Sayings Traditions
Sayings Traditions
Although historians were known to invent speeches and conversations, biographers often preferred to draw on a teacher’s sayings when these were available. Sayings collections (such as Arrian’s Diatribes, a collection of Epictetus’ teachings by one of his students) sometimes could even reflect the teacher’s style (though the writer’s interests could select which sayings were most relevant).
Remembering teachers’ sayings was an expected part of the culture. Both attributed and unattributed maxims were memorized and passed on for centuries even in elementary educational settings.33 Jewish sayings collections like Proverbs and Pirke Aboth consist primarily of short, pithy sayings, and some of Jesus’ sayings were no doubt remembered and circulated in such a form.34 Greco-Roman sayings collections likewise included sayings and brief contexts for them when necessary.35 Outside such collections, sayings were often transmitted apart from one another,36 although sayings could also be combined with narratives to make a work more cohesive. As we noted earlier, ancient readers considered inserting sayings from sayings-collections into narrative, or narratives into sayings, a matter of arrangement, not a matter of fabrication.37
Nevertheless, Jesus probably also used some sayings on more than one occasion, just as most speakers do.38 Moreover, sayings for which context was necessary, such as in brief narratives climaxing in the protagonist’s quip (a kind of chreiai today sometimes classified as pronouncement stories),39 were often transmitted with narrative contexts.40 Thus we probably have some sayings of Jesus in the Gospels in their original contexts, whereas others may appear in distinct contexts (cf. e.g., Matt 7:13-14//Lk 13:24; Matt 8:11//Lk 13:29).
Sayings traditions also may have grown, although in most cases this expansion became significant primarily over a period of generations or centuries.41 Similar sayings could be attributed to different teachers; sometimes this simply indicated that both had uttered the same idea,42 but in other cases sayings or even entire tales may have been transferred, deliberately (as common property cited by various teachers) or through mistake, from one teacher to another, as in Greek tradition.43 Although ancients often assumed the accuracy of attributions, they were not always certain.44 On other occasions, however, the famous speaker himself may have borrowed sayings from others.45
The relevance of this transfer of sayings to study of the Synoptic sayings-traditions is limited;46 such transfer and composition began to happen regularly only long after the teachers’ death, usually a number of generations (and most fully, centuries) after the teachers’ death. By contrast, from the first generation the basic framework of the Jesus tradition was already established in the entire community that revered him, and quickly fixed in various written texts. Moreover, Jesus held a special status in early Christianity; there were not a number of other teachers with whom he could be confused or whose sayings the transfer of which would enhance his authority. He may have also himself used some sayings already in circulation (given the familiarity of his Jewish teaching style in other respects; see e.g., our ch. 13).
Ignoring such limitations, many early form critics applied to the gospel tradition principles of form criticism culled from studies of Old Testament traditions preserved for many centuries and various folk traditions developed over centuries.47 Yet as W. D. Davies notes, probably only a single life span
separates Jesus from the last New Testament document. And the tradition in the Gospels is not strictly a folk tradition, derived from long stretches of time, but a tradition preserved by believing communities who were guided by responsible leaders, many of whom were eyewitnesses of the ministry of Jesus. The Gospels contain materials remembered recently, at least as compared with other traditional literatures, so that the rules which governed the transmission of folk tradition do not always apply to the tradition found in the Gospels.48
Pierre Benoit similarly protests that many rabbinic apophthegms preserve some genuine reminiscences, but that beyond this, recollections no more than thirty to forty years old cannot be compared with the rabbis’ “oral tradition stretching over several centuries which only very late in its life received a fixed form.”49 Others rightly emphasize that Jesus taught publicly as well as privately, and a “radical amnesia” that allowed his followers to forget even the substance of his teachings is quite unlike other schools, and is historically improbable.50
Further, early Christians plainly did not indulge the temptation to create answers for their own situations in the Jesus tradition preserved in the Synoptics: some significant conflicts that early Christians faced (such as circumcising Gentiles) fail to turn up in the Gospels.51 Meanwhile, many sayings imply a Palestinian setting more relevant to Jesus than to the later church.52
Thus Mark, who alone uses the words of Jesus to address the controversy about the purity of foods, resists the temptation to make Jesus explicitly say Mark’s view; Mark provides this explicit interpretation only in an editorial aside (Mk 7:19, which Matthew, writing for a kosher audience, naturally feels free to omit). The gospel tradition nowhere addresses the later-burning issue (attested in Acts and Paul’s letters) of whether Gentiles must be circumcised to join God’s people. It provides only two examples of Jesus’ ministry to Gentiles, and in both cases (if we read his initial response to the centurion as a question)53 he first snubs the Gentile.54 (This is most obvious where Jesus calls the Syrophoenician woman a “dog,”55 a title recognized as an insult throughout the ancient Mediterranean world.)56 One would not expect believers later involved in the Gentile mission to create the snubs, although they undoubtedly sought to make use of these stories about Gentiles available in the gospel tradition.
Although the Gospel writers and their sources felt free to adapt the gospel tradition in ways customary to their era, the tradition does not bear the marks of fabrication. As Secret Mark reflects its twentieth-century milieu and the apocryphal gospels reflect the late-second- to early-third-century heyday of Greek novels, the gospel tradition bears signs of forming earlier than the extant first-century Gospels that adapted it for their own day.