The Oral Gospel.

Such oral tradition was evidently known to Paul, who quoted it as something handed down to him (I Cor. 11:23, the account of the Last Supper; I Cor. 15:3, traditions about the Resurrection). He clearly knew commandments of the Lord (I Cor. 7:10) which he could differentiate from his own counsel (I Cor. 7:12, 25), as well as traditions about the Lord's coming from heaven (I Thess. 4:15). Luke refers to such tradition in Acts 20:35. “Remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, `It is more blessed to give than to receive.”' Similar formulas occur in the first letter of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians ( 3:1; 46:7) — perhaps based on Acts; Polycarp of Smyrna, about twenty years later, quotes Jesus with the words — probably derived from 1 Clement—”remembering what the Lord said” (Phil. 2:3). Not only does the manner of quotation in all these instances suggest memorized material but the items quoted cannot be found in these forms in any written gospel. It is reasonable to suppose that they were derived from oral tradition.

But have we actual mention of such a work — if anything so nebulous can be called a “work” — on the part of any early Christian writer? Sometimes it is thought that what Papias (ca. A.D. 120) says of Matthew compiling the logia in “a Hebrew dialect,” and each one translating them as best he could, is an attempt to describe just such a work. But logia does not mean “sayings,” and what Matthew compiled probably consisted of Old Testament oracles interpreted in relation to Jesus. The process of oral transmission is probably mentioned in Luke's opening sentence: “Just as the original eye-witnesses who became teachers of the message have handed it down to us” (1:2). And whether or not the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas is actually based on oral tradition (see chap. iv), it contains a collection, or a series of collections, ultimately derived from word-of-mouth transmission, and it clearly purports to be a record of this kind of material.

Although this elusive oral tradition must have had a great influence on Christian preaching — echoes of it have been found in many of the epistles — and on the gospels that were later written, we cannot recover it in any detail. It certainly contained some characteristic pieces of Jesus' teaching, with accounts of his last days in Jerusalem and his later appearances to the disciples. We might expect relics of it to survive in the gospels, but New Testament study is not yet in a position — if it ever will be — to pronounce exactly which portions of the gospel materials come directly from Jesus, which from the disciples. The difficulty, of course, lies in the fact that all the materials were transmitted through the disciples.

It is true that the written gospels, when they appeared, sprang up under the shadow of the oral tradition and were largely derived from it. The evangelists intended to arrange and to record the tradition as it had come to them, as well as to indicate what it had come to mean in their time. From the point of view of the story of Christian literature, the work of the evangelists is significant because it does come later and shows that a period of oral tradition preceded that of written documents. A full generation seems to have passed before Christians produced written gospels, and then they arose in Greek, not in Hebrew or Aramaic, and in circles not often close to Jewish Palestine.