7 - Concluding remarks

Summary

At the beginning of this investigation we defined our task as to assess whether early Christian traditions bear witness to interest in the faith of Jesus Christ. During the course of the study, a large stock of ancient literature has been surveyed, firstly, to understand the currency and language of faith at the disposal of nascent Christianity and, secondly, in pursuit of our goal. Such an approach inevitably results in uneven coverage of sources, but we have attempted to provide sufficient detailed exegesis to establish our case for particular texts, whilst also mapping out a broader context within which talk of Jesus' faith becomes meaningful. In this latter respect, the notion of trajectory has been helpful in that it has provided us with a means of correlating material so as to draw attention to a particular perspective or trend in early Christian reflection.

As we intimated at the beginning of chapter 6, two principal trajectories concerned with Jesus' faith can be isolated. One of these, the paradigmatic, revolves around assessments of how Jesus of Nazareth informs the life of faith. In the Synoptic Gospels, we discussed a number of miracle traditions which imply that Jesus' faith was considered a contributory factor. Additional support for this assessment emerged from a comparison between the faith logia attributed to Jesus and the means by which he was recorded as performing miracles.