Amlodhi

Hi Luxie,

First off, I am in complete agreement with cweb255's statement here:


Thus, IMO, there was indeed a pre-gospel (and even pre-Pauline epistle) oral tradition. It is also my opinion, however, that this pre-gospel/epistle tradition is not accurately reflected in the later canonical literature.

Among many similar examples that could be offered, the following example described by Bart Ehrman lends strong support to this viewpoint:


So again, in line with cweb255's thinking, it seems likely that there was a preliterary tradition, but that this original tradition has been re-written and/or edited so as to support the later tenets of "orthodoxy".


Amlodhi

Amaleq13

Just to be clear, I agree with this assumption. Identifying traces of this in subsequent written texts, however, is a pipe dream absent a systematic methodology.

Since I don't know of any way to reliably identify any "preliterary tradition" (other than Crossan's which failed), I tend to consider the claim with agnostic skepticism.

Toto

The formulaic "creed" in Romans 1 might as well have been a post-Pauline interpolation.

Peter Kirby

Perhaps we should discuss the general case. We are looking at a document written between 500 BCE and 500 CE. The document tells a story without indicating the author (or his sources) explicitly.

What kind of arguments could be mounted for showing that there was an oral tradition behind some of the document? Or against?

Feel free to mention real texts from the period, from more recent times, or just from what you imagine would have been the case.

best,
Peter Kirby

Toto

The first that comes to mind is Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

The oral tradition behind those epics is obvious from their poetic, rhymed structure, with numerous repeated phrases.Their is no comparable repetition of phrases or rhyming scheme in the gospels.

Peter Kirby

Yes, it is clear that none of the four canonical Gospels were handed down as a whole in the oral tradition, in the form of a poetic epic. The claim that is made about them is that the individual vignettes and sayings attributed to Jesus were circulating among the members of this sect in its first and second century.

I'm not so sure, though, that there are no memory-aiding oral devices discernable in the Jesus tradition. There is the discussion of repeated catchwords in the Gospel of Thomas, where the use of a word in one saying may have led to the recall of the next. Also, Meier in volume 2 of A Marginal Jew attempts a back-translation of the Lord's Prayer. I have little doubt that the prayer was actually used by Christians before being set down on paper. At best it could be claimed that the attribution to Jesus is the invention of the evangelists (though that would be only a claim).

And there may be other indications (or counter-indications) that a section of the texts were being spoken about before being written down. I once tried to read through Bultmann's A History of the Synoptic Tradition, but I was turned off by the liberal use of Greek and the style of translation from German. Maybe later.

best,
Peter Kirby

Toto

The March-April 2004 edition of the Westar Institute's Fourth R contains an essay by Robert Funk entitled "Do the Gospels Contain Eyewitness Reports?" It is not online as far as I can tell.

Funk states:

Fund then examines the stories in the gospels and decides that they are not credible as eyewitness recollections, but instead appear to be idealized and stereotypical, retrojections from the standpoint of later believers, the product of imagination informed by later events or beliefs. He concludes that the disciples either did not remember how they came to be involved in the Jesus movement (which seems unlikely) or that the stories had been repeated and elaborated so often that the original core had been lost. But he also notes that there may have been other motives for constructing the stories - coopting and subordinationg John the Baptist in particular.

Mark 1:16-20 depicts Jesus recruiting Simon, also known as Peter, and Andrew, and then the Boanerges James and John when they are fishing on the Sea of Galilee. There is no motive for the fishermen to abandon their work and follow Jesus. Matthew has copied these two stories.

gLuke supplies an alternative and more elaborate account, with Jesus commandeering Simon's fishing boat to teach to the crowd on the shore, and then producing a miraculous catch. Andrew has disappeared and John and James are now Simon Peter's partners.

In gJohn, there is a third scenario. Jesus recruits Andrew and Peter in the Jordan Valley where John the Baptist has been baptising, and then Philip and Nathanael. The motivation appears to be John the Baptist's identification of Jesus as the Lamb of God (John 1:35)

Funk concludes by saying that it is curious that there are call stories for only seven persons. He opines that there were originally seven, but the number 12 was adopted for symbolic reasons, to claim continuity with the 12 tribes of Israel.

He then adds a note that the Gospel of the Ebionites lists a call to 8 disciples. He does not deal very satisfactorily with the lack of a consistent list of disciples in the gospels.

I would expect someone to have speculated that the missing disciples were the women who were written out of the gospels.

All of which raises the question: if the gospel stories were based on eyewitness accounts that have mutated to the point of complete unreliability, can we say that they are based on eyewitness accounts?

Amaleq13

If nothing can be identified in the Gospel stories as reliable history, nothing reliable can be said about allegedly historical sources.


Regarding the identification of "oral traditions", I found the Crossan quote I was trying to recall:

"If the transition from historical Jesus to earliest Christianity depends primarily on memory, we need to indicate clearly what theory of memory we are using in our analysis and what practice of memory we are observing in our evidence. If we invoke oral tradition, we need to explain in detail how the Jesus materials became a tradition and what evidence we have for the controls that make a tradition more than gossip, rumor, hearsay, or even memory. If we speak of oral transmission and/or aural reception, we need to be precise about what the ear retained from hearing texts read or words spoken." (The Birth of Christianity, p.85)