Loading...In my previous post I started to summarize what I will be covering in my new book, which hopefully will be published next spring, possibly under the title Jesus Before the Gospels. After devoting the first chapter to a demonstration that everyone agrees that some early Christians were inventing stories about Jesus (as seen in the apocryphal Gospels; it should be stressed – those who read and thought about these Gospels “remembered” Jesus in light of the stories they told),and a second chapter to showing how critical scholars, for as long as there have been critical scholars (late 18th century) have argued that also in the NT there are “invented” traditions that also affected how Jesus was remembered, I move on in the next chapter as follows. (My original plan for this thread was to summarize all six major chapters of my book in one post; then it was to summarize two chapters per post; but I want to devote an entire post to this chapter! And so it goes….)
Chapter three is tentatively entitled, “Eyewitness Testimony and Our Surviving Gospels. In this chapter, I deal with two fundamental questions: Are the Gospels based on eyewitness testimony? And if they are, does that guarantee their essential accuracy? I deal with the questions in reverse order.
The reason for dealing with the questions at all is because it is widely assumed among casual readers of the NT, and sometimes argued by serious scholars, that our Gospels represent eyewitness testimony to the life of Jesus, and that as a result they are essentially reliable. In recent times the one who has made this claim most vehemently is the conservative British New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham, in his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.
Possibly the most striking feature of this hefty 500-page tome is…
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Dr Ehrman, sounds like a fascinating book! I’ll look forward to it in the future.
You mentioned that the eyewitness accounts of the Baal Shem Tov mention the following things he did: “heals the sick, exorcises demons, ascends to heaven, is transfigured into a glowing presence, and so on.”
I often hear fundamentalists/apologists, instead of lumping Jesus in with the mix of everyone else claiming to have done these sorts of extraordinary things, say that all these later examples like Baal Shem Tov are just stealing ideas from Jesus’ life. So my question is: are there many examples of people before Jesus outside of Judaism/Christianity who supposedly did a lot of these same things?
Yes indeed. You might look at David Cartlidge and David Dungan, Documents for the Study of the Gospels
I’m sensing another Great Course in the making!
I got about 1/2 way through Bauckham’s book a year or two ago. I gave up on it once he tried to suggest that the reason Lazarus isn’t mentioned in the synoptics is possibly because the “eyewitnesses” were under some witness protection program! Sure, it’s “possible”, but it reaked of an attempt to avoid the obvious – that the Lazarus story was simply made up post-synoptics.
Thanks for doing this, Bart. It’s time more of us do what we can to put to counter the lame arguments people offer for the believability of the Bible or New Testament. Not, of course, to change the minds of fundamentalists but perhaps prevent even a few people from becoming fundamentalists. Not that that, in itself, matters but, among fundamentalists, are all-too-many who are working to tear down the wall of separation between church and state. That, in my view, must be countered.
“And so it goes… .” Am I correct in detecting a Vonnegut influence?
Yes, I’m afraid so!
I’m lovin’ it, Bart! Thanks!
This makes me think about the outside biblical texts (Pliny the Younger, Josephus, Tacitus, etc…) and how these sources, although vaguely, allude to having a knowledge base about the miracles and the resurrection. Why didn’t they say the claims were unfounded or deny that any of it happened?
Then there’s Paul who had a miraculous conversion experience that changed his whole life.
Thank you again Bart. Interesting. This brings back memories of my limited work in the military intelligence field. I’m not sure if its worthwhile for you but intelligence analysts call human-derived information Humint. Validating or scoring the reliability of sources and their content in Humint is fairly routine, using an alphanumeric scale. As an example, an extremely reliable “source” would be rated A1 a poor or unreliable source is F6. Its all covered in Appendix B of the US Army’s manual FM 2-22-3 Human Intelligence Collector Operations which can be found freely on the internet.
Evaluation of Source Reliability.
A – Reliable: No doubt of authenticity, trustworthiness, or competency; has a history of complete reliability
B – Usually Reliable: Minor doubt about authenticity, trustworthiness, or competency; has a history of valid information most of the time
C – Fairly Reliable: Doubt of authenticity, trustworthiness, or competency but has provided valid information in the past
D – Not Usually Reliable: Significant doubt about authenticity, trustworthiness, or competency but has provided valid information in the past
E – Unreliable: Lacking in authenticity, trustworthiness, and competency; history of invalid information
F – Cannot Be Judged: No basis exists for evaluating the reliability of the source
Evaluation of Information Content.
1 – Confirmed: Confirmed by other independent sources; logical in itself; Consistent with other information on the subject
2 – Probably True: Not confirmed; logical in itself; consistent with other information on the subject
3 – Possibly True: Not confirmed; reasonably logical in itself; agrees with some other information on the subject
4 – Doubtfully True: Not confirmed; possible but not logical; no other information on the subject
5 – Improbable: Not confirmed; not logical in itself; contradicted by other information on the subject
6 – Cannot Be Judged: No basis exists for evaluating the validity of the information
Interesting! Thanks.
Yep. 3 questions were always asked: Is our intel credible? valid (to the concern)? reliable? If it was . . . look at it closely.
Bingo concerning both main points. Thanks for sharing them.
In my work as a psychiatrist, I frequently saw children who imagined all sorts of things, including the presence of “imaginary friends” which is quite common.
How can we really trust much of anything that occurred 2,000 years ago? We can’t even get current events that straight and we have all sorts of recording technology.
Are you sure you have the two points you want to make in the right order? As I understand it, you’re saying first that eyewitness testimony isn’t as reliable (and therefore as important) as many people imagine; then, that the Gospels aren’t really based on eyewitness testimony anyway. If you want your readers to pay close attention to what you’re saying about the Gospels, might it not be desirable to discuss them first, *then* make the point that eyewitness testimony would not, in any case, guarantee factual accuracy?
Yes, my original plan was to do it the other way around, but when I started writing it I came to think this worked better. I hope so!
Prof Ehrman
So far your writing seems concerned with issues that would already be well known (I would think) in the scholarly community. At the appropriate point I hope you will also discuss what the scholarly version of this work will look like.
thx
I hope to come to know myself.!
Fascinating Bart;
I will be interesting to see how you define accuracy; and is an accurate memory necessarily a ‘true’ memory? Or can a historically accurate memory sometimes be ‘false’? I am thinking here of David’s drawing of the ‘Tennis Court Oath’ of 1789. David was an eyewitness to the event (and shows himself in the image to emphasize the point). Centre-front of his picture he shows three representative leaders of the three Estates of France – clergy, nobility, third estate – mutually embracing as the oath is read out and sworn. And indeed numbers of the clergy and nobility estates did join with the third estate in the oath – an unprecedented development, which in turn compelled Louis XVI to concede the transformation of the Estates General into a National Assembly with all three Estates meeting. But historically, the subscription of individual clergy and nobility happened afterwards; they were not present at the original oath-taking. Nor were any of the urban poor historically in the room; but yet again, David has depicted a representative ‘sans coulottes’ front left; embodying the dynamic truth that the oath rapidly mobilised mass proletarian support. David insisted on the greater realism of his representation; as it recorded these truly momentous changes as they were actually unfoldiing; not as they might have been distorted through the happenstances of historic occurrence; and his picture was a deliberate enterprise to establish that the former should stand as the authentic memory of the event. But would you agree with him?
I’m afraid I don’t know how an art historian would judge “truth” in this sense….
I don’t see much dispute on the matter from art historians; the drawing of the Tennis Court Oath marks a definitive rejection of symolism and allegory in conveying artistic truth, and a turning toward realism. David’s art is seen, in art history, as the key demonstration of the propostion that ‘realism’ and ‘truth’ in art are to be identified. From which it also follows that ‘truth’ in art cannot be identified with ‘factually accurate depiction’. David takes this principle further,- and with even greate success, in the ‘Death of Marat’, whose existence in collective memory cannot be separated from David’s depiction even to this day; and where the rejection of accuracy in favour of realism is even starker. And the general principle then becomes the orthodoxy of 19th century artistic theory; paintings, in so far as they are real, convey ‘truth’; wheras photographs can merely convey ‘accuracy’. And I don’t think it is stretching matters to see Kierkegaard’s principles of subjective truth as deriving in part from the revolutionary artistic discourse established by David. For Kierkegaard, religious and philosphical truths are established by trust, not by facts.
I think it’s interesting that there are numerous Jewish parallels with significant legendary expansion of historical figures (e.g. Baal Shem, Sevi Sabbati, the Lubavicher Rebbe). Maybe this is true for Abraham and Moses and David as well, but we just have less controlling data for them? There are even postmortem appearances of the Lubavicher Rebbe. The parallels between Lubavicher messianism and Christianity are nicely described in Simon Dean’s book Lubavitcher Messianism: What Really Happens When Prophecy Fails?
I’m sure you know the film “Twelve Angry Men,” less well known is the Hitchcock/Henry Fonda movie, “The Wrong Man.” These films are more than 50 years old and yet even then the fallibility of eyewitness testimony was well-documented. There is so much research regarding the malleability of memory. Are you enlisting the help of your colleagues at UNC in neurology and related fields? I know you don’t want to produce a medical textbook, but bringing memory research into this discussion would be so helpful.
I’ve read up on neuro-science, but most of it is well over my neuro. I have spoken with colleagues at Duke and Harvard etc (to whom a UNC colleague directed me).
I recently read ‘The Secret Scripture’ by Sebastian Barry. The story is about a 100 year old woman in a mental institution and her psychiatrist. The psychiatrist endeavors to uncover her life story. She, in turn, secretly writes her story – as she remember it. How the two versions match up is the story of the book. One interesting quote that provides food for thought….
” For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.”
The book is presently being made into a movie – set in Ireland – with Vanessa Redgrave in the leading role.
Interesting. Thanks.
Muslims have a similar issue in evaluating the truthfulness of narratives about what the Prophet said or did. There is a whole science of these Hadith narratives where every narrative typically has another embedded narrative about the chain of transmission by which the narrative reached the latest transmitter, and so scholars evaluate authenticity in terms of whether there are other copies of the same narrative passed down through a different chain of narrators, how likely were any two adjacent narrators to have lived in the same time period, met, etc., and how reliable were the narrators in sticking to the facts, what reputation the narrators had for honesty, how young were they at the time of remembering from the previous narrator (as an indicator of whether his or her memory was failing, etc.) – has there been any effort in Christian narratives to maintain such narration chains in the past, and if not, is it too late to implement that methodology, I wonder.
No, nothing like that that I’m aware of.
Another thought – would embedded chains of narratives make remembering such details more rigorous in your opinion. Bart?
I”m not sure they would, but then again, I’m not sure hyow you’re envisioning it.
Here’s an example [my explanation in square brackets]:
“It is narrated on the authority of Amirul Mu’minin [Emir of the Faithful], Abu Hafs ‘Umar bin al-Khattab[Caliph at the time], radiyallahu ‘anhu[may God be pleased with him], who said: I heard the Messenger of Allah[Prophet Muhammed], sallallahu ‘alayhi wasallam[peace and blessings be upon him], say:
“Actions are (judged) by motives (niyyah), so each man will have [in recompense] what he intended. Thus, he whose migration (hijrah) was to Allah and His Messenger[ie to Medina], his migration is to [will be judged according to] Allah and His Messenger; but he whose migration was for some worldly thing he might gain, or for a wife he might marry, his migration is to that for which he migrated.”
[Al-Bukhari & Muslim]
Here’s some info about how it’s done in Islam….(taken from wikipedia)
Sanad and matn
The sanad and matn are the primary elements of a hadith. The sanad is the information provided regarding the route by which the matn has been reached. It is so named due to the reliance of the hadith specialists upon it in determining the authenticity or weakness of a hadith. The term sanad is synonymous with the similar term isnad. The matn is the actual wording of the hadith by which its meaning is established, or stated differently, the objective at which the sanad arrives at, consisting of speech.[13]
The sanad consists of a ‘chain’ of the narrators, each mentioning the one from whom they heard the hadith until mentioning the originator of the matn, along with the matn itself. The first people who received hadith were Muhammad’s Companions, so they preserved and understood it, knowing both its generality and particulars. They conveyed it to those after them as they were commanded. Then the generation following them, the Followers, received it and then conveyed it to those after them, and so on. Thus, the Companion would say, “I heard the Prophet say such and such.” The Follower would say, “I heard a Companion say, ‘I heard the Prophet say’” The one after the Follower would say, “I heard a Follower say, ‘I heard a Companion say, ‘I heard the Prophet say’” and so on.[14]
Importance of the sanad[edit]
Early religious scholars stressed the importance of the sanad. For example, according to an early Quranic exegete, Matr al-Warraq,[15] the verse from the Quran, “Or a remnant of knowledge,”[16] refers to the isnad of a hadith.[17]
In addition, Abd Allah ibn al-Mubarak said, “The isnad is from the religion; were it not for the isnad anyone could say anything they wanted.”[18] According to Ibn al-Salah, the sanad originated within the Muslim scholastic community and remains unique to it.[19] Ibn Hazm specified this claim by adding that the connected, continuous sanad is particular to the religion of Islam. He elaborated that the sanad was used by the Jewish community; but they had a break of more than thirty generations between them and Moses. Likewise, the Christians limited their use of the sanad to the conveyance of the prohibition of divorce.[20]
The practice of paying particular attention to the sanad can be traced to the generation following that of the Companions, based upon the statement of Muhammad ibn Sirin,
“They did not previously inquire about the sanad. However, after the turmoil occurred they would say, ‘Name for us your narrators.’ So the people of the Sunnah would have their hadith accepted and the people of innovation would not.”[21]
Those who were not given to require a sanad were, in the stronger of two opinions, the Companions of the Prophet, while others, such as al-Qurtubi, include the older of the Followers as well.[22] This is due to the Companions all being considered upright, trustworthy transmitters of hadith, such that a mursal hadith narrated by a Companion is acceptable, as the elided narrator, being a Companion, is known to be acceptable.
Would you give brownie points for the astuteness of embedding the chain of narrators with the narration, Bart?
An interesting fact of the matter is that the Prophet forbade people from recording narratives about him while he was alive (and revelation of the Quran was ongoing) for fear of people conflating it for the Quran, the Word of God. Thus, after he died, and revelation had ceased, those who remembered these narrations strove to spread this knowledge, for like the Torah, there needed to be a separate work explaining the commandments and how to implement them, in detail.
Regarding astuteness of Imam Bukhari author of the most famous collection of narrations about the Prophet in ensuring that the Hadiths he collected were impeccable, it is known that once he went on a long tedious journey to record the sayings from one narrator, but as soon as he arrived, he noticed this person pretending to have something in his hand to entice his horse to come to him, and so the Imam turned around and returned home without even speaking to him, for in his estimation, this narrator was untrustworthy!
What I am trying to get at, Bart, is whether “Memory” of events recorded using the above Islamic methodology would overcome the misgivings you have regarding memory of Biblical events, in allowing corroboration of content by analyzing each of the links in the chains of narration especially when reinforced by similar content arrived at from different chains, and whether this gives the Hadith narrations an edge in authenticity over Biblical narratives.
In my opinion, no. You can’t corroborate an oral account without a written record to check it against. You may be interested in reading the work on this by Walter Ong.