Memory Jesus And The Synoptic Gospels

This groundbreaking work addresses the impact that the qualities of human memory would have had on the traditions of the historical Jesus found in the Synoptic Gospels.

Alan Kirk argues that memory theory, in its social, cultural, and cognitive dimensions, is able to provide a comprehensive account of the origins and history of the Jesus tradition, one capable of displacing the moribund form-critical model. He shows that memory research gives new leverage on a range of classic problems in gospels, historical Jesus, and Christian origins scholarship. This volume brings together 12 essays published between 2001 and 2016, newly revised for this edition and organized under the rubrics of: 'Memory and the Formation of the Jesus Tradition'; 'Memory and Manuscript'; 'Memory and Historical Jesus Research'; and 'Memory in 2nd Century Gospel Writing'. The introductory essay, written for this volume, argues that the old form critical model, in marginalizing memory, abandoned the one factor actually capable of accounting for the origins of the gospel tradition, its manifestation in oral and written media, and its historical trajectory.

This is a different book about Jesus. It does not study the Gospels as sources for the historical Jesus, but reads them as memories about Jesus, each Gospel with its characteristic picture of Jesus. The book traces the transmission and growth of memories of Jesus in various contexts and in different historical periods. It also introduces readers to the little known counterstories to Christian memories in Jewish sources, as well as to the rival stories in the Quran. A central perspective in the book is the troubling fact that for centuries the memories of Jesus contributed to hate speech against the Jews in Europe. The passion narratives in the Gospels put the blame for the death of Jesus upon Jewish leaders, and these stories were transmitted across the centuries as historical truth. Memories of Jesus have served as identity markers not only for churches but also for societies and countries. The last chapters focus on how the memories of Jesus have played an important role in supporting the identity of oppressed and marginalized groups, in particular in the contemporary United States.

This volume examines the synoptic problem and argues that the similarities between the gospels of Matthew and Luke outweigh the objections commonly raised against the theory that Luke used the text of Matthew in composing his gospel. While agreeing with scholars who suggests that memory played a leading role in ancient source-utilization, Eric Eve argues for a more flexible understanding of memory, which would both explain Luke's access of Matthew's double tradition material out of the sequence in which it appears in Matthew, and suggest that Luke may have been more influenced by Matthew's order than appears on the surface. Eve also considers the widespread ancient practice of literary imitation as another mode of source utilization the Evangelists, particularly Luke, could have employed, and argues that Luke's Gospel should be seen in part as an emulation of Matthew's. Within this enlarged understanding of how ancient authors could utilize their sources, Luke's proposed use of Matthew alongside Mark becomes entirely plausible, and Eve concludes that the Farrer Hypothesis of Matthew using Mark, and Luke consequently using both gospels, to be the most likely solution to the Synoptic Problem.

Advocates of the established hypotheses on the origins of the Synoptic gospels and their interrelationships (the Synoptic Problem), and especially those defending or contesting the existence of the "source" (Q), are increasingly being called upon to justify their position with reference to ancient media practices. Still others go so far as to claim that ancient media realities force a radical rethinking of the whole project of Synoptic source criticism, and they question whether traditional documentary approaches remain valid at all. This debate has been hampered to date by the patchy reception of research on ancient media in Synoptic scholarship. Seeking to rectify this problem, Alan Kirk here mounts a defense, grounded in the practices of memory and manuscript transmission in the Roman world, of the Two Document Hypothesis. He shows how ancient media/memory approaches in fact offer new leverage on classic research problems in scholarship on the Synoptic Gospels, and that they have the potential to break the current impasse in the Synoptic Problem. The results of his analysis open up new insights to the early reception and scribal transmission of the Jesus tradition and cast new light on some long-conflicted questions in Christian origins.

Nineteen hundred years ago, someone called the Beloved Disciple told stories about Jesus and his days on earth, including reports of what Jesus did and said. These stories had been todl for decades, but then someone took the stories and wrote them down, turning them from oral tradition into the book we know as the Gospel of John. Scholars have long concentrated on the content of this Fourth Gospel, analyzing how it differs from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke and wondering how the different Gospels relate to the Jesus of history.Thatcher builds on all this previous scholarship to as new and exciting questions: Why was this Gospel written? Why would these followers of Jesus turn the oral stories into written Gospel? In exploring the reason for writing the Fourth Gospel, Thatcher focuses on how stories and written texts operate to reflect and to create memory with in groups of people. He uncovers how early Christians strove to remember Jesus in the decades after his ministry and how Christians came into conflict with one another about which memories were best.With this interest in the social memory of early Christians, Thatcher provides original insights into the Gospel of John and shows new answers to old questions. Writing in an engaging and accessible style, Thatcher uses numerous diagrams and modern parallels to show how Gospel texts shape the memory and identity of Christian communities, not only in the ancient world but today as well.

Previous thinking regarding "oral tradition" imagined a one-way process of transmission, handing down the fairly intact textual chunks that would constitute what we know as the end result, the written Gospels.