Loading...In my previous post I indicated that I am debating over my next trade book (for general audiences. The one I described there has to do with how Christians appropriated the Jewish Scriptures for themselves, leading to (and being implicated in) the rise of Christian anti-Judaism. It’s a fascinating topic, and I’m definitely planning on writing the book. But something else has come up that is driving my research right now instead, and I suspect this will be the next book. But I’m happy to hear your opinions about the value of doing one or the other first.
First I need to provide a bit of background. As I have mentioned a number of times on the blog, I am trying to alternate the kinds of books I write – hard-hitting scholarly work, textbooks for university students, and trade books for normal human beings. My next scholarly book was supposed to be a commentary on the early Greek Gospel fragments of the second century (the Gospel of Peter; Papyrus Egerton 2; and a bunch of Gospel fragments of which I would be *amazed* if you had ever heard!). I decided about a month ago that I would not write the commentary.
Here’s why. I had done a ton of work for it – -reading extensively in the field, translating all of the texts, considering their textual problems, and so on. And at the time (six weeks ago or so) I was reading (slowly!) an Italian commentary on the Gospel of Peter. And I simply realized: you know, I find this really boring! The way a commentary like this tends to work is that you go verse by verse through the book you’re commenting on, and if it’s a non-canonical Gospel you show how every sentence, every phrase, every word relates to what you can find in the New Testament Gospels (“this phrase is like what you find in Matthew, except that it uses this word instead of that word; it is less like Mark but also different because of x, y, and z; but it does have some close comparisons to John….” etc. You do that for three or four pages and then go to the next verse). This is highly important work for scholars. But I asked myself: do I really want to spend the next three years of my life working on this kind of thing?
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So you’re committed to writing about the oral history of Jesus, maintained by whoever did that, and about how the Hebrew Bible became Christian, which from your post yesterday is less straightforward than I would have guessed. I’d say it’s entirely up to your own bliss which to do next. Dessert first?
Although both your book topics are very interesting and necessary, my vote is you start with this one. It seems to be a natural progression from of some of your other works: Misquoting Jesus > Interrupting Jesus > Misremembering Jesus.
Your plan to write a trade book about the oral traditions concerning Jesus from 30-50 CE hits my sweet spot. I would like very much to hear your thoughts about the form critics and form criticism, as well as the work of scholars like Birger Gerhardsson.
Yup, I’ll be posting on all this.
I had the same reaction.
Sounds like a great decision! Would you keep it to a trade book, or would there be a scholarly treatment as well?
Not sure — it’ll depend on whether I find that I have anything to say to scholars.
Sounds like a fascinating topic to be writing about. I have to ask you a question perhaps related to the same. Mark’s Gospel is at pains to prove how dimwitted the disciples were and they didn’t recognize Jesus as the Messiah. You have posited though that Jesus did claim to be the Messiah in his lifetime, especially to his closest followers. How would this then square with the Gospel of Mark? Is it because, as you mention in your book, it’s likely that the earliest disciples of Jesus believed in an exaltation Christology where their Master was made divine by God after his death by the act of Resurrection and did not publicly proclaim him to be the Messiah (maybe they were afraid to do so due to Rome, or they could not square his death with their Messianic expectations)?
Mark had reasons of his own (much debated) to show that the disciples never *did* get it. But for him, Jesus was not simply the messiah of the coming kingdom (as for Jesus himself) but the messiah who had to be crucified and raised from the dead (a view Jesus did not have).
Fascinating. I predict you will be transformed by what you will learn while doing your research since these areas of brain research are expanding so rapidly right now.
I also think it is a daring choice because you will need to deal with how to handle “subjective” information.
Congratulations on what IMHO is a great choice.
This sounds like it will be a very interesting book. It may have applications far outside of just Jesus traditions. Oral traditions exist all over the place. All kinds of ancient stories were transmitted orally, for decades or centuries, before they were written down. Insights into how they develop and evolve may be useful in understanding many of those cases, or even for modern day stories such as urban legends.
Very interesting. I would love to hear your response to the frequently-bandied-about claims of Kenneth Bailey’s articles on oral transmission, which get trumpeted so much by more conservative scholars.
Yes, I’ll decide whether ot deal with them or not; I think they are highly problematic myself….
Oops! You said you didn’t know. Nevermind. : )
This sounds fascinating! Speaking as a cognitive psychologist (though memory isn’t my area) I’ll be interested to see your take on it.
Both topics sound very interesting. But how the oral traditions developed before the NT Gospels sounds like a more fascinating topic to me. This would help us understand how early Christianity developed and perhaps shed light on what Jesus’ original message had been. I imagine you are ready for the criticism of “Ehrman is passing himself off as an expert in psychology, etc.”, but I also imagine you would write in such a way as to try to head off that criticism.
Follow your heart.
Yeah, wait til Aslan hears about this. I was going to specify which Aslan, but then thought, naw, wait until either one does.
Hi Bart,
I think both book ideas sound great. I’d be very interested in reading both of them, but of course, you haven’t written them yet.
In your book on the oral traditions, would you also touch upon a discussion of the similarities between the Jewish traditions and the Christian traditions (example: Jewish tradition, Passover lamb was sacrificed, blood of lamb was put on door post, to guard against death. Christian tradition: Passover “lamb of God” was sacrificed, the belief in the sacrifice of this lamb, through the crucifixion and resurrection, gives Christians eternal life which guards against death). There seems to be many of these connections.
I know these concepts are more theological than historical, but they do give us another explanation of why Christianity may have developed in the way that it did.
John
I’m not sure what I’ll cover; in your example, the Christian tradition of course was based on the Jewish, since the Christains who came up with these traditions were (first) Jews….
Hi Bart,
Like your concept of Jesus being buried in a tomb, I have come to wonder whether Jesus was actually crucified during Passover. Perhaps Jesus was crucified, but maybe not during Passover. Perhaps during the oral tradition, one story about Jesus that was developed was that he was the “sinless” one, who was sacrificed to God for the salvation of mankind. Furthermore, this story of Jesus was recognized as being similar to the Jewish Passover. As a result, when the Gospel writers told this story, they chose to connect it to the Jewish Passover.
Now, I’m taking many liberties here, but I got this idea from your book, “Jesus Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium”, Chapter 2, where you talk about German Theologian David Friedrich Strauss and his concept of the Gospels as myths. Perhaps, this Passover story is just one of many myths that came out of the oral tradition and ended up being written in the Gospels.
John
It’s possible — but there are so many converging traditoins pointing to Passover (Mark, L, John, Paul)
Still reading HJBG, and just happened to get to your discussion of preliterary hymns and creeds the same day you posted this. Your look at the preliterary creed at the beginning of Romans is especially fascinating! Not sure if the oral traditions you’re writing about here are the same hymns and creeds you discuss in that book. It looks like in your prospective book you’re more interested in oral stories about what Jesus did while he was alive, as opposed to the tightly constructed creeds and hymns that seem to be about the significance of Jesus’ death and resurection. Perhaps they’re related? Either way, I’d be interested in learning more about what the very earliest Christians were saying about Jesus.
Yes, I’ll be dealing with the oral traditoins about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, not the later creeds based on him/them.
Quite a few of your blog members have read some of your scholarly work, I think, and personally I use your New Testament Introduction as a reference book which I treasure very much (I’m not educated in this field and am no doubt a horrible amateur) . But it is your trade books that have made you famous to the general public all over the world! So they are important books, which at least for me served as door openers to some of your other books and to NT studies in general, which now is my favorite hobby.
I would like the second option, please! The first one is interesting too, but I suspect that people in general find it less interesting than to learn the story of the oral traditions until and beside the gospels. “From where did the gospels come” is a sexy topic, and contrasted with the fundamentalist view, offer good marketing possibilities. It could be another best-seller. The first topic will definitely be harder to market.
Sounds like an interesting project. You might briefly look into the experiences of genealogists with respect to oral histories. Most families only have stories (oral history) going back to their grandparents / great-grandparents (two or three generations… a somewhat similar time frame to the pre-gospel period). The genealogist uses these stories (which are usually unreliable) to help determine facts. Some aspects of their experience might be helpful…. just a thought.
Interesting. If you have any bibliography on this, I’d be happy to hear it.
I don’t have any bibliography, but I have an observation. My four grandparents had 14 children and none of them knew WHERE each of them was born! Over the years the children told stories about the origins of their parents to their children and then these children told the stories to their children. So I have lived this kind of oral tradition. I can tell you that much of what was orally transmitted was nothing but fabrication, with some truth. I personally did the ancestry.com research on the origins of my four grandparents and learned where they came from and who their parents were ( or in most cases, learned only half the story). What I am trying to say is that the stories that went around were embellishments and fabrications, and most of them were untrue. I had to convince many of my first cousins of the truth of their grandparents. Many were shocked to learn what the truth was of their origins. ( three of them were illegitimate). I then spent 60 days traveling around the country and visiting cousins and telling them what I had learned. They were most appreciative of learning what the truth was about the origins of their grandparents. I had lived 65 years of my life without knowing the truth of their births, and all 14 children of these two sets of parents lived their entire lives without knowing the birth origins of their parents. So I can understand how oral traditions can embellish and disseminate information that is simply just not true. ALL of the knowledge of our grandparents was never written down, but just told as oral stories.
Along the same keeping of oral tradition might be the Navaho singers or shamen. I believe they must serve a long apprenticeship and spend a great deal of time memorizing the songs and rituals. Probably in other Native American tribes and other aboriginal peoples also have a similar method of keeping the old stories. For that matter, the Islamic madrasas practice of teaching rote learning of the Koran. Is there any literature on how reliable the memorization is at various times after the initial recitation is accomplished? On the interpretation of the text?
Of course, there is the oft repeated tale of Gladys the cross-eyed bear from Christian primary church school to use as an example
Do This Book Next. It would be a good Scholarly work, and IMO is sorely needed as a Trade book.
The article above prompts a suggestion which I think might be very helpful to the readers while (I hope) having a small impact on the amount of effort that you already generously devote to the blog.
Would you consider occasionally posting an article on “What I’ve Been Reading”?
As I say, I think many folks here would find this helpful, especially in cases like this (or for the other proposed book) when you are devoting a lot of effort to a specific topic.
And to be clear, I’m not proposing “mini-book reports”; rather simply something like “Here’s a topic I’m currently looking into, and here’s a list of books/articles that I’m finding helpful…”
(Although it may be useful to attach a “complexity score”; say, “1=OK to give to your grandmother” to 10=”Don’t even think about reading this unless you’ve done several years of Post-doc in linguistics”. No doubt any such list you would generate would be weighted heavily towards the high end but, even still, I think such a list could be useful to the readers.)
Or, in the case of future posts (e.g. the mention of an article on Form Criticism above), perhaps a brief note like “In the meantime here’s something you might find it useful to look at…” (In this particular case, maybe Gerhard Lohfink’s marvelous little book?)
Anyway, as I say, something to consider.
Interesting idea!
I want to second the “What I’ve been Reading” or “You might want to Check Out This Book” ideas. Since I’ve been reading your blog I’ve been keeping an eye out for books you mention as particularly good which so far have included Joel Marcus’ commentary on Mark, two E.P. Sanders books on Paul and Jesus and Judaism, and Raymond Brown’s commentary on John.
I’ll think about it!
I’m only ten years late in replying!
I think that nichael’s idea of posting a suggested bibliography on topics is excellent! I have taken many, many books out of the library based on comments from your readers so I’d love to get more suggestions -from you!
Awesome. I can’t wait.
Agreed. This should be your next trade book. It sounds even more interesting than the one on how the OT became part of the Christian Bible (albeit that sounds worthwhile as well). What is your working title for this one?
Haven’t come up with one yet!
Maybe “Speaking of Jesus…”
How about “Lost in the Cloud: Oral Tradition and the Historicity of the Gospels”?
I’ll add it to the list! The problem is that publishers want the title to say what hte book is about, or else people won’t buy it (thinking, for example, that it was about meteorology!)
I have heard various versions of a story in which someone is saved from harm by a person, ostensibly an angel, that the person never saw but that others supposedly did. A friend shared one version on Facebook as a factual account, and when I challenged him on it, he swore it must be true because this happened in New York and the Christian he heard it from was a personal acquaintance of his from New York. It’s just amazing to me how quickly implausible stories get circulated as “gospel truth” by people too eager to justify their belief system. No doubt that was just as true in the 1st Century as now, maybe more so. So, any book you write about how stories became “history” would be worthwhile.
Great subject for the next book! Very much respect and enjoyed Crossan’s research on this in The Birth of Christianity. Have you read it?
Yup — parts of it.
Somewhat related maybe? I’m currently reading Chris Keith’s “Jesus Against the Scribal Elite” and he devotes a chapter to methods of assessing the NT texts. Would you ever consider at some point posting on comparing the historical criteria method and the memory approach in terms of both the advantages and disadvantages of each?
Possibly. Chris is a big advocate of memory studies and the historical Jesus. I’m not convinced by the attack on the criteria though.
An interesting side note is not only how stories were remembered and relayed, but how the level of scientific knowledge of their times influenced the construct of the stories in the first place. For example, in a society where sickness was ‘known’ to be caused by demons or gods, how did this influence the stories of miraculous healing. Or in the example of the woman healed of a blood issue … how did she know she was instantly healed by touching Jesus garment? And for that matter how did they ‘know’ that those exhibiting demon possession were ‘healed’? Was there even the idea of a ‘follow up’ check to see if the exhortation was permanent?
I think a book about how Christians appropriated the Jewish Scriptures for themselves may have broader appeal. Most people know that there is an Old Testament and a New Testament, even if they haven’t considered why or how they were put together as the Christian Bible. Personally, as someone with a background in educational psychology, the issue of memory and collective memory would be of interest, particularly with regard to the oral traditions about Jesus. So I would be interested in either topic.
Prof. Ehrman,
This is a fascinating area for exploration and I am very excited at the thought of a book discussing these matters being written in relation to the historical Jesus! It is interesting also because I have often pondered casually on this very same subject matter (I am not an academic) but I always thought the most interesting study of these questions could arise in relation to how Alexander the Great because Dhul-Qarnayn in the Qu’ran. Mostly because a certain amount of the literary evolutionary evidence remains extant in the form of the Alexander Romances!
My favorite chapter in “How Jesus Became God” is the one containing your discussion of bereavement hallucinations; it would be interesting to see you work further in this direction. Are you familiar with Mark S. Smith’s “The Memoirs of God: History, Memory and the Experience of the Divine in Ancient Israel”? It also deals with *some* of these questions but from a much broader viewpoint.
Yup, I”ve used Smith’s work over the years. He’s a top-flight scholar.
I’m reading his “The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts” now after someone recommended it to me when I expressed an interest in learning more about, well, the origins of Biblical monotheism. I don’t have the background to follow everything he says but I’m finding it very interesting.
Your idea sounds fascinating and it has parallels in today’s North American context as well. That is, aboriginal populations resist the “privilege” of white society’s documented approach to history and ascert that their oral traditions are equally valid written versions of the “truth”, whatever that might be. This perspective is increasingly found to be appropriate and hence to be taken into account at the judicial level. Needless to add, others deprecate the whole approach as rubbish, maintaining that if this model is adopted chaos will result with all kinds of “inconvenient” memories coming to the fore creating difficulties for pipeline routes, treaty interpretations and on it goes. I’m not sure what all this will imply for our dominent North American culture, but it will be uncomfortable, divisive and likely expensive. No worries, it’s just money.
Apply this same sort of approach to religious matters, particularly the chasm of documentation between AD 30 and AD 50, and who knows what will come out of the study. The very absence of solid evidence, as you note, makes for very, very interesting speculation. It will also provoke very interesting positions taken with what you might dig up and conclude.
My personal view is that I distrust oral traditions as I tend to think received interpretation and memory serves contemporary needs and interests. Inconvenient memory and interpretation are “forgotten”. I am not unaware that written documentation is very vulnerable to misuse and convenient selection, but at least there is the possibility of finding additional evidence that can contradict and invalidate such manipulation. Debate is hence possible and, indeed, happens all the time. This is healthier in my view than reliance on unanswerable assertions and conclusions associated with the oral tradition approach.
All to say, I think you have a winner for a topic.
If you have any bibliography on this, I’d be happy to hear about it.
Prairieian:
Your comment sent me on a quick look for law reviews on the topic of oral histories being used as evidence in court, and turns out that there are some issues presented. I wonder if there are any other lawyers haunting this blog who, upon being introduced to the historical criteria used by scholars, see parallels to our rules of evidence.
For example, the criterion of dissimilarity reminds me of the “statement against interest” exception to the bar on hearsay: an out-of-court statement that runs against the interests of the speaker is probably reliable enough to admit. The criterion of independent attestation reminds me of our requirement for corroboration of out-of-court confessions. The law review article on oral traditions I found discusses the hearsay exception associated with reputation in a community as to boundaries and customs affecting land. I bet there are others, too. Ultimately, our rules spring from judicial experience with human nature and the ways of the world–not social science. But the conclusions look similar. I took history courses in college, but this blog and these books are my first look into the method of history. It’s as interesting to me as the subject matter.
I would love some bibliography on this — something an outsider can read about legal rules of evidence. Do you know of something off hand?
I’m not aware of anything for non-lawyers, but the rules you’d be interested in are pretty easy to negotiate with a small amount of background info. The primary sources are even in English! I’ll knock it around this weekend and send something by email to get you started.
Great! Thanks.
Fulton, I’ve thought the same thing about the connections between historical criteria and evidentiary criteria in a court of law (I’m a lawyer, too). In addition to the two connections you make above, a few other rules of evidence that might have bearing on oral testimony are impeaching a witness (destroying the credibility of a witness based on a lack of truthfulness in another area, a prior inconsistent statement, etc.) and (2) other exceptions to the hearsay rule, such as dying declarations (Christian apologists often ask why the apostles never retracted their claims of the resurrection when faced with death–though for all I know, they did, since any dying counter-testimony would hardly have been preserved in Christian tradition).
And, Bart, you’ve probably already thoroughly considered this, but prior even to the risk of faulty memory is the risk of inaccurate perception, which only compounds the problem of testimony.
Jeff
Concur that historians probably have criteria that parallel many of our rules. I just don’t know enough about the method of history to know what those criteria are, or how they are expressed. Would be interesting to know.
A place to start is perhaps Tom Flanagan’s “First Nations? Second Thoughts” He has some comments on the whole business of oral traditions on pages 155-165 in my edition.
Thanks!
Is it possible to detect an orthodox corruption of the oral tradition? If so, do you plan to include that in the book?
Well, there are definitely perspectives that are changing the traditions — but I wouldn’t call them “orthodox” at this early stage of the religion.
Both ideas are excellent. I know you will do both and I will read both when they bevome available. I would prefer that this idea becomes reality first. It sounds like exactly what I’d like to read next.
Thanks for all your books.
Prof. Ehrman, this might be slightly off topic, but I think it could be something worth doing (unless it has been done already). Unless you are somewhat knowledgable of any particular field, it is hard “from the outside” to know what are the most commonly accepted theories, ideas and beliefs within that particular field. This makes it so that from an outside perspective you might think there is a lot more controversy over a subject than there really is while in reality there might be a strong consensus.
That is why in-house surveys can be incredibly helpful for outside people to understand what are the most prevalent ideas within a community of inquiry and where controversy really is. Robert Whaples has done that several times within economics and David Bourget has done that in philosophy just to give a couple examples. Why don’t you propose a similar project within Biblical Scholars? It would be really helpful for lay people to understand that things like the 4-source hypothesis or that there are pseudo-epigraphic books in the New Testament is not invention of some crazy fringe atheist group but that they DO constitute the majority position within scholarship. It could really, really help your attempt to make Biblical Scholarship more accessible to the public if in addition to your argument you could add “87% of surveyed scholars also agree”. It would also make it harder for ultra-conservatives to simply dismiss your case simply because you are an agnostic.
If you are curious about the surveys I mentioned:
Economics: http://econjwatch.org/articles/the-policy-views-of-american-economic-association-members-the-results-of-a-new-survey
Philosophy: http://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP
Interesting idea. Thanks.
In point of fact, that’s _exactly_ what the original organizers of the Jesus Seminar were trying (or, at least, claimed to be trying) to do.
Now it is certain true that many of their critics dismissed their efforts as simply trying to “determine the truth by voting”; just as it’s true that some of the JS’s members greatly overplayed the value and meaning of their conclusions. Likewise one is clearly free to disagree (strongly) with those conclusions.
But as the JS made clear repeatedly in their books, the bottom line here is not whether “Saying X is (or is) not authentic”, but rather that “80% (or 50% or 10% or whatever ) of our members consider Saying X to be authentic”.
*That* is the “raw data” that they claimed to be presenting. And that data in itself, I would suggest, is quite valuable, completely independent of any specific conclusion.
Actually, my book will *not* mainly be about which sayings (or deeds, etc.) are authentic, although that will be a peripheral interest.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. The issue here is not about any specific topics.
Rather, the poster above (GokuEn) suggested it would very useful for the public at large to be able to get a good sense of how widely held various “theories” are held among scholars in a given field.
For example: “Virtually all scholars in the field accept this” or “There’s a lot of controversy about this” or “Virtually no one accepts this”.
GokuEn suggested it would be very useful for the “non-expert” reader to have some way to “quantify” this sort of information. I.e.to get at least a roughly idea of whether an idea is something “all scholars know”, or if it just some crackpot idea, etc.
I agree. I was simply trying to point out that is not a new idea. This is essentially, is what the Jesus Seminar were trying to do.
The difference is that the Jesus Seminar is a self-defined group. What I had in mind (and what the people who did these surveys did) is to send a list of questions to as many Biblical Scholars who teach at universities/seminaries around the US. It would be nice to see how many adhere, say, to the Farrer Hypothesis rather than the 4 source hypothesis, how many endorse Markan Priority, how many believe in the Petrine Authorship of 1st and 2nd Peter, the authorship of Collosians etc. Also issues of historicity such as whether Jesus is better understood as an apocalypticist, a cynic, a zealot etc.
You can also draw inferences from your data. For instance, are people who believe in the Farrer Hypothesis more likely to believe in the Petrine authorship of 1st Peter? By how much?
I think a paper like that would be interesting both for scholars to know more about the “sociology” of their own field and it would do a world of good for non-experts to really know what is and what isn’t up for grabs. It will make easier for non-experts to see how far off both innerancy and mythicism are from serious scholarship.
Just my two cents.
I think this is a good point. There’s always will always be question about the methodology of how such data are collected. And it is certainly true the JS is a self-defined group. But, likewise, simply sending out surveys –without some control over who actually responds– is going to be biased towards folks who do tend to respond to such things (which is not necessarily going to be fully representative either).
But I think we completely agree that such information would be very useful to have (if I can let my physics background show through, I’ve always thought of this as a way of placing “error bars” on the information. Of course, even if 99%+ of scholars agree on a topic that doesn’t prove it’s right; but that very fact –that “99+ agree”– is useful information in and of its own right.)
And again, while there are no doubt improvements that could be made in the collecting and quantifying of such information, I still thing the JS made a good start. (In any case, vastly better than the other option; i.e. having the reporter on the evening news simply tell the listeners that a given topic is “controversial”…)
I really hope either you or someone else in the field does something like this. It is really really painful to see the state of confusion that places such as internet forums and blogs have on this topic. From the outside all arguments sound plausible, from mythicism to inerrancy, and all sides are able to quote “experts” to back up their strange claims. I know that a simple appeal to authority is insufficient, but if there is some sort of mathematical tangible evidence that some issues are more or less a consensus within serious scholarship it would do a world of good.
Oh no, I’ve now got to wait two years for this!
Great stuff, I think this is such an important area, far more than arguing over whether the Gospels are accurate or not. This is the one to go with for me.
I was interested to see though, that Beckham seems to call this ‘Form Criticism’ and says it has all been debunked – Jesus and the Eyewitness –
Any thoughts on his views, Bart?
It’s Bauckham; and yes, the old views of the form critics are debunked. But NOT the idea that there was an oral tradition that radically affected the stories in circulation.
I would enjoy reading both of of the books you have in mind to write next. Your enthusiam for the second one comes through strongly in your text today. I have an idea that you will find much psychology and brain memory research to explain how tales are developed around events based on cultural context and individuals’ personal interpretations of those events. Always nice to have a bit of neuroscience to use in thinking about the human factors. Sort of similar to eyewitness testimony research, eh?
Would you consider investigating the similarities and differences between the adoption of Christianity with the rise and development of religions for which we have fairly good documentation? I am thinking of Mormanism, Jehovahs Witness, Scientology, and perhaps some of the prosperity promoting churches as all have come into being in the last two hundred years. I think much of the growth of these religions and patterns of social acceptance would tie in nicely with your research into psychology.
Yes, the research on eyewitness testimony is really interesting — and completely unknown to most NT scholars! Even ones who want to stress the importance of eyewitness testimony….
Memory: self-storytelling, with variations, usually to favor the point of the story!
I’m thinking you may have been the fly on the wall at a recent family reunion and noted the diversity of memory of what happened when we were young. Found that interesting did ya? I did, talked a good bit with my wife about the phenomenon and how, why such variant memories could come to exist. I’m in agreement that it would be an interesting read.
The stolen OT text would also be cool but perhaps to a smaller audience. Christians transformed the tribal God of the Jews to a Christian God, it seems matter of fact that His scripture came with him, except to the Jews of course.
As to writing about Paul, doing so without speculating (attempting to make sense of the man) it seems to me would be hard for a historian. You might have to put on another hat for such an effort and that might wait until your next life after a historian.
Sounds fascinating! I will be sure to read it!
Some people I know believe that in the ancient world, people committed to memory every event they encountered and memorized those events without any change. Somehow, I doubt that. The gospel stories sound exaggerated to me. For one thing, I doubt miracles. It sounds like those who “remembered” those stories embellished them to give Jesus even more authority. I will be interested to see what conclusions you come to.
I find these concepts hard to understand…i.e., I find it hard to understand how they’ll help you make more informed speculations about what actually happened during Jesus’s lifetime, what was thought ten years later to have happened, and so on (how beliefs had morphed in twenty years, thirty years, etc.). But if you think it can be done, I’m all for it.
Right now, I think I’d be more interested in the early Christians’ appropriation of the Jewish Scriptures. But that’s just because I have a better understanding of what you could do with that topic.
OK, stay tuned then!
I love both ideas for trade books, and the latter would be a great scholarly book as well (one that would be cross-disciplinary involving not just new testament scholarship, but psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophies of science and mind and on and on).
The former book idea is one I was hoping someone would write. Because I don’t have the educational background to just pick scholarly works on New Testament and read them, I read the books for a broader audience and the text book treatments, then move on to the more specialized literature. In your book Forgery (I believe) you dedicated a part of a chapter to how the Jewish scripture was reinterpreted by Christians. But a broader treatment of all the major issues for a general audience would be great.
The latter idea I think would make a great trade book, but for selfish reasons I’d like a scholarly treatment. I’ve become interested in the gospel tradition and the chasm between what historical research can establish about the person Jesus and what is believed about Jesus as a matter of Christian faith. I also am deeply passionate about inter-disciplinary fields of cognitive science and philosophy of mind, They wouldn’t seem to overlap but, in terms of the oral transmission of the miracle stories and teachings and how they may have changed, they do.
How do we remember things?
I just read today about a study in which people who at some time in their life had visited Disney World were told about a case in which a visitor was claiming to have been “groped” by the Bugs Bunny mascot while there.
16% of the subjects of this study recalled having been themselves groped by Bugs Bunny at Disney World.
Bugs is not a Disney character.
Yup, I’ve read up on this too. Pretty interesting.
That sounds very interesting. Comparisons with how stories get transmitted in contemporary Christian circles could prove suggestive.
Dr Ehrman: Given your decision noted above, I highly recommend you read an article titled “Partial Recall” written by Michael Specter in the May 19, 2014 issue of the New Yorker. I’m confident it will complement your current research on the psychology of memory, i.e., many of the most recent work/players in the field of memory neuroscience are discussed. Good reading.
Thanks. I get the New Yorker, but have been out of town for a couple of weeks!
Bart, this is the trade book I would prefer reading first. The issue is vital to how the Gospels say what they do. And now the specialists in the three areas you mentioned have terrific tools and excellent information that did not exist until recently.
Bringing this together in your book would be a terrific read…and could stimulate more thinking, discussion, and controversy (never a bad thing for a trade book) than most of your prior books.
I like both topics. Out of synch with most others apparently, I am more interested in the OT/NT topic. I think I have read more than one treatment on fidelity of oral traditions, including I think at length in one of Crossan’s books.
I for one would like to have more background to support my discourse (with evangelicals I know) that one of their starting arguments, i.e. that Jesus was a widely-awaited fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy that the Jews just “didn’t recognize for hat he was — what they were waiting for” fails on first reading because (I contend) despite Christian views, the OT was never an anticipatory document in the eyes of contemporary theology (or at least not widely held to be).
For me there are some critical questions I have which would be important to answer first before moving to the oral traditions:
-Supposing that Mark was the first to write a written account of Jesus life -,why did he do this? Why did he write at a time the Jews were threatened in their core? Did the death of James and the Jewish alChristian community contribute to hisnmotivation. Why exactly didnl he portrait the desciples so negatively? Did he really take thebl Odysee as his blueprint? Who influenced him in his writing and message?,I think it is essential to get mark straight even to do people like me before moving to oral traditions. Maybe that’s all clear to scholars but I am still puzzled and fascinated by Mark
Yes, these are all important questions!
Hmm? Two thoughts as follows:
1. It’s always intriguing to me how my wife and I remember past events in our life in different ways. We both remember the specific events and agree that they occurred (we were married, we had two sons, etc.), but we remember the “details” of the events in markedly different ways.
2. I would start with this second book idea first. Obviously, you would need to start this second book by explaining how scholars date the writing of the Gospels to establish that time had to pass before they were written and during that time oral transmission occurred. You would then have to review the 8 reasons you gave on your recent Great Courses tape that the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses thereby again documenting that oral transmission had to occur from the eyewitnesses to others who wrote the Gospels. I understand that the Gospels had to be written after the death of Paul or he would have quoted from them and had to be written after the destruction of the Jewish Temple or this destruction would not have been described in the Gospels. What I do not know and want to learn is why scholars date Mark first, Matthew and Luke next, and John last, etc. and how they date them to the first rather than the second or third century?.
Yes, I’ll have to deal with all that, you’re right. Maybe I’ll post on the dating question at some point….
Obviously, because, as I have learned from you, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus referred to the Gospels during the second century, the Biblical Gospels had to be written before 150 C.E.
Oral traditions about Jesus 30-70 CE sounds super. I keep all of your books in one place. The stack is about 15 inches.
Obviously since I am an amateur at this, I don’t know how it would be possible put any degree of certainty on how Christian oral traditions evolved. I did read somewhere that Homer’s Iliad existed entirely in oral form before it was written down. Since you are the scholar I am sure you will make some good headway on the problem.
That said, here is a timid thought: Tversky and Kahneman invented the notion of “conjunction fallacy” to show that people believe the joint occurrence of two events is more probable than either event. That is to say people will believe more in a complex story than a simple one. Applied to an oral history of Jesus, I propose that storytellers would be inclined to embellish the life and death of Jesus as time went on to make it more believable.
Why humans commit conjunction fallacy is based on Tversky and Kahneman’s theory of how the mind organises itself into fast thinking (system 1) and slow thinking (system 2). Since fast thinking takes less energy than slow thinking, the brain can survive on less food, and so the brain wants to spend fast thinking on sorting danger signals. I suppose those primitives humans who were better at fast thinking survived better than those who were better at slow thinking (fast thinkers always see a “tiger” in the striped shadows and run, while the slow thinkers see the striped shadows and stop to make sure there isn’t a tiger lurking about). Unfortunately, fast thinking gives rise to many false beliefs and biases people hold.
I tried searching in Kahneman’s 2011 book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, for how oral histories might be impacted by system 1 thinking, but didn’t find anything.
After we find a good theory for oral histories of Jesus, I ask why did people involve themselves to do this. Apart from the Holy Spirit causing people to do what they did, was it a good way for people outside the formal economy to make a living?
Re: the conjunction fallacy. As originally proposed by K&T, the idea was that if you described (say) a woman, Linda, in a way that made her sound like she’s likely to be feminist, then people will say that she’s more likely to be a feminist bank teller than a bank teller (even though that’s impossible) because she *sounds* more like a feminist bank teller than a bank teller.
Similarily, people will tend to say it’s more likely that Famous Tennis Player lost a match because he was sick than that Famous Tennis Player lost a match, because being sick provides a reason for why Famous Tennis Player lost a match.
So it’s not just complexity, but specific types of complexity. For example, if no desciption is given of Linda, people will respond correctly that she’s more likely to be a bank teller than a feminist back teller.
That said, I think that’s an interesting point: adding details that seem to explain why Jesus took an unusual action, or that make him seem more representative of a category the listener belives him to be in, would make the stories more plausible and thus presumably more likely to be repeated.
Yes, I was reading up on this recently. Fascinating stuff.
Bethany,
Thank you for the clarification!
Doug
Thanks for HOW JESUS BECAME GOD.
I like both your ideas for your next book(s) I especially would like to learn about the connections between the early Christians’ use of the Old Testament and the earliest oral tradition. Did the early followers of Jesus search the OT for stories or prophecies that they could adapt to back up their beliefs? Were prophecies taken out of context? What about Blaise Pascal’s claim that God purposely tricked the Jews into expecting a
Messiah who would be an earthly king ?
Yes, those are issues I would be dealing with. Though not the idea that God wanted to trick the Jews so as to condemn them!
I personally like the first book idea as the one for you to begin next. Lately, I have been hearing in the news about crime and memory. Line ups and even eyewitness evidence is proving much less accurate than originally thought, you might want to add this into your study on oral traditions passed down.
Bart, Christians appropriated the Hebrew Bible, but they completely ignored everything that Jews did after the Hebrew Bible. There is a belief that Judaism was in an infertile period during Jesus’s life and that Jews have not created anything worth while since the Hebrew Bible. I shouldn’t have to tell you that is just not true.
I bring this up partly because of a response I gave to a Christian commentator who said that Christians should look to the New Testament instead of the “Old Testament” for their opinions on the death penalty. I brought up the fact that if one reads the Talmud and other rabbinic writings, the rabbis made it impossible to actually ever execute anyone for murder ever. For example, one needed two actual witnesses to a murder in order to execute any one for murder. The panel of judges had to be in complete agreement , there could not be one dissenting judge in order to execute someone. It may not be as poetic as Jesus, but it was just as effective as ending the death penalty. An “eye for an eye” was almost immediately interpreted to mean monetary compensation for an eye. Yet, Christians remain willfully ignorant. Even liberal Christians resort to anti-Jewish tropes when opposing the death penalty. I couldn’t get any response to my comments. No one was willing to say anything to me.
Both of these topics sound great and I’m sure would be well-received, but “How the Christians Stole the Bible” sounds immediately appealing to me. I’ve tried to point out to Christian friends how the New Testament so often completely twists “Old Testament” passages for its own ends (like Isaiah 7.14, which cannot conceivably have been intended to be predicting anything remotely like the Virgin Birth). But is development of a tradition in a new direction really “theft”? What Matthew does to Isaiah, the Chronicler does to the author of 2 Samuel (2 Samuel 24.1; 1 Chronicles 21.1), taking a story and changing it in a significant way to fit a new understanding. Can a religion ever be stabilized and remain a living tradition?
The topic of oral tradition sounds great, too. I think it’s interesting that two of the greatest teachers of the Western tradition–Socrates and Jesus–left nothing in writing for future generations. I think of how Socrates prefers “the living word of knowledge” over mute written works in the Phaedrus, and how the Christian texts say, “In the beginning was the (spoken) Word . . The letter kills but the Spirit gives life.” There’s a wealth of material in this oral/written divide. Assuming that Jesus could write or could at least find a scribe to write down his words–why would he choose not to? For the direct social impact of teaching in person over the more indirect, less personal method of writing? Because he expected the world to end very soon, and books are for long-term thinkers? Because people were less mentally lazy and better at memorization? And what of the whole “secret” tradition, from the Eleusinian mysteries to the “secret” Gospels to the Druids, with the oral transmission of the teaching being a key method for keeping it secret?
Will you be addressing James Dunn’s book “The Oral Gospel Tradition”? Despite interesting thoughts about how there is no “original” traditional story, he feels that the essential elements of the oral tradition are not just accurate but rigorously accurate. Conservative Christians will be referring to his book for the next 100 years to prove the accuracy of oral tradition. Do you think this is an example of a Christian scholar finding arguments to support the conclusion he wanted to find since there was never any doubt what conclusion he would draw from his research?
Yes, I will. I think in fact the traditions were changed significantly, and often invented.
Will you have a section, perhaps a major section, on how oral tradition naturally changes over time to match current conditions? Most commentaries recognize this but often speak of it as though the author or redactor was consciously choosing stories to reflect current conditions rather than a natural unconscious progression of a story to change as it is told and retold to reflect current conditions.
Yup!
a very interesting and important book. i would be keen to read this. I must admit im very surprised at the limited knowledge/interest in memory and processes in the transmission of information in NT scholars. its very very relevant to early christianty (and history generally)
Great idea!
I recently listened to a fascinating lecture by James Dunn
based on his work, Jesus Remembered and wondered How a debate
between the both of you would play out. It would be interesting
if you posted entries while doing your research; particularly
as it would give a reader of the finished work more to go on.
Yes, we disagree on a good deal! But he is a very productive NT scholar!
Admittedly, I am a bit slow witted-it took reading DJE 3 times before I appreciated how solid it is.
You’ll be pleased to know I gave my sister and her daughter a copy( I don’t know if they are fundies, BUT they have been taught that OT violence was just God training us up)
At any rate, I don’t know Dunn’s argument well enough to evaluate him.Dunn, however,
is perhaps the only Christian scholar that doesn’t seem stuck in the Lee Strobbel/ William Lane Craig school of critical thinking. To be sure, the topics(form criticism etc themselves are fascinating) I happen to think you’re right and do not think Dunn can produce evidence to refute the “telephone model” A debate would be fascinating.