Taylor-made Bultmann, again

In his book, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition (London: Macmillan and Co., 1933), Vincent Taylor has a remarkably perceptive comment about the potential authenticity of material in the gospels that scholars might, for whatever reason, judge secondary. In context, Taylor is discussing Rudolf Bultmann's radical scepticism ("[I]t is not strange that [Bultmann] has been looked upon as Strauss Redivivus" [14]) and the "Barthian sympathies" evident in Bultmann's 1925 book, entitled simply Jesus.

In this book "community-sayings" often become a transparent veil. Bultmann will point out how characteristic they are, and that they could never have been formed if Jesus had not taught this or that. The procedure of the community, he argues, "is the best witness for the teaching of Jesus" (J. 72). The certainty with which the community put the eschatological message into His lips is hard to understand if He did not actually proclaim it, and one cannot doubt that the most important words which demand complete obedience to God's will go back to Him.The book did us the service of showing what ought perhaps not to have been doubted, that a "community-saying" is not an invention ex nihilo, but a construction which could not have existed apart from the movement created by Jesus Himself. (Taylor 1933:14–15)

To many of us, the idea of Jesus' followers creating any saying of Jesus will be inappropriate. But scholars have recently come to appreciate that even verbatim reproduction of another person's words is to (re)create them as our own (not unlike how I have recreated Taylor's words in this post, and Taylor himself recreated Bultmann's words). (Re)Creation is not necessarily falsification. Matthew may have said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," but he did so as a representative of the Jesus tradition and to the community of Jesus' followers. Apparently, Matthew expected his audience to accept that his words were also Jesus' words. Taylor's explanation of Bultmann's work clearly communicates this idea.

Taylor-made Bultmann

One of my perennial interests concerns the way we have distinguished Judaism from Christianity and the various ways this distinction has affected our historical, exegetical, and theological work. A lot of work in the post-World War II era has gone to expose and/or correct the anti-Judaic tenor of a lot of Christian scholarship, but even here the fundamental disjunction between Judaism and Christianity as separate things is frequently detectable.

Rudolf Bultmann, famously, attributed the creation and transmission of many of the miracle-stories in the gospels to "Hellenistic circles," by which I understand him to mean Greek (= gentile) Christian communities. The transposition of the Jesus tradition from Palestinian (= Jewish?) to Hellenistic circles is, for Bultmann, a major source of the distortion evident between Jesus and the gospels. Here, then, is an excerpt from British NT scholar Vincent Taylor explaining how Bultmann would have considered a parable to have escaped relatively unscathed the distorting effects of Hellenization:

For the parables he [viz., Bultmann] lays down the principle that the best criterion of genuineness is the presence of an opposition to Jewish morality and piety or of the eschatological attitude which characterized the preaching of Jesus, always providing that no specifically Christian details are present (G.S.T. 222). (The Formation of the Gospel Tradition [London: Macmillan and Co., 1933], 28)

the gospels and "gospel tradition"

In my gospel narratives class I regularly refer to "tradition"—whether "gospel tradition" or "Jesus tradition"—though I don't necessarily explain what I mean. This is a problem, I think, because tradition is one of those words, like myth or criticism, whose connotations overshadow their denotations. Tradition connotes negatively; after all, didn't Jesus condemn the Pharisees for their privileging tradition vis-à-vis the word of God? Aren't tradition-al things bad, like hymnals, bee-hives, and racism?

Of course, this isn't the technical sense of tradition, and the term itself is ubiquitous in biblical scholarship. In fact, tradition as an analytical concept is in need of some precision; in the current environment it's only too easy to write whole books on some aspect or other of tradition without ever really spelling out precisely what we mean by it.

Vincent Taylor, in his famous book, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition (London: MacMillan and Co., 1933), reflects on the term explicitly on the very first page. There's much to disagree with here, especially eighty years after the book was published. But it is helpful for thinking about how far thinking about tradition has come.

It is important that we should appreciate the distinction between the 'Gospel tradition' and the Gospels. Before the Gospels were written the 'tradition' was organic; it was a thing of life, and as such was always changing and growing. Just because of this it was subject to the accidents and experiences of life; it could be corrupted, but it was also capable, through growth and change, of becoming more truly itself, as the sapling grows into the tree and as the child becomes the man. In the Gospels the 'tradition' has attained a relatively fixed formation; it is no longer subject to change, except as it is altered by copyists or by the writers of the later Apocryphal Gospels. Whenever we return to our Gospels we find the tradition as we left it, and the only changes which can happen are those which take place within our own minds through fuller knowledge and understanding. Before these books were written the position must have been very different. At that time the tradition was more plastic; it was a story of life and a product of life; its formation was determined by its contents and by the mental and spiritual environment in which it lived; it grew, and developed, and had a history. (1–2)

Many people recognize that tradition (as distinct from texts, as Taylor is using the term) is hardly made static or fixed by virtue of being written down. Certainly Matthew and Luke, if they knew of and used Mark as a source for their own gospel texts (the standard position among NT scholars) did not think of the tradition in Mark's gospel as "fixed" or "static." And the early Christians who recognized these texts as the word of God did not, apparently, experience angst at the variation and fluidity of the tradition as evident across the three synoptic gospels, to say nothing of John's gospel (!). However counterintuitive it may seem to us that tradition remains "organic," vibrant and adaptable, even in written form, this seems to be the clear perception of the texts among the early Christians. It may seem weird to us, but I suspect that, if they could analyze us, our own preoccupations with the verbal fixation of written/printed texts would seem equally alien.