This book is the first of a two-volume work on the origins of the gospel form from a social memory approach. Social memory takes account of both the individual and the community in the formation of the gospels by considering social frameworks and socially significant narrative patterns that individuals use to remember and recount the past. Part 1 reviews the history of scholarship and then develops a social memory approach and a method of textual study, drawing on insights from recent research on orality, memory, and narrative. Part 2 offers a series of textual studies, focusing on Capernaum and Nazareth, illustrating factors that might have contributed to the construction of a gospel as an extended narrative, inclusive of Jesuss words and deeds, and why such a narrative was essential to early Christian memory of Jesus.