In other words, according to Crossan, the historical Jesus did not simply want to engage the memories of his listeners so that they might be able to tell others about what he said. Yes, he did want that much. But, according to Crossan, he also wanted them to do as they saw him do and enact interpersonal fellowship, following his example. Perhaps we could say that he wanted his followers to form a movement, so to speak - to wit, a Jesus movement.
In Crossan's Chapter 1: Contexts" in his 1994 book The Essential Jesus: Original Sayings and Earliest Images (pp. 1-24), he says, "The continuity between Jesus and his first companions is less in memory than in mimesis, less in remembrance than in imitation" (p. 22).
The Harvard classicist Milman Parry's seminal publications are published in the 550-page book The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, edited with an "Introduction" (pp. ix-lxii) by Adam Parry (Oxford University Press, 1987).
For a judicious study of the Parry-Lord theory of oral poetry compositional practices as exemplified in the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey, see John Miles Foley's judicious book Homer's Traditional Art (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
For the classic study of ancient Greek imagistic thinking, involving the Parry-Lord theory of oral poetry compositional practices, see the classicist Eric A. Havelock's book Preface to Plato (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963) - a book that Ong never tired of referring to.
For English translations of the Homeric epics that accentuate the features of oral composition stressed by Parry and Lord, see Richmond Lattimore's The Iliad of Homer (University of Chicago Press, 1951) and The Odyssey of Homer (University of Chicago Press, 1965).
For a relevant book about oral memory, see the French Jesuit anthropologist Marcel Jousse's posthumously published 400-page anthology Memory, Memorization, and Memorizers: The Galilean Oral-Style Tradition and Its Traditions, texts selected, edited, and translated and with an "Introduction" (pp. 1-13) by Edgard Sienaert; with a "Foreword" (pp. xiii-xxiii) by Werner H. Kelber (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books/ Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2018).
Now, In Crossan's Chapter 1: "Contexts" in his 1994 book The Essential Jesus: Original Sayings and Earliest Images (pp. 1-24), he, in effect, operationally defines and explains what I referred to as his secondary oral hermeneutic under the subheading "Orality and Translation" (esp. pp. 20-21). He says, In a purely or residually oral situation, Homeric bards or Serbo-Croatian singers [studied by Parry and Lord] can recount thousands of lines of an epic as long as it is traditional, rhythmic, and formulaic. They know classic stories, typical scenes, and set formulae, and they mix and match creatively in performance. They do not, like a modern actor, memorize thousands of lines verbatim. That cannot be done without a written text [and an evolved literate memory, I would add], and in fact, the very concept of verbatim is part of writing's domination. If, therefore, Jesus was operating as an oral or non-literate peasant [in terms of class structure] speaking to others like himself [nobodies], and if there is no evidence that he was drilling them in some sort of formulaic remembrance, how can we trust their reports, even their very earliest reports?
"There are two levels to that question. The surface response is that the forms of speech used by Jesus, the aphorisms and the parable, are calculated to help remembrance. The aphorism is somewhat like a proverb. Both forms [aphorism and proverb] are short and sharp, usually involving a content whose image strikes the imagination combined with a form whose rhetoric is difficult to forget. A stitch in time saves - how many? After stitch and time, it could only be fIve or nIne [n.b., the two caps]. Try each: A stich in time saves five; a stitch in time saves nine [n.b., the initial italicized letters]. We are, in English, far, far more used to the SN than the SF conjunction. It has to be: A stitch in time saves nine. Proverbs distill conventional or social wisdom; aphorisms imitate their form to assert possibly unconventional but definitely individual wisdom. An aphorism is a proverb with an attitude. . . . Unlike the proverb, which is remembered in syntactical exactitude, the aphorism is remembered more as structural conjunction" (p. 21).
After noting that parables are short stories, Crossan says, "Our extant New Testament versions of Jesus's parables are more like plot summaries than precise transcriptions [of whatever he made have said in one performance]. An actual version might have been told or even acted out [mimed] by Jesus in far greater detail and with far more audience interaction and response. But even though aphorism and parable are forms of oral speech that vastly enhance the possibility of remembrance, there is one deeper continuity to be noted. This deeper continuity is not memory but mimesis, not in remembrance, but in imitation" (p. 22).
In any event, in Crossan's Chapter 2: "Texts & Images" (pp. 25-144), he identifies what he refers to as 93 original sayings of Jesus. Images are scattered on various pages, where space allows. Next, in Crossan's Chapter 3: "Notes on Texts" (pp. 145-170), he provides a note about each of the 93 texts. Then, in Crossan's Chapter 4 "Inventory of Images" (pp. 171-199), he discusses each of the 65 images or scenes and gives the source of each image.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
