Summary

The antiquity of a saying attributed to Jesus may be tested in several ways; but antiquity does not guarantee authenticity. In his study of Son of man sayings and their non-Son of man rivals or parallels, Jeremias is concerned with the question of the priority of one or the other of the two types. Clearly, investigation of the relative age of traditional sayings must precede the further inquiry into authenticity. The present study has not found sufficient evidence to justify acceptance of either Jeremias' preference for the non-Son of man parallels, or Borsch's contrary arguments in favour of the Son of man versions as the more primitive type. Jeremias' other thesis is that the oldest Son of man sayings of all are likely to be those without non-Son of man rivals (konkurrenzlos). Our investigation, however, has produced the result that the only sayings of this category to which authenticity can be assigned with any degree of probability are the three closely associated sayings in Luke 17.24, 26f., 28–30. These, together with Luke 12.8f. and 11.29f., the only authentic sayings of the other category, constitute the ‘kernel sayings’.

Full account has been taken of the ‘sentence of holy law’ investigated by Käsemann (Perrin's ‘eschatological judgment pronouncement’ or ‘judgment saying’), and of the ‘eschatological correlative’ (Perrin's ‘comparison saying’) more recently isolated by R. A. Edwards. Both these types are represented among the kernel sayings: Luke 12.8f. is a sentence of holy law, and Luke 11.30; 17.24, 26, 28a + 30 are eschatological correlatives.