The generative force of memory: early Christian traditions as processes of remembering.

This article seeks to carry forward recent work on social or cultural memory in relation to the early Christian tradition. It develops the concept of a memorially empowered tradition which operates less as transmission of traditions, and more precisely as a functioning social memory, e.g., as a dynamic driven by the desire to keep Jesus' words alive by making them communicate to the present. Memory understood as a continual process of commemorating activities, intent on remembering the past while simultaneously addressing social identity in the present, is seen as the grand motivating force of tradition.

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The virtual absence of memory both as an analytical tool and as hermeneutical category in Jesus and gospel research has rightly been lamented by Kirk and Thatcher (25-42), and their insightful analysis of this deplorable state in biblical studies merits our close attention (esp. 29-39). I have in two previous articles on the role of memory emanating from Jesus and flowing into the Gospels likewise reflected on this inattention to memory and observed that in "most quarters of the scholarly guild [of New Testament studies] mnemosyne simply is not a relevant issue" (2002, esp. 58; 2005). For the longest part of its history, modernity's scholarship of the Bible has managed--with one notable exception--to operate without a developed concept of memory.

We need not revisit here internal developments in biblical scholarship that have contributed to the demise. Important as these analyses are in illuminating the virtual disappearance of memory from the horizon of biblical and especially New Testament scholarship, we should not lose sight of dimensions that may help us comprehend the present situation in the larger context of the history of memory. For memory has a deep history, and we need to understand its demise in relation to this history. Widely viewed as the centralizing authority of civilized life in ancient and to some degree in medieval culture, memory was traditionally assigned a principal role in rhetoric, until it was gradually deprived of its primary status, taking on auxiliary functions in the ethical, metaphysical and eventually historical disciplines. In medieval culture, memory became integrated into prayer, meditation and moral philosophy, until early modernism proceeded to absorb it into dialectic and logic. Divested of its honorable position of being the birthplace of civilization, memory was thus denigrated to a peripheral province. In these broader historical terms, modern biblical scholarship and its prevalent disregard of memory reveals a historical indebtedness to a distinct intellectual legacy of the gradual marginalization of memory. Biblical studies, presenting itself as historical criticism, took on the nimbus of a science and actively participated in the so-called documentary revolution for which tradition and texts, including biblical texts, were increasingly intelligible without recourse to memory.

The seriousness of the dilemma appears all the more acute if we take cognizance of an exceptional revival of memory work that has taken place internationally in the humanities and social sciences. Roughly since the 1960s, the work of memory has been carried forward with almost obsessive intensity in a great variety of fields such as anthropology, political science, literary criticism, medieval studies, cultural studies, sociology, ethnic studies, philosophy, history, and other disciplines, elevating memory to virtually programmatic significance and generating a diverse body of theories and a plethora of studies on memorializing/commemorative/remembering activities in human culture. In fact, with such an abundance of specialized and interdisciplinary memory studies are the humanities and social sciences now confronted that we risk losing an integral vision of the topic. Biblical studies, it bears repeating, appear to have been largely unaffected by these developments.

In a number of ways, New Testament and memory studies would seem to represent mutually attractive and supportive disciplinary approaches. On the one hand, insofar as Jesus research and gospel studies deal with both oral and scribal materials that are in terms of composition, performance and reception deeply rooted in oral/rhetorical cultural contexts, it is difficult to see how one can grasp the early tradition without a developed concept of memory. Jesus research and gospel studies cry out for an integration of memory studies. On the other hand, memory studies raise a host of hermeneutical, philosophical, social, and linguistic and media issues, many of which would seem to be of fundamental concern to biblical studies. Among those issues one might mention the enigma of the present (or representation) of the absent past, the tradition of the ars memoriae, the entanglements of memory and imagination, the role of image (and imaging) in the process of remembering, the problem of forgetting, the phenomenon of multiple commemorative activities, the cultivation of inwardness from Augustine to Husserl, the notion of a socially shared memory introduced in modernity by Halbwachs, crises and traumas of memories, the representation of the historical personality as an Erinnerungsfigur, and others. A (re)introduction of (some) of these memorial features may prove helpful in casting fresh light on the workings of the Jesus tradition, illuminating them as processes of remembering.

Jesus and His Oral Performances

In the 1920s, virtually contemporaneous with the rise of classical form criticism undertaken by Bultmann, Dibelius and Schmidt, the French Jesuit Marcel Jousse, who called himself "an experimental ethnic psychologist of rhythmic recitation" (1925/1990 trans. 221), published a series of linguistic studies on rhythm and bilateralism in ancient Near Eastern cultures with special consideration of the language of Jesus (1925; 1930; 1952; 1959; 1978). To many of Jousse's readers his work came as something of a shock as they observed the author approaching Jesus under linguistic and anthropological aspects, and identifying him as a Galilean rabbi entirely at home in ancient Mediterranean language and culture. Yet few, if any, before or after Jousse have succeeded in developing laws of oral style and memorization or in demonstrating their applicability to many of Jesus' aphorisms and parables. Entirely in keeping with the verbal arts in ancient oral culture, much of Jesus' language as it has come down to us--operated in a conspicuously rhythmic, formulaic diction, couched in memorially usable patterns and formulated around structural cores. As such it is representative of the ars memoriae that was designed to facilitate remembering in the oral processing of knowledge and information. From its very inception, therefore, memory is an imperative force in Christian origins.

It was in part the implementation of the ars memoriae in the language of Jesus that persuaded Gerhardsson (1961) and others (Riesenfeld 1970; Riesner 1984) to postulate a process of traditioning that never radically altered sayings of and stories about Jesus. Cast in memorable modes of communication, sayings were repeated many times over, until they arrived, more or less intact, in the narrative Gospels. It is, therefore, worth noting that the first and virtually only time in modern biblical scholarship when memory was introduced as an analytical model for conceptualizing what is conventionally called the synoptic tradition, it was in its retentive, passive and strictly preservative function. Put differently, memory in the gospel tradition was perceived to be cold memory.

Now it is a commonplace that speakers in oral cultures are inclined to operate with a rhythmic, formulaic diction. Undoubtedly, "mnemonic techniques," as Gerhardsson has called this mode of operation (148-56), were designed to facilitate remembering in the oral processing of knowledge and information. While the mnemonic patterning of much of the Jesus tradition cannot be in doubt, the question is whether mnemonics facilitated memorization in the strictly mechanical sense as Gerhardsson envisioned it. Using rabbinic culture as template for early Christian word processing, Gerhardsson identified three social contexts that, in his view, encouraged, indeed required, verbatim preservation of texts: the professional copying of texts undertaken by Scripture specialists, the mechanical learning in school settings, and the locus of public worship (43-70).

As far as textual copying in the context of public worship is concerned, we shall provide evidence below that mechanical word processing does not get us to the heart of the early Jesus transmission. While Gerhardsson's observation regarding "the general and basic role played by memorization in Classical Antiquity" (126) would seem to reflect too undifferentiated an understanding of the verbal arts in Greco-Roman and Hellenistic culture, his attribution of memorization to Hellenistic and rabbinic school settings where "the material is first committed to memory, and then an attempt at understanding is undertaken" (126) is more to the point. It is, however, worth noting that Jesus the oral performer was neither a Hellenistic philosopher nor a Tannaitic teacher of the oral Torah, but an itinerant charismatic. More importantly, there is little, if any, early Christian evidence for schools being the principal sociological locus where literal repetition and memorization of the ipsissima verba provided the pedagogical principle for the early traditioning of Jesus sayings. For example, Eldon Epp's remarkable study on Oxyrhynchus, site of the largest and geographically most concentrated find of New Testament papyri ever, has next to nothing to say about scribal exercises conducted in schools (5-55). Instead, what we have found at Oxyrhynchus are fragments of multiple versions of Jesus sayings that are hermeneutically not pedagogically conditioned. Although Oxyrhynchus furnishes some "64 percent of all NT papyri of known provenance" (13), the school setting cannot be assumed to be an identifiable social context for them. Indeed, Gerhardsson himself did not seem able to furnish evidence of schools in early Christian history as principal loci for the memorization of Jesus traditions. As far as we can see at this point, the school setting and its pedagogical principle of teaching by repetition, learning by heart, and scribal exercises was not at the center of the early traditioning processes of Jesus materials.

The ipsissimum verbum, conceived both by form criticism and the modern Quest in terms of the one original saying carrying a single sense and transmitted through the early oral tradition, has no validity in the oral performance situation of the charismatic itinerant. Orality, including Jesus' very own oral performances, is characterized by a plurality of speech acts, and not by the one original logion. When the charismatic speaker pronounced a saying at one place, and subsequently chose to deliver it, with audience adjustments, elsewhere, neither he nor his hearers would have understood the second rendition as a second-hand version of the earlier, "authentic" speech act. Neither he nor his audience would have thought of differentiating the primary, "original" wording from its secondary, "derivative" version. Instead, each proclamation was perceived, by speaker and hearers alike, to be an autonomous, indeed the autonomous speech act. There exists, therefore, in the early Christian oral tradition a multiplicity or, to use a Heideggerian term, a Gleichursprunglichkeit (Heidegger: 131) or equiprimordiality of multiple speech acts. This simultaneity of multiple original speech acts suggests a principle entirely different from, indeed contrary to the notion of the one, original ipsissimum verbum.

More recently, Crossan has suggested that it is not the saying itself, but its structural core, the ipsissima structura, that is being repeated:</p>

<pre> Oral sensibility and ipsissima cerba are, however, contradictions in terms. Or, put otherwise, even if orality speaks of ipsissima verba it means ipsissima structura [38]. </pre> <p>Obviously, the oral performance of words possesses neither duration nor any permanence attached to materiality. Its operations are entirely on the plane of immateriality. For this reason, memory is not merely an embellishment of or addendum to the aphoristic Jesus material, but built into the compositional status and modus operandi of that tradition. As Crossan has articulated the matter perceptively, "the magnificent power of oral memory ... is a memorization primarily of structure" (37). To put it differently: oral culture, including Jesus' aphoristic tradition, thrives on repetition because of its material's ipsissima structura. About this there can be no doubt: the mnemonic patterning of the aphoristic Jesus tradition is designed to facilitate remembering. Aune has put the issue of core structure in a succinct formula: "what is preserved accurately is the ipsissima structura of such aphorisms, not the ipsissima verba" (241).

We need to be very clear, however, what the concept of core structure is capable of providing, and what it cannot provide. It raises the issue of fixity versus flexibility, a concern that is central to oral performance and oral poetics. Specifically, ipsissima structura refers to the element of stability inherent in mnemonically patterned traditions. In oral aesthetics, stability pertains to traditional story patterns, themes and phraseology, and to structural commonalities shared by sayings and stories, epic and poetic traditions. No oral performer operates (entirely) without these structural cores and commonplaces, and Jesus and the tradition emanating from oral performances and reperformances are no exception.

Two caveats need to be expressed with regard to the ipsissima structura. One, for the sake of retaining conceptual transparency in the complex and sometimes fuzzy domain of memory studies, a clear distinction will have to be drawn between memorization and remembering. Under no circumstances can mnemonic structuring automatically be equated with memorization and processes of passive transmission. In antiquity, memorization would seem to be the exception, confined largely to the pedagogics of school education and to certain rabbinic study techniques. While allowing for situations of memorization, Ong has pointed in the right direction when he suggested that to "think of memory as essentially verbatim is to resort to an unreal model for memory fostered by literacy and its practice of transcribing texts" (252). There is no indication that the charismatic itinerant surrounded himself with a group of followers who were duty bound to preserve his exact wording of his message by repeating it over and over again. Again, Ong has accurately captured the mechanism of remembering:</p> <pre> In purely oral memory, formulas and themes are more or less fixed, the stable elements in the storage and retrieval process. But they are always assembled in the present, and each time in a different way [252]. </pre> <p>Remembering, not memorization, will have been the rationale of the mnemonic structuring of the aphoristic tradition.

Two, recent studies of the Quest, represented above all in the magnificent work of Crossan, have utilized the ipsissima structura as a mode of accessing, or rather reconstructing, the ipsissimum verbum. He arrived at the structural commonality of sayings by pruning all existing versions of a given aphorism from what are perceived to be contextual and compositional variables. The resultant core complex, the ipsissima structura, was then secondarily transplanted into the assumed context of Jesus history where it discloses its single sense, the authentic and original meaning.

But, one may well ask, are not these reconstructions of the ipsissima structura the result of an extreme abstraction that runs counter to speech, if only because speech is never finally realized, never totalized? Lord's dictum about spoken words, although arising from a working experience with different materials, would still seem to be apropos of the aphoristic tradition: "... we are deluded by a mirage when we try to construct an ideal form of any given form" (101). To collect and place side by side all written versions of a dominical saying and to trace a trajectory back to the ipsissima structura, the core structure, will give us something that had no existence, not in oral performance nor in scribality. Even if we managed to extract a pattern common to all existing versions of an aphorism, we would have succeeded merely in conjuring a structuralist stability that both by oral and scribal standards is a fictional construct.

The concept of the ipsissima structura clearly has a place in oral performance. But once we seize upon and hold onto this structural stability as an objectified given, we have turned traditional structures into a means of circumventing the inevitable variability of all oral performances. Here we have to acknowledge a deep desire underlying the search for the ipsissimum verbum and the ipsissima structura to overcome the flux of temporality and to dechronologize history, as it were, so as to secure time-obviating fixedness.

As a rule, formulaic stability is not tantamount to memorization, passive tradition and repetition of the single sense. Indeed, nowhere is the identification of structural abstraction with the repeatable single sense less adequate than in oral performance. It is far more appropriate to imagine the aphoristic core as a kind of instrument on which the musician plays and from which (s)he elicits musical tunes. This brings with it all the liberties and constraints that result from the construction of the instrument's bodily form. What matters in the oral composition is not simply the instrument but in a special sense the music played on it. And the success of the performance often depends on the ingenuity of the musician to summon forth the most appropriate tunes for the audience at hand. Mnemonics allow for, indeed thrive on, performative inventiveness in social contextuality. Variable performances on core structures, and not reduction of core structures to a single, historical and repeatable sense is what characterize oral proclamation.

It is important to keep in mind that the Jesus tradition commenced not with archives, but from remembering. To be precise, remembering got under way not with the tradition carrying Jesus sayings, but with Jesus himself insofar as he performed and then "repeated" sayings and parables. We can put the matter at its most precise: the syndrome constituted by tradition, memory and "repetition" is already lodged in Jesus' own proclamatory activities. He is not the commencement of tradition merely as something that, spoken and scripted by others, followed in the wake of his own speech. But insofar as he delivered particular sayings and parabolic stories more than once, as we have suggested, he was confronted with the interval that had elapsed between his earlier and his presently imminent actualization, and thus had to remember his own words so as to "repeat" them. To grasp the role of memory in this process of "repeating" his own words, the Aristotelian distinction between mneme and anamnesis will prove helpful. Referring to memory's affective and recollective side, they constitute the two classic manifestations in the memory tradition. In the case of mneme, the items to be remembered are consciously or subconsciously present and, as it were, ready for "repetition." In the case of anamnesis, one undertakes an active search to recollect the items of the past in response to the needs of the present (Ricoeur: 7-21; Kelber 2005: 233-34). The mnemonic mode of Jesus "repeating" his own aphorisms and parables is that of a lived and acted rather than a searched and represented memory. In this sense we can say that re-performing what has been articulated before marks the onset of tradition already in Jesus' own proclamation. And the generative force is memory, in however subtle and subconscious a way it is operative in the mind of the charismatic speaker.

While thus attributing the "repetitive" mode of memory to a part of Jesus' verbal activity, we prefer the term re-performance to that of "repetition." Memory, including the "repetitive" form of memory in Jesus' tradition, cannot be conceived as cold memory with little interest in and next to no accommodation to live audiences. The quasi-immobile structures of particular aphorisms are meant to ease remembering, not to escape temporality by freezing tradition. It is unthinkable that the charismatic itinerant functioned without consideration of social contexts. Given those contexts, every single proclamation was a freshly original event, whether re-performed or performed for the first time. If, therefore, we imagine Jesus as the commencement of tradition, we should not think of his proclamation in terms of the ipsissimum verbum or ipsissima structura--very much the concerns of modernity's Quest --but as a plurality of words, some articulated for the first time, others re-performed, but all functioning as original speech acts.

The Early Scribal Traditions

In response to Jesus' oral performances and re-performances, the tradition underwent three significant shifts. First, increasingly the tradition came to play itself out post eventum, marking a growing temporal distance from the time of the charismatic itinerant. Second, the tradition was no longer carried by Jesus himself but by others during and increasingly after his lifetime. Third, parts of Jesus' oral proclamation mutated into the scribal medium. Given these facts, how does one assess the relationship between the tradition set into motion by Jesus himself and the one carried by others? Since, as we have seen, Jesus' oral proclamations constituted multiple original speech acts, ought one not to assume that the tradition carried by others post eventum was bent on bringing a sense of stability to Jesus' plural oral performances and re-performances? Ought one not to assume that Jesus' oral proclamations, once transposed into writing, assumed a sense of permanence that comes with the technology of writing? Interestingly, however, this material stability generated by the transit from oral to chirographic medium did not affect the plural manifestations of the Jesus traditions.

To come to terms with the early scribal tradition, we need to turn our attention to recent advances in textual criticism, significantly effected by David Parker (1997), Eldon Epp (2004), and others who have managed to cast fresh light on the early Jesus tradition. It is astonishing to observe how rarely Jesus research and gospel studies have been based on the realities on the ground, e.g., on the available evidence assiduously collected by textual critics over the centuries. In this case as in many other instances, disciplinary compartmentalization has operated to the detriment of the advancement of knowledge. Recent developments in textual criticism are highly significant and make it all but mandatory that scholars with an interest in the early Jesus tradition turn their attention to the actual scribal evidence.

As is well known, modern textual criticism has been propelled by the conviction of the existence of an original text. Based on this premise, text criticism has by and large understood its principal project to be the recovery of this precious original. It is an idea that until recently has been taken to be axiomatic. As long as it is "assumed that there is an original text, the textual critic's task is very simple: to recover the original text" (Parker: 6). But the quest for the so-called original text need not be the central objective of text criticism. A different and perhaps more legitimate option is to study every scrap of textual evidence in its own right. The Copernican revolution Epp, Parker and others are in the process of instituting consists in abandoning, or at least partially abandoning, text criticism's disciplinary fascination with privileging the one-fixed point in the tradition, namely the so-called original text, and instead taking each scribal "variant" seriously on its own terms.

In refocusing textual criticism away from the so-called original text to the multiple "variants," Parker, Epp and others have allowed us see what new and startling wealth the early Jesus traditions can be made to yield. "Suddenly textual criticism comes alive and becomes relevant in ways that no one might have imagined," Epp, a cautious scholar not inclined toward exuberance, announced. "Why didn't we see this sooner and how could we have missed it?" he asked (8). Parker is of the opinion that immense pressure had been put on textual criticism "to deliver the original specific, precise wording spoken by Jesus and recorded by the evangelist" (76). Admittedly, our fixation on the project of constructing the authoritative standard text has blinded us to see the early scribal tradition for what it actually is. Most seriously, it has prevented us from understanding the very nature and dynamics of the early tradition. I cite four conclusions from Parker's work that seem to carry weight for an understanding of the scribal dynamics of the early Jesus traditions.

First, there existed a remarkable scribal fluidity of the early Jesus materials, with "the written tradition ... at its most fluid in the first century of its existence" (Parker: 200). Instead of foundational stability at the outset, there appears to have existed in many instances "initial fluidity followed by stability" (70). Both the amount of variation of individual Jesus sayings and, even more so, the degree of differences "require a serious evaluation of the nature of the tradition" (198). By way of example, the actual scribal evidence presently available to us of the Jesus saying about marriage and divorce which appears in Mark 10:2-12, uniquely in Matthew 5:27-32, in Matthew 19:3-9 dependent on Mark, and in Luke 16:18 is both copious and complex (75-94). Parker's painstaking sifting of the large scribal evidence of this saying demonstrates both small and substantive differences. Importantly, these are differences not merely, as is well known, between the synoptic passages in Mark 10, Matthew 19 and Luke 16, but among the existing scribal versions of any single gospel passage. "The main result of this survey is to show that the recovery of a single original saying of Jesus is impossible" (92).

In the case of the Lord's Prayer (Matt 6:9-13; Luke 11:2-4), the Matthean text exists in two main versions and the Lukan text in three main forms with additional smaller but interesting versions (Parker: 49-74). The Matthean doxology alone is available in eight versions. All these extant versions appear to have been in use at an early point in the tradition. Now, as long as one operates on the assumption that one manuscript was copied from another, one could conceivably reconstruct a genealogical tree that takes us back to the one root saying. But the full evidence of the early scribal tradition of the Lord's Prayer, Parker argued, is too complex to allow for the simple genealogical model of expansion of an "original" short version.

Second, the reason for this early variability of the Jesus tradition is not, of course, that these sayings were considered unimportant and unworthy of being carried faithfully. Quite the opposite. Marriage, divorce, and remarriage have clearly been pressing ethical issues in the past as much as in our modern churches. And surely, there was as much interest in Jesus' programmatic Prayer in the first centuries as there is today. It was precisely the great importance attributed to these traditions that accounts for their variability. It was precisely because of the urgent relevance of this material that verbatim rendition was not the most desirable mode of making Jesus speak to the present. To carry Jesus' words faithfully in these instances meant to keep them in balance with social life and expectations. There is a sense in which one could say that Jesus' sayings were far too important to allow scribality to freeze them into still life. We have arrived here at an understanding of the early Jesus tradition "whose meaning had to be kept alive by reflection and reinterpretation" (Parker: 93).

The example of the Lord's Prayer demonstrates how precarious it is to invoke, with Gerhardsson, public worship settings as locus for the verbatim preservation of the early Jesus traditions. That Prayer carries within its brief compass a very large variety of different versions--hardly evidence for mechanical word processing in the interest of verbatim renditions. Although lacking the benefit of papyrological documentation, Ong perceptively observed that in "the New Testament, still exquisitely oral by comparison with texts coming out of latter-day vigorously programmed literacy, even the words of the institution of the Eucharist do not appear exactly the same in any two places" (252). While the liturgical "text" of the eucharist is formulaically organized to a high degree, it did not attain the status of full stability for a lengthy period, a situation well reflected in the canonical texts of the New Testament. Perhaps it is more appropriate to formulate the matter in terms more in keeping with oral sensitivities: because of its frequent use and overriding importance in public worship, the eucharistic formulation shied away from being a documentary authority while striving to retain its performative mode so as to convey its message instantly and efficaciously.

Third, the behavior of this early papyrological tradition of Jesus materials may tell us something about media interfaces that has as yet not been (fully) told. When viewing the evidence from the perspective of Jesus' own oral proclamation, one is struck by the fact that the early scribal tradition functions in ways that are analogous to the earliest oral tradition. As was the case with the oral performances, this early scribal tradition, notwithstanding its chirographic materiality, seeks to stay with the flux of time by way of social adaptability. As was the case with the oral performances, the very nature of this early scribal tradition is constituted by variables and multiforms. And as was the case with the oral performances, this early scribal tradition does not differentiate between primary and secondary texts, it is we the scholars who have drawn these qualitative differences in the interest of arriving at the original saying and the assumed original text. But as the scribal evidence is now accumulating, one should not speak of the "original" saying any more than of "variants," because "variants" suggest derivation from some kind of a standard authority. The early scribal traditions, both in the oral and in the scribal medium, are constituted by the equiprimordiality of their multiple authentic renditions. "In the beginning there were traditions about Jesus" (Parker: 204). The emphasis, I should like to think, lies on the plural of "traditions."

As far as I can see, these are not ideas entertained or conclusions drawn by either Parker or Epp. Admittedly, the issues raised here will require closer examination in order to bring the new work of textual criticism into fruitful collaboration with studies in orality. But from the perspectives of oral hermeneutics it would appear that the scribal operations observed by Parker and Epp still represent the oral propensity of conducting themselves in plural and variable renditions.

Fourth, the combined efforts of orality and recent text critical studies seem to point to a state of the early Jesus traditions that does not (as yet) evince a stable content with firmly established boundaries. Neither Jesus nor the oral and early scribal traditions are adequately understood with a focus on the so-called original saying or original text, and the refusal to acknowledge the polyphonic nature of the traditions "has encouraged an attitude to the whole manuscript [and oral] tradition which is based on a misunderstanding of its nature" (Parker: 94). The search for and the elevation of singular originality at the expense of relegating the bulk of the traditions to the footnoted apparatus runs contrary to the deepest instincts of the early Jesus traditions. The point, in the words of Parker, is that "we find the original text in the variations" (207).

Tradition Empowered by Remembering

In view of these reflections on the early oral and scribal traditions, how can one understand and conceptualize the dynamics and motivating forces of that tradition? Tentatively, we draw the following four conclusions.

First, we can no longer think of the early tradition as an assembly-line production carrying inert items of information to be collected and preserved for posterity. Neither oral performances nor the early papyrological evidence permit us to opt for mechanical word processing and verbatim preservation as the primary impulse motivating the tradition.

Second, the notion of tradition as a process of accretion and successive layering raises questions about the adequacy of a theory of the verbal arts in antiquity. As a rule, the layered concept of tradition takes its point of departure from existing texts and is largely unsupported

by oral/scribal realities on the ground. How is one to imagine, technically and chirographically, the production of stratified texts?

Third, it cannot be said that the papyrological evidence of the early Jesus tradition represents a distinctly developmental model of the tradition. As for spoken words, they do not exhibit any sense of directionality because they fully operate in temporality without any spatial restraints. Granted both the chance character and the sparseness of the papyrological evidence, what has been recovered cannot be said to indicate clearly identifiable directionalities in the early tradition. This is contrary to a large part of the scholarly imagination for which the model of an evolutionary trajectory remains the all-determining, but unexamined historical and philosophical underpinning.

Fourth, the trajectory model introduced by Koester and Robinson (1971) is not entirely satisfactory either. Its great accomplishment is to have replaced a stationary view of tradition by a model that is fluid and mobile, moving away from essentialist categories toward a recategorization of scholarly nomenclature. But it has made the forward motion in time, "moving from one document to another, from one generation to another" (Koester & Robinson: 16), e.g., transmission understood in a strictly developmental mode, the sole key to tradition. Moreover, the trajectory model takes on the specter of an eerily abstract trafficking in intertextual operations apart from social forces and in the absence of an overriding motivating force.

Our observations of the early Jesus materials suggest that we will have to think of tradition not in terms of scribal errors but of willed variability, not (merely) of mechanical but of dynamic word processing, not of verbatim repetition but of recreation and, importantly, not (merely) of transmissional but of performative dynamics as well. We will best understand the early tradition's proclivity toward variable renditions if we view them not as variations on or transmissions of a given text, but rather as authentic re-performances.

Once this is acknowledged the question of motivation impresses itself upon us. What is it that motivates these oral and scribal activities? Is there a concept with explanatory powers both sufficiently broad and distinct to cover the processes of tradition as we have described them? To put the question differently: what precisely is it that keeps the tradition a living one?

Memory, we have observed, is inscribed into the traditioning from its very inception. The diction of many of Jesus' aphorisms was shaped by the ars memoriae generating mnemonically usable language. Moreover, Jesus' re-performance of some of his own sayings and parables entailed a modicum of remembering. But what about the early oral and scribal traditions carried by others and increasingly post eventum?

The prevailing rationale in the observed oral and scribal fluidity appears to be modification by adjustment to the present. Both in orality and in early scribal processes, the hermeneutical desire is to bring the past in line with the present, e.g., to keep Jesus alive by making him communicate to the present. Precisely what keeps the tradition a living one, then, is this negotiation of the present with the past so as to make the latter speak to the former. Here we have arrived at what may be called the grand motivating force of tradition: the accommodation of the claims of the past with the ever-shifting contingencies of the present.

If we inquire into a name of this dynamic that appears to provide the motivating force for tradition's urge to keep the message a living one, we arrive at the concept of social memory (Halbwachs 1980, 1992, 1997; Assmann 1992; Kirk & Thatcher 2005). It is social memory that has been entrusted with the task of representing the past for present consumption. Unlike the trajectory model, it is characterized not simply by a forward transmission, but both by a regressive gesture, resuming or, if one will, "repeating" Jesus' sayings of the past seeking to retrieve as much as seems appropriate, and a constructive, compositional gesture, adjusting these past sayings to what seems urgent in relation to the present. And unlike the trajectory model, the memory model acknowledges the social involvement of present communal interests in the re-performance of the tradition. In different words, tradition "has its origins in the commemorative activities of communities," and it is "continuously generated out of the semantic interaction between salient pasts and the exigencies of current social realities" (Kirk & Thatcher: 40). From the perspective of social memory, therefore, the early Jesus traditions are growing out of a tension between two competing aspirations: retaining the words of Jesus so as to transport them into the present, and re-performing these words of the past so as to make them address present circumstances. In this sense, social memory offers a plausible explanatory model for the functioning of the early Jesus tradition. We can thus speak of a memorially empowered tradition that operates not as transmission and transformation as such, but as a functioning social memory, e.g., as a continual process of commemorative activities, intent on commitment to the past and serving social relevance and identity in the present. At this point, one can agree with the observations of Kirk and Thatcher that "every act of traditioning is an act of remembering" (39) so that "'tradition' is in fact the substance of 'memory'" (40).

Works Cited

Assmann, Jan. 1992. Das kulturelle Gedachtnis.Schrift, Erinnerung und politische identitat in fruhen Hochkulturen. Munich, Germany: C.H.Beck.

Aune, David E. 1991. Oral Tradition and the Aphorisms of Jesus. Pp. 211-41 in Jesus and the ORAL GOSPEL Tradition, edited by Henry Wansbrough. Sheffield, UK; Sheffield Academic Press.

Crossan, John Dominic. 1983. In Fragments. The Aphorisms of Jesus. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row.

Epp, Eldon Jay. 2004. The Oxyrhynchus New Testament Papyri: 'Not Without Honor Except in Their Hometown'? Journal of Biblical Literature 123/1:5-55.

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Jousse, Marcel. 1978. Le Parlant, La Parole et le Souffle. Paris, France: Gallimard.

1959. La manducation de la lecon dans le milieu ethnique Palestinien. Paris, France: Gallimard.

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Parker, David C. 1997. The Living Text of the Gospels. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Werner H. Kelber, Ph.D. (University of Chicago), the author of The Oral and the Written. (Fortress 1983; French trans.: Editions du Cerf 1990; Indiana University Press 1997), is the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at Rice University.