Pelikan on Tradition and Scripture

I picked up Jaroslav Pelikan's Jesus Through the Centuries from the library earlier today and started reading. I did not get too far (page 10) before I had to get what I had just read posted and into the discussion a little bit. Here is a bit from Pelikan on tradition and Scripture:

Even without settling all the thorny problems of authorship and of dating, we must recognize that in the several decades between the time of the ministry of Jesus and the composition of the various Gospels, the memory of what he had said and done was circulating among the various Christian congregations, and probably beyond them, in the form of an oral tradition.. . . But it is noteworthy that, except for the words of the institution of the Lord's Supper themselves, Paul does not in any of his epistles quote the exact words of any of the sayings of Jesus as we now have them in the Gospels. Nor does he mention a single event in the life of Jesus . . . between his birth and his death on the cross. From the writings of Paul we would not be able to know that Jesus ever taught in parablesand proverbs or that he performed miracles or that he was born of a virgin. For that information we are dependent on the oral tradition of the early Christian communities as this was eventually deposited in the Gospels, all of which, in their present form at any rate, probably appeared later than more or all of the epistles of Paul.

And here we arrive at Pelikan's declaration:

Everyone must acknowledge, therefore, that Christian tradition has precedence, chronologically and even logically, over Christian Scripture; for there was a tradition of the church before there was ever a New Testament, or any individual book of the New Testament.

Did you catch that? Chronologically (a concept important to students of history and historical theology), Christian tradition has precedence over Christian Scripture. This is absolutely true. Keep in mind that no Scripture was written specifically by the authors to be Scripture; Paul did not think to himself (as far as we know, though we can be pretty sure), "I'm gonna write me some Scriptures." The same with Peter and John and Luke and so forth. The letters came as needed. Paul himself told the church at Corinth the evangel he received (1 Co. xv.1-7) which is traced back to a hymn or creedal statement sometime in the forties. This was oral tradition within a Christian community--distinct from Jewish--without a written form of Scripture.