No Robots

As I explained above, the objective of NT midrash is to associate events in Christ's life with passages in scripture.

So then, brethren, stand your ground, and hold fast to the teachings which you have received from us, whether by word of mouth or by letter.—2Thess. 2:15

jakejonesiv

How do you know where to draw the line? What is the methodology to distinguish between midrash and what is historical?

That could be the teachings of a mystery school or myth.

I was asking which particular pericopes in the gospels you think best supports the thesis that the gospels originated in oral tradition among common people at the supposed time of Christ.

For example, "I think the passage where Jesus Christ is said to walk on water originated with the ammé haaretz of his time based on eyewitness testimony because __________you fill in the blank_______.

Does what I am asking for make sense?

Thanks,
Jake

Niall Armstrong

Thanks for the references! They do seem enjoyable! Will return to that discussion sometime.
But since you ask about my motivation, let me just give a short reply to that. I myself was until last year what I'd call a "Jesus-lover", finding great comfort and inspiration in the life of Jesus, and not least in the way he was supposed to have inspired "the common people", being a socialist politically. I had on occasion defended the historicity of Jesus in friendly discussions, but recognized that reliance upon Paul was essential. But I wanted to know more. Having followed the Q-trail to its supposed conclusion (and still wondering about the exact significance of the Gospel of Thomas and the Didache in that matter), I came across several disparaging comments about Doherty. Finally realizing that I had to take issue with his theories, I started reading his web-site with a critical demeanour. For practically every chapter I started upon, I thought he couldn't seriously mean what he was saying, since it flew in the face against so many of my preconceptions. But the logic won through, step by logical step. Not everything is foolproof, as evidence necessarily is lacking, but it is the explanation that makes most sense, and still astounds me by its explanatory power.
So, I'm pretty confident that I've neither got it in for "the living Christ", nor any grudge against "the common people". All I wish is for more people to face the facts.

But if I've understood you right, No Robots, your journey has been in the opposite direction. Please do tell!

No Robots

The trick is to get to the essence of what is being said. In the NT, the essence is this extraordinary man. Once this is established, the details are fit in around it.


I suppose, but my point is that we have here clear evidence of the importance of oral transmission in the earliest Christian communities.

Did you look at the Gerhardsson chapter? He provides several literary criteria for identifying the oral origin of Gospel passages.


Well, I, too, come from a socialist background. But in the end I found socialism just too anemic: it didn't seem to provide any sense of ultimate values. So, like Iggy Pop, I started looking for "one new value." I always thought that there must be something of ultimate value in Christ, or, more precisely, if there wasn't any ultimate value there, then there isn't any anywhere. So I started looking for books that would cast Christ in the light of ultimate values. That's how I found Brunner.

Niall Armstrong

Thanks for the bio! :-)
I too find something of "ultimate value" in the teachings of Jesus, but most of these are to be found outside of the NT as well. The golden rule is a case in point, ascribed to both Hillel and Confucius, but, IMO, finding its most ethically advanced state in the works of Kant, as the categorical imperative, and later philosophers such as Levinas, regarding the face of the Other. Who needs Jesus when better ethics are to be found elsewhere?

As to Gerhardsson, I presume you do not agree, then, with my short critique of his chapter. As I see it he fails to find any traces of the hypothesized oral tradition behind the Gospels. Which points do you disagree about, and why?

jakejonesiv

Thanks for sharing. That is an interesting journey you embarked upon.

If I understand correctly, before you found Brunner, you had already decided that it was Jesus or nothing, and set out to find a portrayal of Jesus that cast him in terms of "ultimate values." If that a fair representation of your search?

When you found the wiritngs of Brunner, did something resonate inside of you, that "This is it!"? How long before you knew that you had found what you were looking for?

Jake

No Robots

Ya. My search did have a scientific rationale: if you are looking for ultimate values, it is probably wise to thoroughly investigate their traditional locus. As the medieval Jewish convert to Christianity said, "With all the corruption I saw in Rome, I became convinced that something valuable must lie at its heart."

He had me at hello. I did a search of our university library catalogue of "christ + philosophy". Brunner's book was on the list of results, and I was immediately drawn by the title: Our Christ: The Revolt of the mystical genius. I was somewhat leery, having read my fair share of Jesus books with great titles but little worthwhile content (Jesus and postmodernism comes to mind). But I went up to the library in short order and signed out the book. From the opening passage I knew that this was it:

How are we to understand Christ, how can we envisage him, this man of Truth, stolen by the men of superstition? No one, for two thousand years, has been the subject of so much talk as Christ has—and mostly on the part of people whose minds are as open to Truth as an owl's eyes are to the light of the sun. Blind as they are, they have even put scales over the eyes of those who can see. And now, at last, the sighted shall see; let them lose, let them forget what they imagined they possessed, and find what they had never sought!

It just gets better and better from there. I feel like Benoit Mandelbrot. He was running printouts of graphic representations of iterative functions using complex numbers. Someone asked him if he thought he would find anything interesting, and he kind of shrugged his shoulders. Well, out came the first fractal. That's how I feel about "discovering" Brunner: worlds within worlds.

This is where things really get interesting. The next thing that I read of Brunner's was his treatise, Spinoza vs Kant. That really clinched the deal for me. It's short (about 50 pages), but it neatly summarizes modern philosophy, contextualizing it in this Spinoza/Kant polarity. It is just unspeakably excellent.

Sometimes I have difficulty pinpointing the locus of your argument. I think that Gerhardsson provides ample grounding of the Gospels in traditional Jewish oral culture. He provides at least eight criteria which identify texts as derived from oral literature, and all these apply to much of the Gospels. I don't think that the oral origins of the Gospel are anywhere in serious dispute. I can multiply the quotations on this if you like. The significance of Gerhardsson is not any argument for oral origin, which, as I said, is nowhere disputed; rather, it is Gerhardsson's argument for reliability that is significant.

Niall Armstrong

I see that “Equivalent Cause” necessitates the existence of Wilhelm Tell and King Arthur, and many more. Does it then also necessitate the existence of someone by the name of Robin Hood? (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood: “In fact, the Robin Hood stories have been different in every period of their history. Robin himself is continually reshaped and redrawn, made to fit whatever values are pushed on to him. This fact makes any notion of a "real" or "true" Robin Hood largely redundant. Even if a historical Robin Hood could be identified, he could account for only the bare minimum of the rich legend surrounding his name. The figure is less a personage and more of an amalgam of the various ideas his "life" has been made to support”) Or how about Dionysos? He was after all, supposed to have come from the east with his elephants, and instituted worship of himself in Thebes. Does this myth necessarily have a core of truth? (Prior to Ventris’ decryption of Linear B, these myths were the basis for theses that the worship of Dionysos was introduced to Greece not long before the classical period….)

Might be a little while till my next posting

Niall Armstrong

This is a nice little article. I like the explanation given for the confusions regarding the first meeting between King Saul & David:

"The failure to understand folklore and its effects has significantly affected textual studies in at least one instance, though it is in the Old Testament rather than the new. This is the case of 1 Samuel 17-18 -- David and Goliath and the meeting of Saul and David. The Hebrew text is long; the Greek text of Vaticanus and other LXX manuscripts is much shorter.
Some scholars have explained the shorter LXX text as eliminating doublets. Well, this is formally true -- and completely fails to look at the evidence. If one takes the material found in both types of text, and the material found only in MT, a folklorist can instantly see the difference: The common material is history of the sort found in the rest of 1 Samuel. The material peculiar to MT is a folktale of how David met Saul. Neither more nor less. In fact, it's a fundamental type of the folktale, found, e.g., in pre-Christian Scandinavian myth: The commoner performs an act of heroism and so comes to the attention of the king. The MT-specific material is not a doublet of the common material; it is a folktale grafted onto the initial text of the court history which comprises the bulk of 1 Samuel. Even the language is that of folktale. (Note, e.g., that in 17:16 the Philistine challenges Israel for forty days -- far longer than an army could have stayed in camp without facing starvation and disease.) Textual criticism of this passage must start from the fact that the MT-specific material is a Hebrew folktale."

Now this naturally does not show that David didn't exist (even if I don't believe most of the stories told about him), but it does show how fairy-tales and other stories get attached to older narratives or important figures. It is hardly believable that this is an oral tradition that survived for approximately 1000 years before being added on to the narrative. But that didn't stop the bible-copyist from including it.
So what does this show regarding the Brunner/Gerhardsson discussion? It tells us that mistaken identity can play a role, even in sacred works, and that therefore oral tradition is not particularly reliable. The oral traditions behind Mark (& perhaps especially behind the Pericope Adulterae) could have gravitated towards this (fictive) character through nothing else but the need of the writer for some good stories. Oral tradition is not reliable, neither for narrative nor identity.
Of course, in one sense this is also what Brunner says, when he proclaims Jesus to be a Genius, but no God. His interpretation (as all secular HJ theories) is dependent upon the supernatural events of the Gospels being merely amme haaretz superstition. (So while MJ-theory says all of the Gospels is fiction, secular HJ-theory says that what we like is true, but what we cannot understand is fiction. Which theory then, is "quite willing to assert the reliability of the Gospels where this suits [its] purpose"?)

Niall Armstrong

I’m obviously being somewhat obtuse and disparate in my arguments. I shall therefore try to make them somewhat sharper and cohesive. Let’s first try to remember what it all is based upon: Brunner does not engage with the MJ-theory because, supposedly, Jesus could not have been created by the amme haaretz, and it was the amme haaretz that passed on the oral traditions that the Gospel of Mark was based on. So if we can show that either of these two conditions is even possibly mistaken, then Brunner has committed a gaffe in not delving deeper into MJ-theory. (Considering that the first condition is so vague, I’ll grapple with the second one.) So let’s go!


1) Mark’s Gospel is the basis for the other Gospels. (Not particularly important in the discussion about oral tradition, but an essential starting point nonetheless.) For Matt & Luke this is pretty obvious (given the 2 source hypothesis), though they build upon Q and exclusive material. For John this is obvious only for the Passion (esp. Peter’s role), while the other stories are often in opposition to Mark’s characterization. Why is this important? Several reasons. Since the other Gospels rely on Mark (even for the most important part of the story: the Passion), then there is, historically speaking, only one source to Jesus’ life. Matt & Luke’s dependence upon Mark shows that they did not have any independent source to the events of Jesus’ life, or the order of it (though they at least thought they had an independent source to some of his sayings: Q. And I wonder if they might not have both got the basis for their nativity stories from the same short piece in the Ascension of Isaiah, Ch 11) Putting it a bit strongly: without Mark none of the other Gospels would have been written; after Mark we should not be surprised to see others joining the successful HJ bandwagon.
2) The writer of Mark may very well have been basing his story on oral sources. I have no problem with this, either way. His use of Q is, for example, so different from Matt’s & Luke’s that he may have been relying on memory or oral sources. But Mark himself was writing in Greek, knowing LXX and some or all of the Epistles (in Greek, after all). He was also skilled storyteller (see remarks about his irony in an earlier post), creating a cohesive picture (not least with the “don’t talk about the miracles” device, which doesn’t work in all the episodes: was Jairus supposed to hide away his daughter so no-one need know of the miracle?) Some of the stories are evidently based upon the OT prophets (for example the feeding of the multitudes, and raising the dead, if I remember correctly), which is what we, for lack of a better term (?) call midrash. If you wish to call them oral sources that’s not a problem. (Considering the fairy-tale character of much midrash-literature, like Daniel’s ascent to the Emperor’s advisor, Esther’s rise to Empress, or Job’s plight and renewal of fortune, etc, there is not much to separate the two.) The question is: Need we assume that these sources were telling stories about Jesus? Were Mark’s oral sources necessarily about Jesus? One place we then would expect to find evidence of these stories is in the Epistles. If there is supposed to be continuity between the presumed events and the Gospel of Mark, this continuity should be seen in the Epistles.
3) There is no trace of these oral sources in the Epistles (As my, albeit amateurish, demolition of Gerhardsson’s argument, shows) There is tradition in the Epistles, not least the pre-pauline hymns, but none of it testifies to the oral sources of Jesus–tradition that is commonly ascribed to Mark. There is nothing in the Epistles telling of Jesus’ supposed life on earth! (You may exclaim that negative evidence doesn’t count, but that is not the point here: we’re merely showing that the amme haaretz did not necessarily create any Jesus-traditions.)
4) There is therefore no reason to assume that Mark’s (hypothesised) oral sources were Jesus-tradition. In the hands of this undoubtedly gifted person, oral sources may have been reassigned to Jesus. (This kind of reassignment is common with folklore material in general. See my last two posts.) Further testimony to this is the mess both Mark and the other Gospel-writers get into over matters like the Son of Man.
5) Doherty’s theory is that the author of Mark inherited two traditions (or more), and did the creative task of joining them together (“Ok, let’s say that all the speeches in Q are spoken by Jesus, even when he is talking of the coming of the Son of Man. He does a lot of miracles, perhaps in the manner of earlier miracle workers. And then he dies on the cross, like how Paul describes it, but by the Romans, naturally. Throw in some foolish disciples, mostly so that we may feel superior to them, and spice it with some secrecy, which will also explain why most believers haven’t heard the story”) By joining these traditions (1: Jesus Christ, the divine Soter, and 2: the Son of Man of the Q community’s mission) the author of Mark invented Jesus of Nazareth (or Nazara?)

So this is what I mean when I say that neither you (when you recognize that Mark was not of amme haaretz himself) nor Brunner (when he insists that the amme haaretz could not “invent” a character like Jesus) is actually arguing against MJ-theory: it does not claim the amme haaretz invented Jesus. The oral tradition may be amme haaretz (though according to Doherty it’s more likely to have its origin in the Q–community itself). But since we cannot find any of these traditions in the Epistles, we need not assume there are any oral traditions about Jesus current at that time. Therefore, we may investigate whether MJ-theory actually does what it says, instead of discussing these by now mythological amme haaretz.

I’m not sure if even this is fully comprehensible, but it’s the best I can manage at the moment. It isn’t always easy to summarize long arguments. If there are any problems, I’ll do my best to discuss them.