This insight, which suggests that the story of Jesus was passed on primarily in the synagogue, opens to us a window into the oral period of Christian history and reveals the context in which the story of Jesus was repeated and thus preserved. It was not a random process in which parents told their children about Jesus, or neighbors passed on Jesus stories over the back fence, or people in the marketplace related stories of Jesus to one another. That kind of oral tradition would have resulted in little more than a few anecdotal episodes that stand out in everyone’s family history—defining
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