Solitary Man

What literary critics? Turton? What a joke.

Yellum Notnef

You make a lot of negative comments about IIDB. If the people here are so ignorant and you dislike them so much why are you here? Just for the bickering?

Toto

OK - Find a defense of the criteria that stands up to any sort of critical examination. Or defend them yourself, instead of just implying that greater minds than mine agree on them. I'm still waiting.

Toto

Why would I need to explain any overlap between Mark and Paul? Mark could have read Paul's letters or a later editor could have rectified the text of one or both.

As for the Brothers Grimm:

Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction (or via: amazon.co.uk)

"In 1901, Hermann Gunkel used the insights of the Brothers Grimm about German folktales to ask if Biblical traditions had not also developed from oral traditions."

But as far as I know, the Brothers Grimm never claimed to be able to discover the historical Little Red Riding Hood or the historical Wolf.

It is one thing to examine tradition, but quite another to claim to extract historical facts from it.

Zeichman

Evidence is the question, though. Not speculation, which is precisely your charge against oral tradition and form criticism.

Were you referring specifically to the tradition/redaction question of (biblical) form criticism, originally?

Toto

Are you trying to say that an oral tradition is the default unless disproven? And why would that have to be an oral tradition going back to Jesus?

The question originally was whether form criticism is a useful tool for a historian.

Solitary Man

No freaking wonder. Toto, what the hell are you talking about? Do you know what form criticism is? Where did anyone say that it automatically recovered what the historical Jesus said? Geez, talk about creating a strawman. No wonder you're so confused. Perhaps if you actually did some research instead of spouting off what you think you know, you'd escape looking like aa5874.

Solitary Man

Where exactly was this question asked?

Zeichman

First, I never suggested that it went back to Jesus.
I DO think that oral tradition is the best way to account for the overlap. Evidence for Mark's use of Paul has generally been unimpressive, from what I've seen. However, oral tradition explains the evidence quite nicely., especially given the obviously ritual context from which it arose. So in this case, yes, I would probably say that oral tradition would be the default position for explaining the overlap.
The question originally was whether form criticism is a useful tool for a historian.[/QUOTE]

Cannot the historian use this information to talk about the way that the Jesus tradition (regardless of authenticity) was transmitted and developed? It needn't all be about the historical Jesus.

No Robots

Birger Gerhardsson is one scholar who has done a lot of work on the oral antecedents of the Gospels as we have them. His book The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition is a good place to start. You will find at the link reviews, the introduction, and a sample chapter that discusses at length the question of oral antecedents.

It seems unreal that anyone would deny that the Gospels originate in the same essentially oral literary milieu as the rest of Jewish literature. The main difference between the Gospels and the Talmud is only that the former originated among the ammé haaretz, the simple folk, as opposed to the latter's origin among the learned.

Robert M. Price is one scholar who criticizes Gerhardsson's work, writing that he:

tried to vindicate gospel accuracy by (gratuitously!) positing that the gospel traditions all go back to rabbinical-type disciples memorizing the maxims of Jesus and handing them on. But this is to beg the question, since we just do not know who originated any single gospel pericope, or whether they stemmed from memory or imagination.

The fact is that the Gospels are of a form similar to the rest of the Jewish literature. All Jewish literature has imaginative elements mixed with memory. What Gerhardsson does is show how the various elements of the Gospels can be sorted. I do not know why Price in this later work ignores Gerhardsson's careful analysis, whereas in his earlier work (here and here) he gives Gerhardsson much credit. It is worth pointing out that the later work does not appear to be published anywhere but on the web page that I linked to, whereas the earlier pieces were published in what appear to be reputable journals.

Both radical skepticism and Biblical fundamentalism refuse to acknowledge oral antecedents to the Gospels as we have them. Both claim that the Gospels originated as pristine written documents, one claiming this as a miracle of divine direction, the other as a miracle of committee work.

The radical skeptic will say that there is no proof of oral antecedents. But the proof is precisely in the literary analysis of the documents that shows that they have the same essential form as other documents that we know originated as oral transmissions, and I am speaking here of the Talmud. That leaves the radical skeptic in the position of denying that the Gospels are in fact Jewish literature. This position is so completely untenable that some radical skeptics then are forced to say that the Gospels are products of a Diaspora Jewry contaminated by Hellenism. On this point, though, they are forced to acknowledge that there are no really similar documents to be found in the Diaspora. Only the Talmud provides a real parallel, and it is certainly not of the Diaspora, nor is it contaminated by Hellenism. What is more, nowhere in the words of Christ is there the slightest hint of Hellenism. It is all pure Judaism. If this is a work of a Hellenized Jewry, why does the central figure in the work display not a jot of Hellenism?