Loading...This post will conclude my mini-thread trying to show that modern practices of story telling in the Middle East, during a community ritual called the haflar samar, in which groups of knowledgeable people ensure that stories are never significantly changed, has no bearing on the question of whether ancient stories told about Jesus were preserved accurately over time.
Here I take on a bigger question, as addressed in in my book Jesus Before the Gospels: Does this group context for telling the stories ensure that they are accurate? Actually, modern psychological studies suggest that just the opposite is normally the case. Cognitive psychologists have studied the phenomenon of “group memory” and have reached several very important conclusions that might be surprising. One is that when a group “collectively remembers” something they have all heard or experienced, the “whole” is less than the sum of the “parts.” That is to say, if you have ten individuals who have all experienced an event, and you interview the ten separately, you will learn a good deal about what happened when you piece all the information together. But if you interview them precisely as a group, you will get less information.
That may be counter-intuitive, but it has been demonstrated time and again. Some researchers have wondered if that’s because of what you might call
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Professor Ehrman. If Peter and James the brother of Jesus founded the Jerusalem Church shortly after the death of Jesus and since these two men would have had first hand knowledge of the life of Jesus and the last week of his life, do we have any knowledge of what Peter and James were teaching their followers about the life of Jesus and that last week of his life?
Unfortunately, no! Oh boy do we wish we did….
Very interesting article and quite convincing.
One minor correction; coup de grace, not coup d’etat.
Wasn’t the message (as shown in Acts and Luke), “repent and be baptized, for the kingdom of god is here.”
Then, it seems the words, “…baptized in the name of Jesus…” were added. Otherwise, it was virtually the same as John’s “gospel.”
I’m not sure whose message you’re referring to.
What can we learn, as far as group re-telling and earliest transmitted knowledge ,from the fact that essential traditions such as baptism and the eucharist seemed to have been cemented from the time of John the Baptist and Jesus?
I can’t imagine that these traditions of experiential application could have been started by anyone but John and Jesus.
It would follow, then, that just as much as these central rituals go back to the sources uncontested, so could many other stories have been genuinely remembered just as they happened, not literally, but at their core.
I am always reminded that the Baptist came first, and that the original credit goes to him both on account of introducing baptism for the remission of sins and on account of his apocalyptic message. Jesus took these three essential ideas ( baptism, remission of sins, and ” repent for the Kingdom is at hand”) and made them the core of his message and doctrine.
Accepting that Jesus put forward these ideals de facto verifies retroactively the existence of the Baptist and of his mission, even as we don’t know of any witness after Jesus’ death who told about John the Baptist.
I don’t think we can root Christian baptism *directly* in the time of John the Baptist per se (his baptism was connected but also very different; theXn rite started there but came to alter the ritual significance of the act). But yes, I do think the baptist traditoin, and the apocalyptic preaching, strongly show the connection of John and Jesus and their deep similarities and almost certainly show that Jesus (ant therefore Xty) emerged out of John’s apocalyptic context and preaching. (Not eucharist though) That would not, however, show that all stories necessarily are accurate as handed down. That’s a very different kettle of fish.