Table Of ContentContents
Introduction 1
Samuel Byrskog
1 Form Criticism 21
Christopher Tuckett
2 The Jesus Tradition as Oral Tradition 39
Terence C. Mournet
3 Jesus Tradition and the Pauline Letters 63
David E. Aune
4 Honi the Circler in Manuscript and Memory: An Experiment
in “Re-Oralizing” the Talmudic Text 87
Martin S. Jaffee
5 Memory and Tradition in the Hellenistic Schools 113
Loveday Alexander
6 Memory 155
Alan Kirk
Conclusion: The Work of Birger Gerhardsson in Perspective 173
Werner H. Kelber
Notes 207
Bibliography 261
List of Contributors 279
Index of Ancient Sources 281
Index of Modern Authors v 288
Introduction
Samuel Byrskog
Memory and Tradition
The present book is about memory and tradition, and a host of
related issues. The relationship between the two is far from evident.
Modern society venerates various sites of artificial memory that distance
traditional knowledge and information from human memory while turn-
ing our minds into a blur of diverging impressions and sensations. In the
Western world the printed book page is the primary site of information,
and it is perceived to represent the stability and durability of commu-
nication. Computerized information tech nology competes successfully
in the arena of artificial memory and influences us in unforeseen ways.
The plurality and fragmented character of its messages collides with our
desire for stability and coherence in communication and threatens to
collapse into an impressionistic fusion of fiction and reality. Human
memory has been emptied of its struct uring elements and become the
battle ground of a vast array of conflicting modes of information. It takes
sustained and disciplined effort to lay open the existential and commu-
nicative importance of the mnemonic structures of the human mind and
recover the ine xtricable bonds between memory and tradition.
Memory can be many things. At a time when writing was virtually
un known and everything depended on the spoken word, it was a vener-
ated goddess. Mnemosyne was born when heaven and earth united and
1
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it was she who gave birth to the Muses (Theog. 53–63, 133–36). When
Hermes discovered the lyre, he sang the story of the immortal gods
and honored Mnemosyne as the first one among them (Merc. 429–30).
During the legendary Golden Age kings and poets were endowed with
the gift of Mnemosyne and privileged to enter into a special relationship
with the Muses. The reasons for the prestige of this Greek Titaness
were manifold. The absence of writing was a contributing factor as it
precluded any sense of external, diachronic development and fost ered a
blending of past, present, and future that was mediated and negotiated
mnemonically. Memory and tradition were symbiotically united in all
aspects of life. Human memory was the structuring force of life in a
world of myths.
This vital and mythical union was nourished especially in circles that
were separate from the mainstream Greek polis-centered cult. Inscrip-
tions of possibly Pytha gorean origin on the so-called Orphic gold leaves
indicate fascinating notions of how the dead were longing to drink from
Mnemosyne and warned against forgetting.1 A noteworthy, although not
direct, analogy is Pausanias’ description of the ancient underground
oracle of Tro phonius at Lebadea (western Boeotia). Visitors to the sub-
terranean chasm, it was believed, were made to drink from the rivers
of Lethe (“forgetfulness,” “concealment”) and Mnemosyne. After their
ascent the priests placed them upon the chair of Mnemosyne, not far from
the shrine, so that they may ask the visitors about all that they had seen
or learned (9.39.8–13). Memory was the fountain of life for those who
sought eagerly to experience the mysteries. To remember was to live, to
forget was to die.
Memory became the essential link to the past. There emerged a never-
ending struggle to protect it from distortion and to prevent the threat of
forget fulness. Plato feared that the invention of the alphabet would make
students rely on external characters which, not being part of them selves,
would discourage the use of memory within them (Phaedr. 275a). In his
treatise De Memoria et Remini scentia Aristotle insisted that true recollec-
tion arranges the past according to the sequential structures of images
imprinted on the mind and creates a sense of temp oral distance between
the past and the present.
The rhetoricians made memory into a matter of honor and shame.
Quintilian would not write anything which he did not intend to memo-
rize (Inst. 10.7.32), and he shared with several other orators an inter-
est—albeit somewhat reticent—in the old mnemo-technical repertoire
believed to have origi nated with Simonides of Ceos in the sixth and
Introduction B 3
fifth century B.C.E. The honor attached to it produced several exagger-
ated accounts. Seneca the Elder, a skilled rhetorician, boasts that in his
youth he was able to repeat two thousand names that were read to him
and that he could recite in reverse order over two hundred verses that
his fellow student told him. To him, this was a true miraculum (Con-
troversiae 1 pref. 2). His boasting is a reminder of the vital importance
that anyone who wished to speak and write persuasively attached to a
good and accurate memory. The well-informed Pliny the Elder likewise
praises memory as the greatest gift of nature and tells several anecdotes
about persons who had gained glory from “this most necessary boon
of life” (Nat. 7.24.88). Forgetfulness, as he goes on to illustrate, was
exceedingly embarrassing. At this point memory was not seen as the
structuring feature of life in a world of myths, but rather as the grand
vehicle of persuasive and successful oral per formance. Memory and
tradition were rhetorically united into forceful and glorious mnemonic
performances.
Pliny died at Pompeii in 79 C.E. This was the time when the rabbis
entered the arena of history. To them as well memory was a matter of
honor and shame, but within a different sacred and scholarly context.
The Mishnah records from the early days of the rabbinic movement
how Yochanan ben Zakkai praised Eliezer ben Hyrkanos for his excel-
lent memory and compared him with a plastered cistern which loses not
a drop (m. Abot 2:8). Eliezer enjoyed a special and ideal ized reputation
for his memory. The rabbis moved memory into the religious domain by
deve loping it into the fundamental basis of a learned didactic discourse
linked to a specific concept of sacred tradition. When they narrowed
down tradition to items of the Torah, they focused on memory as the sta-
ble guarantee and medium of successf ul transmission in a chain of teachers
and students. Hence they both enhanced the importance of memory and
limited its reference. In their own scholarly way, they recovered it as a
vital structuring principle of life and confined it to acts of memorization
and transmission.
The early followers of Jesus thus lived in a milieu where memory and
tradition were closely bound to each other in various sacred contexts
and forms of communication. The Christian authors of the first two
centuries—from Paul to Irenaeus—encoded into their writings different
signs of mnemonic nego tiation between the sacred past and the present
to such an extent that written and oral tradition became words to live by
and to die for. Modern scholars have assessed the significance of these
signs in different ways. While memory studies were scarcely taken into
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account in New Testament scholarship during the last century, there has
recently appeared a significant range of work dealing with the mnemonic
dimension of the early Christian tradition. Memory and tradition are
again seen to belong together and the scholarly world is seeking actively
to recover the ancient bond between the two.
The Contribution of Birger Gerhardsson
Few scholars have influenced New Testament scholarship in the area
of memory and tra dition more profoundly than Birger Gerhardsson.
Today, as memory and tradi tion have again been placed on the scholarly
agenda, his pioneering work comes into new light. The contributors of
the present book come from various acad emic and intellectual milieus
and hold different views on a number of scholarly matters, but they have
all willingly taken on the task of evaluating his contrib ution anew and
bringing his insights up to date with the current debate. The discussion
of his ideas, even where there is disagreement, is a manifestation of the
crucial importance of his work.
Memory and Manuscript
At a time when form criticism tended decisively to dissolve the ancient
relation ship between memory and tradition and focus solely on the
kerygmatic concerns of the early Christians, Ger hardsson launched his
Uppsala dissertation Memory and Manuscript. It was published for the
first time in 1961.2 In his unpublished Licentiatenarbeit from 1956 enti-
tled Studier i Jakobsbrevets uppkomstmiljö, he had discovered—contrary
to Martin Dibelius—that the sayings of Jesus alluded to in the letter of
James had been transmitted in dependently of their use in parae nesis. It
was, however, with his dissertation that he confronted New Testament
scholarship with a deeply erudite and original thesis about Christian
origins.
Uppsala was a lively and stimulating center of biblical studies in the
1950s and early 1960s. Gerhardsson began his doctoral studies in 1952
under Anton Fridrichsen, the dynamic professor of New Testament in
Uppsala from 1928 to 1953, and he served as his last famulus.3 Frid-
richsen knew the leading form critics well and entertained close contact
especially with Rudolf Bult mann. He was positively inclined toward the
form-critical program but addressed only spora dically the problem of
Introduction B 5
tradition. Upon the death of Fridrichsen in 1953, Gerhardsson contin-
ued his doctoral studies under Harald Riesenfeld. It was, however, Ivan
Engnell, the prolific professor of Old Testament in Uppsala from 1947
to 1963, that aroused his interest in oral and written tradition. Gerhards-
son attended Engnell’s seminar for eight years. He was surrounded by
other scholars with a keen interest in various issues concerning orality
and literacy, ancient schools and education, and tradition and trans-
mission in different religious contexts. The investigations of these and
related issues by G. W. Ahlström, Engnell, H. S. Nyberg, Helmer Ring-
gren, and, in a different way, Geo Wideng ren,4 with their attention to
prophetic disciples and traditionalist circles as well as oral and/or written
tradition, made any simple recourse to popular and collect ive features
of oral tradition problematic. Among New Testament scholars, Krister
Stendahl had in his Uppsala dissertation of 1954 questioned Dibelius’
central idea of the kerygmatic force behind early Christian tradition and
focused on settings of scribes and schools.5 Form criticism was indeed an
object of discussion and critical scrutiny in Uppsala during the 1950s.
Ger hardsson recog nized the need to advance these inquiries and he was
the first one in Scandinavia thoroughly to study tradition and transmis-
sion in rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity.6
The influential form-critical paradigm of the 1950s and early 1960s,
with its proposed solution to the problem of the origins of the gospel
tradition, was the starting point of Gerhardsson’s dissertation. He intro-
duces his work with some critical remarks on the form critics’ emphasis
on eschatology, their notions of Jesus’ identity and ministry, their insis-
tence on the pneumatic and nonliterary character of the early church,
and their neglect to define the con cept of tradition and transmission.
Considerations such as these, he believed, make it necessary to determine
the tech nical procedures that were implemented by the early church in
its transmission of the gospel tradition and other material.
The Jewish Torah of the Tannaitic and Amoraic periods serves as
the principal comparative material and constitutes the object of the first
part of Gerhardsson’s study. He is not discussing the Jewish law in the
narrow sense of the term, but, as he emphatically points out, the Jews’
sacred authoritative tradition (doctrine) in its entirety. Written Torah
is not to be equated with the Pentateuch, whether standing on its own
or in conjunction with the Prophets and the Writings. It is, rather,
authoritative transm ission in written form. Oral Torah is not merely
the Mishnah. It is authoritative transmission in oral form and includes
repetition and that which is repeated.
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Gerhardsson’s attention to rabbinic literature was deliberate. He
defends it not by arguing for its roots in the pre-70 situation, as many of
his critics have assumed, but by pointing to the fact that rabbinic Juda-
ism was a most influential current at the beginning of the Christian era
and in subsequent centuries. Moreover, the Oral Torah was sacred and
authoritative to the extent that its transm ission was methodologically
regulated and described in the sources. While fully aware that the catas-
trophes of 70 and 135 C.E. brought with them changes in the rabbis’
views and actions, he regards it unlikely that any radically new teaching
methods were introduced after 70 C.E. It would be highly desirable,
he says, to pay equal attention to the techniques of trans mission within
other groups in the Hellenistic world as well.
Gerhardsson had noticed the occurrence of both Jesus texts and the
free proclamation and teaching about Jesus in the New Testament.
Turning to the Jewish Torah, he discovers a similar duality between the
preservation of the wording of the biblical texts and the imaginative use
of sacred texts in the targums and the midrashic literature. This dual-
ity points to different contexts, he argues. He is aware of the dynamic
adaptation of the text in various situations and intentionally narrows the
perspective of his study to the specific situations in which the text was
faithfully reproduced in its traditional state.
Three contexts of scriptural transmission are crucial. The primary one
is the professional context. Here trained scholars methodologically pre-
served the text in unaltered fashion. The second context is educational.
The Torah was passed on in ele mentary schools. The preservation of the
text was not the main objective in education, but great importance was
placed upon the accuracy of the text. The third context is liturgical. Here
the sacred text was read unchanged in public worship.
Gerhardsson’s major interest was the Oral Torah. It was transmitted
in different places. The activity of the schools—Gerhardsson uses the
term “college” for the bet midrash—was of primary importance. In this
context trained specialists performed transmission programmatically
and methodically. It is difficult, Gerhardsson maintains, to envision
any alternative kind of oral transmission besides this regular and disci-
plined one. While transmission in a sense took place at all times and in
all places and religious tradition had a broad basis among the people as
a whole, it was the specialists who carried the tradition to the religious
communities.
The transmission of the Oral Torah is, according to Gerhardsson,
similar to the transm ission of the Written Torah. The conviction that
Introduction B 7
oral transmission was strongly stamped by the written word is the reason
why he devotes a chapter to the Written Torah before turning to the
Oral Torah. The Oral Torah interpreted, partic ularized, complemented,
and occasionally modified the Written Torah, but both were carried and
handed on by means of memorization. The only important difference
was that in one case the text was a written text and must be learned
from reading, while in the other case it was an oral text to be learned by
repeating what the teacher said.
The teacher and his students memorized and interpreted the Torah
in separate yet closely related activities. While Gerhardsson emphasizes
that these two activities were held apart to the extent that memorization
always should precede interpretation, he also refers to the critique of
some rabbis against those traditionists who only memorized and failed
to penetrate to the meaning of the tradition and to implement it in their
lives. In the advanced college the memo rized texts provided only ele-
mentary knowledge to be used in expos ition and dialectical techniques.
Occasionally the traditionists’ text became the object of negative criti-
cism, especially when it conflicted with the received Mishnah. The trans-
mission of the Oral Torah took place on all school levels in such a way
that the teacher or traditionist equipped the students with the oral text
by repeating it several times and required them to interpret it. Knowl-
edge of the Oral Torah was not complete, according to Gerhardsson,
until it had been interpreted adequately, even if in a most rudimentary
fashion. He spends considerable effort to show how the rather mechani-
cal Mishnah teaching was carried out and memorized, being fully aware
of its limited focus. But his frequent references to the interplay between
solidity and flexibility in the transm ission of the Oral Torah illustrate his
sensitivity to the close relationship and interplay between that which was
transmitted and current discussions and needs.
Gerhardsson divides the Oral Torah roughly into the sayings tradition
and the narrative tradition. After describing in detail the techniques of
memorization, he elaborates how additional inspired words and episodes
concerning the deeds of the rabbis were introduced into the more rigid
process of transmission and themselves became the object of transmis-
sion. Brief halakic statements were memorized together with new sayings,
so that the same tradition could be carried forward in different forms.
Haggadic material cont ained additional sayings which the teacher wished
to place among other texts that the students had in mind.
The students’ reverence for the teacher and their ambition to retain
his every word led to the incorporation of further sayings into the
