Loading...Did Jesus actually say the Golden Rule as found in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7; the saying is in Matt. 7:12). I have talked about the Sermon and why it is so important for Matthew’s Gospel (in a previous post: Little-Known Aspects of the Golden Rule as Found in the Sermon on the Mount) and now it is time to say something controversial about it. I don’t think Jesus ever gave the Sermon on the Mount.
That’s not just a crazy idea I came up with one day. It’s a widespread view among historical scholars, for reasons that would not be hard to figure out. Just think about the logistics of the issue for a second. The Sermon goes on for three entire chapters. These are not concise chapters; in our Bibles today, they are 111 verses in total (48 + 34 + 29) – saying after saying after saying, one after the other, some one-liners, some extended instructions, some parabolic-like illustrations.
It is an amazing collection of Jesus’ teachings, by far his most famous set of teachings in the Bible, probably the most famous set of teachings to come down to us from all of antiquity. I am not at all interested in detracting from its beauty and importance.
According to Matthew, this is Jesus’ first public address. It happened at the very beginning of his ministry. By standard calculations, that would be about 27 CE or so. The sermon is found nowhere before Matthew – it’s not in Mark or, obviously, the writings of Paul – or, for that matter, anywhere else in all of ancient writing. It is just in Matthew.
Let’s think about that. Historical scholars almost universally think
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Matthew was not from Israel, he did not know Jesus, he is writing in a different language from Jesus, basing his account on what he has heard and read from others. And so my question is: how could Matthew possibly know what was in the lengthy sermon that Jesus gave 55-60 years earlier in a different part of the world speaking a different language? There was no audio recording, and there were no stenographers. Those who would have been listening to it (if he gave it) would not have thought that this is a sermon that would be around for 2000 years. They were just listening for the first time to a teacher whom they had just heard about, as he was giving a talk.
Even if Matthew HAD been there (how could he have been? Think about life expectancy in antiquity), how would he remember exactly what Jesus said? Not just in *general* but in *specifics* — saying by saying by saying, word for word? If you believe that Matthew was divinely inspired to record what Jesus actually said, fair enough. That’s a conversation stopper. But if you like to think in historical terms, well, it just ain’t credible.
My 19-20 year old students sometimes have difficult accepting that. Hey, why couldn’t he just remember it all? Why not??? So I say to them, OK, did you hear Joseph Biden’s inaugural address a couple of years ago? Great. Write it down.
And that was two years ago. So let’s make it more applicable to the situation of the Sermon on the Mount. In 1965 Lyndon B. Johnson delivered the first State of the Union address to be televised. Millions of us were alive then. Many millions of people heard it. We have records of it, reports of it, and, of course, recordings of it. Some of you heard it at the time. Please write it down for me.
Havin’ a problem with that? Exactly.
So, did Jesus deliver the Sermon on the Mount? Well, he certainly may have given some sermons on tops of hills at times. I rather doubht there would have been multitudes and multitudes of people there for any of them (as indicated by Matthew) or, if there were, that very many of them could have heard him very well without a sound system. (If you haven’t seen the opening scenes of the Life of Brian, you really *have* to. This is not just a funny movie, it is *brilliant* in its depth of understanding of the historical situation of first-century Israel — and the Sermon on the Mount is just the start of it. For what it’s worth, the Sermon is the only scene in which Jesus himself appears in the movie. And the listeners can’m make our what he’s saying: Blessed are the Cheesemakers! And Blessed are the Greeks!)
It is obviously quite possible (probable, I’d say) that Jesus may well have spoken at times to groups. And he certainly may have delivered many of the sayings we find in the Sermon on the Mount today, probably onnumerous occasions. But the collection of the sayings into a single Sermon is almost certainly Matthew’s own construction.
I’ve indicated that Luke has a lot of the sayings from the Sermon as well, but they are scattered throughout his Gospel (and often come with different wording, sometimes significantly different wording). Some show up in Luke 12, for example (teachings about not being anxious), and Luke 11 (the Lord’s Prayer), others here and there, but especially in Luke 6, the “Sermon on the Plain.”
Most people haven’t heard of the Sermon on the Plain (called that since it’s a sermon not from the top of a hill but … on a plain! Luke 6:17). This sermon is much shorter than the Sermon on the Mount: instead of three chapters of 111 verses it is just part of one chapter with 30 verses (Luke 6:20-49). But most of those verses are like what you find in the Sermon on the Mount, even though many of them include important additions and some other changes.
Luke’s version of the sermon, for example, starts with “Blessed are the poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God,” obviously very similar to the more familiar phrasing of Matthew, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.” But there’s a big difference between living in poverty (being “poor”: Luke) and being humble (being “poor in spirit”: Matthew). (And there are obviously smaller differences between the verses as well, that also matter).
Moreover, after three “blessings” (i.e., “beatitudes”) Luke, unlike Matthew, continues by pronouncing “woes” to those who are experiencing/enjoying life the opposite way, e.g.: “But woe to you rich, for you have (already) received your consolation” (Luke 6:24). This is an apocalyptic “woe”: you’re gonna pay the price later!
In any event, Luke’s Sermon on the Plain is much shorter than Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, lacking a lot of the familiar material; it has different forms of the sayings of Jesus; it’s delivered at a different point in Jesus’ ministry (after Jesus called the Twelve, for example, rather than before), and – an important issue I won’t be addressing just here at any depth – it does not delve into a lot of the key issues Matthew does, including the relationship of Jesus’ followers to the Jewish law.
Matthew sets up his entire Gospel by showing that Jesus is a new Moses come to give the law of God — in possibly to be seen as a fulfillment of Moses’ law; or as a further extension of the law; or as a deeper interpretation of the law; r as a more adequate expression of what is meant by the law, or a combination of all or some of these things. In Matthew’s sermon, Matt. 5:17-20 are absolutely key. Jesus came not to abolish the law of Moses but to fulfill it, and his followers have to fulfill it too, even better than the most strict Jewish teachers (the Scribes and the Pharisees) do. Luke doesn’t have that bit. Throughout the Sermon on the Mount Jesus talks about his disciples’ relationship to Jewish practices. Those too are not found in Luke’s version. And Jesus ends his statement of the Golden Rule (“Everything you want people to do for you, likewise do for them”) with a rationale related to the Law: Because “This is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12). Luke doesn’t have that.
Luke is far less concerned that Jesus’ followers keep the Law. He is interested in them living for God, without an eye on the law itself. Jesus himself, of course, does fulfill the Law in Luke as the Jewish messiah come to the Jewish people. But for Luke, Jesus’ ethical instructions are not about how to fulfill the law or delivered in relation to the law. They are for all people, Jew or Gentile, about how to please God. The law doesn’t have much to do with it.
In that context, though, Luke does have the Golden rule, in a slightly different form: “Just as you want people to do for you, do for them likewise” (Luke 6:31).
Thus Matthew and Luke both have the saying (worded a bit differently). They would have gotten it from the Q source. Did Jesus say it? I’ll discuss that in the next post on the matter.
Even William Barclay points out that Matthew 5:2 has the verb in the imperfect rather than aorist tense, and uses this fact to reinforce the point that what follows is a distillation of multiple sermons. I suspect Barclay goes a little far, though, in saying “Matthew has said as plainly as Greek will say it that the Sermon on the Mount is not one sermon of Jesus” — I’m pretty sure Greek can be plainer than that!
Yes, it is imperfect. But I don’t know why that suggests a distillation of sermons. Oh boy is *that* a stretch. It is almost certainly an “inceptive imperfect”: “and he began teaching them”
It’s been suggested that Luke more closely follows Q than Matthew. Do you agree with that? Since we don’t have Q to compare it to (and a minority argue that there was no Q), I suppose there is no way to know for sure. At least in regard to spreading the sayings out, it does seem more plausible Jesus, if the material goes back to him, would have said it more like that.
Yes, that’s my view. It seems pretty hard to believe that Luke would scatter a bunch of sayings that rae nicely presented in a sermon, but pretty easy to see how Matthew would take a bunch of scattered sayings that combine them into a sermon.
A couple years ago I thought the same thing about The Sermon on the Mount. So I timed myself reading it twice through at a normal speed. It took just under 15 minutes both times, and I still couldn’t remember most of it.
It just consists of too much dialog. At least for me to have remembered it all. It seems impossible that it would have reached Mathew 50 years latter completely intact.
Mark has 5 or 6 verses from the sermon on the mount scattered around his gospel. Paul also indicates some knowledge of the sermon.
Isn’t it better to see Mark, Luke and Paul all doing the same thing, editing the sermon for their purposes, rather than Matthew taking Mark’s few scattered verses and writing the sermon around them?
Even though Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not the actual authors of “their” gospels, is there any reason or evidence that each gospel grew out of a more or less unique tradition that goes back to a distinct community of which each “writer” was an important part?
That’s long been the view of scholars, and there have been a number of scholarly books written on the Matthean Community (this was the dissertation topic long ago of my student Judy Siker, who has been some guest blog posts), the Johannine Community, and so on. The view has recently begun to be challenged by otehr scholars.
Do any of your books lay out a fairly detailed chronology and internal structure for each of the gospels?
Although I see a pretty general overall chronology, much of each gospel just seems “like one damn thing after another.” Jesus does a couple miracles, tells a couple parables, has various kinds of other encounters with people, etc. The overall effect seems to be randomness—especially when one just hears short excepts on Sundays.
I’m pretty sure similar stories are grouped together, that there are “sandwiches” (eg, two miracles with a parable in between or vice versa), that there are some major discourses that seem to divide up a gospel into major sections, etc. There’re almost certainly literary structures intended to make various points.
For example, in Luke and probably all the Synoptics, I noticed (after getting a clue from the internet) that, fairly early on, there are five stories in a row that clearly present Jesus in conflict with Jewish leaders—starting with the one about the man lowered through the roof.
Yes, almost any introduction to any of the Gospels will explain how it is structured. And yes, there are clear organizing motifs in many places.
What’s the fatal flaw in The Chosen’s background story of how the Sermon on the Mount could be historically accurate? I understand that there’s no evidence Jesus had a literate Matthew to faithfully record the Sermon as it was being composed. On the other hand, why default to the assumption that whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew was only relying on oral tradition of memory of an event that happened decades in the past?
To put it more plainly, when we know that at least some of Jesus’ followers were literate, why assume that no event or discourse in Jesus’ life was ever written down by anyone?
I’m not sure we know of any of Jesus’ followers who were probably literate. Whom do you have in mind? One reason for thinking that no one was writing anything down is that we don’t have any indication of it or suggestion of it; another is that his followers, so far as we can tell, were not among the literary elite. It’s *possible* of course; but one would need to find some evidence of it/reason to think so, since most people couldn’t read and write and we don’t have records from the time of *anyone* writing down the sayings/acctivities of their teachers.
I can see why Matthew would mention that the sermon was given on a mount: it reminds the reader of Moses. But I do not understand why Luke bothers to mention that his corresponding sermon was on a plain. How is this relevant? Is it possible that Luke meant to correct Matthew?
I suppose if he knew Matthew that would be an option, but my sense is that he hadn’t read Matthew. If he had, it would indeed be strange to change it to a plain. In Luke’s own narrative, he’s just adding a bit of detail for the sake of the narrative, to indicate where Jeuss was at the time.
I had the same thought…NRSV Lk 6:17 states “…stood on a level place…”. Why specify “level”? The beginning of Luke’s gospel implies he’s the “go to” authority on account accuracy. Could he have been aware of Matthew’s account and wrote a “gotcha” to demonstrate his assertion?
It’s possible. But it’s also possible he just wanted to say where Jesus was and didn’t realize he was at odds with another account.
If we suppose that one of Matthew and Luke copied the other, could we on the basis of the Sermon material rule out Luke copying Matthew?
I don’t think there’s good reason for thinking either copied the other. the both copied Mark and probably had a second soruce (Q) for many of their sayings.
That has been my opinion for a long time,too. But since a growing number of scholars is questioning the Q hypothesis: Is it impossible that Luke redacted the Sermon material so that the only other option is Matthew redacting Luke?
As you probalby know, there are literally dozens of options that would be *possible* (just start inventing more hypothetical sources, realted to each other in complicated ways). So the issue is which is the least problematic view, and for what reasons.
What a courageous statement! I reckon it will take me personally a while to unpack all of it,its many aspects. I do see that one cannot tacitly accept Jesus giving that entire Sermon in the way described in the NT.
But….Jesus must have said many if not most of it, doing so,as you indicate,at different times and places.
I would draw a parallel with the Exodus epic. It didn’t happen as excitingly as relayed in the HB,but if various migrations and the Semitic amalgam that became Israel, plus many other factors are considered,we cannot conclude that nothing ever happened. There is no archaeology of the sayings of Jesus, but surely- as I see it- he said many of them.
Would you consider as a possibility that someone could have taken notes sometimes? Granted,if the teachings came very early in his ministry,he wouldn’t have had the gravitas to compel the recording of his sayings. Also,couldn’t there be a setting in which the people (agreed,not multitudes-) could have been sitting around with Jesus walking amongst them ,speaking? Better logistics,I mean.
I appreciated the humor in your arguments, and “Life of Bryan” is indeed hilarious. Watched it twice.
My favourite was the mother….
Dr. Ehrman, I know this is off topic, but in the past have you written anything about the textual variant in Jeremiah 31:32 (allegedly misquoted in Hebrews 8:9)? I’d love to find information on where the variant began. Thanks!
I”m afraid I have not!
Do you think, instead of Q, Luke used Matthew?
Nope. I think Q is th emost likely hypothesis.
Unrelated question — I was just reading about the dual origins hypothesis by Konrad Schmid as an alternate to the documentary hypothesis. It sounds pretty convincing. Just curious what your thoughts are about it.
I haven’t studied his particular theory deeply.disabledupes{b01f0c9ff157e29d431996bb79a84f76}disabledupes
Do scholars lean towards things like the Sermon on the Mount being the work of the gospel writers or is there evidence that these are products of the lineage of oral tradition attributing things Jesus said to his story?
I was inspired by the Sermon on the Mount to create my own experiment to see how well people can remember a modern gospel-esque philosophy and the results are not unlike how you surmise one might remember Biden’s inaugural address.
AlsocuriousifanyonevertriedtocheatyourwordcountusingthescriptuocontinuathatIironicallylearnedfromreadingyourbooks.
Fantastic read, Dr. Ehrman!
THe common view among historical scholars is that the Sermon is Matthew’s creation based on oral traditions of Jesus’ sayings he heard and read.
Dr. Ehrman –
Bit of trivia I just came to know about “Life of Brian” from an interview with John Cleese. Although “MB and the Holy Grail” was successful, Eric Idle could not find ANY studio, either in Europe or the US, that would fund “Life of Brian”. Eric said that they would need $2M; every studio he approached turned him down. Eric gave the script to his friend George Harrison. George called him up the next day and said that he would fund it. When Eric asked him why, George said “Because I want to see the movie.”
More trivia: Harrison made a cameo appearance.
Do scholars have any sense that the Greek writers of the synoptics each wanted to write the one true Gospel and thought that was the end of it, that they had compiled the final version, based on their picking and choosing what must be true from among the extant written and oral sources so that their version would be used by Christians as theological authority, henceforth?
Or, is the idea that each was simply trying to standardize local Christian theology, and didn’t think about their book circulating throughout Christendom?
My sense is that “John” thought he was cementing Christian beliefs for all time – it certainly reads like a theological textbook that resists being argued against.
Luke seems to have thought that, at least; he pretty much says so in Luke 1:1-4. But yes, my sense is that they, like everyone who tells stories about Jesus, think they are giving “the right account.”
Professor, with respect to Jesus saying the “golden rule”, particularly per Mathew “for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 7:12)”. Mathew has Jesus invoking Leviticus 19:18. One of a number of places where Jesus demonstrates mastery of scripture; but, picking up on your earlier analysis of literacy among Palestinians in general and specifically Galilean villagers…. Could Jesus reasonably have learned enough to have cited it?
Sure. He wouldn’t know it was Leviticus 19:18, since Bibles didn’t have chapters and verses. But it was commnoly quoted among Jews at the time as onen of the most important statements of hte Bible. It would be surprising if he and his listeners hadn’t heard it numbers of times.
I do not have a good memory. It’s one of the reasons I write scripts and direct them versus acting them out on stage. I don’t trust myself to remember line after line and that causes me such great anxiety it has given me stage fright. However, I remember word for word instructions my first acting teacher told me before my very first production and I remember life advice my father gave me word for word. Both significant people gave me those instructions over forty years ago. Why do I remember so well? The stakes were very high in both cases. And because their words were so important and helpful to me at the time, I’ve repeated them to countless others over the decades.
I apply the same memory concept to Matthew and the words of Jesus.
Here’s the strange and completely disconcerting thing. Experts on memory have demonstrated beyond any doubt at all that many of the things we “remember” perfectly well and with crystal clarity in fact are false memories. It’s weird but massively well documented. Even striking things. Most everyone my age remembers perfectly well where we were when the Challenger blew up and how we first learned about it. Crystal clear. And most of us are WRONG. (see my book Jesus before the Gospels where I discuss how psychologists know this)disabledupes{06119214e83a837dc05f4a0401640ce8}disabledupes
“If you believe that Matthew was divinely inspired to record what Jesus actually said, fair enough.”
To me a divinely-inspired sermon on the mount is also problematic. Conspicuously absent is talk of the need for salvation, repentance, faith, belief, and the eternal destinies of heaven or hell—vital features of a typical fundamentalist Christian sermon today.
Jesus is speaking to crowds of people. He gives a lengthy sermon. But it’s all about correct behavior and having the right attitude. There is vague talk about the wide gate and narrow gate, but no specific “simple plan of salvation” today’s preachers talk about.
If today’s fundamentalists are correct in their soteriology, then the Jesus giving this sermon must be seen as either cruel or stupid for denying the crowds what they need to escape the flames of hell.
Off topic,
Grace and the Christian message:
The prominent message of Christianity is that God has forgiven us our sins, he has bestowed grace upon us. We were not worthy of forgiveness, or could not earn it by any “works” but God forgave us anyway. God is a God who can simply forgive without us doing a thing, besides having faith in Jesus.
But does God really forgive everything clean slate? Didn’t Jesus take the sins and die because of them. So God still required “payment,” i.e., he is not a God of grace = unmerited mercy, but he was just cool with taking that payment from one dude.
If Jesus is totally God then OK, God just took the loss on Godself. But the orthodox message is that Jesus was fully human too.
So, I’m wondering, does God just forgive totally (according to the Christian story)? Or doesn’t he?
Great question! And it completely depends on whom you ask. Most readers don’t notice the difference, but for me it’s huge. My sense is that most of the early Christians believe in atonement (= payment), including especially Paul and the author of Mark; but others, such as Luke, get rid of the idea of atonement and emphasize forgiveness instead. But back then, as now, many, many people confuse the two and think they are basically the same thing. They’re not!
Yep, god sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself. How did I ever fall for that?
I’ll agree that a literal event such as the Sermon on the Mount in Mathew did not occur. I’ve had the same questions you asked about such recollections since my childhood. Churches preach “Divine Inspriation” to answer such question, but that leaves question as to how “Divine Inspiration” provides conflicting Gospel accounts. It would seem that the “Divine” providing the inspiration cannot get their stories straight.
That said.. Since the account of Papias describing a logia by Mathew was told, I have question as to such “Gospel of Mathew” and whether it proceeded Gospel of Luke. Mathew (and Mark) are not listed in Muratorian Fragment but implied by scholars to actually be listed on another missing fragment.
What I really question, is whether if the Muratorian fragment did list a Mathew, then which Mathew? The one of Logia or a later version put together by a Mesianic Jew from the earlier “Logia” that was written in Hebrew using the Gospel of Luke as a Template to have a Jewish Gospel. Obviously the “Gospel of Mathew” was formulated to portray Jesus as the prophetized Messiah of Isaiah..
I think the Muratorian Fragment must have had Matthew and Luke given first, since it calls Luke the “third” Gospel and John the fourth; at about the same time as the fragment we have Irenaeus naming the four Gospels as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It’s a good question whether it’s the *same* Matthew. By that time, the end of the second century, it’s the only Matthew we know about. But I myself don’t think it’s the Matthew Papias was referring to (since the one he has in mind was a collection of sayings written in Hebrew; Matthew is not that and was originally in Greek). Church leaders who knew that there were rumors of Matthew having written a Gospel claimed that *this* one that we now have was the one. (Again: that’s my view.)
Do you think Jesus was literate? The dramatic scene in Luke 4:16-21 comes to mind where he stood up to read in the synagogue. The sayings in the “Sermon on the Mount” seem to indicate a good knowledge of the Law. One would think such knowledge could only be gained by reading.
It’s the only passae in the NT which indicates he could read. Scholars usually differentiate between reading adn writing literacy in antiquityy, with lots of shades within each (can someone who knows how to sign her name be considered writing literate? Or if she can copy but not compose a sentence). But it needs to be stressed that in antiquity MOST people “read” something by having heard it read, and plenty of people could learn “the law” that way, even if they didn’t have it memorized. (It’s not hard to learn the 10 commandments, e.g.,)
“I’m not sure we know of any of Jesus’ followers who were probably literate. Whom do you have in mind?”
Wikipedia’s entry on Matthew states that he was probably literate — “as a tax collector, he would probably have been literate and could write highly educated Greek” — and cites your books as a source for this assertion! However, I see your post from 2013 where you explain why you think it’s likely Matthew wasn’t literate: 97% of the people were illiterate, and being a tax collector in that time and place didn’t necessarily indicate literacy.
Having found that Wikipedia misrepresented your take on Matthew the tax collector, I tried to source other academics who side with you that he was likely illiterate. I’m sure they exist, but I couldn’t find them, as everything Google gave me stated that as a tax collector, Matthew was almost assuredly literate in both Aramaic and Greek.
So that brings me back to the “Chosen argument for Matthew the Tax Collector.” If even one person in Jesus’ close retinue was literate, then a record of the Sermon on the Mount is a possibility.
I dont believe that about Matthew for a second. “Tax collector” could mean a huge range of things, from the upper crust elites who ran the tax corporations ot the guy who was hired to bang on your door demanding money. That kind of claim about Matthew drives me nuts.
But none of the gospels say Matthew was a low-level functionary hired to bang on doors like a young Rocky Balboa. They say he was employed at a tax collector’s booth, which leads me to believe he was more likely functionally literate than not. Matthew’s literacy seems to me to be a very key issue on this question of whether Jesus’ sayings are authentic, and again, I’m not finding anyone who concludes as you do that Matthew almost assuredly was illiterate. Do you have any scholars you can point me to who specializes in Roman tax collection at receipt of customs and give reasons why we must assume Matthew was unable to write down what Jesus said?
I’d suggest you read up on what we know about tax collection in antiquity.
As you note, Matthew and Luke record similar but drastically different sayings from this sermon. “Blessed are the poor” vs “Blessed are the poor in spirit”. Which version do you and other scholars believe is more likely to have been authentic? Is Matthew changing the message to be a spiritual one, or is Luke changing it to be a more earthly/physical one?
It’s usually thought that Matthew is spiritualizign it: they both got it from Q but Luke’s version is closer to it. A cas can be made in the other directionk though, given Luke’s very keen interest in social issues involving the poor and marginalized.
Just on this – I have read that Luke’s version may be more historical as it fits in well with the expected coming of the Kingdom. Luke is saying that Jesus predicted the world is about to be turned upside-down and the poor and hungry will have their fortunes reversed here on earth, and soon.
Whereas Matthew has noticed the poor are still poor and the hungry are still hungry so he adjusts Jesus words so they still hold some truth.
Do you adhere to that theory Bart ?
I wouldn’t put it quite that way since Matthew on the whole preserveds more often than Luke Jesus’ apocalyptic message of teh imminent coming end of all things; what I’d say is that Luke presented Q more accurately just because he saw no need to change it, so in these verses Luke *is* more apvalyptic.
So Luke retained Q – so Q, and by implication, Jesus own words – were more likely apocalyptic in this case. The end is coming and you poor will be rewarded, and soon.
I marvel at stories that mentions “crowds” following Jesus, such as Sermon on the Mount, and the feeding(s) of thousands. The simple logistics would be nightmarish for a few dozen followers, much less hundreds, or even thousands. These were peasants; travel beyond a couple of miles took hours and required great planning; work had to be abandoned; food had to be prepared and hauled along.
A “crowd” of thousands would require lodging, and maybe even a toilet break or two. There were no radios, TVs or facebook groups to announce The Next Big Sermon, so everyone communicated via the coconut wireless. In short, these gatherings were absurdly unlikely to have occurred.
Ok, there is always the “god can do miracles” argument, but these are extraordinary claims, requiring extraordinary proof, for which there is none. Just the miracle thing. So, I’m with you, Bart: this is simply legend via literary license.
Do you think that Jesus had a standard set of teachings that he repeated every time he went from village to village? His disciples heard it over and over so that it became part of their collective memories. I would think that this would help ensure a good degree of accuracy of what the gospels present as Jesus’ message. What do you think?
I don’t see why there’s any reason to think so. In the Gospels he teaches whatever’s on his mind at te time, and that’s what just about every itinerant preacher from antiquity that we know about did.
Is it more likely that sayings of Jesus in Mark are more likely to be historical (in the Q source) compared to John? Are there any sayings that could be in the Q source that are specific to John’s Gospel? Perhaps, “You shall know truth, and the truth shall set you free”…
It depends on how you define Q. The traditional definition is that Q consisted of the material found in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark. What else it contains is anyone’s guess. But most experts do consider it (despite the fact it’s hypothetical) to contain sayings of Jesus more likely authentic thanmost of those in John.
Something I’ve been thinking about for a bit; I once had a Professor that said, “that a person needs to have an idea or a saying repeated 10x’s in order to remember it”. Regardless of where or when Jesus might have said certain things, is there any chance that he could have been repeating many of his sayings and teachings?
I’ve known a number of professors and teachers that do this.
Jesus went from place to place teaching and preaching. It’s said he also went often to the synagogues when he was traveling. Could he have been repeating what he was saying and been giving the same or similar talks at different locations?
The people who followed him and who were with him most of the time, could well have ended up remembering what he said in a pretty accurate manner. Or am I wrong, and it’s just not possible to pass ideas down in this way?
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Also, concerning Luke putting Jesus’s beatitude sermon on a plain. Could he have been in his own way, been trying to make Jesus more like Moses? After all Moses didn’t teach the Israelites the 10 commandments till he came down from the mountain.
Thanks4 reading
Yup, some people think so. I”m sure he said a lot of things over and over again, probably changing them for teh situation/audience. It’s a complicated issue, though; I deal with the business of memory and oral traditoin in my book Jesus Before the Gospels.
Just have some questions. When you say Matthew was from a different part of the world and spoke a different language, what part of the world was he from and what language did he speak? Didn’t they both speak Arabic?
We don’t know where he was, but he was a Greek speaking Christain outside Israel and Jesus was an Aramaic speaking Jew in Israel.