Jesus' Death in Early Christian Memory: The Poetics of the Passion.

JESUS' DEATH IN EARLY CHRISTIAN MEMORY: THE POETICS OF THE PASSION. By Ellen Bradshaw Aitken. Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus / Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments, vol. 53. Gottingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht/Fribourg, Switzerland: Academic Press, 2004. Pp. 202. Cloth, $51.92.

Aitken, now associate professor of New Testament at McGill University, undertakes an archaeology of the accounts of the passion of Jesus. This, she argues, is urgent for three reasons. First, the relation between, and the origins of, the three independent narrative passion accounts in Mark, John and the Gospel of Peter have not been sufficiently clarified, nor has there been adequate exploration of the architecture of the version of the passion story known to Paul. Second, form-critical analysis of the synoptic passion stories has left a confused picture. While it is dear that these stories are at least partly the product of reflection on the Hebrew Bible, it is unclear whether the setting of the earliest passion stories was apologetics, homiletics, or cultic reenactment. Nor is clear the degree to which those stories contain historical remembrances or arc the product of scribal invention. Finally and most importantly for Aitken's thesis, the insights of Milman Parry, Albert Lord, and Gregory Nagy on the method of "composition in performance" have never been applied to understanding the passion stories.

Aitken argues that the discourse about Jesus' death was formed in the context of cultic performance and that in this context, the performance of Jesus' death was shaped by covenantal language, by motifs drawn from the story of the exodus, wilderness experience, and entry into the land, and by language drawn from the cycle of hymns and psalms about the righteous sufferer. Hence, to use a recent schematic for understanding the debate about the passion story, Aitken inclines to the view that it is "prophecy historicized" rather than "history remembered." What distinguishes her work from that of Werner Kelber and Burton Mack, however, is her privileging of pre-scribal, oral performance. But this does not lead her, as it does in the case of other recent advocates of "oral performance," to lapse into an apologetics for the historicity of the passion stories. Indeed, Aitken scarcely touches the question of how much of the accounts of Jesus' death reflect genuine historical memory.

This is because Aitken chooses not to examine the passion accounts of Mark, John or Peter, but instead analyzes four non-narrative texts--1 Corinthians, 1 Peter, Barnabas, and Hebrews--which she assumes will afford more direct access to the cultic life of the early Jesus movement and hence a dearer glimpse of the liturgical context in which the passion stories, ex hypothesi, were formulated. In a close analysis of these four texts, or parts of them (1 Cor 10-11; 15:3-5; 1 Pet 2:22-25; Barn. 5-9; Heb 3:5-6; 5:7-10; 6:4-8; 8:7-13; 10:19-25; 13:10-16), Aitken demonstrates how allusions to Jesus' death have been fused with a range of texts from the Tanak: Exodus 17; 24; 32; Numbers 11; 14; 25; Deuteronomy 32; Isaiah 50; 53; Hosea 6:1-2; Zechariah 9-13; Psalms 22; 32; 34; 39; 114) so that the "performance of the cult legend of Israel with particular interest in the trials in the wilderness and the suffering of Moses, the stories and songs of the suffering righteous, the covenant as the interpretive framework for the practices of identity of the community, and the practice of a cultic meal" came to inform the memorialization of Jesus' death (p. 54). The process began, she conjectures, in the context of the ritual meals of the Jesus groups (p. 171).

JESUS' DEATH IN EARLY CHRISTIAN MEMORY represents an important corrective to scribally-based models for understanding the com position of early Christian traditions, and one hopes that this is the first of a longer series of explorations. There are a variety of other tasks that remain if this approach is to become persuasive. First, although Aitken refers to "composition in performance" in other literatures, mostly epic poetry, she does not explain in detail how the model was thought to work there, and hence it is unclear whether a model developed for Homer is really applicable to the discourse of the early Jesus movement. Second, the presence of liturgical traditions is more assumed than it is argued. This also raises the question, largely unexplored, of how one understands the relationship between the hypothetical liturgical performers and the writers responsible for the literary composition of 1 Corinthians, 1 Peter, Barnabas, and Hebrews. Aitken moves rather too quickly from written text, which, whatever else it might be, is scribal, to a hypothetical oral stage without much reflection on the dynamics of textualization. There is also a certain irony in the fact that while Aitken's focus is on the ritual context of the early passion traditions, there is very little discussion of theories of ritual. Despite these few reservations, however, Aitken has struck out in a new and potentially very productive direction. We can look forward to further explorations of com position in performance.

John S. Kloppenborg

University of Toronto 

Toronto, ON