Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives

Conclusion: The Work of Birger Gerhardsson in Perspective

173 Werner H. Kelber The Work of Birger Gerhardsson in Perspective Conclusion I do not believe that there is any simple answer to the question concerning the origins of the gospel tradition. Birger Gerhardsson, The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition . . . the greater part of the ancient literature is intended for the ears as much as, if not more than, the eyes. Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript The study of the Torah is, according to a typical rabbinic mode of expression, “a work of the mouth.” Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript Half a century after Birger Gerhardsson wrote his signature piece, Memory and Manuscript, the contributors to this volume, along with the editors, are offering a reassessment of his scholarly accomplishments . No doubt the status of New Testament studies at the outset of the twenty-first century is impressively different from what it was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. However, humanistic scholarship, including biblical studies, is not a history merely of steady growth and systematic advance in knowledge which would allow us to simply slough off the past as dead matter. To say that biblical scholarship manifests itself in 174 B Werner H. Kelber complex interfaces of present with past states of learning is to acknowledge that with genuine advances come transformations of ostensibly assured knowledge and rediscoveries of what we thought we had known for sure. This hermeneutical insight applies with special relevance to the work of Gerhardsson. Individually and collectively, the essays gathered in this volume treat areas that have been the focus of Gerhardsson’s scholarly attention or have been suggested by him as subject for further inquiry. Building on recent advances in orality, scribality, memory, and rabbinic studies, as well as in our understanding of communications and education in Hellenistic culture, prompted us to revisit and to reacquaint ourselves with principal aspects of Gerhardsson’s work. Taken together these essays offer a vast array of topics and issues pertaining to the early Christian, rabbinic, and Hellenistic tradition processes, which in this variety and combination are not available anywhere else. They are testimony both to Gerhardsson’s wide range of interests and to the productive intellectual impulses that have issued forth from his work. Of the many issues that Gerhardsson’s Memory and Manuscript has raised, none has drawn greater attention than the assumed backdating of rabbinic techniques of transmission into the Second Temple period and their application to the early Jesus tradition. Ever since Morton Smith made this the central point,1 reviews have revisited this topic again and again, defining it frequently as the sole criterion by which to judge the author’s theses. By now the issue has been explicated by Gerhardsson2 and clarified by Samuel Byrskog in the introduction to this volume, while the criticism itself has been revoked by Jacob Neusner in his foreword3 to the reprint of Memory and Manuscript. One can, therefore, proceed from the premise that Gerhardsson’s rabbinic model is just that, “an example, a model, a possibility,”4 a cultural pattern, in other words, which was meant to facilitate comparative thinking in relation to the rabbinic and the early Jesus tradition. While the study of the latter in the context of Second Temple scribalism and post-70 rabbinism remains a fruitful undertaking, as will be shown below, any further discussion of the specific topic of a backdating of rabbinic techniques has become pointless, all the more so since the heavy focus on this issue has had the effect of eclipsing other more significant features of Gerhardsson’s work. Form Criticism More important at this stage is the observation that in its totality Gerhardsson ’s work was meant to propose an alternative to the form-critical The Work of Birger Gerhardsson in Perspective B 175 paradigm of the gospel origins. As is well known, he developed his paradigm of tradition and gospel in the face of what Byrskog has called “the most influential scholarly agenda at the time” and what for the longest part of the twentieth century was the reigning methodology in large parts of gospel studies. Christopher Tuckett is, therefore, quite correct in calling Gerhardsson’s magnum opus “highly courageous” and indeed “seminal in opening up and generating debate and discussion in important areas.” Not surprisingly, form critics were among the most vociferous critics of Memory and Manuscript, often seizing upon Gerhardsson’s rabbinic thesis and thereby deflecting his objections to their own...