The Gospels and their Transmission

The New Testament, when subjected to historical analysis in the quest for its meaning, discloses itself to be stratified. On one level, we may detect the situation in the life of the early Jesus movement that remembered and told and wrote the story of Jesus.

The interpretive problem is whether we are able to disentangle what Jesus really said and did from its reconstruction to meet the needs and mission of the primitive church. By the time we get to the community that committed the Jesus tradition to the final form we have in the Gospels, the story of Jesus had undergone further layers of stratification.

This historical stratification (which is at heart a reformulation of the problem of all historiography – who is it that bears witness?) raises enormous problems for our access to the “real” Jesus. What if the situation in the life of the early church is radically different from that of Jesus? This is not to say that the primitive church lied or invented events, but that it would typically see and remember only those things that it needed to carry out its mission to bear witness to Jesus.

In our attempts to winnow and get back to the real Jesus we must beware our own (usually liberal but formerly dogmatic) hermeneutical bias with its subsequent misrepresentation of meaning. Modern liberal interpreters do not typically believe that Jesus will come again on the clouds of heaven; therefore, they conclude that Jesus never spoke these words and that they were invented by the early church.

In reflecting on the search for the historical Jesus we also need to be clear what kind of documents they are. They are not a stab at academic history about Jesus. Rather, they are self-consciously expressions of propaganda: “These things are written that you may have life.”