Jesus of Nazareth as Messianic teacher stood at the beginning of the Gospel tradition. Rainer Riesner shows that his poetically formed teaching summaries and evocative parables could be impressed on the memory of his hearers and that a continuity of transmission reaching to the Synoptic Gospels existed through the circle of his disciples.

“Riesner has done about as masterful a job as possible in illustrating his thesis of the possibility, plausibility, and even necessity for a historically reliable pre-Easter beginning of the gospel tradition.”
John P. Heil in Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 4, 1983, pp. 702-703