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Loading...I’ve been discussing modern explanations of how the traditions about Jesus found in the Gospels could in fact be historically accurate even if they were passed on by word of mouth over the years and decades before anyone wrote them down. The natural suspicion is that stories that get told and retold by different story tellers in different times and places year after year will change, somewhat significantly, and that some tales and sayings attributed to an important figure will be invented, with no historical basis at all. It happens all the time.
It probably has happened to you. Someone says you did or said something and it’s just not true. Most of them time when you find out about it you are not amused – especially if it’s someone who actually knows you. At other times you might think it is indeed amusing.
But isn’t it different with the ancient world, and especially with stories being told about Jesus? In my previous posts I talked about the theory of a New Testament scholar (Gerhaardson) that Jesus’ followers memorized his words and deeds and passed them along making sure they didn’t change them, and showed why it the theory just doesn’t work.
But there’s another relatively more recent theory that a lot of people think sounds completely plausible and compelling. Here is how I discuss it in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (Harper, 2016).
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The theory is put forth by an author named Kenneth Bailey, whose views have been championed by several scholars, including the New Testament expert James Dunn.[1] Bailey is not himself a specialist in the New Testament. He is a Christian who has spent decades as a teacher in the Middle East. On the basis of his extensive experience, he has written books about how modern Middle Eastern culture can illuminate the life and teachings of Jesus from the New Testament.[2]
Most important for our purposes here is an article he wrote in 1991, called “Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels.”[3] In this article Bailey argues that the early communities of the followers of Jesus were very similar to villagers in the Middle East today, who have traditions they pass along in informal contexts in which they take measures to ensure that the traditions are preserved accurately.
Bailey relates, from personal experience,
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I worry about the “motivated reasoning” behind the theory. Like many Christians, Bailey seems to need to prove that Jesus’s words, as set down in the gospels, actually go back to him. But if the early church was preoccupied with expecting the cataclysm Jesus predicted and/or his return, would preserving his precise words be their immediate concern? Another issue is the sheer volume of parables and aphorisms in the gospels. That’s a lot of material to remember, even if you intended to do so. Just getting the beatitudes right would take real effort, even if you started memorizing right away. Unless (extremely unlikely in unlettered Galilee) someone was jotting down Jesus’s words in real time. Peter’s Pentecost speech in Acts and Paul’s letter don’t suggest a desire to tell of Jesus apart from his death and resurrection. I don’t feel comfortable proposing a wholesale invention of Jesus’s words. But to drape words over a core memory makes sense. As does a theatrical presentation where actions deliver the meaning rather than words. What if the feeding of the 5000 was performance art rather than a straight-out miracle? It’s a stretch, but the mind recalls behaviors better than dialog.
Another obvious problem is, how do you know the initial story teller who started the tradition got it right? Then all the subsequent tellers are doing is repeating a flawed story. Perhaps the haflat samar on the other side of the lake is telling a version that is significantly different. And I’m not even sure the earliest Christians would have been concerned with the details; after all, the end of the age was at hand. It’s not like they were trying to create a new religion to pass along to future generations.
Sounds like apologetic spin to me. No real evidence, just conjecture.
The smacks of being unworkable. Just the simple observation that a member of the audience corrects the storyteller with in incorrect correction would throw this idea out the window. Then it becomes a voting scenario with facts being “remembered” based on consensus rather than cold, hard truth. Actually, it sounds like a good Monty Python scene!
Paul went and told the Greeks/Jews about the Messiah, they wouldn’t have had any eye witness story telling from apostles, until Peter visits. Galatians1:18-24- Galatians is a good letter for this
Typically, in my limited experience of learning in a traditionally oral story-telling society, things to be remembered exactly are orally transmitted in song, or chant, or with repetitive oral forms. Narrative stories are transmitted through ideas. So if this pattern applied the beatitudes and the beginning of the Gospel of John might have been transmitted exactly, but Acts would not.
The transmission of hymns in modern times in which oral transmission is paramount might be a comparator. Feel like a sabbatical in Welsh Valleys?
But even repetition and formulaic delivery does not guarantee accuracy – we all know about ‘Harold be thy name…’
And in the Christmas season, “Hark, Harold the angel sings”
Off Topic: I just listened to your long conversation with Kevin Grant on YouTube. I think it was arguably the best podcast of yours that I’ve heard and I have listened to and enjoyed a lot. But that one was very thorough.
He’d be glad to know that!
Well, yeah, IF it happened that way. Really, this is nothing more than wishful thinking. It also assumes that the only time stories of Christ were retold was at these hypothetical gatherings. I would think that any time a few believers got together, matters relating to Jesus could easily have been the topic of conversation with little or no critiquing going on. Of course, that’s a hypothesis, too. But one thing is certain; talk to enough members of any given denomination even today, and you’ll find there are vast misunderstandings (intended or otherwise) of what the “official” belief of that denomination is. The most recent church I belonged to had very unclear dogmatic standings on eternal damnation; that ambiguity went all the way up the chain of command, too.