Conclusion
Conclusion
Ancient Mediterranean culture valued orality more than modern western culture does. They could preserve oral traditions and could use collections of sayings in written or oral form, or in both. Many of Jesus’ teachings are in the sort of readily memorizable forms in which sages often offered them to facilitate retention.
Ancient memories could be highly developed, as illustrated in oratory, storytelling, basic education and advanced education. Disciples normally preserved the substance of their masters’ teachings and, where relevant, stories about their behavior. Disciples sometimes took notes that proved highly accurate. To assume that Jesus’ disciples acted completely unlike other disciples with regard to transmitting their teacher’s sayings — despite the comparatively early publication of sources about Jesus — is to value one’s skepticism about Jesus more highly than the concrete comparative evidence.
Scholarship as a whole has become less impressed with some earlier form-critical criteria like the criterion of dissimilarity (meant to emphasize Jesus’ uniqueness); today it often emphasizes the continuity between Jesus and his Palestinian Jewish environment. Jesus’ sayings often reflect their original context in his Galilean ministry far better than they reflect the situations of the churches addressed in the Gospels. Such insights will help to shape the discussion involved in the rest of this book, where we hope to illustrate how well the Jesus of the Gospels fits his milieu.