Followers of Jesus and the Development of the Gospel Tradition

The memory of what Jesus said and did, of his trial, and of his crucifixion was preserved by his followers. Also inscribed into each of the four canonical Gospels is the conviction that God raised him from the dead. The Gospel accounts of Jesus’ postmortem appearances to his disciples were not included in the discussion of the historical Jesus because resurrection intimates an experience of transcendence that cannot be verified by historical method. What can be explored historically are the effects that belief had on his followers, and on the formation of the Gospels. In the Gospel of Mark, the risen Jesus does not appear to his disciples. Rather, a young man tells the women who go to the tomb, “He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you” (Mark 16:6–7). The Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John all have different appearance stories, which betokens not only multiple encounters with the risen Jesus but also that the narration of the event is itself an interpretation of its significance (see Matt. 28:1–20; Luke 24:1–53; John 20:1–29; 21:1–23). The earliest reference to the resurrection of Jesus is the tradition Paul cites in 1 Corinthians, which says that the risen Jesus “appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died” (1 Cor. 15:5–6). Paul goes on to mention Jesus’ appearance to James and to himself, and then asserts that in raising him from the dead God had inaugurated the general resurrection of the dead (1 Cor. 15:12–13).

An important element of the resurrection accounts in all four Gospels that is absent from Paul’s discussion is the empty tomb tradition. The empty tomb tradition belongs to the earliest conceptualization of Jesus’ resurrection. In all four Gospels, it features women who go to the tomb where Jesus was buried to anoint his body, only to discover that it is not there. The initial message from the young man in the tomb in Mark’s account, who become angels in Matthew and Luke, is that Jesus is not here because he has been raised. The interpretation of the empty tomb is not self-evident, and indeed raises the question of how an ancient audience would have understood this tradition. Daniel Smith contends that a first-century person (Jewish or Greek) would have interpreted an inexplicably disappearing body or an unaccountably empty tomb as evidence, not of “resurrection,” but of “assumption” (D. A. Smith, 4). He notes this is an idea found in almost every ancient culture that, in certain special cases, God or some divine being or beings could take a person immediately and bodily into the divine realm. The significance ancient audiences would have inferred from the empty tomb tradition in the Gospels is that God had vindicated Jesus. In other words, since Jesus was executed as an enemy of the Roman order for sedition, the view that he had been raised from the dead was regarded as a divine response that validated his prophetic message and activity.

The various accounts of Jesus’ postmortem appearances have a different function from the empty tomb tradition in the Gospel narratives. The phrase “he appeared” in 1 Corinthians 15 likely denotes a visionary experience of the risen Jesus, but in the Gospels, Jesus’ appearances to his disciples are depicted as more than an apparition or a resuscitation. In Matthew, Luke, and John, the risen Jesus walks and talks, and in Luke and John, he even eats with his disciples, thus providing narrative accounts of what in Paul’s discussion of resurrection he describes as a “spiritual body”: “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15:44). One concern addressed by the appearance stories, especially in Luke and John, may have been the belief, which came to be known as docetism, that Jesus only seemed to be human, and that his physical body was a phantasm. The primary purpose of the appearance stories in all the Gospels, however, was to show Jesus commissioning his disciples to carry on with his mission. Those who had seen the risen Jesus could claim distinctive authority for leadership in the movement. In the shorter ending of Mark’s Gospel, which does not include an appearance account, the young man instructs the women to “go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you” (Mark 16:7). Galilee here is not just a geographical location but also symbolic of any place where the ministry of Jesus was continued by his followers. Therefore, within the narrative strategy of the Gospels, appearances of the risen Jesus serve to validate his message and mission vis-à-vis the imperial system that executed him and to inspire his followers to continue the movement he initiated in Galilee.

The empty tomb and the appearance traditions first circulated orally among Jesus’ followers. They were related and handed down in the context of instruction or proclamation. These traditions were shaped by the conviction that Jesus was risen from the dead, and then woven together with other traditions about Jesus to form the narrative accounts that are the canonical Gospels. The memory of Jesus was, from the very beginning, shaped by followers who reflected on the significance of his message and actions for their own lives in diverse contexts. The earliest traditions about him were transformed as they were appropriated by communities of his followers throughout the Roman Empire. Form usually follows function, and this is no less true of the Jesus tradition, as followers made use of them to define their identity and develop practices of communal patterns of life.

Jesus was crucified sometime around 30 CE, and there is general agreement that Mark was written shortly after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. In this forty-year period between the time of Jesus and the time of the Gospels, stories and sayings circulated as oral tradition in what was an oral culture. In contrast to Western societies predominated by written media, the fundamental dynamic of communication in the ancient world was between speaker and hearer. The literacy rate was low, somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent, and most written texts were scripts to be performed in public. Performative storytelling was the ordinary medium of literary production in the Greco-Roman world. As Michael White puts it, written texts served as scripts of and for oral presentations (White, 92). Stories about and sayings of Jesus that were disseminated in an oral culture were not static or fixed in the same way written texts are. Oral tradition is conservative in seeking to preserve authentic memories, but it is also malleable in that it changes with each new performance. As the Jesus tradition was transmitted in new contexts, it reflected the interests, values, and ideals of the community in which it was performed (White, 101–3). In this respect, the constructed memories of oral tradition do not simply relate the facts of what happened. They are also scripts for communal practice and belief.

During the forty or so years between Jesus and the Gospel of Mark, the memory of Jesus circulated orally. However, Mark and the other Gospels used sources, some of which were written down. There were likely collections of stories about Jesus’ deeds of power, aphoristic sayings and parables, accounts of his suffering, death, and resurrection, and eventually nativity stories. As noted earlier in this essay, the sayings of Jesus common to Matthew and Luke are regarded by many scholars as an example of such a sayings collection, and are together referred to as Q. The sayings are not identical in the two Gospels because they were edited by the Gospel writers, but the sayings in Luke are generally regarded as closer to the original than Matthew (Robinson, Kloppenborg, and Hoffmann). Q contains some of the most memorable sayings of Jesus and is important because it is purported to be an example of an early source for the Gospels; the best guess for its date would be somewhere between 50 and 70 CE. But because there is no manuscript evidence for Q or any references to it in any ancient Christian texts, this dating is at best a working theory that has been questioned by a growing number of scholars (e.g., Goodacre).

What is interesting about scholarship on the Q sayings source is that it provides a window, albeit one based on conjecture, onto the period of oral tradition between Jesus and the Gospels. While there are no extant copies of Q, the Gospel of Thomas is an analogous example of a collection of Jesus’ sayings that has no narrative structure. The Gospel of Thomas is one of the most famous of the cache of texts found in 1945 in the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. It is an extant sayings collection that contains 114 logia, or sayings, of Jesus. Half of the sayings have parallels in the Gospels, and half were formerly unknown. So whether there was an actual Q document or not, the Gospel of Thomas is an example of a collection of Jesus sayings that makes no allusion to the passion or resurrection. This would suggest that the individuals and communities for whom this document was of value probably tried to live in accordance with these particular sayings of Jesus. Similarly, scholars who work on Q maintain that it describes a particular way of life of Jewish disciples of Jesus, who regarded themselves as itinerant prophets, moving from town to town and announcing, “The kingdom of God has come close to you.” Many of the sayings in Q also imply that these followers of Jesus called for repentance and experienced persecution.

There are a number of observations to be made from this brief treatment of collections of sayings during the period between Jesus and the Gospels before we turn to discuss the canonical Gospels. Although there is no evidence for the existence of the Q sayings source as a document, it is probable that this collection, or ones like it, existed as oral tradition. In other words, whether there is a Q source or not, the Gospel of Thomas confirms that collections of Jesus’ sayings did circulate and were a source for the narratives of Jesus constructed by the Gospel writers. Perhaps even more significant for understanding the development of these Jesus traditions into the Gospels is how the tradition was simultaneously preserved and modified as Jesus’ followers sought to embody his teachings. For some communities in the Jesus movement, the sayings functioned as practical wisdom to live by. Not only was the Jesus tradition being performed for followers, followers were themselves performing the tradition with their lives. The Jesus movement was, in its first decades, a messianic movement within Judaism that, if Paul’s letters are any indication, included an increasing number of gentiles so that by the end of the first century they were a majority. Jews and gentiles alike were drawn into the movement by the communal pattern of life, predicated on Jesus’ teaching and prophetic praxis and on the conviction that, though he had been executed for sedition, God had raised him from the dead and hence had inaugurated the new age.