The “formation” of Jesus in the long second century : a proposal for an agenda

Abstract

It is conventionally accepted in New Testament studies that the image of Jesus Christ and the interpretations of his significance, as represented in the canonical Gospels and epistolary literature, gained early hegemonic status and remained stable from the first century onwards. Within this framework, the concept of “Jesus remembered” functions to root the evolving Christological traditions and trajectories in a “proto-orthodox” tradition in conceptual and ideological proximity to the historical Jesus. However, a number of considerations militate against this view of Christian origins: a) the continued oral traditioning of creative Jesus stories alongside and influencing the emerging written traditions; b) a production of a wide variety of literature (including gospels, acts, and other theological treatises) often manifesting very different trajectories of Jesus interpretations complementary and simultaneous to those writings that later became canonical; c) a variety of divergent social formations constructed on the basis of these divergent Jesus traditions. Social and collective memory, as a term to encapsulate the idea of reception of Jesus traditions in the second century, highlights how various Christ-cult groups adapted and adopted continually changing Jesus traditions. These traditions were ritualised and formalised to give expression of and maintain their self-identities and self-perceptions through invented traditions. In this way a variety of suitable pasts for suitable histories was constructed. The incipient collections of paradigmatic writings started to gain traction towards the end of the second century as Christ-cult groups and social formations contested for hegemonic, definitional statuses. Those groups that gained hegemonic status got to define what the canonical version of the “remembered Jesus” would be. This paper provides an overview of the recent scholarship on the topic and raises some critical questions for further research.