One of the detailed kinds of study carried out by New Testament scholars is to attempt to identify the forms in which the recollections of Jesus may have been originally preserved before the gospels were written. This study is called form criticism. We can understand what is involved if we take a simple modem comparison.

Imagine that you have been chosen to be a representative for your home area at a meeting at which the President is making an important speech in the national language. When you return home you are expected to give an account of what took place and what was said to a number of different people and local meetings using both the national and local language. Altogether you may have to repeat your account nine or ten times and then finally a written record of what you have said will be made in both the languages you have been using. After repeating the same thing several times you are likely to find that you have settled into using the same words, more or less, each time and that you are also following the same form of presentation. Those who hear you and then repeat what you have said to others are likely to copy your wording and form of presentation. Any particularly important message is likely to be remembered as exactly as possible, but those who pass on what you have said might also add some explanations and interpretations of their own. What is finally written down is likely to follow the wording and form of presentation that you have used but might incorporate some explanations or interpretations, emphasize some points more than others, omit some points and generally try to meet the needs and interests of those who will read the record in future. Differences between the national and local language may also be reflected. The written record will reflect faithfully what took place at the meeting to which you went, but it will also reflect your understanding, explanation and interpretation of what took place; it will be a bit different from a tape-recording of the proceedings.

This is roughly what happened with the recollections of the early Church about Jesus Christ. What was recollected and frequently repeated is likely to have settled into particular forms of presentation with more or less fixed wording. Many Christians, particularly women in the early Church, were not literate and relied on memorization of what they were taught. As we find in traditional African society, those who rely on their memories instead of on the written word have very good memories and can repeat accurately what they have heard. In the very early period of the Church, there was a great deal of dependence on accurate memorization of what was passed on.

When what was passed on orally and memorized was put into writing, the same forms of presentation and pattern of words are likely to have been used in the written record as in the oral transmission of the recollections. From this, we can see that the gospel writers did not 'make up' what they wrote about Jesus Christ. They used, organized and arranged material that was already in use in the Church. Each gospel writer had his own particular aims and interests and his own style of writing and each wrote for particular readers, for example. Luke 1:1-4 shows that Luke wrote for a man who had a Greek name and a title indicating that he was in a position of some importance. The way in which Mark writes his gospel indicates that he wrote for Gentile Christians, almost certainly the Roman Christians. Matthew's gospel gives the impression that it was intended particularly for Jewish Christians. The writer of John's gospel looks back at Jesus in a different way from the writers of the three synoptic gospels, but all the gospel writers worked from what was already the living tradition of the Church.

·