How Were Stories About Jesus Preserved? (4/5)
This is the fourth post of a series of five on the historical reliability of the NT Gospels written in response to some of the claims made in Jesus Before the Gospels by NT scholar Bart Ehrman. This post is dedicated to exploring how stories about Jesus were preserved between the time when Jesus lived on the earth and when the NT Gospels were written.
EHRMAN, FORM CRITICS, & ORAL TRANSMISSION
Most NT scholars agree that there was anywhere between a 25 to 65 year gap of time between Jesus’ life and ministry and the writing of the NT Gospels. Ehrman leans more towards a gap of 40 to 65 years.[1] The big question in NT studies is: What happened to the stories about what Jesus did and said during that period of time? The obvious answer is that they were passed around orally, but what was the nature of this transmission? Were these stories passed around carefully and without alteration? Or were they passed around recklessly; without any regard for retaining their historical accuracy? Or something in between?
In the early part of the twentieth century, a few influential scholars who became known as form critics answered these questions based on the premise that the NT Gospels were best understood as folklore shaped and transmitted by the “folk” or everyday people. In the view of the form critics, those transmitting stories about Jesus were more interested in using these stories to address the present concerns of their community, than they were in preserving the historical truth of Jesus.[2] On page 13 of Jesus Before the Gospels, Ehrman informs his readers that he wrote the book to be a popular level treatment of the issues the form critics raised.
Regarding the oral transmission of stories about Jesus, Ehrman writes:
“Those passing along traditions in oral cultures are not interested in preserving exactly the same thing. They are interested in making the same thing relevant for the new context. That necessarily involves changing it. Every time.”[3]
On one level, these words from Ehrman are beyond dispute. The NT gospels are self-consciously selective in the way they present and arrange events from Jesus’ life and ministry so as to show the relevance of these events and to highlight the reality of who Jesus is to those who are already his followers or who are considering whether to follow him. But Ehrman seems to mean something more than this. In Ehrman’s mind, there is not much that can be known about the historical Jesus from the NT Gospels with any kind of certainty.[4] According to Ehrman, NT Gospels leave us with little more than socially constructed memories of Jesus that are at least distorted, if not invented.
In other words, Ehrman, like the form critics before him, are skeptical about how well stories about Jesus were preserved. If Ehrman and the form critics are right, the gospels are of limited value as a source for determining what can be known about Jesus of Nazareth. Is this level of skepticism necessary? I think not.
EVIDENCE FOR HISTORICALLY ACCURATE TRANSMISSION
There are several reasons for not accepting the model of oral transmission originally formulated by the form critics and later adapted by Ehrman.
First, this model was originally patterned after the oral transmission of folklore which bears little to no resemblance to how the NT Gospels came to be. The NT Gospels were written within a generation of the events they record—this is not the case with folklore. Furthermore, the nature of folklore is very different from the genre of Bioi or Greco-Roman biography to which the NT Gospels belong.[5]
A second reason for rejecting the model of the form critics and Ehrman is that it assumes that there were almost no controls that would have limited changes made to the stories of Jesus. However, there are reasons to believe that controls would have been in place to safeguard these stories from being changed:
The NT Gospels present the words and deeds of Jesus in a form that is easy to recall and pass around accurately. When you combine this truth with the reality that within the oral culture of the first century people were trained to memorize and retell stories accurately, it is reasonable to believe that the stories of Jesus were passed down in a similar way.[6]
Stories about Jesus were preserved by communities. These communities would have served as another control that would prevent these stories from being changed from the original testimony they had received. Leaning on his experience among the oral cultures of modern middle eastern villages, Kenneth Bailey—the late research professor of Middle Eastern New Testament Studies at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem—has observed that in this culture, communities are responsible to ensure that the overall plotline as well as particular words and phrases remain intact when retelling the stories of a historical figure important to the identity of the community. Bailey has suggested that a similar model was used in the preservation of stories about Jesus since Jesus was that identity-shaping figure for these early Christian communities and since when the stories of Jesus in the New Testament Gospels are compared, we find a stable core to those stories even if there are differences in detail.[7]
Richard Bauckham, Professor Emeritus of NT Studies at the University of St. Andrews, and others, have emphasized that well-known eye-witnesses to Jesus’ life and ministry would have played the role of official guarantors of the oral history of Jesus from the beginning until the NT Gospel writers wrote these stories down as either eyewitnesses themselves (as was case with Matthew and John), or in consultation with the testimony of eyewitnesses (as was the case with Mark and Luke).[8] These eyewitnesses were still alive and traveling between the early Christian communities of the Roman Empire during the decades between Jesus’ life and the writing of the NT Gospels.[9]
CONCLUSION
When it comes to historical records, there is no way to provide the kind of empirical evidence that would convince everyone of their historical accuracy. However, there is evidence to suggest that there were controls that safeguarded the oral transmission behind the NT Gospels. I believe that Ehrman and others who accept the conclusions of the form critics are overly skeptical regarding this transmission. This evidence lends support to the thesis I am seeking to promote in this series of posts:
Rather than being the products of stories and memories of Jesus freely and frequently reshaped to meet the immediate needs of different early Christian communities, the NT Gospels are the reports of carefully preserved eyewitness testimony written down within the lifetimes of those who would have been able to and would have desired to safeguard their historical accuracy.
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[1] Bart Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 65.
[2] Richard Bauckham, Jesus: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford, 2011), 10-11.
[3] Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels, 185.
[4] Ehrman lists out which “gist memories” appear to be historically accurate in Jesus Before the Gospels. See Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels, 194.
[5] For more on the genre of the NT Gospels see Richard Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography; 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).
[6] Timothy P. Jones, How We Got the Bible (Coral Stream: Rose, 2015), 70.
[7] Kenneth Bailey, “Informal Controlled Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels" Themelios 20 (January 1995): 10.
[8] Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 241.
[9] Jones, How We Got the Bible, 70.