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Differing facets of the Gethsemane question come into view as we turn to see it from various angles. What did Jesus actually do and say in Gethsemane in the time between his final meal with the disciples and his arrest? How were those events commemorated in accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching? What influence did those events and their commemoration have on the discourse of the early churches? And so on. The present essay applies traditional form-critical methods to these questions and shows that those methods are incapable of either authenticating or disauthenticating the Gethsemane traditions. Rather than removing historical elements from their interpretive overlays, this discussion examines how the texts’ interpretive frames preserve traditional elements even as those elements are remembered in and/or applied to new contexts. It also asks how possible historical elements function within our authors’ redactional and interpretive programs. As a result, we see that reception history is a useful perspective from which to conceptualize and pursue historical questions and to generate knowledge of the past.