Jesus Tradition, Early Christian Memory, and Gospel Writing

Alan Kirk is professor of religion at James Madison University, Virginia, where he teaches a range of courses in New Testament and early Christianity. His research focuses on ancient gospels, including applications of cognitive and cultural memory theory to problems in the origins and history of the gospel tradition. He is the author of several books, most recently Memory and the Jesus Tradition and Q in Matthew.

"Penned by the leading expert in the interface between orality and writing, Jesus Tradition, Early Christian Memory, and Gospel Writing is not only a meticulously attentive reading and an incisive critique of the history of scholarship on the relationship among the Synoptic Gospels. It is also a rereading of that history that engages recent insights into the cognitive aspects of reading and writing and the operation of memory and commemoration. Kirk exposes and exorcizes many of the ghosts that have troubled the history of the Synoptic problem and offers new ways forward. This is a landmark in scholarship on the gospels." --John S. Kloppenborg University of Toronto "By opening a fresh perspective on the Synoptic tradition, Kirk's learned Forschungsgeschichte addresses the dire need for a media and memory history of ancient Christianity, with special regard to the composition and handing down of traditions within an oral-aural Mediterranean society. Reading the history of the Synoptic tradition as a history of cultural transformations is a long overdue eye-opener." --Sandra Huebenthal Universitaet Passau "In this characteristically evenhanded and detailed study, Alan Kirk showcases his expertise in scribal composition and memory theory in order to probe the history of Synoptic problem scholarship for its media assumptions. Much of this scholarship, he shows, embodies ideas about authorship and media that unfortunately do not accord with ancient compositional techniques. But all is not lost: if we can situate the Synoptic Gospels in their proper ancient media realities, then we can restore them as key data for the cultural practices and animating memories of the early Jesus movement." --Sarah Rollens Rhodes College?