(11 votes, average: 4.64 out of 5)
Loading...In my previous post I showed how Christian missionaries – the vast majority of them not companions of Jesus or eyewitnesses to his life – were telling stories about Jesus as they moved around in the empire spreading the gospel in the early decades, before the Gospels were written (think Paul and his missionary companions, Timothy, Silvanus, etc – none of them from Israel, none of them having laid eyes on Jesus before his death). The problems of word-of-mouth traditions are even more complicated than I’ve so far discussed, however. Here is how I go on to discuss the matter in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016).
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It was not only these missionaries who were converting others, however. The converts they made were themselves converting people. Take another hypothetical but completely plausible situation: suppose I’m a worshiper of the traditional Roman gods, living in the town of Colossae in, say, the year 50 CE. The missionary Epaphras comes to town and I meet him at his place of business. I’m a highly religious man, but I’m always interested in new ideas. Ephaphras begins to tell me about the Son of God who did miraculous deeds in Galilee: he healed the sick, and cast out demons, and raised the dead. At the end of his life, he was betrayed by his own people and crucified by the governor Pontius Pilate. But then God raised him from the dead.
At first I might think that Epaphras is making it up. Or that he’s a bit looney. But then I talk to other people whom Epaphras has convinced. They also are full of stories, both about the amazing things Jesus did and the fact that people actually saw him alive after his death. They also tell about other miracles that are happening, even now, in the powerful name of Jesus.
I eventually become convinced. I give up
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I realize it isn’t the same, but I am often reminded of my experience converting at age 18 to the religion of Sun Myung Moon. I wanted others to believe, like me, that he was the new Christ, the predicted “second coming” and that Christians had gotten it wrong, that it was the “mission” to build the Kingdom on earth that was left incomplete, that the mission required a new savior, picking up where Jesus left off, one who would forgive, not only personal sin, but the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, one who provides complete salvation, not just the spiritual salvation we believed Jesus provided. I didn’t talk much about what I knew of Moon’s life, rather about what I personally experienced in converting, how it changed my life. I could barely remember what I had been told (or read) about Moon’s life. That was not as important as my experience. I converted people using the teachings, not Moon’s life. I think that is why Paul didn’t relate much about Jesus life – he was teaching about what to believe and how conversion would change your life for the better. People respond to personal testimony.
I went to a Moon gathering because I liked the people I met so much. When I was being instructed, I didn’t even know about the man, it was the teaching that impressed me, but only because I saw such a glow on the faces of the believers. It is conceivable that early Christians found it hard to convince people that an executed criminal was the son of God. But it wouldn’t be so hard to accept once they had been absorbed into the community – then spoken to about the fact Jesus had been seen after his execution, and continues to be seen by followers. I can hear them now: You can see him to, he will speak to you and guide your life. It is powerful stuff.
Bart,
I have heard you compare remembering The Sermon on The Mount to remembering a modern president’s State of The Union speech, for example. I think there are problems with that analogy. (The thoughts I offer below were partially inspired by considering Mike Licona’s counterargument about “over and over …. again”
— although I am sure he would not agree with my take on this.)
I am more interested in whether Jesus said these ideas at some point, (possibly somewhat repetitively), not necessarily all in one telling. Then a better analogy would be to recalling typical things said by a politician. (For example if someone were to construct a not entirely historical speech by Obama about healthcare, but with one of the sentences being: “If you like your plan, you can keep it.”) My speculation is that even if people told stories of Jesus giving a sermon (or many sermons), they would tend to transmit pieces of content independently. We still have the usual “telephone game” issues, but some sayings collected in “The Sermon on The Mount” could be somewhat reflective of something actually said by Jesus at some point and others not so much. Your thoughts on this?
Do you think you could record accurately three chapters worth of sayings of the first GEorge Bush from the first three years of his presidency?
There’s something else I wonder about converts converting converts converting converts: just how stringently detailed were those “join our community” experiences, especially when many (most?) of the converts were illiterate. This is beside the fact that there is no official “guide book” to go by. As a Roman Catholic having gone through 12 years of parochial school taught by nuns and priests, I had the official creed drilled into me in detail. Later, when I switched to a different Catholic denomination, I made it a point to learn the theological differences between the two. But my experience was not typical. New members most frequently joined because they married into the denomination, they disagreed with a Roman policy (often birth control), or the church was at a convenient location. As far as I know, there was no formal “indoctrination” for adults. When I served as a deacon, I was often surprised in talking to adults that they had little knowledge of some of the “official” beliefs of the denomination. My point here is this: even today, rigorous teaching of official beliefs varies. Could this not be true from the beginning?
Yes, different believers would teach different things. But I’m not sure literacy made a difference: all the teachings (nearly all) were by word of mouth.
Bart, am I becoming an Ehrmanite??? Should you and your fellow academics stand with Simon Magnus, Marcion, Valentinus, and Carpocrates? Your books and posts have made me a 21st century Gnostic, setting me apart from the vast majority of Christians today who have no interest, awareness, or understanding to ask the questions you pursue or hear the range of answers you and your colleagues present. The ignorant refuse to drink deep from the Pierian spring as Alexander Pope observed. I am now “in the know” with a tiny fraction of the human race while the rest labor in ignorance and misunderstanding, accepting the propaganda, mistakes, confusion, and mistranslations of texts and traditions handed down by the capricious twists of history and the power structures that use them to retain control. The further irony is that this new Gnostic knowledge doesn’t promise me salvation as did those beliefs of old, but rather they aim me in the opposite direction since the final revelation is that any god is our invention. I am now free of ignorance, and free of a universe with meaning. Maybe we should create a secret handshake?
Well, I’m afraid I can’t guarantee your return to the Pleroma, but thanks!
As usual, great article; thanks for posting them. Oral transmission was undoubtedly going on within the then world of Christendom resulting in all sorts of stories. A question that I have is how many, if any, of these orally transmitted stories made it into the four canonical gospels? If Mark’s gospel was written as satire and/or astrologically based storytelling, then it might not have used whatever oral stories were in circulation at the time. And, in that case, since Matthew and Luke are largely Mark plus Q, the only way the oral stories could be in the synoptics in a big way is if Q had an oral origin. If Q doesn’t have an oral origin, then, arguably, the synoptic material mostly didn’t come from any of the verbally circulated stuff. John’s gospel seems to be propaganda for its then-unusual Christology and, arguably, didn’t come from an oral tradition. Do you think the canonical accounts are mostly devoid of the orally transmitted stuff? Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
REF
https://ntstudies.org/f/menippean-satire-in-marks-gospel
Q almost certainly had an oral origin. Otherwise, whoever wrote Q is inventing all the sayings himself. There’s nothing to suggest that. My sense is that virtually all the stories in the Gospels — as with all the hundreds (or thousands) of stories about Jesus not found in the Gospels — were passed around by word of mouth for years (decades) before being written — even if someone *did* “make them up.” If John is independent of the Synoptics, e.g., then all sorts of stories from the Passion narrative were circulating independently (so too with M and L versions)
Yeah, where Q came from is something that I find very interesting. I had in mind the idea of Q coming from the Jerusalem church. If it came from there, then I wouldn’t really think of it as coming from an oral source, with the inevitable changes that happen in oral transmission, because it would be coming from the apostles themselves. From what I’ve seen among scholars, there seems to be no consensus as to where Q came from. But I suspect that Q predates Mark and may be the only correct account of what the historical Jesus said.
I think Q would have had to have been composed in Greek (given the extensive verbatim agreements between Matthew and Luke); and that almost certainly rules out the Jerusalem church, IMO.
That is an interesting point. Could the content of Q have come from the Jerusalem church via an intermediary? This particular post has got me thinking again about where the authors of the canonical gospels got their material. We know that the authors of Matthew and Luke got most of their material from written sources (Mark and Q) so those authors evidently ignored oral source material in their communities. That suggests those authors didn’t have much trust in the oral material they would certainly have been immersed in. That leaves only Mark and John as canonical gospels that potentially have most of their material from oral sources. Most of the stuff in John focuses on its Christology and it seems that an oral source wouldn’t be so focused. Do you have an opinion as to how much of the material in John comes from oral sources? Could the walking on water and feeding of the 5000 in John have come from a written source originating in the synoptics? If John’s material mostly has no oral source that leaves only Mark’s gospel with possibly lots of oral material. But Mark’s gospel is eccentric.
I don’t think I see anything in particular that suggests a connection of Q with Jerusalem.
Dr Ehrman, I have a vaguely related question to your excellent post. Growing up in the church everyone was taught early that “Gospel” is an ancient word for good news as one of the foundations of learning to be a Christian. We simply accepted it as a fact, without really noticing that it’s always presented as if this word was invented for the stories about Jesus because nothing else had ever been worthy of the claim and these stories deserved a special description. You never question the idea that a “gospel” is anything other than a sacred true story about the life of Jesus.
That’s the background, here’s my question. I was recently reading a book that claimed the term “Gospel” was actually a well established one for a document something like a modern press release, issued by emperors to announce the “good news” of their ascension to the throne or other grand achievements that their loyal subjects should rejoice about. In short, ancient propaganda. Is this the case? If so, it would make the meaning of Gospel more like fake news.
Ah, interesting point. But not necessarily. The “good news” could be about lots of different things — including, often, the “gospel” of your army’s success in wiping out the enemy. That news would not necessarily have to be fake. It could be absolutely true. The term doesn’t have a value judgment (true/false; real/fake) intrinsically connected with it. It just means a “good report”.
I find it interesting what Papias had to say in regard to Mark’s writing, ” … Peter, who used to give teaching as necessity demanded but not making, as it were, an arrangement of the Lord’s oracles, …”. It doesn’t seem as though Peter was attempting to follow a strict adherence to an oral tradition.
Well, Papias is maintaining that Mark repeated completely and only what Peter said, but that he re-arranged the order as he thought useful. (So that he sequenced the stories). The big issue for me is whether Papias is talking about *our* Mark!
Bart, what is your opinion about Papias as a reliable source for, well, anything? I know Eusebius had a low opinion of him. I see that many people will use Papias as an authority for one thing or another, such as the authorship of the Gospel of Mark, but once I read his account of the fate of Judas, I have pretty much dismissed anything he says as authoritative. Are any of his accounts about his so-called eyewitnesses to be trusted?
I’m not sure anything he says is historically reliable. But it’s endlessly interesting!
Regarding the first G Bush I do recall “read my lips, no new taxes”. Oh well only one short sentence 🙂
I can go along with the concept of eyewitnesses, regarding Jesus’s teachings. It’s very believable that he attracted scores of people to hear him speak in the synagogues as well as in outdoor forums, like the Sermon on the Mount in many parts of Judea. And it is highly possible that those people could have still have been around when the Gospels were written to offer eyewitness testimony of his words and teachings. But when it comes to the Virgin Birth narrative, any “eyewitness” accounts are impossible. No one at the time would know anything about a virgin birth other than Mary or Joseph and neither would ever have revealed it because Mary would have been stoned to death for adultery. The Virgin Birth narratives must have been added later on to make Jesus more divine and acceptable to the Romans, based on a long, long Greco-Roman history of Gods born from the union of a mortal man or woman and a God or Goddess.
OK on the eyewitnesses. But in my case I’d want to see some evidence of it, given everything we actually know about the situation at the time (the Gospels were written 35-60 years after the Sermon on the Mount by someone who didn’t know Aramaic and apparently wasn’t from Israel, e.g.)
Ok, but who were the eyewitnesses to the Virgin Birth? Mary and Joseph couldn’t reveal anything and Jesus was totally in human form from birth to death so neither Jew nor Roman nor anyone else could know that he was God or had a virgin birth…historically speaking, of course. ?
There weren’t any!