Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance, and Text

Social memory research has complicated the relationship between past and present as
that relationship finds expression in memorial acts (storytelling, music- and image-making, textproduction,
and so on). This relationship has emerged as a dialectic in which the phenomena
'past' and 'present' are mutually constitutive and implicating. The resultant 'messiness' directly
affects the procedures and products of 'historicaI Jesus' research, which has especially depended
upon the assumption that we can neatly and cleanly separate 'authentic' (past) from
'inauthentic' (present) traditions. This thesis establishes some problems that attend to this
assumption and attempts to establish a 'historical Jesus' programme that is more sensitive to the
entanglement of past and present. Social memory research has especially identified 'reputation' .
as a vehicle of this entanglement in the memory of specific historical persons. Therefore, Jesus'
reputation' plays a key analytic role in this project.
Another consequence of social memory research has been the emphatic insistence that
all memorial acts are culturally and socially conditioned; the meaning of 'memories', the
products of memorial act? emerges from the relationship of memorial acts and their social
contexts. One aspect of the gospels' social context that has been underappreciated in most New
Testament research is the contextualisation ofour written gospels within the vibrant and fluid
oral traditional milieux ofJesus and Israelite communities. This project examines and applies
the poetics of oral traditional narrative, including the textualisation of oral tradition, to our
written gospels.
The resultant theoretical perspective dramatically affects gospels and 'historical Jesus'
research. Since both these fields are too vast to encompass here, this project focuses its attention
on We appearance of Jesus' healing and exorcistic praxis in the sayings tradition. Afterwards, we
will suggest a few areas in which critics might fruitfully pursue future research in the gospels and
on tile historical Jesus.