"collective" and/or "social" memory

I'm reading Samuel Byrskog's article, "A New Quest for the Sitz im Leben: Social Memory, the Jesus Tradition and the Gospel of Matthew" (New Testament Studies 52 [2006]: 319–36). Byrskog has recently fired off a series of essays looking to reframe the form-critical concept of Sitz im Leben within the contemporary theoretical framework sustaining NT scholarship. Of course, as I've mentioned previously, I'm not as interested in salvaging NT criticism's form-critical heritage. But inasmuch as Sitz im Leben has degenerated into a fairly generic term that means not much more than "context," it remains flexible enough to serve contemporary needs while maintaining an apparent continuity with the research of previous generations.

At any rate, Byrskog is rightfully drawing attention to the surprising terminological disarray in the secondary literature regarding the communal dimension of memory. "There is a confusing variety of terminology. The literature uses 'family memory', local memory', 'popular memory', 'public memory', 'relational memory', 'cultural memory', etc. These expressions sometimes carry different connotations, but are also often employed synonymously" (321–22). Byrskog's right; the loose use of language here is unfortunate and, I think, masks a worrying imprecision with respect to what we're after when we use these terms.

So I'm sympathetic with what Byrskog's trying to do when he defines more precisely what he means by "social" and "collective" memory. But I'm not sure he's successful. He clarifies:

With James Fentress and Chris Wickham, I will use "social memory" as a label distinct from "collective memory". While the latter is social in that it includes those recollections of a group that are shared by all of its members, being something else than the sum total of all the individual recollections, the former is social in that it deals with the social aspects of the mental act of remembering. Social memory is thus interested in the memory of individuals in social contexts which are larger than the individual and yet related to the individual. (322)

Byrskog describes beautifully the most important insight of social memory theorists: that every act of memory is social. But I'm not sure what his use of "collective memory"actually refers to. Byrskog equates collective memory with "recollections of a group," but I'm not sure what a group's recollection actually is, how it's manifested, for whom it's manifested, or whatever. Funnily enough, Byrskog himself has balked at this very idea of "collective memory": "Groups and cultures might have what we call ‘memory’, which affects the members of those contexts, but groups and cultures do not remember and recall; individuals do” (2000:255; original emphasis). Granted that in this current context (Byrskog's NTS article) he still focuses on the individual rememberer (notice the reference to "all of its [viz., a group's] members"). But I don't understand at what point a sufficient number of individuals within a group exhibit a particular recollection, and I don't understand what makes the memories of individuals "collective" other than, apparently, the mere fact that multiple individuals share them in common.

In a rough draft of another paper, I've questioned Byrskog's concept of "collective memory" this way:

Byrskog affirms that “groups and cultures do nurture a memory of their past” and that “memory is to some extent a social construct” (2000:255), though he does not explain what processes, social or psychological, are involved in this nurturing. This problem plagues Byrskog’s work at multiple points; another example, taken at random: “[O]ral historians of today often attempt to control the uniqueness of each eyewitness account with a sense of its representativeness and a careful method of strategic sampling. In order to do this, one needs to single out persons who are representative of a larger group, and compare their versions with each other. Groups are important, but one needs to focus on the individuals within each group, because the collective version [of the past] might be entirely different from the version of the individual” (2000:69; original emphasis). But what, precisely, is “the collective version” that an oral historian could compare and contrast with an account given by any given individual? And which individual, for that matter, is able to give an account of the past that isn’t already reflective of the history, interests, and culture of the groups to which s/he belongs?

I should clarify that I wrote these comments solely in reference to his very important monograph, Story as History, History as Story (Mohr Siebeck, 2000). However, the same problems are operative in his 2006 article. I'm very, very sympathetic to the interest in the social dynamics of even the most individual of processes (here, memory). And I do think that "remembering together" affects the way individuals express and employ memory. But I just can't convince myself that "collective memory" refers to "group memory" or even the aggregate of individuals' memories. Individuals and groups aren't separate (or separable) entities; my memories all by themselves are already social creations. The act of remembering with other people doesn't transform my memories into social facts; still less does it produce social facts in the melding of multiple individuals' memories. Remembering together augments and extends the social-ness of my/our memories; it does not cause that social-ness.

getting ready for SECSOR 2011

The SECSOR 2011 meeting is this weekend (4–6 March) at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, KY. The pictures look gorgeous, and I'm excited to get on the road. I'll be presenting my paper, "Speaking of Jesus: 'Oral Tradition' beyond the Form Critics," in the SBL New Testament section on Saturday evening. I've been working on this paper for over a month, and I think it's pretty good. But I would think that, wouldn't I?

In the spirit of open and public academic discussion and debate, I've uploaded my paper to both Scribd and Google Docs. I'll embed the Scribd version below. If, for some reason, you prefer Google Docs, you can use the link I've included. Both documents are completely public.

The highlighted numbers in the paper refer to the accompanying PowerPoint presentation. I've tried to upload the .pptx file to Scribd and Google Docs, but it didn't display properly in either place. If you're interested in seeing the PowerPoint, leave a comment here and I'll happily e-mail it to you.

UPDATE: I've finished the handout that I will distribute to anyone determined to listen to my paper. Like the paper itself, you can find the handout on Google Docs, or you can see the embedded Scribd version, below.

Speaking of Jesus: "Oral Tradition" beyond the Form Critics
Speaking of Jesus: "Oral Tradition" beyond the Form Critics (handout)

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.

is Bultmann's idea of Mark schizophrenic?

In my last post I presented, in his own words, Martin Dibelius's conception of those responsible for the Jesus tradition as the anonymous, unskilled community that passed on the tradition until the evangelists (especially Mark and Matthew, but also Luke) got their hands on it.

In his own landmark form-critical study, Rudolf Bultmann exhibits a different conception of the evangelists (or at least of Mark). Bultmann begins Die Geschichte der Synoptischen Tradition (1921) with a recapitulation of the previous generation's estimation of Mark as "the actual course of historical events" in the life of the historical Jesus, and he then revisits William Wrede's devastating critique of that view. In his revisitation Bultmann writes,

Mark is the work of an author who is steeped in the theology of the early Church, and who ordered and arranged the traditional material that he received in the light of the faith of the early Church—that was the result; and the task which follows for historical research is this: to separate the various strata in Mark and to determine which belonged to the original historical tradition and which derived from the work of the author. (History of the Synoptic Tradition [trans. by John Marsh; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963], 1)

Dibelius, if I read him rightly, considers Mark and Matthew, especially, to be collectors of tradition, hardly authors at all and certainly not in any meaningful sense of the word. So he can dissolve the gospel narratives into their individual pericopae, because the evangelists strung them together, leaving the traditional units they collected more-or-less intact. Bultmann, following Wrede, sees Mark as a much more revolutionary presentation of Jesus. Mark—in this way of reading him—casts Jesus as Israel's messiah, but he well knows that no one during Jesus' lifetime thought of him in messianic terms. So he weaves a narrative in which the messianic secret develops organically from the very beginning, in which Jesus himself at first silences and then gradually affirms his messianic status.

So Bultmann's Mark—again, if I'm reading rightly—is a strange hybrid between two competing conceptions. Bultmann affirms Wrede's innovative Mark, who tells the story of man who never was and so is responsible for both the story and the man. But Bultmann also affirms Dibelius's traditional Mark, who collects the traditions told by others and so is responsible only for anthologizing stories already in circulation. Hence Bultmann's program: "to separate the various strata [viz., the innovative (Wredian) and traditional (Dibelian) strata] in Mark and to determine which belonged to the original historical tradition and which derived from the work of the author."

Those of you more familiar with the history of form-critical scholarship: Is this a helpful way to understand what I'm reading?

the anonymity of gospel tradition

The opening words of the English translation of Martin Dibelius's landmark work, Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums (1919):

There is a theory that the history of literature is the history of its various forms. This may be true of literature properly so-called, but it cannot be applied indiscriminately to every kind of writing. It has, however, special significance when applied to materials where the author's personality is of little importance. Many anonymous persons take part in handing down popular tradition. They act, however, not merely as vehicles, but also as creative forces by introducing changes or additions without any single person having a "literary" intent. In such cases the personal peculiarities of the composer or narrator have little significance; much greater importance attaches to the form in which the tradition is cast by practical necessities, by usage, or by origin. The development goes on steadily and independently, subject all the time to certain definite rules, for no creative mind has worked upon the material and impressed it with his own personality. (From Tradition to Gospel [trans. by Bertram L. Woolf; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935], 1)

It would be difficult to explain how strongly and how thoroughly I disagree with just about every word with which Dibelius characterizes the early Christian tradition. That this is our received heritage should give all of us currently involved in exploring and reconstructing Christian origins pause to consider just how far astray our forebears drifted. We should also expect that breaking free of this heritage can only happen with tremendous and focused and sustained effort.

Christopher Tuckett on Form Criticism

Christopher Tuckett provides an eighteen-page essay that surveys Birger Gerhardsson's nearly five-decade critique of form criticism as well as some of Gerhardsson's counterproposals regarding the development and transmission of the Jesus tradition in Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (W. H. Kelber and S. Byrskog, eds.; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009). Tuckett focuses some attention on the German term Formgeschichte, for which "form criticism" has become the standard English equivalent.

The German compound noun Formgeschichte (combining Form and Geschichte) might be more literally translated as "form history"; certainly the aspect of tracing out the possible history of the development of traditions in the New Testament has always been an integral part of Formgeschichte, at least for many (German) form critics. (27)

In other words, what in German scholarship is a single discipline—Formgeschichte—has been divided into two subdisciplines in English scholarship: form criticism on the one hand and the reconstruction of a tradition's history on the other. Tuckett, however, suggests a different bifurcation:

[P]erhaps we should distinguish carefully between two issues: the use of Jesus traditions in the early church and the origin of Jesus traditions. Both are important issues, but they need to be distinguished and should not be confused. (27–28)

This is certainly a helpful proposal; we cannot suggest that just because Jesus' early followers found a particular tradition useful for their purposes (instruction, apologetics, preaching, worship, etc.) that tradition must have been created by them for those purposes. If we discount every account of Jesus' polemical victory over his opponents (Pharisees, scribes, etc.) as Christian propaganda, we are left with the hypothesis that in the first century some people found Jesus' teaching persuasive even though Jesus never bested his contemporaries in debate, and that these people later created stories of Jesus' persuasive abilities in order to cover up that fact. Immediately after the quote on pp. 27–28, Tuckett refers to the well-known British scholar, T. W. Manson:

We can list these stories in the Gospels. We can label them . . . But a paragraph of Mark is not a penny the better or the worse as historical evidence for being labelled, "Apophthegm" or "Pronouncement Story" or "Paradigm."¹

---

¹ T. W. Manson, "The Quest of the Historical Jesus—Continued," in Studies in the Gospels and Epistles (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1962), 5; quoted in Tuckett, "Form Criticism," 212n. 34.

Sitz im Leben: an exposé

Brandon Wason has as good an introductory discussion on Sitz im Leben as one could ask for here, including a reference to a recent article by Samuel Byrskog. I'm intrigued by the short quote Wason provides from Byrskog's article. If I read him rightly (which is hard to tell in any case, but especially without the context of the rest of his article), Byrskog advocates a fairly significant shift in the concept Sitz im Leben from its original form-critical function. That is, for the form critics a pericope's Sitz was conceptualized as a generative context which added not just shape but also substance to the Jesus tradition. But I think Byrskog is proposing a less dramatic conceptualization of a pericope's Sitz as a formative context in which social context influences the tradition's expression. Again, if I read Byrskog rightly, this would be a more responsible use of Sitz im Leben in gospels research, though we would still need to remember that factors other than social context—including the tradition's performative history—were also formatively influential in the expression of traditions from and about Jesus.

[In differentiating the formative and generative dynamics of early Christian traditioning processes, I gratefully acknowledge the influence of the discussion in Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher, "Jesus Tradition as Social Memory," in Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity (Semeia Studies 52; ed. A. Kirk and T. Thatcher; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 25–42.]