Scripture and God in Christianity

It is interesting to note that in his writings, Paul is quite silent about the historical settings which
seem to be fundamental to the whole gospel narrative of Jesus' life and he does not quote from
Jesus but once. H. Anderson rightly observes that "if Paul were our only source, we would know
nothing of Jesus' parables, the Sermon on the Mount, or the Lord's prayer." 123 Victor P. Furnish
observes that "It is striking, however, how little use the apostle actually makes of Jesus' teachings.
For example, he invokes none of the parables which later on were given such prominence in
the Synoptic Gospels. Moreover, he has very little to say about the Reign of God, even though
that is fundamental theme in both the sayings and parable traditions. True, not all of Paul's letters
have survived, and we have no transcripts of his actual preaching. Yet the sources we do have
probably give us an accurate picture... Paul focuses his attention neither on the teachings of Jesus
nor on Jesus' Palestinian ministry. His attention is focused, rather, on Jesus the crucified Messiah
and the risen Lord." 124 John Hick observes that "Paul fits Jesus into his own theology without little
regard to the historical figure." 125
Burridge, on the other hand, argues that "Because Paul says little about the person of Jesus in his
epistles does not necessarily mean that he was not interested in his earthly ministry; it might be
because he is writing epistles and not Bioi." 126 It is beyond the scope of this treatise to discuss
how far the Gospels could be treated as the Bioi. Whatever the case, it highlights the fact that the
parables, sayings of Jesus or the Gospels were neither transmitted in a rigid, organized or systematic
method nor written or accepted as the Holy Scriptures in the Christian circles of the middle
first century. This complete silence on the part of Paul, observes Grasser, "is an unexplained riddle."
127 Francois Bovon argues that "We must learn to consider the gospels of the New Testament
canon, in the form in which they existed before 180 C.E., in the same light in which we
consider the apocrypha. At this earlier time the gospels were what the apocrypha never ceased to
be. Like the apocrypha, the gospels of the New Testament were not yet canonical; they did not
circulate together [for example, only Luke and John are present in Papyrus 45], and when they
did, they did not always appear in the same sequence [for example, the order Matthew, John,
Luke, Mark in Codex Bezae]." 128
The Gospel's composition and collection were not the end of oral tradition of Jesus' sayings. 129 It
can be traced until well into the second century, in the Apostolic Fathers, and perhaps in Justin,
who of course knew and used gospel writings. M. Wiles observes that "For a long time, even after
many of the New Testament writings had been written, the method of oral transmission continued
to be regarded as the basic way in which the substance of the Christian Gospel was to be
learned and passed on. Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor in the first half of the second
century, is not unrepresentative of his age in preferring to the written record of books a living and
abiding voice, a continuous chain of remembered teaching which could be traced back to 'the
commandments given by the Lord to faith, and reaching us from the Truth himself '. The overall
picture to be found in the writings of Justin Martyr and the other apologists contemporary with
him is fundamentally similar; their conception of Christianity is the teaching of Jesus spreading
its way around the world through the medium of the preaching first of the apostles and then of
those who came after them." 130 Papias of Heirapolis (about 130-140), who has been credited with
being the author of "Exposition of the Lord's Oracles" which "survives in fragments only", 131
states what is thought to be a classical example of the continued exaltation of oral tradition: "I
did not think that I could get so much from the contents of books as from the utterances of the
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