silly internet . . .

For reasons that don't need to be explained here, I googled the title of Samuel Byrskog's major work on oral historiography and the Jesus tradition. I can never remember if it's called Story as History, History as Story, or if it's History as Story, Story as History. Anyway, I new the Internet would have the answer, and sure enough, it did. But then I noticed something odd, and I thought I'd share it here. Here's a screenshot:

Even if the picture is cut off, you should be able to see the peculiarity. Amazon, for whatever reason, has classified Byrskog's book in the Interior Design sub-section of their Home & Garden section of their bookstore. Now, Story as History, History as Story is a good-looking book, as you can see. But does it merit classification as "Interior Design"?! You decide.

contrasts (or, not ridiculicity)

In contrast to that other article I was reading, Samuel Byrskog's 2003 review of Rudolf Bultmann's classic, Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition [1921; ET: History of the Synoptic Tradition (1963)] strikes me as both fair and appropriate. I have my own disagreements with Byrskog's approach to memory and oral tradition, but his evaluation of Bultmann's work and its legacy seems pretty cogent to me. So I appreciate the force with which Byrskog gives the following blunt assessment:

The fundamental problem with Bultmann's method is not its inherent skepticism toward the historicity of the tradition. Occasionally he grants a good deal of continuity to the tradition; and skepticism is indeed part of all critical investigations. Rather, what is essentially problematic is precisely that his method does not work as a tool of historical inquiry. (Byrskog, "review of The History of the Synoptic Tradition" [JBL 122/3 (2003)], 554; emphasis added)

Byrskog goes on to demonstrate the unworkability of Bultmann's method; this is not simply dismissive invective. And so the blunt assessment is not only warranted but also welcome.

Byrskog on haggadic tradition

I started reading the volume edited by Werner Kelber and Samuel Byrskog, Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009). This book springboards from the seminal works of Birger Gerhardsson in the areas of memory and tradition and sets the agenda for future research in these areas. I'm still reading Byrskog's introduction (1–38), which surveys Gerhardsson's work (who, I believe, supervised Byrskog's doctoral research). Byrskog provides an interesting analysis of Gerhardsson's distinction between sayings and narrative tradition:

The narrative tradition, with the exception of the imaginative, legendary haggadah type, was mainly formulated when the eyewitnesses at a later point needed to illustrate a particular question that was posed to them. (8; my emphasis)

If I'm reading him rightly, Byrskog seems to suggest (or to say that Gerhardsson believes) that rabbinic haggadic tradition stems from eyewitness memory unless it exhibits "imaginative, legendary" characteristics. This strikes me as an astonishingly nineteenth-century thing to say, as if critical scholars can accept without worry traditional materials from antiquity that transfer relatively easily into an Enlightenment framework and can discard those materials that violate Enlightenment sensibilities.

I'm not sure this approach to ancient texts can be sustained any longer. Instead, the memorial dynamics that produced more mundane "narrative tradition" also led to "the imaginative, legendary haggadah type" of Jewish tradition. Both stem from how ancient tradents (i) understood the worlds in which they found themselves and (ii) navigated the texts that explained and programmed their experiences in those worlds. These memorial dynamics are thoroughly social, and I've criticized Byrskog elsewhere on precisely this point (see chapter 3 of Structuring Early Christian Memory). Eyewitnesses at some later point may have needed to formulate accounts of their past in order to answer this or that question, but Byrskog's analysis needs to address the social factors that determined how those eyewitnesses formulated their accounts.