The Tradition of Jesus at the Point of Origin

Abstract

A NOTHER title could be affixed to this article: Beyond Form Criticism. The new discipline of Form Criticism was developed in gospel study because Source Criticism could reach only so far and could yield only limited returns. Form Criticism, the child of this disappointment, opened up the whole field of the oral period and the tradition living in the living church. We propose to raise the question, Can we go back of the church tradition of to the point of origin? This is a question of procedure and method in the historical investigation of gospel materials. We may not go much beyond the question, for this paper is intended to be exploratory and its conclusions are only tentative. When we have finished, we may have simply underscored the obvious. The title of Dibelius' book, From Tradition to Gospel, has set the limits of much gospel study in the last twenty-five years. We have heard much about the living tradition in the church, the method of its transmission through kerygma and didache. We have seen church life reflected in the gospel material. We have made conjectures as to the form of the preliminary drafts of gospel stories and the crystallization of the passion narrative. This period of the earliest Christian community has become clear to us. Equally clear are the units of the tradition which can be seen in the gospels as finally written down. But what of the original impact of Jesus? What of the tradition at the point of origin? We have hesitated to ask such questions, for some of these thorough-going form critics have left us deeply sceptical. These students discredited the aims of the Jesus of history school and left us in uncertainty. Bultmann said, Interest in the personality of is excluded . . . I think that we can now know almos nothing concerning the life and person ity of Jesus.1 They said, We can hear only the whisper of his voice. Lightfoot joined the chorus: It seems, then, that the form of the earthly no less than of the heavenly Christ is for the most part hidden from us.2 In some quarters the scholars seem to have abandoned the attempts to reconstruct the historical figure of Jesus, and many are content to stop with the well-defined faith of the primitive church. And of course this faith can be directly related to the faith of the church today. What was good enough for the early church is good enough for us; that seems to justify the current point of view that rests with the belief of the primitive community. For example, Alan Richardson in his book, The Miracle Stories of the New Testament, treats the miracles as part of the gospel record but considers them chiefly as signs of his teaching and as the result of meditation on the person and acts of Jesus. He says that the story of the blind man at Bethsaida is an enacted parable and that it is a secondary question whether the blind man was an histori-