Toto

Polycarb was a pastafarian saint in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It's easy to confuse him with Polycarp (which means many fruits.)

hjalti

Really?

Do you think that there were any Christians in the first part of the 2nd century? Do you really think that they didn't circulate stories about Jesus?

Was it some kind of a taboo to tell stories about Jesus?

GakuseiDon

No.

I was thinking about Polycarp's sources. According to Irenaeus, Polycarp was "instructed by apostles", "conversed with many who had seen Christ" and "always taught the things which he had learned from the apostles".

I see.

Vorkosigan

if there was an oral tradition, why are the gospels all based on each other and identifiable texts (Q, OT, Josephus, etc).

if there was an oral tradition, why does justin in trypho cite the memoirs of the apostles instead of reaching for the oral tradition?

GakuseiDon

Assuming a historical Jesus and assuming that the first written accounts weren't until a generation or two afterwards, such a proposition is inevitable.

More by Irenaeus on Polycarp from here:
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/polycarp.html

I can even describe the place where the blessed Polycarp used to sit and discourse-his going out, too, and his coming in-his general mode of life and personal appearance, together with the discourses which he delivered to the people; also how he would speak of his familiar intercourse with John, and with the rest of those who had seen the Lord; and how he would call their words to remembrance. Whatsoever things he had heard from them respecting the Lord, both with regard to His miracles and His teaching, Polycarp having thus received [information] from the eye-witnesses of the Word of life, would recount them all in harmony with the Scriptures...

PhilosopherJay

Hi Vorkosigan,

Precisely.

Where is the letter of Paul saying "And you remember when I repeated the 23 parables, 18 blessings, 12 woes and 35 wisdom sayings of Jesus to all of you over and over again and I made you repeat them every day for six weeks until you did not make any mistakes, and then I came back two years later and you all repeated them word for word?"

There is no evidence like this.

The oral tradition was invented to explain the gap between the time of the writing of the gospels and the narrative date of death of Jesus at least 40 years earlier and the numerous contradictions in the gospels.

What is the proof of the oral tradition? There was an historical Jesus. What is the proof of the historical Jesus? There was an Oral tradition. This Petitio Principii is the secular version of "How do I know the Bible is true? Because God wrote it." "How do I know God wrote it? Because the Bible tells me."


Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

aa5874

Why are you reading into the texts what is NOT there?

There is NO need to assume there was an historical Jesus when WE are actually QUESTIONING the very existence of an historical Jesus.

Irenaeus did NOT assume Jesus was just a man with a human father.

Irenaeus assumed Jesus was a born of a holy Ghost.

It is just mind boggling that you want people to assume an historical Jesus when quoting Irenaeus who wrote that it was an Heresy to claim Jesus was NOT born of a Holy Ghost.


Have you forgotten that it is claimed Ireneus wrote "Against Heresies" in 5 books?

The Jesus of Irenaeus was NOT an ordinary man but born of the Holy Ghost.

PhilosopherJay

Hi GakuseiDon,

I agree with your statement, "Assuming a historical Jesus and assuming that the first written accounts weren't until a generation or two afterwards, such a proposition is inevitable."

This shows exactly that an assumed historical Jesus is the basis for the whole oral tradition. Thus an historical Jesus is the proof that the oral tradition is true. And what is the proof that there is an historical Jesus, why, because there must have been an oral tradition of his words and deeds. The proof of an assumed oral tradition is an assumed historical Jesus, and the proof of an assumed historical Jesus is an assumed oral tradition. I can think of no better name for these solid and indubitable proofs than "Papiass proofs," for they match exactly Papias' claim to get his fantastic and undocumented ideas directly from the elders who got them from the apostles.

Concerning the quote from Irenaeus:

While Irenaeus or whoever wrote these passages in Irenaeus promotes the idea of an oral tradition of sacred knowledge, it is only to gain authority. It is simply the mythological transmission of secret truth - God told Jesus, Jesus Told the Apostles, the Apostles told Polycarp and Polycarp told Irenaeus. Thus what Irenaeus says is true. That secret truth turns out to be no more and no less than what is already in the written works of the New Testament. The agreement between transmitted secret truth and the written works makes the oral transmission redundant. It could be a check on the written works, if we could be sure that Irenaeus had never read them and we could get him into a room to write them over again from memory of his boyhood conversations with Polycarp.

What Irenaeus is making is a theological claim about the method of transmission of the God's word. It is not an historical claim in the sense that he offers written documents to back up his memory or any reader could independently check out his claim. It is the equivalent of the braggart writer saying, "I will never forget the hot breath on the monsters tongue when he coiled me in his arms." It is perfectly absurd and silly to take it as evidence of a real oral tradition.

When we look at Polycarp's letter to the Philippians, he somehow forgets to tell them that he has been instructed in truth by the Apostles themselves. He does reaffirm a culture not of orality, but of literacy (chapters 12-14):

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

GakuseiDon

Thank you.

I agree that people who use such logic are wrong to do so.

Sounds good! Probably could add "illogical" to the name as well if they are using such proofs as solid and indubitable.

That is true. Ehrman points out in one of his books that all Second Century Christians tried to tie their beliefs back to the views expressed by the apostles, heretics and proto-orthodox alike.

True, that would be interesting.

True.

Okay.

I see. Is your point then that those references to writing would be unexpected in the culture of the time? Or that a culture of oral transmission and tradition was inconsistent to the culture of the time?

The question of oral tradition isn't something I've spent time researching, so not much I can say about that, but you might genuinely be on to something here. What are your views on the Gospel of Thomas and the hypothetical Q document, from an oral transmission perspective?

I know that the Talmud is generally considered to have been partially built from oral sources, going back centuries. From here:

http://www.lookstein.org/online_journal.php?id=13

For the Babylonian scholars, orally transmitted legal texts and analyses were the warp and woof of rabbinic learning. Though the Rabbinic class was certainly literate, the place of written texts in Rabbinic society was sharply limited – whatever reports we have of written notes in the Babylonian Talmud refer to Palestinian venues. There are hardly any cases in which legal, halakhic texts (as opposed to deeds or documents) are described as existing in writing in Babylonia.

Let me present but one of many statistics, courtesy of the Bar Ilan Responsa Project, which will put this into perspective. In the Babylonian Talmud the root katav ("to write"), in all its forms, appears 11,976 times, of which more than two-thirds refer to Scriptural citations. In contrast, the root amar ("to say") appears more than 70,000 times.

In the Babylonian Talmudic era, the choice of oral over written transmission was axiomatic - almost unconscious - whether because of cultural and religious concerns, the cost of writing materials, or a combination of these and other factors.

Also, from Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud

Originally, Jewish scholarship was oral. Rabbis expounded and debated the law (the written law expressed in the Hebrew Bible) and discussed the Tanakh without the benefit of written works (other than the Biblical books themselves), though some may have made private notes (megillot setarim), for example of court decisions.[citation needed]

This situation changed drastically, however, mainly as the result of the destruction of the Jewish commonwealth and the Second Temple in the year 70 CE and the consequent upheaval of Jewish social and legal norms.[citation needed]As the Rabbis were required to face a new reality—mainly Judaism without a Temple (to serve as the center of teaching and study) and Judea without at least partial autonomy—there was a flurry of legal discourse and the old system of oral scholarship could not be maintained. It is during this period that Rabbinic discourse began to be recorded in writing.

Perhaps this explains the Gospel of Mark? If the impetus to move away from oral scholarship occurred around 70 CE, then the author of the Gospel of Mark and the other Gospel writers may have been moving to the same influence.

Vorkosigan

That is an interesting and useful suggestion, but I rather think the writer of Mark was not Jewish and would not have been impacted by traditional Jewish practices in the first place.

Rather, aMark constructed by paralleling written sources because that was the practice in the Hellenistic Romance literature whose conventions Mark draws from.

It is more interesting to contemplate "Paul" from the standpoint of your remark, DonG.

Vorkosigan