Book Jacket: Many believe that the Gospel stories of Jesus are based on eyewitness testimony and are therefore historically reliable. Now for the first time, New Testament scholar and New York Times bestselling author Bart D. Ehrman surveys research from the fields of psychology, anthropology, and sociology to explore how oral traditions and group memories really work and questions how reliable the Gospels can be.
Reflection
I am guilty of not only believing it, but also saying "it"--using it as an argument-ender, a defense against the haters, a buoy to hold me above the waves when doubt threatened to sweep me away. The "it"? That the Bible is more reliable because of it's reliance on oral traditions. The argument? That because so few people could read or write in the ancient world, those storytellers must have had superior memory functioning and could therefore keep all the details of Jesus' life (shared orally) in better order. I know I have also said something along the lines of, "People were telling and re-telling these stories in the presence of eyewitnesses, who would have corrected any false interpretations and recollections being spread about what actually happened."
I may have been wrong.
In my first reading of this author I tackled "How Jesus Became God," and was thoroughly kicked off the raft in a class nine Grand Canyon raging rapids type experience. Don't read that book if you want to keep your Sunday school/confirmation beliefs in tact about the divinity of Jesus in Christianity. Do read that book if something has never sat right with you about how we talk about the divinity of Jesus in Christianity. In "Jesus Before the Gospels," the reader will be able to wrestle with questions about how "oral tradition" vs "literary tradition" compare in how we understand the New Testament's authorship and construction. I was most interested in doing some scholarship about those 40-65 years in between Jesus' death and the first Gospel, in this case, "Mark's" Gospel. I have always wondered how to account for that ridiculously large gap in time. I'm sure if I sat down to write about JFK today based only on things other people told me, a few things might be missed, distorted or invented.
Pg. 185 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. For that reason, when someone in an oral culture claims that the current version of the tradition--a story, a poem, a saying--is "the same" as a earlier one, they do not mean what we mean. They mean "the same basic thing." They do not mean "exactly" the same. At all. The "gist" remains pretty much the same, but the details get changed. Often they get changed massively.
Pg 211 Thus while it is fair to say that in oral traditions the gist of a message often remains the same, that is not always the case. Sometimes, demonstrably, even the gist of a memory can change. In this case (Synoptic Gospels vs Gospel of John vs Gospel of Thomas), the gist memory changed for a very specific reason: the earliest recollections of Jesus's teaching of the coming apocalypse were not borne out by the realities of history. And so these memories faded and then disappeared, to be replaced by the teachings of a non apocalyptic, or even an anti apocalyptic Jesus. As we have repeatedly seen, memory is not just about what happened in the past; it is also about the present of those who are remembering the past.
Historical criticism tends to get a bad wrap. Just because something Jesus said or did can't be considered 100% historically factual does not mean it can no longer provide meaning or truth. The truth for me is the reading, studying and teaching the Bible has changed my life for the better. I don't get bent out of shape when people harp about how it contradicts itself or that stories are too preposterous to be "real." This book and many, many other forms of ancient literature (and present literature for that matter) have the ability and track-record of changing lives and transforming behavior and beliefs. I think that's the work of truth more than facts. When movies or songs are meaningful to people, you rarely, if ever, hear someone say to them: "that movie wasn't real--it didn't actually happen, how can you be so impacted?" Likewise, I wonder what might happen if we allowed scripture to read us and influence our thinking and being just as films like "Schlinder's List" or "Slumbdog Millionaire" or "Moonlight" have?
The Gospels are more than historical sources. They are deeply rooted and profound memories of man, memories that ended up transforming the entire world. The historical Jesus did not make history. The remembered Jesus did...History was changed, not because of brute facts, but because of memory.
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