–26; Steven D. Fraade, ‘Literary Composition and Oral Performance in Early Midrashim’, OT 14 (1999), pp. 33–51 (45); Ronald J. Williams, ‘Scribal Training in Ancient Egypt’, JAOS 92 (1972), pp. 214–21 (219). 27. Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 156.

Manuscript Tradition as a Tertium Quid

119

works whose cultivation and transmission in scribal memory was crucial to the reproduction of a community’s identity across generations.28 Memory-based control of a written artefact was requisite for its practical utilization, given the problems of visual access presented by the cumbersome scroll format and minimally formatted, mostly unbroken scripts that made not just reading but also search-and-location operations difficult.29 But memory competence was a good deal more than just a practical matter. It lay at the heart of the scribal ethos, according to which a text was not truly learned until it had been internalized by thorough assimilation to memory.30 Memory internalization was essential to the scribal project of moral transformation that Carr describes as ‘the cognitive internalization of “wisdom” … on the heart of the student’.31 In other words, memory was the principal faculty for intellectual and moral formation. The effect, at least ideally, was that the scribe educated in this manner came to be the living, orally proficient embodiment of the community’s tradition. Correspondingly, the ‘work’ was a multimedia reality that existed most pristinely and authentically in its memory version and its corollary oral and aural expression. The written manuscript was, as Jaffee puts it, ‘an almost accidental existent, a material object whose most authentic being resided as a spiritual possession in the memory of its student’.32 As an unformatted, undifferentiated stream of letters, the manuscript text bore only weak representational correspondence to the

28. Jan Assmann, ‘Form as a Mnemonic Device: Cultural Texts and Cultural Memory’, in Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark (ed. Richard A. Horsley et al.; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), pp. 67–82 (81); Jerome Bruner and Carol Fleisher Feldman, ‘Group Narrative as a Cultural Context of Autobiography’, in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (ed. David C. Rubin; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 291–317 (295); Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 193–4; Anson F. Rainey, ‘The Scribe at Ugarit’, Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 3 (1969), pp. 126–46 (131); Vanstiphout, ‘Memory and Literacy’, p. 2189; Carr, Tablet of the Heart, pp. 19, 29–30, 73; Carr construes scribal curricula of memorized classical texts somewhat onesidedly as a hegemonic strategy of elites, overlooking the pragmatic exigency of the perpetuation of a cultural identity. 29. R. A. Derrenbacker, Jr., Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem (BETL, 186; Leuven and Paris: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 2005), p. 116; C. B. R. Pelling, ‘Plutarch’s Method of Work in the Roman Lives’, JHS 99 (1979), pp. 74–96 (92–3); L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 3rd edn, 1991), pp. 2–5; Small, Wax Tablets, p. 220. 30. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, p. 209; Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 10; Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 156–63; Fraade, ‘Literary Composition’, p. 45. 31. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, p. 210; also Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 136; Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 164–73. 32. Martin S. Jaffee, ‘Oral Tradition in the Writings of Rabbinic Oral Torah: On Theorizing Rabbinic Orality’, OT 14 (1999), pp. 3–32 (9); also Kelber, Oral and Written Gospel, p. xxii; Assmann, ‘Form as Mnemonic Device’, p. 81.

120

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

composition that it recorded. David Olson points out that ‘as long as knowledge was thought of as in the mind … writing could only be seen as reminder not representation’.33 The manuscript was ancillary; it was the visual, material support – an external ‘reference point’ – for the primary existence and transmission of the text in the medium of memory. Likewise, it was not in minute textual dissection but in oral enactment out of memory that the text’s meaning was actualized.34 In effect, scribal memory constituted the interfacial zone where writing and oral-traditional practices converged and interacted. The text was restored to oral utterance primarily out of memory, just as through its conversion to aural and oral utterance in ruminative reading or recitation it came to be inscribed upon memory. Hence it was in memory that manuscript tradition was opened up to oral phenomenology in its utilization and transmission and, accordingly, led its cultural existence as an ‘oral-performative tradition’.35 More to our point, oral enactment of memory-based works affected scribal practices of textual transmission. Conversely, the existence of texts as chirographic traditions injected into their memory-grounded cultivation the countervailing, stabilizing effects of the written medium, with their assimilation to memory in fact frequently represented as graphic inscription upon material surfaces.36

Scribes as Tradents It is clear that characterizing scribes sweepingly as ‘copyists’ – that is, as better or worse transcriptional functionaries – gives them short shrift. To be sure, transcription was central to the scribal vocation, and it is also important to

33. Olson, World on Paper, p. 196. 34. Franz H. Bäuml, ‘Medieval Texts and the Two Theories of Oral-Formulaic Composition: A Proposal for a Third Theory’, NLH 16 (1984), pp. 31–49 (38–9); Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998 (reprint 1961)), p. 81; Martin S. Jaffee, ‘Writing and Rabbinic Oral Tradition: On Mishnaic Narrative, Lists and Mnemonics’, JJewThPhil 4 (1994), pp. 123–46 (145–6); Olson, World on Paper, pp. 180–2; H. Gregory Snyder, Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World: Philosophers, Jews, and Christians (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 1. 35. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, p. 151; also Kelber, Oral and Written Gospel, p. xxii; Paul Mandel, ‘Between Byzantium and Islam: The Transmission of a Jewish Book in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods’, in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion (ed. Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 74–106 (77). 36. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, p. 160; Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 16; Yaakov Elman, ‘Authoritative Oral Tradition in Neo-Assyrian Scribal Circles’, JANESCU 7 (1975), pp. 19–32 (20); Jaffee, ‘Writing and Rabbinic Oral Tradition’, p. 144; Small, Wax Tablets, pp. 99–100.

Manuscript Tradition as a Tertium Quid

121

distinguish among the various sorts of tasks and functions scribes might perform. Certainly many scribes were capable of only routine clerical functions – the term ‘scribe’ is imprecise and obscures wide disparities in literate competency. It is nevertheless the case that scribes with more extensive grounding in literacy might act as full-fledged tradents, exercising in the chirographic transmission of their community’s tradition a performative competence analogous to that of the oral-traditional performer.37 No doubt very many manuscript variants arose from carelessness or ineptitude, as well as from the susceptibility of transcriptional operations to particular sorts of errors. Likewise, scribes might differ significantly in their approaches to transcribing a particular text.38 The point is not to flat-iron scribal practice, but to grasp a core phenomenon of oral manuscript culture that is likely to be missed or misconstrued from a print culture perspective. In transcription a scribe converted a portion of manuscript text through vocalization into the aural and oral register and simultaneously into a memory trace; the trace was, in its turn, reconverted to manuscript copy likewise through low-voice dictation. In other words the scribe grasped the manuscript text not just as a visual but as an auditory entity, even preponderantly so.39 In Sweeny’s words, ‘the transmission of the text from one manuscript to another – from an “original” to a “copy” – is oral rather than visual.’40 The scribe apprehended the written work cognitively not primarily ‘as a string of written signs’ as in print culture but in its reconstitution as oral utterance.41 The effect of engaging the manuscript text in this

37. A. N. Doane, ‘The Ethnography of Scribal Writing and Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Scribe as Performer’, OT 9 (1994), pp. 420–39 (421–31); idem, ‘Oral Texts, Intertexts’, p. 81; also Malachi Beit-Arié, ‘Publication and Reproduction of Literary Texts in Medieval Jewish Civilization: Jewish Scribality and Its Impact on the Texts Transmitted’, in Elman and Gershoni, eds, Transmitting Jewish Traditions, pp. 225–47 (238); Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, pp. 18–19. 38. Ernest C. Colwell, What Is the Best New Testament? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 117. 39. Chaytor, Script to Print, p. 19; Clanchy, Memory to Written Record, p. 267; Klaus Junack, ‘Abschreibpraktiken und Schreibergewohnheiten in ihrer Auswirkung auf die Text-uberlieferung’, in New Testament Textual Criticism: Its Significance for Exegesis (ed. Eldon Jay Epp and Gordon Fee; Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), pp. 277–95 (281–2); Sweeny, A Full Hearing, pp. 7–8. 40. Sweeny, A Full Hearing, p. 90. 41. John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen Amor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 145; also Corbier, ‘L’écriture’, p. 109; Harry Gamble, ‘Literacy, Liturgy, and the Shaping of the New Testament Canon’, in The Earliest Gospels: The Origins and Transmission of the Earliest Christian Gospels – the Contribution of the Chester Beatty Gospel Codex P45 (ed. Charles Horton; JSNTSup, 259; London and New York: T&T Clark, 2004), pp. 36–9 (31); Junack, ‘Abschreibpraktiken’, pp. 282–3. Research in the cognitive science of memory posits a ‘phonological loop’ in short-term memory: in reading, written words are typically ‘heard’ and held in short-term memory as auditory traces (Alan K. Baddeley, Essentials of Human Memory (East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press, 1999),

122

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

manner, moreover, would be to cue and activate the memory version of the work. To return to Chaytor’s point, the scribe ‘brought not a visual but an auditory memory to his task … . He had learnt to rely on the memory of spoken sounds, not upon the interpretation of written signs’.42 These observations on the oral and auditory nature of scribal transcription should not be pushed too far. Transcriptional errors often arose from visual misapprehension of the text, and scribes often faithfully transcribed solecistic and defective readings.43 Nevertheless, it is clear that scribal transcription displayed emblematic features of oral enactment of the tradition.44 A more precise account can be given of the forces at work upon the manuscript tradition as, restored to oral/aural form, it traverses the interfacial zone of scribal memory to its transcriptional destination. In turning from exemplar to copy, the scribe must carry shorter or longer textual sequences in short-term memory. Short-term memory traces are quite unstable, and if the peripheral role that memory plays in print culture is the point of reference, this instability would seem to give a plausible account of the effects of memory on manuscript transmission (a corrupting factor). There can be little doubt that variants arose for this reason. In manuscript culture, however, where a cultural text existed primarily as a memory artefact, the fleeting nature of short-term memory would not have been a significant factor. Instead, a wider range of memory and oral/aural dynamics may be considered. Phenomena such as transpositions in the grammatically flexible Greek word order, as well as phonetic substitutions, indicate that scribes worked with the text as an oral and auditory entity.45 The migration of vocabulary and syntactic constructions from nearby contexts, as well as familiarized phraseology from elsewhere in the work, into the transcription of a phrase is likewise intelligible in light of the operational role of memory. Colwell labels these ‘harmonization to the immediate context’.46 More specifically, they are cases of what researchers on the cognitive aspects of memory refer to as ‘proactive interference’, that is of one

pp. 51–3). The visual-spatial uniformities of modern printed texts are highly conducive to visual processing and so render the ‘phonological loop’ less central to comprehension. 42. Chaytor, Script to Print, p. 14. 43. Bruce M. Metzger, and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn, 2005), pp. 251–4, 271; von der Toorn, Scribal Culture, 126. 44. Hermas’s copying of his visionary scroll ‘letter by letter, for I could not make out the syllables’ (Vision II.i.4) may say more about his level of literacy than about scribal practice in general, as Metzger was inclined to think (Metzger and Ehrman, Text of the New Testament, p. 23, n. 29). Junack estimates the length of the scribal phrase-units as ‘somewhere between 15 and 60 letters … so 5 to 12 words or 10 to 25 phonetic units’ (‘Abschreibpraktikan’, p. 290). 45. Ernest C. Colwell, Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1969), p. 110; James R. Royse, ‘Scribal Habits in the Transmission of New Testament Texts’, in The Critical Study of Sacred Texts (ed. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty; Berkeley: Graduate Theological Union, 1979), pp. 139–61 (152). 46. Colwell, Studies, p. 113.

Manuscript Tradition as a Tertium Quid

123

memory upon another.47 The reciprocally active openness of the transcriptional unit to the ambient field of scribal memory that it traverses as an auditory memory trace also helps account for substitutions of synonyms and synonymous expressions, as well as for the displacement of words and phrases by more familiar or naturalized expressions from other well-known texts. Greenstein, in his discussion of 4QPsb and other Qumran texts, describes these phenomena as ‘memory contamination’.48 The effects of memory on manuscript traditions were, however, even more farreaching than these perhaps often involuntary alterations. Trained scribal memory was an active competence in the wider community repertoire of both oral and written tradition, memory-ingested, constituting what Dagenais refers to as a scribe’s ‘oral-memorial register’,49 corresponding in important respects to Foley’s ‘oral-traditional register’.50 As the manuscript text was activated in scribal memory in recitation and transcription, it might intersect and react with this traditional repertoire at many points. ‘The performing scribe’, writes Doane, ‘produced the text in an act of writing that evoked the tradition by a combination of eye and ear, script and memory.’51 In consequence the text might undergo characteristic sorts of transformations – conflations with or substitutions of similar traditions, harmonizations, integration of different materials, in some cases hybridizations with other works – even to a point where the transmission of the text might merge into a project of producing a new work.52 Certainly scribes made bona fide memory mistakes, but memory-based transformations such as those described above were integral to the more thoroughgoing performance competence that capable scribes might exercise with respect to their manuscript tradition. ‘The singer and the scribe equally’, Assmann observes, ‘are first of all tradents, bearers of tradition, living embodiments of the “extended communication situation.” To both falls the task of sustaining the

47. Baddeley, Essentials of Human Memory, p. 126. 48. Edward L. Greenstein, ‘Misquotation of Scripture in the Dead Sea Scrolls’, in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume, vol. 1 (ed. Barry Walfish; Haifa: Haifa University Press, 1993), pp. 71–83 (77); see Carr, Tablet of the Heart, pp. 42–3; Innocent Himbaza, ‘Le Décalogue du Papyrus Nash, Philon, 4QphylG, 8QPhy13 et 4Qmez’, RevQ 79 (2002), pp. 411–28; Naoko Yamagata, ‘Plato, Memory, and Performance’, OT 20 (2005), pp. 111–29 (117–18). 49. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 145; also Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 106–7. 50. Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, pp. 26–31, 89–90. 51. Doane, ‘Ethnography of Scribal Writing’, p. 436. 52. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, pp. 137–46; Doane, ‘Ethnography of Scribal Writing’, pp. 432–3; Carr, Tablet of the Heart, pp. 35–40; Kelber, Oral and Written Gospel, p. xxiii; also Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), pp. 430–1; Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, p. 80; Peter Schäfer, ‘Research into Rabbinic Literature: An Attempt to Define the Status Quaestionis’, JJS 37 (1986), pp. 139–52.

124

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

communicative process [of tradition-transmission]’.53 The written work existed not as a typographic fixation but as a cultural tradition memorially and orally embodied in the persons of scribes who were themselves socially embodied in live community contexts, and whose acts of transcription were extensions of their oral-recitational tradent role in the community. The activities of scribes were driven by the exigency of any enactment of tradition, namely, to render in this case the chirographic tradition responsive to the realities and crises of the tradent community. Thereby scribes sustained the critical continuity between the historically situated community and its foundational tradition.54 This competence operated across the range of scribal activities, from the fashioning of recognizably new works out of the repertoire of memory-ingested oral and written tradition to the transmission of the manuscript tradition of established works. The author of Chronicles, for example, has ‘taken over older historical traditions and reformulated them in the light of contemporary emphases … . In this way … the post-exilic generation, not only retrieve their past but also reorient themselves toward the future’.55 Van der Toorn notes similarly that ‘the expansion of the Masoretic text of Jeremiah 33 [vv. 14–26] is an instance of a teacher explaining the meaning of received oracles for his own time’.56 In the course of the manuscript transmission of the Babylonian version of Lamentations Rabbati, the conventional sequence of nations that ruled over Israel, namely, the Babylonians (Bavel), Persians (Paras), Greeks (Yavan) and Romans (Edom), is extended by the addition of Ishmael to incorporate the Muslim rule that was the contemporary historical framework of the tradent community.57 The dynamism in the manuscript tradition of the Hebrew Bible during the Second Temple period is a striking case of performative competence in scribal transmission of cultural texts. ‘In light of the evidence provided by the larger collection of biblical scrolls from Qumran,’ writes Eugene Ulrich, ‘it can be recognized that small additions, omissions and rearrangements are characteristic of the biblical text throughout its history up to the second century CE.’58 Ulrich’s construal of this phenomenon as ‘repeating it [the tradition] faithfully but reshaping it creatively in the light of the

53. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, pp. 136–7. 54. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, pp. 412–13; Kelber, ‘The Generative Force of Memory: Early Christian Tradition as a Process of Remembering’, BTB 36 (2006), pp. 15–22 (21). 55. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, p. 413. 56. van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, p. 132. 57. Mandel, ‘Between Byzantium and Islam’, p. 95. 58. Eugene Ulrich, ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Biblical Text’, in The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, vol. 1 (ed. Peter W. Flint and James C. Vanderkam; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1998), pp. 79–100 (88, emphasis original); also H. Vanstiphout, ‘On the Old Babylonian Eduba Curriculum’, in Centres of Learning: Learning and Location in Pre-Modern Europe and the Near East (ed. Jan Willem Drijvers and Alasdair A. MacDonald; BSIH, 61; Leiden and New York: Brill, 1995), pp. 3–16 (8).

Manuscript Tradition as a Tertium Quid

125

exigencies of their current cultural situation’ identifies the major vectors at work in scribal cultivation of manuscript tradition.59 As with oral-traditional performance, scribal operations of the sort observed, for example, by Vanstiphout for Mesopotamian texts and Fishbane and Ulrich for the history of the texts of the Hebrew Bible amounted to internal transformations of the tradition itself. In other words, the traditum and its scribal traditio were co-constitutive, though with the traditum ‘dominat[ing] the traditio and condition[ing] its operations’.60 This means that no hard and fast distinction existed between the ostensible author of a work and its scribal tradents. The redaction of a work and its transmission existed on a continuum.61 Scribes, positioned as they were at the interface of orality and writing, were instrumental in shifting authoritative tradition into the written medium. Many cultural texts originated as anonymous scribal compositions that, like their constituent traditions, existed from the outset as the collective possession of the community. Correspondingly, as its embodiments and tradents scribes exercised a shared authority with respect to the written tradition – a collective authorship as it were. Their operations upon it in the course of its chirographic transmission effectively amounted to a continuation of the tradent dynamics that had brought the work into existence.62 Even in the case of the prophet books or the named sages of the Talmud, the voices of anonymous scribal tradents merged with the tradition in the course of its transmission.63 Such authority was grounded in an ethos that, as noted, rendered scribes living embodiments of the normative tradition, and it found expression in tropes that identified interpretive scribal activity with prophetic inspiration.64

59. Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: Eerdmans; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999), p. 74, emphasis original; also James A. Sanders, ‘The Scrolls and the Canonical Process’, in Flint and Vanderkam, eds, The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, vol. 2 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999), pp. 1–23 (11). 60. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, pp. 86–7. 61. Ibid., p. 85; Peter Schäfer, ‘Once Again the Status Quaestionis of Research in Rabbinic Literature: An Answer to Chaim Milikowsky’, JJS 40 (1989), pp. 89–94 (90). 62. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, pp. 86–7; Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 191; Chaytor, Script to Print, p. 128; Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979) p. 122; Zumthor, Oral Poetry, pp. 203–4. 63. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, pp. 148–9; Eliezer Segal, ‘Anthological Dimensions of the Babylonian Talmud’, in The Anthology in Jewish Literature (ed. David Stern; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 81–108 (83). 64. Michael Fishbane, ‘From Scribalism to Rabbinism: Perspectives on the Emergence of Classical Judaism’, in idem, Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 64–78 (66–9); Michael H. Floyd,

126

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

On this point it is important to note salient distinctions between the respective compositional Sitze of scribal tradents of cultural texts and aristocratic GrecoRoman authorship (the latter often adduced as the relevant comparison for gospel composition). In elite Greco-Roman literary circles, authorial and transcriptional functions typically were separated; scribes were low status and marginal to the compositional process.65 An overt authorial ethos controlled these Greco-Roman literary works, only some of which might subsequently enter into the cultural tradition. This contrasts not just with the primacy but also the anonymity of scribes in the production and cultivation of cultural texts. The identity and personality of scribal composers, that is, receded behind works that were formulated from the outset to secure the deposit of tradition that already constituted and sustained a community’s identity. The distinctions of course should not be pressed too far. Elite Greco-Roman authors possessed compositional competence comparable to that of educated scribes in other cultural contexts. Likewise, scribes who laboured in low-status Greco-Roman occupational settings may not infrequently have possessed some literary competence. It is likely that some of the tradents of early Christian texts were to be found among scribes such as these, in which case they were users of their texts and hence vitally situated within communities where those texts functioned as normative tradition.66 It bears emphasizing again that the tradent competencies just outlined would have been unevenly distributed and realized in actual scribes. The warning against dissolving scribal operations into oral dynamics likewise bears repeating. Scribes were copyists and composers bound to and defined by the written medium. The visual materiality of the chirographic tradition exerted strong inertial effects upon its oral-traditional utilization. Emanuel Tov points out, for example, that ‘the rigid form of the manuscript’ rendered scribal glosses visible,67 and Fishbane notes that ‘the written form of the traditum and its textual context impose certain inevitable restraints upon the traditio which copies it’.68 Similarly, the tradition, inscribed upon memory as upon the page, was transmitted as a work, that is, ‘in a very definite formulation’,69 though, as will be seen below, not a fixed one.

‘“Write the Revelation!” (Hab 2.2): Re-imagining the Cultural History of Prophecy’, in Ben Zvi and Floyd, Writing and Speech, pp. 103–43 (141–2). 65. Alexander, ‘Ancient Book Production’, pp. 81–6; Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters, p. 7; Myles McDonnell, ‘Writing, Copying, and Autograph Manuscripts in Ancient Rome’, CQ N.S. 46 (1996), pp. 469–91 (477–83); Raymond J. Starr, ‘The Circulation of Literary Texts in the Roman World’, CQ N.S. 37 (1987), pp. 213–23 (214–15). 66. Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 78; Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters, pp. 16–17. 67. Emanuel Tov, ‘Scribal Practices Reflected in the Texts of the Judaean Desert’, in Flint and Vanderkam, Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years, vol. 1, pp. 402–29 (424). 68. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, p. 88. 69. Ibid., p. 87.

Manuscript Tradition as a Tertium Quid

127

Manuscript Mouvance It emerges that dynamism was a core feature of manuscript tradition, in contrast to the stasis, the motionlessness, of print. Dagenais has in fact applied mouvance, Paul Zumthor’s term for the emblematic indeterminacy of the oral text, to manuscript tradition to capture this its most striking property.70 The text, ‘apparently fixed on the manuscript page, is actually in constant flux, changing its shape, order, texture to suit the needs of the reader, who also inhabits a soul, body, and world in constant flux’.71 Analysis grounded in print assumptions typically attempts to parse out the mouvance observable in the history of the manuscript tradition of a text into a succession of fixed editorial stages (though to be sure, transmission might be punctuated by the appearance of new editions), or, alternatively, to construe a manuscript tradition as a matter of ‘variants’ on a fixed original. But the prolific multiformity of manuscript traditions simply eludes these sorts of printinspired reductions.72 Many factors contribute to manuscript mouvance, but the principal factor is the operation of oral-traditional dynamics in the manuscript medium, not as an ‘invasion’ (as Doane dramatizes it)73 but as one of its constitutive vectors – hence Dagenais’s characterization of mouvance as the essential indeterminacy of manuscript tradition.74 Schäfer argues that rabbinic literature is best understood ‘as an open continuum in which the process of emergence is not to be separated or distinguished without further ado from that of transmission’.75 The scribal practices sketched out above, in other words, reflect back into the very materiality of the manuscript medium. In chirographic transmission the person of the scribe was kinetically, cognitively and existentially bound up in the re-creation of the text in a way that is incomprehensible in our era of mass production of documents by mechanical means. Transcription was a socially embodied reading that effaced any absolute distinction between reader and manuscript; in Dagenais’s words, ‘The medieval text transcends the letter and escapes into a unique and personal ethical realm.’76 This entails that manuscript texts would come to bear in their receptive materiality the marks of the social and cultural contexts traversed in the course of their transmission. In the traces of the transmission of the Mishnah, for example, may be found harmonizations with current halakhic and commentary traditions, as

70. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 30; Zumthor, Oral Poetry, pp. 207–8. 71. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 58. 72. Schäfer, ‘Research into Rabbinic Literature’, pp. 147–51; also Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 19; Eisenstein, Printing Press as Agent of Change, p. 11. 73. Doane, ‘Oral Texts, Intertexts’, p. 81. 74. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 17. 75. Schäfer, ‘Once Again the Status Quaestionis’, p. 89. 76. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 16.

128

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

well as divergences reflective of Palestinian and Babylonian cultural environments respectively.77 The medieval text of the Latin Vulgate absorbed elements from its contemporizing usage in missionary homiletics as well as from the authoritative tradition of patristic exegesis.78 No sharp distinction existed between the text and its mediating gloss.79 The boundaries of the manuscript work, moreover, might be open to enlargement with other materials or to rearrangements of order. Accordingly, it might proliferate in different versions or undergo significant development along the course of its transmission, as with the Isaiah scroll.80 It is risky, however, to generalize. Variables such as genre, whether a text originated with a named authorial personality or in tradition, and context-specific contingencies might affect the ground rules for the utilization and transmission of given texts and hence the nature and extent of such transformations. Phenomena such as those of the examples surveyed above are alien to a print sensitivity habituated to the typographically fixed original exactly replicated in mechanically produced copies. So far from indicating weak prescriptiveness, however, variability in manuscript transmission may in many cases be understood as the means by which a normative base tradition reacted authoritatively with the historical contingencies of a tradent community. Doane comments: In the mixed vocal/writing medium of manuscripts … a particular message continues to be authorized by its status as a performance. … Variability would have been seen as a positive value, as a kind of authorizing afflatus in itself. From this point of view, the scribe-as-performer would see the rewriting as enhancing the traditional text by giving it life in the present.81

As with oral tradition, therefore, the most pertinent expression of a chirographically transmitted work would have been its contemporizing enactment in recitation and transcription. Clanchy observes that ‘manuscript culture put the emphasis in any text on its current presentation rather than its archaeological correctness’.82

77. H. L. Strack and Günter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (trans. and ed. Markus Bockmuehl; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2nd edn, 1996), pp. 139–40. 78. Raphael Loewe, ‘The Medieval History of the Latin Vulgate’, in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation (ed. G. W. H. Lampe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 102–54 (109–10, 131, 141–2). 79. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, pp. 21–7; Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, pp. 18–19. 80. Assmann, ‘Form as Mnemonic Device’, p. 79; Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 19; Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, pp. 235–6. 81. Doane, ‘Ethnography of Scribal Writing’, p. 433; also Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 91. 82. Clanchy, Memory to Written Record, p. 265; also Carr, Tablet of the Heart, p. 46; Martin S. Jaffee, ‘The Oral-Cultural Context of the Talmud Yerushalmi: Greco-Roman Rhetorical Paideia, Discipleship, and the Concept of Oral Torah’, in Elman and Gershoni, eds, Transmitting Jewish Traditions, pp. 27–73 (28); idem, Torah in the Mouth, p. 18; Mandel, ‘Between Byzantium and Islam’, p. 76; Schäffer, ‘Research into Rabbinic Literature’, p. 151.

Manuscript Tradition as a Tertium Quid

129

Given the multiformity of manuscript tradition, the question put trenchantly by Peter Schäfer is whether there is any sense in continuing to speak of the existence of the ‘work’ as though of an integral entity. So great are the variations between the Vatican and London manuscripts of Bereshit Rabba, for example, ‘that the redactional unity of the work is debatable … . What then constitutes the identity of the work of “Bereshit Rabba”?’83 Schäffer proposes for rabbinic literature an ‘open text-continuum’ model, one that approaches a text as ‘a dynamic process that has entered into various and changing configurations and fixations’.84 Nevertheless – and somewhat paradoxically – it is difficult to dispense with the notion of the work as a traceable constant, whose realization in the materiality of the chirographic medium accounts for a capacity to persist in transmission. Lamentations Rabbati is a case in point. Paul Mandel points out that the Babylonian and Palestinian versions of this text diverge so much that their parallel units have the appearance of oral variants. Nevertheless, ‘a comparison between the two manuscript traditions demonstrates that they constitute exactly the same work. Almost all the passages found in one recension are found in the other, in similar language, and in approximately the same order’.85 Preferable, therefore, is Dagenais’s further characterization of the mouvance of manuscript tradition as ‘the peculiar way in which handwritten texts “move” about each other and a presumed originary center’.86 What seems difficult to square what has been argued so far about memory competence and manuscript mouvance, however, is the manifest scribal concern for fidelity in copying operations. Close visual contact with exemplars, transcription of even defective readings, collation of copies, counting lines and appending colophons that certified accuracy and sometimes warned against altering the text were characteristic scribal practices. Scribes were alive to the concept of textual corruptions and hence to the normativity of the work; they were ‘well aware of the “mistakes” in their texts and often took great pains to “correct” these and prevent further mistakes’.87 Assmann comments: ‘The occupational ethos of the scribe-tradent stipulated the duty of the transmission of tradition virtually as a matter of a legal obligation, as undertaking a solemn, contractually-binding obligation with respect to the text.’88 Van der Toorn accounts for this curious duality

83. Schäffer, ‘Research into Rabbinic Literature’, p. 146. 84. Ibid.; emphasis added. 85. Mandel, ‘Between Byzantium and Islam’, p. 80, emphasis original; also Ulrich, Dead Sea Scrolls, p. 109. 86. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 130, emphasis added. ‘The manuscript still participates with other scripta of the “same” text in a system of differences’ (p. 129). 87. Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters, p. 106; see Metzger and Ehrman, Text of the New Testament, pp. 198–202. 88. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 104, emphasis original; on this point see also Junack, ‘Abschreibpraktiken’, pp. 292–3; and Nick Veldhuis, ‘Mesopotamian Canons’, in Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (ed. Margalit Finkelberg and Guy G. Strousma; JSRC, 2; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), pp. 9–28 (22).

130

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

in scribal practices by distinguishing ‘copying’ from ‘editing’, modes respectively appropriate to different sorts of textual projects.89 At a deeper level, however, this duality manifested the reality that scribes embodied the interface of oral and written competencies. Thus, it was grounded in the scribal ethos itself, where the obligation to preserve and pass on written tradition conjoined with the didactic obligation to render the tradition responsive to present community contexts.90 A few examples will clarify how the differential interaction of these two vectors is constitutive of manuscript tradition. Beit-Arié discusses the case of Joseph ben Eliezer of Spain, ‘who copied, in 1375, a supercommentary to Ibn Ezra’s commentary on the Pentateuch. … He tells us that he copied the text from an extremely erroneous exemplar and was able to emend part of the mistakes. … In addition there were many cases where the author’s explanations seemed to him unreasonable, and there he integrated [glossed] his own opinion into the text’.91 At Qumran, fluid biblical text histories and memory-based trafficking with texts coexisted with visual copying practices.92 We noted that in the course of its transmission the medieval text of the Vulgate not only absorbed contemporizing usages from monastic preaching but also was subjected to scholastic attempts to align its wording with patristic exegesis. But one also finds countervailing attempts at its restoration, such as Alcuin’s to a normative standard defined by correct Latinity, or that of post-Carolingian Irish scholarship that even restored to it some Old Latin readings.93 Finally, Colwell’s comparison of P45, P66 and P75 shows that concern for textual replication on the one hand and freedom to transform the text on the other might vary significantly from scribe to scribe.94 Given its mouvance properties, therefore, the manuscript medium per se was characterized by only a relative stability (relative, that is, to other variables), notwithstanding that textualization frequently amounted to a consolidation, a strategic act of conservation, of a cultural tradition. In this connection the trend of a culturally foundational manuscript tradition towards transmission in an increasingly stabilized, more inviolable form (canonization) as touched on earlier may similarly be explained as a strategic response, attested cross-culturally, to momentous changes in the historical and social frameworks that had previously defined for a tradent community the possible range for its more open cultivation of a chirographic tradition, usually historical ruptures or other developments that, either suddenly or gradually, threatened a community with lethal discontinuity

89. van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, pp. 126–7. 90. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, p. 538. Carr writes of Ben Sira: ‘Ben Sira’s instruction is full of calls to “listen” and “hear” the instruction. … Yet the book itself witnesses to Ben Sira’s use of writing to pass his instruction to “future generations” (24.33-34; cf. 39:32)’ (Tablet of the Heart, p. 208). 91. Beit-Arié, ‘Publication and Reproduction’, p. 235. 92. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, pp. 232–3. 93. Loewe, ‘Medieval History of Latin Vulgate’, pp. 132–9. 94. Colwell, Studies in Methodology, p. 117.

Manuscript Tradition as a Tertium Quid

131

from its formative past. This brought increasing standardization and external objectification of the written tradition as well as corresponding shifts in the ground rules for its cultivation, most pertinently, making interpretation increasingly extrinsic – a matter of external commentary – to the tradition rather than immanent in its scribal performances.95 The greater stabilization of Hebrew Bible texts after the destruction of Second Temple society is a case in point,96 as is the standardization of Homer against local textual traditions in the wake of the collapse of the classical polis and the rise of the Hellenistic kingdoms,97 and perhaps also the stabilization of the transmission of the Babylonian Talmud after the loss of continuity ‘with past modes of learning’ with the closing of the geonic yeshivas in the eleventh century.98 The curious fact that most transformations in the gospel manuscript tradition occurred ‘in the earliest period of text transmission’ while ‘later manuscripts are remarkably more stable’99 may also be more intelligible seen in this light. Indeed, in comparison with the Matthew and Luke’s utilization of their written sources, the early manuscript tradition (second and third centuries) in fact already registers a major abatement in variation. Absolute fixation, however, the complete cessation of mouvance, is inconceivable for manuscript culture.

Scribal Tradition in Early Christianity Dagenais observes that despite ‘the chasm that separates medieval scriptum and modern textuality’, the ‘author/print paradigm’ continues to distort scholarly views on manuscript tradition.100 Print replaced the scribal transmission of manuscript tradition with mechanical replication of typographically fixed works. With the wide mechanical dissemination of texts in the visual clarity and uniformity of type, memory shifted from being central to literate activities to completely peripheral.101 In place of its embodied existence in memory and oral/aural utterance, the ‘work’ came to be identified primarily with the external written artefact, optically

95. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 165, 218–21; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, pp. 29–30, 53–4, 87–8; idem, ‘Form as a Mnemonic Device’, pp. 80–1. 96. See Ulrich, ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’, p. 83. 97. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 274–8; see Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, pp. 28–9. 98. Mandel, ‘Between Byzantium and Islam’, p. 100; also Daphna Ephrat and Yaakov Elman, ‘Orality and the Institutionalization of Tradition: The Growth of the Geonic Yeshiva and the Islamic Madrasa’, in Elman and Gershoni, eds, Transmitting Jewish Traditions, pp. 107–37 (114). Carr draws attention to textual standardizations of ancient cultural texts in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and at Qumran (Tablet of the Heart, pp. 44, 78–9, 235–6). 99. Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters, p. 113. 100. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 28. 101. Eisenstein, Printing Press as Agent of Change, pp. 66, 125.

132

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

processed and autonomous vis-à-vis its user. In a complete reversal of function, in other words, the book became less a reminder of the work and more its full objectification and representation.102 Textual variants became uniformly errata, deviations from the norm of typographically exact copies of the original. Mechanical rather than human replication effectively uncoupled the composition of a work from its transmission; consequently, intentional alterations came to be viewed uniformly as vitiations of the authorial original.103 As Dagenais points out, modern scholarship has tended to internalize print norms and generalize them unreflectively to manuscript textuality, superimposing modern conceptions of the authorial text, construing scribes narrowly as copyists, and measuring transcription solely against the standard of exact replication, while the scribal tradent function hardly registers. Inevitably scribes are construed ‘as inept defilers of the sacred authorial text’, and ‘transmission’ is conceived as the cumulative scribal corruption of a fixed original.104 The greatly diminished role of memory in print culture is similarly projected upon ancient literary practices. Memory is adduced only rarely in biblical source criticism, and then mostly in reference to the instability and transience of short-term memory as an ad hoc expedient to account for certain textual variations. As noted above, intentional scribal transformations have been recognized as a feature of the early gospel manuscript tradition. Colwell identifies many such changes as ‘editorial’ and ‘doctrinal’, while suggesting that these scribal operations in fact indicate the authority of the tradition.105 Epp recognizes that the manuscript tradition bears the marks of its social contextualizations, and also that the so-called original text, and hence textual authority, are essentially multiform.106 Nevertheless, gospel text critics have struggled to come up with explanations of these phenomena that do not, at least in part, revert to print assumptions. Perhaps it is no coincidence that accounts conspicuously lack engagement with research on the dynamics of tradition. One suspects that artificial disciplinary boundaries that separate the history of the Synoptic tradition and the history of the manuscript tradition into different academic subfields (though see Karnetzki)107 prevent text

102. Olson, World on Paper, pp. 110, 196. 103. Chaytor, Script to Print, p. 34; Eisenstein, Printing Press as Agent of Change, pp. 80–3, 122–6. 104. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 113; also Doane, ‘Ethnography of Scribal Writing’, p. 432. 105. Colwell, Studies in Methodology, p. 118; idem, What Is the Best New Testament? pp. 51–5. 106. Jay Eldon Epp, ‘The Multivalence of the Term “Original Text” in New Testament Textual Criticism’, HTR 92 (1999), pp. 245–83 (257–63, 278); idem, ‘The Oxyrhynchus New Testament Papyri: “Not without honor except in their own hometown”?’, JBL 123 (2004), pp. 5–55 (10). 107. Manfred Karnetzki, ‘Textgeschichte als Überlieferungsgeschichte’, ZNW 47 (1956), pp. 170–80.

Manuscript Tradition as a Tertium Quid

133

critics from recognizing the pertinence of oral-traditional dynamics to their research problems. Some reflections on the work of Robbins on the Synoptic tradition and of Parker and Ehrman on the manuscript tradition will illustrate these problems and, it is hoped, contextualize their acute observations within this wider theoretical framework. Robbins Robbins has long recognized the significance of ‘the dynamic relation between oral speech and written literature’ in antiquity, which he prefers to characterize as the ‘rhetorical’ quality of ancient composition, for the study of gospel origins.108 His correlation of rhetorical composition techniques to key features of the Synoptic tradition has cast much light upon the latter’s formation and history. Robbins misconstrues, however, the specific practices of elite Greco-Roman literaryrhetorical circles – a particular cultural permutation, in a particular cultural niche, of the oral/written dynamic – as its definitive expression. This leads him to distinguish ‘scribal culture’ categorically from ‘oral culture’ on the one hand and from ‘rhetorical culture’ on the other and, accordingly, to characterize scribal culture largely as rote copying and minor editorial operations.109 His model and its rubrics, that is to say, reflect the low status and adjunct role of scribes in Greco-Roman literary circles, who copied works they had no hand in composing and who likewise exercised no true tradent function in the circulation of those texts within elite friendship networks.110 A similar criticism may be levelled at Robbins’s attempt at a cross-correlation of this typology of ‘cultures’ to the graduated steps of the Greco-Roman educational curriculum. In the resulting schema, ‘scribal culture’ putatively corresponds to mastery of basic reading and copying skills, and ‘rhetorical culture’ to the progymnastic rhetorical composition taught at the very highest level of education.111 Viewed in the framework of Robbins’s model, this amounts to a correlation of low social status to low skill levels. In reality scribes were to be found at all gradations on the educational scale, from those capable of only simple clerical tasks to skilled literary tradents, and scribes labouring as low-status transcriptional functionaries for Greco-Roman elites might in some cases possess advanced literary capabilities.

108. Vernon K. Robbins, ‘Writing as a Rhetorical Act in Plutarch and the Gospels’, in Persuasive Artistry: Studies in New Testament Rhetoric in Honor of George A. Kennedy (ed. Duane F. Watson; JSNTSup, 50; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), pp. 142–68 (147–8); see also idem, ‘Progymnastic Rhetorical Composition and the Pre-Gospel Traditions: A New Approach’, in The Synoptic Gospels: Source Criticism and the New Literary Criticism (ed. Camille Focant; BETL, 110; Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 1993), pp. 114–47. 109. Robbins, ‘Writing as a Rhetorical Act’, pp. 145–8. 110. McDonnell, ‘Writing, Copying’, pp. 477–84; Starr, ‘Circulation of Literary Texts’, pp. 214–15. 111. Robbins, ‘Writing as a Rhetorical Act’, pp. 145–6.

134

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

In appealing to these practices Robbins is looking for a viable alternative to the tendency of gospels scholarship to interpret Synoptic patterns of variation and agreement implausibly on the model of direct copying and editing of exemplars. In taking such as emblematic of ‘scribal culture’, however, and associating it with manuscript transcription while distinguishing it categorically from the literary competencies of ‘recitational’ and ‘rhetorical composition’, Robbins runs the risk of reproducing print culture caricatures of scribal function and manuscript transmission. A more satisfactory solution might be found in approaching Synoptic patterns of variation as the manifestation of scribal tradent activities. Parker In his book The Living Text of the Gospels, distinguished text critic David Parker demonstrates, through a comparison of manuscript witnesses of parallel gospel passages, that intentional scribal changes were profusely characteristic of the early manuscript tradition. His survey of the over twenty variations on the four Synoptic passages on divorce and remarriage, for example, brings to light the remarkable range of interpretation and application of Jesus’s aphoristic norm.112 Nevertheless, though aware of the historical contingency of print culture perspectives, Parker does not locate this phenomenon adequately in the context of tradition dynamics in an oral manuscript culture. He interprets it along the lines of the print norm that takes fixation to be the index of textual authority. ‘For it is of the essence of a manuscript tradition that every copy is different,’ he writes. ‘It follows that while early Christianity may have come to make lists of authoritative books, there were no authoritative copies of them.’113 Similarly, the question of the role of variant dominical sayings ‘in establishing authoritative moral teaching is very sharply posed … . There is no dominical prescript on which church discipline can call as its authority’.114 Pursuing this line of reasoning, Parker argues that the imputation of canonical textual authority coincides with the appearance of the printed book.115 Research on the dynamics of tradition, however, identifies multiformity as in fact wholly consistent with a tradition’s authority, its prescriptiveness for the life and identity of its tradent community.116

112. David C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 80–90. 113. Ibid., p. 188. 114. Ibid., p. 183. 115. Ibid., pp. 188–9, 206–7. 116. Kelber, ‘Generative Force of Memory’, p. 20; see Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters, p. 124.

Manuscript Tradition as a Tertium Quid

135

Ehrman Bart Ehrman, likewise an accomplished text critic, has written extensively on intentional scribal changes in the New Testament manuscript tradition. Even more so than Parker, however, his analysis remains affected by print conceptions. Ehrman is cognizant of important aspects of the ancient media environment. He recognizes that the transmission of early Christian manuscript traditions was socially contextualized and also the effects of ambient oral tradition upon scribal transmission. He is aware that the low literacy rates and hence oral communications environment of antiquity would have been marked features of the early Christian communities.117 The enumeration of these realities, however, does not lead to a full rethinking of the standard approaches to manuscript tradition. The print distinction between authentic originals and variant copies controls his analysis.118 Though he stipulates that his use of the term ‘corruption’ is ironic (alterations being good faith, what scribes took to be implicit in the tradition), Ehrman’s evaluative terminology for intentional scribal changes is likewise expressive of print norms. Changes of this sort occur with a frequency that is ‘alarming’; they amount to ‘misquoting’, to ‘tampering with the text’.119 We have to ‘admit’, he says, that scribes were ‘changing scripture’,120 a sentiment echoed by his student Wayne Kannaday, who speaks of ‘catching scribes in the act of altering the scriptures’.121 As noted earlier, ancient scribes certainly had an engrained sense of obligation to the integrity of the written work. They were capable of contesting written tradition and the reliability of its transmission, and they were practised in applying the evaluative categories of textual corruption and transcriptional malfeasance. Ehrman, however, tends to comprehend most manuscript variation under these rubrics. Though acknowledging Haines-Eitzen’s point that early Christian scribes, unlike many of their working counterparts, were users of the literature they transcribed, Ehrman views scribes largely as copyists. In other words, he has a

117. Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 3–4, 277; idem, ‘The Text as Window: New Testament Manuscripts and the Social History of Early Christianity’, in The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis’ (ed. Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 361–79 (362); idem, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), pp. 37–9, 97–8. 118. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, pp. 55–69. 119. Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption, pp. xii, 31, 59, 275. 120. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, p. 210. 121. Wayne C. Kannaday, Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition: Evidence of the Influence of Apologetic Interests in the Text of the Canonical Gospels (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2004), p. 23. Like Ehrman, Kannaday offers insightful descriptions of scribal reperformances of manuscript tradition but lacks a model that can fully clarify the dynamics at work.

136

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

weak conception of scribes as tradents or of written artefacts (manuscripts) as comprising and behaving like a genuine tradition. Instead, he distinguishes transmission of the written tradition categorically from acts of transforming it and hence finds it anomalous, an ‘acute irony’, that second- and third-century Christian scribes (or, for that matter, even Matthew and Luke) should do this to authoritative texts.122 The irony perhaps lies in the fact that Ehrman’s assessment of scribal activity is predicated on the very print assumptions that underlie the view of scriptural authority (God’s Word fixed in originals) that he has come to reject and now makes the butt of his criticism. The inadequacies of this analytical framework are evident in the tensions in Ehrman’s explanation of why most variation arose in the early as opposed to the later manuscript tradition. Ehrman suggests that early Christian scribes were amateurs, whose replacement after Constantine’s conversion by a cadre of professional scribes better at exact copying resulted in a more stable transmission. But at the same time he imputes to these early scribes theological and political sophistication, the capability to shape the manuscript tradition of the gospels in a manner responsive to the second- and third-century Christological conflicts.123 Aside from the need to reconcile these characterizations, the effect is to construe practices characteristic of manuscript culture ad hoc as a narrowly early Christian phenomenon. Closer to the mark, therefore, is the analogy Ehrman draws between interpretative scribal transformations and the active interpretation that always accompanies the reading of a text.124 What Ehrman sees as the ‘unique hermeneutical enterprise’ of Christian scribes in physically transforming their texts,125 however, is better recognized as a typical tradent activity of scribes.

Conclusion Robbins, Parker and Ehrman illustrate the difficulty of escaping from engrained print assumptions. This chapter, following analytical approaches pioneered by Werner Kelber, has focused upon the convergence of orality, writing and memory in scribal transmission. It has argued that the origins and transmission of the written gospel tradition is best viewed in light of the scribal tradent competence that was an emblematic feature of oral manuscript culture. More specifically, the  active manuscript transmission of early Christian scribes should be seen as the continuation of the cultural memory project initiated by the compositional

122. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, p. 69; see also pp. 50, 219–15, and idem, Orthodox Corruption, p. 14. 123. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, pp. 51–2, 71–3, 124, 175, 205. 124. Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption, pp. 31, 280; idem, Misquoting Jesus, pp. 216–17. 125. Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption, p. 280, emphasis original.

Manuscript Tradition as a Tertium Quid

137

activity of the Evangelists, with the mouvance dynamism of the written gospel tradition abating as the project develops in historically contingent and contested ways towards canonization. Along this course, the gospel manuscript tradition comes to bear visibly, in the marks of its re-inscriptions, the memory of its transmission down through the shifting historical contexts of early Christianity.

Chapter 8 MEMORY, SCRIBAL MEDIA AND THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM*

When engaging with the Synoptic Problem it is difficult to break free of cognitive habits associated with written media in print culture. The visually processed, closely replicated text often operates just below the surface of critical awareness as the norm for assessing Synoptic source relationships. Close verbal agreement, with some limited margin allowed for editorial modification and transcriptional variation, is taken as a primary indicator of a documentary relationship. Accordingly, the tendency of the major utilization theories has been to construe Synoptic relations as closed circuits of copying and editing written sources.1 Corresponding to this approach is a strict operational separation between oral and written media. Variability is taken to be the index feature of oral tradition, close agreement the index feature of writing. Once rendered in writing, tradition is viewed as having crossed what A. N. Doane sardonically describes as ‘the “impermeable barrier”’ – shut off from oral dynamics and henceforth subject to the strictly literary operations of copying and editing.2 In practice this means that one finds oral tradition and memory invoked in discussions of the Synoptic Problem mostly ad hoc, to cope with residual cases of variation or problems of order that resist reduction to copying and editing scenarios. Memory is assigned the peripheral role it plays in visually oriented print culture. It is a weak faculty, unable to recollect with accuracy passages not immediately before the eyes, and hence culpable for some of the variation that has been introduced into the written transmission of the Gospels.

* Originally published in New Studies in the Synoptic Problem (ed. Paul Foster, Andrew Gregory, John S. Kloppenborg, and Joseph Verheyden; Leuven: Leuven University Press/ Peeters, 2011), pp. 459–82. Used by permission. 1. On this point, see V. K. Robbins, ‘Progymnastic Rhetorical Composition and the PreGospel Traditions: A New Approach’, in The Synoptic Gospels: Source Criticism and the New Literary Criticism (ed. C. Focant; BETL, 110; Leuven, Peeters, 1993), pp. 111–47 (116–17). 2. A. N. Doane, ‘The Ethnography of Scribal Writing and Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Scribe as Performer’, Oral Tradition 9 (1994), pp. 420–39 (424).

Memory, Scribal Media and the Synoptic Problem

139

‘The chasm that separates medieval scriptum and modern textuality’, writes John Dagenais, ‘is deep enough and broad enough to invalidate the application of much contemporary theory to medieval literature, based as this theory is on the author/print paradigm.’3 Synoptic scholarship likewise has been affected by modern media categories alien to the memory-based, oral manuscript culture of antiquity.4 This may go some way towards explaining why the Synoptic Problem has proven so intractable to resolution.

Memory, Orality and Scribal Tradition Variability is indeed emblematic of oral tradition. Oral tradition comes to tangible expression in live utterance that taps into the oral-traditional register, the body of authoritative tradition carried by a community ‘inter-mnemonically’.5 Its variable enactment (sensitive, that is, to changing contexts of reception) is constantly constitutive of cultural identity. This charged interaction of the tradition with the contemporary crises and predicaments of the tradent community is the core cultural memory dynamic.6 A material solidification (Verfestigung) of the tradition, with far-reaching consequences, occurs with its media shift into written artefacts – its chirographic externalization.7 The programmatic inscription of tradition, Jan Assmann argues, amounts to a strategic response to a ‘crisis of memory’ – a breakdown of the social frameworks for its oral transmission and cultivation.8 By virtue of its inscription, tradition receives durable, material ingredience in a visually apprehended script

3. John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 28. 4. ‘Oral manuscript culture’ is Armin Sweeney’s apt label (A Full Hearing: Orality and Literacy in the Malay World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 73). 5. Ward Parks, ‘The Textualization of Orality in Literary Criticism’, in Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages (ed. A. N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 46–71 (57); also John Miles Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 26–31. 6. Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992), passim; idem, ‘Form as a Mnemonic Device: Cultural Texts and Cultural Memory’, in Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark (ed. Richard A. Horsley et al.; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), pp. 67–82; see also Werner H. Kelber, ‘The Generative Force of Memory: Early Christian Tradition as a Process of Remembering’, BTB 36 (2006), pp. 15–22 (21). 7. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 165. 8. Ibid., pp. 159–65, 218–21; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis (Munich: Beck, 2000), pp. 29–37, 53–4, 87–8.

140

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

that thereby becomes an increasingly normative reference point for its enactment and hence its transmission.9 This irreducible media distinction between oral and written tradition needs to be emphasized, especially against over-reaching applications of orality theory that reduce gospels to epiphenomena of oral processes. It is nevertheless important to recognize that in antiquity, engagement with written artefacts occurred within predominantly oral environments.10 Notwithstanding their distinctive properties, orality and writing stood in a highly active interfacial relationship. ‘Scholarship over the past twenty years’, observes Foley, ‘has taught us to distrust the false dichotomy of “oral versus written” and to expect complex inventories and interactions of oral and literate in the same culture and even in the very same individual.’11 More to the point, oral utilization practices affected trafficking with written texts. This was not just a pragmatic matter of vocalized deciphering of minimally formatted, unbroken manuscript script; rather, writing found its actualization in reconversion to oral enactment. Written cultural texts depended for their reception and transmission upon their constant re-entry into the oral and aural register.12 Likewise, the manuscript work was composed and cognitively

9. On this point, see A. N. Doane, ‘Oral Texts, Intertexts, and Intratexts: Editing Old English’, in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 75–113 (78); John Miles Foley, The Singer of Tales in Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 157; Martin S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism 200 B.C.E.–400 C.E. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 6; Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997 (reprint 1983)), p. xxiv. 10. See William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 22; Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (TSAJ, 81; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2001), p. 498; Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 163, and Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 3, 53–6, 75–6, 249. On ancient Egypt, see Donald B. Redford, ‘Scribe and Speaker’, in Writings and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy (ed. Ehud Ben Zvi and Michael H. Floyd; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2003), pp. 145–218 (154). 11. Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, p. 3; Morgan, Literate Education, pp. 11–12. 12. David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 72–4; Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn, 1993), p. 284; Cribiore, Gymnastics, p. 190; Elaine Fantham, ‘Two Levels of Orality in the Genesis of Pliny’s Panegyricus’, in Signs of Orality: The Oral Tradition and its Influence in the Greek and Roman World (ed. E. Anne MacKay; Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 221–37 (222); H. G. Chaytor, From Script to Print: An Introduction to Medieval Vernacular Literature (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1945), pp. 10–11; Rosalind Thomas, ‘Prose Performance Texts: Epideixis and Written Publication in the Late Fifth and Early Fourth Centuries’, in Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture

Memory, Scribal Media and the Synoptic Problem

141

grasped not so much as an optical as an aural and oral phenomenon.13 The boundaries between the written and the spoken word, ‘the separation of the visual and aural aspects of the text that enable us to treat print and speech differently’, were not so cleanly drawn.14 Scribes apprehended the written work not just ‘as a string of written signs’ but also in its reconstitution as oral utterance.15 In short, written cultural memory artefacts, in Jaffee’s words, ‘enjoyed an essentially oral cultural life’, in their utilization and transmission open in some measure to the kinds of transformations characteristic of oral tradition.16 It is in connection with the oral life of written artefacts that it becomes possible to grasp something of the instrumental role that memory played in ancient literary activities. Oral manuscript culture was a memory culture, Carruthers points out, ‘to the same profound degree that modern culture in the West is documentary’.17 Memory was ‘the classical means of cognitively organizing and, most significantly, retrieving words’.18 Manuscript embodiments of a cultural text were ancillary to the work’s operative existence as a memory and oral artefact. Manuscript was ‘an external reference point’, the material substratum for works embodied in memory and oral-aural utterance.19

in Ancient Greece (ed. Harvey Yunis; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 162–88 (162–3); Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 11–12. 13. Clanchy, Memory, p. 267, 284; Carr, Writing, pp. 72–3; Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 14–15; Chaytor, Script to Print, p. 14; Klaus Junack, ‘Abschreibpraktiken und Schreibergewohnheiten in ihrer Auswirkung auf die Textüberlieferung’, in New Testament Textual Criticism: Its Significance for Exegesis (ed. Eldon Jay Epp and Gordon D. Fee; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 277–95 (285); Sweeny, Full Hearing, pp. 7–8, 90. 14. Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 20; also Mireille Corbier, ‘L’écriture en quête de lecteurs’, in Literacy in the Roman World (ed. J. H. Humphrey; Ann Arbor: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1991), pp. 99–118 (113); Cribiore, Gymnastics, p. 174; David R. Olson, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 196. 15. Dagenais, Ethics, p. 145. 16. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, p. 125; see Doane, Oral Texts, p. 82; van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, pp. 233–4. 17. Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 71. 18. Small, Wax Tablets, p. 71, emphasis original. 19. Carr, Writing, p. 160; also Olson: ‘As long as knowledge was thought of as in the mind … writing could only be seen as reminder not representation’ (World on Paper, p. 196). See van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, pp. 21–2; Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 8, 101; J. A. Loubser,

142

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Unwieldy scrolls and their undifferentiated scripts made memory control of a text requisite for its actual utilization. Sweeny notes that ‘in manuscript culture “visual retrieval” is still very rudimentary’.20 More importantly, memory ingestion of the written cultural tradition was central to ancient education and the scribal project of moral transformation.21 A core principle of the scribal ethos was that a cultural text was not truly learned until thoroughly internalized, that is, indelibly inscribed upon memory. Indeed, need for frequent consultation with the manuscript was viewed with contempt, betraying as it did a superficial grasp of the work.22 In accordance with writing’s role as the provisioner of memory, ancient composition frequently incorporated mnemonic principles that capitalized on memory’s cognitive efficiencies.23 Habituated narrative sequences functioned as mnemonic scripts, as did conventional moral topoi and topoi sequences.24 A work would have been accessed and orally activated out of memory in accordance with this organizational network of cues that constituted it as a memory artefact. Moreover, what Neusner refers to as ‘cognitive units’, namely ‘the smallest whole units of discourse’,25 functioned as irreducible mnemonic units, generated from memory by virtue of their properties as coherent, meaningfully patterned sequences of words and phrases. Hence they were not easily broken down – by memory operations at any rate – to their lexical elements, which in isolation from the coherent sequences in which they were embedded lacked capacity for easy recollection and compositional manipulation.26 In effect scribal memory was the crucial interfacial zone where writing and oral-traditional practices converged, where written tradition in its cultivation and transmission was opened up to oral phenomenology. Scribes worked with cultural texts in important respects as oral, aural and memory entities.

Oral and Manuscript Culture in the Bible: Studies in the Media Texture of the New Testament (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2007), p. 162. 20. Sweeny, Full Hearing, p. 84; see Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 92–3. 21. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, p. 210; Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 156–73; Cribiore, Gymnastics, pp. 193–4, 213–16. 22. Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 83; also Martin S. Jaffee, ‘Oral Tradition in the Writings of Rabbinic Oral Torah’, OT 14 (1999), pp. 3–32 (9). 23. Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 16, 28–32, 72; Small, Wax Tablets, pp. 90–111, 185–6, 215–16; Corbier, ‘L’écriture’, p. 113; Carr, Writing, pp. 77–8; Franz H. Bäuml, ‘Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy’, Speculum 55 (1980), pp. 237–65 (248); Redford, ‘Scribe and Speaker’, p. 207. 24. On cuing in the cognitive operations of recollection, see David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-Out Rhymes (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 90–101, 143, 293. 25. Jacob Neusner, Oral Tradition in Judaism: The Case of the Mishnah (New York and London: Garland, 1987), p. 61. 26. Small, Wax Tablets, p. 278.

Memory, Scribal Media and the Synoptic Problem

143

Even simple transcription entailed the conversion through vocalization of a phonetically-defined textual sequence, comprised of ‘somewhere between … 5 to 12 words or 10 to 25 phonetic units’, into an aural and oral memory trace.27 The reciprocal openness of this trace to the ambient field of scribal memory that it activated and traversed entailed the possibility of its undergoing various sorts of transformations.28 In addition to small-scale lexical and syntactical changes, words or verbal sequences might migrate into the reproduction of the text from near or remote contexts or from different but more familiarized works.29 This is a memory phenomenon called ‘proactive interference’ – a stronger, more habituated memory interfering with a less engrained memory.30 Greenstein analyses some of its occurrences (‘memory contamination’) in various Qumran texts.31 Petersen identifies the ‘tincture’ of Diatessaronic variants in the separate Syriac Gospels (the Diatessaron being anterior to the Syriac Tetraevangelium, hence more memory-habituated to scribes) and conversely, of Vulgate readings that displace Diatessaronic readings in Latin Gospel harmonies.32 Educated scribal memory, however, was also an active performative competence  – a tradent competence similar to that of the oral-traditional performer – in the wider repertoire of a community’s written and oral tradition that Dagenais refers to as a scribe’s ‘oral-memorial register.’33 ‘The performing scribe’, writes Doane, ‘produced the text in an act of writing that evoked the tradition by a combination of eye and ear, script and memory’.34 While scribes indeed inhabited a world of manuscripts, their central resource for composition was their trained memory – to borrow Fishbane’s words, ‘the vast thesaurus’ of the written and oral materials of the cultural tradition.35 Carr notes that scribes did not ‘juggle multiple

27. Junack, ‘Abschreibpraktiken’, p. 290. 28. Ibid., pp. 281–3; Chaytor, Script to Print, p. 19; Clanchy, Memory to Written Record, p. 267; Sweeny, Full Hearing, pp. 7–8. 29. See Ernest C. Colwell, Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1969), pp. 110–13. 30. Alan D. Baddeley, Essentials of Human Memory (East Sussex: Psychology Press, 1999), p. 126. 31. Edward L. Greenstein, ‘Misquotation of Scripture in the Dead Sea Scrolls’, in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume, vol. 1 (ed. Barry Walfish; Haifa: Haifa University Press, 1993), pp. 71–83. 32. William L. Petersen, Tatian’s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History of Scholarship (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1994), pp. 219, 305. 33. Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 154; see Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 106–7; Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, pp. 136–7; Carr, Tablet of the Heart, p. 9. 34. Doane, ‘Ethnography of Scribal Writing’, p. 436. 35. Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 10.

144

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

copies of manuscripts in the process of producing their conflated text. … Welleducated scribes often could write out a verbatim, memorized form of an older, authoritative text, so faithfully reproducing it that its borders and clashes with other material would still be visible in the finished product’.36 In antiquity ‘thesaurus’ was in fact the image used for the educated memory, not just in the sense of ‘inventory’, that is, well-stocked, but as the centre for inventio, the active capacity to retrieve material from different sources and combine them in new compositions.37 These written sources with their constitutive units existed therefore as cultural traditions memorially and orally embodied in scribes who were themselves embodied in live community contexts, and whose source-utilizations were extensions of their tradent role in the community. As with oral-traditional performance, scribal operations of the sort observed, for example, by Fishbane and Ulrich for the history of the texts of the Hebrew Bible frequently amounted to internal transformations of the written tradition itself.38 Transcription and composition were affected by the exigency of any responsible enactment of tradition – to render in this case the chirographic tradition responsive to the contemporary realities of the tradent community. Scribal transformation of the written tradition therefore was not whimsical – it is misleading to label variation a random phenomenon. Rather, it was strategic, dialectical with scribal transcriptional norms, and circumscribed by the materiality and visual qualities of the written medium itself.39 Indeed, scribal memory competence was capable of close-to-verbatim reproduction because it had a stable material substratum in the manuscript tradition. Differential variability therefore emerges as a core property of scribal tradition, indeed, emblematic of its life as tradition. In this connection it is important, however, to emphasize again the stabilizing effects of the visual and materialspatial properties of the written medium. Lamentations Rabbati is a case in point. Paul Mandel points out that its Babylonian and Palestinian versions diverge so greatly that their parallel units have the appearance of oral variants. Nevertheless, ‘a comparison between the two manuscript traditions demonstrates that they constitute exactly the same work. Almost all the passages found in one recension are found in the other, in similar language and in approximately the same order’.40 This calls to mind and suggests fruitful comparisons with Synoptic phenomena.

36. Carr, Tablet of the Heart, p. 159; see Kelber, Oral and Written Gospel, p. xxiii. 37. Small, Wax Tablets, p. 179; Carruthers, Memory, pp. 33, 72, 161, 194–7. 38. Fishbane, Interpretation, pp. 86–7, 413–31; Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 74, passim. 39. See Fishbane, Interpretation, p. 88; Emanuel Tov, ‘Scribal Practices Reflected in the Texts from the Judaean Desert’, in The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, vol. 1 (ed. Peter W. Flint and James C. Vanderkam; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1998), pp. 402–29 (439). 40. Paul Mandel, ‘Between Byzantium and Islam: The Transmission of a Jewish Book in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods’, in Transmitting Jewish Tradition: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion (ed. Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 74–106 (80).

Memory, Scribal Media and the Synoptic Problem

145

Patterns of variation and agreement evident in Synoptic source relationships can therefore be approached as a phenomenon innate to scribal tradent activity that shapes written tradition to shifting enactment contexts and thereby sustains the basic cultural memory function of tradition. Synoptic relationships must be assessed in light of memory-based, oral-performative scribal competence in a community’s repertoire of written and oral tradition. This contrasts with the tendency to construe Synoptic relations as mediated by copying and editing along closed circuits of texts sealed off from oral media dynamics. Each of the major utilization hypotheses suffers from media myopia of this sort. This raises questions as to their respective viability when the Synoptic Problem is reframed by ancient media realities.

Two-Document Hypothesis Print (‘typographic’) assumptions have been operative in Synoptic scholarship from its beginnings. Reimarus took variation in the Synoptic accounts as indication of error and falsification. Lessing, Herder, Eichhorn and others in their response sought to identify anterior to all Synoptic variation some fixed, originating point (written or oral) of unvarying, apostolic stability in the tradition.41 The TwoDocument hypothesis (2DH) eventually gained widespread assent, but with the striking patterns of variation in wording and order nevertheless remaining a nagging anomaly for the underlying literary model. 2DH scholarship typically has accounted for variation either in documentary terms by appeal to editorial operations with ad hoc appeals to oral tradition and to multiple editions, or alternatively, by sorting out the Synoptic tradition into written sources and oral tradition, with level of variation a rough-and-ready criterion for assignation to one or the other.42 Basic to Hawkins’s 1909 analysis was exactly this hard and fast distinction between written and oral lines of transmission, the effects of which are to be seen in near-verbatim and variable reproduction, respectively. Identities of wording ‘are so many and so close … that the use of written Greek documents is prima facie suggested by them’.43 On the other hand, the large number of high-variation parallels remains ‘inexplicable on any exclusively documentary theory’.44 These

41. See John S. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), pp. 275–82, 295. 42. See John S. Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), p. 43. 43. John C. Hawkins, Horae Synopticae (Oxford: Clarendon, 2nd edn, 1909), p. 54; also idem, ‘Probabilities as to the So-Called Double Tradition of St. Matthew and St. Luke’, in Studies in the Synoptic Problem (ed. William Sanday; Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), pp. 96–138 (99–100). 44. Hawkins, Horae, p. 67, n. 2.

146

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

parallels indicate the ‘influence of oral transmission’.45 Hawkins also correlated variation to the memory factor – either recollection-and-substitution of parallel oral traditions, or inexact ‘reminiscence’ of the exemplar.46 This line of analysis (which surfaces many times in scholarship) has difficulty accounting for the reality that variation and verbatim agreement in the Synoptic tradition rarely occur unmixed. Hawkins seemed to sense this problem when he acknowledged that ‘we may be unable … to explain how [oral and written transmission] accompanied or succeeded one another’.47 While he recognized the effects of both oral and written dynamics in the gospel tradition, he lacked a model for correlating them. B. H. Streeter, generalizing from scribal transcriptional practices of the kind analysed in text-criticism,48 could conceive utilization of a written source only as copying admitting of a modest range of editorial modifications. High-variation parallels, therefore, cannot issue from a common source.49 Streeter pushed this to its logical conclusion – a written Q limited to the near-verbatim double tradition parallels.50 ‘In the last resort’, he said, ‘we must choose between Q and not-Q.’51 Streeter’s analytical criteria were relentlessly documentary. Though variation originates in oral tradition, high-variation passages come to the Evangelists via written sources (M and L). High-variation double tradition passages in Matthew are due to an M source replete with M/Q overlaps that the Evangelist conflated with Q.52 Streeter contemplated substitution directly from ‘cycles’ of oral tradition only as a last resort, in default of a convincing editorial account of the variant.53 He scarcely mentioned memory, and then only ad hoc, to account for some cases of ‘inexact’ reproduction of a source not actually before the eyes.54 The media assumptions of the Oxford scholars, as well as the anomalies and ad hoc expedients that these assumptions generate, continue to be evident in contemporary 2DH scholarship, as is the growing recognition that redaction criticism (a tool critics such as Streeter did not fully have at their disposal) is not

45. Ibid., p. 67. 46. Hawkins, ‘Probabilities’, pp. 100, 112; idem, Horae, pp. 173, 216–17. 47. Hawkins, Horae, p. 217. 48. See Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, pp. 336–42. 49. B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels (London: MacMillan, 1936), p. 237. 50. Ibid., pp. 185, 237–8. 51. Ibid., p. 238. 52. Ibid., pp. 249–54, 265. 53. Ibid., pp. xiv–xv, 183–4, 237–9, 261, 281–8. See John S. Kloppenborg, ‘Variation and Reproduction of the Double Tradition and an Oral Q?’, ETL 83 (2007), pp. 53–80 (53). Vincent Taylor, when variation is such as to push the copying-editing framework to the breaking point, similarly posits an additional document M or direct use by the Evangelists of ‘different cycles of tradition’ (‘The Original Order of Q’, in New Testament Essays (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972 (reprint 1959), pp. 95–117 (110))). 54. E.g., ‘Mark’s Knowledge and Use of Q’, in Sanday, ed., Studies, pp. 166–83 (166).

Memory, Scribal Media and the Synoptic Problem

147

able to encompass the phenomenon of variation.55 Luz argues, for example, that if variation exceeds what might plausibly be attributed to redaction, a pericope is to be assigned to oral tradition. The problem is that the two criteria for stipulating written Q – high levels of verbal agreement and a common order – very often do not converge. To sustain the theory of a written Q Luz posits two editions: QMt and QLk.56 This is the familiar strategy of positing ad hoc another written source when editorial modification cannot account for levels of variation.57 To be sure, in manuscript culture it is to be expected that a written work, cultivated as a memorybased, oral-aural entity, would evolve different forms in different communities. The danger is that appeals to QMt and QLk function as ad hoc expedients to explain away the phenomenon of variation by distributing it across fixed editorial stages, keeping writing thereby effectively insulated from oral-traditional dynamics.58 James D. G. Dunn’s revised 2DH is notably informed by awareness of the pervasively oral communications environment of antiquity.59 For the most part, however, Dunn continues to distinguish oral sharply from written modes of transmission.60 Written transmission is a matter of copy-editing written sources, which leaves its mark in near-verbatim parallels, while oral transmission is marked by the variation characteristic of oral performance. In high-agreement double tradition passages, therefore, Matthew and Luke are drawing from a document ‘Q’, and in low-agreement passages from ‘q’, that is, cycles of oral tradition.61 This takes us full circle back to Hawkins, Streeter, and others who when levels of variation exceed what might plausibly be accounted for by editorial

55. T. Bergemann notes that patterns of variation run throughout the double tradition in a manner that defies documentary and theological logic (Q auf dem Prüfstand (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1993)), p. 59). 56. Ulrich Luz, ‘Matthäus und Q’, in Von Jesus zum Christus: christologische Studien (ed. Rudolf Hoppe and Ulrich Busse; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 201–15 (202). 57. Luz, ‘Matthäus und Q’, pp. 205–6. Frans Neirynck rejects recensional explanations of variation in favour of attributing creative redaction to the Evangelists (‘Synoptic Problem’, in The New Jerome Bible Commentary (ed. Raymond E. Brown; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), pp. 587–95 (591); idem, ‘QMt and QLk and the Reconstruction of Q’, ETL 66 (1990), pp. 385–90). What Neirynck fails to appreciate, however, are the explanatory limits of a simple redaction model, given both the levels and patterns of variation among Synoptic parallels. To invoke creative redaction begs the question, or better, takes the explicandum as the explicans. Little is left thereby to differentiate the 2DH on this point from the FGH, whose advocates frequently invoke narrative creativity ad hoc to escape difficulties in Luke’s postulated use of Matthew. 58. On this point, see also Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, pp. 109–10. 59. James D. G. Dunn, ‘Altering the Default Setting: Re-envisaging the Early Transmission of the Jesus Tradition’, NTS 49 (2003), pp. 139–75 (157). 60. Ibid., pp. 142, 147–8. 61. James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 237, emphasis added; also idem, ‘Default Setting’, pp. 164, 172.

148

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

modifications of a written source assign such passages their most proximate origins in oral tradition. Little distinguishes Dunn’s ‘Q/q’ from Streeter’s ‘Q’ and ‘not-Q’ or Taylor’s ‘Q’ and ‘cycles of tradition’. Like Hawkins, moreover, Dunn lacks a model for coordinating the written/oral dynamics he postulates for Synoptic composition. ‘Q/q’ entails for the Evangelists the curious compositional procedure of shifting back and forth unpredictably from close copying and redaction of documents to oral tradition and oral performance modes. In short, Dunn lacks a media-interface model adequate to the complex realities of orality and writing in the Roman world. Though he suggests that Matthew and Luke on occasion might ‘retell’ a written pericope ‘in an oral mode’,62 he construes this as merely a different approach the Evangelists might occasionally take to their written sources before returning to the ‘distinctively literary exercise’ of copying and editing.63 Kloppenborg recognizes that oral performance dynamics likely had feedback effects upon the transcription and transmission of a work.64 In the absence of a model for a strong interface of scribal tradition with oral-traditional dynamics, however, it is difficult for him to be more precise about this feedback mechanism. Influenced by the characteristic separation of rhetorical-compositional from scribal function in Greco-Roman literary circles, Kloppenborg takes the scribal function to be largely transcriptional and likewise the librarii or low-level administrative scribes (with their limited compositional competence) as the relevant comparison for scribal operations in Synoptic composition.65 He has difficulties, in other words, bringing the scribal and the performative functions together, hence in accounting satisfactorily for how the rhetorical transformations of a text might come to be incorporated in its transmission. Rhetors and authors were, to be sure, educated to a memory-based compositional and performative competence in Greco-Roman cultural texts, and the chreia transformations and rhetorical aemulatio that Kloppenborg adduces are certainly relevant manifestations of performance dynamics.66 The difficulty lies in finding analogies to the direct cultivation of written compilations of

62. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, pp. 214–22, 231–3; idem, ‘Default Setting’, p. 163, n. 72, pp. 166–7; idem, ‘Q1 as Oral Tradition’, in The Written Gospel (ed. Markus Bockmuehl and Donald A. Hagner; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 54–69 (59). 63. Dunn, ‘Default Setting’, p. 167. 64. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, p. 60; idem, ‘Variation’, pp. 54–6, 60; idem, ‘Goulder and the New Paradigm: A Critical Appreciation of Michael Goulder on the Synoptic Problem’, in The Gospels According to Michael Goulder: A North American Response (ed. C. A. Rollston; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002), pp. 29–60 (44–5). 65. Kloppenborg, ‘Variation’, pp. 77–9; idem, Excavating Q, p. 109; see Myles McDonnell, ‘Writing, Copying, and Autograph Manuscripts in Ancient Rome’, in CQ N.S. 46 (1996), pp. 469–91 (483). 66. John S. Kloppenborg, ‘The Reception of the Jesus Traditions in James’, in The Catholic Epistles and the Tradition (ed. Jacques Schlosser; Leuven: Peeters, 2004), pp. 93–141 (116–22).

Memory, Scribal Media and the Synoptic Problem

149

a community’s foundational tradition itself of the sort and on the scale of the Synoptic enterprise.67 The chreia and aemulatio examples Kloppenborg canvasses do not display the curious profile of variation and agreement that are the most striking characteristic of Synoptic source relations, and the paraphrase of sources in Hellenistic history-writing, as Kloppenborg notes, is more homogenizing.68 Sirach’s sapiential transformations of Written Torah and the paraenetic reperformance of Q sayings in the Epistle of James more closely approximate to the Synoptic dynamic.69 Sirach and James, however, stand at a conscious remove from their written base traditions (Torah; Q), which supply the stable point of reference for their allusive sapiential variations, while the Synoptics embody immanent scribal re-enactments of the constitutive base tradition itself, enactments which at the same time function to transmit the base tradition.70 This accounts for the fact that the Synoptic materials manifest the full range of agreement and variation. Not inclined to associate performative competence closely with scribal function, Kloppenborg interprets these patterns somewhat awkwardly as the juxtaposition of ‘wooden copying’ with ‘rhetorical paraphrase’,71 a formulation reminiscent of the verbatim-copying/variation dichotomy that has a long history in Synoptic scholarship. In this sampling of more recent 2DH scholarship, memory is conspicuous by its absence. As it was for the Oxford Studies circle, memory is a marginal factor invoked with extraordinary rarity, ad hoc, and usually in the weakened form of an Evangelist’s ‘reminiscence’ or ‘anticipation’ of a passage not immediately before the eyes. Neirynck is typical of 2DH scholarship in making occasional appeals to memory along these lines.72 Derrenbacker’s substantive invoking of the memory factor, in an attempt to resolve the problem of Matthew’s rearrangement of Q, is an exception.73

67. See Erhard Blum, ‘Historiography or Poetry? The Nature of the Hebrew Bible Prose Tradition’, in Memory in the Bible and Antiquity (ed. Stephen C. Barton et al.; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), pp. 25–46. 68. Kloppenborg, ‘Variation’, pp. 66–9. 69. Ibid., pp. 77–8; idem, ‘Reception’, pp. 113–17, 133–4. 70. The distinction is the same as that which exists between Sirach and the anonymous scribe-tradents of the Hebrew Bible studied by Michael Fishbane (Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon), 1985). 71. Kloppenborg, ‘Variation’, pp. 78–9. 72. Neirynck, ‘Synoptic Problem’, pp. 588–9; idem, ‘Matthew 4:23-5:2 and the Matthean Composition of 4:23-11:1’, in The Interrelations of the Gospels (ed. David L. Dungan; BETL, 95; Leuven: Peeters, 1990), pp. 23–46 (41–2, 46). 73. R. A. Derrenbacker Jr., Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem (BETL, 186; Leuven: Peeters, 2005), pp. 237–9. George Kennedy identified memory as a likely factor in Synoptic relationships. See his ‘Classical and Christian Source Criticism’, in The Relationships among the Gospels: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (ed. William O. Walker; San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1978), pp. 125–55 (143).

150

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Might the 2DH nevertheless be reconcilable with ancient media realities?74 From that perspective, Mark and Q would have been appropriated by Matthew and Luke as memory-controlled scripts capable of chirographic re-enactments that shaped them to new social and historical frameworks. The casting of heterogeneous tradition in the materiality and spatial extension of the written medium accounts for the persistence of a common order despite Matthew and Luke’s independent use of their sources, even while the tradition itself is subjected to different degrees of variation, and that differently by each Evangelist. Order, being constitutive of Mark and Q’s intelligibility as memorially and orally enacted scripts, would have been the basis for their compositional utilization by Matthew and Luke. Arguments for the documentary status of Q that appeal to common order are therefore weighty, not weakened per se by high levels of variation in the double tradition itself. Critics such as Goulder have pointed to overlap in motifs and vocabulary to argue that Q cannot be stylistically or theologically distinguished from Matthew.75 The standard 2DH response to this criticism – Matthew picks up expressions from his source – finds corroboration in scribal memory practices. Not only did memory-ingested cultural texts function as the ‘authorized building blocks’ for new composition; they also supplied scribal composers with a ‘memorized compositional lexicon’ for their own expression.76 The phenomenon in question, therefore, is evidence that Matthew (on the 2DH) was working with Q as a memory artefact; it also indicates Q’s normativity for Matthew and his tradent community. Indeed, Carr points out that using the language of a source has the legitimating function to ‘establish a continuity of one new composition with its precursors, even as the new composition might innovate in crucial respects’.77 On the other side of the coin, media analysis also exposes or exacerbates problems in the 2DH. The most serious is the absence of a feasible compositional account of Matthew’s significant reordering of the Q materials. Proponents of the 2DH generally are content to gesture towards Taylor’s ‘multiple-scan’ solution. The truth is that Taylor’s analysis only brings the problem into sharper relief. Comparing each of Matthew’s five discourses individually with Luke’s order, Taylor suggested that, in effect, Matthew had made fifteen forward passes through Q, collecting sayings on a topical principle.78 A closer look shows, however, that non-sequential materials frequently disrupt Taylor’s sequences of

74. In addition to Derrenbacker’s seminal study on this question (addressing not just the 2DH but also the FH and the 2GH), see F. Gerald Downing’s groundbreaking work, for example, ‘Compositional Conventions and the Synoptic Problem’, JBL 107 (1988), pp. 69–85. 75. Michael D. Goulder, Luke: A New Paradigm (JSNTSup, 20; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989), pp. 12–14. 76. Carr, Writing, pp. 35–6. 77. Ibid., p. 35. 78. Taylor, ‘Order of Q’, pp. 90–4.

Memory, Scribal Media and the Synoptic Problem

151

relative agreement in order. For example, though Mt. 6.9-13 and 7.7-11 indeed correspond to Q 11.1-4 and 11.9-13, in the Sermon on the Mount they are separated by materials from Q 12, Q 11, Q 6 and Q 16. This entails difficult scrolling and location manoeuvres, in each case picking out the desired segment of text from unformatted, unbroken script  – but then inexplicably copying it with varying degrees of inexactitude! Taylor’s sequences really just amount to a formal reconciliation of Luke and Matthew’s orders; they do not represent actual compositional actions. A media approach to this problem would start from the postulate that Matthew has memory competence in Q. Memory competence in a written work made it possible to overcome the limitations of the scroll, enabling not just sequential but random access by traversing the organizational network of cues that constituted the text as a memory artefact. Moreover, because memory access occurs through cued sequences, and because textual intelligibility unfolds in order, utilization would tend to be directionally in sequence forward from a selected textual location.79 Q is itself to a significant extent organized as an intelligible serialization of composite deliberative speeches arranged under standard moral topoi. Q’s topoi sequence would have functioned as topoi-organized texts did in antiquity – to facilitate assimilation to memory and by the same token as memory scripts for repeated enactment.80 Taylor’s analysis showed that Matthew’s movement through Q is mostly forward – forward in the macro sense from Q’s beginning to its end, and forward through the shorter sequences of sayings, even when these are utilized out of their absolute order. This accords with a memory-based performance competence. The fact that this is not a rote but a performance mode explains Matthew’s strategic redactional variations on the materials that he appropriates from his source. This account does not exclude a Q-scroll from the compositional scene; rather, it recoups the instrumentality of memory in relation to manuscript in ancient compositional practices.

Farrer-Goulder Hypothesis Goulder Goulder’s working premise is that Matthew and Luke are genuine authors who rewrite old materials and create new ones ingeniously, freely and often quite spontaneously from motifs in the source-text before them. In other words, he invokes authorial-literary creativity as the primary factor in the transformation of the tradition – the generation of much of the tradition itself as well as its

79. See Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, pp. 155–83. 80. Small, Wax Tablets, pp. 90–118, 215–16; Carruthers, Memory, pp. 72, 181.

152

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

characteristic patterns of variation and agreement.81 The factor of oral tradition is not even invoked ad hoc, as it often is in 2DH scholarship.82 This all but complete absence of the category of oral tradition alerts us that Goulder’s analysis operates on flawed media assumptions. In effect he alienates the authorial function of scribes from the tradent framework within which scribal innovation operated. His sweeping rejection of form criticism, which despite its limitations did grasp something of the dynamics of tradition, leaves him without any adequate model for the phenomenology of tradition, more precisely, for the performative forces at work in the transformations of tradition along the course of its transmission. This is particularly evident in his conception of the pre-Markan oral tradition as the more or less inert, immobile consolidation (with some ‘erosions’ and ‘additions’) of apostolic memories.83 It accounts for his default to individual authorial inspiration as the engine of change and development in the tradition and, more to our point, for his confidence that the double tradition is explicable as Matthew’s free rewriting of Mark. Memory plays the same ancillary role in Goulder’s scheme that it does in the 2DH – invoked ad hoc as ‘reminiscence’ to deal with anomalies (in Goulder’s case mostly anomalies of order in Luke’s use of Matthew) inevitably thrown up by visually oriented literary utilization scenarios.84 Judiciously eschewing the expedient of repeated scans, Goulder’s usual procedure in explaining Luke’s departures from Matthew’s order is to claim that eye-catching motifs and key words where the scroll is open before Luke’s eyes act as cues triggering spontaneous recollection of fitting passages from remote, hence out of sequence Matthean locations. While copying Mt. 7.1-5 (Judge Not, Lk. 6.38-42), for example, ‘a text from Matthew comes to [Luke’s] mind: “A disciple is not above his teacher …” ([Mt.] 10.24f.)’, that thereupon Luke inserts (6.40).85 Ad hoc appeals to memory of this sort predictably spike in Goulder’s account of the Travel Narrative, where double tradition is concentrated but a common absolute

81. See Goulder, Luke, pp. 87–8, 543–4; idem, Midrash and Lection in Matthew (London: SPCK, 1974), pp. 4–5, 64; also Mark Goodacre, Goulder and the Gospels: An Examination of a New Paradigm (JSNTSup, 133; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), p. 363; also pp. 25, 137–8. 82. Goulder vacillates on whether Luke might have had access to oral tradition in cases of the allegedly greater primitiveness of Luke’s double tradition: see ‘On Putting Q to the Test’, NTS 24 (1978), pp. 218–34 (234); idem, ‘Is Q a Juggernaut?’, JBL 115 (1996), pp. 667–81 (673, note 22). 83. Goulder, Midrash, pp. 138–52, 297; also idem, Luke, pp. 22–3. 84. Michael Goulder, ‘The Order of a Crank’, in Synoptic Studies: The Ampleforth Conferences of 1982 and 1983 (ed. C. M. Tuckett; JSNTSup, 7; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1984), pp. 111–30 (113). 85. Goulder, Luke, p. 370, emphasis added. Elsewhere Goulder describes the effect of the memory of other Matthean passages as its ‘draw[ing] [Luke] away from his serial progression through the First Gospel, as the magnet the steel’ (p. 545).

Memory, Scribal Media and the Synoptic Problem

153

sequence with Matthew all but disappears. Goulder must attribute to Luke a complex set of scrolling-and-copying operations: forward (Matthew 9 to 16), skipping forward (to Matthew 23 forward to 25), then backward (from Matthew 25 to 17), then forward again (to Matthew 24 for the Luke 17 Apocalypse). Memory is then invoked ad hoc for the numerous passages that still cannot be resolved into sequence by these scrolling manoeuvres.86 For example, Goulder has Luke scrolling ahead from Matthew 16 to 24–25 to locate and copy the Servant parable (Lk. 12.41-48), but for the next unit, ‘I have come to cast fire (Lk. 12.49-53), ‘cast[ing] his mind back’ to Mt. 10.34-35.87 The strained nature of this line of explanation becomes particularly evident in Goulder’s account of Luke’s usage of Matthew 16 for the composition of the sequences in Lk. 12.1-49. On the one hand Luke has his Matthew scroll open to Matthew 16, and on the other hand he copies very little from the passage, since it mostly duplicates triple tradition already picked up (from Mark) in Luke 8-9. Instead, Matthew 16 serves for Luke as a set of often vague memory cues, the ‘thread under the embroidery’, for recollecting double tradition materials (often with impressive accuracy) from remote locations in Matthew 6, 10, 12, and 24.43– 25.13 (for Lk. 12.35-40).88 After this effortless, expert memory roving across wide Matthean expanses, however, Goulder has Luke suddenly scroll forward from Matthew 16 to 24 virtually mid-pericope (his present memory location being Mt. 24.43-44) to copy the Servant parable (Lk. 12.41-46; Mt. 24.45-51). Goulder’s stated evidence for Luke’s sudden switch from memory to scrolling-and-copying is the close agreement of the parallels,89 but this is dubious in view of Luke’s closely preceding, virtually verbatim reproduction from memory of Do Not Be Anxious (Mt. 6.25-34; Lk. 12.22-32). The reality is that Goulder can no longer plausibly sustain the fiction that Luke has his scroll open to Matthew 16 (for 12.1-40 Luke has been everywhere except Matthew 16); moreover, Goulder needs a pretext to get Luke open to Matthew 24–25 to set up (after Lk. 13.23) a reverse scrolling operation back to Matthew 17. The Minor Agreements are likewise ‘reminiscences’, for the most part involuntary, of Matthean parallel passages when Luke is following Mark.90 This is cognitive phenomenon of ‘proactive interference’: habituated memories interfering

86. Ibid., pp. 581–2. Goulder attributes to Luke additional irregular scrolling movements, as when Luke scrolls from Matthew 12 to 15.1ff. (handwashing controversy) from which Luke infers a meal setting for his Woes (11.37-38, 54), and then forward to Matthew 23 for the Woes, then back to Matthew 15 and 16.5-6 (leaven of the Pharisees) (Luke, pp. 516–28; ‘Order of a Crank’, pp. 118–21). 87. Goulder, Luke, p. 552. 88. Ibid, pp. 529–35. 89. Ibid., p. 549. 90. Ibid., pp. 329, 419–20. Goulder sometimes speaks of Luke ‘allowing’ memory of the Matthean parallel to influence him when using Mark (Luke, p. 428, re Lk. 9/Mark 9, Mission Instruction).

154

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

with similar memories that though foregrounded in working memory are less engrained. Goulder indeed identifies Luke’s strong familiarity with the Matthean parallels as the operative factor in the Minor Agreements.91 The difficulty that stands in the way of taking memory interference from Matthew as accounting for the Minor Agreements, however, is that it would then entail (cognitive memory interference from Matthew being a neurobiological constant) what is actually lacking from Luke, namely, a more regular and evenly distributed pattern of these small-scale involuntary harmonizations to Matthew, especially since Luke is scarcely concerned with close transcription of Mark but is frequently varying – reperforming – his source. Another Farrer-Goulder Hypothesis (FGH) feature open to media-based critique is Luke’s recontextualization of the double tradition, which frequently requires that he locate, discriminate and cleanly excise M materials in Matthean passages where M/Mk exist in close configuration (Luke’s notorious ‘unpicking’ procedure). The unwieldy scroll format and its undifferentiated script make this an extraordinarily difficult operation. Goulder’s solution accords with his visual scanning model for manuscript utilization, with memory in its typically ancillary role: Luke ‘simply marked his copy of Matthew with his pen’, and sometimes he could rely on his memory of Mark to help him isolate Matthew’s additions.92 Luke would have engaged his Matthew text, however, not primarily as a visual entity, with M/Mk fault lines discernible given sufficient scrutiny and editor’s mark-up, but as a memory-based, oral-aural entity enacted as integral sequences of text, with visual contact serving as a memory-activating prompt. Accordingly, it is quite difficult to imagine Luke successfully extracting M from Mk elements in his source (difficult enough on the visualist model). It is unlikely, for example, that the Mission of the Seventy (Lk. 10.1-12) would be scrubbed so clean of the Markan elements that are quite closely integrated compositionally with the Matthean additions (Mt. 10.1-16). Given the spontaneous memory attraction supposedly exerted by Matthean passages (as putatively in the Minor Agreements), and conversely, the occasional migration of Markan phrases into Luke’s use of Matthew elsewhere (e.g. Lk. 3.21-22 par.; Lk. 17.2 par.), it is not clear how Luke manages to keep most of his M material so free of Markan elements. Problems with the specifics of Goulder’s account do not per se disqualify the FGH. Like the 2DH, the FGH may be assessed at least provisionally for its feasibility when reframed by the media realities of the ancient world. One might propose that Luke has memory competence in Matthew’s memorably arranged

91. Ibid., Luke, pp. 414–15; idem, ‘Luke’s Compositional Options’, NTS 38 (1993), pp. 150–2 (150). 92. Goulder, Luke, pp. 39–40; idem, ‘Juggernaut’, p. 677. Authors selecting material alternatively from two or more closely related sources is no true analogy, as Ken Olson suggests (‘Unpicking on the Farrer Theory’, in Questioning Q: A Multidimensional Critique (ed. Mark Goodacre and Nicholas Perrin; Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2004), pp. 127–50 (150)).

Memory, Scribal Media and the Synoptic Problem

155

discourses and that he cycles these materials into memorable topoi sequences of his own devising, the Travel Narrative being the prominent example. Nevertheless there are difficulties with this scenario. On the 2DH, Matthew locates desired sayings sequences readily in a topoi-organized Q. The sayings that Luke must retrieve from Matthew (on the FGH), however, on a number of occasions are not embedded in a specific Matthean topos composition and topoi sequence, but occur isolated within narrative pericopes. This complicates memory-based search-and-location operations. Lk. 6:39 (Blind Leading the Blind), for example, must be fetched over from Mt. 15.14, where despite its aptness in context it is embedded in a ritual purity controversy with which it has little topical affinity. Likewise, Luke must locate Faith as a Mustard Seed (Lk. 17.5) in the Healing of the Epileptic (Mt. 17.20), and similarly for At Table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Lk. 13.28-29), which in Matthew is a rather loosely appended element of the Healing of the Centurion’s Servant (Mt. 8.11-12). Luke of course is quite capable of recollecting these as uncontextualized sayings, but to argue along these lines is to undercut the case for Luke composing from systematic memory competence in Matthew. This raises questions about whether Luke’s random movement around his Matthew source accords with how the text would exist and hence be most efficiently activated and traversed in Luke’s memory. Luke’s habituated competence in Matthew would be as an intelligible script repeatedly generated forward in its enactment, and this habituated competence would act determinatively on his use of it as a source. The FGH is notable, however, for the number of backwards retrieving movements in Matthew that it must attribute to Luke. A survey of the Travel Narrative gives a rough count of seventeen backward and twenty-three forward movements. These are often randomly interspersed and sometimes constitute breathtaking leaps across the source.93 In other words, little correlation exists between this pattern and memory competence in Matthew as an intelligibly performed script. This compares unfavourably with Matthew’s utilization of Q on the 2DH. Matthew maintains an absolute position in Q that moves consistently forward; on occasion material is pulled forward to this position, more rarely is material left behind his absolute position that he needs to retrieve subsequently.94 Often when Matthew appears to be moving backward he is in fact returning to the absolute position that marks his progress through the source. This utilization pattern coheres with how the text would have been activated in memory.

93. For example, (1) Lk. 11.4-36/Mt. 6.22-23 (Sound Eye); Lk. 11.37-54/Mt. 23.1-29 (Woes); (2) Lk. 12.33-34/Mt. 6.19-21 (Treasures in Heaven); Lk. 12.39-48/Matt 24.42-45 (Watchful Servants); Lk.12.49-53/Mt. 10.34-36 (Houses Divided). 94. Usually in the source context (e.g. Mt. 7.12/Lk. 6.31; transpositions in the Mission Instruction). Matthew passes over the John the Baptist material (Lk. 7.18-35/Mt. 11.2-19) as a block and retrieves it as a block.

156

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Goodacre Mark Goodacre, the leading contemporary defender of the FGH, likewise works within the visually oriented model of source utilization. Unlike Goulder, however, he adduces the factor of oral tradition, not just in view of the implausibility of Goulder’s accounts of Matthew’s and Luke’s generation of new tradition, but also to explain the anomaly that Luke sometimes appears to have the more primitive version of a double tradition passage.95 The difficulty here is that Goodacre appears not to recognize that the attribution of the double tradition to Matthew’s authorial creativity was essential to Goulder’s case for the superfluity of Q and to the FGH’s touted claim to greater economy.96 Most striking in comparison with Goulder, however, is that memory as a factor in source utilization and composition is to all intents and purposes absent from Goodacre’s account. In this respect his analysis operates in greater disconnection from ancient media realities than Goulder’s. On the main occasion that Goodacre invokes memory, like Goulder he does so ad hoc, to meet some standard objections to the FGH claim that Luke used Matthew. Specifically, Goodacre postulates that Luke has more habituated memory familiarity with Mark than with the recently published Matthew; Luke has got Mark ‘into his bloodstream’; he has it ‘by heart’.97 This accounts, he continues, for Luke’s dramatically differing editorial approaches to his two sources: Luke dutifully follows Mark as his primary source for the triple tradition; in turn this explains why he relocates his Matthean materials from the Markan contextualizations where Matthew has placed them. Memory for Goodacre does not even rise to the level of an ancillary utilization tool that Goulder allowed. Rather, it simply serves ad hoc to explain why Luke would for practical and affective reasons prefer Mark over Matthew as his source for the triple tradition. A more serious problem for the FGH that arises in this connection is that Luke’s stronger memory familiarity with Mark – for Goodacre the key to Luke’s utilization policy – is difficult to square with the standard FGH explanation of the Minor Agreements as memory interference from the more cognitively engrained Matthew when Luke is following Mark. Here the FGH finds itself hung out on the horns of a dilemma: if it claims that the Minor Agreements are memory interference from Matthew, it loses its rationale for Luke’s practice of separating Matthean material from Markan contexts; if it claims that Luke follows the more memory-habituated Mark as his primary source over Matthew, the FGH argument from the Minor Agreements collapses. In addition, the stronger familiarity with

95. Goodacre, ‘Goulder’, pp. 259–60, 284–91; idem, The Case against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002), pp. 64–6, 77; idem, The Synoptic Problem: A Way through the Maze (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2001), p. 138. 96. See Goodacre, Case against Q, p. 70, note 49. 97. Ibid, pp. 89–90.

Memory, Scribal Media and the Synoptic Problem

157

Mark that Goodacre imputes to Luke heightens the anomalousness of the relative absence of memory-bleeding from Mark in the course of Luke’s unpicking of Matthean elements from Matthew’s M/Mark macro-conflations. This is especially the case given Goodacre’s view that Luke, in the course of following Mt. 3-11 for his first two blocks of non-Markan material (Lk. 3.1-4.16; Lk. 6.20–7.35), takes over, as a matter of ‘source-critical inevitability’, traces of Matthew’s narrative contextualizations of these materials.98 In any case, Luke’s opting for Mark over Matthew as his primary source for the triple tradition would seem much the more troublesome way of proceeding, for it creates the compositional problem of separating M materials from their Markan contextualizations, a difficult set of operations given ancient manuscript formats and the corresponding memory-based, performative approaches to source utilization. Finally, while Goodacre rejects the viability of Goulder’s step-by-step description of Luke’s scroll utilization procedures vis-à-vis Matthew, he offers no alternative account in its place, nor is it clear if he is conscious of any need to do so.99 Goulder at least saw that it was important to connect the utilization hypothesis to ancient media realities. The issue is a particularly pressing one given that Goodacre, differently from Goulder, does not view Luke as having significant memory control of Matthew. His approach is to try to settle the matter simply by referencing ‘narrative-critical studies of Luke’ which confirm Luke’s literary artistry. To refute thus the standard 2DH criticism of the FGH (Luke’s arrangement of the double tradition is aesthetically inferior to Matthew’s) is also regarded as resolving the utilization problem.100 However, this is to confuse questions of design with questions of execution. What amounts to a reluctance even to problematize Luke’s utilization procedures vis-à-vis Matthew seems to owe something to an unreflective projection of contemporary authorial practices and modern media conditions back into the Synoptic context. Goulder also fell back upon blanket appeals to Luke’s artistic creativity, but only occasionally, when unable to stipulate an intelligible source-utilization procedure,101 not programmatically as Goodacre does.

98. Ibid., p. 181. 99. Derrenbacker points this out (Ancient Compositional Practices, p. 200). 100. Goodacre, Synoptic Problem, p. 126; idem, Case against Q, pp. 118–23; also Jeffrey Petersen, ‘Order in the Double Tradition and the Existence of Q’, in Goodacre and Perrin, eds, Questioning Q, pp. 28–42 (37–8). 101. For example, ‘Juggernaut’, p. 680.

158

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Griesbach (Two Gospel) Hypothesis One finds at most perfunctory reflection among defenders of the Griesbach hypothesis on ancient media realities. Neville in his comparative assessment of the 2GH makes reference to the paraphrasing, performative aspects of ancient composition, but with no application of these to Mark’s use of his sources.102 The 2GH postulate of Mark’s close conflation of his sources is grounded in visualist conceptions of source utilization, conceiving Mark as having, as Farmer puts it, ‘both the texts of Matthew and Luke before him’ and comparing and conflating the wording of the parallel passages.103 As is typical for Synoptic scholarship generally, Peabody, Cope and McNicol categorically distinguish oral-traditional factors from literary factors in Synoptic phenomena, making a token gesture to the former before adverting exclusively to the latter.104 To the extent memory surfaces at all in 2GH accounts it is in its predictably marginalized, ad hoc role – to deal with difficulties that arise in the course of working out explanations within the visualist, compare-and-combine framework. The oddity that Mark follows Matthew for Jesus’s Rejection in Nazareth (Mk. 6.1-6/ Mt. 13.53-58) but, as in Lk. 4.16, places the incident on the Sabbath ‘indicates that he either turned to, or had in mind, the Lucan parallel’.105 Neville looks askance at the occasions ‘the two-gospel team’ appeals ad hoc to Mark’s memory of Peter’s tradition ‘to “explain” those features of Mark’s Gospel that cannot have been derived from the texts of Matthew or Luke’.106 He does not hesitate, however, to appeal to ‘reminiscence’, to Mark’s ‘familiarity’ with Matthew, to help account for agreements with Matthew when Mark has switched to following Luke.107 The programme of close comparison and alternating micro-conflation of Matthew and Luke that the 2GH attributes to Mark is predicated on modern print media and its effects – print media’s easy manipulability and visual perspicuity; its visual objectification of individual words – not upon the awkward scroll format and the minimally unformatted, orally appropriated manuscript scripts of antiquity.108 The corollary realities of memory-based, oral-performative trafficking with written

102. David J. Neville, Mark’s Gospel – Prior or Posterior? A Reappraisal of the Phenomenon of Order (JSNTSup, 222; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), pp. 117, 145. 103. William R. Farmer, The Synoptic Problem: A Critical Analysis (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1964), p. 264. On the revival of the 2GH as a ‘triumph of visualism’ over the spoken word, see Kelber, Oral and Written Gospel, pp. xv–xvi. 104. David B. Peabody, with Lamar Cope and Allan J. McNicol, One Gospel from Two: Mark’s Use of Matthew and Luke (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002), p. 12; similarly Allan J. McNicol, David L. Dungan and David P. Peabody (eds), Beyond the Q Impasse: Luke’s Use of Matthew (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996), p. 26. 105. For example, Farmer, Synoptic Problem, p. 241, emphasis added. 106. Neville, Mark’s Gospel, p. 322, on Mk 4.35-41. 107. Ibid., pp. 307–8. 108. See Derrenbacker, Ancient Compositional Practices, pp. 161–2, 257.

Memory, Scribal Media and the Synoptic Problem

159

tradition raise even further difficulties. A case in point is Mark’s ‘alternating wordby-word conflation’ of Mt. 8.24 (σεισμὸς μέγας ἐγένετο) and Lk. 8.23 (λαῖλαψ ἀνέμου) to give γίνεται λαῖλαψ μεγάλη ἀνέμου (Mk 4.37).109 The improbabilities of the requisite scroll access and visual scanning actions aside, Mark would have engaged passages from his two written sources not so much optically as lines of discrete lexical units, but in large part as generated from memory in cued integral sequences, performed, moreover, in the oral-aural sensorium. This makes one sceptical that the close textual dissections and conflations the 2GH posits here and elsewhere constitute a viable editorial programme, one that requires, moreover, that Mark sometimes shift sources mid-phrase,110 at other times combine the content of one source with the syntax of the other111 or the content of one source with the order of the other.112 Operations of this sort are all but inconceivable for memorybased, performative source competence. Advocates of the 2GH point to the second-century gospel harmonies such as Tatian’s Diatessaron as examples of micro-conflation of sources in antiquity.113 But that any real analogy exists may be doubted. The Gospel of Mark and the Diatessaron represent far separated points on the cultural memory trajectory of authoritative written tradition towards canonization and external textual fixation and objectification. Accordingly, they embody different ground rules vis-àvis cultivation of the tradition. The Evangelists are full-fledged tradents who appropriate their chirographic traditions in a mode still significantly affected by oral-traditional performance dynamics. Assmann has described the cultural process by which a normative tradition moves from internal malleability of this sort towards greater textual fixation and external objectification as the tradent community becomes increasingly removed historically and generationally from its foundational period of origins.114 Harmonizing, micro-conflating projects like Tatian’s, that is to say, are the corollary of the greater fixation and external objectification of the gospel texts by the mid-to-late second century. It is anachronistic to impute literary activity of this sort to Mark, whose gospel belongs to a period when variation in the cultivation of the written tradition was the norm.

109. Peabody, Cope, and McNicol, One Gospel from Two, p. 138. 110. Ibid., p. 197, re Mk 8.35-37 par. 111. Farmer, Synoptic Problem, p. 84, re Mk 2.24 par. 112. Ibid., p. 264, re Mk 12.13-17 par.; Peabody, Cope, and McNicol, One Gospel, p. 90, re Mk 1.29-31 par. 113. For example, David L. Dungan, ‘Mark: The Abridgement of Matthew and Luke’, in Jesus and Man’s Hope (ed. David G. Buttrick; Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, 1970), pp. 51–98 (91); Farmer, Synoptic Problem, p. 280; Peabody, Cope, and McNicol, One Gospel, pp. 16, 94–5; T. R. W. Longstaff, Evidence of Conflation in Mark? A Study of the Synoptic Problem (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977). 114. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 165, 218–21; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, pp. 29–30, 53–4, 87–8.

160

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Conclusion The major utilization hypotheses are to one extent or another predicated upon inadequate understandings of ancient media realities – the open interface of writing with the oral register, the persistence of oral-traditional dynamics into the cultivation of written tradition, the instrumental role of memory in the corresponding literary practices. This chapter has made just preliminary attempts to assess the ongoing viability of the major hypotheses in light of these realities. In carrying this line of analysis forward it will be important to give the specific media practices more precise description and a more differentiated social and cultural contextualization in order to sharpen their applications to this and other problems in the history of the gospel literature.

Part III M EMORY AND H ISTORICAL J ESUS R ESEARCH

Chapter 9 THE MEMORY OF VIOLENCE AND THE DEATH OF JESUS IN Q*

Jesus’s death is frequently treated in scholarship as a theological reification. Because Q seems to feature comparatively little theological reflection on Jesus’s death, one often hears the claim that allusions to Jesus’s death in Q have a secondary status in the materials and that Jesus’s death was marginal to the world view of the so-called Q community. We will challenge this claim – which has become dogma in Q scholarship – by recovering the nature of Jesus’s crucifixion as fundamentally an act of ritualized violence that had a formative rippling effect upon the memory of the group that had aligned itself with him, an effect that ultimately issued in the emergence of Q itself as a commemorative artefact.

Violence and Memory Violent events become engraved in the collective memory of the affected group. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen report the frequent visits of Oglala Sioux to ‘such places as the Wounded Knee massacre site, Crazy Horse Mountain’.1 Arthur Neal notes that the experience of violence is ‘an injury, a wound, or an assault on social life as it is known and understood’.2 It brings about a social disruption, a rupture with what has gone before so significant that it calls forth commemorative activities crucial for a group’s subsequent identity formation and moral repristination.3 As such, it takes on archetypal significance in the collective memory with enormous * First published in Memory, Tradition, & Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity (ed. Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher; Semeia Studies 52; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), pp. 191–206. Used by permission. 1. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 164–5. 2. Arthur G. Neal, National Trauma and Collective Memory (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1998), p. 4. 3. Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 58–9; Sarah Bennett Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Ouradour-sur-Glane

164

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

cognitive capacity to shape group perceptions.4 The Wounded Knee massacre, for example, ‘is a shaping force in the lives of almost all the Sioux residents of Pine Ridge reservation’.5 Liisa Malkki draws attention to the ‘social imagination of violence … both in the perpetration and in the telling’,6 referring to cases in which violence is a symbolically encoded, socio-political act. Torturous deaths – such as crucifixion was – can be highly symbolized forms of violence, with the disfiguring, distending, dismembering, smashing and perforation of the human body routinized and choreographed to display and enact publicly the socially degraded status of the victim. Malkki reflects on this in reference to the 1972 genocide of Hutu in Burundi: Hearing scores of accounts of cumbersome, difficult mutilation and killing, the listener eventually begins to become numb to their horror and to ask grimly practical questions. For instance: Would the process of killing tens or hundreds of thousands of Hutu not have been more efficiently pursued with guns and bullets? ... ‘This death’, they [the Tutsi] said, ‘is not designated for the Hutu’. The meaning of an ‘honorable’ or ‘normal’ death was brought up by many, and it was generally believed that the Tutsi considered Hutu unworthy of bullets.7

Hutu were frequently murdered with sharpened bamboo poles thrust from anus to head or vagina to head. ‘In the case of both men and women, the narratives suggest, a systematic connection was made between the vagina or anus and the head through the penetration of bamboo poles. … Such connections did not appear haphazard or accidental. Rather, they seem to have operated through certain routinized symbolic schemes of nightmarish cruelty.’8 It hardly needs to be spelled out how crucifixion was an exhibitionist act of political violence of precisely this sort. Violent acts freighted with stigmatizing symbolism of this kind are taken up and find their symbolic inversion in the ‘social imagination’ – the memory – of the group affected. To return to Malkki’s analysis of the processes of memory in Hutu refugee camps: The accounts of the atrocity, remembered and retold, themselves become acutely meaningful themes in the mythico-history [Malkki’s term for commemorative narrative]. … They had been incorporated into the overarching moral order

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), p. 119; Robin Wagner-Pacifici, ‘Memories in the Making: The Shape of Things that Went’, QualSoc 19 (1996), pp. 301–21 (301–308). 4. Neal, National Trauma, pp. 6–7. 5. Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, p. 172. 6. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 293. 7. Ibid., p. 96. 8. Ibid., p. 92.

The Memory of Violence and the Death of Jesus in Q

165

expressed in the mythico-history. The stories of atrocity thus stand as ordering stories at an extraordinary level. … Acts of atrocity are not only enacted and perpetrated symbolically; they are also, after the fact, stylized or narratively constituted symbolically.9

In this way the traumatic experience of violence comes to inscribe itself upon the collective memory in the form of what George Bonanno refers to as a ‘nuclear script’  – that is, a cognitive schema that fundamentally organizes memory, supplies group orientation and exerts a determinative effect upon perception and interpretation of subsequent experience.10 To use Michael Schudson’s terminology, it takes on the dimensions of a ‘“pre-emptive metaphor”, a past, traumatic experience so compelling that it forces itself as the frame for understanding new experiences’.11 The experience of violence is commemorated; in this way it is etched into the social memory of the community and into the cognition of its members. Tel Aviv ‘commemorated [the assassinated] Rabin by changing the name of the square  … to Rabin Square and erecting a monument on the spot where he was killed’.12 Commemoration of the SS massacre in the French village Oradour-sur-Glane, Sarah Farmer observes, ‘entailed establishing monuments and commemorative rituals in the interest of shaping memory for the long term’.13 Violence poses a particularly difficult challenge to the hermeneutical impulse that drives all commemoration, owing to the massively disruptive and disorienting effect of violence upon the affected community. It generates a sense of fragmentation, of the disintegration of a moral and social order previously experienced as stable and routine.14 In this crisis context, commemorative activities represent the exertion of strenuous effort to restore moral coherence and social continuity by working out the meaning of violence suffered, ‘the desperately needed understanding of what had occurred’.15 In the face-to-face discourse of the group affected,16 the events at stake are forged into a ‘master commemorative

9. Ibid., p. 95. 10. George A. Bonanno, ‘Remembering and Psychotherapy’, Psychotherapy 27 (1990), pp. 175–86 (179–82). 11. Michael Schudson, Watergate in American History: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 167; see also Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln in the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 225. 12. Yoram Peri, ‘The Media and Collective Memory of Yitzhak Rabin’s Remembrance’, JComm 49 (1999), pp. 106–24 (121). 13. Farmer, Martyred Village, p. 60. 14. Neal, National Trauma, pp. 4–22. 15. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. 38. 16. Malkki, Purity and Exile, 105; Gérard Namer, Mémoire et société (Paris: Méridiens Lincksieck, 1987), p. 154.

166

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

narrative’,17 a memorial artefact in its own right, or to revert to Malkki’s term, ‘mythico-historical reconstruction’.18 The narrative thus fashioned becomes a ‘set piece’ in the group’s memory. As Farmer observes in the case of the Oradour-surGlane massacre, the facts of the atrocity … form the heart of the commemorative narrative. … The story of the horrific events of 10 June was recounted to visitors to the ruins and to French children at school. … It became a set piece. … The complexity of the historical context … over time, was pared away to produce a simple tale of French innocence violated by Nazi barbarism.19

Engraved in the social memory, it acts as a cognitive script definitive for the group’s self-understanding, for interpretation of its perceptions of reality, and for defining itself as a moral community. ‘The mythico-history of the Hutu past in Burundi’, Malkki comments, ‘serve[s] as a paradigmatic model and interpretive device for giving meaning to and acting upon the socio-political present of the refugee camp.’20 The martyrdom script lies ready to hand as a master trope for interpreting, and hence mastering, acts of violence inflected with encoded social and political meanings. The massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane gained the status of an ‘archetypal atrocity’,21 and the town ‘became France’s village martyr (martyred village), a testament to French suffering … stand[ing] for the ultimate victimization of innocent French people’.22 Jews that perished in the Rhineland during the first Crusade for refusal to convert, along with victims of later pogroms, were commemorated in martyrologies (Memorbücher), for ‘the catastrophe simply could not be explained by the stock notion of punishment for sin, for the Ashkenazic communities of the Rhineland were holy communities, as their own response to the crisis had demonstrated’.23 The invoking of an existing cultural script – in this case, martyrdom – to fix the meaning of, and give narrative coherence to, the experience of violence brings us into touch with the central dynamic of social memory: its interpretative ‘keying’,24 or ‘analogic mapping’,25 of the experiences of the present with salient events of the

17. Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 7. 18. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 244. 19. Farmer, Martyred Village, p. 29. 20. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 105; see Neal, National Trauma, p. 22. 21. Farmer, Martyred Village, p. 58. 22. Ibid., pp. 1–2; emphasis original. 23. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, pp. 38–9, 46. 24. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, pp. 225–32. 25. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 121.

The Memory of Violence and the Death of Jesus in Q

167

past that exist as semantically dense Erinnerungsfiguren (memory configurations),26 or ‘frame images’,27 and occupy secure niches in the cultural memory. This memorializing activity (Erinnerungsarbeit) becomes particularly pronounced – it spikes – in the face of crisis and calamity, as the community urgently ransacks the archetypal past for images that might explain and give meaning to a tragic or otherwise deeply troubling present.28 Keying to cultural memory images and scripts renders such experiences intelligible, and so counters the threat of moral and social anomie, by associating them with established normative patterns and sacred narratives. Yerushalmi points out that ‘there is a pronounced tendency [in medieval Jewish chronicles] to subsume even major new events to familiar archetypes, for even the most terrible events are somehow less terrifying when viewed within old patterns rather than in their bewildering specificity’.29 A few examples will illustrate the keying, analogizing work of memory. On 11 November 1945 (Armistice Day), De Gaulle brought into Paris coffins of fifteen people who had perished in the most recent war and had them ‘solemnly transported … to the Arc de Triomphe, and soldiers laid them around the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier [from the First World War]’.30 ‘Moments after President John F. Kennedy was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, a black limousine pulled up to the Lincoln Memorial. The two people inside sat silently for ten minutes, gazing at the memorial and thinking about the image inside. Scanning the past for images to make sense of their grief, Bobby and Jackie Kennedy had found Abraham Lincoln.’31 A poster from the Second World War connects two images: Lincoln writing his famous letter of consolation to Mrs Bixby (five sons fallen) in the early 1860s, and soldiers dying in the early 1940s. ‘So conceived’, Schwartz comments, ‘Lincoln is not so much a historical object as a historical symbol under which the calamities of the present are subsumed and interpreted.’32 As these examples indicate, keying is hermeneutical activity in which denominators common to the present event in question and the image from the salient past are perceived and, accordingly, come to illuminate each other.33 Some connected Yitzhak

26. Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung, und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck,1992), p. 52. 27. Barry Schwartz, ‘Frame Image: Towards a Semiotics of Collective Memory’, Semiotica 121 (1998), pp. 1–38, (25–28). 28. Ibid., pp. 7–8; idem, ‘Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II’, ASR 61 (1996), pp. 908–27 (passim); Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 254; also Yerushalmi, Zakhor, p. 38; Jeffrey Prager, Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 216; Peri, ‘Media and Collective Memory’, p. 113. 29. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, p. 36. 30. Farmer, Martyred Village, pp. 6–7. 31. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. ix. 32. Schwartz, ‘Frame Image’, p. 7 33. Peri, ‘Media and Collective Memory’, p. 113.

168

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Rabin’s assassination with Kennedy’s and thereby ‘expressed the feeling that this was the assassination of a hero who embodied the hope for a new future’, while the political left compared it with ‘the 1933 assassination of the leader of the Labor Party, Haim Arlozorov’, a keying which ‘served the left in its claim that political murders are the province of the [political] right in Israel’,34 hermeneutical manoeuvres that illustrate social memory’s entanglement in political struggles and social conflict. Keying as a semantic transaction masters a distressing event; it gives it intelligibility, coherence, meaning and narrative integration with the sacred past. Just as critically, it engineers that event’s consolidation into a group’s identity-forming cultural memory  – its metamorphosis in its own right into an evocative memory image.35

Killed Prophets and Martyrs in Q We now turn to apply this analytical approach to Q. Our point of entry is the oracle in 11.47-51: Woe to you, for you build the tombs of the prophets, but your forefathers killed them. Thus you witness against yourselves that you are the sons of your forefathers. Therefore also Wisdom said, ‘I will send them prophets and sages, and some of them they will kill and persecute, so that a settling of accounts for the blood of all the prophets poured out from the founding of the world may be required of this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, murdered between the sacrificial altar and the House. Yes, I tell you, an accounting will be required from this generation!’36

34. Ibid., p. 114. 35. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. 231; also Prager, Presenting the Past, p. 4; James Fentress and Christopher Wickham, Social Memory (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 73–4; Neal, National Trauma, pp. 6–7, 22. Part of the problem with the Holocaust, by contrast, lies in the absence of precedents in the cultural memory of Jewish suffering that might bestow meaning upon it. Memory is a process of linking to cultural narratives to give meaning to events. In the case of the Holocaust, no such memory scripts are available, and memorialization falters. Vera Schwarz writes, ‘The Creator is always testing the Jewish people, testing Abraham, testing Isaac and, finally, testing Job. … But in the death camps, the possibility of dialogue vanished. There can be no “test” of the Holocaust. What lingers after Auschwitz is simply the shock-effect of a brutal, experienced reality, the throbbing trace of an event. … It leaves in its wake nothing but stammering speech and a wounded imagination … [Primo] Levi reaffirmed the power of memory words. Returning to the language of Genesis, he described the madness of the war years as tohu–vavohu (unformed and void)’ (Bridge across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998], pp. 80–1). 36. From The Critical Edition of Q (ed. James M. Robinson; Paul Hoffmann; John S. Kloppenborg; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000).

The Memory of Violence and the Death of Jesus in Q

169

The passage bristles with interpretative difficulties. We will focus upon analysis of commemorative keying as a formative feature of the excerpt. Killed Prophets This oracle is the climax of the catena of Woes that began with 11.39. In the Woes, a prophetic-speech genre (accusation), Jesus accuses those addressed of injustice, moral impurity and venality. In 11.47-48, the accusation shifts suddenly to the topic of killing prophets. This culminating woe in turn shifts to the prophetic oracle of judgement in 11.49-51, which thrice makes reference to the killing of the prophets and the righteous. What accounts for the sequence at this point shifting from classic prophetic impurity and injustice charges to the insinuated association of the addressees with the killing of prophets, and then, in a further escalation, to the grave pronouncement that an accounting for the blood of all the prophets is to be required of ‘this generation’? Scholarship on Q, notorious for its lack of consensus on many other matters, agrees that the oracle is in some manner making retrospective reference to Jesus’s own violent death. The passage may be read on three intersecting planes. First, the scraps of narrative detail in the Q 11 materials leading up to and culminating in the woe and oracle – materials characterized by aggressive challenges (including a sorcery accusation) to Jesus’s prophetic credentials issuing from hostile interlocutors – establish a setting contemporary with Jesus. At the level of its dramatic presentation of Jesus’s own speech, therefore, the oracle projects a premonition of mortal danger. Second, Q, brought together after Jesus’s activities and demise, inevitably adopts a perspective on that career and death. Thus these verses refract their ‘living’ subject through the prism of the convictions Q displays with respect to his life and death. That Jesus’s own death is encompassed by the oracle is corroborated by the introduction of Abel and Zechariah, who likewise suffered violent deaths, for this coheres with the practice in the preceding sections of Q of associating Jesus with exemplary figures of Israelite epic. Finally, the passage reflects the identity of the successor community, that is, its own self-understanding of likewise being threatened by, if not actually subjected to, the experience of violent persecution.37

37. An interpretive problem is whether Wisdom’s oracle is wholly retrospective – that is, looks back over an epic history of sending and rejection, a history culminating in ‘this generation’ and, presumably, its rejection of Jesus – or whether the successor community numbers itself in the line of those prophets and sages, inclusive of Jesus, commissioned by Wisdom and subjected to rejection and death. These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive: the boundary between the killing of Jesus and then, in a sequel, the persecution of his followers, is in this case blurred. We might say that the violence, perceived or real, hanging over the affiliated community is the aftershock from the killing of Jesus. Both are signs of condemnation of ‘this generation’.

170

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

This sense of imminent threat is confirmed by the immediately adjoining ‘martyrparaenesis’ of Q 12.2-12.38 The oracle displays the hallmark operations of commemorative keying. The prophets, and the violent deaths of the prophets, held a secure place as Erinnerungsfiguren in the cultural memory of ancient Judaism. A memory script, that is, an iterative sacred narrative, incorporated this deaths-of-the-prophets motif, namely, the pattern according to which Israel chronically rejects the prophets God sends to call her to repentance. The oracle maps an analogy between Jesus’s violent death and the deaths of the prophets, and accordingly appropriates the deuteronomistic cultural script of sending and rejection for comprehending and interpreting this event.39 This conflation of the present, or recent past, with the epic past to form a unified picture, is, as Assmann points out, one of the most characteristic operations of social memory: ‘In the cultural memory of a group, these two planes of the past are pushed together in a seamless manner.’40 Malkki comments: ‘The present [Hutu refugee camp context] was incorporated quite continuously and cumulatively into the mythico-historical discourse describing the past in Burundi – just as the past was, in a sense, inserted into the present. Thus, significant contemporary events of daily life in the camp were transformed into mythico-historical events.’41 Q 11.47-51 does not merely establish the death of the righteous messengers as a term of comparison for Jesus’s death; rather, it integrates the death of Jesus into the sweep of that sacred narrative, in fact as its climactic episode.42 In the face

38. Jens Schröter, Erinnerung an Jesu Worte: Studien zur Rezeption der Logienüberlieferung in Markus, Q, und Thomas (WMANT, 76; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1997), pp. 355–8. We see that martyr-paraenesis (12.2-12) follows directly upon the introduction of the martyr motif in reference to Jesus’s death (11.47-51). This is an intelligible macrosequence that can only be put down to Q composition. 39. A contemporary example is Zionist commemoration of Joseph Trumpeldor, an early settler who died defending the Tel Hai settlement: ‘The oral and written literature about Trumpeldor often created a link between him and the famous Jewish heroes of Antiquity’ (Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, p. 109). 40. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 49–50; see also Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 115; Schwartz, ‘Frame Image’, pp. 25–28. 41. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 106. 42. In a similar manner, the ‘frame image’ described by Schwartz – a Second World War poster ‘depicting contemporary soldiers parading before George Washington’s bedraggled troops at Valley Forge (the low point of the Revolution) – gave meaning to current military difficulties by defining them as momentary episodes in a longer narrative’ (Schwartz, ‘Frame Image’, pp. 13–14). Zerubavel says that ‘the pilgrimage [by modern Israelis to Masada] introduces a mythical temporal framework [emphasis added] that fuses into a single representation the Hasmoneans’ revolt, the defence of Masada, and the modern Zionist’s struggle for liberation’ (Recovered Roots, p. 126). Namer has a fascinating description of this phenomenon shaping 1945 commemorations in France, as the French sought to come

The Memory of Violence and the Death of Jesus in Q

171

of the disruptive event of Jesus’s violent death at the hands of political elites, the affiliated group looks to the past, that is, to ancient Judaism’s cultural memory of the violent fate of the prophets, to find its bearings. By this means the disturbing experience of violence is given meaning, and thereby an important step is taken towards mastering it. This commemorative operation, semantically nourished by the rich streams of ancient Jewish memory, simultaneously subjects Jesus’s death to metamorphosis into memory, that is, it gives it coherence, shape and elevated status as a durable, semantically dense Erinnerungsfigur in its own right in the memory of the commemorating group. Its integration as an episode in the sacred narrative of the sending and rejection of the prophets, the already existing cultural memory script, or, as Valensi would put it, its being ‘harmonized with the great tradition’,43 is also crucial to its anchoring in memory, whence it can exert ongoing effects upon the life and identity of the commemorating group. Commemorative keying weaves Jesus’s violent death – if left uncommemorated like countless other Roman crucifixions a passing, unmarked event – into the long narrative tapestry of memory.44 Formatively at work in this project commemorating violent death is the agonistic politics of memory, a contest over the memory of Jesus taking place within an ongoing situation of at least latently violent social conflict.45 Corresponding to its torturous, degrading disfigurement of the human body, crucifixion was a form of symbolically weighted imperial violence that attempted, if not to subject to oblivion, at least to degrade and dishonour publicly the memory and status of its victims, if at all remembered as discarded social deviants. That Jesus died at the hands of Romans, whereas the epic connection with Zechariah in particular evokes intra-Israel conflict, has little bearing. Native elites were incorporated, if ambiguously, into the imperial system. Q 11.47-51 contests the memory of Jesus. It integrates him, precisely in virtue of his violent death, into the epic memory tapestry of Israel. With the same commemorative manoeuvre the group passes a

to terms with the troubling events of the Second World War by integrating them into the grand narrative of national memory: ‘On the morning of April 2, the French army was fêted, and then the journey along the parade route began, setting out from the Invalides (Louis XIV, Napoléon). It passed by l’Etoile, then stopped before the statue of Clémenceau. The itinerary of the procession functioned to link these commemorative sites together into a unity. It symbolized the entire history of France and at the same time the continuity of the war from 1914 to 1944. The route actualized successive commemorative sites in very much the same way that a verbal recitation moves from word to word’ (Mémoire et société, pp. 204–5, emphasis original). 43. Lucette Valensi, ‘From Sacred History to Historical Memory and Back: The Jewish Past’, Hist&Anth 2 (1986), pp. 283–305 (289). 44. See M. Simondon, ‘Les modes du discours commemorative en Grèce ancienne’, in La commémoration (ed. Philippe Gignoux; Paris: Peeters, 1988), pp. 91–105 (98). 45. See Shaunna L. Scott, ‘Dead Work: The Construction and Reconstruction of the Harlan Miners Memorial’, QualSoc 19 (1996), pp. 365–93 (385–8).

172

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

moral judgement on Jesus’s death, and, accordingly, aggressively attacks the moral legitimacy of its opponents, the Romans and their local elite clients who were responsible for executing Jesus. Far from the latter being guardians of the sacred social and moral order, in a breathtaking status reversal, they are analogically mapped to those elites in Israel’s sacred narrative who killed God’s messengers, the prophets. Martyr Q 11.47-51 depicts Jesus’s death as the rejection of a prophet, but also, keying to a cognate script in ancient Judaism’s cultural memory, as the killing of a righteous man. The latter ascription, no less than the former, is an aggressive commemorative strategy responding to Jesus’s degradation and death. Abel (who was not a prophet) and Zechariah epitomize the righteous who are unjustly killed. Kloppenborg points out that ‘what is common to the two figures is the fact that innocent blood was shed’.46 The killing of Zechariah is recounted in 2 Chronicles 24 and then finds midrashic development in rabbinic sources, where it is fitted into a sequence with other martyrs viewed as prophets.47 The pragmatic effect of the story in rabbinic sources was to offer assurance that the violent deaths of rabbis, successors of the prophets and priests, would not go unavenged.48 Accordingly, in rabbinic usage the appearance of the story marks a commemorative response to painful deaths and tragedies of calamitous proportions. A genealogical, though not direct, relationship between the Q and rabbinic versions of the Zechariah story is likely – both specify the innermost court as the location of the killing – but cannot be demonstrated. Nevertheless the rabbinic and Q versions function homologously inasmuch as they are brought to bear upon catastrophically violent events. The appearance of martyr motifs is a reliable indicator that a commemorative response to violence is under way; it is a memorializing reverberation of traumatic events that have shaken a community. The keying of Jesus to archetypal martyrs in the cultural memory is evidence of a concern to transform the horrific public stigma attaching to the executed person, and by extension to the identity of the affiliated group. Correspondingly, like the ‘death of the prophets’ motif, it constitutes an indictment: those who sit in judgement – tyrants who break the bodies and spill the blood of the innocent – are themselves judged guilty. The martyr claim promulgated by evocation of Abel and Zechariah reverses guilt ascriptions in a

46. John S. Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1987), p. 145. Wis. Sol. 10:3b depicts Abel as a murder victim, not an early envoy of Wisdom. Zechariah was a prophet, but the 2 Chronicles 24 narrative, as well as rabbinic retellings, concentrate on his murder. 47. Betsy Halpern Amaru, ‘The Killing of the Prophets: Unravelling a Midrash’, HUCA 54 (1983), pp. 153–80 (169). 48. Ibid., pp. 178–9; Sheldon H. Blank, ‘The Death of Zechariah in Rabbinic Literature’, HUCA 12/13 (1938), pp. 327–46 (341).

The Memory of Violence and the Death of Jesus in Q

173

manner that renders the dominant order itself guilty.49 If asserted publicly it constitutes a frontal assault on the authorities, opening a new chapter in a struggle over social and moral legitimacy.

Jesus’s Death and Moral Exhortation in Q With the appearance of martyr scripts applied to Jesus we enter into the realm of normative memory, that is, we observe the essential connection between commemoration and moral exhortation. Group-constitutive norms are immanent in memories of foundational persons and events.50 It is by virtue of its normativity that the past makes programmatic, urgent moral claims upon a community.51 Deaths of significant persons summon forth commemorative activities focused upon the virtues these individuals embodied in life and in their death. Martyrs, by definition heroic persons killed because of steadfast commitment to a set of emblematic virtues, attract intense cults of commemoration. A violent death, commemorated as a martyr’s death, is itself instrumental in establishing the urgent normative claims of the virtues the person embodied and died exemplifying, and in mobilizing a social movement cohering around those norms.52 Commemorative narratives coalescing out of the experience of violence aspire to be far more than mere records of events for posterity. Rather, bound up in the transformation into commemorative narrative is the indelible infusion of constituent events and personae with categorical moral meanings. Thereby such narratives, raised to culture-constitutive status, become ‘moral ordering stories on a cosmological level’53; they are ‘most centrally concerned with the reconstitution of a moral order of the world’.54 This is to say that they comprehensively organize reality in moral terms and constitute the commemorating community as a ‘moral community’.55 This operation is particularly crucial in the aftermath of violence, for violence seems to shatter the moral order of the world. Commemoration of salient

49. Likewise a formative feature of the adjoining ‘martyr–paraenesis’ Q 12.2-12 (see Alan Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source (NovTSup, 91; Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 203–14). 50. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 (reprint 1952)), p. 59; Schwartz, ‘Frame Image’, pp. 8–9; Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 16–17; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis: zehn Studien (Munich: Beck, 2000), pp. 127–8; Malkki, Purity and Exile, pp. 53–4. 51. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 76–80; Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, pp. xi, 304. 52. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, pp. 148–54. 53. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 244. 54. Ibid., p. 56; emphasis original. 55. Ibid., pp. 53–5, 73.

174

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

persons and events therefore entails inculcation of emblematic norms. The Greek funeral speech contained paraenetic elements: ‘The anonymous and collective homage of the logos épitaphios unfolded in accordance with precise roles of composition: exordium, encomium (ἐπαίνεσις), exhortation (παραίνεσις), and consolation (παραμυθία).’56 The same is true of funerary epigrams: ‘It is this [paraenetic] dimension of collective memory that gives to funerary epigrams their commemorative value, even when it is a matter of private inscriptions that celebrate merits other than martial ἀρετή, for example, the justice and the wisdom (δικαιοσ ύνη and σωφροσ ύνη) of Sosinos of Gortyne … or again, the σοφία of a physician.’57 It is through inculcation of its distinctive norms that a community incorporates its members and subjects them to moral formation.58 The normative dimension of social memory is, accordingly, brought to bear in a community’s various educational Sitze im Leben, distilled into various commemorative artefacts – the instructional, paraenetic genres and media appropriate to the socialization goals of those settings.59 One may therefore speak of a synergistic connection that exists between commemorative and instructional activities. A community’s ritualized activities commemorating martyrs become opportunities not just for narrative recitations of the martyr’s life and death but also for instructional artefacts and activities aimed at inculcating and securing commitment to those emblematic norms.60 Recitational and instructional impulses that converge around cults of collective commemoration find expression in respectively differentiated genres. Jan Assmann captures this aptly with his rubric Formative and Normative Texte. Formative Texte designate narrative genres, that is, foundational histories and myths, whose retellings integrate the community into the sweep of a sacred narrative, and Normative Texte refer to instructional genres calibrated to inculcate the cognate norms. ‘Normative texts codify the norms of social behavior; here belongs everything from individual proverbs, to Wisdom literature, to the Shulhan Aruch [a medieval Talmud epitome]’, while to formative texts ‘belongs everything from

56. Simondon, ‘Les modes du discours’, p. 101. 57. Ibid., p. 100. 58. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 17; Yael Zerubavel, ‘The Historic, the Legendary, and the Incredible: Invented Tradition and Collective Memory in Israel’, in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (ed. John R. Gillis; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 105–23 (111); Nachman Ben Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 238–9. 59. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. 249; Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, pp. 138–42; Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 141–2; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 127. 60. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, pp. 28–9, 41, 91, 108, 148; Malkki, Purity and Exile, pp.  53–4; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 43.

The Memory of Violence and the Death of Jesus in Q

175

tribal myths, to sagas of origins, to Homer and Virgil’.61 These are not mutually exclusive generic categories; in a given text one will predominate, thus positioning it towards either the narrative or instructional pole, but elements of the other will likely be found to some degree.62 Assmann’s rubrics help us find Q’s location in emergent Christianity. In its determinative genre profile Q is an instructional text, which is to say its definitive components are Jesus’s ethos-forming teachings.63 Q’s commemorative focus on Jesus’s violent death in 11.47-51 coheres with its overall pragmatic focus upon moral exhortation covering multiple topoi, for we have seen the necessary, even generative connection that exists between the two. The joint appearance of these elements in Q should no longer perplex us, and it is not necessary to posit socialhistory, redaction history shifts to account for it. We also are in a position, invoking Assmann’s rubrics Formative and Normative texts, to assess the meagreness of narrative elements in Q compared to its density in various genres of moral exhortation. We recall that commemorative ritual, narrative recitation and moral formation through paraenesis are constellated activities, various dimensions of the group-constitutive enterprise.64 This range of commemorative activities requires respectively differentiated genres, clustering around the Formative and Normative poles. Q is positioned towards the Normative end of the spectrum. Narrative recedes in Q because of its genrespecific commitment to the social task of moral formation, of inculcating norms; nevertheless we have seen that Q coalesces around the memory of Jesus’s violent death, commemorating it in an idiom appropriate to its genre and pragmatic task. An illuminating comparison is the symbiotic relationship between sacred narrative (Geschichte) and Law (Gesetz) in the commemorative tradition of the Hebrew Bible: The imperative, ‘Remember!’ makes reference to two realms, each of which are equally binding: the laws of the Covenant, which are to be observed in all circumstances and in all their details, and the story that founded and grounded these laws. The laws receive their meaning on account of the story [of deliverance

61. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 127. 62. Ibid., p. 127; also idem, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 16–17, 141–2. ‘Knowledge of the sort that defines social identity encompasses two quite different complexes; these can be comprehended under the categories “Wisdom” and “Myth”’ (p. 141). 63. Kloppenborg, Formation, pp. 317–24. Horsley and Draper argue that Q is, as regards genre, a prophetic text, but acknowledge the significant presence therein of ‘covenant instruction’ (Richard A. Horsley and Jonathan A. Draper, Whoever Hears You Hears Me: Prophets, Performance, and Tradition in Q (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999), pp. 206–7, 233–5). 64. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 223–4; Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, pp. 94, 138–40; Ben Yehuda, Masada Myth, pp. 135–6, 152; Malkii, Purity and Exile, pp. 53–4.

176

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

from Egypt]. Only the person who does not forget the flight from Egypt knows that the Law signifies freedom, and is able to follow it. In fact, all communities live within the bounds of foundational stories, from which they draw the ordering and direction of their actions.65

We have seen that commemorative narratives, particularly those arising out of the experience of violence, are ‘concerned with order in a fundamental, cosmological sense … with the ordering and reordering of social and political categories, with the defining of self in distinction to other, with good and evil … [with] the reconstitution of a moral order of the world’.66 Helmut Koester recognizes that the emergence of early Christianity’s foundational story, grounded ‘in the actual suffering and death of the historical Jesus of Nazareth’ and commemorated in Eucharistic ritual, simultaneously brings into existence a new social and moral order that entails ‘new legislation’. ‘As Augustus [in establishing his new order] had made recourse to the legislation of Caesar, the new community reached back to the words of Jesus as part of this legislation, especially the commandment of love, in which all the law and the prophets are summarized.’67 Koester makes no reference to Q in this connection, but Q sets out in a series of instructions, reinforced with prophetic exhortations, a comprehensive moral and social order that is anchored, moreover, in its inaugural Love Your Enemies paraenesis (6.27-35) and, as we have seen, grounded in the memorializing, in Q 11, of Jesus’s violent death. It is therefore difficult to maintain the view that Q is representative of a distinct community, ‘the Q community’, with little interest in Jesus’s life and death, defined by its focused reverence for Jesus as a ‘sage’, or, correspondingly, that Q, by virtue of its genre characteristics, bears witness to a distinct theological and social formation and accompanying trajectory in primitive Christianity. Q’s low ratio of narrative to moral exhortation is largely a function of genre constraints, the functional role it plays in helping carry the moral-exhortation load at some site of early Christian commemoration.68 These observations should not be construed as suggesting that Q’s view of Jesus can be easily collapsed into the images emerging in other streams of early Christian tradition, or that Q is a supplement to a Passion narrative like that found in Mark. Comparative reconstruction of Q’s commemoration of Jesus, however, must proceed on methodological grounds other than the questionable ones that more often than not have undergirded claims for Q’s uniqueness in the context of early Christianity.

65. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 296. 66. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 56; emphasis original. 67. Helmut Koester, ‘The Memory of Jesus’ Death and the Worship of the Risen Lord’, HTR, 91 (1998), pp. 335–50 (349). 68. See Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 162; Yerushalmi, Zakhor, pp. 14–15, 31–2, 45–6.

The Memory of Violence and the Death of Jesus in Q

177

Q as Commemorative Artefact That Q aligns Jesus’s death with the death of the prophets and coordinates it with the martyr framework is hardly an indicator that Q ascribes comparatively less importance to Jesus’s death – a view that seems to take the extensive space allotted the Passion narrative in the gospels as its dubious evaluative norm. On the contrary, the appearance of these motifs attests to the tremendous problem Jesus’s violent death posed to the community that identified itself with him, as is evidenced by its invoking hermeneutical frameworks from Israel’s epic past – Israel’s cultural memory – to give meaning to and master it. These frameworks are indicators of a political and social conflict, a struggle for control of the memory of Jesus’s death, for this frameworking strategy constitutes an attempt to reverse the moral and social signification of Jesus’s status-degrading death and to attribute culpability to that thin though powerful stratum of local elites, incorporated into the Roman order, responsible for his condemnation and execution. Frame-imaging is the definitive dynamic of social memory, and we have found it operating within Q. Our analysis has largely concentrated on how Q keys Jesus’s death to evocative archetypal images existing in the cultural memory of ancient Judaism. The effect of this activity is to shape and transform Jesus’s violent death into a durable Erinnerungsfigur in its own right, symbolically and hermeneutically potent, with a leading position in the emergent cultural memory of early Christianity. We see a group urgently at work retrieving and constructing its own salient past, and hence its distinct identity, within the flux of its Jewish cultural identity – an identity as unstable as the contested memory of Jesus himself.69 We see Christian cultural memory in formation, ‘the quest for durability and identity within the flow and depth of time’.70 As a group-constitutive memory configuration, the death of Jesus serves as a symbolic and moral resource for organizing and interpreting the community’s new experiences, and for mobilizing the community to face fresh crises. Conversely, the present experiences of the community, harassed and facing at least the threat of violence (Q 12.2-12), act heuristically and reciprocally upon the resources its salient past makes available to it. Taken as an integrated body of tradition, therefore, Q can be understood as an artefact of the formative effects of cultural memory. For the life of the group identified with him the violent death of Jesus would have constituted a rupture on the scale that Assmann associates with the appearance of concentrated cultural memory activities. He notes in addition that ‘the most original form, so to speak the primal experience of that break between Yesterday and Today, in which the decision between disappearance or preservation forces itself as an issue, is death. Only with its end, with its radical discontinuousness, does a life obtain that form

69. See Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 202. 70. Aleida and Jan Assmann, ‘Schrift, Tradition, und Kultur’, in Zwischen Festtag und Alltag: Zehn Beiträge zum Thema Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit (ed. Paul Goetsch et al.; Tübingen: Narr, 1988), p. 34.

178

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

of pastness upon which a culture of remembrance can be built’.71 A violent death magnifies the crisis of rupture and the urgency of commemorative activities crucial to a community’s reconstitution and moral repristination. The death of Jesus, through political violence, would bring about the sort of radically altered situation and dissolution of previous group frameworks such that if the community were to survive it would need to reconstitute its memory, and with the same stroke the coherence of its own social and moral identity, in intense commemorative activities. We have seen that a crucial element of this project is supplying the violent events themselves with moral intelligibility and integrating them into the community’s story. In this scenario the community takes up Jesus’s ethical teachings, places them in the new framework of the post-death situation, aligns them with the reality of Jesus’s violent death, gives them fresh, stabilizing connections with Israel’s cultural memory, and thereby reconstitutes itself as a moral community centred on commemoration of Jesus, a commemoration that becomes a major force in the community’s historical development.

71. Aleida and Jan Assmann, ‘Schrift, Tradition, und Kultur’, p. 33.

Chapter 10 MEMORY THEORY AND JESUS RESEARCH*

The form-critical account of the tradition, which still supplies a number of the analytical premises in historical Jesus scholarship, is predicated upon conceptions of memory considered long superseded by those who study memory in its social, cognitive, and cultural aspects. The ‘passivist’ model of memory is described by Casey as ‘the view that all memories of necessity repeat the past in a strictly replicative manner. The contribution of the remembering subject … is nugatory.’1 The cognitive theory associated with this approach likens memories to traces, ‘stored up like so many definite impressions, fixed and having only the capacity of being reexcited’.2 Memory is thereby reduced, in Casey’s words, ‘to being an inert sedimentation, a mere residuum’.3 This epitomizes the conception of memory operative in the model of tradition that has been bequeathed to historical Jesus scholarship by classical form criticism. At least as early as F. C. Bartlett’s seminal work in 1932, however, and virtually contemporaneously with the second German edition of Bultmann’s History of the Synoptic Tradition, memory theorists were beginning to approach memory as an active, constructive faculty. The last few years have seen a renewal of interest in historical Jesus scholarship in the memory factor. One observes, however, a tendency to move directly from research on memory to historical inferences in a way that bypasses the prior and more fundamental question of the origins of the tradition and its history. The contribution of memory theory lies in its ability to account for the formation of the tradition and its history, that is, to clarify for critical Jesus historiography proper object of its analysis.

* Originally published in Handbook Study Historical Jesus, vol. 1 (ed. Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter; 4 vols; Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 809–42. Used by permission. 1. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 269. 2. Frederic C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 (repr. 1932)), p. 214; also George A. Bonanno, ‘Remembering and Psychotherapy’, Psychotherapy 27 (1990), pp. 175–86 (175). 3. Casey, Remembering, p. 277.

180

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Form Criticism and Memory The form-critical model for memory was individual eyewitness recollection. While memory traces of this sort lay at the origins of the tradition, they were a residuum, largely inert with respect to developments in the tradition itself. The salient image was of so-called authentic memories of Jesus coming to be buried under multiple layers of ‘tradition’. The history of the tradition, in other words, had only tangentially to do with memory. William Wrede’s bifurcation of Markan tradition into surviving elements of empirical history on the one hand and Easter-engendered dogma on the other, the latter occluding the former, was precursor to the form critics’ model. Of a ‘historical view of the real life of Jesus’, wrote Wrede, only ‘pale residues’ survive.4 The analytical task, therefore, was like refining metals from slag: ‘How do we separate what belongs properly to Jesus from what is the material of the primitive community?’5 Bultmann adopted this view of the tradition, positing, for example, that underlying the Passion narrative was ‘a short narrative of historical reminiscence about the Arrest, Condemnation and Execution of Jesus’ that had been overgrown and ‘disfigured’ by legend.6 Martin Dibelius correlated the ‘Paradigms’ chronologically with the period of the eyewitnesses, with eyewitness recollections assigned a role, however, not in the formation of the tradition itself, but as a sort of external control on the latter.7 Bultmann connected the formation of tradition with recurrent social settings associated with the life of the early communities. In attributing importance to a community’s present social realities in its conceptualizations of the past, Bultmann’s approach aligned with a central postulate of memory theory (see below). However, correlating form closely with sociological function, and assuming that the primitive eschatological communities lacked constitutive orientation to the past, he inferred that contemporary social forces were the primary factor in generating the tradition. The gospel tradition was thus construed as a bifurcated entity: fabricated tradition coming to overlay diminishing residues of memory, for their part more or less inert with respect to the traditioning process itself. Tradition thus

4. William Wrede, The Messianic Secret (trans. J. C. G. Greig; London: James Clarke, 1971), p. 131. Analysis of this trend can be pushed back to D. F. Strauss; see Jens Schröter, ‘Von der Historizität der Evangelien: Ein Beitrag zur gegenwärtigen Diskussion um den historischen Jesus’, in Der historische Jesus: Tendenzen und Perspektive der gegenwärtigen Forschung (ed. Jens Schröter and Ralph Brucker; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 163–212 (169–73). 5. Wrede, Messianic Secret, p. 4. 6. Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (trans. John Marsh; New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 273–4. 7. Martin Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel (trans. Bertram Lee Woolf; London: Redwood, 1971), pp. 61–2.

Memory Theory and Jesus Research

181

conceived primarily gave expression to the contemporary debates, predicaments and developments of the early communities.8 Bultmann’s analysis was in fact characterized by a programmatic disconnect between memory and the growing tradition, his occasional gestures to ‘reminiscence’ notwithstanding. This was the consequence of according little agency to memory and instead locating the decisive generative forces for tradition in contemporary social factors. In Bultmann’s additive model, dominical sayings were the tradition’s primary point of departure. But authentic sayings in his view exercised only an anaemic influence upon the expanding tradition; he found it difficult to believe, for example, ‘that the changes and revaluation of such meshalim as are to be found in the tradition have in fact retained some reminiscence of such changes and revaluations by Jesus’.9 This inertness made possible, indeed necessary, the large-scale incorporation of inauthentic sayings into the Jesus tradition to meet the challenges of contemporary exigencies.10 In consequence, Jesus’s radically distinctive message could now be heard only faintly. Bultmann was far from denying all continuity whatsoever between authentic sayings and developments in the tradition. Extraneous materials and community practices often displayed significant congruence with dominical pronouncements. The dogmatic belief in Jesus as Messiah, moreover, did not eradicate the memory of Jesus’s ‘actual work as a teacher of the Law’, and this inspired confidence that many of Jesus’s sayings about the Law had been preserved.11 On this point also, however, Bultmann’s conception of memory – its trace-like existence and marginality visà-vis other forces generating the tradition – asserts itself, for this ‘picture [of Jesus as rabbi], which must have been distinctly impressed on their memory … was gradually thrust into the background by the figure of the Messiah’.12 Bultmann famously conceived the history of the gospel traditions as a sequence of stages.13 Each stage generated its own tradition, and subsequent stages stood in discontinuity with preceding stages. Hence his analytical project was to ‘clearly distinguish’, ‘separate’ the tradition in accordance with these stages.14 Such a procedure was entailed in locating the decisive forces in the creation of tradition in the evolving social and cultural contexts of the various communities. Particularly notable was his distribution of the tradition into Palestinian and Hellenistic stages

8. Bultmann acknowledged in a footnote that ‘memories of Jesus, his words and deeds played their part in the literary productions of the early Church’ (History, p. 48 n. 2), but it is clear that he assigned these – which he thought of as individual recollections – no significant role in the formation of the tradition. 9. Bultmann, History, p. 101. 10. Ibid., p. 105. 11. Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (trans. Louise Pettibone Smith and Erminie Huntress Lantero; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), pp. 125–6. 12. Bultmann, Jesus, p. 126. 13. Bultmann, History, p. 155. 14. Bultmann, Jesus, p. 12.

182

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

respectively, traditions from the latter standing in ‘distinction’ from those of the former.15 The social and cultural realities of the Hellenistic milieu generated corollary traditions that superimposed upon the older Palestinian tradition, ‘impressing it with a meaning such as it needed in the Hellenistic Churches’.16 Notable, in other words, was the inertia of the Palestinian tradition as it and its particular portrayal of Jesus were commandeered by the religionsgeschichtliche forces of syncretistic Hellenism. The Gospel of Mark was the resulting artefact: a ‘cult legend’ that combined the κύριος Christ-myth of the Hellenistic cult ‘with the tradition of the story of Jesus’.17 Accordingly, ‘the Christ who is preached is not the historic Jesus, but the Christ of faith and the cult’.18 In its terminal point in Mark the tradition had moved a distance quite remote from the memory traces that lay at its origins. Given this scenario the task of historical Jesus research was to move back through the developmental stages of the tradition, bracketing materials that could be designated ‘Hellenistic’ as well as other materials that expressed the interests of the church. With the goal being ‘to distinguish the oldest layer’,19 the form critics’ procedure was to identify and discard accreted materials and arrive at the authentic residue through application of the dissimilarity criterion, the ‘original form’ axiom, and the so-called laws or ‘tendencies’ of the tradition. Bultmann put a great deal of effort into defining these laws of the tradition that he considered to have likewise been key factors in the creation of tradition, for isolating the auto-operations propelling the tradition’s ‘immanent urge to development’20 gave him precision tools for further tracing back its history to prior to its fixation in the written sources. These tendencies included the attribution of specific names and labels within a tradition originally marked by anonymity. Others could be subcategorized under a broad evolutionary tendency of the tradition to develop from simple to complex forms, while apophthegms had a tendency to differentiate into variants.21 This positing of innate tendencies reflected the form-critical conception of the tradition as a development away from original memory traces under the impulse of not just external but also immanent forces. The development of the Jesus tradition, in other words, was driven by virtually every force except the salient past itself. Little of this history of the tradition holds up. The primary factors producing tradition variants are not innate tendencies but contingent social and cultural variables inhering in the settings in which tradition is iteratively enacted. On these grounds alone the confidence that knowledge of the tradition’s ‘tendencies’ opened

15. Ibid., p. 13; idem, History, p. 239. 16. Bultmann, History, p. 437. 17. Ibid., pp. 347–8. 18. Ibid., p. 371; also Dibelius, Tradition to Gospel, pp. 297–300. 19. Martin Dibelius, Jesus (trans. Charles B. Hedrick and Frederick C. Grant; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1949), p. 34. 20. Bultmann, History, p. 373. 21. Ibid., pp. 52–3, 62–8, 85–9, 199.

Memory Theory and Jesus Research

183

up pathways allowing the critic to move back through its oral stages to isolate earlier forms and perhaps even an authentic residuum was misplaced. Moreover, Bultmann grounded his tendencies of the oral tradition in evidence from written sources. For example, he identified the ‘tendency of the tradition to enlarge upon older sayings’ by reference to Ben Sirach, who ‘combined and enlarged’ collections of popular sayings.22 As regards his claim that proper names and specific labels displace primitive anonymity in the transmission of apophthegms, Bultmann connected up Mark, Matthew, John, and then novelistic developments in the apocrypha into a trajectory to infer this as an inherent tendency of the oral tradition.23 This derivation of oral tendencies from redactional operations was predicated on his view that ‘there is no difference in principle’ between oral and written processes.24 The oral-written juncture, however, is better construed as a break than a continuum.25 John Miles Foley characterizes writing and orality as distinct communication ‘channels’ or media.26 Literary trafficking with oral tradition entails a displacement of oral dynamics, even if the written artefact is composed for oral enactment. The written medium enables new ways for working with tradition, such as incorporation within comprehensive literary frameworks and reworking not under the immediate exigencies of performance settings but in the service of meditated redactional programmes. Literary editorial operations, therefore, are not prescriptive for the oral medium, and to take them to be so, as Bultmann did, was to inject into scholarship some very misleading notions about the history of the tradition.27 Tradition histories are only possible where the existence of parallel traditions in written sources permits analysis of priority. In other words, the oral tradition and its history can only be viewed through the opacity of the written medium; ‘one cannot go beyond the different versions and contextualizations of a saying into the oral phase of transmission’.28 This spells the end of the form-critical

22. Ibid., pp. 88–9. 23. Ibid., p. 68. 24. Ibid., pp. 6, 87. 25. Jens Schröter, Erinnerung an Jesu Worte: Studien zur Rezeption der Logienüberlieferung in Markus, Q und Thomas (WMANT, 76; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1997), p. 464. 26. John Miles Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), p. 4. 27. Werner Kelber summarizes the form-critical conception of the history of the gospel tradition with its underlying ‘print mentality’ thus: ‘The gospel composition is imagined as a revision of antecedent texts carried out with such literary precision and ideological correctness that it enables us to retrace tradition, stratum by stratum’ (The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997 (repr. 1983)), p. xxii). 28. Jens Schröter, ‘The Historical Jesus and the Sayings Tradition: Comments on Current Research’, Neot 30 (1996), pp. 151–68 (157).

184

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

project of arriving at memory traces of the historical Jesus thought to lie near the bottom of a multilayered oral tradition. Critique of the form-critical model for tradition is hardly a novel enterprise, despite the account still functioning as the basis for much historical Jesus work. Our approach has been to assess its operative conceptions of memory. We have seen that the form critics, to the very limited extent they even reflected on it, associated memory with individual eyewitness recollections. These lay as inert traces at the origins of a tradition whose formation and development took place at the primary behest of other factors. Hence the distinguishing of so-called authentic memory from fabricated tradition is the hallmark of historical Jesus analyses indebted to the form-critical model. Contrary to its complete marginalization in the form-critical account, memory in fact is the primary force in the formation of the tradition and its development. After first grasping memory as a social and cultural force,29 we will turn to cognitive aspects of memory, showing how tradition is the integrated artefact of these social, cultural, and cognitive processes. Memory theory gives solid methodological grounding to Jesus research by supplying it with a defensible account of the origins and history of the Jesus tradition.

Memory, Cultural Identity, and Community Social memory studies originated with Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945), a disciple of Émile Durkheim.30 Halbwachs argued that memory is constituted by social frameworks, which is to say that the social realities and communicative practices of communities give substance, shape and duration to the memories of the people belonging to them. Correspondingly, a community bears a complex of memories constitutive of its very existence. ‘Genuine communities’, writes Jeffrey Olick, ‘are communities of memory that constantly tell and retell their constitutive memories.’31A community marks certain elements of its past as being of constitutive significance, in particular, memories of its origins, ‘the event that

29. For a fuller survey, see ‘Social and Cultural Memory’, Chapter 2 in this book. 30. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (trans. Francis J. Ditter Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter; New York: Harper and Row, 1980), originally published as La mémoire collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1950); idem, On Collective Memory (ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), originally published as Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1952; 1st edn 1925). 31. Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘Collective Memory: The Two Cultures’, ST 17 (1999), pp. 333–48 (344); also James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 25.

Memory Theory and Jesus Research

185

marks the group’s emergence as an independent social entity’.32 Both identity and continuity, in fact the very survival of a community, depend upon its constant activation and rehearsal of these memories.33 Commemorative practice therefore is a core activity of viable communities. It counteracts the danger of rupture between a community and its past, the loss of memory that spells the unravelling of a community’s identity and hence its dissolution.34 Commemoration picks up ‘bedrock events experienced with powerful immediacy’ but whose meaning and significance must be discerned, precisely through commemorative activities.35 It is in its commemorative activities that a community shapes its representations of its formative past.36 That memory is active and constructive should now be clear. Memory ‘acts to organize what might otherwise be a mere assemblage of contingently connected events’.37 Its configurations, however, do not assume immobile forms. The activity of memory in articulating the past is unceasing because it takes place within the social frameworks of the ever-shifting present. Halbwachs argued that to remember is not to retrouver, but to reconstruire, to align the image of the past with present social realities.38 Barry Schwartz points out that collective memory thus becomes ‘a social fact as it is made and remade to serve changing societal interests and needs’.39 It is by constantly bringing its commemorated past into alignment with its open-ended series of ‘presents’ that a community maintains continuity of identity across time, a sense of always being vitally connected to its past.40 In a manner reminiscent of the form critics, some theorists go so far as to suggest that constructions of the past may in all important respects be

32. Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 4–7. 33. Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992), pp. 132–3. 34. Casey, Remembering, pp. 224–5; also Yosef Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. 94; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 70. 35. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of Memory in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 67; also Kirk Savage, ‘The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Movement’, in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (ed. John R. Gillis; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 127–49 (127). 36. Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 306. 37. Casey, Remembering, p. 291. 38. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 40. 39. Barry Schwartz, ‘Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II’, ASR 61 (1996), pp. 908–27 (909). 40. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 40–2, 88.

186

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

understood as projections of the ideological factors of the present.41 These radical constructionist approaches tend to argue in a circle, however, by a priori excluding inquiry into the diachronic question, namely, how the depth of the past might inform, shape and constrain the dispositions and actions of those situated in the present.42 Appadurai argues that the past is not just ‘a limitless and plastic symbolic resource, infinitely susceptible to the whims of contemporary interest and the distortions of contemporary ideology’.43 While communities view and shape their past from the perspective of their present contexts, they do so on the basis of an identity emergent from the diachronic depth of memory.44 It is this identity that orients to the experiences of the present and that encompasses the predispositions for a community’s continual reassessment of its own past. The past, constellated by the work of commemoration and immanent in the narrative patterns in which it has become engrained in the social memory, provides for a community the framework for cognition and interpretation of the experiences of the present.45 Social memory makes available the moral and symbolic resources for making sense of the present through its ‘keying’ of present experiences and predicaments to archetypal images and narrative representations of the commemorated past.46 This entails that both present social realities and the salient past are potent variables in these semiotic constructions constantly occurring in social memory.47 A community’s commemorated past exercises powerful normative force. Its images of archetypal persons and events embody a group’s moral order and thus are mnemonic of the group-defining ethos.48 Hence a synergistic relationship exists between commemorative and instructional activities. Deaths of significant persons call forth commemorative activities focused in a particularly intense way upon the virtues these individuals embodied in life and in their death. A martyr’s death is instrumental in establishing the urgent normative claims of the virtues

41. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 15. 42. Schwartz, ‘Memory as a Cultural System’, p. 910; Jeffrey K. Olick and Daniel Levy, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Constraint: Holocaust Myth and Rationality in German Politics’, ASR 62 (1997), pp. 921–36 (922). 43. Arjun Appadurai, ‘The Past as a Scarce Resource’, Man N.S. 16 (1981), pp. 201–19 (201). 44. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 126. 45. Ibid., p. 51; Connerton, How Societies Remember, p. 2. 46. Barry Schwartz, ‘Frame Image: Towards a Semiotics of Collective Memory’, Semiotica 121 (1998), pp. 1–38, (25–28). 47. See Olick and Levy, ‘Collective Memory’, p. 923. 48. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 59; Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 16–17; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis: zehn Studien (Munich: Beck, 2000), pp. 127–8.

Memory Theory and Jesus Research

187

he or she embodied and died exemplifying, and in mobilizing a social movement cohering around those norms.49 Commemorative activities, therefore, drive the formation and transmission of cultural identity. Social memory fashions a system of symbols, which is to say that in commemorated persons, commemorative narratives and related artefacts and practices, it objectifies a community’s archetypal, axiomatic meanings and norms. This is where we begin to see the essential connection of social and cultural memory forces with the formation of a body of tradition. Through commemorative transposition a community elevates to symbolic, identity-constituting status marked elements of its past. The ‘symbolische Figuren’ of culture are in effect ‘Erinnerungsfiguren’ (memory configurations).50 These commemorative symbols are responsive hermeneutically to complexity and change in a community’s social realities. Robin Wagner-Pacifici points out that memorializing activities are triggered by ‘ordering’ persons and events, that is, ‘fraught with conflict and significance’ on the larger social scale.51 Persons and events of this sort form the ‘adamantine core’ of commemoration, generating and shaping the interpretations that can be produced upon them across time.52 The form critics had a firm grasp of the effects of the present upon early Christian constructions of the past laid down in the tradition but given their cramped conception of memory they misunderstood it, one-sidedly identifying present realities as the operative factor in the tradition. As Appadurai puts it, social memory is in fact the ‘symbolic negotiation between “ritual” pasts and the contingencies of the present’.53 Olick and Levy summarize the point as follows: ‘Collective memory is this negotiation, rather than pure constraint by, or contemporary strategic manipulation of, the past. The relationship between remembered pasts and constructed presents is one of perpetual but differentiated constraint and renegotiation over time, rather than pure strategic invention in the present or fidelity to (or inability to escape from) a monolithic legacy.’54 The pertinence of social and cultural memory analysis for clarifying the gospel tradition should be evident. Along with its negation of replicative and individualistic models for memory, it rules out the sharp distinction the form critics made between memory and tradition. Rather, the tradition may be approached as the artefact of memory, the artefact of the continual negotiation and semantic

49. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 175; Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, pp. 28–9; Connerton, How Societies Remember, p. 43. 50. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 52–9, 139–40; also Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, pp. x–xi, 17–18; idem, ‘Frame Image’, pp. 25–6; Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 59; Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, pp. 188–9. 51. Robin Wagner-Pacifici, ‘Memories in the Making: The Shape of Things that Went’, QualSoc (1996), pp. 301–21 (302–3). 52. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. 309; also Casey, Remembering, p. 286. 53. Appadurai, ‘Past as a Scarce Resource’, p. 218. 54. Olick and Levy, ‘Collective Memory’, p. 934.

188

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

engagement between a community’s present social realities and its memorialized past, with neither factor swallowed up by or made epiphenomenal of the other.55 By the same token, memory approaches make it possible to overcome the polarities of radical constructionism (tradition as the product of a community’s present social realities) on the one hand, and the tradition as direct reportage of the empirical events of the past on the other. Memory analysis also accounts for transformations in the tradition, for as the artefact of memory dynamics tradition is responsive hermeneutically to the social frameworks of its reception. What it rejects is the denial or even downplaying of vital connections between developments in the tradition and a community’s salient past. Rather, it recognizes in these very transformations the engagement of the normative past, laid down in tradition, with the present frameworks of the tradent community. Bultmann, for example, attributed the tense dialogue about forgiveness of sins (Mk 2.5-10) – on his form-critical criteria interpolated into the Healing of the Paralytic (Mk 2.1-12) – to the desire of the ‘Church … to trace back to Jesus its own right to forgive sins’.56 The dialogue element, that is, is secondary, generated by the present interests of the church. But analysis informed by memory approaches, if not actually disputing this tradition-history, would at minimum be sceptical that the community’s assertion of a claim to forgive sins could be accounted for apart from some impulse from the salient past. This is not a matter of drawing naïve correspondences between ‘memory’ and ‘history’. Rather, it provides a research framework for assessing the origins and transformations of the gospel tradition in the framework of the constitutive orientation of the Jesus communities to a commemorated past. Jens Schröter’s Erinnerung an Jesu Worte (1997) constitutes one of the first concrete applications of this methodology. His approach is predicated upon the autonomous semantic vigour of the constitutive past and the effect of present social realities that gives particular refractions to that past, as well as upon recognition that the past is accessible only through those refractions.57 Common traits perduring in Mark, Q, and Thomas as well as the acts of reception themselves become the basis for Schröter to draw inferences about the lineaments of a historical past that exerts its charged influence upon all three reception contexts.58 Aware that every act of traditioning is an act of remembering in which past and present semantically interact, Schröter’s approach, instead of discounting, exploits interpretative reconfigurations of the tradition to draw inferences about the historical Jesus. Schröter restricts himself to a triangulating analysis of complexes of tradition found in the written sources. Mark and Q nevertheless stand near the threshold with orality. In these works the contours of the oral tradition, to be sure, worked

55. 56. 57. 58.

See Schröter, Erinnerung, p. 463. Bultmann, History, pp. 15–16. Schröter, ‘Historical Jesus’, p. 165. Schröter, Erinnerung, pp. 142, 483–5.

Memory Theory and Jesus Research

189

over within new literary contexts and hence with earlier reception contexts effaced, are to an extent still visible.59 Working back diachronically through ‘stages’ of the oral tradition, we have seen, is nonsensical. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to turn away prematurely from the oral gospel tradition, such as we have it. Memory theory has a great deal to say about the formation and transmission of oral tradition, as well as about the crux problem of the transition from oral to written media. At this point, research on the cognitive aspects of memory becomes particularly pertinent.

Cognitive Approaches to Memory and Tradition Gospels scholarship, to the limited extent it even reflects upon memory and the transmission of tradition, tends to conceive it as a matter of serial communication along chains of individuals. This accords with its habit of thinking of memory as discrete acts of individual recollection. Bart Ehrman, for example, in his college introduction to the New Testament, draws an analogy between the transmission of the tradition and the children’s game ‘Telephone’.60 Curiously, little attention is given to how this individuals-seriatim model is to be reconciled with the formcritical account, which conceives communities as the social basis of the tradition. Tradition Transmission: Chains or Networks? Occasionally one finds attempts to support the individuals-seriatim model by reference to studies on the cognitive function of memory, and in particular to experiments carried out in 1932 by Frederic Bartlett.61 Bartlett tested individual

59. John Miles Foley’s category oral-derived texts, designating written artefacts characterized by complex interactions of orality and literacy, is pertinent here. See Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, p. 4; and idem, The Singer of Tales in Performance (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 210–11. 60. Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 2000), pp. 46–7. Robert Funk and Roy Hoover are also typical: ‘The evidence provided by the written gospels is hearsay evidence. Hearsay evidence is secondhand evidence. In the case of the gospels, the evangelists are all reporting stories and sayings related to them by intermediate parties; none of them was an ear or eyewitness of the words and events he records. Indeed, the information may have passed through several parties on its way to the authors of the first written gospels’ (The Five Gospels (New York: Macmillan, 1993), p. 16). For their analysis of the tradition Funk and Hoover work up weighty ‘rules of evidence’ of the sort relevant to cross-examination of individual recollection in a courtroom setting. 61. John Crossan appeals to Bartlett’s experiment (The Birth of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), p. 82).

190

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

recollection by asking Cambridge undergraduates to reproduce a story, after one or two exposures, multiple times at lengthening intervals. He concluded that ‘remembering is rapidly affected by unwitting transformations: accurate recall is the exception and not the rule’.62 He also tested ‘serial reproduction’ along a chain of individuals, with this result: ‘Serial reproduction normally brings about startling and radical alterations in the material dealt with. … Nearly every possible variation seems as if it can take place, even in a relatively short series.’ He concluded, cogently enough, that human memory ‘is normally exceedingly subject to error’.63 The problem is that Bartlett’s results have virtually no pertinence to the gospel tradition. They correspond to the artificial lab environment of seriatim transmission of random information down a chain of randomly selected individuals with no social connections to one another and accordingly, as David Rubin says, tell us more about rumour transmission or ‘party games’ than about the cultivation of memory and tradition within communities.64 Rubin points out that ‘transmission in oral traditions … is much more complex and much more conducive to stable transmission’.65 In contrast to the one or two exposures that initiated the lab experiments in recall, cultivation of oral traditions is characterized by ‘overlearning’, that is, ‘numerous intermittent repetitions by different members of the group’, by ‘recitation’ in performance mode, and by ‘spaced practice’, all of which have been empirically shown to be ‘important factors in improving long-term retention’.66 Cultivation of tradition, moreover, is an enterprise of communities, not isolated individuals. Tradition is enacted within a group knowledgeable of and existentially identified with it; its performance is a shared ritual rehearsal of the cultural memory. The social aspect of memory and tradition entails that transmission does not occur down seriatim chains of individuals at all, as Bartlett’s experiment had it, but along far more complex nets the very complexity of which, Rubin says, ‘leads to greater stability of transmission than would be expected from laboratory research’.67 He explains the distinctions as follows: For a single individual, the chain [model of transmission] would have a single line leading in and a single line leading out. In contrast, for a single individual, the net would have an indefinite number of lines leading in and out. … That

62. Bartlett, Remembering, p. 61. 63. Ibid., p. 175. 64. David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-Out Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 122. Bartlett readily acknowledged that ‘much human remembering is influenced directly and strongly by factors which are social in origin. The influence of these factors may be obscured by the ordinary laboratory methods of the study of memory’ (Remembering, p. 95). 65. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, p. 132. 66. Ibid., pp. 129, 154, 228. 67. Ibid., p. 144.

Memory Theory and Jesus Research

191

is, the difference between chains and nets is that in a chain an individual hears only one version and transmits it to only one other person, whereas in a net individuals can hear and combine many versions before passing on their own version any number of times to any number of people.68

This has a mnemonically reinforcing and stabilizing effect: ‘The main advantage of a net over a chain is that if the version transmitted by one singer omits parts or introduces changes that are outside the tradition, then other versions can be substituted for these lapses. … Multiple versions from many sources serve another purpose. They allow a listener to learn the range of acceptable variation.’69 Transmission along nets, taken with the overall community contextualization of the latter, shows that the precariousness of the memory/tradition nexus exists not at each of the multiple points of a putative individual-to-individual seriatim chain but chiefly in the crisis brought about by a community’s generational succession, a threshold that Assmann identifies as a ‘disruption of transmission’ (Traditionsbruch) which triggers a memory crisis (Krise in der kollektiven Erinnerung).70 We will have more to say about this memory phenomenon, crucial for accounting for the emergence of written gospels, later in the chapter. Oral Tradition as Memory Artefact Far from being helplessly exposed to the inefficiencies of memory of the sort documented in Bartlett’s experiments, oral tradition is better viewed as a set of strategies calibrated precisely to counter these inefficiencies.71 At stake is nothing less than cultural survival. As the deposit of a community’s formative narratives and normative wisdom,72 tradition must be proof against the limitations of human memory. In Rubin’s words, ‘Oral traditions must, therefore, have developed forms of organization (i.e., rules, redundancies, constraints) and strategies to decrease the changes that human memory imposes on the more casual transmission of verbal material.’73 In addition to the learning and retention strategies that have already been mentioned, the formation of oral tradition stems from cognitive operations that render memory in fact an extraordinarily efficient faculty. Researchers have pointed to memory’s radical economizing activity. Bonanno comments: ‘The myriad of possible experiential stimuli necessitates that the memory system be prudent. For the purposes of economy, experiences are catalogued schematically into categories, scripts and prototypical units of

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

Ibid., p. 134. Ibid. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 218. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, p. 144. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 141–2. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, p. 10.

192

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

knowledge.’74 Exact recall would entail unmanageable surfeits of detail, inducing, as Casey puts it, ‘that state of clutter and confusion which Luria’s subject … reported as a living nightmare’.75 Memory is in the literal sense a cognitive arteficer that renders the raw material of experience and perception into manageable, efficient memory artefacts. Bartlett observed this cognitive drive towards rapid condensation of remembered stories into concise, economical units through the elimination of details.76 Rubin compares the newspaper report of an actual train wreck with its commemorative version in the ballad The Wreck of the Old 97 and its variants: ‘The article was divided into 100 facts. … On the average, only 6 of these 100 facts appeared in each ballad, producing ballads in which only the essentials were preserved.’77 He points out that memory operates ‘to abstract and remember the structure from many similar events’, that is, it compounds multiple related remembrances into single, frequently composite memories that take on emblematic, representational functions.78 This economizing activity of memory likewise accounts for the fading out of precise times, durations, and locales of discrete experiences into more indeterminate spatio-temporal frameworks, for example, ‘last year’, or, ‘a few days ago’. Locales act as clustering points and hence important mnemonic cues for emblematic memories associated with them. This accounts for what Casey describes as the ‘pastiche’ character of memory’s representations of the past: ‘Between and around the stably situationed and relatively well-defined locales of memories are undefined and unlocalized patches of space. … Thanks to their very gappiness, memories can be considered pastiches of the past – never its full spatial re-presentation.’79 Another cognitive operation performed by memory is conventionalization or schematization. This refers to the rapid reduction of diffusely complex experiences to stereotyped forms and scripts that serve as mnemonic mechanisms for their reproduction as memory.80 This works in tandem with condensing operations, for as memory reduces empirical remembrances to schematic types, details ‘not … adding to the representational significance of the whole’ are dropped.81 Rubin’s case study cited above is illuminating in this regard: ‘Almost 60% of the lines produced could have occurred in a ballad about another train wreck. … Thus much of the

74. Bonanno, ‘Remembering and Psychotherapy’, p. 177. 75. Casey, Remembering, p. 285, referring to A. R. Luria’s study of an individual with savant capability of exact recall, in whom external sensory cues triggered overwhelming cascades of detailed remembrances, inducing a kind of cognitive paralysis; see The Mind of a Mnemonist (trans. Lynn Solotaroff; New York: Basic Books, 1968). 76. Bartlett, Remembering, pp. 126–7. 77. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, p. 284. 78. Ibid., p. 7; also Larry R. Squire and Eric R. Kandel, Memory: From Mind to Molecules (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999), p. 46. 79. Casey, Remembering, pp. 72–5l; emphasis original. 80. Bartlett, Remembering, pp. 53–4, 63, 83. 81. Ibid., pp. 106–7.

Memory Theory and Jesus Research

193

text of the generated ballads followed a general pattern, including just enough facts that fit the existing ballad pattern to keep the song unique.’82 We see that assimilation to a type entails significant distancing from the actual empirical realities. It must be stressed, however, that this distancing is itself a mnemonic and pragmatic strategy. The human mind is inefficient at retaining and reproducing the details of uninterrupted streams of experience. Memory therefore filters incoming streams of perception for elements that are salient. ‘Memory work’, Schwartz explains, ‘like a lens filters extraneous materials the better for us to see the kinds of recollecting relevant to our purposes.’83 Memory’s radical reduction of detail is what makes possible its efficient operation in the first place. Conformity to formulaic types endows memories with simplicity and coherence, enables their categorization, and thereby facilitates their subsequent recollection. With conventionalization of memories, moreover, comes their greater impregnability to change.84 The cognitive operations of memory – economizing; compounding; conventionalization; convergence on salient elements – bring to mind definitive features of oral-traditional genres. Here we find ourselves at the intersection of memory with the origins of tradition as a cultural artefact, the point where the cognitive functions of memory intersect with social and cultural memory dynamics. The variability of the tradition is likewise closely aligned with memory’s cognitive function. Research brings to light that memory, as a biologically adaptive cognitive resource, is essential to an organism’s ability to respond successfully to new environments. In memory the data of experience are shaped into these economical patterns, or ‘schemas’, that, as Bartlett puts it, ‘render a specific adaptive reaction [to present and future situations] possible’.85 The busy condensing, compounding and conventionalizing activities of memory described above therefore are not merely to enhance memory’s retentive capacities but to make possible its crucial function as a rapid-response strategy for comprehending and mastering new situations.86 This occurs through memory’s capacity to perform analogical operations, that is, to cue present experiences directly ‘to that portion of the organized setting of past responses which is most relevant to the needs of the moment’.87 Casey describes

82. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, p. 284. It is important, however, to avoid relapse into notions of ‘historical residue’ or ‘abbreviated history’ as models for the relationship of the tradition artefact to history. Memory transformations are more like alchemy (see below). 83. Barry Schwartz, ‘Jesus in First-Century Memory – A Response’, in Memory, Tradition, Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity (ed. Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher; Semeia Studies 52; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2005), pp. 249–62 (251). 84. Bartlett, Remembering, pp. 83–93. 85. Ibid., p. 208. 86. Ibid., pp. 44–5; Bonanno, ‘Remembering and Psychotherapy’, p. 177. 87. Bartlett, Remembering, p. 206.

194

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

this process as follows, in terms markedly redolent of the manner in which the social memory configures past and present within a community: Rather than a mere repository of experience, remembering becomes thereby a continually growing fund for experience: a source itself, indeed a resource, on which not only future acts of remembering but many other experiential modes can draw as well. … It also supplies a supportive Hintergrund for ongoing experience: a backdrop which at once unifies and specifies what comes to appear in the foreground. Any experiential scene … possesses such a background, which contributes depth to an otherwise shallow setting.88

Memory, being an active cognitive capacity of this sort, never amounts to mere retrieval of stored ‘traces’ of the past. Rather, it manifests itself as a ‘formulation’ expressive of the active relationship that the past – as it has come to be configured in memory – enters into with the circumstances of the present for which it has its particular cognitive salience.89 This is not construction of the past, but reconstruction: items are ‘picked out of [memory] schemes, reshuffled, and used to aid adaptation towards conditions which have perhaps never occurred before. The items picked out are the distant events; the immediate situation sets the problems which they are to help solve’.90 Casey refers to this as the ‘thick autonomy of memory’ – autonomous with respect to the empirical past because it is not bound to direct recall, but rather to remembering ‘the same past differently on successive occasions’.91 Memory nevertheless ‘is enmeshed in its origins even when it seems to be functioning independently of them’; it retains ‘a commitment to truth concerning the past, a truth that reflects the specificity of the past even if it need not offer an exact likeness of it’.92 Analysis of the cognitive dynamics of memory, the focus of experimental psychology or phenomenological studies such as Casey’s, naturally takes human memory as embodied in its neural substrate as its object. But that these same dynamics play out in the social context of groups should not be surprising, for as noted earlier, the locus of communal memory is the memories of individuals whose identities are bound up in their affiliation with a particular community. Social memory, the appropriation of a commemorated past within the frameworks of present social realities, fulfils for a community the cognitive function of memory that Bartlett describes as ‘the utilisation of the past in the solution of

88. Casey, Remembering, p. 284; emphases original. 89. Bartlett, Remembering, p. 225. 90. Ibid., p. 297. 91. Casey, Remembering, p. 286; emphases original. 92. Ibid., pp. 280, 283; on this point, see also Martin A. Conway, ‘Autobiographical Knowledge and Autobiographical Memories’, in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (ed. David C. Rubin; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 67–93 (88).

Memory Theory and Jesus Research

195

difficulties set by the present’.93 The ‘keying’ (Schwartz) or ‘analogic mapping’ (Malkki) operations of social memory reproduce the ‘effort after meaning’ that Bartlett designates as the salient feature of memory cognitively brought to bear upon present situations.94 The import for the phenomenology of tradition likewise is obvious. Above we suggested that the forms of oral tradition reflect the schematizing, compounding and transmuting activities of memory and that, accordingly, oral genres can be viewed as pragmatic mnemonic strategies. Tradition, as a community’s deposit of its formative narratives and normative wisdom, is the artefactual manifestation of its cultural memory. The semantically dense, image-rich, formulaic properties of tradition artefacts enhance their utility for cognitive search-and-cue operations that bring apposite aspects of the commemorated past to bear upon a community’s present predicaments. Oral Tradition Genres as Memory Strategies Oral tradition can be arranged in culture-specific genre typologies. These genres are strategies that maximize the memorability and therefore the stability of the tradition while simultaneously enabling the flexibility that renders tradition responsive to new situations. Rubin characterizes each genre as ‘a different solution to the problem of stability’.95 In cultural environments in which orality predominates, it is a matter of necessity that the normative resources of the community, essential to the reproduction of its cultural identity, be transmitted in the medium of memory. The repertoire of genres that a tradition encompasses may therefore be understood as a collocation of mnemonic strategies that circumvent the natural limitations of human memory while exploiting its remarkable strengths.96 Mastery of oral tradition proceeds along lines quite other than rote, verbatim memorization, the goal of the latter being identical recall across numerous enactments. Memory is notoriously inefficient at such tasks, and static memory formations of this sort typically require the support of the written medium. Rather, oral-traditional genres are ‘systems of multiple constraints’ that on the one hand supply cues to memory and on the other place limits on variation by limiting choice.97 Constraints include the schematic form of the genre itself, theme, imagery, association, and (depending on genre) assonance, rhyme and rhythm. Though their joint operation is a dynamic rather than static process, its outcome is stability in the tradition, or better, a genre-relative equilibrium between stability

93. Bartlett, Remembering, p. 225. 94. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln, p. 232; Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 121; also Bartlett, Remembering, p. 20. 95. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, p. 251; also Bartlett, Remembering, p. 81. 96. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, pp. 10, 309–19. 97. Ibid., pp. 119, 300.

196

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

and variation. Constraints and cues combine to relieve memory of the impossible burden of exact memorization of masses of detail.98 ‘Memorization’ applied to oral tradition, therefore, does not signify verbatim mastery and rote reproduction, but accurate recall through competency in a system of constraints and cues.99 Multiformity is an index feature of oral tradition because genre-embodied configurations of constraints and cues permit more than just a single, exact solution.100 Genres, moreover, vary among themselves in the number of interacting constraints each characteristically exhibits. The result is a spectrum running from low-constraint genres that enable a wider range of variation in performance to high-constraint genres that permit minimal variation, perhaps even something approaching verbatim reproduction from performance to performance, though Rubin stresses that ‘in all genres the overall constraints are enough to prevent drift beyond local variation’.101 The inherent flexibility of genre-based multipleconstraint systems enables a community to engage its foundational traditions with its changing social and historical realities. This points ‘to the importance of learning the general organization, constraints, or rules of a genre as opposed to the rote learning of a collection of instances without the ability to extend them to new situations’.102 We observe again the convergence of cognitive memory strategies with social memory forces operative within a community. Let us look at how multiple-constraint systems work in practice, and then bring this to bear upon genres of the gospel tradition. Genres themselves are culturally inculcated patterns of organization, or scripts, that operate cognitively as memory schemas; in other words, the recurrent pattern definitive of a particular genre functions as an aide to memory. Competence in the conventions of a genre facilitates both learning and reproduction of multiple traditions cast in that genre. To the extent that genre patterns cause recitation of a given tradition to unfold in a conventional, scripted order, its individual elements cue one another sequentially. Moreover, component elements of a genre frequently stand in conventional relationships to one another. In the ancient administrative genre of the petition, for example, the concrete petitions always follow upon an inaugural honorific address. We see this in the Our Father, which conforms to this genre.103 Conventional narrative scripts may organize sets of motifs constitutively operative within a particular genre, as in the case of healing stories.104 Intertwined with a genre’s infrastructure, accordingly, are meaning and imagery, which constrain and cue the specific content of a given tradition. ‘Meaning’ designates specific

98. Ibid., pp. 90, 101. 99. Ibid., p. 293. 100. Ibid., pp. 284–5. 101. Ibid., p. 300. 102. Ibid., p. 143. 103. See A. Kirk, ‘Peasant Wisdom, the “Our Father,” and the Origins of Christianity’, TJT 15 (1999), pp. 31–50. 104. See Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, pp. 36, 304; Casey, Remembering, pp. 74–5.

Memory Theory and Jesus Research

197

themes conventional to a particular genre. This may include a set of motifs or a plot conventionally constellated with a particular theme, and so cued associatively with the invocation of the theme. Requests for subsistence food and debt relief, for example, are highly recurrent in the ancient petition genre. The powerful mnemonic properties of images have long been recognized, and so it is not surprising that oral tradition is characteristically rich in both descriptive and spatial imagery. This (spatial imagery in particular) provides loci that cue motifs and – in a non-rote manner – the verbal component of the tradition.105 That imagery forms the leading edge of the cuing properties of tradition is clear from the fact that it facilitates the searching and combining operations of memory.106 It emerges that tradition artefacts are memory artefacts, systems of ‘constraints that combine to limit choices for recall and increase stability’.107 Rubin points out that most of these bundled constraints have ‘their own neural substrates’, a testament to the capacity of tradition to muster and combine all the cognitive resources of the brain for the exigency of remembering.108

Gospel Tradition and the Form Critics Cognitive operations of memory, such as economy of presentation, compounding, temporally indeterminate framing, and schematizing in a typology of forms correspond to characteristic features of the Synoptic tradition. These were acutely observed and catalogued by the form critics.109 Bultmann noted the ‘gappiness’ or ‘pastiche’ effect (to use Casey’s terms) resulting from these modes of representing the past and that persisted even beyond the efforts of the Evangelists to create narrative contiguity.110 Both Bultmann and Dibelius posited the existence of initial processes from which the tradition, particularly in its definitive form of the pronouncement story, emerged. But having discounted vital connections of tradition with memory, they could not offer a satisfactory account of these processes. Bultmann made a not unimportant reference to ‘the relatively rapid precipitation of a somewhat fixed tradition’ in traditional Jewish genres, while Dibelius located the formation of the ‘Paradigm’ in the pragmatics of preaching.111 Particularly ironic, however, was Bultmann’s inclination to view the tradition’s

105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, pp. 18–19, 48, 94–5, 305. Bartlett, Remembering, p. 219. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, p. 101. Ibid., pp. 94–5. Bultmann, History, pp. 188–90. Ibid., p. 307. Bultmann, History, p. 368; Dibelius, Tradition to Gospel, p. 65.

198

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

distancing from empirical realities, in fact the effect of mnemonic strategies, as evidence that it had come untethered from memory and history.112 Both Bultmann and Dibelius gave particular attention to the queen of the tradition, the pronouncement story (apophthegm; chreia). Bultmann observed the economy of the form, for instance, and that its dramatis personae are portrayed as emblematic types.113 Both Bultmann and Dibelius, in isolating and classifying the genre, recognized its distinctive organizing schema. This sets the constraints and cues for enactment in all the genre’s discrete exemplars: brief narrative contextualization, frequently with conventionalized syntax, culminating in a pointed saying, itself formulated in accordance with cultural conventions for proverbs and maxims for maximum memorability. The pronouncement story’s utilization of additional constraints to cue specific content is exemplified in Mk 3.31-35, the Family of Jesus. The narrative contextualization that inaugurates the unit (vv. 31–32) is dense in descriptive and spatial (inside/outside) imagery. The dominant image is ‘family’, and it is important to note that the imagery cues wording, in a generative, non-rote manner, for the brief lead-in narrative. The image of Jesus’s family (mother and brothers), moreover, cues the theme: ‘Who are my mother and my brothers’ (v. 33)? The image and the theme are simultaneously a mnemonic for the climactic aphorism: ‘Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’ (v. 35). The image of ‘mother and brothers’ recurs in each component of the unit. Likewise, the image and the aphorism reinforce each other mnemonically, which is to say that the narrative portion could for its part be cued from recollection of the memorable aphorism. In short, the unit is a system of cues that together eliminate the burden of exact recall, that is, of carrying the story around verbatim in one’s head as a condition for reproducing it from occasion to occasion. It also renders it capable of variation. Though an acute observer of the features of the genre, Bultmann failed to recognize its mnemonic orientation and integration. Consequently, he put the origins of the narrative elements down to pedagogic and aesthetic impulses – they were ‘pictorial concretions’ of ‘universal truths’ expressed by the dominical sayings, giving ‘vividness’ or ‘lively’ expression to the latter.114 This naturally induced him to infer that the narrative settings were secondary derivations of the sayings. Taken with the fact that many sayings had the capacity to circulate independently, this led him to isolate dominical sayings as the primary datum, the seeds, of the gospel tradition.115 Correspondingly, he construed the fact that the dramatis personae

112. Bultmann, History, pp. 63–4. 113. Ibid., p. 309. 114. Ibid., pp. 32–47. Bultmann supported these opinions, moreover, by reasoning from literary analogies (see p. 61). Dibelius for his part put the origins of the narrative settings of the Paradigms down to the ‘edifying tendencies’ of the sermon, and their narrative economy he attributed to the concern of the preachers that the listeners not be ‘distracted from the sermon’ (Tradition to Gospel, pp. 26, 48). 115. Bultmann, History, pp. 47–9.

Memory Theory and Jesus Research

199

were ideal, symbolic types as evidence that the scenes were imaginary, that is, generated by the respective saying. While acknowledging that in some cases sceneconstruction might have drawn upon traditional materials, he regarded this as incidental.116 This assigning of priority to sayings over narrative, and its corollary, that sayings were the generative seeds of the tradition, were crucial to Bultmann’s evolutionary account of history of the gospel tradition. Nothing is easier than to show that dominical sayings could and did indeed circulate separately, that individual sayings might subsequently have narrative settings attached to them, or conversely become independent of narrative settings. Nor is there anything to be gained denying that the narrative settings reflect pedagogic and aesthetic concerns, or that sayings influenced the shaping of their narrative frames. By the same token there can be no naïve construing of the idealtype narratives as simply abbreviated versions of discrete historical occasions on which sayings were pronounced – the relationship between history and the representational powers of memory is far too complex for that. What memory analysis does, however, is destroy Bultmann’s grand evolutionary schema for the history of the tradition, for it shows that memory strategies, enacted in various genres, are an inherent property of the tradition. As just such a constellation of memory strategies, tradition expresses a community’s constitutive orientation to its salient past, its resolute determination to remember. Likewise, as a system of constraints and cues that enables variation in reproducing that past, rather than a technology of static verbatim repetition, tradition speaks in fresh ways to the present social realities of a community without diminishment of the animating moral authority of the salient past. Enactment of tradition takes place at the point where social and cultural memory forces intersect with the cognitive memory strategies formative of the tradition itself and enabling its reproduction. A community’s constitutive mnemonic efforts, however, are directed towards remembering the tradition. In other words, the pressing historiographical problem of the relationship of memory, tradition and history needs to be posed once again.

Memory, Jesus Tradition and History Our point of entry into this problem is our earlier discussion of memory’s cognitive conversion of experience into memory artefacts. Memory shapes the undifferentiated streams of experience to conventional patterns, scripts, and types. While the purpose is mnemonic, the effect is to conform events to the representational type. Elements consistent with the pertinent memory schema are assimilated to it, while ‘discrepant information is ignored or devalued’.117 Rubin

116. Ibid., pp. 29–30. 117. Bonanno, ‘Remembering and Psychotherapy’, p. 177.

200

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

describes this process as follows: ‘Changes in the recall of a particular piece will make it more like the schema, both in order and content. If a detail cannot be recalled, a common substitute from the schema will often be used. … Aspects of a piece that are more central or important to a schema will be recalled more quickly than aspects that are not.’118 By way of example Rubin examines another balladic commemoration, this time the 1896 murder of Pearl Bryan: ‘The events could fit into either of two existing [narrative] patterns of ballads: the murdered-girl pattern or the criminal-brought-to-justice pattern. … The actual murder has enough details to fill both patterns, but the traditional ballad must follow one or the other; it is either the victim’s story or the murderer’s.’119 The results of these complex cognitive conversions are memory artefacts in which an exact redescription of the past has been exchanged for enormous mnemonic advantage. Casey refers to this as ‘intensified remembering’ and points out its correspondence to commemorative artefacts: One way to intensify something is to give it a thicker consistency so as to help it last or to remain more substantively. Such thickening is surely the point of any memorialization, whether it be ceremonial, sculptural, scriptural, or psychical. Every kind of commemoration can be considered an effort to create a lasting ‘remanence’ for what we wish to honor in memory – where ‘remanence’ signifies a perduring remainder or residuum (as in the literally thick stone of war memorials or grave markers).120

The cognitive activity of memory, in other words, is not just about achieving mnemonic efficiency. Rather, as is the case with all commemoration, it carries out a thoroughgoing signification of the past. Drawing upon all the symbolic resources of the culture, memory infuses past events with meaning; it converts them into symbolic forms arteficed to be bearers of the truths, moral judgements and norms perceived to be immanent in the actual empirical events.121 This accounts for important features of the Jesus tradition. The tradition is inherently neither calibrated nor concerned for a direct redescription of empirical events. Rather, through complex mnemonic, commemorative operations, it amounts to the conversion, or transmutation, of the diffuse actualities of historical events into mnemonically efficient, image-rich verbal artefacts designed to bear the axiomatic meanings and norms – the emerging cultural memory – of the Jesus communities. Put differently, in the Jesus tradition the past is marked and

118. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, p. 22. 119. Ibid., pp. 280–1. Rubin draws upon A. B. Cohen, Poor Pearl, Poor Girl: The Murdered-Girl Stereotype in Ballad and Newspaper (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973). 120. Casey, Remembering, p. 273. 121. Ibid., pp. 51, 283; also Malkki, Purity and Exile, pp. 242–4; Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 52–9, 139–40; Schwartz, ‘Frame Image’, pp. 25–6; Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 59; Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, pp. 188–9.

Memory Theory and Jesus Research

201

represented in such a way as to enable it to exercise culture-symbolic power for the tradent communities. Malkki’s characterization of the formation of tradition in Hutu refugee camps in Tanzania following their flight from the 1972 genocide in Burundi is apposite: ‘It was most centrally concerned with the reconstitution of a moral order of the world. It seized historical events, processes, and relationships, and reinterpreted them within a deeply moral scheme of good and evil.’122 Rehearsal of the tradition constitutes the community in its identity as a moral community. A community’s commemorative activity productive of its tradition always occurs, it must be emphasized, in the crucible of its present realities and crises, and by the same token, ‘it contribute[s] to structuring social action in the present’.123 The normative concerns driving the formation of tradition account for the prominence of dominical sayings and pronouncement stories in the Jesus tradition. The ‘ideal types’ of narrative settings (Pharisees, Scribes, Disciples, Crowds, Tax Collectors, etc.) function not just as mnemonic shorthand, but as categorical moral types. Typification of narrative scenes and their tight coordination with authoritative sayings evince the investment of the early communities in the normative dimension of their commemoration of Jesus. The observable form of the pronouncement story is an artefact of this guiding interest in normative memory, exhibiting, moreover, the convergence of mnemonic strategies with normative goals. The form critics themselves constantly remarked on the tradition’s heavy investment in norm inculcation vis-à-vis historical description.124 Moreover, in Bultmann’s repeated characterization of narrative settings as ‘ideal and symbolic’ there lurks a fundamental insight into the phenomenology of tradition, and in this vein it is hard to improve, for example, upon his observation that ‘Mk 1.1620, 2.14 condense[s] into one symbolic moment what was actually a process’.125 Lacking adequate models for memory and tradition, however, and handicapped by superannuated historiographical assumptions,126 Bultmann failed to recognize the essential memorializing connection of the forms of the tradition with the life of Jesus. He regarded symbolic representation and historical representation as mutually exclusive. The Calling of the Disciples (Mk 1.16-20), for instance, ‘is in no sense an historical record, but a description of an ideal scene’.127 The question Bultmann puts in stark terms to Mk 11.28-30 (Challenge to Jesus’s Authority) is ‘whether it is a historical record or a creation of the early Church, designed to disarm its opponents of their weapons’.128 ‘Ideal’ is for him largely synonymous

122. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 56; emphasis original. 123. Ibid., p. 105. 124. For example, Bultmann, History, p. 63; Dibelius, Tradition to Gospel, p. 65. 125. Bultmann, History, p. 57. 126. See David S. du Toit, ‘Der unähnliche Jesus: Eine kritische Evaluierung der Entstehung des Differenzkriteriums und seiner geschichts- und erkenntnistheoretischen Voraussetzungen’, in Schröter and Brucker, eds, Der historische Jesus, pp. 89–130. 127. Bultmann, History, p. 28, emphasis added. 128. Ibid., p. 20, emphasis added.

202

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

with ‘imaginary’. The vagueness of chronological and geographical data indicates to Bultmann that the tradition has lost its moorings in history.129 ‘Religious and edifying’ is contrasted with ‘historical’.130 History in his view is in principle accessible apart from symbolic mediation, albeit meagrely, through ‘historical record[s]’, ‘reports of historical occasions’, and ‘actual historical reports’ excavated from the tradition.131 Memory approaches suggest that this construal of the tradition should be viewed with scepticism. They also bring important contributions to the historiographical discussion. Tradition being the product of memory dynamics, we have seen, rules out that it transparently redescribes empirical events. Genrebased mnemonic strategies, moreover, are directed to recalling the tradition. Nevertheless, the gospel tradition has an essential relationship to the empirical past, one that is mediated by commemoration. The tradition may be viewed, in other words, as a commemorative representation of historical events. To deny this historical dynamic to the Jesus tradition would be equivalent to claiming that the Vietnam War Memorial on the National Mall in Washington DC, because it is the product of politically charged commemorative debates of the 1980s,132 has no historical relationship to the Vietnam War, or likewise that the Lincoln Memorial, reflective as its design is of the preoccupations of the pre-Civil Rights era,133 has nothing of historical value to tell us about the presidency of Abraham Lincoln and the events of the American Civil War. To the contrary, the changing, even conflicting, interpretations of landmark events evident in these commemorative enterprises amount to the reverberative effects of foundational events into new social contexts and thus are historically informative in their own right. As regards the Jesus traditions this entails a historiography of reception along the lines sketched out, for example, by Schröter, summarized above, one that addresses the relationship between historical events and their symbolic representation.134

Orality, Memory and Written Gospels This chapter has focused quite a bit on the properties of oral tradition, intentionally so. There is a danger that the abandonment of the form critics’ project of working

129. Ibid., pp. 63–4. 130. Ibid., p. 244. 131. Ibid., pp. 29–30, 39–41, 48, 57. 132. Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, ‘The Vietnam Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past’, AJS 97 (1991), pp. 376–420. 133. Savage, ‘Politics of Memory’, pp. 127–49. 134. See Schröter, ‘Von der Historizität der Evangelien’, pp. 184–206; and Michael Moxter, ‘Erzählung und Ereignis: Über den Spielraum historischer Repräsentation’, in Schröter and Brucker, eds, Der historische Jesus, pp. 67–88.

Memory Theory and Jesus Research

203

back through the oral tradition to its so-called earliest layers may have the collateral effect that scholarship comes to view the oral tradition and its history as inaccessible and hence simply not relevant to analysis. Schröter in fact argues that a reception-based historiography must focus on the written sources because earlier reception contexts for the oral tradition are simply irrecoverable.135 This is true if by analysis is meant de-layering on the form-critical model, but the form critics’ notion that the oral tradition is layered or a sequence of diachronic ‘stages’ was greatly mistaken. Others, however, draw attention to the fluid nature of oral tradition (though this is often exaggerated), hence the difficulty of getting an analytical fix on it except as it has survived into the medium of writing.136 To be sure, reconstructing a history of the performances of the oral tradition is out of the question. Memory analysis, however, throws a great deal of light upon a period that post-form-critical scholarship is prone to view as impenetrably obscure. This is not just because the genres of oral tradition are mnemonic strategies calibrated to bring stability and flexibility into equilibrium. These give us no royal road to the historical Jesus. We have seen that built right in to oral genres, precisely as mnemonic strategies, is not just autonomy from the empirically described past, but also capacity for variability in recall and, accordingly, for enactments adaptive to diverse social contexts. To be sure, oral tradition’s mnemonic configuration is a warning against exaggerating its fluidity or underestimating a community’s resolute dedication to remembering its past. What memory analysis does, however, is negate accounts of the oral history of the gospel traditions as a diachronic transmission through multiple stages – a sort of complex regress from the gospels that is simply incapable of reconstruction. According to such accounts, each stage constitutes a caesura, a crisis and cumulatively a progressive breakdown in transmission, much as in the individuals-seriatim model. Against this view, memory analysis indicates that the sphere of oral transmission of the tradition, even given the realities of a community’s multiple performance settings and shifting social contexts, is a synchronic space defined by a community’s generational life cycle. Stated differently, the crisis in the transmission of the tradition is first significantly triggered by the generational succession within an emergent community. This is because foundational memories and their artefact, tradition, are shaped socially and discursively by the community. Moreover, consistent with its social origins and emplacement, tradition circulates along nets, not down chains, within the ambient social space of the entire community and within this generationally defined temporal space. Cast in genres that enable flexibility and multiformity, the tradition is responsive to the community’s shifting social realities without thereby becoming severed from foundational memories collectively forged and over which the community exercises collective proprietorship. This scenario is corroborated by sociological research that demonstrates that a generation is defined by shared memories of

135. Schröter, ‘Historical Jesus’, p. 165; idem, Erinnerung, pp. 48–85. 136. du Toit, ‘Der unähnliche Jesus’, p. 123.

204

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

autobiographically experienced formative events. Formative memories, that is to say, are borne through the life cycle of the generation. Absent successful strategies for cross-generational transmission they tend to fade with their tradent cohort.137 How then does a community respond to the grave crisis generational succession poses for its survival? Jan Assmann’s analysis of the transition from ‘communicative memory’ to ‘cultural memory’ illuminates this problem. Broadly conceived, ‘communicative memory’ encompasses all dimensions of face-to-face communication in predominantly oral societies: ‘Communicative memory belongs to and arises within the sphere of face-to-face interaction among individuals.’138 This draws upon Halbwachs’s insight that the social realities and communicative practices of communities give substance and duration to the memory of the people belonging to those communities. Hence communicative memory includes those communicative and cognitive operations through which oral traditions coalesce in emergent communities. Traditionsbruch is Assmann’s term for the serious breakdown of the communicative frameworks enabling transmission of tradition. This confronts a community with loss of connection to memory and hence with the crisis of its own dissolution. It forces it to turn towards more durable media capable of carrying memory in a vital manner across generations, that is, towards the artefactual forms of cultural memory, and in particular, writing.139 For emergent communities, a Traditionsbruch arises out of a breakdown in communicative memory that is directly connected with its generational lifespan. ‘Communicative memory emerges historically within the group; it comes into  existence temporally and passes away temporally – more precisely, with its tradents.  … This temporal space, defined by the transmission of personally communicated and authenticated memory, corresponds to the biblical span of three to four generations.’140 The outer limit for the operations of communicative

137. Howard Schuman and Jacqueline Scott, ‘Generations and Collective Memories’, ASR 54 (1989), pp. 359–81. 138. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 13. 139. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 165, 218–21, 275; also idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, 53–4, 87–8. Assmann’s model suffers from a certain ambiguity at this point owing to his positioning ‘communicative memory’ and ‘cultural memory’ in too categorical of a distinction to each other. Assmann wants to reserve ‘cultural memory’ to refer to the artefactual forms of memory that arise after the breakdown in ‘communicative memory’. But as we have seen, oral traditions are themselves cultural artefacts forged in the crucible of oral practices Assmann associates with communicative memory. Assmann nonetheless recognizes that ‘an oral tradition manifests the traits of both communicative and cultural, every-day and ritual remembering’ (Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 59). Assmann softens the distinction in a recent essay in which he analyses tradition as a cultural artefact (‘Form as a Mnemonic Device: Cultural Texts and Cultural Memory’, in Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark (ed. Richard A. Horsley et al.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), pp. 67–82). 140. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 50.

Memory Theory and Jesus Research

205

memory, that is to say, is the cohort of those still able to claim direct contact with those who knew the first generation, hence three or at the most four generations.141 Assmann argues that the limitations of communicative memory, however, force themselves upon an emergent community as a crisis of memory at approximately the forty-year threshold, that is, when it is becoming apparent that the cohort of its living carriers – the generation that experienced the charismatic period of origins – is disappearing. It is at this point that the community, if it is not eventually to dissolve along with its memory, must accelerate the transformation of communicative memory into the more durable artefacts of cultural memory, a process Assmann characterizes as ‘the objectification, in the forms of cultural media, of knowledge transmitted in the collective memory’.142 Moreover, ‘if the three-to-four generation span of living, communicative memory can be conceived as a synchronic memory space, the artefactual forms of cultural memory constitute a diachronic axis of tradition transmission, that is, that extends far back into the past’.143 The exigency is the securing of long-term cultural viability in the face of the collapse in the social frameworks, in this case the generational framework, for oral transmission of foundational tradition.144 The most recurrent strategic response is to give normative tradition externalized, visible form in the materiality of the written medium. In other words, the large-scale, programmatic consolidation of oral or otherwise dispersed tradition in written media arises out of the crisis of memory. The written gospels (Mark in particular; Q also may owe its origin to these circumstances) as oral-derived texts are artefacts of this crisis of memory triggered by generational succession in the Jesus movement. This accounts for why all four gospels emerge in the last third of the first century ce. It means that the oral tradition therein incorporated has freshly emerged from the synchronic space of memory, namely, the social frameworks constituted by the foundational generation, in whom those memories were autobiographically vested. These works constitute fresh acts of memory, fresh enactments of the tradition in their own contemporary social and cultural frameworks, forging in the process a new kind of connection with the past, one that reconstructs it from quite different vistas, from across the Traditionsbruch.145

141. Ibid., p. 37. Rosalind Thomas’s study of Athenian family traditions is a striking confirmation of the three-to-four generation lifespan of communicative memory (Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 125–9). 142. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 117; also idem, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 11, 32–8, 50–6, 218–21. See also Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 197–213. 143. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 19, drawing here expressly upon Aleida Assmann’s Zeit und Tradition: Kulturelle Strategien der Dauer (Köln: Böhlau, 1999). 144. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, pp. 29–30. 145. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 274.

206

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Conclusion Memory theory does not offer facile solutions to the historiographical challenges of Jesus research. Its initial effect, in fact, should be methodological complication as it is brought into more specific engagement with existing research approaches where with some notable exceptions the category ‘memory’ is remarkably absent. We have seen, however, that memory analysis puts the proper complexion on the core datum of research, the gospel traditions. They are artefacts of memory; they have circulated along memorializing pathways; and by finding their way into the written medium they have navigated the major crisis of memory.

Chapter 11 COGNITION, COMMEMORATION AND TRADITION: MEMORY AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF JESUS RESEARCH*

The origins of the Synoptic tradition lie not solely in contingent factors particular to early Christianity and its history but rather primarily in commemorative practices through which a community shapes its identity in reference to a foundational past. Commemoration, a cultural practice, raises the vexed question of the tradition’s connection with memory, a cognitive, neurobiological phenomenon. This is the old problem of the connection between the tradition – a cultural artefact that circulates autonomously in external media – and memory. A growing body of research on the close interaction between cognition and cultural media gives new leverage on this problem. Analysis of the emergence of the Synoptic tradition at the cognitive-cultural interface is distinct from the historiographical project of Jesus research. Social psychologist Harald Welzer draws an analogous distinction between the history of the national socialist period, which circulates institutionally in German society, and the intergenerational transmission of family memories of the period.1 The two enterprises nevertheless connect with each other, though in complex ways that require careful clarification. Direct appeals to memory research to argue for the historical reliability of the Jesus tradition – or conversely, to argue for its unreliability – completely miss this point.2 The point at which memory research bears upon historiography is its clarification of the origins and properties of the * Originally published in Early Christianity 6 (2015), pp. 285–310. Used by permission of Mohr-Siebeck, Tübingen. 1. Harald Welzer et al., ‘Opa war kein Nazi’: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch 2002), p. 10. 2. Paul Foster’s criticism of attempts to recruit memory theory to establish a priori the historical reliability of the Jesus tradition is on the mark (‘Memory, Orality, and the Fourth Gospel: Three Dead-Ends in Historical Jesus Research’, JSHJ 10 (2012), pp. 191–227), though I had to rub my eyes in amazement to see myself included among those who claim that early Christian memory practices ensure reliable access to the historical Jesus. Foster appears to confuse the uncontroversial claim that memory theory has implications for historiographical method with a reliability claim.

208

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Jesus tradition. Critical historical analysis cannot go about its business with the tradition unless it understands how the tradition mediates the past. This is where memory theory has its critical contribution to make. Memory-based analysis supports reception-history (Wirkungsgeschichte) historiographical approaches, for it shows how the cognitive and cultural operations of memory are the processes by which past realities are mediated through their reception effects (Wirkung) in the sources. In making their critical historical judgements, scholars who follow this approach locate materials on reception-history vectors rather than sorting them into categories of ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ and treating the latter as historiographically worthless (a procedure that has been unable to produce consistent results across its multitudinous applications). Among practitioners of reception-history historiography, however, one observes a tendency to proceed without a precise account of the tradition itself: how it is that the tradition comes to mediate historical materials that receive narrative representation in the gospels. Naturally there are reasons for this. Jens Schröter’s starting point is the macro sources of the gospels, on the sound theoretical grounds that the gospels’ narrative representations are themselves Wirkungseffekte of the originating historical realities.3 Chris Keith, comparing parallel pericopes of Jesus’s engagement with scribes and scribal activities, is able to track receptionhistory vectors back towards the historical Jesus.4 But his model for how the traditions he is comparing actually come to mediate the past is less than explicit. In Anthony LeDonne’s Historical Jesus: What Do We Know and How Can We Know It? the category of tradition seems to disappear altogether, its place taken by references to ‘memory’. ‘Tradition’ surfaces briefly, to explain the phenomenon of variation, and then disappears again.5 In short, memory-based historiographical approaches have not adequately established their starting point in the tradition.6 This puts them at a disadvantage in the debate with established historical Jesus methodologies grounded in the comprehensive account of the tradition inherited

3. Jens Schröter, From Jesus to the New Testament: Early Christian Theology and the Origin of the New Testament Canon (trans. Wayne Coppins; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013), pp. 96–9. 4. Chris Keith, Jesus against the Scribal Elite: The Origins of the Conflict (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2014). 5. Anthony LeDonne, Historical Jesus: What Can We Know and How Can We Know It? (Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2011). 6. Samuel Byrskog has done groundbreaking work on the relationship between history, memory and narrative, grounded in oral history theory, that is highly pertinent to the memory/tradition problematic; see, for example, Story as History – History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History (WUNT, 123; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2000). The present chapter comes at this issue from a cognition/cultural media angle.

Cognition, Commemoration and Tradition

209

from form criticism, an account predicated upon a programmatic disconnect between memory and the history of the tradition.7 In the first part of the chapter we address the question of the extent to which memory, as a cognitive faculty, is even capable of mediating truth about the past. Is memory inherently distortive, a property which it then inevitably passes on to the tradition? This will require us to engage with memory distortion research, increasingly being referenced by all sides in historical Jesus debates. Its reception shows how hastily Jesus scholars can leap from empirical research on memory direct to estimations of the tradition, and then on to drawing historiographical inferences. Our analysis below is sceptical of memory distortion claims, so it is important to be clear at the outset that the critique does not amount to a covert case for the historical reliability of the tradition. The whole chapter is a protest against simplistic historiographical inferences of that sort. While the analysis shows that memory is not an inherently distortive faculty, the question of the complex relationship between the cognitive operations of memory and the formation of the tradition remains unresolved. The second part of the chapter addresses this problem, clarifying how tradition emerges at the interface of cognitive processes with cultural media. The last section of the chapter draws out historiographical implications for Jesus research.

‘Memory Distortion’ and Truth in Memory Questions have been raised about the extent to which memory is even capable of mediating truth about the past, or, to the extent that it does, whether one is able to distinguish it. Scepticism is fed by a phenomenon called ‘memory distortion’, the subject of numerous empirical studies and popularized in books such as Daniel Schacter’s The Seven Sins of Memory.8 Philosopher Sue Campbell, a sharp critic of

7. This difficulty affects other Jesus historians who do not identify with the form-critical project but whose historical analyses of the gospel materials proceed without a working model of the tradition. Sean Freyne, for example, appeals to ‘the historical intention of the gospel writers’ to plead rather weakly that ‘we should, at least initially, show a greater trust in the various leads they suggest with regard to the course of Jesus’ ministry’ (Jesus, A Jewish Galilean: A New Reading of the Jesus-Story (London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2004), p. 6). He relies on the criterion of ‘contextual plausibility’ in assessing the historical grounds of gospel materials, that is, the tradition’s impressive congruence with the realities of Galilee and Palestinian Judaism (p. 90). An adequate model for the tradition might explain why this is the case. 8. Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001); idem, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1996); idem (ed.), Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

210

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

the sceptical stance on memory, nevertheless acknowledges its force: ‘There is no easy remedy to a skepticism that comes from a deep suspicion about the reliability of a core area of knowledge, and our knowledge of the past is especially vulnerable. The past is beyond the reach of our perceptual checking and it requires no great effort to find inaccurate histories or autobiographies.’9 Clearly, if an essential connection exists between memory, as a cognitive capacity, and the formation of tradition, the distortive effects of memory must contaminate the tradition at its source. This is the conclusion drawn by Dale Allison and Alexander Wedderburn, though neither is led to a hard historical scepticism.10 Zeba Crook adopts a more pronounced sceptical position, asserting that ‘memory theory ought to leave us feeling deeply troubled about what we can actually know about the past’.11 This sentiment seems to find a counterpart in the historian of medieval Europe Johannes Fried’s declaration of ‘the methodological indispensability of radical scepticism rooted in critique of memory’,12 though as it turns out (see below), Fried is in fact not sceptical about the possibility of achieving historical knowledge. Claims about memory distortion are taken for granted by both sides in historical Jesus debates, with sceptics emphasizing its contamination of the tradition, defenders of the tradition its limits. Campbell points out that ‘we learn from the past and need somehow to get it right. We can not give up on the idea that memory should be faithful to the past, though we need to understand the very complex ways in which that value might be expressed.’13 There is reason to doubt that memory’s relationship to the past can be so simply grasped in the ‘memory distortion’ model. Memory is essential to other cognitive processes such as perception and ratiocination. As Rupert puts it, memory ‘is a fundamental cognitive process, subserving virtually all other important cognitive functions’.14 One cannot make distortion epistemically emblematic of memory without calling all of one’s knowledge and beliefs into

9. Sue Campbell, ‘Memory, Truth, and the Search for an Authentic Past’, in Memory Matters: Contexts for Understanding Sexual Abuse Recollections (ed. Janice Haaken and Paula Reavey; New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 175–95 (181). 10. Dale Allison, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker 2010), p. 30 (and elsewhere); Alexander Wedderburn, Jesus and the Historians (WUNT, 269; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2010), p. 217. 11. Zeba A. Crook, ‘Collective Memory Distortion and the Quest for the Historical Jesus’, JSHJ 11 (2013), pp. 53–76 (76). 12. Johannes Fried, Der Schleier der Erinnerung: Grundzüge einer historischen Memorik (Munich: Beck 2004), p. 32. 13. Sue Campbell, ‘The Second Voice’, MemSt 1 (2008), pp. 41–8 (42). 14. Robert D. Rupert, ‘Challenges to the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition’, JPhil 101 (2004), pp. 389–428 (407). Alvin Plantinga observes that ‘science is an extension of our ordinary ways of learning about the world. … For science to be successful there must be a match between our cognitive faculties and the world’ (Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 270).

Cognition, Commemoration and Tradition

211

question. Criticism of memory distortion research has in fact become increasingly widespread. Critique has focused on (a) problems in its methodology, (b) its facile inference from memory constructiveness to memory distortion, and (c) its debatable assumptions about how to measure memory accuracy. Problems in Experimental Methodology Since the focus of experimental psychology is neurocognitive processes, it tends to take the isolated individual as its subject in lab-based experiments. To isolate and control variables, experiments are decontextualized from the natural social environments in which remembering occurs. Social milieu, being difficult to control experimentally, is regarded as a potential source of data contamination.15 The standard for assessing memory capability is usually quantitative – how much information subjects recall under conditions defined by different independent variables. Recollection tasks typically feature trivial, experimenter-introduced materials of no existential significance to the subject, ‘far from representative’, that is, ‘of what ordinary people remember and forget’.16 In this conceptual framework, subjectivity, meaning and affect are by definition distortive factors; hence the use of nominal information for recollection tasks. ‘Collaborative remembering’ experiments designed within this research framework are similarly decontextualized, featuring nominal groups constituted ad hoc of individuals with no social connection to each other and tasked with remembering materials of no significance either to the group or its individual members. Critics question the extent to which this research regime delivers an adequate account of memory’s qualities – memory as it actually operates ‘in the wild’, in the real world of natural social settings.17 A number of researchers therefore have begun to take an ‘ecological’ approach to memory: designing experiments that study memory in natural communities, such as families, which are constituted of strong social and emotional bonds.18 Research has shown, for example, that when collaborative remembering occurs in authentic communities (rather than in ad hoc subject

15. Mary Susan Weldon and Krystal D. Bellinger, ‘Collective Memory: Collaborative and Individual Processes in Remembering’, JExpPsych 23 (1997), pp. 1160–75 (1160); Uric Neisser, ‘Memory: What Are the Important Question’, in Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts (ed. Ulric Neisser; San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1982), pp. 3–20 (12); John Sutton et al., ‘The Psychology of Memory, Extended Cognition, and Socially Distributed Remembering’, Phenom&CogSci 9 (2010), pp. 521–60 (544); Sue Campbell, Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars (Lanham, NY, and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 147, 199. 16. Neisser, ‘Memory’, p. 11; Sutton et al., ‘Psychology of Memory’, p. 522. 17. Neisser, ‘Memory’, p. 12. 18. For example, Richard I. Kemp, ‘Collaborative recall and Collective Memory: What Happens When We Remember Together’, Memory 16 (2008), pp. 213–30 (223–6).

212

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

groups), the phenomenon of ‘social contagion’ (false memories of one member infecting the memories of all members) ‘is greatly reduced or even eliminated’.19 More serious is the criticism that, owing to the publicity given in the 1990s to ‘false memory syndrome’, arising out of dubious ‘recovered memory’ psychotherapeutic practices, contemporary research has selectively focused on memory distortion; moreover, that its experimental regimes are designed to manufacture it, resulting in exaggerated findings of memory inaccuracy.20 One experiment, for example, found rates of false recall equal to rates of accurate recall, the absurdity of which is noted by Koriat, Goldsmith and Pansky: ‘If information retrieved were as likely to be correct as wrong, then memory would be totally useless.’21 Campbell points out that prominent distortion researchers such as Schacter readily acknowledge the prevalence in real life of memory accuracy; owing to their experimental designs, however, they cannot account for it.22 It is in fact notable how much memory distortion research is based on experiments contrived to produce distortion effects. Schacter, the leading popularizer of the ‘sins of memory’, is quite frank about this: ‘Psychologists have devised clever methods of inducing powerful misattribution errors in the laboratory.’23 Methods include deception, lures and misleading questions, false information introduced by the researcher, false accusations, false corroboration by confederates posing as members of the subject group, and the like. A study adduced by Schacter illustrates the point. College students seated at computers are instructed to type a series of letters, but not to touch the ALT key. None of them do so, but the lead experimenter deliberately accuses them of doing so. When they deny it, confederates of the experimenter posing as members of the subject group claim to have witnessed them doing so. Seventy per cent of subjects end up signing ‘a false confession … and 35 per cent produced a detailed false recollection of how they had made the error’.24 But this is less about the ‘sins of memory’ than about students coming to disbelieve their quite accurate memory through deception and manipulation. Campbell points out that experiments of this sort pervert the inherently relational and thus ethical dimension of remembering:

19. Sutton et al., ‘Psychology of Memory’, p. 548. 20. Asher Koriat et al., ‘Toward a Psychology of Memory Accuracy’, AnRevPsych 51 (2000), pp. 431–587 (522). In In Search of Memory, Schacter bundles together, as indicators of ‘memory fragility’, what are in fact unrelated phenomena – routine forgetting of details; false/coerced confessions; brain damage impairments; psychological abnormalities such as dissociative disorders; Holocaust revisionism, and so on. 21. Koriat et al., ‘Memory Accuracy’, p. 522. 22. Campbell, Relational Remembering, pp. 123–4. Koriat et al. observe that when experiment design does not stack the deck to produce distortion effects, ‘the out-bound accuracy of free recall has been found to be remarkably high … typically ranging from .85 to .95’ (‘Memory Accuracy’, p. 522). 23. Schacter, Seven Sins, p. 8. 24. Ibid., p. 122.

Cognition, Commemoration and Tradition

213

trustworthy relationships are an essential element of the epistemic basis for good remembering.25 There is of course nothing scientifically untoward about producing an effect in the lab in order to study it. The problem is that memory’s susceptibility to distortion effects is then blown out of proportion. Facile Inferences from Memory Construction to Memory Distortion The simplistic identification of the constructivist processes of memory with distortion is similarly vulnerable to criticism.26 As we will see in detail later, neural encoding of memories, and then their recollection, are indeed actively constructive processes. Recollection is a matter of approximate pattern-reconstruction along associative neural networks, ‘the temporary reactivation of a particular pattern or vector across the units of a network’.27 No neural activation of a particular memory is precisely identical with any other of its activations, for each is cuedriven, sensitive to immediate social contexts of recollection, and responsive to patterns of activation of other neural networks. Constituent elements of a recollection, moreover, are cognitively assembled from different regions of the brain.28 The inference from memory construction to memory distortion, however, is fallacious, for veridical memories are also constructed.29 It also leaves one unable to give a theoretical account of good remembering: it cannot be the case that we remember well despite the constructiveness of our memories.30 Indeed, since all neurocognitive processes are constructive, identifying constructiveness per se with distortion puts all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, in question. Problematic Assumptions about Defining Memory Accuracy Behind the disputes about ‘truth in memory’ and ‘memory distortion’ there operate different, often unclear notions of what constitutes accuracy and reliability in memory’s representation of the past. Memory distortion research frequently

25. Campbell, Relational Remembering, p. 147 (demolishing the widely cited ‘lost in the mall’ experiment, in which older family members ‘deliberately deceived younger family members that they had been lost as small children’). 26. Sue Campbell, ‘Models of Mind and Memory Activities’, in Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (ed. Peggy DesAutels and Margaret Urban Walker; Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), pp. 119–37 (128). 27. John Sutton, ‘Remembering’, in The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (ed. Phillip Robbins and Murat Aydede; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 217–35 (219). 28. Larry R. Squire and Eric R. Kandel, Memory: From Mind to Molecules (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999), p. 73. 29. Sutton et al., ‘Psychology of Memory’, p. 544; John Sutton, ‘Memory’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (15 June 2014; plato/stanford.edu/entries/memory). 30. Campbell, ‘Models of Mind’, p. 128.

214

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

has forensic settings in view: false confessions, false identifications, coercive interrogations, errant testimony, legal admissibility of ‘recovered memories’ and the like. Because of the stakes (determining harm, guilt, liability and punishment), the forensic standard for recollection is accuracy down to incidental details; by the same token, eyewitness testimony is regarded as the prototype for memory functionality.31 The forensic, quantitative standard is then tacitly generalized into the norm for adequate remembering, with any loss of detail taken to indicate memory’s fragility.32 Such a model, however, spells cognitive failure in pretty much all other contexts, where grasp of salience, and accordingly the sifting out of details, is essential to effective remembering. What Campbell refers to as ‘the epistemic value of memory’ consists in selecting what is worth remembering, what it is critically important to remember.33 Though grasp of salience entails discarding of detail, they are mutually informing: the significance of the past cannot float free of truth about the details of the past, and the details filtered for remembrance are salient details.34 This calls attention in turn to the role that evaluation plays in memory function: subjective factors are essential to estimations of salience. Memory distortion research, however, identifies the interpretative, subjective and affective dimensions of memory, essential to determinations of salience, with distortion. One observes here the influence of the forensic norm, for which subjective, value-laden testimony is inimical to establishing forensically relevant facts. But a deeper set of oppositional values is covertly at work, namely, one that associates objective, judgement-free reason with epistemic reliability, and subjectivity, affect and evaluative stances with distortion.35 Much experimental work on memory

31. See Campbell, ‘Memory, Truth’, pp. 178–9; Sutton, ‘Remembering’, p. 221. 32. Sutton et al., ‘Psychology of Memory’, p. 544. 33. Sue Campbell, ‘Our Faithfulness to the Past: Reconstructing Memory Value’, PhilPsych 19 (2006), pp. 361–80 (362–8). See also Eugene Winograd, ‘The Authenticity and Utility of Memories’, in The Remembering Self (ed. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 243–51 (245–6). 34. Campbell, ‘Faithfulness to the Past’, p. 367. See also Martin A. Conway’s comments on the functional necessity of a baseline of veridicality in autobiographical memory (‘Autobiographical Knowledge and Autobiographical Memories’, in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (ed. David C. Rubin; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 67–93 (88)). Asher Koriat reports from his research that subjects strategically regulate the ‘grain size’ of their recollections in order to ensure accuracy, that is, exchange quantity of information for quality (‘Remembering: Metacognitive Monitoring and Control Processes’, in Science of Memory: Concepts (ed. Henry L. Roediger III et al.; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 243–6). 35. Campbell, ‘Models of Mind’, p. 127. Cheshire Calhoun comments: ‘Among feminist philosophers, there is increasing concern that neither reason nor emotion is a gender neutral concept. … The capacity for epistemic objectivity has historically been located in both reason and men while the defect of epistemic subjectivity has been identified with both emotion and women’ (‘Subjectivity and Emotion’, PhilForum 20 (1989), pp. 195–210 (196)).

Cognition, Commemoration and Tradition

215

is predicated on this binary opposition between accuracy and interpretation, assigning objective, verifiable materials (such as word-lists; videos) for recollective tasks, thereby ‘exclud[ing] the interpretative dimensions of rememberings and the values that might be at stake in such contexts’.36 The effect is to instantiate a caricature of the authentic past that is decontextualized and without subjective, evaluative connections to its rememberers. Campbell argues that to the contrary, the subjectively situated, affective, evaluative operations of memory are epistemic capacities, essential to distilling out the meaning, the moral truth, of the past, a truth that cannot be separated from the past’s objective reality.37 It is only in memory’s differential marking of moral and existential salience that a past becomes more than just an agglomeration of events and emerges as significant – including historiographically significant. Naturally, the meaning-laden associative memory landscapes of the past, where past and present flow into one another in complicated ways, will not coincide with the past critically reconstructed by the historian. But it is the only past of historiographical interest, and evaluations of salience transmitted in memory cannot be bracketed out of critical historical enquiry.38 Campbell points out in the same vein that remembering a significant past is an inherently relational activity: ‘Judgments that I have the significance of the past roughly right are rarely mine alone.’39 Memory distortion research assumes that relational influences on memory are distortive of the idealized individual memory, ‘inured from all influence’.40 Campbell argues for a more balanced model able to give an account of memory ‘as an inherently relational capacity’.41 That remembering is relational entails that it is under obligation to ethical norms, to the virtues of integrity, responsibility and accountability to others, which are, accordingly, epistemic virtues.42 Since memories are forged in wider communicative contexts, these epistemic virtues find their applicability precisely

36. Campbell, ‘Memory, Truth’, p. 183. 37. Campbell, ‘Models of Minds’, pp. 130–1. One cannot get at the history of an oppressed group without taking seriously that ‘those who are oppressed are trying to get at the truth of their experience’ (‘Memory, Truth’, p. 191). She also notes German writer Max Sebald’s 1999 book On the Natural History of Destruction, on the absence, in post-war German memory, of moral and narrative reflection on the deliberate Allied bombing of civilians in German cities, an absence that amounts to a distortion of the truth of history. 38. ‘Historical episodes and their interpretations are essential to the historian’ (Fried, Schleier der Erinnerung, pp. 146–7). 39. Campbell, ‘Faithfulness to the Past’, p. 362; see also Kenneth J. Gergen, ‘Mind, Text, and Society: Self-Memory in Social Context’, in Neisser and Fivush, eds, The Remembering Self, pp. 78–104 (90). 40. Campbell, ‘Second Voice’, p. 45. 41. Campbell, Relational Remembering, p. 199; also Weldon and Bellinger, ‘Collective Memory’, p. 1160. 42. Campbell, ‘Faithfulness to the Past’, p. 374; also Sutton: ‘Remembering’, pp. 221–2.

216

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

in the constructive dimension of memory.43 Because memory is relational, the question of what happened in the past cannot be separated from its moral, existential significance for its rememberers.44 While construals of the past shaped in relational remembering will hardly be taken over as such by the historian, who stands outside those relational networks, those construals will be an indispensable part of the historical data. Summing Up This demonstration that memory distortion claims are grounded in flawed research, flawed inferences and flawed assumptions is not a covert plea for the reliability of the tradition. The point is to de-stigmatize memory as inevitably a source of distortion, and thus to deny memory distortion research unwarranted, a priori significance in historiographical assessment of the Jesus tradition. As we are about to see, the relationship between memory and tradition is nothing if not complicated, and the cognitive features of individual memory cannot simply be mapped onto the tradition. So what precisely is the relationship between memory, a cognitive, neurobiological capacity and tradition, a cultural artefact that circulates externally in various media? How does the tradition in fact mediate the past? To grasp this we must begin at the cognitive formation of memories.

Cognitive Schemas, Cultural Schemas and Memory Formation In memory formation, salient elements are filtered out of the diffuse input of perception and encoded in neural networks.45 These networks are organized in accord with a set of economical patterns, or ‘schemas’. This reduction of complexity to simple schematic forms is a matter of efficiency – shedding the vast amounts of detail that under conditions of total recall would induce cognitive paralysis.46

43. Campbell, ‘Faithfulness to the Past’, p. 377; similarly Sutton et al., ‘Psychology of Memory’, p. 544 44. Campbell, ‘Models of Minds’, p. 133. 45. The next few pages are adapted (with some substantial omissions, but also expansions with additional material) from ‘The Formation of the Synoptic Tradition: Cognitive and Cultural Approaches to an Old Problem’, in Social Memory and Social Identity in the Study of Early Judaism and Early Christianity (ed. Samuel Byrskog et al.; NTOA; Göttingen 2016), pp. 49–67 (Chapter 5 in this book), which gives a fuller account of the cognitive/ cultural dynamics and of the Synoptic tradition itself. Here we take that essay’s theoretical work on cognition, cultural media and tradition and apply it to questions of historiography. 46. Siegfried J. Schmidt and Siegfried Weischenberg, ‘Mediengattungen, Berichterstattungsmuster, Darstellungsformen’, in Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaft (ed. Klaus Merton et al.; Opladen 1994), pp.  212–36 (213);

Cognition, Commemoration and Tradition

217

The schematic patterns that structure memories exist as neural networks (‘engrams’) that are constituted of conventionalized sequences, or ‘nodes’. These ‘are so strongly interlinked that activating any one of them necessarily activates them all’.47 In memory encoding, elements filtered from incoming perceptual information are conformed, as noted, to the underlying representational structure of the schema. When the thus encoded memory is activated, schematic elements perhaps not present in the original experienced realities may be filled in by default through the activation of the conventional nodes of the schema. The supplied elements are therefore conventional, or ‘typical’. Experiences unfold in unpredictable, diffuse ways, rarely schematically, but in memory they will be organized and recalled as such.48 The cognitive schemas that configure memories possess conceptual or sequential (e.g. narrative) logic; thus they give memories intelligible form.49 They filter the flow of experiential input for salience, directing perceptual attention to elements that are significant.50 Consequently they are instrumental to grasping patterns of intelligibility in experienced realities. ‘Sub-schematic’ elements of a situation – details irrelevant to the operative schema or lacking salience – have a low probability of being encoded in memory.51 Schematically similar memories will over time blend into a generic memory. This brings us back to the mass shedding of detail in the conforming of memories to mental schemas: the drive towards cognitive efficiency is at the same time a drive towards maximum intelligibility and salience. Koriat and his colleagues describe this as achieving ‘maximal compactness within a [neural] trace system while suffering only a minimal loss of information’.52 Memory encoding therefore amounts to abstracting from originating occurrences.

Martin A. Conway, ‘Remembering: A Process and a State’, in Roediger et al., eds., Science of Memory, pp. 237–41 (241). 47. Eliot R. Smith and Sarah Queller, ‘Mental Representations’, in Social Cognition (ed. Marilynn B. Brewer and Miles Hewstone; Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 5–27 (21). 48. Jean M. Mandler and Nancy S. Johnson, ‘Remembrance of Things Parsed: Story Structure and Recall’, CognPsych 9 (1977), pp. 111–51 (134, 149); Smith and Queller, ‘Mental Representations’, p. 17. See also F. C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 (repr. 1932)), pp. 52–4, 83, 185, 312–13. 49. Harald Welzer, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis: Eine Theorie der Erinnerung (Munich: Beck, 2002), p. 30. 50. Mandler and Johnson, ‘Remembrance’, p. 112; Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 172. 51. Jean M. Mandler, Stories, Scripts, and Scenes: Aspects of Schema Theory (Hillsdale, NJ: 1984), p. 105. Maurice Bloch states, ‘Not only do our schemas … enable us not to clutter our consciousness with the obvious, they also enable us to focus and deal with what cannot be taken for granted, which is probably precisely what we should be dealing with’ (Anthropology and Cognitive Challenge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 174). 52. Koriat et al., ‘Memory Accuracy’, p. 489.

218

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

The effect is to give memories a representational relationship to the experiential realities that are their grounds.53 Culture penetrates right down into memory formation: many cognitive schemas are drawn from a cultural repertoire of schemas and scripts internalized through socialization.54 ‘In this way’, Fried comments, ‘the cultural environment shapes the neural networks of the individuals who participate in the culture.’55 Here one begins to see hints of the cognitive-cultural interface that will be implicated in the formation of tradition. Cognitive schemas and the forms of a tradition overlap in a number of respects. Both are schematic, mnemonically efficient formats that stabilize content and facilitate retrieval. Both ‘render our memory representations stable and durable’.56 Schema-supplied organization gives to both a good measure of typical elements. Both converge on elements that are high-salience. Moreover, since cognitive schemas are culturally transmitted and acquired, they are already a form of tradition.57 As we noted earlier in the chapter, the activation of a memory in recollection is matter of approximate pattern re-creation across associatively open neuronal networks. None of the neural activations of a specific memory is precisely identical to any other activation of that memory, because each is sensitive to immediate contextual cues and to other patterns of activation.58 Strauss and Quinn describe this as the ‘distinction between relatively stable cognitive networks and the everchanging reactions that are the response of these networks to particular events’.59 Through this connecting of present experience to the schematic patterns laid down in memory, memory renders present experience intelligible.60 The strength of these neural connections is a variable that depends in the first instance upon conditions at initial encoding and second upon the history of subsequent activations. The leading variable in strong as opposed to weak encoding is the motivational state of the subject.61 Not surprisingly, subjects are more highly motivated to encode information that is salient – that matters – to them, and

53. Squire and Kandel, Memory, p. 206. 54. Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 146; also Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 169. 55. Fried, Schleier der Erinnerung, p. 145. 56. Schmidt and Weischenberg ‘Mediengattungen’, p. 213. 57. Dorthe Berntsen and David C. Rubin, ‘Cultural Life Scripts Structure Recall from Autobiographical Memory’, MemCogn 32 (2004), pp. 427–42 (430). 58. Smith and Queller, ‘Mental Representations’, pp. 10–13; Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 20; Fergus I. M. Craik, ‘On the Making of Episodes’, in Varieties of Memory and Consciousness: Essays in Honour of Endel Tulving (ed. Henry L. Roediger III and Fergus I. M. Craik; Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1989), pp. 43–57 (43); Squire and Kandel, Memory, pp. 73–4. 59. Strauss and Quinn, Cognitive Theory, p. 54; similarly, Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 203, and Bloch, Anthropology and Cognitive Challenge, p. 208. 60. Bartlett, Remembering, p. 225. 61. Craik, ‘On the Making of Episodes’, pp. 55–6; Strauss and Quinn, Cognitive Theory, p. 47; Koriat et al., ‘Memory Accuracy’, p. 496.

Cognition, Commemoration and Tradition

219

conversely, to filter out the many details of perceptual input that do not.62 Affect level correlates to salience: ‘emotionally arousing’ events will be more durably encoded, and recollecting them will re-excite the affective response.63 What DiMaggio calls moral salience is a leading factor in differential encoding: elements of experiences that are charged with moral significance excite evaluative attention and emotional response (itself an evaluative reflex), and thus have a higher probability of being selected out of the morass of details and deeply encoded.64 Morally and affectively signified memories will be more frequently recollected and ruminated, further reinforcing the connections of the schematic patterns in which they are encoded.65 This is the cognitive dimension of the subjective, evaluative aspects of memory’s functionality discussed by Campbell. Here we can observe further similarities between memories as cognitive artefacts and tradition forms as cultural artefacts: schematic, scripted structure; filtering of detail; convergence upon existentially and morally salient elements. Similarly to tradition, memories are economical bearers of judgements, evaluations and affects. As with the enactment of tradition, recollection of memories occurs in and for present contexts. We will now see that when memory is externalized into the social realm through communication, it rises to a still more tangible level of culturally mediated, narrative expression.

Memory Genres and Forms When memories are mediated into the social sphere through their articulation in the groups in which individuals participate, of necessity (to be comprehended, shared and assimilated), they are conformed to formulaic and narrative patterns drawn from the cultural repertoire of genres. Genres cross the boundary of the cultural and the cognitive; they are ‘simultaneously cognitive and communicative schemata … trans-individual, intersubjective organizing patterns or cognitive scripts’.66 By virtue of their mediation between the cognitive and social spheres, they enable social interaction.67 Genres act back upon cognition: memory encoding

62. Paul DiMaggio labels this phenomenon ‘deliberative cognition’ (‘Culture and Cognition’, ARS 23 (1997), pp. 263–87 (271)). 63. Schacter, Seven Sins of Memory, p. 179; also Craik, ‘On the Making of Episodes’, pp. 53–4; Strauss and Quinn, Cognitive Theory, p. 93. 64. DiMaggio, ‘Culture and Cognition’, p. 271; also Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 136. 65. Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 21. 66. Siegfreid J. Schmidt, Kognitive Autonomie und soziale Orientierung: konstruktivistische Bemerkungen zum Zusammenhang von Kognition, Kommunikation, Medien und Kultur (Münster: Lit Verlag, 3rd. edn, 2003), p. 170. 67. Ibid., p. 170; also Strauss and Quinn, Cognitive Theory, p. 49, and Astrid Erll and Klaudia Seibel, ‘Gattungen, Formtraditionen und kulturelles Gedächtnis’, in Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies (ed. V. Nünning and A. Nünning; Weimar: Metzler, 2004), pp. 180–208 (189).

220

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

and consolidation occur in and through communication.68 Memory becomes public, Bruner and Feldman explain, ‘by being based on narrative properties such as genre and plot type that are widely shared within a culture’.69 The genres active in the cognitive formation and articulation of memory belong to the repertoire of cultural genres and narrative patterns one also finds in a body of tradition. Ruben Zimmermann points out that ‘genres, as the cultural media for memory, therefore have a tradition-formative function’.70 Welzer et al.’s analysis of the three-generation transmission of family memories of the national socialist era further clarifies this convergence of memory, narrative and tradition. Welzer and his co-researchers observed that the grandparents (1930s/1940s generation) articulated their personal memories by drawing upon narrative elements from the ambient cultural sphere, that is, narrative patterns for representing the Nazi era that after the war circulated extensively in public media, especially in movies and documentaries. More precisely, these interviewees appropriated narrative motifs of the experiences of Jews in the Holocaust to express their own dire experiences – soldiers transported east to Soviet prison camps; women in houses trying to hide from Red Army soldiers. The reason is that these were the dominant narrative schemata publicly available to them post-war to give associative resonance to their memories. Elements of these narratives structured the public form of their memory. Welzer summarizes: Biographical narrations of the witnesses from that period, as expressed both at the time and when recounted later, received their narrative shape from the available narrative models. The latter give narrative articulation to these biographical experiences, within a nuanced range of variation. The effect is that the narrative is experienced by the narrator as well as by those listening as the authentic report of his or her actual experiences.71

These stories continued to be reconstructed across the course of their generational transmission, with the third generation (the grandchildren) retelling them in such a way that their grandparents are distanced from the regime and even take on heroic status as resisters and helpers of the oppressed.

68. Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 98; William Hirst and David Manier, ‘Remembering as Communication: A Family Recounts Its Past’, in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (ed. David C. Rubin; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 271–90 (271). 69. Jerome Bruner and Carol Fleisher Feldman, ‘Group Narrative as a Cultural Context of Autobiography’, in Rubin, ed., Remembering Our Past, pp. 291–317 (293). 70. Ruben Zimmermann, ‘Gleichnisse als Medien der Jesuserinnerung: Die Historizität der Jesusparabeln im Horizont der Gedächtnisforschung’, in Hermeneutik der Gleichnisse Jesu: Methodische Neuansätze zum Verstehen urchristlicher Parabeltexte (ed. Ruben Zimmermann; WUNT, 231; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2008), pp. 87–121 (109). 71. Welzer et al., ‘Opa war kein Nazi’, p. 12.

Cognition, Commemoration and Tradition

221

The constructive process by which culturally ambient narrative elements and topoi are appropriated to articulate memories entails a correspondence between memories and the cultural media that give them intelligible symbolic structure. This process is mutually constructive. Memory absorbs these schemata from the ambient cultural field and puts them to cognitive use. The effect is to give symbolic reification to historical events and, accordingly, to contribute to the complex representational relationship between the narratives and the empirical diffuseness of the originating historical experiences.72 Welzer’s study clarifies the interface between memory and cultural media in the formation and transmission of a tradition, while also bringing the tradition/history problematic into sharp relief.73 We still have some way to go, however, towards understanding the emergence of a body of normative tradition. The next step will be to look more closely at the shaping of shared memories within communities.

From Commemoration to Tradition Earlier we noted that researchers increasingly take the view that what is called ‘collaborative remembering’ is best studied in authentic communities. Because community identity is grounded in a shared past, remembering is a high-stakes activity: commemoration.74 Groups adopt specific strategies in collaborative

72. See Welzer et al., ‘Opa war kein Nazi’, pp. 104–8. As a social psychologist, Welzer is primarily interested in the social/cultural praxis of intergenerational transmission of memory. He only gestures at the problem of historical referentiality, though noting that the fact that memories are narratively constructed ‘naturally does not entail that Frau Müller’s and Frau Brinkmann’s [two interviewees] descriptions are not grounded in real experiences’ (p. 90). 73. While illuminating, certain aspects the Welzer/Moller/Tschuggnall study caution against generalizing its results without qualification: (1) Its focus is potentially problematic memories, those that could disrupt rather than constitute a family as a moral community, that is, memories of a ‘past marked by criminality, a past into which family memory [nevertheless] needs to be integrated’ (p. 24). Nina Leonhard’s parallel study shows the extent to which grandparent memories of the NS period are typically under-thematized in family memory, and the extent to which the third generation (grandchildren) regards the era a closed period of history from which lessons must be drawn but which has no existential bearing on them (‘Politikbewußtsein und Vergangenheitsbezug in der dritten Generation: Ein Forschungsprojekt zum Wandel der Erinnerung an Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust’, in ‘Uns hat keiner gefragt’: Positionen der dritten Generation zur Bedeutung des Holocaust (ed. Jens Fabian Pyper; Berlin and Wien: Philo Verlag, 2002), pp. 67–101). (2) Families unwilling to talk about generational family memories of the Nazi period were excluded from Welzer et al.’s data set (p. 26). This biased the data set towards families that adopted these particular narrative and reconstructive strategies (not a criticism of the study itself). Leonhard employs a non-selective design and comes up with a more differentiated picture. 74. Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 151.

222

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

remembering to subsume the contributions of individual members in shared representations.75 But these representations display emergent rather than additive qualities; that is, they are not merely the sum of individual recollections. Rather, they converge on the existential and moral significance of experienced events; they nucleate around elements salient to the social and moral identity of the commemorating community.76 In this process individual recollections, with their idiosyncratic, episodic qualities, as a matter of course get filtered out.77 Emergent representations thereby escape the limitations of unreflective, notoriously unstable eyewitness memories with their fragmented, idiosyncratic perspectives. Furthermore, commemorative remembering takes place within the wider associative matrix of cultural symbols, types, master narratives, genres, topoi and media. These shape emergent representations and deeply infuse them with cultural signification and intelligibility.78 Here we are within sight of a normative tradition, mediated in conventional cultural forms, issuing from commemorative remembering.79 Commemorative artefacts highlight morally significant elements of a past event at the expense of specific details; thus they take on timeless, exemplary qualities. For the commemorating community they become what Liisa Malkki calls ‘moral ordering stories’.80 They take on the function of cultural

75. Sutton et al., ‘Psychology of Memory’, pp. 547–8; see Lyn M. van Swol, ‘Performance and Process in Collective and Individual Memory: The Role of Social Decision Schemes and Memory Bias in Collective Memory’, Memory 16 (2008), pp. 274–87 (275). 76. Sutton et al., ‘Psychology of Memory’, pp. 547–8. 77. Kemp, ‘Collaborative Recall’, pp. 225–6; DiMaggio, ‘Culture and Cognition’, p. 271. Rosalind Thomas, in her study of the formation of family traditions in ancient Athens, notes how ‘casual reminiscences’ related to salient events fell away as features of the memories resonant with the moral traditions of the polis moved to the fore (Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 118). 78. Elaine Reese and Robyn Fivush, ‘The Development of Collective Remembering’, Memory 16 (2008), pp. 201–12, (202); also Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 60; and Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (trans. Sara B. Young; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 106. 79. In the anthropological literature one can find real-time descriptions of this process, for example, Maurice Bloch’s description of the formation of narrative traditions out of memory in a Madagascar village (How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), pp. 105–8), and Liisa Malkki’s description of commemorative remembering issuing in tradition formation in refugee camps in Tanzania (Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], p. 106). See also Barry Schwartz, ‘Collective Forgetting and the Symbolic Power of Oneness: The Strange Apotheosis of Rosa Parks’, SocPsychQ 72 (2009), pp. 123–42. 80. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 244.

Cognition, Commemoration and Tradition

223

symbols, that is, dense concentrations of social and moral signification, freed of all but the barest spatio-temporal contextualization, and stabilized in culturally resonant media forms. Summing Up We began with cognitive, neurobiological processes. We find ourselves, without crossing any great gulf, in the external realm of cultural artefacts. We are now in a position to enquire more fully into the converse effects of externalized cultural artefacts back upon cognitive processes. This will complete our account of the formation and activation of tradition.

Cognitive-Cultural Coupling: Tradition as Cybernetic Memory ‘Cognitive-cultural coupling’ is shorthand for the ways in which neurobiological cognition co-opts cultural artefacts to greatly extend its capacities. ‘Brainartefact interface’ is Lambros Malafouris’s term for the phenomenon.81 ‘The very simplest cases [of cognitive-cultural coupling]’, writes Andy Clark, ‘are those that involve the use of external symbolic media to offload memory onto the world.’82 Consolidating memory representationally in external cultural media drastically reduces the cognitive load on the brain. At the same time, in a recursive movement it makes this artefact-mediated memory accessible to cognitive operations, such that these symbolic artefacts are cycled right into the internal cognitive apparatus. This can be seen most clearly in the case of language. Language, Clark explains, ‘seems to straddle the internal-external borderline itself, looking one moment like any other piece of biological equipment, and at the next like a particularly potent piece of external cognitive scaffolding’.83 Tradition, like language a symbolically laden cultural artefact, emerges out of cognitive processes, circulates in oral, written, ritual and material media, and acts back upon the neural plasticity of the brain.84 This brings about, in Malafouris’s words, an ‘extensive structural rewiring either by fine-tuning of

81. Lambros Malafouris, ‘The Brain-Artefact Interface (BAI): a Challenge for Archaeology and Cultural Neuro-science’, SCAN 5 (2010), pp. 264–73. 82. Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 201. 83. Andy Clark, ‘Material Symbols’, PhilPsych 19 (2006), pp. 291–307 (293). 84. To be more precise, language is a sign system (relationship between word and referent is a convention), tradition a symbol system (relationship with referent is representational), though these are not categorical differences.

224

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

existing brain pathways or by generating new connections within brain regions’.85 The cognitive effect, Clark explains, is to ‘drive, sculpt, and discipline the internal representational regime’.86 Memory engrams, we have seen, are relatively unstable: a matter of reconstructive pattern activations across plastic and associative neural networks. Encounters with external memory representations, mediated in schematic cultural formats, shape and stabilize the corresponding neurobiological memory networks.87 The effect is enduring modifications to one’s cognitive apparatus.88 Just as importantly, these materials are now immanent to cognitive operations in the stabilized representational format afforded by their cultural mediation.89 Tradition is a clear case of cognitive-cultural coupling. It emerges as a normative set of meaning-laden forms out of cognitive memory processes and circulates in various cultural genres apt for cycling back into cognition. By way of example, in an effect observed in empirical studies, the tradition of a community is neurally assimilated such that it displaces, or better, inhibits individual memory.90 Tradition becomes the cognitive basis for individual recollection. Commemorative remembering in a community is a powerful form of reinforcement and cultural incorporation. It has ‘enduring and transformative effects on the participants’ individual memories, which converge on shared representations of the past’.91 Through commemorative rehearsal, externalized tradition artefacts take on a stable cognitive existence, displacing, overwriting, or fine-tuning an individual’s unstable and less integrated personal memory traces. The commemorative production and dissemination of tradition artefacts is in fact a cultural strategy to stabilize

85. Malafouris, ‘Brain-Artefact Interface’, p. 266; similarly John Sutton, ‘Material Agency, Skills, and History: Distributed Cognition and the Archeology of Memory’, in Material Agency: Toward a Non-anthropocentric Approach (ed. C. Knappett and L. Malafouris; New York: Springer, 2007), pp. 37–55 (37–8); Andy Clark, ‘Word, Niche, and Super-Niche: How Language Makes Minds Matter More’, Theoria 54 (2005), pp. 655–68 (264). 86. Clark, ‘Word, Niche, and Super-Niche’, p. 264. 87. John Sutton, ‘Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process’, in The Extended Mind (ed. Richard Menary; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), pp. 189–225 (205). 88. Sutton, ‘Remembering’, p. 229; also Clark, Being There, p. 61, 198–9, and Edwin Hutchins, ‘Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends’, JPrag 37 (2005), pp. 1555–77 (1575). 89. Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew, ‘The Cognitive Life of Things: Archaeology, Material Engagement, and the Extended Mind’, in The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind (ed. Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew; Cambridge: McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, 2010), pp. 1–12 (6–7). 90. Summarized by Celia B. Harris et al., ‘Collaborative Recall and Collective Memory: What Happens When We Remember Together?’ Memory 16 (2008), pp. 213–30. 91. Sutton et al., ‘Psychology of Memory’, p. 546; also Welzer, Gedächtnis, p. 99.

Cognition, Commemoration and Tradition

225

and ensure the transmission of salient memory; it is a powerful countermeasure against the transience of unsupported memory.92

Tradition as an Autonomous Cognitive System The media forms of a tradition, cognitively internalized, stabilize and shape neurobiological memory processes. We have seen that tradition artefacts are meaning-laden symbolic entities. The assimilation of tradition into memory makes possible higher-order cognitive operations utilizing this internalized system of symbols.93 Stability of mental representations is essential to advanced cognition.94 Tradition formation is a process of abstracting salient, normative elements and patterns from originating realities and resolving these into simple representational wholes, in turn cycled back into memory. The effect, as Terrence Deacon puts it, is an ‘increasingly indirect linkage between symbolic mental representation and its grounds of reference’.95 Clark describes this aptly as ‘fix[ing] the ideas at a high level of abstraction from the idiosyncratic details of their proximal origins in sensory input’.96 The indirect, representational relationship of the tradition to its historical grounds drastically reduces the load on memory; by the same token it greatly extends the scope for cognitive operations – now directly with the tradition. As symbolic entities, the elements of a tradition operate at two levels of reference: indirectly and implicitly to their empirical (i.e. historical) referents, but directly with one another as a configurable system of symbols.97 This is the muchremarked autonomy of the tradition. The tradition maintains its representational reference to historical realities, but it operates free from them, at what Deacon calls a ‘superordinate’ level. Tradition amounts to symbolic mediation of the past: it subsumes normative elements of the past, retaining such spatio-temporal contextualization as is necessary to support the normative appropriation. This greatly augments the cultural effects of the formative historical realities. Tradition’s decoupling from its originating contexts is what renders it capable of ongoing normative engagement with the shifting historical and social horizons of its tradent communities. It frees cognition from being tied down to laborious and pointless recapitulation of past events in all their diffuse detail. It is by virtue of its autonomy, its coalescing in mnemonically efficient, durable representational

92. Fried, Schleier der Erinnerung, p. 359. He comments further: ‘By this means the community creates the conditions for, and supports the media and symbol-systems that ensure, the long-term transmission of knowledge’ (p. 313). 93. Clark, ‘Word, Niche, and Super-niche’, pp. 263–4; idem, Being There, p. 209. 94. Edwin Hutchins, ‘Material Anchors’, p. 1557. 95. Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York and London: Norton, 1997), p. 454. 96. Clark, Being There, p. 210. 97. Deacon, Symbolic Species, pp. 301–2.

226

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

forms loosened from originating historical contexts, and made proof against the vagaries of individual memory, that tradition is able to operate, analogously to language itself, as an internally ordered, ‘superordinate’ system of symbols, as a living cognitive system, the elements of which are capable of being brought into new combinations and mobilized to meet new challenges that arise with shifts in a tradent community’s historical and social horizons. Tradition makes it possible for a community to engage in higher-order cognitive reflection on present predicaments. It makes available the moral resources for comprehending and mastering present realities. Thereby it ensures the transmission of a cultural identity.

Memory, Tradition and Historical Jesus Historiography We have approached the historiographical problem of how the gospel tradition mediates the past by stepping back and looking at tradition as a cognitive and cultural phenomenon. This has made it possible for us to clarify the tradition’s property of autonomy. It also solves the puzzle of the absence of traces of individual eyewitness testimony in the tradition: as we saw above, the tradition of a community is neurally assimilated such that it displaces individual memory. Tradition becomes the cognitive basis for individual recollection. It also explains the tradition’s high interactivity with the biblical narrative and moral tradition. Commemorative remembering, the matrix for an emergent tradition, opens associatively into the wider field of cultural signification and tradition. It is clear, moreover, that the Evangelists utilize the tradition as an autonomous, versatile system of cultural symbols. Luke and Matthew, for example, when they transpose the order of Markan episodes or reorganize Q material, are treating the tradition as a configurable system of symbols. More the point, however, we also see why the tradition offers the challenges that it does to critical historical enquiry. Contrary to widespread opinion, this has absolutely nothing to do with the reliability of eyewitness recollection or with so-called memory distortion. The reason is that though constitutively oriented to historical events, and amounting to an urgent strategy for subsuming and transmitting the past, the tradition serves not so much historiographical as cultural ends – and with requisite cognitive efficiency. In other the words, the things of primary interest to the historian, what Fried calls ‘the contingent historical circumstances’, the episodic details of discrete events,98 are precisely the memoryburdening elements that are least important, indeed inimical, to the formation of the tradition and to its strategic function to ground and sustain a cultural identity. As such they are the elements that recede to the minimum necessary to support the normative appropriation and to sustain referentiality to history.99

98. Fried, Schleier der Erinnerung, p. 95. 99. The historical details retained by the call stories of Mk 1.16-20 – the Sea of Galilee location; the fisherman occupation of the four; names and family relationships; the activi-

Cognition, Commemoration and Tradition

227

Not coincidentally, episodic details are also the most unstable elements of memory, the most susceptible to loss or misremembering. Beginning in the cognitive formation of the memories themselves, the tradition in its formation converges on the semantic rather than episodic aspects of historical events, that is, on the conceptual and morally signifying elements essential to the cultural identity of the commemorating group and the propagation of that identity.100 Frustrating though it is for the historian, ‘the semantic elements of the experienced realities  – context-independent cultural knowledge – are more durably and securely transmitted in memory than the details of original episodic contexts of those elements’.101 It is essential to grasp that this is precisely what fits the tradition for its crucial cultural tasks. The tradition stabilizes normative elements of the past in forms resistant to the vagaries of memory and capable of mediation across time and space.102 The forms of the tradition are easily rehearsed as well as calibrated for assimilation to memory. The resulting internalization of the tradition shapes a corresponding cultural and moral identity, which is also a cognitive capacity for interacting with the world.103 These effects are achieved through the tradition’s consolidation of the salient past into its normative essentials, and its dissociation from individual episodic memory. This facilitates, moreover, its appropriation and existential assimilation by recipients, as Welzer et al. observed in their research: ‘The schematic forms of these narrative accounts contain gaps that the recipients are able to fill in with elements from their own representational and conceptual worlds.’104 The tradition distils signifying elements out of the historical events, taking them ‘out of time’ as it were; by so doing it makes it possible for the tradent communities, along their historical trajectories, to maintain their connection with founding events.105

ties of casting and mending – all contribute to the moral and Christological effects of the double chreia (see Schröter, From Jesus to the New Testament, p. 121). Historical referentiality is maintained even in the Gospel of John, which goes furthest in exploiting the symbolic potential of the tradition. In the Gospel of Truth one sees the corollary of the elimination of all historical referentiality: the tradition escapes into the sphere of pure myth. 100. Fried, Schleier der Erinnerung, p. 95. 101. Ibid., p. 146, emphasis original. From his positivistic historian’s perspective, Fried labels memory’s selective and interpretative operations as ‘distortions’ and ‘deformations’. But that these very Verzerrungen and Verformungen mediate historical reality he makes his leading historiographical principle. 102. Aleida and Jan Assmann, ‘Das Gestern im Heute: Medien und soziales Gedächtnis’, in Wirklichkeit der Medien, pp. 114–40 (120); Fried, Schleier der Erinnerung, p. 331. 103. Bloch, Anthropology and Cognitive Challenge, p. 196. 104. Welzer et al., ‘Opa war kein Nazi’, p. 199. 105. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, ‘Religion as Memory: Reference to Tradition and the Constitution of a Heritage of Belief in Modern Societies’, in The Pragmatics of Defining Religion: Contexts, Concepts and Contests (ed. Jan G. Platvoet and Arie L. Molendijk; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999), pp. 71–92 (89–90). Erll notes that ‘circulation media can synchronize

228

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

This brings into view the additional complicating factor for critical historiography, namely, the tradition’s capacity for autonomous development as it is enacted against the shifting social and historical horizons of its tradent communities. The tradition becomes the medium, the lens, for focusing the contemporary predicaments of the tradent communities. The Synoptic and Johannine tradent communities are not directly remembering the past, but the tradition, which mediates the normative past in symbolic forms into the present. The tradition circulates in visual, oral and written media, all of which have tractable properties. It can be redacted, reformulated, recontextualized, re-performed, reconfigured, consolidated, and in the course of unfolding its symbolic potential supply the resources for Christological and moral reflection and for its own elaboration. The autonomy of the tradition entails that past and present come to coexist in the tradition in ways that are not easily parsed (though the normative past is certainly the dominant factor). The tradition thus gives much scope for the exercise of critical historical judgement. Nevertheless, the indissolubility of the connection between the tradition’s symbolic mediation of the past and its autonomous course of development is what opens up productive lines of historical enquiry on the basis of the materials of the tradition. It explains why the Synoptic tradition has in fact proven so responsive to historical analysis.106 Even Fried, so exasperated with memory’s indifference to the episodic detail so prized by the historian and the contingent paths memory’s cultural manifestations can take, nevertheless holds as a matter of highest historiographical principle that in its very modulations and reshapings memory mediates historical reality (Wirklichkeit) and, accordingly, delivers the essential materials for historical analysis. Memory’s permutations of the past are to be understood as ‘complex signals of [historical] reality’,107 as ‘the effects of an actual (tatsächlicher) reality’,108 as manifestations ‘of the force that the past exerts on the present’.109

large memory communities in which face-to-face communication is no longer possible, and disseminate versions of a common past’ (Memory in Culture, p. 126). Here we have one of the seeds of the origins of written gospels. 106. This is analogous to the mediation of the past that one experiences in public memorials. When viewing the Vietnam, Roosevelt, or Lincoln memorials on the National Mall in Washington DC, or the Oradur sur Glane memorial in France, or Bloody Sunday commemorations in Belfast, no one doubts that in their symbolic configurations these commemorative artefacts and practices mediate historical events and personages. They distil out moral, symbolic meanings discerned in the historical events, and historical elements are necessarily configured into the symbolic appropriations. 107. Fried, Schleier der Erinnerung, p. 127. 108. Ibid., p. 172. 109. Ibid., p. 367. In Fried’s view, even ‘historical realities that have been forgotten or suppressed continue to exert their effects, in their own way, upon individuals and collectives’ (p. 360).

Cognition, Commemoration and Tradition

229

This entails a reception-history historiography, that is, a controlled analysis that follows the vector from transmitted representations of the past back to the originating realities and events.110 Here we come back full circle to the receptionhistory (Wirkungsgeschichte) approaches that are increasingly prominent in historical Jesus scholarship. At the beginning we pointed out that these approaches need to establish their starting point more adequately in a model for the formation and history of the tradition. We have worked out the theoretical basis for such a model, one that shows how the effects (Wirkungseffekte) of Jesus might be traced back into the cognitive formation of memory itself and to the formation of the tradition at the interface of the cognitive processes of memory with cultural media. We have been able to clarify how it is that the tradition mediates historical realities, and yet how it enables, and is itself part of, a reception-history, one that includes the appearance of the gospel narratives themselves. Two more points relevant to historiographical enquiry bear mentioning in conclusion.111 First, the analysis above raises questions about the tendency of historical Jesus scholarship to approach the Synoptic Gospels as garden-variety archival materials, regarding them in their relative brevity as incomplete records preserving just traces of events, rather than symbolically concentrated mediations of the aggregate of events. Corroboration for the latter scenario is found in the paucity of additional early Jesus tradition in the extracanonical materials, the basis on which Gerhardsson questioned the view ‘that the evangelists made a scant selection from the full stream of Jesus-tradition’.112 Second, we have seen that the question of the historical referentiality of the tradition is not really a question of its relationship to individual eyewitness recollection, even though it has been the habit to regard this as the crucial

110. Ibid., p. 380. 111. Though analogies to it are to be found in the ancient and medieval worlds, there are difficulties with taking the ‘invention of tradition’ dynamic (per Hobsbawm and Ranger) as a paradigm for tradition origins and history. The phenomenon is closely tied to nationalistic movements of the nineteenth century and the corresponding need for elites to manufacture traditions to ground new nationalist identities (see Aleida and Jan Assmann, ‘Gestern im Heute’, p. 126; also Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘Collective Memory: The Two Cultures’, ST 17 (1999), pp. 333–48 (342)). The model also owes something to Hobsbawm’s Marxist-inspired interest in debunking and unmasking ‘tradition’, and the case studies in the volume have been selected to this end (see Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 28–9). Hobsbawm himself acknowledges that ‘the strength and adaptability of genuine traditions is not to be confused with the “invention of tradition”’ (‘Introduction: Inventing Tradition’ in The Invention of Tradition (ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger; London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1–14 (8)). 112. Birger Gerhardsson, ‘The Path of the Gospel Tradition’, in The Gospel and the Gospels (ed. Peter Stuhlmacher; trans. John Bowden and John Vriend; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), pp. 75–96 (89, n. 43).

230

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

factor. The contingent episodic details of individual recollection are precisely those that get filtered out in commemorative remembering as of least relevance to the cultural task to be fulfilled by the tradition, namely, to distil out and transmit the normative past. The supposed defect of individual memory – its uneven recollection of contingent episodic details – bears least upon the memory connections of the tradition to historical events. We have been able to clarify where the historiographical challenges presented by the tradition lie, but these have little to do with the qualities of eyewitness recollection.

Part IV M EMORY IN S ECOND- C ENTURY G OSPEL W RITING

Chapter 12 THE JOHANNINE JESUS IN THE GOSPEL OF PETER: A SOCIAL MEMORY APPROACH*

Introduction: Commemoration, Memory and Cultural Identity Genuine communities are communities of memory. Memory is constitutive of community formation, cohesion and continuance. A shared past, perpetuated in a community’s collective memory, both forms and sustains the identity of that community.1 Barry Schwartz observes that ‘as individuals acquire knowledge of the past through forebears, common memories endow successive generations with a common heritage, strengthen society’s temporal integration … and promote consensus over time’.2 Moreover, a community’s formative past, in particular archetypal memories of community origins that are configured in its ‘constitutive narrative’, permeates its present and shapes its conceptions of, and response to, contemporary experiences and challenges.3 ‘Far from being simply the first in * Originally published in Jesus in Johannine Tradition (ed. Robert T. Fortna and Tom Thatcher; Louisville, KY: Westminster/Knox, 2001), pp. 313–22. Used by permission. 1. James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 25–6, 201; also Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Tradition’, in The Invention of Tradition (ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger; London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1–14 (12); Pierre Nora, ‘The Era of Commemoration’, in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 3 (ed. Pierre Nora; trans. Arthur Goldhammer; New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 609–37 (626, 636); Barry Schwartz, Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington’, ASR 56 (1991), pp. 221–36 (222); Lucette Valensi, ‘From Sacred History to Historical Memory and Back: The Jewish Past’, Hist&Anth 2 (1986), pp. 283–305 (284). 2. Barry Schwartz, ‘Postmodernity and Historical Reputation: Abraham Lincoln in Late Twentieth-Century American Memory’, SocForces 77 (1998), pp. 63–103 (67). 3. Peter Burke, ‘History as Social Memory’, in Memory: History, Culture and the Mind (ed. Thomas Butler; Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 97–114 (103–4); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 2; Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (trans. and ed. Lewis Coser; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 (French edition, 1952)), p. 223; Michael Schudson, ‘The Present in the Past

234

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

a series of irretrievable events’, Schwartz writes elsewhere, ‘social beginnings can infuse the present and occupy space within it.’4 The struggle for American independence is one obvious example. Fentress and Wickham cite another instance: In Britain, the inhabitants of the coalfields of South Wales and Durham … have a very clear sense of the past as struggle, and it constitutes a memory that goes back at least a century. … The General Strike of 1926 is a common touchstone, and for many miners the strikes of 1972, 1974, and 1984–5 simply replayed the experiences of 1926, with the same dramatis personae in each: the community, the employers, and the police.5

For early Christians the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus assumed this kind of archetypal significance and, accordingly, received narrative configuration in the Passion narrative. Extraordinary, identity-defining events such as those referred to above are singled out, and the memory of them perpetuated, by acts of commemoration.6 Ritual is an important mode of commemoration: prototypical events not only receive narrative form but also are represented to the community in moments of ritual performance and reenactment. A problematic gap exists between crucial events of origins and a community’s ongoing historical existence. Commemorative ritual fills this gap with cultivation of memory; in commemorative ritual, explains Connerton, ‘a community is reminded of its identity as … told in a master narrative’.7 Creation of textual artefacts – inscribing the community’s archetypal stories – is another form of commemorative practice. Similarly to ritual (or in tandem with ritual as liturgy), such literary productions both perpetuate and shape collective memory. Burke observes that ‘these records are not innocent acts of memory, but rather attempts to persuade, to shape the memory of others’.8 Again, the effect of bringing the community’s archetypal past into its present by means of ritual, narrative and textual practices of commemoration is to shape not only the

versus the Past in the Present’, Comm 11 (1989), pp. 105–13 (108–13); Schwartz, “Social Change and Collective Memory’, p. 222. 4. Barry Schwartz, ‘The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory’, SocForces 61 (1982), pp. 374–402 (395). 5. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, pp. 115–16. 6. Schwartz, ‘Social Context’, p. 377. 7. Connerton, How Societies Remember, p. 70; also Lewis Coser, ‘Introduction to Maurice Halbwachs’, in Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, pp. 1–34 (25); Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 100; Barry Schwartz, ‘The Reconstruction of Abraham Lincoln’, in Collective Remembering (ed. David Middleton and Derek Edwards; London: Sage, 1990), pp. 81–108 (90); Valensi, ‘Sacred History’, pp. 285–6. 8. Burke, ‘History as Social Memory’, p. 101; also Connerton, How Societies Remember, p. 102.

The Johannine Jesus in the Gospel of Peter: A Social Memory Approach

235

identity but also the perceptions of the community such that it comprehends and interprets its present realities in light of the patterns supplied from its salient past.9 Conversely, a community appropriates its past in the framework of the exigencies of its present social and historical contexts. It is this dynamic semantic interaction between the commemorated past and present exigencies that constitutes a community’s social memory. In Schwartz’s words, ‘Recollection of the past is an active, constructive process, not a simply matter of retrieving information. To remember is to place a part of the past in the service of conceptions and needs of the present.’10 Valensi puts the point as follows: ‘But sacred history, inherited as a patrimony and endowed with a fixed, universal reference, turns out, in fact, to be subject to permanent negotiation, constantly readjusting itself to the local surroundings and experiences, to a policy of memory. This policy could, however, only be organized along the paradigms of religious tradition.’11 Through analysis of a community’s commemorative activities, therefore, a great deal can be learned about its identity and its assertion of that identity in its contemporary contexts.12 Examples of this phenomenon are numerous. Medieval Muslim historians did not regard the Crusades as paradigmatic events, but in post-1945 Muslim historiography ‘the Crusades have come to be seen as the primary phase of European colonisation … culminating in the foundation of the state of Israel’.13 John Cabot was commemorated by early American colonists as ‘first among the post-Columbus explorers to land on the North American continent. By the time of the Revolution, however, anti-British sentiment transformed Cabot into the “shadowy agent of the British King.” Simultaneously, Columbus – the agent of a Spanish king whose successors no longer threatened the colonies – emerged suddenly as America’s ultimate founding hero.’14 In the Song of Roland ‘the Saracens were substituted for the Basques [the original assailants encountered by Charlemagne] because this fitted [the contemporary situation] better’.15 In France in 1985, the tricentennial commemoration of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes celebrated diversity and human rights: ‘The antiracist group S.O.S. Racisme saw the banished Protestants of 1685 as the historical counterpart of today’s victims of

9. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 51; Valensi, ‘Sacred History’, p. 292. 10. Schwartz, ‘Social Context’, p. 374; also Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, pp. 58–9, 88; Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction’, pp. 5–6; Nora, ‘Era of Commemoration’, pp. 618–19; George H. Mead, ‘The Nature of the Past’, in Essays in Honor of John Dewey (ed. Jay Coss; New York: Holt, 1929), pp. 235–42 (240–1). 11. Valensi, ‘Sacred History’, p. 291, emphasis original. 12. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 89. There are constraints on reconstructions of the paradigmatic past. For corrections to unbalanced ‘presentist’, invention-of-tradition approaches see Arjun Appadurai, ‘The Past as a Scarce Resource’, Man N.S. 16 (1981), pp. 201–19. 13. Connerton, How Societies Remember, pp. 15–16. 14. Schwartz, ‘Social Context’, pp. 389–90. 15. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 73.

236

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

discrimination.’16 Joan of Arc was constructed as an ‘unfortunate idiot’ by Voltaire, by nineteenth-century French republicanism as prefiguring ‘the heroic rising of the Third Estate’, and by French socialists as a proto-proletarian ‘born into the poorest class of society’, while Vichy France commemorated Joan’s resistance to the English.17 Common to all these examples is the construction of the paradigmatic events and heroes of the past under the influence of contemporary social, cultural and historical factors impinging upon the commemorating community.

‘Legs Not Broken’ in Jn 19.31-37 and Gos. Pet. 4.10-14 The crucifixion of Jesus was a formative event for early Christian communities; accordingly, it was commemorated in Eucharistic ritual and Passion narrative. The latter came to exist in discrete versions, besides the canonical versions notably that of the Gospel of Peter. In this section we shall explore the differences between the respective versions of the Legs Not Broken episode in Jn 19.31-37 and Gos. Pet. 4.10-14. We will see that the Gospel of Peter version is a social memory artefact of a second-century group that is activating this element of the Passion narrative in its contemporary social and historical frameworks. The salient feature of this setting is religious rivalry with Jewish communities. We shall assess the Johannine version first. The request of the Jews to Pilate in Jn 19.31 that the legs of the crucified be broken is connected to their purity concerns. Deut. 21.22-23, prescribing burial by nightfall for an executed criminal, though not cited is implicit. Attention is drawn to the holiness of the next day (beginning at sunset). The Evangelist intends an ironic twist to the Johannine Jews’ legalistic concern with purity, for though hastening death, the crurifragium was violent and brutal. Moreover, this request to Pilate parallels the earlier request that the cross inscription be modified, a request frustrated by Pilate’s refusal (Jn 19.21-22). The Jews, with their subsequent request that Jesus’s legs be broken, want to hasten his removal and thereby his association with the offensive sign that proclaims him ‘king of the Jews’. Hence in this regard also they are animated by hostile intentions.18 In this as in the earlier request, however, the Johannine Jews are frustrated in their desire to control the execution; in fact, their request recoils upon them. They fail to cause Jesus’s death through the crurifragium, for Jesus has sovereignly given up his life prior to the soldiers’ arrival. Furthermore, the actions of the Roman soldiers transform the episode into an epiphany: Jesus,

16. Nora, ‘Era of Commemoration’, p. 620. 17. Michel Winock, ‘Joan of Arc’, in Nora, ed., Realms of Memory, vol. 3, pp. 433–80. 18. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, vol. 2: Chapters 13-21 (AB; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), pp. 1175–6; Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St. John, vol. 3: Chapters 13–21 (trans. David Smith and G. A. Kon; New York: Crossroad, 1987), p. 287.

The Johannine Jesus in the Gospel of Peter: A Social Memory Approach

237

Table 12.1 Comparison of Legs Not Broken Episode Jn 19.31-37

Gospel of Peter 4.10-14

31

10 And they brought two malefactors and crucified the Lord in the midst between them. But he held his peace, as if he felt no pain. 11And when they had set up the cross, they wrote upon it: This is the King of Israel. 12And they laid down his garments before them and divided them among themselves and cast the lot upon them. 13But one of the malefactors rebuked them, saying, ‘We have landed in suffering for the deeds of wickedness which we have committed, but this man, who has become the saviour of men, what wrong has he done you?’ 14And they were wroth with him and commanded that his legs should not be broken, so that he might die in torments.

Since it was the day of Preparation, the Jews did not want the bodies left on the cross during the Sabbath, especially because that Sabbath was a day of great solemnity. So they asked Pilate to have the legs of the crucified men broken and the bodies removed. 32Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who had been crucified with him. 33But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. 34Instead, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out. 35(He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth.) 36These things occurred so that the scripture might be fulfilled, ‘None of his bones shall be broken.’ 37And again another passage of scripture says, ‘They will look on the one whom they have pierced’.

legs unbroken, is revealed as the Passover Lamb (Exod. 12.46; Num. 9.12) and the Innocent One (Ps. 34.20), while the Jews are forced to ‘look on the one they have pierced’.19 The breaking of the legs (forestalled) and the resultant piercing of the side become Christological revelations; the Johannine Jews, far from being the agents of Jesus’s death as they intend, are portrayed as benighted, impotent dupes of God’s sovereign plan being revealed in Jesus’s death. The Evangelist’s perspective on these Jews is not unremittingly harsh, however. The quotation, ‘they will look on the one they have pierced,’ occurs in the context of the salvific blood and water flowing from Jesus’s side and hence seems to encompass a future recognition that entails either salvation or judgement.20 The Gospel of Peter episode parallels the Fourth Gospel insofar as Jesus’s legs remain unbroken, but it diverges from the Johannine episode in a number of striking ways. In the Gospel of Peter version the Jews, who are cast as Jesus’s executioners, order that Jesus’s legs not be broken, ‘so that he might die in torments’.21 In John the Jews’ influence is exerted, in vain, through indirect agency:

19. Schnackenburg, Gospel According to John, pp. 287, 292; also C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John (Philadelphia: Westminster, 2nd edn, 1978), p. 590; Brown, Gospel According to John, pp. 952–3. 20. Schnackenburg, Gospel According to John, pp. 293–4. 21. The ambiguous referent of ‘his legs’ (4.14) is Jesus; see Alan Kirk, ‘Examining Priorities: Another Look at the Gospel of Peter’s Relationship to the New Testament Gospels’, NTS 40 (1994), pp. 572–95 (578–83), for fuller discussion of the debate over whether it is Jesus’s or the Thief ’s legs that are left unbroken.

238

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Pilate must authorize their request, it is Roman soldiers who carry out the order, and the request itself is not fulfilled, as Jesus sovereignly chooses the moment of his death. In John’s depiction, therefore, the Jews are clearly not in control of events. The Gospel of Peter, by contrast, portrays the Jews as the agents that directly cause Jesus’s suffering and death, and Jesus as the passive recipient of the torments that they inflict. They are involved in all the scenes of the passion, from Herod’s condemnation of Jesus at trial through to ‘the Jews’ drawing the nails out of Jesus’s corpse. The non-breaking of Jesus’s legs episode is told in such a way as to cohere with this narrative Leitmotif of direct Jewish responsibility for the killing of Jesus. While the Johannine Jews are indirect agents in the death-by-crurifragium attempt, and failed ones at that, the Petrine Jews order that Jesus’s legs not be broken, ‘so that he might die in torments’. Their malevolence and cruelty, implicit in John, here is explicit. The Johannine Jews’ failure to become Jesus’s executioners by virtue of Jesus’s sovereign expiration is here the Petrine Jews’ successful infliction of the torture of an extended, agonizing crucifixion intended to culminate in Jesus’s death. The Johannine Jews act from benighted incomprehension; the Petrine Jews act out of stubborn obduracy and malice, in response to the Thief ’s open proclamation that Jesus is the ‘saviour of men’. The purity concerns of the leading Jews are the initiating factor in the Johannine pericope, serving as plausible motive for their attempt to cause Jesus’s swift death. Moreover, the narrative concern of the Johannine passage is not so much burial of a corpse before sundown as it is to connect Jesus’s death to the ritual slaying of the Passover Lamb. Hence the Johannine Jews’ purity concerns, once having fulfilled the function of getting the episode under way, drop out of sight (though to be sure, setting up the ironic reversal that Jesus’s corpse, in the Jews’ view a virulent pollutant menacing the purity of the imminent holy day, is in fact the holy Passover Lamb). What is the case in the Gospel of Peter? The purity motif at first sight appears to be absent from the episode, where we find the Legs Not Broken motif triggered instead by the Thief ’s Rebuke to Jesus’s Jewish executioners (4.13). The Gospel of Peter’s tight configuration of these two episodes serves, as noted, to highlight Jewish obduracy, and it is directly linked with attribution of direct responsibility for killing Jesus to the Jews. The purity motif is not absent, however, but is distributed throughout the entire Gospel of Peter narrative where it likewise serves to pin responsibility for Jesus’s death on the Jews. The Deut. 21.22-23 regulation prescribing burial of a malefactor before sundown, implicit in Jn 19.31, is cited twice (2.3; 5.15) and accordingly is uppermost in the Jewish executioners’ minds throughout the Gospel of Peter narrative. Their obdurate, infuriated response to the Thief ’s Rebuke leads them to rule out swift death by crurifragium, ‘so that he might die in torments’. But mistaking the onset of preternatural darkness for sundown, they seek some other means of swiftly dispatching Jesus and getting him off the cross and buried (5.15). To this end they poison him: ‘And one of them said, “Give him to drink gall with vinegar.” And they mixed it and gave him to drink. And they fulfilled all things and completed the measure of their sins on their heads’

The Johannine Jesus in the Gospel of Peter: A Social Memory Approach

239

(5.16-17).22 Jesus’s death follows and the Jews – now able to follow the prescription of Deut. 21.22-23 – disengage Jesus’s body from the cross; accordingly, they are relieved when the sun returns (6.23). In short, the Gospel of Peter uses the purity regulation as the narrative motif that drives the sequence of events that culminates in the Jews’ murder of Jesus. It is co-opted to serve the Gospel of Peter’s generative redactional concern to portray the Jews as the agents directly responsible for Jesus’s death.

Social Memory and Gospel of Peter’s Reception of ‘Legs Not Broken’ The Passion narrative pattern, and its use in ritual and other contexts, was a central, defining element of the commemorative activities of the early Christian communities. Commemoration of a community’s archetypal past is carried out within the frameworks of the community’s present situation. The Gospel of Peter’s rendering of the Passion narrative tradition emerges from a social context of religious rivalry and competition with Jewish groups; it displays certain features that point in particular to the middle of the second century. We saw that the generative dynamic of the Gospel of Peter’s recounting of the Legs Not Broken episode and indeed of the entire passion was attribution of direct responsibility for Jesus’s death to the Jews. We see the Romans all but completely exculpated, indeed, absented from the crucifixion altogether, and the Jews acting as Jesus’s tormentors and murderers. Though a tendency to elaborate Jewish involvement in Jesus’s arrest and trial is a feature of the first-century passion accounts, the motif of direct Jewish involvement in Jesus’s execution, such as we see in Gospel of Peter, is attested for other second-century sources as well, such as Peri Pascha (Melito of Sardis), Epistle of Barnabas, Kerygma Petrou and Acts of Pilate.23 These parallels corroborate the hypothesis of a social setting for the Gospel of Peter’s enactment of the Passion narrative tradition characterized by acrimonious relations with Jewish groups. They clarify its particular reception of early Christianity’s master commemorative narrative: the latter serves the Gospel of Peter as a commemorative symbol through which conflicts in its contemporary context are refracted.

22. See Arthur Dewey, ‘“Time to murder and create”: Visions and Revisions in the Gospel of Peter’, Semeia 49 (1990), pp. 101–27 (110); Kirk, ‘Examining Priorities’, p. 580, Susan E. Schaeffer, ‘The “Gospel of Peter”, the Canonical Gospels, and Oral Tradition’ (PhD diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1991), p. 225. 23. David Satran, ‘Anti-Jewish Polemic in the Peri Pascha of Melito of Sardis: The Problem of Social Context’, in Contra Iudaeos: Ancient and Medieval Polemics between Christians and Jews (ed. Oral Limor and Guy G. Strousma; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1996), pp. 49–58 (53); Stephen G. Wilson, Related Strangers: Jews and Christians 70–170 C.E. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), pp. 93–4, 108–9, 129, 245–9.

240

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Peter Head shows that martyrological motifs prominent in second-century Christian sources (noting in particular Martyrdom of Polycarp) also exert a formative influence on the Gospel of Peter’s narration of Jesus’s trial and sufferings. Among others these include silence and apparent insensitivity to pain: ‘But he held his peace, as if he felt no pain’ (Gospel of Peter 4.9-10). The martyrological motif of ‘dying in torments’ surfaces in 4.14. Head comments: There is evidence to suggest that this ‘Christology of martyrdom’ was widespread among Christians in the second century. In other words, we have a widespread genre in which insensitivity to pain and silent acceptance of real suffering can be juxtaposed, in reports which use Jesus’ death as the basic paradigm. If reports of martyrdoms could be shaped by the paradigm of Jesus’ passion, it is not difficult to assume that the accounts of Jesus’ death could be shaped by the martyr theology.24

Even if actual deaths occurred only sporadically, second-century Christian communities were conscious of the illicit status of their faith and their vulnerability to martyrdom. Social memory analysis would predict that this consciousness surfaces in commemorative activities and artefacts, and this is indeed what we see in the Gospel of Peter’s configuration of the Passion narrative.25 Though the extent of Jewish involvement in Christian martyrdoms likely is exaggerated by Christian sources, there is evidence that Jews occasionally played a role in denunciations. Christians were executed by Bar Kochba; accordingly, tensions between the two communities would have been high in the mid-second century, when the memory of this would have been relatively fresh.26 We see that bitter religious rivalry between the Jewish and Christian communities in the second century as well as consciousness of vulnerability to martyrdom are the generative social and historical frameworks for the Gospel of Peter and its appropriation of the ‘Legs Not Broken’ pericope from the Gospel of John. By the same token, the Gospel of Peter throws light on the trajectory of Johannine (and Synoptic) tradition into the second century.

Social Memory and the ‘Cross Gospel’ This leads us to reflect on J. D. Crossan’s most recent argument for the priority of the pre-Synoptic ‘Cross Gospel’ that he argues is preserved in the Gospel of Peter. Crossan rests his case on an argument he considers so unanswerable

24. P. M. Head, ‘On the Christology of the Gospel of Peter’, VigChr 46 (1992), pp. 209–24 (213). 25. See Schaeffer, ‘Gospel of Peter’, pp. 177–8. 26. Wilson, Related Strangers, pp. 172–3.

The Johannine Jesus in the Gospel of Peter: A Social Memory Approach

241

that it effectively trumps all critiques, namely, that compared with the Synoptic Gospels and John, the Gospel of Peter is the least ‘anti-Jewish’. If true this would undermine a major argument for placing it (i.e. the underlying ‘Cross Gospel’) in the second century; instead it would place it at the beginning of a trajectory of increasing so-called anti-Jewishness traceable in the Synoptic and Johannine Passion narratives. Crossan acknowledges that Gos. Pet. 1.1-6.24 makes the Jewish people directly responsible for Jesus’s death. But in Gos. Pet. 8.28-30, the amorphous Jewish ‘people’ who crucified Jesus suddenly split into two groups: on the one hand the ‘people’ that, affected by the supernatural signs, express second thoughts (‘If at his death these exceeding great signs have come to pass, behold how righteous he was’), and on the other the Jewish authorities who, fearing a mutiny, place a guard on the tomb to secure the corpse, and, when this fails of its purpose, arrange to suppress the truth of a resurrection which they themselves have witnessed (see Gos. Pet. 14.47-48). Crossan’s argument pivots on this ‘split between Jewish authorities and Jewish people’: ‘My reading of the Gospel of Peter, therefore, is that it is more anti-Jewish with regard to the authorities than any of the canonical gospels but also more pro-Jewish with regard to the people than any of them.’27 Moreover, he asks, if the Gospel of Peter is so anti-Jewish, and dependent on the four-gospel tradition, why does it pass over Mt. 27.25: ‘his blood be on us and on our children’?28 With respect to the latter point, the Gospel of Peter’s version of the Passion narrative is nothing if not a prolonged, vivid dramatization of Mt. 27.24-25: unlike Pilate the Jewish people refuse to wash their hands (1.1); they crucify and murder Jesus (1.2-6.21). So the Matthean handwashing motif that Crossan adduces seems rather to work against his proposal. The Gospel of Peter can hardly stand prior to Matthew; rather it belongs somewhere along the Matthean trajectory.29 His argument positing a ‘split’ between the Jewish authorities and the Jewish people, already weakened by the failure of its corollary, also cannot bear the weight he wants to put on it. These are the same ‘people’ (2.5) whom the Gospel of Peter has just vividly depicted tormenting and killing Jesus. None of the first-century passion accounts goes so far. The Jewish people’s subsequent doubts and inclination to reconsider, though a narrative development certainly requiring explanation,

27. J. D. Crossan, The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), pp. 496–8, emphasis original; also idem, ‘The Gospel of Peter and the Canonical Gospels: Independence, Dependence, or Both?’ Forum N.S. 1/1 (1998), pp. 7–51 (27–8, 39). 28. Crossan, ‘Gospel of Peter’, p. 29. 29. Of course, Crossan is not so dense as to fail to see the handwashing elements at the beginning of the Gospel of Peter fragment. Rather, his argument is grounded in binary media assumptions that define dependency as direct literary utilization, mediated accordingly by redactional operations on the base source-text. In other words, he has no working conception of how a written narrative tradition can behave as a tradition and therefore be open to a range of narrative reenactment.

242

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

does not suffice to cancel this fundamental characterization and render the Gospel of Peter’s depiction of the Jewish people more moderate in comparison with the Synoptic and Johannine accounts, as Crossan argues. Furthermore, the situation depicted by the Gospel of Peter, namely that ‘the Jewish people [appear] ready, willing, and able to accept Christianity if only the Jewish authorities had not lied and misled them’30 itself fits best in the second century. Crossan’s assumption that such a complex depiction of the Jews can only belong early in the first century relies upon the older assumption that the events of 70 ce marked the decisive breach and irreparable alienation between the Christian and Jewish communities. More recent research inclines to the view that the trauma of the Bar Kochba revolt (132–135 ce) was in fact the decisive factor that accelerated the differentiation of Christianity and Judaism from each other, and that, correspondingly, during a good part of the second century (to 170  ce) there was considerable complexity in Jewish-Christian relations: a time of still permeable boundaries and continued engagement between the two communities, albeit an ‘engagement’ characterized by antipathy (but perhaps not always and not everywhere), rivalry and competition.31 The communities frequently existed in proximity, with the Christians feeling themselves the oppressed minority vis-àvis established Jewish communities that benefited from its licit (albeit sometimes precarious) status. Moreover, as two ‘Judaic’ groups existing in proximity, Christians and Jews competed for recruits. Christians attempted to convert both Jews and Gentiles, but the traffic also went the other way, with Christians defecting to the synagogue.32 Positing this second-century context, characterized by acrimony yet competitive engagement, may help reconcile the Gospel of Peter’s attribution of direct responsibility for killing Jesus to the Jewish people with its subsequent distinguishing of the Jewish people from the Jewish authorities, and its singling out the latter for particular denigration. In effect the Gospel of Peter claims that indeed the Jews are responsible for killing Jesus, but their subsequent failure to convert is because the people are misled by dishonest leaders who deliberately conceal from them the truth of the Christian proclamation. The Jewish authorities acknowledge among themselves the wrongfulness of their killing of Jesus (7.25), they witness the resurrection (8.33), yet in a self-serving manner they conceal from their people the truth of what they have seen (11.47-49). This portrayal could conceivably be seen as a propagandistic attempt to discredit the leadership of the synagogue. The Gospel of Peter, accordingly, serves several purposes in the context of second-century religious rivalry. The same propaganda might serve to hinder defections to the synagogue.

30. Crossan, ‘Gospel of Peter’, p. 39, emphasis original. 31. Other second-century sources also feature a similar bifurcation; see Wilson, Related Strangers, pp. xiv, 83–7, 283. 32. Ibid., pp. 34, 167, 263–5, 300.

The Johannine Jesus in the Gospel of Peter: A Social Memory Approach

243

Conclusion We have seen that the reenactment of the Passion narrative in the Gospel of Peter opens a window onto a group of second-century Christians negotiating their identity in their contemporaneous social and historical frameworks. Social memory analysis also has permitted us to trace the trajectory of a Johannine pericope, Legs Not Broken, into the second century and to render its striking transformation in that setting intelligible. The Gospel of Peter has taken the Christologically nuanced Johannine episode and turned it to rather onedimensional propagandistic purposes. As historians of Christian origins we will find the Gospel of Peter invaluable for understanding second-century Christianity; from another perspective there can be few regrets that Bishop Serapion effectively terminated its career.

Chapter 13 TRADITION AND MEMORY IN THE GOSPEL OF PETER*

Cultural memory analysis and orality theory offer promising new ways to approach problems of oral tradition, writing and canonization. These are the issues at stake in determining the location of the Gospel of Peter in the history of the gospel literature, a problem usually regarded as a matter of determining its relationship to the Synoptic Gospels. We will use cultural memory and media approaches to critique Crossan’s, Brown’s, and, in greater detail, Koester’s solutions  to this problem. We will then argue that the Gospel of Peter’s distinctive profile arises from its reenactment of the Synoptic and Johannine Passion narrative tradition within the memory frameworks of the second century. Its uninhibited mode of appropriating what is nevertheless its baseline gospel narrative tradition will illuminate how canonizing forces are at work in the second century.

The Literary Paradigm Analysis has generally operated within a literary paradigm that defines dependence either as a direct literary relationship, mediated by redaction of the sources, or more expansively, as a matter of redactional elements from the Synoptics or the Fourth Gospel surfacing within an apocryphal work such as the Gos. Pet. We can observe the influence of this media model upon Crossan, Brown and Koester, respectively. Crossan Crossan argues that the Gospel of Peter is a second-century redaction, drawing upon the Synoptic and Johannine Passion narratives, of the Cross Gospel, a midfirst-century document that was a source for the Synoptic and Johannine Passion narratives. The point of this second-century Gospel of Peter redaction was to bring

* Originally published in Das Evangelium nach Petrus: Text, Kontexte, Intertexte (ed. Tobias Nicklas and Thomas Kraus; Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2007), pp. 135–57. Used by permission.

Tradition and Memory in the Gospel of Peter

245

the Cross Gospel into alignment with emergent orthodoxy.1 Crossan’s utilization analysis is situated wholly within the literary, redaction-of-sources paradigm, with ‘sources’, ‘redaction’, ‘stages’ and ‘stemma’ his operative terms throughout.2 It is also his basis for rejecting arguments for the Gospel of Peter’s dependence upon the gospels: he points to the implausibility of the former being a ‘composite digest’ of the latter.3 He assigns the Gospel of Peter’s Thief on the Cross episode priority over Luke’s because, reversing the redactional scenario, he ‘can see no reason’ for the Gospel of Peter’s ‘textual dismemberment’ of Luke’s story.4 Most previous analysis of the Gospel of Peter’s relationship to the gospels has operated within this text-and-redaction framework, and Crossan’s hypothesis remains securely within it.5 While briefly considering the possibility that oral tradition might be a complicating factor, Crossan ultimately adverts to a pronounced media binary: oral and literary lines of transmission are incommensurable. He conceives oral processes on a linguistic model as deep structure generative dynamics constantly giving rise to variants. This, he thinks, cannot be reconciled with scribal processes, in his view a matter of the production of strict sequences bound to ‘established original[s]’. He has no working model, that is, for the interface of oral and written media; indeed, he categorically rules such out, finding it incomprehensible that oral processes can possibly be implicated in a scribal Gos. Pet.: ‘How … can an author with a written tradition … sustain an override from an oral tradition?’6 Koester Koester in his comprehensive approach to gospels and their history makes far more allowance for the variable of oral tradition. Like Crossan, however, Koester remains within the binary media framework, making a particularly sharp, categorical distinction between oral and written lines of transmission. In his study of Synoptic tradition in the Apostolic Fathers he posits as categorical alternatives either literary dependence on analogy with Matthew and Luke’s utilization of Mark, or independent recourse to common oral tradition: Where do the Apostolic Fathers stand as regards their relationship to the Synoptic Gospels and to the history of the Synoptic tradition? For every quotation or

1. John D. Crossan, The Cross That Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), pp. 16–30. 2. Helmut Koester points out Crossan’s literary assumptions (Ancient Christian Gospels (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International; London: SCM, 1990), p. 219). 3. Crossan, Cross That Spoke, pp. 14–15. 4. Ibid., p. 173. 5. In a subsequent essay Crossan claims, ‘I never presumed that synoptic-style copying was the best or only model’, but acknowledges, ‘I [am] not at all clear yet on how exactly these processes happened’ (‘The Gospel of Peter and the Canonical Gospels: Independence, Dependence, or Both?’ Forum n.s. 1 (1998), pp. 7–51 (24)). 6. Ibid., pp. 33–4.

246

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

reference in the Apostolic Fathers must we assume its direct derivation from the Synoptic Gospels? Or, ought references of this sort be traced to a pre-Synoptic stream of tradition that continues to run parallel with the tradition of the written Gospels?7

To make determinations of dependency on the Synoptic Gospels, therefore, Koester employs much the same literary criteria as Crossan, namely, indications of copying and redaction of a written source(s). For example, the agreements between 1 Clem. 46.6-8 and their parallels in the Synoptic Gospels notwithstanding, because of ‘the significant deviations, the influence of the Gospels upon 1 Clem. 46.6-8 is absolutely ruled out. This leaves as the only possible alternative that 1 Clem. 46.8 is related to a stream of tradition that pre-dates the gospels.’8 In other words, if variations from the Synoptic parallel are significant enough to make direct copying of an exemplar unlikely, Koester adverts to his default position – independent appropriation ‘from the freely circulating [pre-Gospel] tradition [aus der freien Überlieferung]’.9 Koester’s analysis of Ign. Pol. 2.1-2 is a case in point, for here the immediate proximity of Matthean-sounding (2.2) and Lukan-sounding (2.1) materials in his view rules out influence of the First and Third Gospels upon Ignatius and rules in Synoptic-independent oral tradition, for such proximity is not comprehensible on the model of utilization of literary exemplars.10 Similarly indebted to this binary model is Koester’s practice of assigning Synoptic-type materials occurring in the Apostolic Fathers sans the literary context and accompanying redactional features of the Synoptic parallel likewise to this primitive parallel stream of tradition. Conversely, ‘whenever one observes words or phrases that derive from the author or redactor of a gospel writing, the existence of a written source must be assumed’.11 Absent these indicators, Koester routinely shifts to the other pole: independent recourse to independent oral tradition. Like Crossan, Koester has virtually no concept of, let alone a working model for, the interface of orality and writing. This explains another marked feature of Koester’s approach: his curious a priori tendency to designate traditions that he determines, on his binary media model, to have been drawn from ‘the free oral tradition’ as also more primitive than the corresponding materials in the gospels. With respect to Synoptic-related traditions in Ignatius, for example, Koester argues that ‘most of these pieces of tradition don’t display any of the features characteristic of the editorial work of the written gospels; hence it is more likely that in the form in which they appear in Ignatius they were either drawn directly from the older oral tradition (Eph. 5.2;

7. Helmut Koester, Synoptische Überlieferung bei den apostolischen Vätern (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1957), p. 2, emphasis added. 8. Ibid., p. 18, emphasis added. 9. Ibid., p. 43, here in reference to Ign. Pol. 2.2. 10. Ibid.: ‘It is more likely that both sayings come from the free oral tradition, than that one is taken from Matthew, the other from Luke.’ 11. Helmut Koester, ‘Written Gospels or Oral Tradition?’ JBL 113 (1994), pp. 293–7 (297).

Tradition and Memory in the Gospel of Peter

247

14.2; 17.1; Pol. 2.2; probably also Pol. 2.1) or have been further developed from a more primitive piece of tradition of that sort (Trall. 11.1; Phld. 3.1; 6.1)’.12 Given a conceptual model inherently incapable of positing reciprocal feedback between written and oral tradition, it follows that a tradition in a second-century source, determined in accordance with this model to have been drawn from the ‘free oral tradition’, will be viewed either as more primitive than its counterpart in the written gospels or as occupying an identical position vis-à-vis the appropriation from this primitive, parallel stream of oral tradition.13 To support these judgements Koester applies the classical form-critical principle that oral tradition develops according to particular tendencies that make it possible to determine whether a given tradition is primitive or secondary.14 This is an approach that has long lost any purchase it might have once had: the morphology of tradition depends not upon innate developmental tendencies or laws but upon contingent social and historical variables impinging upon the different contexts in which a given tradition is enacted. Koester’s binary media model controls his analysis of the Gospel of Peter. It makes it possible for him to claim virtually a priori (without laborious source and redaction analysis) that a number of the Gospel of Peter’s constituent traditions are independent of, and more primitive than, their Synoptic parallels. To be sure, the Gospel of Peter’s divergence from the Synoptics in narrative logic, and the low number of their direct agreements, manifestly raise difficulties for any literary utilization hypothesis. Koester’s view that dependence is largely to be understood as literary dependence on the model of copying and editing of written exemplars permits him to uncouple Gospel of Peter from the Synoptics at that level (and judiciously to reject the possibility of reinstituting the connection in a reverse

12. Koester, Synoptische Überlieferung, p. 60, emphasis added. 13. Koester’s analysis of the relationship between Ign. Sm. 3.2-3 and the resurrection story in Lk. 24.36-43 is a case in point: ‘In the words ψυλαφήσατέ με καὶ ἴδετε they agree verbatim. In their respective following sentences the notion that he is an apparition is disposed of, but not in the same words. … At the end both report that the resurrected Christ ate with his disciples, but the differences in the wording of the parallel reports are not insignificant. … Is it possible that Luke’s report is serving Ignatius as his exemplar? Their precise agreement in the words ψηλαφήσατέ με καὶ ἴδετε ὅτι would seem to suggest this. But this can be explained as due to the more careful preservation of the actual words of the resurrected Christ, which – like the sayings of the Lord generally – were more faithfully preserved than the narrative frameworks. Therefore this element of close agreement does not suffice to prove literary dependency on Luke. However, at least one thing is clear: Sm. 3.2 and Lk. 24.36ff. are variants of the same report’ (Ibid., pp. 46–7, emphasis added). Koester’s line of analysis and the assumptions informing it are obvious. He determines that the agreements are not significant enough to indicate dependency, understood as redaction of a literary Vorlage. The only possible alternative Koester’s model permits is that Sm. 3.2 and Lk. 24.36-43 are independent enactments of an oral tradition. 14. Ibid., p. 2.

248

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

stemma, as Crossan does). He then accounts for parallel episodes by arguing that they came to the Gospel of Peter independently through the oral tradition. He closes the circle by applying form-critical laws-of-development criteria to claim that these traditions embedded in the Gospel of Peter attest a more primitive stage of the oral tradition than their Synoptic counterparts. In the case of the Guard at the Tomb and Resurrection episode (Gos. Pet. 8.28-11.49; Mt. 27.62-68; 28.2-4, 11-15), for example, Koester argues that because the Gospel of Peter tradition, when purged of its elaborative accretions, stands closer to the form of the epiphany genre than can be recovered from Matthew’s version, it is the more primitive, a line of reasoning which predicated on the form-critical postulate of the original, generically pure form.15 He applies the simple-to-complex form-critical canon to the mocking scene (Gos. Pet. 3.6-9): ‘The narrative version of this [exegetical] tradition as it is preserved in the Gospel of Peter has not yet split the mocking account into several scenes [as in the gospels].’16 Both Crossan and Koester work with a binary media model that sharply distinguishes oral and written media and oral and written lines of transmission. Research on ancient media, however, shows that orality and writing, their distinctive media properties notwithstanding, interface with each other such that the boundaries between them are indistinct. John Miles Foley designates writing and orality as distinct communication ‘channels’ that when present within a particular cultural sphere cannot be insulated from each other. In traditional cultures with even highly restricted literacy, reciprocal feedback occurs across the interface of the oral and written registers.17 He comments: ‘Scholarship over the past twenty years, especially field research on living oral traditions, has taught us to distrust the false dichotomy of “oral versus written” and to expect complex inventories and interactions of oral and literate in the same culture and even in the very same individual.’18 These advances in our understanding of ancient media render the form-critical canon of developmental tendencies in the oral tradition that Koester adverts to a dead letter. Distinct forces, moreover, are not at work in the enactment of oral tradition in various performance arenas (Foley’s apt term) on the one hand and

15. See Koester’s discussion in Ancient Christian Gospels, pp. 232–8. Nikolaus Walter, ‘Eine vormatthäische Schilderung der Auferstehung Jesu’, NTS 19 (1972–3), pp. 415–29, makes a similar argument, identifying the primitive tradition as a Befreiungswunder (miraculous deliverance genre). Walter likewise works with a literary Vorlage model of dependency. 16. Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 227. 17. John Miles Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 3–4. See also Ruth Finnegan, Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 178–9; idem, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 62. 18. Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, p. 3; see also Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 156.

Tradition and Memory in the Gospel of Peter

249

in the written appropriation of tradition on the other. Variants in oral tradition (multiforms) arise from the diverse social contexts in which it is performed; similarly, the mediation of written tradition also occurs within living social contexts. Oral tradition by definition exists in its actualization in utterance. An audience’s horizon of expectations and the impinging social variables of a particular enactment setting are constitutive of tradition as it is iteratively embodied in a particular performances, a process W. F. Hanks refers to as ‘internalizing reception into the production process itself ’.19 This is essential to the very life of the tradition inasmuch as it enables it to speak to the crises, contingencies and exigencies of the group that reveres it.20 No fixed original is recoverable in relation to which variants can be viewed as defective derivatives. Each multiform is uniquely affected by social factors, the configuration of which defines a particular performance arena.21 Brown and Schaeffer This compressed survey of research developments on media interface gives us a vantage point to assess Raymond E. Brown and Susan Schaeffer’s analysis of the Gospel of Peter’s connections to the Synoptic Gospels. Unlike Crossan and Koester, both Brown and Schaeffer make use of orality theory to connect the Gospel of Peter to the written gospels. The ‘remarkably little exact verbal identity’ lead them to rule out any scenario in which the Gospel of Peter’s dependence on the gospels is understood as direct literary appropriation, noting that neither redaction on the Synoptic model nor harmonization on Tatian’s model can account for the Gospel of Peter’s profile.22 That profile points instead, they argue, to dependence upon the gospels via memory mediated by secondary orality.23 The paucity of copies of

19. W. F. Hanks, ‘Texts and Textuality’, ARA 18 (1989), pp. 95–127 (112). 20. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2nd edn, 2000), p. 101; Jack Goody, The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 295–7. 21. Tradition-histories are nevertheless possible as histories of reception. See Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992), p. 120 (acts of reception amount to ‘selective recourse to the tradition’); Jens Schröter, Erinnerung an Jesu Worte: Studien zur Rezeption der Logienüberlieferung in Markus, Q und Thomas (WMANT, 76; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1997); Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘Genre Memories and Memory Genres: A Dialogical Analysis of May 8, 1945 Commemorations in the Federal Republic of Germany’, ASR 64 (1999), pp. 381–402. 22. Raymond E. Brown, ‘The Gospel of Peter and Canonical Gospel Priority’, NTS 33 (1987), pp. 321–43 (333); Susan E. Schaeffer, ‘The “Gospel of Peter”, the Canonical Gospels, and Oral Tradition’ (PhD diss. Union Theological Seminary 1991), pp. 119–20. 23. Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, vol. 2 (New York and London: Doubleday, 1994), p. 1336; see also Karlmann Beyschlag, Die verborgene Überlieferung von Christus (Munich and Hamburg: Siebenstern Taschenbuch, 1969), pp. 51–2.

250

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

the gospels in the second century meant that the exposure of most Christians to them was aural, from the liturgy. Through this liturgical portal, narratives and sayings from the written gospels re-entered the stream of popular oral tradition where in the nature of things they were subject to significant alterations. In Brown and Schaeffer’s view, this accounts for the characteristic features of the Gospel of Peter. The author is dependent on the written gospels, not however, through the written medium (written exemplars), but through aural mediation and secondary oralization.24 The much less controlled nature of aural and oral mediation accounts for the Gos. Pet.’s transpositions of motifs and confusion of details.25 Brown and Schaeffer’s account is sensitive to the complexity of media factors in the ancient world. Moreover, papyrus remains confirm, in Christoph Markschies words, that ‘a large number of Christians knew the Bible only from short passages in the liturgy’.26 Nevertheless, in a number of respects their solution is not satisfying. A case in point is their attempt to argue that its use of direct discourse and parataxis are indicators of the ‘spoken background of the GPet’.27 This tells us little, however, for in the ancient world much writing was calibrated for oral enactment. They associate the author of the Gospel of Peter with unlettered audiences with only aural exposure to the gospels, and, accordingly, suggest that the apocryphon is a textualization of this popular oral tradition.28 Schaeffer herself recognizes, however, that the Gospel of Peter is a literary artefact with some claim to stylistic refinement, and in her own fine analysis she demonstrates the complexity of its narrative design.29 The dense texture of allusions to the Jewish scriptures, long recognized as a definitive of Gospel of Peter, similarly points to learned scribal activity. These features rule out viewing the Gospel of Peter as a collocation of popular tradition, and they weaken the claim that the Gospel of Peter’s Passion narrative has its characteristic profile because its author’s connection to the gospels was non-elite oral tradition that in the course of things had deformed the written narratives.30 In addition, its divergences from the latter show a certain narrative logic. Another set of forces must have been in play,

24. Brown, ‘Gospel of Peter’, p. 335; idem, Death of the Messiah, pp. 1334–5 (Brown vacillates on whether the author had reading knowledge of Matthew); Schaeffer, ‘Gospel of Peter’, pp. 155–61. 25. Brown, ‘Gospel of Peter’, p. 335. 26. Christoph Markschies, ‘The Canon of the New Testament in Antiquity: Some New Horizons for Future Research’, in Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (ed. Margalit Finkelberg and Guy G. Strousma; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2002), pp. 175–94 (186). 27. Brown, Death of the Messiah, p. 1335; also Schaeffer, ‘Gospel of Peter’, pp. 196–7. 28. Brown, Death of the Messiah, p. 1336. 29. Schaeffer, ‘Gospel of Peter’, pp. 26–7, 89. On the sophisticated design of the Gospel of Peter’s narrative, see also Tobias Nicklas, ‘Die “Juden” im Petrusevangelium (PCair 10759): Ein Testfall’, NTS 46 (2000), pp. 206–21. 30. Schaeffer in fact concludes in light of these features that the author’s ‘reliability as a direct witness to the oral tradition … is questionable’ (‘Gospel of Peter’, p. 159).

Tradition and Memory in the Gospel of Peter

251

which Brown and Schaeffer’s popular tradition, secondary orality hypothesis cannot account for. Schaeffer moves in these alternative directions with her canvassing of social and ideological frameworks germane to second-century churches that, she argues, affected the Gospel of Peter’s shaping of the Synoptic Passion narratives. She never reconciles this approach, however, with the popular oral tradition component of her hypothesis. In the final analysis Brown and Schaeffer leave us without a coherent account of the Gospel of Peter’s relationship to the written gospels. Their promising experimentation with orality factor notwithstanding, like Crossan and Koester they reason largely within the framework of a binary media paradigm that envisions either written reception, on the model of Tatian’s reworking of gospel exemplars, or oral reception, the latter understood as a stream of pure orality functioning as the middle term between the Gospel of Peter and the gospels, which because of its supposed innate instability serves as an expedient to account for the Gospel of Peter’s deformations of the gospel episodes.31 While their introduction of the category of secondary orality is an important complication of the media paradigm, their approach has difficulties taking the measure of the complexity of interaction along the oral and written axes. We turn now to cultural memory and media approaches to construct a more adequate methodological framework. This will then be applied in a provisional analysis of gospel traditions in the sub-apostolic writings, using data discussed by Koester in his seminal study. With the ground thus prepared we will use this framework to try to specify the location of the Gospel of Peter within the history of the gospel literature.

Cultural Memory, Commemorative Narratives and Canonization Cultural Memory and Commemorative Narratives The leading cultural memory theorist Jan Assmann describes how salient elements of a community’s past are transformed into group-constitutive ‘memory configurations’ (Erinnerungsfiguren). A community marks and commemorates certain elements of its past as being of fundamental significance to its cultural (or subcultural) identity, typically events and persons foundational to its origins and epitomizing its distinctive ethos.32 These salient events and persons are configured in a foundational narrative, through the rehearsal of which the community connects to its core identity and ethos in shifting historical and social circumstances and in the face of contemporary crises. It is a matter, Assmann says,

31. Brown, Death of the Messiah, pp. 1333–4; Schaeffer, ‘Gospel of Peter’, p. 207. 32. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 30–8, 132–3; also Barry Schwartz, ‘The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory’, SocForces 61(1982), pp. 374–402 (377).

252

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

‘of the transformation of the past into a founding narrative’, the latter referred to by Yael Zerubavel as a community’s ‘master commemorative narrative’.33 These culturally powerful narratives, Assmann continues, ‘lead their existence in the tradition of a community, constantly primed for reactivation’.34 Margalit Finkelberg points out that the Iliad ‘became the foundation myth of the new Greek civilization at the beginning of the first millennium B.C.E.’, while the Exodus is a foundational narrative in Jewish cultural memory.35 The Passion narrative took on this role in the emergent cultural memory of early Christianity. A master commemorative narrative shapes and sustains the core identity of a group; its recitation in ritual settings ensures the reproduction of cultural identity.36 Accordingly, the salient past, immanent in the semantically dense narrative patterns in which it has become engrained in the collective memory, provides the cognitive frameworks and hermeneutical resources by which a community orients itself to and masters its present.37 A master commemorative narrative provides, in Barry Schwartz’s words, ‘an expressive symbol – a language as it were, for articulating present predicaments’.38 Correspondingly, the present realities of a community acutely affect its representation of its past. The father of social memory studies, Maurice Halbwachs, argued that to remember is not retrouver, but reconstruire, to align the image of the past with present social realities.39 Assmann expresses this point as follows: ‘Cultural memory operates reconstructively. It does not preserve the past as such; rather, it constantly reorganizes it within the frameworks of the present.’40 According to Schwartz, ‘to remember is to place a part of the

33. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 77; Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 4–7. 34. Jan Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis: zehn Studien (Munich: Beck, 2000), p. 18. 35. Margalit Finkelberg, ‘Homer as Foundation Text’, in Finkelberg and Strousma, eds, Homer, the Bible, and Beyond, pp. 74–96 (90); Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 52. 36. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 55; also pp. 22–3, 43; idem, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 89, 139. 37. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 16, 52; also Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, p. 229; James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p.  51; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 2. 38. Barry Schwartz, ‘Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II’, ASR 61 (1996), pp. 908–27 (910). Assmann articulates this point as follows: ‘The connective structure formed by the cultural memory serves to bind Yesterday to Today by giving shape to culturally-formative experiences and memories and making these effective forces in the present, through integrating images and narratives of the formative past into the shifting present horizons of the community’ (Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 16). 39. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (trans. Lewis A. Coser; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 (1st French edn, 1925)), p. 40. 40. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 42.

Tradition and Memory in the Gospel of Peter

253

past in the service of the needs and conceptions of the present’.41 Current crises and preoccupations determine what elements of a community’s past are awarded prominence, that is, commemorated, or conversely, are so to speak forgotten.42 Cultural memory configurations such as commemorative narratives are not static, immobile objects but are themselves hermeneutically responsive to external and internal factors in the community’s shifting contexts. Finkelberg provides an illuminating example of this in her discussion of geographical anomalies in the Iliad: Tiryns and Amyclae, whose functions as the administrative and cult centers of pre-Dorian Greece were well known to the Greeks of the Archaic period, were replaced by the more up-to-date Argos and Sparta and, accordingly, marginalized. That is to say, although it was a matter of common knowledge that the Dorians were post-Mycenaean newcomers into the Peloponnese, their descendants could nevertheless easily locate themselves on the map of Heroic Greece that Homer supplied [i.e. the Argos of Diomedes reflecting the Dorian Argos and the Sparta of Menelaus corresponding to the Dorian Sparta]. This suggests that in drawing his picture of Heroic Greece Homer systematically updated the past in such a way that it might fit the present.43

In John Thompson’s words, traditions can ‘become increasingly remote from their contexts of origin and increasingly interwoven with symbolic contents derived from the new circumstances in which they are re-enacted’.44 These are the cultural forces at work in the Gospel of Peter. It can hardly be a matter of indifference that the Gospel of Peter constitutes an enactment of the Passion narrative pattern, early Christianity’s master commemorative narrative. As with the Synoptic and Johannine Passion narratives, in the Gospel of Peter we see a group’s salient past, configured in its master narrative, being activated in such a way as to express present circumstances and conflicts. Conversely, the community’s conflicted present shapes the master narrative, not just cosmetically, but to its core. Cultural Memory and Canonization Forces The trajectory of a normative cultural tradition towards canonization is also intelligible as a cultural memory phenomenon. Our starting point for grasping this is the distinction that Assmann makes between ‘communicative memory’, which roughly corresponds to oral cultivation of tradition in face-to-face

41. Schwartz, ‘Social Context of Commemoration’, p. 374. 42. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 224. 43. Finkelberg, ‘Homer as Foundation Text’, p. 81. 44. John B. Thompson, ‘Tradition and Self in a Mediated World’, in De-traditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity in a Time of Uncertainty (ed. Paul Heelas et al.; Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 89–103 (103).

254

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

settings, and ‘cultural memory’ in the more specialized sense that Assmann uses it to refer to the casting of formative cultural traditions in tangible, more durable media forms such as writing and other visible and material artefacts.45 Broadly conceived, ‘communicative memory’ is mediated through face-toface communication in primarily oral settings.46 It serves as the medium for cultivation and transmission of a community’s foundational narratives and the corresponding ethos (‘wisdom’). Brian Stock notes that in communities in which orality predominates, ‘the continuity of culture depends on individuals who verbally transmit the heritage from one generation to the next. The form and content of knowledge … are passed on in a series of face to face encounters. Such meetings are rich in gesture, ritual, and ceremony. … The human sensorium is oriented around the ear.’47 Oral communicative memory is also the framework for the coalescing of culturally foundational traditions within emergent groups, as the latter distil their foundational narratives and normative ethos out of the flux of the originating events. These of course are the cultural forces at work within emergent Christianity. The passing down of cultural traditions primarily through an oral transmission memory framework (‘communicative memory’) can operate efficiently for centuries in long-standing, historically stable and socially stable societies. Oral tradition, the bearer of a community’s formative narratives and normative ethos, possesses no innate tendency towards writing, even when writing technologies are available.48 Concern for the shifting of foundational traditions to the durable materiality of the written medium is a strategic response to a disruption in the transmission of a cultural tradition (Traditionsbruch), brought about by breakdown, gradual or sudden, of the social frameworks for the smooth functioning of its oral cultivation and transmission (communicative memory). In such cases a community, confronted with loss of connection to memory and hence with the threat of its own dissolution, must turn towards more enduring media capable of carrying cultural memory across generations, that is, towards visible, material media such as writing, a process that also involves reworking

45. Assmann’s distinction between communicative and cultural memory is too categorical at this point; the forms assumed by an oral tradition are also cultural artefacts, as Assmann indeed acknowledges: ‘Oral tradition can be divided into communicative and cultural memory, that is, into every-day memory and ritual memory, just as with a culture that makes use of writing’ (Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 59). 46. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 13. 47. Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 14–15. 48. Jan Assmann, Fünf Stufen auf dem Wege zum Kanon: Tradition und Schriftkultur im frühen Judentum und seiner Umwelt (Münster: Lit, 1999), pp. 13–14.

Tradition and Memory in the Gospel of Peter

255

connections to the formative past in the midst of drastically altered social and historical circumstances.49 In Egypt, for example, the millennia-long succession of dynasties that provided the framework for cultivation and transmission of Egyptian cultural tradition was destroyed by the Persian conquest. This touched off a counter-movement to codify tradition in monumental media, that is, ‘an extensive program of constructing temples’, the latter inscribed inside and out with representations of formative myths and wisdom traditions.50 In politically more unstable Mesopotamia ‘we see each great political revolution accompanied by a concern for the securing of the tradition and its codification’, namely, in books and monumental libraries.51 For its part Greece experienced two great historical ruptures that issued in new ways of establishing connections with the foundational cultural tradition across the Umbruchszeit. The first was the collapse of archaic society and with it the social frameworks it provided for oral epic performance. This led, on the one hand, to the writing down of the disappearing epic tradition in the Iliad and Odyssey and, on the other, to the rise of rhapsodic performance of these epics in the new social framework supplied by the polis festivals. The second was the subsequent collapse of the society centred on the classical polis with the rise of the Hellenistic kingdoms, which led to the intense efforts of the Alexandrian scholars to standardize the texts of these monumental epics from the many local performance variants that had arisen.52 In deportation and exile Israel experienced a potentially calamitous Traditionsbruch. Assmann explains: ‘In the ancient world deportation signified the destruction of collective identity. With the loss of homeland, all the frameworks essential to collective memory collapse, the connective structure of culture tears apart, and the deported group disappears without a trace into its alien environment.’53 This crisis led to the production of Torah as a written artefact, in which the catastrophes of the present acted as social frameworks for retrieval and reconstruction of the salient past.54 That the redaction and systematization of oral interpretation of Torah and Mishnah in the Talmud was another such undertaking is suggested from David Stern’s description: ‘The Gemara’s project … is … to harmonize and unify the many fragmentary and seemingly inconsistent pieces of tradition. … What is most important, however, is the attempt – that is, the desire to construct a unified tradition which can assemble and encompass the manifold heritage of the past.’55

49. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 165, 218–21, 275; also idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, pp. 53–4, 87–8; idem, Fünf Stufen, p. 20. 50. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 159, 193. 51. Ibid., p. 165. 52. Ibid., pp. 274–8. 53. Ibid., p. 294. 54. Ibid., pp. 253–4. 55. David Stern, ‘On Canonization in Rabbinic Judaism’, in Finkelberg and Strousma, eds, Homer, the Bible, and Beyond, pp. 227–52 (249).

256

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Such cultural memory projects consolidate the narrative and moral traditions foundational to the community’s collective identity. For emergent communities still in proximity to their charismatic period of origins, a crisis of memory arises in connection with the limited lifespan of ‘communicative memory’. This crisis begins with the passing away of the firstgeneration cohort, in whom formative events are biographically vested as living memory, and then culminates in the passing of generational cohorts able to claim living connection with the first generation. Hence the span of living ‘communicative’ memory extends three to four generations, that is, eighty to one hundred years.56 Assmann argues that the limitations of communicative memory force themselves upon an emergent community as a crisis of memory at approximately the forty-year threshold, the point at which it is becoming apparent that the cohort of its living carriers – those who experienced the charismatic period of origins – is disappearing. It is at this point that the community, if it is not eventually to dissolve along with its memory, must accelerate the shifting of its tradition to more durable cultural media capable of transgenerational transmission.57 The fact that Deuteronomy utilizes the forty-year threshold of communicative memory, that is, the passing of the generation that had experienced the liberation from Egypt, as its dramatic setting to address what is in truth the civilizational memory crisis brought in the wake of the Traditionsbruch of the Exile shows that these two types of memory crisis – the civilizational and that of an emergent community – are in fact cognate. In both cases the exigency is the securing of long-term cultural viability in the face of breakdown in the social and historical conditions for communicating normative and formative tradition. For our purposes the salient point is that the programmatic consolidation of formative tradition in written media is hardly a matter of whimsy or mere convenience; rather, it is a strategic response to a crisis of memory, to a breakdown in the memory frameworks for the cultivation and transmission of tradition. ‘Tradition disruptions trigger writing initiatives’ is Assmann’s aphoristic way of putting it.58 Importantly for our purposes of understanding the Gospel of Peter’s

56. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 37, 50. Rosalind Thomas’s study of Athenian family traditions is a striking confirmation of the three-to-four generation lifespan of communicative memory (Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 125–9). 57. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, pp. 29, 37–8, 53–4, 87–8, 117; idem, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 11, 32–8, 50–6, 218–21. See also Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 197–213. 58. Assmann, Fünf Stufen, pp. 20–2; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 88. Formalized orality, usually entailing memorization, is an alternative strategic response to a memory crisis of this sort; see Shaul Shaked, ‘Scripture and Exegesis in Zoroastrianism’, in Finkelberg and Strousma, eds, Homer, the Bible, and Beyond, pp. 63–74 (65).

Tradition and Memory in the Gospel of Peter

257

appropriation of the Passion narrative tradition of the gospels, cultural memory textual artefacts emerging out of a Traditionsbruch crisis possess heightened normativity.59 This is because as ‘Exkarnations’ of a community’s normative and formative traditions, they constitute a ‘survival strategy for cultural identity’. By the same token, they have the latent potential to develop further along that strategic course into a canon.60 In other words, the absolute normativity and textual inviolability associated with canon is the terminus ad quem of a historically protracted project of cultural identity.61 Precisely because it is ‘a survival strategy for cultural identity’, for emergent communities the canonization trajectory correlates, as an ascending line, with the running down of the three-to-four generation lifespan of living memory. Written artefacts of cultural memory do not appear belatedly, at the last wheeze of living memory when the circle comprising that last cohort of tradents that can claim directly mediated contact with participants in the charismatic period of origins is on the verge of dying out. Rather, as we saw above, they begin to spring up relatively early in the multigenerational lifespan of communicative memory, with the passing of the first generation of tradents. At this juncture living, ‘communicative’ memory still has much of its cycle to run through. Hence both the operations and the authority of the oral tradition continue unabated, though now in connection with an important new factor that exerts a strong gravitational pull: written forms of the normative tradition. This phenomenon is illuminated by its analogy with the civilizational memory crisis that spurred textualization of the Greek oral epic tradition. Foley points out that with the appearance of Iliad, ‘we most assuredly do not posit the immediate demise of the large tradition and the smaller local traditions out of which the poems were fashioned’.62 Oral and written transmission, moreover, do not run along separate channels. The boundaries between them are indistinct and active, particularly since, as Jocelyn Penny Small puts it, ‘public performance before an audience … remained a dominant form of transmission’ of written texts.63 Written cultural memory texts, their heightened normativity notwithstanding, are caught up into this interactive and highly oralized media environment. The

59. Assmann, Fünf Stufen, p. 20; idem, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 169 (‘erhöhte Normativität’). 60. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 127, 294; also Margalit Finkelberg and Guy Strousma, ‘Introduction: Before the Western Canon’, in Finkelberg and Strousma, eds, Homer, the Bible, and Beyond, pp. 1–8, (5). 61. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 127, 159; Finkelberg and Strousma emphasize that ‘canonization of the text is an ongoing process, and fixation is only one of the stages in canon formation’ (‘Before the Western Canon’, p. 7). 62. John Miles Foley, Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), p. 23. 63. Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 35.

258

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Iliad, in its origins an oral epic, after its transposition into the written medium with the collapse of archaic society found its new enactment setting in rhapsodic performance in the poleis festivals. These oral rhapsodic performances orbited around the written epics; at the same time local rhapsodes ‘would continue to modify the received text and to shape it to their conception of what Homer must have said or meant’, which gave rise to local variants.64 Obviously, this renders notions of isolated lines of oral and written transmission (and the binary media model) nonsensical.65 We see how blurred the boundaries are of oral and written transmission, as materials from written cultural memory texts are caught up into the oral medium where they are subject to oral performance forces. It is evident, moreover, that within the three-to-four generation span in which living, ‘communicative’ memory is still operational, written artefacts, without prejudice to their heightened normativity, will possess a relatively weak prescriptive capacity with regard to the interactive media modes in which the tradition is cultivated. Appropriation of written tradition in these modes might also include fresh acts of writing, given that writing itself enacts tradition for the exigencies of new social contexts. It would be an error, however, to subsume writing completely to oral media dynamics. Written cultural memory artefacts, in addition to a capacity for diffusion and relatively precise replication, possess material ingrediency in their manuscript substratum that renders them resistant to assimilation to orality.66 Inscription of tradition, moreover, is a strategy for cultural identity calibrated to overcome the limitations of oral transmission, which is localized to face-to-face interaction situations, in order to secure the cross-generational transmission and reproduction of cultural identity.67 Consequently it is not possible to view the appearance of written cultural memory artefacts (such as the gospels) as anything but epochal for an emergent community or, on the larger scale, a civilization.68 They emerge in response to a community’s recognition of the vulnerability of its foundational cultural traditions, and accordingly of the fragility of its own identity. They are activated within ceremonial performance arenas, whence they exercise a heightened influence upon oral tradition.69

64. Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, pp. 28–9. 65. Ibid., p. 28. 66. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 227; Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 91. 67. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 284. 68. Foley describes the Iliad and Odyssey texts as ‘monumental poems that bear the burden of a long tradition’, and as ‘the flower’ of their epic tradition (Traditional Oral Epic, p. 23). 69. Goody, Power of the Written Tradition, p. 56. Foley points out that the effect of the ‘manuscript text’ of the epics was to introduce forces of ‘inertia’ into the performance tradition of Homer (Traditional Oral Epic, p. 27).

Tradition and Memory in the Gospel of Peter

259

As we have emphasized, oral tradition retains its innate authority and free scope for operation when written cultural memory artefacts first appear, for the communicative memory frameworks that enable it are still in place. According to our model, however, oral tradition’s authority wanes and that of the written texts waxes as the three-to-four generation lifespan of communicative memory gradually plays itself out. Canonization is the cultural memory response to the eventual demise of communicative memory. In canonization, Assmann explains, ‘the normativity of the texts becomes increasingly binding as regards both their form (the actual text-sequences) as well as their authority, two elements that are in fact closely connected’.70 Canonization amounts to the final stage in the ‘construction of cultural continuity … the [final] consolidification of cultural significations’.71 Utilization practices alter correspondingly. We saw that while communicative memory is operating effectively, cultural memory texts are appropriated in modes of oral performance and reperformance. This entails free interpretive play with the  texts themselves – in oral performance, in written or redactional re-enactments – as the normative contents of the cultural tradition react to shifting social frameworks. Canonization, as a further consolidation or hardening of the written text, amounts to a securing of cultural continuity in the face of the final loss of the communicative connection to the salient past. The ground rules for cultivation of the written tradition shift correspondingly to citation and commentary. Interpretative commentary takes over the task of ensuring cultural continuity. Assmann summarizes: When foundational texts come to bear the whole weight of cultural continuity, it becomes critically important to preserve this vital function and to overcome the inevitably increasing distance between these texts and the changing realities of life. In initial stages this happens internally to the text itself, through rewriting and supplementation, through redactional adaptation to the transformed circumstances in which they are to be grasped anew. Then, when the text is canonized – when its sequence and extent are defined once and for all – this distance can only be overcome through a meta-text, that is, the commentary.72

Appropriation of Written Gospel Tradition in the Second Century The utility of cultural memory approaches to describing the history of the gospel traditions is clear. In emergent Christianity the Traditionsbruch at the forty-year threshold is marked by the appearance of the Gospel of Mark, followed over the

70. Assmann, Fünf Stufen, p. 14. 71. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 278. 72. Ibid., p. 295, also pp. 176, 278–9; idem, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, p. 59; idem, Fünf Stufen, p. 14. See Brian Stock, Implications of Literacy, p. 56.

260

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

next two decades by the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Since our interest here is the Gospel of Peter, however, we will pass directly to the data from the sub-apostolic period gathered in Koester’s seminal work on Synoptic traditions in the Apostolic Fathers and take our critique of Koester further. It is in Justin that citation formulae such as γέγραπται and εἴρηκεν, signalling reference to writings approaching explicitly recognized scriptural status, first begin to appear applied to gospel materials with measurable frequency.73 ‘Here [Dial. 100:1]’, observes Koester, ‘for the first time in ancient Christian literature there occur together the terms γέγραπται (“it is written”) and εὐαγγέλιον.’74 Notably, these occurrences, attested in Justin’s mid-second-century writings, correspond to the winding-down of the three-to-four generation lifespan of the effective operation of communicative memory. Prior to this we can expect to find utilization practices that accord with the sub-scriptural status possessed by written artefacts during the period in which communicative memory sustains the operations and authority of oral tradition. We can expect for this period that Synoptic Gospel tradition will appear under the signs of oral processing and performance rather than citation or close copying. In Ignatius, for example, ‘we find no express citation of the Synoptics. What we find fairly often, though, are tacit quotations of sayings that are handed down in the Synoptic Gospels as words of Jesus. In addition, we find some mention of episodes from the Synoptic Gospels as well as a number of allusions to them.’75 The case is similar for 2 Clement: ‘The use of λέγει in the reference to Synoptic citations confirms that these citations in 2 Clement come from a written source, but one that still lacks scriptural authority.’76 Similarly, references of this sort in the Didache, 2 Clement and other pre-Justin writings are placed under the direct authority of ‘the Lord who is speaking in them. In none of these passages is it a matter of “Scripture”’.77 At this point things are unlikely to be otherwise. The sub-scriptural status of the written gospel tradition during the period of the operation of communicative memory means that its textualized form is not tightly prescriptive for its utilization. In its performance and reperformance it will be subjected to forces characteristically at work in orality, resulting in the production of oral multiforms of the literary tradition. Certain features of Synoptic Gospel traditions in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers can be plausibly attributed to this phenomenon. Koester and others have noted, for example, the frequent conflation of Lukan

73. Koester, Synoptische Überlieferung, pp. 200–1. 74. Ibid., p. 12. Koester’s claim that in Justin ‘the formula does not mean “it is written in Holy Scripture”, but “it is recorded in a written document that Jesus said” (Dial. 100.1)’ (Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 41) is premised on his ad hoc account of the origins of the canonical status of the gospels (see below). 75. Ibid., p. 24. 76. Ibid., p. 66. 77. Ibid., pp. 11–12, 64–5; see also Theo K. Heckel, Vom Evangelium des Markus zum viergestaltigen Evangelium (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1999), pp. 277–8.

Tradition and Memory in the Gospel of Peter

261

and Matthean materials. The Didache’s version of the ‘Love Enemies’ instruction (1.3-5) is characterized by ‘a combination of Matthean and Lukan parallels. These Synoptic sayings have undergone further expansions and transformations. … Sayings stemming from Matthew and Luke – in part significantly transformed – have been combined to form a new whole with a piece of Jewish tradition (1:5) and a quotation from an apocryphal writing (1:6)’.78 This points to the flexibility characteristic of oral appropriation. The close contextual integration of nonSynoptic tradition likewise points to the prominence of oral modes of trafficking with tradition in a scenario in which the written artefacts, with their heightened normativity, are a significant factor in the traditioning process while not yet being wholly prescriptive of the shape of the tradition or its extent, nor, because of the enduring efficacy of communicative memory, being the sole reference point for the tradition’s authority. The Didache’s instruction on fasts (Did. 8.1), which reorients the Matthean version (Mt. 16.16-18) from the proper demeanour for fasting to the proper days for fasting while anomalously retaining Matthew’s ‘hypocrite’ epithet, shows how oral modes, in which the social exigencies of new enactment settings generate fresh configurations of the tradition, can strip Synoptic materials of their literary contexts.79 With regard to 2 Clem. 5.2, where the ‘Sheep among Wolves’ saying is combined with sayings from Q 12.4-5, Jens Schröter observes that ‘sayings from the Synoptic tradition have been combined in a new way, but their original Synoptic contexts have not been passed down’.80 Did. 1.3-5, the ‘Love Enemies’ instruction touched on above, is a diagnostic case of Synoptic materials appropriated in oral enactment modes: the social realities of the enactment setting act upon the tradition to reconfigure it. The Didache passage, for example, features προσεύχεσθε ὑπὲρ τῶν ἐχθρῶν instead of the Synoptic ἀγαπᾶτε τους ἐχθρούς, ‘which characterizes the particular stance of Christianity towards enemies’81 – in other words, later community practice was marked liturgically by prayer for enemies: This explains why ‘Love Your Enemies’ could become ‘Pray for your Enemies’ … . The ecclesiastical custom has had an effect upon the wording of the original commandment. The same influence of ecclesiastical practice can also be seen in the command, νηστεύετε δὲ ὑπὲρ τῶν διωκόντων ὑμάς. There can be little doubt that this reduction to a practical, ethical exhortation is a sign of a later time.82

Koester’s media binary approach to the issue of dependency makes it difficult, however, for him to account for these transformations of the tradition.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

Koester, Synoptische Überlieferung, p. 238. Ibid., pp. 202–3. This of course is not the inference Koester draws. Schröter, Erinnerung, p. 173. Koester, Synoptische Überlieferung, p. 224. Ibid., p. 224.

262

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Koester observes that the time framework of the literary productions of the Apostolic Fathers (roughly between 90 ce and 150 ce) was the period during which ‘our canonical gospels established themselves over against the oral tradition’.83 This corresponds to the declining lifespan of communicative memory and the corresponding trend of the written artefacts towards scriptural status. These shifts correlate with a decline in oral performance modes of appropriating the written tradition in favour of commentary on increasingly inviolable texts. Because his analysis is so determined by the media binary paradigm, however, Koester draws mistaken inferences from his data. His media model is unable to conceptualize let alone assess the interface of written and oral media. Accordingly, when little evidence of direct redaction of the Synoptics in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers can be found, he predictably defaults to the ‘freely circulating’ and ‘more primitive’ tradition as their primary source. He marvels at ‘the great extent to which the history of the tradition in the Apostolic Fathers is one that runs alongside the Synoptic Gospels and indeed reaches far back behind them into their sources’.84 His further inference follows inexorably: the written gospels, although known, lacked any normativity.85 The actual media reality – the interaction of oral and written registers is the norm – negates this line of reasoning. It also calls in question Koester’s methodology at another point. For Koester the unreconstructed form critic, the Sitz im Leben of a tradition is a constant in its oral transmission: ‘When pieces of tradition are quoted and used in early Christian authors, their function in the life of the community is usually maintained’, for example, catechetical applications.86 Shifting the tradition into a written gospel, on the other hand, entailed the transposition of oral materials from community Sitze into a context in the life of Jesus. In Koester’s view, this brings about ‘fundamental changes in [form and] function and meaning’ that supposedly leave an indelible mark on the tradition.87 Framing this latter assumption within his binary media model, which categorically separates oral and written modes of transmission, he concludes unsurprisingly that the absence of ambient Synoptic literary contexts indicates that a tradition is both distinct from, and more primitive than, its gospel counterpart.88 It also entails that he insulates written tradition from oral enactment forces. In fact the latter act upon tradition to configure in its various contextualizations. Previous receptions of tradition are a factor but not the sole or necessarily determinative one. Literary contexts are not necessarily transmitted when written tradition is taken up in oral

83. Ibid., p. 3. 84. Ibid., p. 267, emphasis added; see also p. 258. 85. Ibid., p. 267. In context Koester is referring to the weak presence of gospel narratives in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, in contrast to kerygmatic statements, but the statement is representative. 86. Koester, ‘Written Gospels or Oral Tradition?’ pp. 296–7. 87. Ibid., p. 296, n. 12. 88. Ibid., p. 296.

Tradition and Memory in the Gospel of Peter

263

cultivation (one need only think of free-floating quotations from Shakespeare). The binary media schema that controls Koester’s analysis is incapable of assessing the capacity of oral utilization practices to digest and recontextualize written tradition. Correspondingly, it induces him to misconstrue the phenomenon of multiformity. Enactment of tradition in changing reception contexts generates multiformity. The multiformity of tradition is therefore emblematic of its authority. But owing to his defective media premises Koester mistakenly associates it with lack of authority: from the fact that the written gospels in the sub-apostolic period ‘could be freely altered and changed according to the existing needs’ he infers that ‘there was no special authority attached to their existence in written form’.89 Øvind Andersen points out that ‘in a still essentially oral culture, tradition does not strive towards transcription’.90 Given his view on the negligible authority of the gospels in the sub-apostolic period, Koester does not adequately problematize their very existence. Consistently with his view of their nugatory status, Koester, true to his form-critical point of departure, interprets their appearance as being likewise a matter of little consequence. The gospels were simply ‘alternative forms of the continuing oral tradition, optional and convenient aids designed to strengthen the role the tradition about Jesus played in the churches’.91 The problem then compounds itself: the insignificance of the gospels means Koester must account for their second-century apotheosis. Koester puts this in his characteristic media binary terms: ‘Only around this time [mid-second century] did Matthew and Luke begin to establish themselves against the freely circulating, presynoptic tradition.’92 (One notes that the written tradition has now shifted course from tacking ‘alongside’ (neben) to ‘against’ (gegen) the ‘freely-circulating oral tradition’.) Lacking a framework capable of conceptualizing the cross-culturally attested dynamics of canonization, Koester is forced back on ad hoc explanations. It was Justin who is responsible for elevating the gospels from nullity to repute, as an ad hoc reaction to Marcion’s canon. Justin, however, stopped short of ascribing to the gospels scriptural status. That fateful step was taken by the Alexandrian theologians Clement and Origin, who borrowed from the Gnostics the notion that books containing the words of Jesus were inspired.93

89. Ibid., p. 295; also idem, Synoptische Überlieferung, p. 241. 90. Øvind Andersen, ‘Oral Tradition’, in Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition (ed. Henry Wansbrough; JSNTSup, 64; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), pp. 17–58 (46). 91. Koester, ‘Written Gospels or Oral Tradition?’ p. 294. Koester here contradicts his characterization, in the same essay, of the composition of Synoptics as a significant inscription of tradition standing in distinction to ‘the casual written fixation of oral materials’ (p. 296, n. 12). 92. Koester, Synoptische Überlieferung, pp. 122–3. 93. Helmut Koester, ‘Writings and the Spirit: Authority and Politics in Ancient Christianity’, HTR 84 (1991), pp. 353–72 (365–72).

264

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

Reception of the Gospel Narrative Tradition in the Gospel of Peter This critique of Koester’s views indicates the need for a redescription of the history of the gospel traditions in the second century within the framework of cultural memory analysis. More to our purposes, however, it shows the great extent to which analysis of the Gospel of Peter specifically has been based upon unsound models. Accordingly, we can now connect with our earlier discussion on cultural ‘memory configurations’ (Erinnerungsfiguren) to show how cultural memory approaches can clarify problems raised by the Gospel of Peter. The power of this approach lies in its capacity to integrate advanced understandings of the operations of tradition with an account of the social/cultural memory dynamic that drives transformations and canonizations of tradition. We recall that tradition is the authoritative deposit of the salient past of a community. It is constituted by ‘memory configurations’ that give expression to the narrative and moral (ethics) elements of the cultural memory. A group constantly establishes connections with its salient past, deposited in its tradition, within the frameworks of its present social realities. Contemporary social contexts affect enactments of the tradition. The Gospel of Peter is a site at which the Passion narrative, early Christianity’s master commemorative narrative, intersects with memory frameworks of the second century. The distinctiveness of the Gospel of Peter arises from its bringing the gospel Passion narrative tradition into dramatic alignment with the social realities impinging upon some local group of second-century Christians. It has been frequently pointed out how alien to the Gospel of Peter’s narrative are the cultural realities, ritual practices and topography of first-century Jewish Palestine and conversely, how saturated it is in ecclesiastical conditions and practices of the second century. Second-century martyrological motifs pervade the Gospel of Peter’s narration of Jesus’s sufferings.94 Dieter Lührmann argues that the relatively small role granted to Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of Peter resurrection account is intelligible in light of second-century rivalries among competing strands of Christianity.95 A pronounced anti-Jewish Tendenz, mirroring the acrimonious rivalry between church and synagogue attested for the second century, has exerted a formative effect upon the narrative.96 The absence of Romans from the crucifixion, their role as executioners filled by the Jews, is a classic example of the ‘forgetting’ of an element of a master narrative that does not conform to a community’s present

94. P. M. Head, ‘On the Christology of the Gospel of Peter’, VigChr 46 (1992), pp. 209–24. 95. Dieter Lührmann, Die apokryph gewordenen Evangelien: Studien zu neuen Texten und zu neuen Fragen (NovT Suppl., 112; Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 40. 96. See Brown, ‘The Gospel of Peter’, pp. 331, 339; Schaeffer, ‘Gospel of Peter’, pp. 227, 242–53; also Alan Kirk, ‘The Johannine Jews in the Gospel of Peter: A Social Memory Approach’, in Jesus in Johannine Tradition (ed. Robert T. Fortna and Tom Thatcher; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), pp. 313–22 (Chapter 12 in this book).

Tradition and Memory in the Gospel of Peter

265

realities. Such forgetting, Assmann says, ‘is caused by a change in frameworks, through significant changes in the conditions of life and social relations’.97 Further, these synchronic transformations of the Passion narrative pattern in the Gospel of Peter correlate to the diachronic communicative memory/cultural memory axis that controls the history of the gospel tradition. This makes it possible to account at least in general terms for the Gospel of Peter’s strikingly uninhibited rewriting the four-gospel narrative tradition while nevertheless taking this narrative tradition as its normative baseline. The Gospel of Peter appears after the production of the gospels as cultural memory artefacts but around the same time as or not long after the running down of the operations of communicative memory, which would have persisted into the second century. This means that the Passion narrative tradition of the gospels, with its heighted normativity, will have a determinative though not prescriptive effect upon the stream of early Christian narrative tradition. By the same token, the ground rules for the Gospel of Peter’s reception of this gospel narrative tradition reflect the interactive media interface for cultivation of written tradition. Since increasing elevation of the gospels to canonical, textually prescriptive status correlates to the running down of the threeto-four generation communicative memory span, we can expect a utilization mode in which no categorical gap has opened up between the normative tradition and its reenactment. In other words, the Passion narrative itself will be transformed to make it responsive to contemporary social exigencies. This admittedly is a rather abstract description of the operations of the model, one that does not take adequate account the historically contingent and contested nature of the appropriation of gospel traditions in the second century. In its appropriation of the narrative tradition of the gospels the Gospel of Peter tries to register its own claim to authority, which its fictive authorship simply underscores. Reenactment of the tradition is precisely the means by which the authority of tradition is exploited for new contexts. Similarly, nothing prevents fresh articulations of the Synoptic and Johannine tradition from being intended to complement, update, compete with, displace or transcend the gospels. Cultural memory analysis, therefore, while rendering intelligible the course followed by the gospels from their writing in the last third of first century to their canonization by the last third of the second allows us to take stock of the historical contingencies and contestations that attended this process along the way.

97. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 224; see also Schaeffer, ‘Gospel of Peter’, pp. 214–15; and Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record, pp. 141–78.

WORKS CITED Adams, Fred, and Ken Aizawa, ‘Defending the Bounds of Cognition’, in The Extended Mind (ed. Richard Menary ; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), pp. 67–81. Alexander, Loveday, ‘Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of the Gospels’, in The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (ed. Richard Bauckham; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 71–111. Alexander, Loveday, ‘Memory and Tradition in the Hellenistic Schools’, in Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (ed. Werner H. Kelber and Samuel Byrskog; Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009), pp. 113–53. Allison, Dale C., Jr., Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010). Ammaniti, Massimo, and Daniel Stern (eds), Psychoanalysis and Development: Representations and Narratives (New York: New York University Press, 1994). Andersen, Øvind, ‘Oral Tradition’, in Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition (ed. Henry Wansbrough; JSNTSup, 64; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), pp. 17–58. Appadurai, Arjun, ‘The Past as a Scarce Resource’, Man NS (1981), pp. 201–19. Assmann, Aleida, Zeit und Tradition: kulturelle Strategien der Dauer (Cologne: Böulou, 1999). Assmann, Aleida, and Jan Assmann, ‘Das Gestern im Heute: Medien und soziales Gedächtnis’, in Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaft (ed. Klaus Merton, Siegfried J. Schmidt, and Siegfried Weischenberg; Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994), pp. 114–40. Assmann, Aleida, and Jan Assmann, ‘Schrift und Gedächtnis’, in Schrift und Gedächtnis: Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation (ed. Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann and Christoph Hardmeier; Munich: Fink, 1983), pp. 265–84. Assmann, Aleida, and Jan Assmann, ‘Schrift, Tradition, und Kultur’, in Zwischen Festtag und Alltag: zehn Beträge zum Thema Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit (ed. Paul Goetsch, et al.; Tübingen: Narr, 1988), pp. 25–49. Assmann, Aleida, Jan Assmann, Christoph Hardmeier (eds), Schrift und Gedächtnis: Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation (Munich: Fink, 1983). Assmann, Jan, ‘Ancient Egyptian Antijudaism: A Case of Distorted Memory’, in Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past (ed. Daniel Schacter; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 365–76. Assmann, Jan, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, NewGerCrit 65 (1995), pp. 125–33. Assmann, Jan, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitiät in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992). Assmann, Jan, ‘Égypte ancienne – la mémoire monumentale’, in La commémoration (ed. Philippe Gignoux; Paris: Peeters, 1988), pp. 47–56. Assmann, Jan, Fünf Stufen auf dem Wege zum Kanon: Tradition und Schriftkultur im frühen Judentum und seiner Umwelt (MTV, 1; Münster: Lit, 1999).

268

Works Cited

Assmann, Jan, ‘Form as Mnemonic Device: Cultural Texts and Cultural Memory’, in Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark (ed. Richard A. Horsley, et al.; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), pp. 67–82. Assmann, Jan, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis: zehn Studien (Munich: Beck, 2000). Assmann, Jan, and Tonio Hölscher (eds), Kultur und Gedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988). Backhaus, Knut, and Gerd Häfner, Historiographie und fiktionales Erzählen: Zur Konstruktivität in Geschichtstheorie und Exegese (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2007). Baddeley, Alan D., Essentials of Human Memory (East Sussex: Psychology Press, 1999). Bar Ilan, Meir, ‘Illiteracy in the Land of Israel in the First Centuries C.E’, in Essays in the Social Scientific Study of Judaism and Jewish Society, vol. 2 (ed. S. Fishbane, et al.; New York: Ktav, 1992), pp. 46–61. Bar Ilan, Meir. ‘Scribes and Books in the Late Second Commonwealth and Rabbinic Period’, in Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (ed. Martin Jan Mulder; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004), pp. 21–38. Barclay, Craig R., ‘Autobiographical Remembering: Narrative Constraints on Objectified Selves’, in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (ed. David C. Rubin; New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 94–125. Barrett, C. K., The Gospel According to St. John (Philadelphia: Westminster, 2nd ed., 1978). Bartlett, Frederic C., Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (London: Cambridge University Press, 1995 [reprint 1932]). Barton, Stephen C., et al. (eds), Memory in the Bible and Antiquity (WUNT, 212; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2007). Bauckham, Richard, ‘In Response to My Respondents: Jesus and the Eyewitnesses in Review’, JSHJ 6 (2008), pp. 225–53. Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006). Bauckham, Richard (ed.), The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). Baum, Armin, Der mündliche Faktor und seine Bedeutung für die synoptische Frage (Tübingen: Franke, 2008). Bäuml, Franz H., ‘Medieval Texts and the Two Theories of Oral-Formulaic Composition: A Proposal for a Third Theory’, NLH 16 (1984), pp. 31–49. Bäuml, Franz H. ‘Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy’, Speculum 55 (1980), pp. 237–65. Beit-Arié, Malachi, ‘Publication and Reproduction of Literary Texts in Medieval Jewish Civilization: Jewish Scribality and its Impact on the Texts Transmitted’, in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion (ed. Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 225–47. Ben Yehuda, Nachman, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). Ben Zvi, Ehud, and Michael H. Floyd (eds), Writings and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy (Atlanta: SBL, 2003). Bergemann, T., Q auf dem Prüfstand (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1993). Berntsen, Dorthe, and David C. Rubin, ‘Cultural life scripts structure recall from autobiographical memory’, MemCogn 32 (2004), pp. 427–42.

Works Cited

269

Beyschlag, Karlmann, Die verborgene Überlieferung von Christus (Munich and Hamburg: Siebenstern Taschenbuch, 1969). Blank, Sheldon H., ‘The Death of Zechariah in Rabbinic Literature’, HUCA 12/13 (1938), pp. 327–46. Bloch, Maurice E. F., Anthropology and Cognitive Challenge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Bloch, Maurice E. F., How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). Blum, Erhard, ‘Historiography or Poetry? The Nature of the Hebrew Bible Prose Tradition’, in Memory in the Bible and Antiquity (ed. Stephen C. Barton, et al.; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), pp. 25–46. Bockmuehl, Markus, Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006). Bockmuehl, Markus, and Donald A. Hagner (eds), The Written Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Bodnar, John, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Bonanno, George A., ‘Remembering and Psychotherapy’, Psychotherapy 27 (1990), pp. 175–86. Borsò, Vittoria, ‘Gedächtnis und Medialität: Die Herausforderung der Alterität: Eine medienphilosophische und medienhistorische Perspektivierung des GedächtnisBegriffs’, in Medialität und Gedächtnis: interdisziplinäre Beiträge zur kulturellen Verarbeitung europäischer Krisen (ed. Vittoria Borsò, et al.; Weimar: Metzler, 2001), pp. 23–54. Borsò, Vittoria, et al. (eds), Medialität und Gedächtnis: interdisziplinäre Beiträge zur kulturellen Verarbeitung europäischer Krisen (Weimar: Metzler, 2001). Brewer, William F., ‘What is Recollective Memory?’ in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (ed. David C. Rubin; New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 19–66. Brewer, Marilynn B., and Miles Hewstone (eds), Social Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Brown, Raymond E., The Death of the Messiah (New York and London: Doubleday, 2 vols., 1994). Brown, Raymond E., The Gospel According to John, vol. 2: Chapters 13-21 (AB; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970). Brown, Raymond E., ‘The Gospel of Peter and Canonical Gospel Priority’, NTS 33 (1987), pp. 321–43. Brown, Raymond E (ed.), The New Jerome Bible Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall), 1990). Bruner, Frederick Dale, Matthew: A Commentary, vol. 1, The Christbook: Matthew 1-12 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, rev. ed., 2004). Brunner, Jerome, and Carol Fleisher Feldman, ‘Group Narrative as a Cultural Context of Autobiography’, in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (ed. David C. Rubin; New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 291–317. Bultmann, Rudolf, History and Eschatology (Edinburgh: At the University Press, 1975). Bultmann, Rudolf. Jesus and the Word (trans. Louise Pettibone Smith and Erminie Huntress Lantero; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958) Bultmann, Rudolf, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (trans. John Marsh; New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, rev. 3rd edn, 1968).

270

Works Cited

Bultmann, Rudolf, The Presence of Eternity: History and Eschatology (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1975). Bultmann, Rudolf, ‘The Study of the Synoptic Gospels’, in Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Kundsin, Form Criticism (trans. F. C. Grant; New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 7–78. Bultmann, Rudolf, and Karl Kundsin, Form Criticism (trans. F. C. Grant; New York: Harper, 1962). Burke, Peter, ‘History as Social Memory’, in Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind (ed. Thomas Butler; New York: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 97–113. Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion (trans. John Raffan; Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). Buss, Martin J., The Changing Shape of Form Criticism: A Relational Approach (ed. Nicki M. Stipe; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2010). Butler, Thomas (ed.), Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind (New York: Blackwell, 1989). Buttrick, David G. (ed.), Jesus and Man’s Hope (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, 1970). Byrskog, Samuel, ‘A Century with the Sitz im Leben: From Form-Critical Setting to Gospel Community and Beyond’, ZNW 98 (2007), pp. 1–27. Byrskog, Samuel, ‘A New Perspective on the Jesus Tradition: Reflections on James D. G. Dunn’s Jesus Remembered’, JSNT 26 (2004), pp. 459–71. Byrskog, Samuel, ‘A New Quest for the Sitz im Leben: Social Memory, the Jesus Tradition, and the Gospel of Matthew’, NTS 52 (2006), pp. 319–26. Byrskog, Samuel, ‘The Eyewitnesses as Interpreters of the Past: Reflections on Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses’, JSHJ 6 (2008), pp. 157–68. Byrskog, Samuel, ‘From Memory to Memoirs: Tracing the Background of a Literary Genre’, in The Making of Christianity: Conflicts, Contacts, and Constructions: Essays in Honor of Bengt Holmberg (ed. M. Zetterholm and S. Byrskog; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012), pp. 1–21. Byrskog, Samuel, ‘Introduction’, in Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (ed. Werner H. Kelber and Samuel Byrskog’; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), pp. 1–20. Byrskog, Samuel, ‘Memory and Identity in the Gospels: A New Perspective’, in Exploring Early Christian Identity (ed. Bengt Holmberg; WUNT, 226; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2008), pp. 33–57. Byrskog, Samuel, Story as History – History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History (WUNT, 123; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2000). Byrskog, Samuel, ‘Theißen Form-Criticism and Social Memory: Ways to Reconfigure Jesus the Galilean’, in Jesus – Gestalt und Gestaltungen: Rezeptionen des Galiläers in Wissenschaft, Kirche und Gesellschaft (FS Gerd Theißen; ed. Petra von Gemünden, et al.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 499–513. Byrskog, Samuel, ‘The Transmission of the Jesus Tradition’, in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, vol. 2 (ed. Thomas Holmén and Stanley E. Porter; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), pp. 1465–94. Byrskog, Samuel, ‘The Transmission of the Jesus Tradition: Old and New Insights’, EC 1 (2010), pp. 1–28. Byrskog, Samuel, ‘When Eyewitness Testimony and Oral Tradition Become Written Text’, SEÅ 74 (2009), pp. 41–53. Byrskog, Samuel, Raimo Hakola and Jutta Jokiranta (eds), Social Memory and Social Identity in the Study of Early Judaism and Early Christianity (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016).

Works Cited

271

Calhoun, Chesire, ‘Subjectivity and Emotion’, PhilForum 20 (1989), pp. 195–210. Campbell, Sue, ‘Memory, Truth, and the Search for an Authentic Past’, in Memory Matters: Contexts for Understanding Sexual Abuse Recollections (ed. Janice Haaken and Paula Reavey ; New York: Routledge, 2010) pp. 175–95. Campbell, Sue, ‘Models of Mind and Memory Activities’, in Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (ed. Peggy DesAutels and Margaret Urban Walker; Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), pp. 119–37. Campbell, Sue, ‘Our Faithfulness to the Past: Reconstructing Memory Value’, PhilPsych 19 (2006), pp. 361–80. Campbell, Sue, Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars (Lanham, NY and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). Campbell, Sue, ‘The Second Voice’, MemSt 1 (2008), pp. 41–8. Carr, David M., Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Carruthers, Mary J., The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (CSML, 10; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Casey, Edward S., Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Chaytor, H. G., From Script to Print: An Introduction to Medieval Vernacular Literature (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1966 [reprint 1945]). Clanchy, Michael, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn, 1993). Clapin, H., P. Staines and P. Slezak (eds), Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation (London: Elsevier, 2004). Clark, Andy, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). Clark, Andy, ‘Material Symbols’, PhilPsych 19 (2006), pp. 291–307. Clark, Andy, ‘Word, Niche, and Super-Niche: How Language Makes Minds Matter More’, Theoria 54 (2005) pp. 655–68. Clayton, Jay, and Eric Rothstein (eds), Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Cohen, A. B., Poor Pearl, Poor Girl: The Murdered-Girl Stereotype in Ballad and Newspaper (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973). Colwell, Ernest C., Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1969). Colwell, Ernest C., What is the Best New Testament? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). Connerton, Paul, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Conway, Martin A., ‘Autobiographical Knowledge and Autobiographical Memories’, in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (ed. David C. Rubin; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 67–93. Conway, Martin A., ‘Remembering: A Process and a State’, in Science of Memory: Concepts (ed. Henry L. Roediger III, et al.; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 237–41. Corbier, Mireille, ‘L’écriture en quête de lecteurs’, in Literacy in the Roman World (ed. J. H. Humphrey ; JRASup, 3; Ann Arbor: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1991), pp. 99–118. Coser, Lewis, ‘Introduction: Maurice Halbwachs’, in Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (trans. and ed. Lewis A. Coser; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 1–34.

272

Works Cited

Craik, Fergus I. M., ‘On the Making of Episodes,’ in Varieties of Memory and Consciousness: Essays in Honour of Endel Tulving (ed. Henry L. Roediger III and Fergus I. M. Craik; Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1989), pp. 43–57. Cribiore, Raffaella, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Crook, Zeba A., ‘Collective Memory Distortion and the Quest for the Historical Jesus’, JSHJ 11 (2013), pp. 53–76. Crosby, Ruth, ‘Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages’, Speculum 11 (1936), pp. 88–110. Crossan, J. D., The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998). Crossan, J. D., The Cross that Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988). Crossan, J. D., ‘The Gospel of Peter and the Canonical Gospels: Independence, Dependence, or Both?’ Forum N.S. 1/1 (1998), pp. 7–51. Dagenais, John, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen Amor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Deacon, Terrence W., The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York and London: Norton, 1997). DeLoache, Judy S., ‘Becoming Symbol-minded’, TrendsCogSci 8 (2004), pp. 66–70. Derrenbacker, Robert A., Jr., Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem (BETL, 186; Leuven: Peeters, 2005), pp. 237–9. DesAutels, Peggy, and Margaret Urban Walker (eds), Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). de Vega, Manuel (ed.), Meaning and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Dewey, Arthur, ‘“Time to murder and create”: Visions and Revisions in the Gospel of Peter’, Semeia 49 (1990), pp. 101–27. Dibelius, Martin, Die Formgeschichte des Evangelium (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 6th edn, 1971). Dibelius, Martin, From Tradition to Gospel (trans. Bertram Lee Woolf; London: Redwood, 1971). Dibelius, Martin. Jesus (trans. Charles B. Hedrick and Frederick C. Grant; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1949). DiMaggio, Paul, ‘Culture and Cognition,’ ARS 23 (1997), pp. 263–87. Doane, A. N., ‘The Ethnography of Scribal Writing and Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Scribe as Performer’, OT 9 (1994) pp. 420–39. Doane, A. N., ‘Oral Texts, Intertexts, and Intratexts: Editing Old English’, in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Doane, A. N, and Carol Braun Pasternak (eds), Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Donald, Merlin, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York and London: Norton, 2001). Donald, Merlin. ‘Hominid Enculturation and Cognitive Evolution’, in Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage (ed. Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre; Cambridge: MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998) pp. 7–18. Donald, Merlin. Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Downing, F. Gerald, ‘Compositional Conventions and the Synoptic Problem’, JBL 107 (1988), pp. 69–85.

Works Cited

273

Drijvers, Jan Willem, and Alasdair A. MacDonald (eds), Centres of Learning: Learning and Location in Pre-Modern Europe and the Near East (BSIH, 61; Leiden and New York: Brill, 1995). du Toit, David S., ‘Der unähnliche Jesus: Eine kritische Evaluierung der Entstehung des Differenzkriteriums und seiner geschichts- und erkenntnistheoretischen Voraussetzungen’, in Der historische Jesus: Tendenzen und Perspektive der gegenwärtigen Forschung (ed. JensSchröter and Ralph Brucker; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 89–130. Duchesne-Guillemin, Jacques, ‘La commemoration: Temps retrouvé temps aboli’, in La commémoration (ed. Philippe Gignoux; Paris: Peeters, 1988) pp. 13–20. Dungan, David L., The Interrelations of the Gospels (BETL, 95; Leuven: Peeters, 1990). Dungan, David L., ‘Mark: The Abridgement of Matthew and Luke’, in Jesus and Man’s Hope, vol. 1, (ed. David G. Buttrick; Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, 1970), pp. 51–98. Dunn, James D. G., ‘Altering the Default Setting: Re-envisaging the Early Transmission of the Jesus Tradition’, NTS 49 (2003), pp. 139–75. Dunn, James D. G., ‘In Grateful Dialogue: A Response to My Interlocutors’, in Memories of Jesus; A Critical Appraisal of James D. G. Dunn’s Jesus Remembered (ed. Robert B. Stewart and Gary R. Habermas; Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2010), pp. 287–323. Dunn, James D. G., Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). Dunn, James D. G., ‘Q1 as Oral Tradition’, in The Written Gospel (ed. Markus Bockmuehl and Donald A. Hagner; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 54–69. Dunn, James D. G., ‘Remembering Jesus: How the Quest for the Historical Jesus Lost Its Way’, in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, vol. 2 (ed. Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter; Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 183–205. Dunn, James D. G., ‘Social Memory and the Oral Jesus Tradition’, in Memory in the Bible and Antiquity (ed. Stephen C. Barton, et al.; WUNT, 212; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2007), pp. 179–94. Durkheim, Émile, ‘Individual and Collective Representations’, in Sociology and Philosophy (ed. Émile Durkheim; London: Cohen and West, 1953 [French original 1898]), pp. 1–34. Echterhoff, Gerald, ‘Das Außen des Erinnerns: Was vermittelt individuelles und kollektives Gedächtnis?’ in Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses: Konstruktivität – Historizität – Kulturspezifität (ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning; Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2004), pp. 61–82. Edmunds, Lowell, and Robert W. Wallace (eds), Poet, Public, and Performance in Ancient Greece (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Ehrman, Bart, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Ehrman, Bart, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005). Ehrman, Bart. The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edn, 2004). Ehrman, Bart, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Ehrman, Bart, ‘The Text as Window: New Testament Manuscripts and the Social History of Early Christianity’, in The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis’ (ed. Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 361–79.

274

Works Cited

Ehrman, Bart, and Michael W. Holmes (ed.), The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis’ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995). Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Ellis, Andrew W. (ed.), Progress in the Psychology of Language (London and Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1985). Elman, Yaakov, Authority and Tradition: Toseftan Baraitot in Talmudic Babylonia (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1994). Elman, Yaakov, ‘Authoritative Oral Tradition in Neo-Assyrian Scribal Circles’, JANESCU 7 (1975), pp. 19–32. Elman, Yaakov, and Israel Gershoni (eds), Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Ephrat, Daphna, and Yaakov Elman, ‘Orality and the Institutionalization of Tradition: the Growth of the Geonic Yeshiva and the Islamic Madrasa’, in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion (ed. Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 107–37. Epp, Jay Eldon, ‘The Multivalence of the Term “Original Text” in New Testament Textual Criticism’, HTR 92 (1999), pp. 245–83. Epp, Jay Eldon, ‘The Oxyrhynchus New Testament Papyri: “Not without honor except in their own hometown”?’ JBL 123 (2004), pp. 5–55. Epp, Jay Eldon, and Gordon D. Fee (eds), New Testament Textual Criticism: Its Significance for Exegesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). Erll, Astrid, Memory in Culture (trans. Sara B. Young; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Erll, Astrid, and Klaudia Seibel, ‘Gattungen, Formtraditionen und kulturelles Gedächtnis’, in Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies (ed. V. Nünning and A. Nünning; Weimar: Metzler, 2004), pp. 180–208. Erll, Astrid, and Ansgar Nünning (eds), A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010). Erll, Astrid, and Ansgar Nünning (eds), Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses: Konstruktivität – Historizität – Kulturspezifität (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2004). Fantham, Elaine, ‘Two Levels of Orality in the Genesis of Pliny’s Panegyricus’, in Signs of Orality: The Oral Tradition and its Influence in the Greek and Roman World (ed. E. Anne MacKay ; Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 221–37. Farmer, Sarah Bennett, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradoursur-Glane (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). Farmer, William R., The Synoptic Problem: A Critical Analysis (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1964). Feldman, Carol Fleisher, ‘Genres as Mental Models’, in Psychoanalysis and Development: Representations and Narratives (ed. Massimo Ammaniti and Daniel Stern; New York: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 111–22. Feldman, Carol Fleisher, ‘Oral Metalanguage’, in Literacy and Orality (ed. D. R. Olson and N. Torrance; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 47–65. Fentress, James, and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Fine, Gary Alan, ‘Reputational Entrepreneurs and the Memory of Incompetence’, AJS 191 (1996), pp. 1169–93. Finkelberg, Margalit, ‘Homer as Foundation Text’, in Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (ed. Margelit Finkelberg and Guy G. Strousma JSRC, 2; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), pp. 74–96.

Works Cited

275

Finkelberg, Margalit, and Guy G. Strousma (eds), Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (JSRC, 2; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003). Finnegan, Ruth, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). Finnegan, Ruth, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1977). Finnegan, Ruth, Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Fishbane, Michael, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). Fishbane, Michael, ‘From Scribalism to Rabbinism: Perspectives on the Emergence of Classical Judaism’, in Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Michael Fishbane; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 64–78. Fishbane, S., et al.; Essays in the Social Scientific Study of Judaism and Jewish Society (New York: Ktav, 2 vols., 1992). Flint, Peter W., and James C. Vanderkam (eds), The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2 vols., 1998). Floyd, Michael H., ‘“Write the revelation!” (Hab 2:2): Re-imagining the Cultural History of Prophecy’, in Writings and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy (ed. Ehud Ben Zvi and Michael H. Floyd; Atlanta: SBL, 2003), pp. 103–43. Foley, John Miles, Homer’s Traditional Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). Foley, John Miles. ‘Memory in Oral Tradition’, in Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark (ed. Richard A. Horsley, et al.; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), pp. 83–96. Foley, John Miles, The Singer of Tales in Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Foley, John Miles, Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990). Foley, John Miles (ed.), Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1987). Foster, Paul, ‘Memory, Orality, and the Fourth Gospel: Three Dead-Ends in Historical Jesus Research’, JSHJ 10 (2012), pp. 191–227. Foster, Paul, Andrew Gregory, John S. Kloppenborg and Joseph Verheyden (eds), New Studies in the Synoptic Problem (BETL, 239; Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 2011). Focant, C. (ed.), The Synoptic Gospels: Source Criticism and the New Literary Criticism (edBETL, 110; Leuven: Peeters, 1993). Fraade, Steven D., ‘Literary Composition and Oral Performance in Early Midrashim’, OT 14 (1999), pp. 33–51. Freyne, Sean, Jesus, A Jewish Galilean: A New Reading of the Jesus-story (London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2004). Fried, Johannes, Der Schleier der Erinnerung: Grundzüge einer historischen Memorik (Munich: Beck 2004). Frow, John, Genre (London and New York: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2015). Fuchs, O., and B. Janowski (eds.), Die Macht der Erinnerung (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2008). Funk, Robert W., and Roy W. Hoover, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993). Gamble, Harry, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995).

276

Works Cited

Gamble, Harry, ‘Literacy, Liturgy, and the Shaping of the New Testament Canon’, in The Earliest Gospels: The Origins and Transmission of the Earliest Christian Gospels – the Contribution of the Chester Beatty Gospel Codex P45 (ed. Charles Horton; JSNTSup, 259; London and New York: T&T Clark, 2004), pp. 26–39. Gathercole Peter, and David Lowenthal (eds), The Politics of the Past (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990). Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Georgoudi, Stella, ‘Commémoration et célébration des morts dans les cites grecques: les rites annuels’, in La commémoration (ed. Philippe Gignoux; Paris: Peeters, 1988), pp. 73–89. Gergen, Kenneth J., ‘Mind, Text, and Society: Self-Memory in Social Context’, in The Remembering Self (ed. Ulric Neisser and Robin Fivush; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 78–104. Gerhardsson, Birger, The Gospel Tradition (ConBNT 15; Lund: Gleerup, 1986). Gerhardsson, Birger. ‘Illuminating the Kingdom: Narrative Meshalim in the Synoptic Gospels’, in Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition (ed. Henry Wansbrough; JSNTSup, 64; Sheffield: JSOT, 1991), pp. 266–309. Gerhardsson, Birger, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Grand Rapids and Livonia: Eerdmans and Dove, 1998 [reprint 1961]). Gerhardsson, Birger, The Origins of the Gospel Traditions (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979). Gerhardsson, Birger, ‘The Path of the Gospel Tradition’, in The Gospel and the Gospels (trans. John Bowden and John Vriend; ed. Peter Stuhlmacher; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991). Gerhardsson, Birger, ‘The Secret of the Transmission of the Unwritten Jesus Tradition’, NTS 51 (2005), pp. 1–18. Gerhardsson, Birger, Tradition and Transmission in Early Christianity (ConBNT, 20; Lund and Copenhagen: Gleerup and Munksgaard, 1964). Gignoux, Philippe (ed.), La commémoration (Paris: Peeters, 1988). Gillis, John R., ‘Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship’, in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (ed. John R. Gillis; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 3–24. Gillis, John R (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Goetsch, Paul, et al. (eds), Zwischen Festtag und Alltag: Zehn Beträge zum Thema Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit (Tübingen: Narr, 1988). Gomila, Antoni, ‘Mending or Abandoning Cognitivism?’ in Meaning and Cognition (ed. Manuel de Vega; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 357–74. Goodacre, Mark, The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002). Goodacre, Mark, Goulder and the Gospels: An Examination of a New Paradigm (JSNTSup, 133; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). Goodacre, Mark, The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2001). Goodacre, Mark, and Nicholas Perrin (eds), Questioning Q: A Multidimensional Critique (Downers Grove; Intervarsity Press, 2004). Goody, Jack, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Goody, Jack, The Power of the Written Tradition (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000).

Works Cited

277

Goulder, Michael D., ‘Is Q a Juggernaut?’, JBL 115 (1996), pp. 667–81. Goulder, Michael D., Luke: A New Paradigm (JSNTSup, 20; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989). Goulder, Michael D., Midrash and Lection in Matthew (London, SPCK, 1974). Goulder, Michael D., ‘On Putting Q to the Test’, NTS 24 (1978), pp. 218–34. Goulder, Michael D., ‘The Order of a Crank’, in Synoptic Studies: The Ampleforth Conferences of 1982 and 1983 (ed. C. M. Tuckett ; JSNTSup, 7; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1984), pp. 111–30. Greenstein, Edward L., ‘Misquotation of Scripture in the Dead Sea Scrolls’, in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume, vol. 1 (ed. Barry Walfish; Haifa: Haifa University Press, 1993), pp. 71–83. Haaken, Janice, and Paula Reavey (eds), Memory Matters: Contexts for Understanding Sexual Abuse Recollections (New York: Routledge, 2010). Häfner, Gerd, ‘Das End der Kriterien? Jesusforschung angesichts der geschichtstheoretischen Diskussion’, in Historiographie und fiktionales Erzählen: Zur Konstruktivität in Geschichtstheorie und Exegese (ed. Knut Backhaus and Gerd Häfner; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2007), pp. 97–130. Haines-Eitzen, Kim, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Halbwachs, Maurice, On Collective Memory (trans. and ed. Lewis A. Coser; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1952]). Halbwachs, Maurice, The Collective Memory (trans. Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter; New York: Harper and Row, 1980 [La mémoire collective, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950]). Halpern Amaru, Betsy, ‘The Killing of the Prophets: Unravelling a Midrash’, HUCA 54 (1983), pp. 153–80. Handler, Richard, and Jocelyn Linnekin, ‘Tradition, Genuine or Spurious’, JAmFolk 97 (1984), pp. 273–90. Hanks, W. F., ‘Texts and Textuality’, AnRevAnth 18 (1989), pp. 95–127. Harris, C. B., H. M. Paterson and R. I. Kemp, ‘Collaborative Recall and Collective Memory: What Happens When We Remember Together’, Memory 16 (2008), pp. 213–30. Harris, William, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Hasher, Lynn, ‘Inhibition: Attentional Regulation of Cognition’, in Science of Memory: Concepts (ed. Henry L. Roediger III, et al.; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 291–4. Hawkins, John C., Horae Synopticae (Oxford: Clarendon, 2nd edn, 1909). Hawkins, John C. ‘Probabilities as to the So-called Double Tradition of St. Matthew and St. Luke’, in Studies in the Synoptic Problem (ed. William Sanday ; Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), pp. 96–138. Hayden, Robert M., ‘Recounting the Dead: The Rediscovery and Redefinition of Wartime Massacres in Late- and Post-Communist Yugoslavia’, in Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism (ed. Rubie S. Watson; Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1994), pp. 167–84. Head, Peter M., ‘On the Christology of the Gospel of Peter’, VigChr 46 (1992), pp. 209–24. Heckel, Theo K., Vom Evangelium des Markus zum viergestaltigen Evangelium (WUNT, 120; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1999). Heelas, Paul, et al. (eds), De-traditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity in a Time of Uncertainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

278

Works Cited

Hervieu-Léger, Danièle,‘Religion as Memory: Reference to Tradition and the Constitution of a Heritage of Belief in Modern Societies’, in The Pragmatics of Defining Religion: Contexts, Concepts and Contests (ed. Jan G. Platvoet and Arie L. Molendijk; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999), pp. 71–92. Hezser, Catherine, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (TSAJ, 81; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001). Himbaza, Innocent, ‘Le Décalogue du Papyrus Nash, Philon, 4QphylG, 8QPhy13 et 4Qmez’, RevQ 79 (2002), pp. 411–28. Hirst, William, and David Manier, ‘Remembering as Communication: A Family Recounts its Past’, in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (ed. David C. Rubin; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 271–90. Hjärpe, Jan, ‘La commémoration religieuse comme légitimation politique dans le monde muselman contemporain’, in La commémoration (ed. Philippe Gignoux; Paris: Peeters, 1988), pp. 333–41. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Holmberg, Bengt (ed.), Exploring Early Christian Identity (WUNT, 226; Tübingen: MohrSiebeck, 2008). Holmén, Thomas, and Stanley E. Porter (eds), Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 4 vols., 2011). Hoppe, Rudolf, and Ulrich Busse (eds), Von Jesus zum Christus: christologische Studien (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998). Horsley, Richard A., and Jonathan A. Draper, Whoever Hears You Hears Me: Prophets, Performance, and Tradition in Q (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999). Horsley, Richard A, Jonathan A. Draper and John Miles Foley (eds), Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006). Horton, Charles (ed.), The Earliest Gospels: The Origins and Transmission of the Earliest Christian Gospels – the Contribution of the Chester Beatty Gospel Codex P45 (JSNTSup, 259; London and New York: T&T Clark, 2004). Humphrey, J. H. (ed.), Literacy in the Roman World (JRASup, 3; Ann Arbor: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1991). Hunter, Ian M. L., ‘Lengthy Verbatim Recall: The Role of Text’, in Progress in the Psychology of Language, vol. 1 (ed. Andrew W. Ellis; London and Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1985), pp. 207–34. Hurford, James R., ‘Review of Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species’, Times Literary Supplement (October 23, 1998), p. 34. Hutchins, Edwin, ‘Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends’, JPrag 37 (2005), pp. 1555–77. Jaffee, Martin, ‘Gender and Otherness in Rabbinic Oral Culture: On Gentiles, Undisciplined Jews, and their Women’, in Performing the Gospel. Orality, Memory, and Mark (ed. Richard A. Horsley, et al.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), pp. 21–43. Jaffee, Martin, ‘The Oral-Cultural Context of the Talmud Yerushalmi: Greco-Roman Rhetorical Paideia, Discipleship, and the Concept of Oral Torah’, in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion (ed. Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 27–73. Jaffee, Martin, ‘Oral Tradition in the Writings of Rabbinic Oral Torah: On Theorizing Rabbinic Orality’, OT 14 (1999), pp. 3–32. Jaffee, Martin, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism 200 B.C.E.–400 C.E. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Works Cited

279

Jaffee, Martin, ‘Writing and Rabbinic Oral Tradition: On Mishnaic Narrative, Lists and Mnemonics’, JJewThPhil 4 (1994), pp. 123–46. Jenkins, Philip, The New Faces of Christianity. Believing the Bible in the Global South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Junack, Klaus, ‘Abschreibpraktiken und Schreibergewohnheiten in ihrer Auswirkung auf die Textüberlieferung’, in New Testament Textual Criticism: Its Significance for Exegesis (ed. Eldon Jay Epp and Gordon D. Fee; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 277–95. Jung, Jun, The Temple of Memories: History, Power, and Morality in a Chinese Village (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Kannaday, Wayne C., Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition: Evidence of the Influence of Apologetic Interests in the Text of the Canonical Gospels (Atlanta: SBL, 2004). Karnetzki, Manfred, ‘Textgeschichte als Überlieferungsgeschichte’, ZNW 47 (1956), pp. 170–80. Keith, Chris, Jesus Against the Scribal Elite: The Origins of the Conflict (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2014). Keith, Chris. ‘Memory and Authenticity: Jesus Tradition and What Really Happened’, ZNW 102 (2011), pp. 155–77. Kelber, Werner H., ‘The Case of the Gospels: Memory’s Desire and the Limits of Historical Criticism’, OT 17 (2002), pp. 55–86. Kelber, Werner H. ‘The Generative Force of Memory: Early Christian Tradition as a Process of Remembering’, BTB 36 (2006), pp. 15–22. Kelber, Werner H., The Oral and the Written Gospel:The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997 [reprint 1983]). Kelber, Werner H., ‘The Works of Memory: Christian Origins as Mnemo-History – a Response’, in Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity (ed. Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher; Semeia Studies 52; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2005), pp. 221–48. Kelber, Werner H., and Samuel Byrskog (eds), Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009). Kennedy, George, ‘Classical and Christian Source Criticism’, in The Relationships Among the Gospels: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (ed. William O. Walker; San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1978), pp. 125–55. Kirk, Alan, ‘The Formation of the Synoptic Tradition: Cognitive and Cultural Approaches to an Old Problem’, in Social Memory and Social Identity in the Study of Early Judaism and Early Christianity (ed. Samuel Byrskog, Raimo Hakola and Jutta Jokiranta; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016). Kirk, Alan, The Composition of the Sayings Source (NovTSup, 91; Leiden: Brill, 1999). Kirk, Alan, ‘Ehrman, Bauckham, and Bird on Memory and the Jesus Tradition’, JSHJ 15 (2017), pp. 88–114. Kirk, Alan, ‘Examining Priorities: Another Look at the Gospel of Peter’s Relationship to the New Testament Gospels’, NTS 40 (1994), pp. 572–95. Kirk, Alan, ‘Peasant Wisdom, the ‘Our Father’, and the Origins of Christianity’, TJT 15 (1999). Kirk, Alan, and Tom Thatcher (eds), Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity (Semeia Studies 52; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005). Kitayama, Shinobu, and Dov Cohen (eds), Handbook of Cultural Psychology (New York: Guilford, 2007). Kloppenborg, John S., Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000).

280

Works Cited

Kloppenborg, John S., The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987). Kloppenborg, John S. ‘Goulder and the New Paradigm: A Critical Appreciation of Michael Goulder on the Synoptic Problem’, in The Gospels According to Michael Goulder: A North American Response (ed. C. A. Rollston; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002), pp. 29–60. Kloppenborg, John S., ‘The Reception of the Jesus Traditions in James’, in The Catholic Epistles and the Tradition (ed. Jacques Schlosser; BETL, 176; Leuven: Peeters, 2004), pp. 93–141. Kloppenborg, John S., ‘Variation and Reproduction of the Double Tradition and an Oral Q?’, ETL 83 (2007), pp. 53–80. Knappett, C., and L. Malafouris (eds), Material Agency: Toward a Non-anthropocentric Approach (New York: Springer, 2007). Koester, Helmut, Ancient Christian Gospels (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International; London: SCM, 1990). Koester, Helmut, ‘The Memory of Jesus’ Death and the Worship of the Risen Lord’, HTR, 91 (1998), pp. 335–50. Koester, Helmut, Synoptische Überlieferung bei den apostolischen Vätern (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1957). Koester, Helmut, ‘Writings and the Spirit: Authority and Politics in Ancient Christianity’, HTR 84 (1991), pp. 353–72. Koriat, Asher, ‘Remembering: Metacognitive Monitoring and Control Processes’, in Science of Memory: Concepts (ed. Henry L. Roediger III et al.; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 243–6. Koriat, Asher, Morris Goldsmith and Ainat Pansky, ‘Toward a Psychology of Memory Accuracy’, AnRevPsych 51 (2000), pp. 431–587. Lampe, G. W. H., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Le Donne, Anthony, The Historical Jesus: What Can We Know and How Can We Know It? (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2011) Le Donne, Anthony, The Historiographical Jesus: Memory, Typology, and the Son of David (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009). Le Donne, Anthony, ‘Theological Memory Distortion in the Jesus Tradition: A Study in Social Memory Theory’, in Memory in the Bible and Antiquity (ed. Stephen C. Barton, et al.; WUNT, 212; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2007), pp. 162–77. Leonhard, Nina, ‘Politikbewußtsein und Vergangenheitsbezug in der dritten Generation: Ein Forschungsprojekt zum Wandel der Erinnerung an Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust’, in ‘Uns hat keiner gefragt’: Positionen der dritten Generation zur Bedeutung des Holocaust (ed. Jens Fabian Pyper; Berlin and Wien: Philo, 2002), pp. 67–101. Limor, Oral, and Guy G. Strousma (eds), Contra Iudaeos: Ancient and Medieval Polemics between Christians and Jews (TSMEMT, 10; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1996). Loewe, Raphael, ‘The Medieval History of the Latin Vulgate’, in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation (ed. G. W. H. Lampe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 102–54. Longstaff, T. R. W., Evidence of Conflation in Mark? A Study of the Synoptic Problem (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977). Lord, Albert B., The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2nd edn, 2000).

Works Cited

281

Loubser, J. A., Oral and Manuscript Culture in the Bible: Studies in the Media Texture of the New Testament (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2007). Lowe, E. J., ‘Personal Experience and Belief: the Significance of External Symbolic Storage for the Emergence of Modern Human Cognition’, in Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage (ed. Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre; Cambridge: MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998), pp. 89–96. Lowenthal, David, ‘Conclusion: Archaelogists and Others’, in The Politics of the Past (ed. Peter Gathercole and David Lowenthal; Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), pp. 302–14. Lowenthal, David, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Lührmann, Dieter, Die apokryph gewordenen Evangelien: Studien zu neuen Texten und zu neuen Fragen (NovT Sup, 112; Leiden: Brill, 2004). Luz, Ulrich, Matthew 1-7: A Commentary (trans. James E. Crouch; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007). Luz, Ulrich, ‘Matthäus und Q’, in Von Jesus zum Christus: christologische Studien (ed. Rudolf Hoppe and Ulrich Busse; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 201–15. MacKay, E. Anne (ed.), Signs of Orality: The Oral Tradition and its Influence in the Greek and Roman World (Leiden: Brill, 1999). Malafouris, Lambros, ‘The Brain-Artefact Interface (BAI): a Challenge for Archaeology and Cultural Neuro-science’, SCAN 5 (2010) 264–73. Malafouris, Lambros, and Colin Renfrew, ‘The Cognitive Life of Things: Archaeology, Material Engagement, and the Extended Mind’, in The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind (ed. Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew ; Cambridge: MacDonald Institute of Archaeology, 2010), pp. 1–12. Malafouris, Lambros, and Colin Renfrew (eds), The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind (Cambridge: MacDonald Institute of Archaeology, 2010). Malkki, Liisa H., Purity and Exile: Violence Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Mandel, Paul, ‘Between Byzantium and Islam: The Transmission of a Jewish Book in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods’, in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion (ed. Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 74–106. Mandler, Jean M., Stories, Scripts, and Scenes: Aspects of Schema Theory (Hillsdale, NJ and London: Erlbaum, 1984). Mandler, Jean M., and Nancy S. Johnson, ‘Remembrance of Things Parsed: Story Structure and Recall’, CognPsych 9 (1977), pp. 111–51. Manier, David, and William Hirst, ‘A Cognitive Taxonomy of Collective Memories’, in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning; Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 253–61. Markowitsch, Hans J., ‘Cultural Memory and the Neurosciences’, in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, eds., Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 275–83. Markschies, Christoph, ‘The Canon of the New Testament in Antiquity: Some New Horizons for Future Research’, in Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (ed. Margalit Finkelberg and Guy G. Strousma; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2002), pp. 175–94. Marshall, Howard I., The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978).

282

Works Cited

McDonnell, Myles, ‘Writing, Copying, and Autograph Manuscripts in Ancient Rome’, in CQ N.S. 46 (1996), pp. 469–91. McIver, Robert K., Memory, Jesus, and the Synoptic Gospels (SBLRBS, 59; Atlanta: SBL, 2011). McNicol, Allan J., David L. Dungan and David P. Peabody (eds), Beyond the Q Impasse: Luke’s Use of Matthew (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996). Mead, George H., ‘The Nature of the Past’, in Essays in Honor of John Dewey (ed. Jay Coss; New York: Holt, 1929), pp. 235–42. Menary, Richard (ed.), The Extended Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Merten, Klaus, et al. (ed.), Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaft (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994). Meyer, Ben F., The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1979). Metzger, Bruce M., and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn, 2005). Michnic-Coren, Joanna, ‘The Troubling Past: The Polish Collective Memory of the Holocaust’, EastEurJewAff 29 (1999), pp. 74–84. Middleton, David, and Derek Edwards (eds), Collective Remembering (London: Sage, 1990). Mikolajczyk, Andrzej, ‘Didactic Presentations of the Past: Some Retrospective Considerations in Relation to the Archaeological and Ethnographical Museum, Lódz, Poland’, in The Politics of the Past (ed. Peter Gathercole and David Lowenthal; Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), pp. 247–56. Morgan, Teresa, ‘Literate Education in Classical Athens,’ CQ N.S. 49 (1999), pp. 46–61. Morgan, Teresa, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Moxter, Michael, ‘Erzählung und Ereignis: Über den Spielraum historischer Repräsentation’, in Der historische Jesus: Tendenzen und Perspektive der gegenwärtigen Forschung (ed. Jens Schröter and Ralph Brucker; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 67–88. Mulder, Martin Jan (ed.), Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004). Namer, Gérard, Halbwachs et la mémoire sociale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000). Namer, Gérard. Mémoire et société (Paris: Méridiens Lincksieck, 1987). Neal, Arthur G., National Trauma and Collective Memory (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1998). Neisser, Ulric, ‘Memory: What are the Important Questions’, in Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts (ed. Ulric Neisser; San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1982), pp. 3–20. Neisser, Ulric (ed.), Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts (San Francisco: W. H Freeman, 1982). Neisser, Ulric, and Robin Fivush (eds), The Remembering Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Neirynck, Frans, ‘Matthew 4:23-5:2 and the Matthean Composition of 4:23-11:1’, in The Interrelations of the Gospels (ed. David L. Dungan; BETL, 95; Leuven: Peeters, 1990), pp. 23–46. Neirynck, Frans, ‘QMt and QLk and the Reconstruction of Q’, ETL 66 (1990), pp. 385–90. Neirynck, Frans, ‘Synoptic Problem’, in The New Jerome Bible Commentary (ed. Raymond E. Brown; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall), 1990), pp. 587–95. Neusner, Jacob, Oral Tradition in Judaism: The Case of the Mishnah (New York and London: Garland, 1987).

Works Cited

283

Neville, David J., Mark’s Gospel – Prior or Posterior? A Reappraisal of the Phenomenon of Order (JSNTSup, 222; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). Nicklas, Tobias, ‘Die “Juden” im Petrusevangelium (PCair 10759): Ein Testfall’, NTS 46 (2000), pp. 206–21. Nineham, D. E., ‘Eyewitness Testimony and the Gospel Tradition’, JTS n.s. 9 (1958), pp. 13–25, 243–52; JTS n.s. 11 (1960), pp. 253–64. Nissinen, Martti, ‘Spoken, Written, Quoted, and Invented: Orality and Writtenness in Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy’, in Writing and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy (ed. Ehud Ben Zvi and Michael H. Floyd; Atlanta: SBL, 2000), pp. 235–71. Nora, Pierre, ‘The Era of Commemoration’, in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 3 (ed. Pierre Nora; trans. Arthur Goldhammer; New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 609–37. Nora, Pierre, and Lawrence D. Dritzman (eds), Realms of Memory (trans. Arthur Goldhammer; New York: Columbia University Press, 3 vols., 1996–8). Norenzayan, Ara, Incheol Choi and Kaiping Pen, ‘Perception and Cognition’, in Handbook of Cultural Psychology (ed. Shinobu Kitayama and Dov Cohen; New York: Guilford, 2007), pp. 569–644. Nünning, V., and A. Nünning, Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies (Weimar: Metzler, 2004). O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger (ed.), The Critical Study of Sacred Texts (Berkeley: Graduate Theological Union, 1979). Olick, Jeffrey K., ‘Collective Memory: The Two Cultures’, ST 17 (1999), pp. 333–48. Olick, Jeffrey K., ‘Genre Memories and Memory Genres: A Dialogical Analysis of May 8, 1945 Commemorations in the Federal Republic of Germany’, ASR 64 (1999), pp. 381–42. Olick, Jeffrey K., and Daniel Levy, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Constraint: Holocaust Myth and Rationality in German Politics’, ASR 62 (1997), pp. 921–36. Olick, Jeffrey K., and Joyce Robbins, ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices’, ASR 24 (1988), pp. 105–40. Olson, David, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Olson, David, and N. Torrance (eds), Literacy and Orality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Olson, Ken, ‘Unpicking on the Farrer Theory’, in Questioning Q: A Multidimensional Critique (ed. Mark Goodacre and Nicholas Perrin; Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2004), pp. 127–50. Ortner, Sherry B., ‘On Key Symbols’, AmAnth N.S. 75 (1973), pp. 1338–46. Parker, David C., The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Parks, Ward, ‘Orality and Poetics: Synchrony, Diachrony, and the Axes of Narrative Transmission’, in Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry (ed. John Miles Foley ; Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1987), pp. 511–32. Parks, Ward, ‘The Textualization of Orality in Literary Criticism’, in Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages (ed. A. N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternak; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 46–61. Peabody, David B., with Lamar Cope and Allan J. McNicol, One Gospel from Two: Mark’s Use of Matthew and Luke (Harrisburg PA: Trinity Press International, 2002). Pelling, C. B. R., ‘Plutarch’s Method of Work in the Roman Lives’, JHS 99 (1979), pp. 74–96.

284

Works Cited

Peri, Yoram, ‘The Media and Collective Memory of Yitzhak Rabin’s Remembrance’, JComm 49 (1999), pp. 106–24. Petersen, Jeffrey, ‘Order in the Double Tradition and the Existence of Q’, in Questioning Q: A Multidimensional Critique (ed. Mark Goodacre and Nicholas Perrin; Downers Grove; Intervarsity Press, 2004), pp. 28–42. Petersen, William L., Tatian’s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History of Scholarship (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1994). Plantinga, Alvin, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Platvoet, Jan G., and Arie L. Molendijk (eds), The Pragmatics of Defining Religion: Contexts, Concepts and Contests (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999). Prager, Jeffrey, Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Pyper, Jens Fabian (ed.), ‘Uns hat keiner gefragt’: Positionen der dritten Generation zur Bedeutung des Holocaust (Berlin and Wien: Philo Verlag, 2002). Rainey, Anson F., ‘The Scribe at Ugarit’, Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 3 (1969), pp. 126–46. Redford, Donald B., ‘Scribe and Speaker’, in Writings and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy (ed. Ehud Ben Zvi and Michael H. Floyd; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), pp. 145–218. Redman, Judith, ‘How Accurate Are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research’, JBL 129 (2010), pp. 177–97. Reese, Elaine, and Robyn Fivush, ‘The Development of Collective Remembering’, Memory 16 (2008), pp. 201–12. Renfrew, Colin, and Chris Scarre (eds), Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage (Cambridge: MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998). Reynolds, L. D., and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 3rd edn, 1991). Robbins, Philip, and Murat Aydede (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Robbins, Vernon K., ‘Progymnastic Rhetorical Composition and the Pre-Gospel Traditions: A New Approach’, in The Synoptic Gospels: Source Criticism and the New Literary Criticism (ed. C. Focant; BETL, 110; Leuven: Peeters, 1993), pp. 111–47. Robbins, Vernon K., ‘Writing as a Rhetorical Act in Plutarch and the Gospels’, in Persuasive Artistry: Studies in New Testament Rhetoric in Honor of George A. Kennedy (ed. Duane F. Watson; JSNTSup, 50; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), pp. 142–68. Roediger, Henry L. III, et al. (eds.), Science of Memory: Concepts (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Roediger, Henry L. III, and Fergus I. M. Craik (eds), Varieties of Memory and Consciousness: Essays in Honour of Endel Tulving (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1989) Rollston, C. A. (ed.), The Gospels According to Michael Goulder: A North American Response (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002). Rosenzweig, Roy, and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Royse, James R., ‘Scribal Habits in the Transmission of New Testament Texts’, in The Critical Study of Sacred Texts (ed. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty ; Berkeley : Graduate Theological Union, 1979) pp. 139–61.

Works Cited

285

Rubin, David C., Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Rubin, David C. (ed.), Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Rupert, Robert D., ‘Challenges to the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition’, JPhil 101 (2004), pp. 389–428. Russo, Joseph, ‘Prose Genres for Performance of Traditional Wisdom in Ancient Greece: Proverb, Maxim, Apothegm’, in Poet, Public, and Performance in Ancient Greece (ed. Lowell Edmunds and Robert W. Wallace; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 49–64. Sanday, William (ed.), Studies in the Synoptic Problem (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911). Sanders, James A., ‘The Scrolls and the Canonical Process’, in The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, vol. 2 (ed. Peter Flint and James Vanderkam; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999), pp. 1–23. Sapir, Edward, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir (ed. David G. Mandelbaum; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949). Sasson, Jack M. (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 4 vols., 1995). Satran, David, ‘Anti-Jewish Polemic in the Peri Pascha of Melito of Sardis: The Problem of Social Context’, in Contra Iudaeos: Ancient and Medieval Polemics between Christians and Jews (ed. Oral Limor and Guy G. Strousma; TSMEMJ, 10; Tübingen: MohrSiebeck, 1996), pp. 49–58. Savage, Kirk, ‘The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Movement’, in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (ed. John R. Gillis; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 127–49. Schacter, Daniel L., Searching for Memory: The Brain, The Mind, and the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1996). Schacter, Daniel L., The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001). Schacter, Daniel L., Kenneth A. Norman and Wilma Koutstaal, ‘The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory’, AnRevPsych 49 (1998), pp. 289–318. Schacter, Daniel L. (ed.), Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Schaeffer, Susan E., ‘The “Gospel of Peter”, the Canonical Gospels, and Oral Tradition’ (Ph.D. diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1991). Schäfer, Peter, ‘Once again the Status Quaestionis of Research in Rabbinic Literature: An Answer to Chaim Milikowsky’, JJS 40 (1989), pp. 89–94. Schäfer, Peter ‘Research into Rabbinic Literature: An Attempt to Define the Status Quaestionis’, JJS 37 (1986), pp. 139–52. Schlosser, Jacques (ed.), The Catholic Epistles and the Tradition (Leuven: Peeters, 2004). Schmidt, Siegfried J., Kognitive Autonomie und soziale Orientierung: konstruktivistische Bemerkungen zum Zusammenhang von Kognition, Kommunikation, Medien und Kultur (Münster: Lit Verlag, 3rd edn, 2003). Schmidt, Siegfried J, and Siegfried Weischenberg, ‘Mediengattungen, Berichterstattungsmuster, Darstellungsformen’, in Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaft (ed. Klaus Merton, Siegfried J. Schmidt, and Siegfried Weischenberg; Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994), pp. 212–36. Schnackenburg, Rudolf, The Gospel According to St. John, vol. 3: Chapters 13-21 (trans. David Smith and G. A. Kon; New York: Crossroad, 1987).

286

Works Cited

Schröter, Jens, Erinnerung an Jesu Worte: Studien zur Rezeption der Logienüberlieferung in Markus, Q, und Thomas (WMANT, 76; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1997). Schröter, Jens, From Jesus to the New Testament: Early Christian Theology and the Origin of the New Testament Canon (trans. Wayne Coppins; Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013), pp. 96–99. Schröter, Jens. ‘The Historical Jesus and the Sayings Tradition: Comments on Current Research’, Neot 30 (1996), pp. 151–68. Schröter, Jens, ‘Von der Historizität der Evangelien: Ein Beitrag zur gegenwärtigen Diskussion um den historischen Jesus’, in Der historische Jesus: Tendenzen und Perspektive der gegenwärtigen Forschung (ed. Jens Schröter and Ralph Brucker; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 163–212. Schröter, Jens, and Ralph Brucker (eds), Der historische Jesus: Tendenzen und Perspektive der gegenwärtigen Forschung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002). Schudson, Michael, ‘The Present in the Past versus the Past in the Present’, Comm 11 (1989), pp. 105–13. Schudson, Michael, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1992). Schuman, Howard and Jacqueline Scott, “Generations and Collective Memories”’, ASR 54 (1989), pp. 359–81. Schwartz, Barry, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Schwartz, Barry, ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Past’, QualSoc 18 (1995), pp. 263–70. Schwartz, Barry, ‘Frame Image: Towards a Semiotics of Collective Memory’, Semiotica 121 (1998), pp. 1–38. Schwartz, Barry, ‘Jesus in First-century Memory: A Response’, in Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity (ed. Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher; Semeia Studies 52; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), pp. 249–61. Schwartz, Barry, ‘Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II’, ASR 61 (1996), pp. 908–27. Schwartz, Barry, ‘Postmodernity and Historical Reputation: Abraham Lincoln in Late Twentieth-Century American Memory’, SocForces 77 (1998), pp. 63–103. Schwartz, Barry, ‘Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington’, ASR 56 (1991), pp. 221–36. Schwartz, Barry, ‘The Reconstruction of Abraham Lincoln’, in Collective Remembering (ed. David Middleton and Derek Edwards; London: Sage, 1990), pp. 81–107. Schwartz, Barry, ‘Rereading the Gettysburg Address: Social Change and Collective Memory’, QualSoc 19 (1996), pp. 395–422. Schwartz, Barry, ‘The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory’, SocForces 61 (1982), pp. 374–402. Schwartz, Barry, ‘Collective Forgetting and the Symbolic Power of Oneness: the Strange Apotheosis of Rosa Parks’, SocPsychQ 72 (2009), pp. 123–42. Schwartz, Barry, and Eugene Miller, ‘The Icon and the Word: A Study of the Visual Depiction of Moral Character’, Semiotica 61 (1986), pp. 69–99. Schwarz, Vera, Bridge Across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Scott, Shaunna L., ‘Dead Work: The Construction and Reconstruction of the Harlan Miners Memorial’, QualSoc 19 (1996), pp. 365–93.

Works Cited

287

Scruton, Roger, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Sedgwick, W. B., ‘Reading and Writing in Classical Antiquity’, ContempRev 135 (1990), pp. 90–94. Segal, Eliezer, ‘Anthological Dimensions of the Babylonian Talmud’, in The Anthology in Jewish Literature (ed. David Stern; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 81–107. Shaked, Shaul, ‘Scripture and Exegesis in Zoroastrianism’, in Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (ed. Margelit Finkelberg and Guy G. Strousma; JSRC, 2; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), pp. 63–74. Shanks Alexander, Elizabeth, ‘The Fixing of Oral Mishnah and the Displacement of Meaning’, OT 14 (1999), pp. 100–39. Shils, Edward, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Simondon, M., ‘Les modes du discours commémoratif en Grèce ancienne’, in La commémoration (ed. Philippe Gignoux ; Paris: Peeters, 1988), pp. 91–105. Small, Jocelyn Penny, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1997). Smith, Eliot R., and Sarah Queller, ‘Mental Representations’, in Social Cognition (ed. Marilynn B. Brewer and Miles Hewstone; Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 5–27. Smith, Morton, ‘A Comparison of Early Christian and Early Rabbinic Tradition’, JBL 82 (1963), pp. 169–76. Snyder, H. Gregory, Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World: Philosophers, Jews, and Christians (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Spear, Norman E., ‘Retrieval: Properties and Effects,’ in Science of Memory: Concepts (ed. Henry L. Roediger III, et al.; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). pp. 215–19. Sperber, Daniel, ‘Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations’, Man 20 (1975), pp. 73–89. Squire, Larry R., and Eric R. Kandel, Memory: From Mind to Molecules (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999). Starr, Raymond, ‘The Circulation of Literary Texts in the Roman World’, CQ N.S. 37 (1987), pp. 213–23. Stern, David, ‘On Canonization in Rabbinic Judaism’, in Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (ed. Margelit Finkelberg and Guy G. Strousma; JSRC, 2; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), pp. 227–52. Stern, David (ed.), The Anthology in Jewish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Stewart, Robert B., and Gary R. Habermas, Memories of Jesus; A Critical Appraisal of James D. G. Dunn’s Jesus Remembered (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2010). Stock, Brian, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Strack, H. L., and Günter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2nd edn, 1996). Strauss, Claudia, and Naomi Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Straub, Jürgen, ‘Psychology, Narrative, and Cultural Memory: Past and Present’, in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 215–28. Streeter, B. H., The Four Gospels (London: MacMillan, 1936).

288

Works Cited

Streeter, B. H. ‘Mark’s Knowledge and Use of Q’, in Studies in the Synoptic Problem (ed. William Sanday ; Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), pp. 166–83. Stuhlmacher, Peter (ed.), The Gospel and the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991). Sutton, John, ‘Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process’, in The Extended Mind (ed. Richard Menary ; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), pp. 189–225. Sutton, John, ‘Material Agency, Skills, and History: Distributed Cognition and the Archeology of Memory’, in Material Agency: Toward a Non-anthropocentric Approach (ed. C. Knappett and L. Malafouris; New York: Springer, 2007), pp. 37–55. Sutton, John, ‘Memory’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (June 15, 2014; plato/stanford. edu/entries/memory). Sutton, John, ‘Remembering’, in The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (ed. Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 217–35. Sutton, John. ‘Representation, Reduction, and Interdisciplinarity in the Sciences of Memory’, in Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation (ed. H. Clapin, P. Staines and P. Slezak; London: Elsevier, 2004), pp. 187–216. Sutton, John, Celia B. Harris and Paul G. Keil, ‘The Psychology of Memory, Extended Cognition, and Socially Distributed Remembering,’ Phenom&CogSci 9 (2010), pp. 521–60. Sweeny, Armin, A Full Hearing: Orality and Literacy in the Malay World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). Tattersall, Ian, The Monkey in the Mirror: Essays on the Science of What Makes Us Human (New York: Harcourt, 2002). Taylor, Vincent, ‘The Original Order of Q’, in New Testament Essays (ed. Vincent Taylor; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972 [reprint 1959]), pp. 95–117. Thatcher, Tom, ‘Beyond Texts and Traditions: Werner Kelber’s Media History of Christian Origins’, in Jesus, The Voice and the Text: Beyond the Oral and the Written Gospel (ed. Tom Thatcher; Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008), pp. 1–28. Thatcher, Tom (ed.), Jesus, The Voice and the Text: Beyond the Oral and the Written Gospel (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008). Thatcher, Tom (ed.), Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity: A Conversation with Barry Schwartz (Semeia Studies 78; Atlanta: SBL, 2014). Theissen, Gerd, ‘Tradition und Entscheidung: Der Beitrag des biblischen Glaubens zum kulturellen Gedächtnis’, in Kultur und Gedächtnis (ed. Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), pp. 170–98. Thomas, Rosalind, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Thomas, Rosalind, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), 1989. Thomas, Rosalind, ‘Prose Performance Texts: Epideixis and Written Publication in the Late Fifth and Early Fourth Centuries’, in Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece (ed. Harvey Yunis; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 162–88. Thompson, John B., ‘Tradition and Self in a Mediated World’, in De-traditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity in a Time of Uncertainty (ed. Paul Heelas, et al.; Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 89–108. Thompson, Paul, Voices of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edn, 2000).

Works Cited

289

Tonkin, Elizabeth, Narrating our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Tov, Emanuel, ‘Scribal Practices Reflected in the Texts from the Judaean Desert’, in The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, vol. 1 (ed. Peter W. Flint and James C. Vanderkam; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1998), pp. 402–29. Tuckett, Christopher M., ‘Form Criticism’, in Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (ed. Werner H. Kelber and Samuel Byrskog; Waco: Baylor, 2009), pp. 21–38. Tuckett, Christopher M. (ed.), Synoptic Studies: The Ampleforth Conferences of 1982 and 1983 (JSNTSup, 7; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1984). Turner, James, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014). Ulrich, Eugene, ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Biblical Text’, in The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, vol. 1 (ed. Peter W. Flint and James C. Vanderkam; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1998), pp. 79–100. Ulrich, Eugene, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1999). Valensi, Lucette, ‘From Sacred History to Historical Memory and Back: the Jewish Past’, Hist&Anth 2 (1986), pp. 283–305. van der Toorn, Karel, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). van Os, Bas, Psychological Analyses and the Historical Jesus: New Ways to Explore Christian Origins (LNTS, 432; London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2011). van Swol, Lyn M., ‘Performance and Process in Collective and Individual Memory: The Role of Social Decision Schemes and Memory Bias in Collective Memory’, Memory 16 (2008), pp. 274–87. van Unnik, W. C., Neotestamentica et Patristica: Eine Freundesgabe Herrn Professor Dr. Oscar Cullmann zu seinem 60. Geburtstag überreicht (NovTSup, 6; Leiden: Brill, 1962). Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Vanstiphout, H. ‘Memory and Literacy in Ancient Western Asia’, in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, vol. 4 (ed. Jack M. Sasson; New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995), pp. 2181–96. Vanstiphout, H. ‘On the Old Babylonian Eduba Curriculum’, in Centres of Learning: Learning and Location in Pre-Modern Europe and the Near East (ed. Jan Willem Drijvers and Alasdair A. MacDonald; BSIH, 61; Leiden and New York: Brill, 1995), pp. 3–16. Veldhuis, Nick, ‘Mesopotamian Canons’, in Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (ed. Margalit Finkelberg and Guy G. Strousma; Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 2; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), pp. 9–28. von Gemünden, Petra, et al. (eds), Jesus – Gestalt und Gestaltungen: Rezeptionen des Galiläers in Wissenschaft, Kirche und Gesellschaft (FS Gerd Theißen; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2013). Wagner-Pacfici, Robin, ‘Memories in the Making: The Shape of Things that Went’, QualSoc (1996), pp. 301–21. Wagner-Pacifici, Robin, and Barry Schwartz, ‘The Vietnam Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past’, AJS 97 (1991), pp. 376–420. Walfish, Barry (ed.), The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume (Haifa: Haifa University Press, 1993).

290

Works Cited

Walker, William O. (ed.), The Relationships Among the Gospels: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1978). Walter, Nikolaus, ‘Eine vormatthäische Schilderung der Auferstehung Jesu’, NTS 19 (1972–3), pp. 415–29. Wang, Qi, ‘On the Cultural Constitution of Collective Memory’, Memory 16 (2008), pp. 305–17. Wang, Qi, and Jens Brockmeier, ‘Autobiographical Remembering as Cultural Practice: Understanding the Interplay Between Memory, Self, and Culture’, CultPsych 8 (2002), pp. 45–64. Wang, Qi, and Michael Ross, ‘Culture and Memory’, in Handbook of Cultural Psychology (ed. Sinobu Kitayama and Dov Cohen; New York: Guilford, 2007), pp. 645–67. Wansbrough, Henry (ed.), Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition (JSNTSup, 64; Sheffield: JSOT, 1991). Warner, Lloyd W., The Living and the Dead : A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). Watson, Duane F. (ed.), Persuasive Artistry: Studies in New Testament Rhetoric in Honor of George A. Kennedy (JSNTSup, 50; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991). Watson, Rubie S. (ed.), Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1994). Wedderburn, Alexander J. M., Jesus and the Historians (WUNT, 269; Tübingen: MohrSiebeck, 2010). Weissenrieder, Annette, and Robert B. Coote, The Interface of Orality and Writing: Speaking, Seeing, Writing in the Shaping of New Genres (WUNT, 260; Tübingen: MohrSiebeck, 2010). Weldon, Mary Susan, and Krystal D. Bellinger, ‘Collective Memory: Collaborative and Individual Processes in Remembering’, JExpPsych 23 (1997), pp. 1160–75. Welzer, Harald, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis: Eine Theorie der Erinnerung (Munich: Beck, 2002). Welzer, Harald, et al., Opa war kein Nazi: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002). Wilder, Amos, ‘Form History and the Oldest Tradition’, in Neotestamentica et Patristica: Eine Freundesgabe Herrn Professor Dr. Oscar Cullmann zu seinem 60. Geburtstag überreicht (ed. W. C. van Unnik; NovTSup, 6; Leiden: Brill, 1962), pp. 3–13. Williams, Ronald J., ‘Scribal Training in Ancient Egypt’, JAOS 92 (1972), pp. 214–21. Wilson, Robert A., and Andy Clark, ‘How To Situate Cognition: Letting Nature Take Its Course’, in The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (ed. Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 55–77. Wilson, Stephen G., Related Strangers: Jews and Christians 70-170 C. E. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). Wink, Walter, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). Winock, Michael, ‘Joan of Arc’, in Realms of Memory, vol. 3 (ed. Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Dritzman; trans. Arthur Goldhammer; 3 vols.; New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–8), pp. 433–80. Winograd, Eugene, ‘The Authenticity and Utility of Memories’, in The Remembering Self (ed. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 243–51. Wrede, William, The Messianic Secret (trans. J. C. G. Greig; London: James Clarke, 1971).

Works Cited

291

Yerushalmi, Yosef H., Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982). Yunis, Harvey (ed.), Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Zelizer, Barbie, ‘Reading the Past against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies’, CritStMassComm 12 (1995), pp. 214–39. Zerubavel, Eviatar, ‘Social Memories: Steps to a Sociology of the Past’, QualSoc 19 (1996), pp. 238–99. Zerubavel, Yael, ‘The Historic, the Legendary, and the Incredible: Invented Tradition and Collective Memory in Israel’, in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (ed. John R. Gillis; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 105–23. Zerubavel, Yael, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Zetterholm, M., and S. Byrskog (eds.), The Making of Christianity: Conflicts, Contacts, and Constructions: Essays in Honor of Bengt Holmberg (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012). Zhang, Tong, and Barry Schwartz, ‘Confucius and the Cultural Revolution: A Study in Collective Memory’, IntJPolCulSoc 11 (1997), pp. 189–212. Zimmermann, Ruben, ‘Formen und Gattungen als Medien der Jesus-Erinnerung: Zur Rückgewinnung der Diachronie in der Formgeschichte des Neuen Testaments’, in Die Macht der Erinnerung (ed. O. Fuchs and B. Janowski; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2008), pp. 131–67. Zimmermann, Ruben. ‘Geschichtstheorien und Neues Testament: Gedächtnis, Diskurs, Kultur und Narration in der historiographischen Diskussion’, EC 2 (2011), pp. 417–44. Zimmermann, Ruben. ‘Gleichnisse als Medien der Jesuserinnerung: Die Historizität der Jesusparabeln im Horizont der Gedächtnisforschung’, in Hermeneutik der Gleichnisse Jesu: Methodische Neuansätze zum Verstehen urchristlicher Parabeltexte (ed. Ruben Zimmerman; WUNT, 231; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2008), pp. 87–121. Zimmermann, Ruben, ‘Memory and Form Criticism: The Typicality of Memory as a Bridge between Orality and Literality in the Early Christian Remembering Process’, in The Interface of Orality and Writing: Speaking, Seeing, Writing in the Shaping of New Genres (ed. Annette Weissenrieder and Robert B. Coote; WUNT, 260; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2010), pp. 137–43. Zimmermann, Ruben (ed.), Hermeneutik der Gleichnisse Jesu: Methodische Neuansätze zum Verstehen urchristlicher Parabeltexte (WUNT, 231; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2008). Zonabend, Françoise, The Enduring Memory: Time and History in a French Village (trans. Anthony Forster; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Zumthor, Paul, Oral Poetry: An Introduction (trans. Kathryn Murphy-Judy ; THL, 70; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).

INDEXES OF REFERENCES

Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Exodus 12.46, 237 22.25–27, 44 Numbers 9.12, 237 Deuteronomy 21.22–23, 236, 238–9 24.10–13, 44 2 Chronicles 24, 172 Psalms 34.20, 237 Jeremiah 33.14–26, 124 New Testament Q 11.1–4, 151 11.9–13, 151 11.39, 169 11.47–51, 168–72, 175 12.2–12, 170, 173, 177 12.4–5, 261

Matthew 5.38–42, 44 6.9–13, 151 6.19–21, 155 6.25–34, 153 7.1–5, 152 7.1–11, 151 7.12, 155 8.8–11, 155 8.24, 159 10.1–16, 154 10.24, 152 10.34–35, 153 10.34–36, 155 11.2–19, 155 13.53–58, 158 15.4, 155 16.16–18, 261 23.1–25, 155 24.42–45, 155 24.43–25.13, 153 24.45–51, 153 27.24–25, 241 27.62–68, 248 28.2–4, 248 Mark 1.16–20, 201, 226 1.29–31, 159 2.1–12, 188 2.5–10, 188 2.25, 159 3.31–35, 198 4.35–41, 158 4.37, 159 6.1–6, 158

11.28–30, 201 12.1–2, 8 12.13–17, 159 14.3, 46 Luke 3.1–4, 157 3.21–22, 154 4.16, 158 6.20–7.35, 157 6.25–28, 46 6.27–30, 44 6.27–35, 176 6.31, 155 6.38–42, 151 6.39, 155 7.18–35, 155 8.23, 159 9.57–62, 47 10.1–12, 154 10.25–28, 46 10.29–37, 46 10.38–42, 46 11.37–38, 54, 153 11.37–54, 155 12.1–40, 153 12.1–49, 153 12.22–32, 154 12.33–34, 155 12.35–40, 153 12.38–48, 155 12.41–46, 153 12.41–48, 153 12.49–53, 153, 155

13.23, 153 13.28–29, 155 17.2, 154 17.5, 155 19.29, 46 24.36–43, 247

Ignatius Letter to the Ephesians 5.2, 246 14.2, 247 17.1, 247

John 11.1–7, 18, 46 11.2, 46 12.3., 46 19.21–22, 236 19.31–37, 236–38

Letter to Polycarp 2.1–12, 246–7

1 Corinthians 11.23–26, 11

Apocryphal Gospels

APOCRYPHA

Gospel of Peter 2.3, 238 2.5, 241 3.6–9, 248 4.1–14, 236–7 4.9–10, 240 4.13, 238 4.14, 240 5.15, 238 5.16–17, 238 6.23, 239 7.25, 242 8.28–30, 241 8.28–11.49, 248 8.33, 242 11.47–49, 242 14.47–48, 241

Wisdom of Solomon 10.3, 172 Patristic, Writings 1 Clement 46.6–8, 246 2 Clement 5.2 261 Didache 1.3–5, 261 1.6, 261 8.1, 261

Letter to the Smyrnans 3.2–3, 247

INDEX OF AUTHORS

Adam, F. 83 Aizawa, K. 83 Alexander, L. 65, 67–8, 85, 116, 126 Allison, D. 47, 55–7, 210 Andersen, Ø. 263 Appadurai, A. 27, 35, 186–7, 235 Assmann, A. 12, 16, 21, 33, 78, 178, 227, 229 Assmann, J. 12, 16–23, 30–3, 40–1, 49, 62–3, 67–8, 78, 81, 100–3, 110–11, 115, 118–19, 123–4, 129–31, 139, 143, 159, 167, 170, 173–8, 185–7, 191, 200, 204–5, 227, 229, 249–59, 265 Baddeley, A. D. 108, 121, 123, 143 Barclay, C. R. 108 Bar Ilan, M. 97 Barrett, C. K. 237 Bartlett, F. C. 38–42, 64, 68, 73, 76, 107–8, 179, 189–97, 218 Bauckham, R. 49, 52–7, 61, 84, 106, 116 Baum, A. 54 Bäuml, F. H. 120, 142 Beit-Arié, M. 121, 130 Bellinger, K. D. 40, 109, 211, 215 Ben Yehuda, N. 21, 24, 31–2, 35, 174–5 Ben Zvi, E. 115, 126, 140 Bergemann, T. 147 Berntsen, D. 13, 74–5, 218 Beyschlag, K. 245 Blank, S. 173 Bloch, M. E. F. 80, 85, 90, 217–18, 222, 228 Blum, E. 149 Bockmuehl, M. 48, 61–2, 128, 148 Bodnar, J. 17, 24, 32, 186 Bonanno, G. A. 28, 38, 63, 107, 165, 179, 191–3, 199

Borso, V. 78. Brewer, M. B. 73, 217 Brewer, W. F. 108 Brockmeier, J. 71 Brown, R. E. 147, 236–7, 244, 249–51, 264 Bruner, F. D. 45 Bruner, J. 40, 66, 78, 108–10, 119, 220 Bultmann, R. 2–7, 49, 51, 71, 93, 179–83, 188, 197–202 Burke, P. 20, 25, 28, 33, 233–4 Burkert, W. 13 Buss, M. 3–5 Butler, T. 20, 233 Byrskog, S. 4–7, 48, 57–60, 65, 69, 71, 85, 93, 208, 216 Calhoun, C. 214 Campbell, S. 209–16, 219 Carr, D. M. 97, 102–3, 117–20, 123, 125, 128–31, 140–4, 150 Carruthers, M. J. 101, 103, 118–20, 125, 128, 141–4, 151 Casey, E. S. 7, 13, 16–22, 28, 34, 41–2, 67–9, 115, 179, 185, 187, 192–7, 200, 258 Chaytor, H. G. 116–17, 121–2, 125, 132, 140–3 Choi, I. 72 Clanchy, M. 116–17, 121–2, 128, 140–1, 143 Colwell, E. C. 121–2, 130, 132, 143 Connerton, P. 19–21, 24, 26, 28, 32–5, 174, 186–7, 233–5, 252 Conway, M. A. 73, 108, 194, 214, 217 Cope, L. 158–9 Corbier, M. 117, 121, 141–2 Coser, L. 12, 19, 26, 28, 109, 172, 184, 233, 236, 252

294

Index of Authors

Craik, F. I. M. 75–6, 218–19 Cribiore, R. 96–7, 117–19, 140–2 Crook, Z. 210 Crosby, R. 116 Crossan, J. D. 189, 240–51 Dagenais, J. 104, 121, 123, 127–32, 139, 141, 143 Deacon, T. W. 41–2, 68, 86, 225 DeLoache, J. S. 41 Derrenbacker, R. A. 119, 149–50, 157–8 Dewey, A. 239 Dibelius, M. 1–3, 6, 180, 182, 197–8, 201 DiMaggio, Paul 76, 80, 219, 222 Doane, A. N. 42, 100, 114–17, 121, 123, 127–8, 132, 138–42 Donald, M. 38, 40–2, 64, 69, 81–3 Downing, F. G. 150 Duchesne-Guillemin, J. 19 Dunn, J. D. G. 48, 58–61, 147–8 Durkheim, E. 11, 71, 184 du Toit, D. 201, 203 Echterhoff, G. 55, 67 Ehrman, B. 50, 52, 114, 122, 129, 133, 135–6, 189 Eisenstein, E. L. 125, 127, 131–2 Elman, Y. 104, 120–1, 128, 131, 144 Ephrat, D. 131 Epp, J. E. 121, 132, 141 Erll, A. 55–6, 63–4, 77–8, 80, 219, 222, 227–8 Fantham, E. 116, 140 Farmer, S. B. 13, 17, 19–20, 33, 40, 163, 165–7, 205, 256 Farmer, W. R. 158–9 Feldman, C. F. 39–40, 66, 77–8, 105, 108–10, 22 Fentress, J. 13–14, 16, 22–3, 27–30, 33, 41–2, 168, 170, 176, 184, 186, 189, 200, 233, 234–5, 252 Fine, G. A. 32 Finkelberg, M. 129, 250–3, 255–7 Finnegan, R. 100, 115–16, 248 Fishbane, M. 123–6, 130, 143–4, 149 Fivush, R. 80, 222

Floyd, M. H. 125–6, 140 Foley, J. M. 105, 110–11, 114–18, 123, 131, 139–40, 183, 189, 248, 257–8 Foster, P. 138, 209 Fried, J. 210, 215, 218, 225–9 Frow, J. 4 Funk, R. W. 50–1, 54, 189 Gamble, H. 121, 126 Geertz, C. 5, 40–3, 66, 68–9, 81 Georgoudi, S. 19 Gergen, K. J. 215 Gerhardsson, B. 93–107, 111–13, 120, 123, 229 Gomili, A. 83 Goodacre, M. 152–7 Goody, J. 100–1, 249, 258 Goulder, M. 150–7 Greenstein, E. L. 123, 143 Häfner, G. 60 Haines-Eitzen, K. 123, 126, 129, 131, 134–5, 143 Halbwachs, M. 11–25, 31–3, 38–9, 109–10, 173, 175, 177, 184–7, 200, 204, 233–4, 252 Halpern Amaru, B. 172 Handler, R. 23, 25–6 Hanks, W. F. 114, 249 Harris, C. B. 76, 79–80, 84, 96, 224 Harris, W. 96, 140 Hasher, L. 85 Hawkins, J. C. 145–8 Hayden, R. M. 27 Head, P. M. 240, 264 Heckel, T. K. 260 Hervieu-Léger, D. 227 Hezser, C. 97, 140 Himbaza, I. 123 Hirst, W. 55, 77, 109, 220 Hjärpe, J. 28–30, 32 Hobsbawm, E. 229, 233, 235 Horsley, R. A. 175 Hurford, J. R. 42 Hutchins, E. 83, 86–8, 224–5 Jaffee, M. 99, 101–3, 116–21, 128, 140–2 Jenkins, P. 97

Index of Authors

295

Johnson, N. S. 73, 217 Junack, K. 121–2, 129, 141, 143 Jung, J. 13, 15, 27

Miller, E. 31 Morgan, T. 96–7, 116, 140 Moxter, M. 202

Kandel, E. R. 38–40, 63, 66, 74–5, 107–8, 110, 192, 213, 218 Kannaday, W. C. 135 Karnetzki, M. 132 Keil, P. G. 76, 79, 84 Keith, C. 8, 208 Kelber, W. H. 4, 11, 43, 59, 65, 85, 93, 96, 98, 110–11, 114–20, 123–4, 134, 136, 139–40, 144, 158, 183 Kennedy, G. 149 Kirk, A. 52, 88, 173, 196, 237, 239, 264 Kloppenborg, J. S. 145–9, 168, 172, 175 Koester, H. 176, 244, 245–51, 260–4 Kontsal, W. 75 Koriat, A. 74, 76, 212, 214, 217–18

Namer, G. 12–14, 18–19, 22–3, 25, 31, 39, 109, 165, 170–1 Neal, A. G. 163–6, 168 Neirynck, F. 147, 149 Neisser, U. 211 Neusner, J. 142 Neville, D. J. 158 Nicklas, T. 250 Nineham, D. E. 2, 49–52, 54, 84, 104 Nissinen, M. 115 Nora, P. 233, 235–6 Norenzayan, A. 72 Norman, K. A. 75

LeDonne, A. 64, 208 Leonhard, N. 221 Levy, D. 26, 29–30, 35, 186–7 Linneken, J. 23 Loewe, R. 128, 130 Longstaff, T. R. W. 159 Lord, A. B. 249 Loubser, J. A. 141 Lowe, E. J. 86 Lowenthal, D. 14–16, 22–4, 27, 40 Lührmann, D. 264 Luz, U. 45, 147 McDonnell, M. 126, 133, 148 McIver, R. K. 48, 54–6, 84 Malafouris, L. 72, 82–3, 88, 90, 223–4, 279 Malkki, L. H. 14, 27–31, 39–40, 65, 81, 109–10, 163–6, 170, 173–6, 195, 200–1, 222 Mandel, P. 104, 120, 124, 128–9, 131, 144 Mandler, J. M. 73–4, 217 Manier, D. 55, 77, 109, 220 Markowitsch, H. J. 64 Markschies, C. 250 Marshall, I. H. 46 Metzger, B. M. 122, 129 Meyer, B. F. 41 Michnic-Coren, J. 25

Olick, J. K. 11, 15–16, 26, 29–30, 33, 35, 39, 184, 186–7, 229, 249 Olson, D. 101–2, 115, 117, 120, 132, 141 Olson, K. 154 Ortner, S. B. 64 Parker, D. C. 114, 133–6 Parks, W. 42, 111, 114–16, 139 Peabody, D. B. 158–9 Pelling, C. B. R. 119 Peri, Y. 34, 165 Petersen, J. 157 Petersen, W. L. 143, 157 Plantinga, A. 210 Prager, J. 12, 15–16, 22–3, 28, 35, 38, 107, 167–8 Queller, S. 73, 75–6, 217–18 Quinn, N. 71–2, 74–7, 85, 98, 218–19 Rainey, A. F. 119 Redford, D. B. 140, 142 Redman, J. 55 Reese, E. 80, 222 Reynolds, L. D. 119, 128 Robbins, J. 4, 16 Robbins, V. K. 114, 133–4, 136, 138 Rosenzweig, R. 14–16, 19, 28, 30, 32, 39, 109, 163–4, 185 Ross, M. 77

296

Index of Authors

Royse, J. R. 122 Rubin, D. C. 13, 38–9, 63–4, 66, 74–7, 87, 108–9, 111, 142, 151, 190–200, 214, 218 Rupert, R. D. 210 Russo, J. 99–100, 105 Sanders, J. A. 125 Sapir, E. 39–41, 66, 69, 81 Satran, D. 239 Savage, K. 18–19, 25, 185, 202 Schackenburg, R. 236, 236 Schacter, D. L. 75, 76, 209, 212, 219 Schaeffer, S. E. 239–40, 249–51, 264–5 Schäfer, P. 104, 123, 125, 127 Schmidt, S. J. 73–8, 216, 218–19 Schröter, J. 170, 180, 183, 188, 202–3, 208, 227, 249, 261 Schudson, M. 15, 25, 27–30, 165, 233 Schuman, H. 205 Schwartz, B. 15–16, 19, 22–4, 26–35, 39–43, 48, 66–9, 110, 165–70, 173–4, 185–7, 193, 195, 200, 202, 222, 233–5, 251–3 Schwarz, V., 27, 168 Scott, J. 204 Sedgwick, W. B. 116 Segal, E. 103, 125 Shaked, S. 256 Shanks Alexander, E. 102–3 Shils, E. 15–16, 21, 30, 258 Simondon, M. 21–2, 32, 171, 174 Small, J. P. 101, 103, 117–20, 141–2, 144, 141, 257 Smith, E. R. 73, 75–6, 217–18 Smith, M. 94 Snyder, H. G. 120 Spear, N. E. 76 Sperber, D. 72 Squire, L. R. 38–40, 63, 66, 74–5, 107–8, 110, 192, 213, 218 Starr, R. 96, 126, 133 Stemberger, G. 101–3, 128 Stern, D. 103, 255 Stock, B. 117, 141, 254, 259 Strack, H. L. 101–3, 128 Straub, J. 63–4 Strauss, C. 71–2, 74–7, 85, 98, 218–19

Streeter, B. H. 146–8 Sutton, J. 72, 75–6, 79, 82–4, 90, 211–16, 222, 224 Sweeny, A. 102, 117–18, 121, 141–3 Tattersall, I. 39, 41 Taylor, V. 146–51 Thatcher, T. 43 Theissen, G. 30 Thomas, R. 80, 103, 117, 142, 205, 222, 256, 265 Thompson, J. B. 24, 43, 253 Thompson, P. 57, 76, 78 Tonkin, E. 78–81, 100, 105, 108–10, 222 Tov, E. 126, 144 Tuckett, C. M. 4, 152 Turner, J. 4 Ulrich, E.

45, 124–5, 129, 131, 144

Valensi, L. 20, 29, 35, 171, 223, 234–5 van der Toorn, K. 117–18, 122, 124, 129–30, 141 van Os, B. 61 Vansina, J. 4–5, 26, 65, 67, 69, 81, 248 Vanstiphout, H. 116, 119, 124–5 van Swol, L. M. 79, 222 Veldhuis, N. 129 Wagner-Pacifici, R. 27, 34, 39, 164, 187, 202 Walter, N. 248 Wang, Q. 71, 77, 79, 81 Warner, L. W. 19–21, 25, 32–3 Weldon, M. S. 40, 109 Welzer, H. 61, 73–9, 85, 207, 217–21, 224, 227 Wickham, C. 13–14, 16, 22–3, 27–30, 33, 41–2, 168, 170, 176, 184, 186, 189, 200, 233, 234–5, 252 Wilder, A. 49 Williams, R. J. 118 Wilson, N. G. 119, 128 Wilson, R. A. 87 Wilson, S. G. 239–40, 242 Wink, W. 45 Winock, M 24, 236

Index of Authors Winograd, E. 214 Wrede, W. 180 Yerushalmi, Y. H. 19–22, 29–30, 33, 128, 165–7, 176, 185 Zelizer, B. 22, 27 Zerubavel, E. 15

297

Zerubavel, Y. 16, 18, 20–1, 24–6, 28, 31–4, 39, 166, 170, 173–5, 185, 187, 252 Zhang, T. 34 Zimmermann, R. 6–7, 51, 63, 64, 66–7, 69, 75, 78, 220 Zonabend, F. 13, 15–16, 28 Zumthor, P. 105, 116, 125, 127