Reading Mark's Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory

By Sandra Huebenthal and Werner H. Kelber

How did the Gospel of Mark come to exist? And how was the memory of Jesus shaped by the experiences of the earliest Christians? 

For centuries, biblical scholars examined texts as history, literature, theology, or even as story. Curiously absent, however, has been attention to processes of collective memory in the creation of biblical texts. 

Drawing on modern explorations of social memory, Sandra Huebenthal presents a model for reading biblical texts as collective memories. She demonstrates that the Gospel of Mark is a text evolving from collective narrative memory based on recollections of Jesus’s life and teachings. Huebenthal investigates the principles and structures of how groups remember and how their memory is structured and presented. In the case of Mark’s Gospel, this includes examining which image of Jesus, as well as which authorial self-image, this text as memory constructs. Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory serves less as a key to unlock questions about the historical Jesus and more as an examination of memory about him within a particular community, providing a new and important framework for interpreting the earliest canonical gospel in context.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: May 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781467458467

Sandra Huebenthal

Sandra Hübenthal is Professor of Exegesis and Biblical Theology at the University of Passau in Germany. She is the author of The Gospel of Mark as a Collective Memory.

Book preview

1Exegetical Kaleidoscope:

Images of the Genesis and Interpretation of Mark’s Gospel

A kaleidoscope is an optical device for producing beautiful forms. It is not a scientific tool that can be used to explain the exact nature of things. Its operation is simple: small pieces of colored glass or similar objects are loosely inserted between two clear pieces of plastic and are reflected by mirrors that are longitudinally incorporated in a tube. Light enters through one end of the tube, making colored symmetrical patterns visible; in addition, every twist of the kaleidoscope changes the position of the glass pieces, creating new, beautiful patterns. The attraction of the kaleidoscope lies not in the depiction of the individual elements but in the patterns that are created when the relative location of the objects is changed by a twist of the tube.

Gospel scholarship sometimes resembles the kaleidoscope. The scholarly approach to the complex process of the origin and textualization of Jesus memories and Jesus traditions considers different elements and arranges them in ever-new ways. This method allows for impressions as to what was remembered and passed on, when and in what form the items were collected, up to the moment when the familiar canonical form of Mark’s Gospel came into existence. Retracing this process, however, is nearly impossible. Not only is it determined by a variety of possible factors, but it is also governed by each scholar’s selection of hermeneutical principles, for each turn of the exegetical kaleidoscope leads to different solutions to the research question.

When it comes to Markan scholarship, the status quaestionis is almost a genre in itself, or at the least a distinct research field. There are a great number of surveys on particular topics and areas of interest. There are also general surveys on Markan scholarship, for example, the Literaturberichte of Andreas Lindemann—rich in material and very helpful—each report covering a decade of research on Mark.¹ This great tradition has recently been continued by Cilliers Breytenbach.² We also have surveys about particular questions such as the identity of Jesus,³ genre (Gattung), and its feasibility in a particular sociohistorical situation (Kontextplausibilität).⁴ William R. Telford has even published a whole compendium for working with Mark’s Gospel.⁵ He reviews publications and summarizes research trends since 1980 in his Guide to Advanced Biblical Research, which offers an annotated bibliography in minisurveys that cut helpful paths through the jungle of Markan research. In this way he empowers novices in Markan research to undertake their first autonomous steps—at least to follow the paths of Markan scholarship beyond Wrede Way (Wredestraße)⁶ and Schmidt Street (Schmidtweg).⁷ The importance and helpfulness of these contributions can be gauged from the statement of specialists on Mark that are commonly not published, like the open confession of one of the grand dames of American Markan scholarship during the Mark Session of the 2012 SBL Annual Meeting in Chicago. She frankly admitted that she had not read all the commentaries published in the last two decades—because there are simply too many of them!⁸

In light of this state of research it might be wise to follow Breytenbach and ask not only what was published, but rather what questions have not been addressed.⁹ The fact that research areas such as Mark as history, Mark as literature, Mark as story, and Mark as theology are eagerly discussed in the international discourse leads to the justifiable conclusion that new methods and new hermeneutics are habitually put to the test with this particular text.¹⁰ It is remarkable, however, that the whole discourse on memory and questions of cultural-scientific readings of the Bible are mostly absent from recent research surveys and commentaries.¹¹ The search for monographs (Einzelstudien) addressing these topics is similarly frustrating and fruitless. It seems that this particular approach appears in Jesus research only when it is occasionally used to answer questions like what is remembered, who remembers, and how this recollection takes place or what implications these recollections might have for Early Christian identity formation processes.

As regards the developments in the field of hermeneutics and methodology, Fernando F. Segovia has defined three stages: (1) historical critical, (2) literary criticism/(socio)cultural criticism, and (3) cultural studies/ideological criticism.¹² Segovia locates the greater paradigm changes in biblical scholarship at the transitions between the stages, namely the narrative turn in the 1970s and the cultural turn in the 1990s. Cultural studies is not only relatively new but also a relatively broad area of research; a large share of the contributions to the field occur in the greater area of reception history and the history of effects.¹³

Narrative criticism is still the preferred method in the international research discourse on Mark,¹⁴ but there is also activity in other synchronic and diachronic research areas, which contributes to questions regarding both the origin and the interpretation of the text. There is an overall consensus emerging that the primacy of synchrony (Primat der Synchronie) cannot be bypassed when it comes to questions of what lies behind the text.¹⁵ It remains a problem, however, that the research insights of the different hermeneutical and methodological approaches usually remain separate and unrelated fields:

Whereas Jesus researchers approach the Gospels as source materials to be excavated and sifted for valuable evidence, narrative critics approach the Gospels as creations in themselves to be explored and appreciated holistically, including their gaps and tensions. Thus one finds in key English-language scholars of the quest for the historical Jesus little interest in or use of the results of narrative criticism. Narrative criticism and historical Jesus research, at least in the United States and England, seem to have begun and remained as parallel tracks rather than as intersecting approaches.¹⁶

This judgment applies not only to English-speaking scholarship but also to the German research context. As hinted already, the separate ways of Jesus research and Markan research might be one reason why memory-theoretic approaches have up to now not gained currency in Markan scholarship.¹⁷

In the wake of narrative criticism and reader-response criticism, the spectrum of different approaches to texts was extended, embracing, for example, cultural studies and postcolonial criticism, which could be described as first cousins of reader-response criticism.¹⁸ Since the turn of the millennium, aural/oral criticism and performance criticism also joined the club.¹⁹ In most cases, Mark’s Gospel was chosen as the preferred test case for the new approach.²⁰ Seen against this background, it comes as no surprise that the secondary literature on Mark has grown into an unmanageable glut; there is no end to the writing of books! Accordingly, remarks in the introductions of doctoral theses can at times be quite ironic: It may seem that another book on Mark is the last thing we need in the field of biblical studies.²¹

Taking up the image of the kaleidoscope, the following pages will neither chronologically retrace the history of gospel origins in its different stages nor provide a survey of the research history on Mark’s Gospel. In fact, the aim is to show—similarly to a gaze through a kaleidoscope—which patterns emerge if the elements involved are aligned in a particular way and what new kinds of images occur when a new turn challenges the usual perceptions. Such an approach to the phenomenon of gospel origins is tied to a particular perspective and cannot be exhaustive. It is nevertheless helpful to show the tentativeness of these explanatory images, which will be enriched in this monograph by another tentative explanation. This latest turn is the cultural-scientific/memory-theoretic approach in the wake of the cultural turn.²²

As the quest for the origins and textualization of the gospels is one of the core questions not only for New Testament scholarship but for theological research per se, this field has been developed in particular depth. To use a familiar image, each stone has been lifted and turned around several times to be analyzed with the help of varying methods and research questions. Research literature on the question of gospel origins (Evangelienentstehung) is accordingly quite extensive and includes contributions about Gattung, historical investigation (Historische Rückfrage), and theological purpose(s).

Ernst Käsemann once said in a response to his teacher Rudolf Bultman that science progresses antithetically (Wissenschaft bewegt sich ja in Antithesen vorwärts).²³ Research on the origins of the gospels and the understanding of the Gospel of Mark well illustrate the deeper truth of this axiom. This area shows—maybe much better than other possible examples—that every thesis is sooner or later replaced by its antithesis.²⁴ In the course of research history, many of these tensions remained unresolved and present continual challenges and paradoxes. This status applies, for example, to the following binaries in the contested field gospel origins:

memory of an individual (applicable to an eyewitness) vs. memory of a group (social memory)

apostolic or original community (Urgemeinde) vs. community of commemoration

history or biographical historical narrative (Biographische Geschichtserzählung) vs. kerygma

historicity vs. fictionality

evangelists as collectors vs. evangelists as theologians

evangelists as conservative redactors vs. evangelists as formative theologians

textualization in layers vs. textualization in one shot

interpretation in segments (such as stages of origins [Wachstumsstufen]) vs. interpretation in flux (text-based or based on the final form of the text)

interests of a hierarchical position or position of power vs. interests of a community

authority (of the original community or an apostle) defended vs. authority or normativity created

creation of the text for a community vs. creation of the text within a community

missionary text (ad extra) vs. realized memory (ad intra).

These antitheses form the basis for the particular patterns of understanding that can occur when the glass pieces in the kaleidoscope are turned. In the remainder of this chapter, I briefly introduce some of these images, locating them briefly in a cultural-scientific/memory-theoretic perspective. The aim is to provide a first impression of the complexity of the area of research and to gain an initial sense of the nature of a cultural-scientific/memory-theoretic approach.

Starting Point: Farewell to Traditional Ideas

Tradition has long assumed that the gospels were direct reports of the events with and around Jesus. This idea lasted for several centuries and was shattered only in the course of the Enlightenment, before it was finally abandoned. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the consensus that the gospels, including Mark and Q, are not direct reports and that the texts do not present a reliable bridge to the history of Jesus began to gain currency.²⁵ In the wording of the time, one could say that the insight became established that the offense of the resurrection (the so-called Easter ditch, or Ostergraben) cannot be bypassed by the gospels, and the way back to those events cannot be retraced. It became increasingly clear that the gospels present not so much records of Jesus’s life and teachings as "the proclamation of the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God."²⁶ It also became clear that the agents behind the written gospels who carried the memory of Jesus have a certain impact on the formation and transmission of the material and inform these traditions:

Thus the community’s Easter faith gains an independent methodological significance as a phenomenon mediating between the Jesus of history and the Synoptic sources. In addition, the question whether the Synoptic sources claim to be authentic reports is added to the question whether they do indeed report authentically.²⁷

The question as to how kerygma and report might be related is not addressed here but is further carried along like flotsam to reemerge in the discourse much later. From a hermeneutical point of view, we are dealing with two different categories: proclamation (Verkündigung) claims to be authentic, while a report seeks to be objective. There are different criteria for both categories. Martin Kähler pointed in that direction already in 1892, when he understood gospels to be proclamation and thus not suitable for historical inquiries:

We do not possess any sources for a Life of Jesus which a historian can accept as reliable and adequate. I repeat: we have no sources for a biography of Jesus of Nazareth which measure up to the standards of contemporary historical science. A trustworthy picture of the Savior for believers is a very different thing.²⁸

The difference between both is virtually understood to be material. Today, scholars would rather speak of a formal difference:

For historical facts which first have to be established by science cannot as such become experiences of faith. Therefore, Christian faith and a history of Jesus repel each other like oil and water as soon as the magic spell of an enthusiastic and enrapturing description loses its power.²⁹

What is left in the end is the concept of memory, which was already connected with the gospel in antiquity. Justin thought of the gospels as memoirs of the apostles (ἀποµνηµονεύµατα τῶν ἀποστόλων),³⁰ Papias refers to Mark also in terms of his memory (what things he remembered [ὅσα ἐµνηµόνευσεν]) and notes that Mark wrote down Peter’s teaching (διδασκαλία) at least partly the way he remembered it (as he recalled [ὡς ἀπεµνηµόνευσεν]).³¹ Eusebius, who quotes Papias, also picks up the idea of a written memory of the oral teaching handed on to those who remained (γραφῆς ὑπόµνηµα τῆς διὰ λόγου παραδοθείσης αὐτοῖς καταλείψοι διδασκαλίας) at a different point.³² Other than the Gospels of Matthew and John, which he understands to be memories of the Lord’s teachings (τῶν τοῦ κυρίου διατριβῶν ὑποµνήµατα),³³ he receives Mark’s Gospel also as memory, but only as secondhand memory. His idea is that Mark wrote down his memory of Peter’s teaching. The reason Eusebius mentions for this textualization is most interesting for our topic: The audience asked Peter to leave them a written copy of his words because they did not deem it enough to listen to them only once.³⁴ The text bypasses the apostle’s absence and preserves his words in a different medium so that they can be voiced over and over again. In this case the text replaces the spoken word. In Eusebius’s reading this account goes without a loss of authority as the process had been revealed to Peter in the Spirit, and he authorized the text for readings in churches.

Leaving aside the fourth-century ecclesiastical structures visible in the text, it is interesting to see what significance the concept of memory gains in this context and how it is applied. Papias acted on the assumption of authentic testimony, but he did not think of objective reports. He hints, rather, at the notion of a demand-oriented and thus audience-oriented teaching activity of Peter. Likewise, Papias was not interested in a structured overall survey of Jesus’s words and deeds in their chronological and causal-logical order, but Peter gave testimony of his own memory in individual and unsorted episodes and from his own perspective. The same idea can be found with Eusebius, who was also not concerned with an accurate account of Jesus’s life down to every detail. For him, rather, Mark’s Gospel presented the memory of Peter’s teaching. There’s no mention of historiography, but there is of the unwritten teaching of the divine proclamation (τῇ ἀγράφῳ τοῦ θείου κηρύγµατος διδασκαλίᾳ), which in its written form should also be proclamation, as he (i.e., Peter) authorized the writing for the purpose of study in the churches (τὴν γραφήν εἰς ἔντευξιν ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις).³⁵

In the end, the concept of memory—or a certain notion of it—could have become a leading category in the wake of the ancient testimonies, but it never got there. In the course of history, both the pragmatics of the texts as proclamation and their authority, which rested on eyewitness testimony or a chain of tradition, were accentuated more strongly, with the authority of the witnesses and the assumed objectivity of the testimony becoming ever more conflated. But even this notion had to be dismissed at some point. In his reflections Kähler rejected both a naive theory of inspiration and a positivist presentation. For him, the gospels are not objective documents but memories from a particular perspective.³⁶ Seen from a cultural-scientific/memory-theoretic point of view, this could be understood to be processes of social memory,³⁷ and the pleas of Peter’s audience for a written text could be seen as the wish to secure his ephemeral testimony and put an end to its temporal limitations.

Tradition criticism (Traditionskritik) was largely concerned with the question of how to distinguish, on the one hand, Jesus’s life and proclamation from early Christian kerygma and, on the other hand, authentic material from later additions. The dichotomy between the original Jesus material on the one hand and the historically rather unreliable community tradition and proclamation on the other was rarely questioned. To state the problem in a very rough and simplified manner, this led in the end to the notion that redaction-critical division (redaktionskritische Scheidung) could be a bridge to the authentic Jesus material, the ipsissima vox. In this regard, the question of oral tradition becomes the focus of attention. If the gospels are not of one piece, there must have been prior stages, and those prior stages could have been written as well as oral. Orality was rather alien to the research of those times, so the majority of the traditional approaches are biased by their thinking in terms of scribality/textuality. They got it right, however, in maintaining that even in oral cultures, tradition is not passed on without a certain form. Accordingly, the traditions that gave rise to the gospels are likewise not imaginable without particular shape and form. This insight forms the basis of the older form history (Formgeschichte) approach that was concerned to distill authentic Jesus material through the identification and analysis of smaller units from the texts.

Of Episodes and Frames: Formgeschichte

The two most prominent representatives of the form-historical school (formgeschichtliche Schule), Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Dibelius, located the origins of Mark’s Gospel in a particular historical situation of a community and investigated the Sitz im Leben of the gospel’s’ different genres (Gattungen) in order to explain their origins and formation. Both share the idea that the community is the carrier of the Jesus memory, which was later textualized by the evangelist. This concept understands the evangelist’s job to be collecting and sampling the material and not so much the original achievement of a theologian or an author. The contribution of the evangelist is limited to the creation of a frame, which can be removed by a thorough analysis of the text in order to make visible the original Jesus tradition.³⁸ The original community in Jerusalem and early Palestinian Christianity are thereby seen as the originating cell or root of all tradition.³⁹ This viewpoint constitutes a clear difference in comparison with the ideas held up in antiquity. It is no longer the evangelists—in this case Mark—who are carriers of the tradition but the communities. What Formgeschichte takes up from the ancient approach, however, is the notion that individual episodes were handed down without a context—yet not in sequence (οὐ µέντοι τάξει), as Papias said it.⁴⁰ Karl Ludwig Schmidt consequently concluded that the frame was a secondary addition:

The oldest Jesus tradition is ‘pericope’-tradition, that is, the tradition of individual scenes and sayings that were passed on within the community, mostly without clear chronological or topographical markers. Much of what appears to be chronological or topographical is merely the frame that was added to the images.⁴¹

These thoughts were further developed by Bultmann. For him, too, the community is the carrier of the tradition, and the evangelist is merely a kind of scribe. When he understands the evangelist to arrange the material according to the needs of the community, Bultmann also regards the process to be a creation from a certain perspective:

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 that follows for the historical researcher 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.⁴²

This said, the tasks of exegesis are also outlined. The exegete’s mission, so to speak, is to separate the episode from the frame, or the division of tradition (Tradition) from redaction (Redaktion). A particular variation of the episode-and-frame theme is the summary statements. Schmidt was convinced that such a summary statement is more recent than the individual anecdote (daß solch ein Sammelbericht jünger ist als die Einzelanekdote). He states further:

While the anecdote has a strong afterlife within the tradition, this is not the case for the summaries. And while it is impossible to trace back the origin of an individual anecdotal narrative (it has somehow almost grown naturally), the summary statement is the product of a particular author, that is, an artificial product, and its existence is guaranteed only by its textualization. In our case we are thinking of the evangelist himself who has combined these individual stories, connected them though summary statements, and placed them into a wider frame.⁴³

This case, too, shows that there is no thesis without antithesis. The secondary character of the summary statements compared to the individual episodes was questioned by C. H. Dodd. Dodd assumed that both individual episodes and larger complexes or general surveys of Jesus’s words and deeds were handed down. He saw evidence for the latter especially in Acts 10:37–41 and 13:23–31 and assumed the composition of the summary statements to be analogous compositions.⁴⁴

Both positions were vigorously discussed, with Dodd’s position dominating the English-language scholarship, and Schmidt’s, the German discourse. The provisional result could be described as follows:

What seems to be emerging from this analysis is that the summary statements are generalized non-specific descriptions of the ministry of Jesus intended to expand it beyond the few typical episodic incidents in the Gospel. They are not summaries in the narrow sense that they summarize new activities over broad general geographical areas and indefinite periods of time. The action narrated in the summary is clearly distinguishable from that narrated in the episodes. While one might argue that the summaries supply cohesion in various ways to an episodic and poorly integrated narrative, evidence for the summaries providing a basic structural framework for the Gospel is still lacking.⁴⁵

This was more or less the end of the idea of a historically appropriate frame in which the individual episodes only had to be adjusted as carefully as possible. The thesis was abandoned because it was simply impossible to prove it. In addition, with the rise of the assumption that Mark’s Gospel is actually a literary text, the insight gained currency that the framework of the story of Jesus is not geographic but narrative.⁴⁶

The form-historical (formgeschichtliches) paradigm dominated research on these questions until after World War II, when it was finally replaced by the redaction-historical (redaktionsgeschichtliches) paradigm, which will be depicted in the next image of our kaleidoscope, to be considered in the next section. Any approach that tried to break away from the paradigm was critiqued so forcefully that it was hardly ever adopted. This comment applies, for example, to the idea of Ernst von Dobschütz, who described the narrative art of Mark’s composition at a time when studies of the literary composition of the gospels were out of fashion and were interested more in what happened in the area of oral transmission that preceded the written account of the evangelist.⁴⁷ Von Dobschütz assumed that no one would be able to evaluate this previous oral tradition correctly if he or she did not first get a clear insight into the mode the evangelist used for the textualization of the tradition.⁴⁸ With this approach he took a direction opposite to that of the prevailing research trend. His conclusion anticipates what redaction history (Redaktionsgeschichte)—even though in a different way—identified as an important achievement, namely, the original compositional accomplishment of the evangelist:

Is this indeed Mark, or is he only the translator and the real narrator is actually Peter? It will hardly be possible to find out anything in this area beyond doubt, but the whole composition of the Gospel of Mark indicates that Mark is not simply someone who is dependent in his handing down of a tradition previously written down in fixed contexts. He will continue to be credited as the one who created the structure of the story of the Gospels as we know it today.⁴⁹

A much more prominent example of the dominance of the prevailing paradigm is Käsemann’s thesis that access to the Jesus story is narratively mediated. This thesis, too, was hardly noticed and was revisited only in the light of narrative criticism. Käsemann had already carved out the narrative character of the gospels before the turn from form history (Formgeschichte) to redaction history (Redaktionsgeschichte):

With regard to past history, we learn about it only through (oral) narration. All history can be accessed only through tradition and interpretation. There is little use in knowing the actual facts that happened in the story. Rationalism and supranaturalism, however, made great efforts to at least partly prove the facts reported in the NT, but what actual truth emerged from their efforts?⁵⁰

In the gospels, Käsemann concluded, the kerygma appears in the guise of history, and it must catch the readers’ attention that the gospels present the message of Christ only within the frame of the story of the earthly Jesus.⁵¹ Once again we come across the image of message and frame, but this time it is approached from a different angle, for Käsemann does not deem it possible to separate the Christian message from Jesus’s life. The core of the problem is thus the understanding of history—an ever-recurring problem in the history of research. According to Käsemann, the evangelists connect historical tendencies with kerygma and make use of a historical mode of presentation. He continues: To put it differently: While the past dimension of the gospel as well as the Christology in Paul and John can move into the shadow of the present and the future without being dissolved entirely, it is this very dimension of the past that dominates the Synoptics and clearly has kerygmatic and parenetic interests in the present.⁵²

Seen this way, the evangelists do not appear as collectors and carriers of tradition (Tradenten). There can be no doubt that they are driven by kerygmatic interests. They do, however, express it in the form of gospels, which are, in fact, not proclamation, but report.⁵³ This report, however, should not be misunderstood to be history: This is not about proving faith historically, but about critically separating the right message from the false one, and this is, in fact, achieved with the help of the one who back then was and had to be the historical Jesus.⁵⁴ This notion also has implications for historical investigation, and Käsemann remains quite skeptical about this point. Although he would not deny the existence of the historical Jesus, he assumes "that we gain access to this Jesus only via the medium of the urchristliche message and that this message does not primarily offer open access, but rather blocks it. We do not encounter the historical Jesus in the New Testament—the only real document about him—the way he really was, but as the Lord of the faithful community."⁵⁵

In principle, Käsemann’s argument anticipates the cultural-scientific/memory-theoretic view. The point is neither the (hi)story in itself nor the authenticity of what is presented but the kerygmatic approach to the material, which is at the same time oriented to the audience’s needs and, from a certain perspective, indicates that the point is the make-up of a community that refers back to the right message. Identity construction works here by establishing a border against what the community of commemoration regards to be the wrong message—without concern for historical reliability. It would be tempting to call this founding memory or interpreted experience, but the discussion shows that memory as a category had already been dispensed with at this point of the discussion. Pierre Benoit, who exhibits a typical Catholic perspective, is a good example of how form-critical (formkritische) approaches were estimated in those days:

It is reasonable to assume that many of the Jesus memories, especially those that served as rationales for teaching or were useful as rules for the first Christians, were chosen and passed on. Had Formgeschichte limited itself to that, it would have had to be complimented. But the form historians go beyond that and arrive at different conclusions. We speak of memories while they talk about community creations [Gemeindebildungen]. Tradition has not only collected and selected, but first of all invented."⁵⁶

The very fact that the exegetical tradition treats oral and written material analogously will turn out to be one of the biggest problems of Formgeschichte.⁵⁷ Vincent Taylor noted early on: The first question is whether any definite oral forms existed in primitive Christianity and whether the Form-Critics have succeeded in isolating them.⁵⁸ This notion was to be overcome by orality research, which would show that the idea of an original form cannot be reconciled with the reality of oral composition, and that forms (Formen) and genres (Gattungen) are indeed fluid.⁵⁹ Already at this early point in time it became clear that Formkritik operated according to the principles of scribality/textuality and thus acted on the wrong assumptions—even though it would take a fairly long time before this insight was finally spelled out clearly.

From Tradent to Theologian: Redaction History

In the wake of redaction history (Redaktionsgeschichte), the core assumption that the community was the carrier of the tradition was abandoned, replaced by the idea that the evangelist or redactor was the carrier and custodian of the traditions he received.⁶⁰ It was a necessary step to rehabilitate those who wrote down the gospels as theologians, but it nevertheless led to new methodological problems. On the one hand, it is problematic that the material with which the evangelist/redactor dealt is understood to be only a written template. Depending on how many stages of redaction (Redaktionsstufen) the different models assume for the origin of the gospels, several oral and written templates or pre-stages have to be assumed and then need to be described and reconstructed. Since this procedure does not presume existing texts, it is necessarily strongly hypothetical. On the other hand, the concept is flawed insofar as it concludes directly from literary-critical analysis (literarkritischer Analyse) that there was text growth, but it neither reveals nor reflects the assumed underlying text model. That is, a direct conclusion is drawn from synchronic observations to diachronic theses. This is problematic insofar as cohesion (a text-grammatical category) and coherence (a cognition-scientific category) are connected directly, without any intermediary step.⁶¹ Furthermore, there remained both the problem of the pure form, which already began to take shape in Formgeschichte, and the problem that, in the case of Mark, the separation of tradition (Tradition) and redaction (Redaktion) can be done only circularly: "This research task comes with a hermeneutical circle that can easily turn into a treacherous slope for the researcher: The more it is possible to determine the tradition the evangelist has included, the better can Markan redaction be recognized, and inversely, this determination can be achieved much better the clearer the redactional asset and interest of Mark can be asserted. Each of these insights basically requires the other."⁶²

While form history (Formgeschichte) was concerned with the reclamation of traditions and lost sight of the evangelist in the process (consider only the famous statements of Wrede,⁶³ Bultmann,⁶⁴ or Taylor⁶⁵), redaction history (Redaktionsgeschichte) is occupied with the idea that the existing gospels cannot be imagined without a precise redaction, which of course needs the mind of an author. In a certain way, redaction criticism (Redaktionskritik) can be seen as the renaissance of the evangelist, for the focus is no longer on the level of tradition (Tradition) but on the level of redaction (Redaktion). This conclusion also turns the focus of attention to a different stage of time: the time of the evangelist. From this point on, historical inquiries would need to differentiate between the time of the events and the time of the evangelist:

Redaction criticism [Redaktionskritik] is not primarily interested in the authenticity of the tradition, but in the situation and the theological concern of the respective author who uses his traditions as building blocks for an overall draft. In this respect, redaction criticism uncovers one piece of the history of early Christian theology by description and historical classification of the theological peculiarities of the Gospels of Mark, Luke, and Matthew, as well as the sayings collection Q and the theological teachers and schools they are based on.⁶⁶

Schmithals’s characterization sheds light on various issues that can be connected directly with a cultural-scientific/memory-theoretic perspective. On the one hand, it becomes obvious that we are dealing with the interference of the stream of tradition from a particular perspective that does not simply continue the tradition but changes it. Not all parts of the tradition are used, but the material is carefully reviewed, and only some elements are chosen, which are then put together in a coherent whole. The plans for this construction are informed by theological considerations, not the authenticity, authority, or age of the material.

With the rise of redaction history (Redaktionsgeschichte), the evangelist is introduced to exegetical scholarship both as a person and as a writer. This development, too, was accompanied by theses being replaced by their antitheses. Instead of the anonymous community, it is now the evangelist who is responsible for the preservation and presentation of the tradition, and the unsorted mass of tradition is replaced by a systematic composition. Willi Marxsen put it as follows:

The unity subsequently created by the evangelists—first of all by Mark—is . . . a systematically constructed piece that cannot be understood as the termination of the anonymous transmission of material. . . . This counteraction cannot be explained without taking into account an individual, an authorial personality who pursues a definite goal with his work. . . . As far as we can tell, Mark is the first to bring the individualistic element to the forming and shaping of tradition.⁶⁷

Taking Marxsen’s reflections seriously, the initial conclusion would be that a reasonable gospel narration would not have been possible without the creative mind of a redactor. But what has not changed since Papias’s times is the assumption of a particular perspective and distinct location of the one who wrote down the text. It is only the location and the perspective, respectively, that change. For Papias, it was the needs of the addressees of Peter’s teaching that determined the arrangement of the material. For Bultmann it was the needs of the community that informed the editor’s layout of the traditions he had received, and for Marxsen the redactor composed the gospel for the community from the pieces of tradition that accrued to him. The community who once was the carrier of the tradition now becomes the addressee of the tradition. The redactor or evangelist, in turn, becomes the new bearer of the tradition.

One can now look back on the changing history of tradition or tradition material. It migrated from the memory of the eyewitnesses (or their disciples) via the communities of commemoration to the evangelist, who is the new bearer. What remains is the core assumption that, when it comes to the gospels, we are dealing with eclectic, need-oriented, and perspective-based narrations. There is no such thing as free-floating tradition that is erratically handed down. Marxsen is right to the point with his question: Could not each community or period in which the evangelists live develop a quite distinct ‘form’ out of its own problems and for its own ends?⁶⁸

Redaction history (Redaktionsgeschichte) has brought about major changes for the understanding of the gospels and the methods of their investigation. At the same time, it exhibited equally large problems. One of the major issues is the status of orality, which gives rise to a whole bundle of other questions. First of all, the redaction-historical (redaktionsgeschichtlicher) approach and history-of-religions (religionsgeschichtliche) methods are founded and based on the principles of scribality. Redaction criticism (Redaktionskritik), understood as the separation of tradition (Tradition) and redaction (Redaktion), works only with written material. Oral traditions need carrier groups and locations for reception, Sitze im Leben—characteristics they lose instantly if the evangelist is the only carrier and keeper of tradition. Another problem is that if one works on the assumption that Mark receives tradition in order to interpret it affirmatively, it makes even less sense to separate between tradition (Tradition) and redaction (Redaktion) in a given text. As Breytenbach has observed,⁶⁹ one must work with the entire text. Taking into consideration the entire text (i.e., a whole biblical book) alters not only the perspective on the text but also the task of the interpreter. If the interpreter’s concern is to highlight the theological direction, the historical location, or the pragmatic interest of the evangelist, the separation of tradition (Tradition) and redaction (Redaktion) is not a sufficient and satisfying method. Accordingly, the self-perception and tasks of redaction criticism (Redaktionskritik) have changed.⁷⁰

The open questions Erhard Güttgemanns formulated for form history research (Formgeschichte) belong to this broader discussion. Güttgemanns’s starting point was the unsettled relation between Formgeschichte and Redaktionsgeschichte and thus also the unsolved question of the theological relevance of the gospel’s form: Is the form of the gospel the linguistic expression of a particular christological understanding of time?⁷¹ For Güttgemanns, one of the core issues was, once more, the question of the relation between orality and scribality, mostly depicted as Tradition and Redaktion. If the continuity between orality and scribality is to be maintained from a form-historical (formgeschichtlicher) point of view, the gospel could no longer be regarded as a literary text.

The written gospel form is, like the gospel tradition in general, not a product of a literary movement; the tradition has its origin in Jesus’s proclamation and in the living expressions of his community, in preaching and teaching, mission and apology. It is thus not based on an individually positioned or formed unique act of production, but on a longer nonliterary process of development that is borne by the sociological entity community, which in the end goes back to Jesus’s proclamation and flows into the written gospel-form. To put it differently: For conventional form history, the textuality of the Gospels is, like their tradition, a sociological phenomenon, namely the surrogate-like condensation of the lived realities of a collective.⁷²

It almost goes without saying that, in the form-historical view, the gospel could no longer be regarded as a literary text, especially after it had just been discovered to be a carefully shaped composition and could thus be understood independent of its context (i.e., read as an autosemantische Einheit).⁷³ In order to come to terms with this problem, Güttgemanns suggested extending form history research (Formgeschichte) with insights from linguistics and literary studies. This new Formgeschichte, which has clarified its premises, especially concerning orality and scribality,⁷⁴ could also be the history of the change of forms and thus not only aesthetic but also sociological.⁷⁵ This allows us to ask the question once again whether the textuality of the gospel-form is in the same way surrogate for orality as perhaps (with limitations) the Pauline letters.⁷⁶ Papias would for sure have responded affirmatively, while for Güttgemanns the question is not yet finally answered.

In the following and concluding reflection, Güttgemanns poses a question for Formgeschichte, namely, to clarify its premises. This question discloses the relationship of quite different factors for the origin and understanding of the gospels and it is—at least for Markan scholarship—still highly debated.

Part of such a specification is the theologically unbiased analysis of the linguistic function of the narration of the gospel that today is often (and without considering the linguistic-literary scientific research on the presentation function of language in general and narrative fictionality in particular) identified with the report. As report it is identified with historiography, although the similarity of the narration would for all simple forms also allow for narration as mythologization, as long as the form-historical specification of gospel narration (in contrast to mythological narration) is not further specified, and thus the description of gospel as historiography and as an antithesis to myth appears to be only a petitio principii.⁷⁷

Güttgemanns solves this problem by regarding the gospel as an essentially context-free form (autosemantische Form) of speech. Jürgen Roloff, who also expresses "doubts as regards the methodological and objective legitimacy of a redaction-historical approach that regards the Gospel of Mark as an originally well-formed document [unmittelbare Struktur],"⁷⁸ focuses a different solution for the issue, claiming that an appropriate explanation of the literary phenomenon of the written gospel is possible as he [Güttgemans] from the outset furnishes the aspect of historiography with a negative accent. Roloff continues: In fact, this literary phenomenon can be explained sufficiently only when its intention to present the history of Jesus as a past event is recognized.⁷⁹

At the end of the day, Güttgemanns and Roloff are not that far from each other, as they both urge the idea of reading Mark’s Gospel as a text that can be understood on its own. Their understanding of and approach to the text—as an essentially context-free form of speech on the one hand and representation of history on the other—remain distinctly different, and still they exhibit the same tendency of how to go about things. With redaction history research (Redaktionsgeschichte), two questions remain unsolved that call for thorough engagement: What is the relation of orality and scribality in the process of gospel formation? and How can we understand and interpret gospels in a methodical, reflective, and responsible way as texts that are continuous and obviously carefully planned and shaped?⁸⁰ The three images of the kaleidoscope considered in the following three chapters will address these fields of research. It will become obvious that, in the case of research on Mark’s Gospel, inquiry into formation and inquiry into understanding move further and further apart and, at least in the practice of day-to-day exegesis, are only rarely connected.

Evolutionary Synoptic Growth? Orality, Scribality, and the Memory Approach

Orality and Scribality

Form-critical research worked with a particular model of the prehistory and growth of the Gospels, with the original community (Urgemeinde) being the initial carrier of the tradition. In the course of time this tradition underwent a reasonably linear process of development through several oral stages and the process of collecting written material that finally ended in the Gospels.⁸¹ Research at the interface of orality and writing opens two different fields of questions: the how and the why of textualization. The question of textualization cannot be separated from questions about genre (Gattung) and the formative interests of redaction (redaction criticism and composition criticism), which could stand against the tradition, preserve or record it, or be an eclectic creation.

Werner H. Kelber, in one of his first contributions to the field of orality studies, including the critique of Bultmann and the form-historical school (formgeschichtliche Schule), noted the following:

Our main thesis establishes that the Gospel of Mark rather stands in contrast to oral pre-history than being its natural continuation. For the literary achievement of Mark, other laws apply than those that control pre-Markan oral tradition history. . . . Our main thesis establishes that Formgeschichte, insofar as it assumes an evolutionary process of orality in the direction of the gospel composition, misjudges both the nature of synoptic orality and Markan textuality."⁸²

Kelber continues with an attempt to initiate a revision of the conventional model of pre-Markan orality and debate the following consequences for the understanding of the textuality of Mark’s Gospel.⁸³ This is another example of the antithetical character of research and progress in this area. One model considered to be out of date based on insight from a different area of research is replaced by another.

Kelber sees the difference with the Bultmannian model to be that it is not based on the idea of linear growth. He does not consider the Synoptic process of growth to be natural, evolutionary, or even logical, as if the sources and streams of pre-Markan tradition were propelled by their own gravity and barely had a choice other than being propelled into the reservoir of the gospel.⁸⁴ This idea, Kelber argues, runs counter to the laws of orality and what can be derived from the investigation of oral cultures. Based on these observations, he promotes a different model:

The pre-Markan oral tradition history is a vibrant phenomenon that increases and decreases, stretches out and contracts, and is open to progressive and regressive developments. The general behavioral pattern can be compared to prices on the stock market, which, in more or less predictable periods, increase and decrease and are tied to social and political conditions in a mysterious way.⁸⁵

At the very least, this model states that oral tradition does not work according to distinct and predictable laws. In particular, the authority model, which occurs frequently in this context, does not do justice to the complexity of the processes.⁸⁶ It does not mean that there are no rules or regulations for oral tradition; it is only that the control mechanisms, which must be understood as a process of social control, cannot be explained by the authority model alone, because oral tradition is controlled by the law of social identification and not the law of verbatim memorization.⁸⁷ Accordingly, Kelber concludes:

Regardless of whatever sources and authorities may underlie the Gospel of Mark, the evangelist cannot justify it with the authoritative testimony of the disciples. He is in fact the one who is least likely to try to present the disciples as eye- or ear-witnesses. His dramatic display of the failure of the disciples and their inability to hear what Jesus said and pass it on, the second rule of the oral tradition process, illustrates the law of social exclusion or preventive censorship. In the event that a statement is completely alien to the audience and is met by indifference or even refusal, it cannot be passed on in the very same form. Either it must be modified, which means in accordance with prevalent opinion or social expectation, or it is completely excluded. This basic phenomenon of oral neglect or social amnesia has not been given enough attention in New Testament scholarship, since both now and in the past, the process of oral tradition has been identified with a practice of continued passing on of the tradition. If the rule of social exclusion or preventive censorship is taken seriously, it would mean that a tradition that was not able to break through the threshold to gain social acceptance would have been threatened with extinction.⁸⁸

In accordance with orality studies, Kelber identifies four different guiding principles of orality: the equiprimordiality of Jesus’s sayings (i.e., each saying is an original),⁸⁹ their situation-dependent manifestation, the fact that they cannot be objectified, and the fact that they are time-dependent.⁹⁰

The principles Kelber mentions for Jesus’s orality, including equiprimordiality, are closely interconnected. Situation-dependency is significant because speaker and hearer necessarily must be in the same social situation; said differently, we have the principle of a biosphere shared by speakers and hearers.⁹¹ Oral communication, however, leaves no external traces, for it exists only in the moment of its articulation and thus cannot be objectified. This is the major difference from written words, which are spatially organized visible signs⁹² and can thus be permanent. Speech, in contrast, is never bound spatially and can thus be realized only in the present.⁹³ These premises are already sufficient to understand that the media of orality and scribaltiy cannot simply be compared to each other or investigated with the same preconceptions.⁹⁴ All indications are that a change in medium to scribality, or a written text, must be taken seriously, unlike how this change was treated before Kelber’s investigations.⁹⁵ When Kelber’s reflections, including an intriguing stock market metaphor, are merged with the terminology of cultural-scientific/memory-theoretic research, tradition appears as a buzzword representing a tangle of tradition and composition-historical processes, of continuities and discontinuities, of memories and amnesia, of faithful passing on and revisions, of oral and scribal communication and reciprocal transitions; thus, processes that in their entirety cannot be subsumed under one unique paradigm.⁹⁶

This view comes quite close to what Harald Welzer and Aleida Assmann understand as social memory (soziales Gedächtnis). In exegetical research, the process of selecting these disparate ideas and outlines and arranging them into a consistent whole is dealt with under the heading redaction (Redaktion). Following Marxsen, redaction-historical research (Redaktionsgeschichte) has convincingly concluded that this is not simply a process of compilation and mechanical sampling. Read from the memory-theoretical perspective, this process can also be seen as the transition into collective memory (kollektives Gedächtnis)—the very moment when the various elements of a shared memory become a common history and a past-related draft for future identity. This process is social and creative, taking place not necessarily (only) in the silent study of a redactor. A history that is not socially accepted and shared is not a common history.⁹⁷

It is difficult to overestimate the impact of Kelber’s ideas. Even though many of his thoughts have since been justifiably criticized and revised, the influence of The Oral and the Written Gospel has been crucial.⁹⁸ The current state of the question in German-language scholarship was summarized as follows by Wolfgang Stegemann:

Although it generally stands to reason that a certain period of oral tradition of Jesus traditions must be expected, its practical analysis, that is, the deduction from written texts to their oral pre-stages, poses serious problems. On the one hand, we do not possess verifiable methodological standards that enable us to survey the oral pre-stage from a written text with much confidence. On the other hand, there are good reasons to assume that it might possibly be generally impossible to deduce from the written gospels to a pure oral Jesus tradition that is freed from all their influence. Werner H. Kelber has coined the memorable dictum texts fossilize; that is, the textualization of the pre-scribal oral tradition basically puts an end to the dynamics and plurality of the processes of oral tradition.⁹⁹

This brief summary reflects the course of the argument, as well as the weak points of orality studies, at least in its early phase. Kelber’s approach, at least the way it is presented here, does happily without secondary orality (a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print),¹⁰⁰ just as form criticism (Formkritik) lived happily without memory. Once again, antitheses become apparent. While form criticism thought of the transition from orality to writing as happening without fractures (almost like an organic transition, just as if orality and writing took place in the very same medium), orality studies emphasize their difference, taking the transition from one to the other as the central issue, to the extent that scribality was pushed back by orality, and Kelber initially understood the gospels as counter-form to, rather than an extension of, oral hermeneutics.¹⁰¹

There were, of course, critical voices, and rightly so.¹⁰² What Kelber basically observed in 1983 without having the means to theoretically frame it was supported by the theoretical background that Jan Assmann, drawing on the works of Maurice Halbwachs, introduced to the discussion about a decade later. Kelber was right, insofar as the transition from orality to writing indeed denotes a significant turning point, without it being a clear rupture. This thought can also be found in Assmann’s work, where he locates either processes of change in medium and canonization within communicative memory (generational gap) or the transition from communicative to cultural memory (floating gap).¹⁰³ In the meantime, Kelber has followed up on Assmann’s break in tradition (Traditionsbruch) and modified his own ideas accordingly.¹⁰⁴ As chapter 2 will show, with the application of social memory theory the textualization of the gospels can indeed be understood to be an attempt to abandon particular streams of tradition in favor of one harmonious memory image and as a tendency toward canonization without the oral discourse thereby coming to an end.

Another question concerns the mode of securing and handing down oral tradition. Were units of tradition precisely memorized, possibly with the help of certain techniques, or were they instead passed on as they related to context, and thus rather free?¹⁰⁵ One of the main differences between current notions of orality studies is the question of how the social control of tradition, bearing at the same time conservative and innovative potential, is understood and imagined. With Holly Hearon one can say:

It comes down to a matter of control over the sanctity of the tradition. On the one hand are those who argue that the tradition—however defined—was carefully preserved and transmitted, beginning with eyewitnesses who handed down the tradition to authorized individuals and thus preserved it from corruption. On the other hand are those who emphasize the role of the community in giving shape to tradition, as it was contested among and within groups who were negotiating both means and structure, in part, through the use of tradition. In most theories, memory, as transmitted in tradition, is seen as a means of constructing a bridge between past events and present experience, but how that bridge is constructed differs widely.¹⁰⁶

My impression is that at the end of the day it is crucial how seriously one takes cultural-scientific research on social memory. Those who follow the insights of Maurice Halbwachs, Aleida and Jan Assmann, or Barry Schwartz do not usually opt for eyewitnesses as guardians of the tradition but emphasize the role of the communities of commemoration. In an analogous manner, the character of traditions as social agreements is highlighted against authority-oriented models.¹⁰⁷ Kelber’s research has in the meantime developed in that direction and taken up Jan Assmann’s ideas:

More recently, however, Kelber has begun to conceptualize tradition as cultural memory, the broader set of social frameworks that guide the composition of both oral and written texts that refer to the past. Kelber thus understands memory both as a structural element of oral speech (mnemotechnique) and as the human context in which words about the past become meaningful (memory frameworks).¹⁰⁸

It must be noted, however, that Kelber’s position is only one voice in the choir, even though an important one. But this does not imply that other positions could not be held and defended with good arguments, too. François Vouga, for instance, understands the social control at work in the transmission of texts to be much more authority-oriented, but he does so without appealing to eyewitnesses or other steering committees as referees as to which tradition should or should not be passed on.¹⁰⁹ While Kelber emphasizes the innovative character of social control, Vouga highlights instead the conservative one—both nevertheless describe social processes, not hierarchical allowances.

Even though the transition from orality to writing does not necessarily imply a clear break, neither does it imply that there will be a smooth transition from one to the other. Selection, formation, arrangement, and (subsequent) interpretation of traditions in the course of textualization definitely dissociated them from their original contexts and brought them (in the Hegelian sense of sublation [Aufheben]) into a new context, toward which the construction of early Christian identity could and should be oriented. Mournet rightly indicates that early Christianity was not a kind of monolithic entity, but different groups in different locations exhibited their own particular profiles.¹¹⁰ Otherwise, some of the controversies recorded in New Testament texts such as the incident at Antioch (Antiochenischer Zwischenfall) or the Jerusalem Council would not be plausible. The individual New Testament texts speak volumes about how the emerging Christian identities interacted with their Jewish or pagan environments. These phenomena are also better explained by orality studies, especially the principles of equiprimordiality and shared biosphere, than by authoritative tradition.

Memory-Theoretical Approaches

Since the cultural-scientific investigation of memory and commemoration is an interdisciplinary enterprise, this image starts with a nonspecialist view of the issue. From a sociologist’s perspective, the further development of form-historical (formgeschichtliches) works looks as follows:

Maurice Halbwachs, Rudolph Bultmann, and their successors were serious constructionists. They analyzed the commemoration of Jesus by matching representations of his life to real social predicaments in such a way as to make it seem the former were derivatives of the latter. They educed but never explained the relationship, ignoring connections among social experience (of which memory itself is a constituent), the contents of oral and written history, and the commemorative rituals through which these contents were collectively realized. They never got beyond a simple correspondence theory of social memory. Concerned with the way early Christians molded the story of Jesus to their own preoccupations, they saw memory reflecting reality but never as a social force in its own right. Their analyses cast memory as a construction rather than a selectively moral and inspirational marking of history.¹¹¹

Taking Schwartz’s observations seriously, the relation of memory and tradition is the starting point for all further questions—a category that up to now has not had its own place in biblical scholarship.¹¹² The common origin of cultural-scientific research and form-critical (formgeschichtlicher) reflections is difficult to overlook, likewise the differences between both approaches. Considerations of social memory theory do indeed connect with some of Bultmann’s and Dibelius’s questions, but they are emphasized differently:

Consistent with the form-critical model, social memory theory views present social realities as decisive factors in the constant rearticulation of a community’s salient past, and it contends that the past is never objectified apart from the frameworks of memory supplied by present circumstances. But social memory theory departs significantly from the form-critical legacy by refusing to authorize any sharp distinction between memory and tradition. Memory is not equivalent to the individual faculty of recall, and the transmission of memories is not an isolated sharing of data between individuals. Instead, cultivation of memory takes place within a number of settings of community life and, correspondingly, across a broad range of memorializing practices. Further, social memory theory indicates that commemorated pasts exercise powerful agency in the community’s present life. A group’s social memory is the constant, creative negotiation of commemorated past and open-ended presents.¹¹³

For the examination of biblical texts from a social memory perspective, different questions apply from those asked in form-historical research (Formgeschichte). They are concerned, not with the prehistory or the processes of formation of the texts themselves, but with their premises. The social frames or memory frames describe, not the limits of texts or of transmissions, but areas of discourse (Diskursräume) as social entities in the process of early Christian identity construction. They are to be investigated on the basis of existent texts from a cultural-scientific/memory-theoretic perspective instead of trying to determine the origin of a particular text from its assumed pre-stages.¹¹⁴

Only recently has biblical scholarship—especially New Testament studies—begun to engage with social memory theory. Insights and ideas from this field are frequently encountered in Old Testament studies when cultural memory is discussed—especially in the canonical approach—but in New Testament studies the question is largely absent.¹¹⁵ This comment applies to hermeneutics, methodology, and application. Alan Kirk was one of the first (perhaps the first) to systematically summarize ideas and approaches in and for New Testament studies.¹¹⁶ Furthermore, he and Tom Thatcher deserve the credit for being the first to assess the array of Jesus traditions from this particular perspective.¹¹⁷ In doing so, they not only retraced the most important steps and questions for engaging with social memory theory, but they also identified areas of research that could be surveyed anew by drawing on the insights of social memory theory:¹¹⁸

Memory as an analytic category. This approach is useful especially for understanding the processes of individual and social memory.

Tradition formation and transformation. From the perspective of social memory theory, tradition can be seen as a phenomenon of memory.

Oral tradition as cultural memory. The dynamics of orality roughly correlate with those of social memory.

Written gospels as commemorative artifacts. Assmann’s research on the transition from collective to cultural memory offers new starting points for gospel research.

Early Christian commemoration. Social