What Jesus Didn’t Say by Gerd Lüdemann (review)

In an industry of so many books focusing on claims of what Jesus “actually” said and did, a book about what Jesus did not say is a novel idea with much potential. Recent advances in scholarship on the historical Jesus has scholars moving away from rediscovering the ipsissima verba of Jesus and focusing instead on how Jesus was remembered among early Christians (e.g., James D.G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, Eerdmans, 2003). Gerd Lüdemann’s book fits into that recent trend as well, since he too is interested in how Jesus was remembered, and in how memories of Jesus were used and shaped by the needs of the communities transmitting and using the sayings traditions.

Lüdemann introduces the book by discussing the phenomenon of fictional sayings of Jesus. This discussion anticipates many of the points that will be made later when discussing the inauthenticity of certain sayings: Jesus did not speak after he died; sayings that make sense in a post-Easter setting are post-Easter sayings; redactional activity is evidence of the gospel writer’s creativity; sayings that make sense in a gentile environment are secondary. Lüdemann also suggests that identifying authentic sayings can be a useful way of setting the inauthentic sayings apart. Not that this will comprise much of the book, but Lüdemann names four criteria for authenticity: offensiveness (e.g., Matt 13:44), difference (Mark 2:18–22), growth (the addition of Matt 5:34b–37 to an original saying of Jesus found in Matt 5:34a), and coherence.

These criteria are similar to and different from the consensus criteria: Lüdemann’s criterion of offensiveness relates, in part, to the criterion of embarrassment; the criterion of difference resembles the criterion of discontinuity; and the criterion of coherence is the same. Lüdemann’s criterion of growth, however, is both unique and unfortunately out of step with important recent advances in scholarship. This criterion too closely follows the thinking of the older Form Criticism, which imagined oral transmission as a stratified, sequential literary process. It is not, in my opinion, that sayings of Jesus do not undergo change during transmission; rather, it is that this will not happen in a linear fashion, as it does with texts. But worse, the notion of growth as Lüdemann articulates it imagines that Jesus would have produced a single version of a saying, an original saying that could be discovered by peeling back sequential secondary layers of accretion. This is not likely the best way to be thinking about this process anymore. Also interesting is the absence from Lüdemann’s criteria of the traditional one of multiple independent attestation.

The main part of the book analyzes twenty-eight sayings and sayings-clusters of Jesus as presented in the canonical gospels, all of which Lüdemann assesses to be inauthentic. These inauthentic sayings are divided into two categories: sayings pertaining to the career of Jesus (e.g., words exchanged with John the Baptist at the baptism, Jesus’s inaugural sermon in Nazareth, his prediction of the “betrayal” of Judas, and his words at the empty tomb), and those pertaining to his theology (e.g., prophetic statements, rules for piety, vices, a number of parables, and John’s “I am” statements).

This approach cannot have found a more sympathetic reviewer, yet I was consistently disappointed by the bulk of the book. In every instance, Lüdemann’s explanations of his assessments of inauthenticity were unsatisfying. Too often, the sayings targeted were too easy (e.g., sayings of the resurrected Christ, which no self-respecting scholar considers material for the historical Jesus). When the targets were not too obvious, the explanation given was too brief. Time and again, Lüdemann offers little more than a summary of a more detailed analysis of inauthenticity. The book as a whole feels like an outline of a longer, scholarly study.

Lüdemann obviously has in his sights a...