"... Remembering what the Savior had said”

Abstract

Scholarship concerning the sayings attributed to Jesus has often been driven by the goals of historical Jesus studies, so that approaches to the sayings tradition have largely focused on determining the probaility of those sayings’ having originated with Jesus himself, and sorting the tradition into its presumed more and less genuine parts. This focus has been based in part on an understanding of human memory as capable of conveying accurate kernels of the actual past—here, genuine sayings of Jesus—alongside and within accreted tradition. Social memory theory, which originated in the social sciences but has been applied to Jesus scholarship over the last several decades, controverts this understanding of memory, arguing rather that memory is a dynamic social process, which continually interprets the perceived past through the socially-engaged frameworks of the present, and therefore cannot be separated into accurate and inaccurate parts. This correction to previous thinking about memory demands a corresponding correction to previous approaches to the Jesus and sayings tradition. The present dissertation proposes a variant-conscious approach—a label adopted and adapted from a parallel approach developed within New Testament text criticism—to the sayings tradition as a means of answering this demand and taking into account social memory theory’s claims concerning the entanglement of the past and present in the social construction of the tradition. Its aim is to attend to the sayings tradition and the variants within it each as distinct pieces of evidence for the diverse ways in which Jesus and his sayings were being remembered across Christian communities of the first three centuries CE. Two case studies (Chapters 2 and 3) apply this approach to two clusters of variants of sayings attributed to Jesus, an “Explaining the Parable(s)” cluster and an “Ask, Seek, and/or Knock” cluster. These studies find that the variations between the variants reflect each one’s origins as a product of social memory, connected at once to its past received tradition and to its own author’s present and socially-informed thinking about, for example, esoteric and exoteric knowledge, community identity, or the ongoing means of authority and revelation. A third case study (Chapter 4) turns its attention onto one sayings tradition text, the Apocryphon of James, in order to observe how its author, who could now be described as participating in the process of social memory, understood and described his own engagement with the processes of memory as a means of authorizing his contribution to the sayings tradition. Together these case studies demonstrate how a variant-conscious approach brings the insights of social memory theory to bear on the sayings tradition in a way that highlights the diversity and even competition within Christianity, as that diversity is given voice through the various memories of the voice of Jesus, which cannot be reduced to a singular vox Jesu.