Alan Kirk. Jesus Tradition, Early Christian Memory, and Gospel Writing

Alan Kirk examines questions of media and memory in Synoptic source criticism from G. E. Lessing and J. G. Herder in the eighteenth century through source criticism’s eclipse by form criticism in the early twentieth century. The form-critical turn from the search for the earliest texts to the recovery and reconstruction of the earliest traditions turns out, as Kirk demonstrates, to be little more than a rebranding of the old quest. As the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, the earlier consensus that gelled—but did not solidify—around the Two Document Hypothesis was challenged by a new generation of source critics who took up Austin Farrer’s call to dispense with Q; Kirk provides a lengthy analysis and rebuttal of this primary competitor to the Two Document Hypothesis. Finally, Kirk examines a trend in contemporary Q studies: the popularity of the “Galilean Q community.” The bulk of this book is critical and evaluative, submitting the work of others to close analysis and exposing flawed—as Kirk sees them—arguments or assumptions. In the last sixteen pages or so (pp. 324–40; about 5 percent of the overall book), Kirk provides his own positive proposal for understanding not just Q and Mark but the very origins of the Jesus tradition itself.This book has six chapters of uneven length. The first three chapters (of 81, 40, and 29 pages, respectively) narrate the progress of German source criticism from early debates about the earliest Gospels and/or their sources as written or oral phenomena through the broad conclusion of Markan priority and a collection of sayings behind Matthew’s and Luke’s sayings materials. Kirk keeps his eye on the problem of patterns of synoptic agreement and variation, which patterns are visible both in the order of the gospels’ pericopes and in their wording. Variation (in order and in wording) is often taken as the symptom par excellence of oral tradition. Also significant for the movement from the early dominance of the Griesbach Hypothesis to the development of and emerging consensus around the Two Document Hypothesis is the increasing weight given to internal data and the decreasing authority of early church traditions. In all of this, the search was for the earliest—and presumably, the most authentic—source for the life and teachings of Jesus. The prevalence of miraculous elements in the narrative tradition and the comparative stability of the sayings tradition led to a preference for sayings materials as the authentic stratum of the tradition, though this scholarship, notes Kirk, “never successfully closed the gap between eyewitness testimony and the observable forms of the tradition” (p. 150).The fourth chapter (52 pages) turns to the rise of form criticism as a (new?) quest for the earliest/most authentic tradition. In the wake of William Wrede’s The Messianic Secret (1899), scholarship turned its attention, “with scarcely a bump, to tradition history: the quest to identify the impeccably authentic primitive source became the quest to identify the impeccably authentic stratum of the tradition buried under layers of community dogma” (p. 151; italics in the original). This shift, however, is “little more than a relabeling exercise,” (p. 173), hunting for source criticism’s earliest, most authentic source under the guise of the earliest, most authentic oral-tradition layer. Form criticism’s most striking achievement—and its most significant error—is to sever any link between memory and tradition.Chapter 5, “The Farrer Juggernaut: Is It Unstoppable?,” is both the longest chapter (95 pages) and an echo of Michael Goulder’s 1996 essay, “Is Q a Juggernaut?” (JBL 115/4). Kirk surveys key Farrer Hypothesis scholars (Austin Farrer, Michael Goulder, Mark Goodacre, John Poirier and Ken Olson, Francis Watson, and Eric Eve), examining each author’s explicit or implicit view of FH Luke’s source utilization (that is, how Luke is imagined to have used his two sources, the Gospels of Mark and Matthew), whether he is imagined to have scrolled and scanned his written sources, excepted them in intermediary notes, and/or accessed them via memory. Kirk is especially wary of what he calls “FH logics,” by which the FH need only to be shown to be possible, not incredible, rather than probable or even just plausible (pp. 209–10). He is also on the lookout for “phantom Q,” or any hint of a source or sources posited by Farrerians either between Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels or behind Matthew’s materials that also appear in Luke. Notably, the chapter ends with a section, “FH Luke: Source Critic or Tradent?” (pp. 293–97), that offers a significant recalibration of how we ought to view the Synoptic authors’ activities of (a) accessing and utilizing traditional sources (written and oral) and (b) creating their accounts of Jesus’s life and teaching.The final chapter undermines the current trend of locating Q in Galilee and identifying it with the earliest community/-ies of Jesus’s followers. The discussion in this chapter is largely convincing but, compared to previous chapters, cursory and suggestive. Rather than a conclusive analysis of hypothetical origins of Q among an early community of Jesus-followers in Galilee, Kirk’s discussion in this section sets up his positive proposal, in which the earliest Jesus tradition exhibited narrative and ethical impulses, with neither impulse being ontologically opposed to or, indeed, distinct from the other. “Q and the Gospel of Mark,” explains Kirk, “are, respectively, the downstream artifacts of the dual didactic and narrative impulses in primitive Christianity’s commemoration of Jesus” (p. 328).As with any complex and detailed analysis of 300-plus pages, there are facets of Kirk’s argument with which some readers will argue. In my view, Kirk minimizes the significance of Q’s hypothetical status whenever he complains about “FH logics.” Kirk also identifies any pre-Lukan source in a Farrerian perspective as “phantom Q,” whether that source is conceived as oral or written, or as pre- or post-Matthean. Finally, it is not obvious to me that Kirk’s sophisticated media-critical hypotheses about the earliest Jesus tradition only map onto the Two Document Hypothesis, even if those hypotheses have not previously been mapped onto other source-critical perspectives.These questions aside, Kirk has reminded us of the importance of source criticism not just for understanding the prehistory of the Synoptic Gospels but also for questions pertaining to Christian origins and the historical intent and value of the Jesus tradition. Issues of memory, genre, and source utilization are vital parts of these questions. Kirk brings these issues into greater clarity even as he also reminds us of the history of source critical inquiry into the Synoptic Gospels. These accomplishments set the stage for Gospels and Jesus scholarship in the twenty-first century

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