The Early Church as a Narrative Fellowship. An Exploratory Study of the Performance of the Chreia

In English The early Church was a narrative fellowship which narrativized the Jesus tradition and per-formed it from memory. It did so by using specific narrative and mnemonic forms of commu-nication. The chreia combines features of narrativity, oral performance, and memory and con-stituted a basic element of the narrative mosaic of the Church. The author of the Gospel of Mark indicates a broader pattern of narrative performance in that he introduces his narrative by combining the chreia with the diēgēma, demonstrating the rhetorical kind of narrativiza-tion that characterizes the Jesus tradition.