Given that the Book of Mark is considered the first gospel to be written, and that was about 40 years after the death of Jesus on the cross, can one make a reasonable guess that the the oral tradition was not originally meant to be reflected accurately in the subsequent written works?
For example, there are so many elaborate miracle stories in Mark. Could it be possible that when Mark was being written, it wasn’t supposed to be an exact version of the oral tradition. Perhaps it was, as suggested by Dennis R. MacDonald, written so that Mark’s story of Jesus was not meant as purely a historical account, but it was purposely embellished and exaggerated for literary effect, using the Homeric Epic of the Odyssey as the outline. He gives the example of the feeding of the multitudes which is also reflected in the Greek classic. I’m guess the original event was more like a large picnic by the seashore with no need to feed an inflated crowd of 5000 or 4000. It was possible just a few hundred people, and everyone was more interested in hearing the teachings of Jesus rather that having a big meal at the same time.
Thus, through ornate literary exercise in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus becomes a stylized Hebrew hero for the reader in a Hellenistic world which wasn’t at all the same events that may have been stated by oral history. And as such the written and greatly fictionalized account was never intended to substitute or bypass the original and more factual oral tradition, which he might have assumed would be carried on into the distant future.
Robert C. Culley, in citing Ivan Engnell in journal.oraltradition.org states that “… as evidence for the oral composition and transmission of the biblical text, he pointed to various features like the use of word association, doublets and variants, epic laws, and various kinds of patterning in poetry and prose.” Later on, there is a reference to the work of William Foxwell Albright and a brief mention of the Homeric style with its repeated language and patterns as being the product of many generations of singers. See “Oral Tradition and Biblical Studies” by Robert C. Culley, Oral Tradition, 1/1(1986):30-65.
I understand there is a small percentage of Muslims who have the entire Koran bible memorized, about 1-2% of the faithful of that religion seem to have that amazing capacity of memory.
Likewise, I suppose it’s reasonable to think that the entire gospel of Mark could have been faithfully reproduced into written form more or less exactly based on the oral tradition from someone’s prodigious memory of the events coming from the previous forty years after the death of Christ. Not sure how this can be ascertained with a reasonable degree of probability, since there’s no way to compare the ancient oral to existing written records.
I was thinking the original oral story of the Mark gospel might have been something like an audible.com version of the Jeffersonian bible, which was a greatly simplified version of the story of Christ, devoid of miracle stories and magical healing. An oversimplication of events but there isn’t really any way be confident of that case.
The fact that the Quran has rhyming as an integral part of the text, at least in the original, strongly suggests that it was originally transmitted, or intended for, an oral tradition. Poetry and song probably began as part of oral traditions, since the additional structural aspects help to act as a check on alterations. These are, of course, merely plausible conjectures.
I finally found a 2017 post by Bart Ehrman that addresses this topic.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
He makes a credible argument that it was unlikely for the oral to written accounts of the life and death of Jesus to be continuous and seamless by 70 AD when Mark was being composed: “…eyewitnesses would have been Aramaic speaking peasants almost entirely from rural Galilee. Mark was a highly educated, Greek speaking Christian living in an urban area outside of Palestine (Rome?), who never traveled, probably, to Galilee. So the existence of eyewitnesses would not have much if any effect on his Gospel.” Moreover “…[t]he Gospels are based on oral traditions that had been in circulation – and changed as a result – for decades before the Gospel writers had even heard them.” A reader’s comment on this thread mentions that, concerning the lack of eyewitness accounts:
“A) A handful of them were martyred in Jerusalem in the 30s, being arrested and executed for sedition.
B) Many more were martyred in the 40s, especially following the tumult of Caligula trying to place his statue in the Temple, and Herod Agrippa’s mopping up operations throughout his new kingdom. Legend has it that this is when James the brother of Jesus was martyred, for example.
C) A splinter group in the 50s chose to flee Jerusalem as things were getting worse for the nascent Church, eventually ending up in some neutral town, possibly Beit She’an (i.e. Scythopolis), as legend has it. This splinter group would have no connection at all with the eventual gentile churches united across the empire. The Ebionites may or may not have been the descendents of this splinter group.
D) Any remaining Christians in Jerusalem who were eyewitnesses to Jesus would later die in the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE.”
I think it’s safe to say that Mark could not have been using some direct oral tradition to write this gospel, but it doesn’t rule out the “Oral gospel tradition” hypothesis.
It gives at least some credence to an embellishment of Jesus’ life based on some aspects of the Homeric epic written in 8th century BC. An ancient version of a modern comic book superhero, as MacDonald wrote in his books. OTOH it should be mentioned that MacDonald also favors the Q+/Papias hypothesis.
ngant17 said
Given that the Book of Mark is considered the first gospel to be written, and that was about 40 years after the death of Jesus on the cross, can one make a reasonable guess that the the oral tradition was not originally meant to be reflected accurately in the subsequent written works?For example, there are so many elaborate miracle stories in Mark. Could it be possible that when Mark was being written, it wasn’t supposed to be an exact version of the oral tradition. Perhaps it was, as suggested by Dennis R. MacDonald, written so that Mark’s story of Jesus was not meant as purely a historical account, but it was purposely embellished and exaggerated for literary effect, using the Homeric Epic of the Odyssey as the outline. He gives the example of the feeding of the multitudes which is also reflected in the Greek classic. I’m guess the original event was more like a large picnic by the seashore with no need to feed an inflated crowd of 5000 or 4000. It was possible just a few hundred people, and everyone was more interested in hearing the teachings of Jesus rather that having a big meal at the same time.
Thus, through ornate literary exercise in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus becomes a stylized Hebrew hero for the reader in a Hellenistic world which wasn’t at all the same events that may have been stated by oral history. And as such the written and greatly fictionalized account was never intended to substitute or bypass the original and more factual oral tradition, which he might have assumed would be carried on into the distant future.
Bart discusses this extensively in “Jesus Before the Gospels”. What we have in Mark are (at best) gist memories of Jesus passed along for 40 years before the author of Mark decided to write a story of his life. I don’t think you have to go as far as to say Mark’s gospel directly contradicted the oral tradition because after that long there were certainly different oral traditions in various places. The author may have invented stories, but we’ll never know which ones were invented and which were actual stories being told about Jesus.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
1 Guest(s)