Ancient biographers generally felt that a record of the subject’s deeds and words revealed the person’s character far better than editorial comments might.263 Jewish disciples cared about their teacher’s lifestyle, which they normally sought to imitate,264 and which in later sources might even function as legal precedent.265 Even Jewish children learned by practice and imitation as well as by memorization, so a teacher’s behavior was presumably a matter of careful observation.266 In Greek as well as Jewish culture, students were eager to preserve the deeds and character of their masters as well as their teachings.267
Although the early Christians undoubtedly retold the stories in a variety of ways, the most common form of Synoptic pericopes suggests that early Christians adopted the sort of short narratives typically used to recount the deeds and deed-related sayings of famous teachers. These often bare-bones scenes offered the easiest form for remembering and transmitting the accounts. Even original eyewitness reports usually include a narrative element; the interpretive process of narrativizing occurs throughout the process of memory and is not inconsistent with even eyewitness reports.268 The “forms” of stories that form critics assigned to early Christian homiletic use (perhaps based partly on their familiarity with the pericopes’ later Christian usage) could thus as easily stem from the natural ways eyewitnesses could have constructed and developed their stories.269 But we do not know the precise milieu in which any given unit of tradition in our Gospels assumed its basic present form.
Although our present Gospels are finished literary works intended to be read as such, they still reflect some of the process of oral tradition that stands behind their sources. For instance, many of our stories in the Synoptic Gospels are brief accounts of events in Jesus’ ministry, often with a minimum of chronological links to their context. Some have compared these Synoptic accounts with chreiai, brief examples (often of heroes of history) recounted, memorized, and paraphrased in regular school exercises in the ancient Mediterranean world.270 (The length and form of chreiai admittedly varied,271 limiting the precision of the comparison.) It was natural for Jesus’ disciples and their first hearers to remember stories about Jesus in the same way that they were accustomed to remembering stories about other important figures. The combination of such narratives with anecdotes, teaching material (sayings and speeches), plus an extended account of the protagonist’s end, characterizes ancient biography in general, so we should not be surprised to find it in the Gospels.272
In the first half of the twentieth century form-critics pointed out some particular patterns in the Synoptic Gospels’ accounts about Jesus. Some form-critics called one recurrent pattern “controversy-narratives,” short accounts where Jesus debates with his opponents and proves his case. Although we may guess that the social repercussions of these debates continued long after the recorded narratives end, such narratives typically close with a rejoinder or quip from Jesus that shames and often silences his opponents. Some form-critics called narratives concluding with Jesus’ witty retorts “pronouncement stories.” Such stories about teachers were common in antiquity,273 suggesting that Jesus shamed his opponents in a way understood by his disciples from their culture. 274 The use of such accounts also suggests why the disciples would have transmitted the stories as they did. Occasions on which restraint is shown in describing miracles suggest controls on these traditions similar to those on the sayings traditions.275
Because Jesus authored the sayings material but not the narratives about him, his disciples presumably transmitted the sayings more carefully while transmitting the narratives more in their own words;276 hence Aramaisms predominate in the former. Other ancient writers also seem to have adapted narratives with some degree of freedom, as we have noted. Nevertheless, the historiographic considerations we noted for ancient sources in general apply here: sources from the first generation or two are likely to have often preserved the gist of the events they report.
