Another eminent New Testament scholar has come out and declared that traditional form criticism is now obsolete.
Richard Bauckham’s 2006 book ‘Jesus and the Eyewitnesses – The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony’ is the latest in the recent trend of contemporary British gospel scholarship to re-examine many long-held assumptions about the oral tradition behind the gospels which is coming up with some rather startling conclusions.
Bauckham, professor of New Testament studies at the University of Scotland and a fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, has joined fellow British heavyweight scholar James D G Dunn in recently noting major flaws and faulty assumptions of the last 80 or so years of traditional form criticism. Relatively recent research and insights that have shed much light on the nature of ancient oral storytelling - a difficult area of study that has not been adequately treated - has led these British heavyweight scholars to come to some conclusions that will infuriate sceptics.
James D G Dunn’s conclusions have been published in his Book ‘Jesus Remembered’ (2003) and ‘A New Perspective on Jesus – What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed’ (2005). He argues that the form-critical conception of oral tradition operating like successive editions of a literary text suffers from major flaws. It has utterly failed to properly take into account how ancient oral societies worked. Rather, each performance of a tradition is a performance of the tradition as such, not a further development away from the last performance. There are no layers of tradition, only various performances, differing with strict limits where there was a balance between continuity and flexibility. Specific aspects of the oral tradition were considered inviolable, while other specific aspects can be varied to a degree. This means the story cannot change into another. It’s basic features are fixed. Although there is clearly a literary interdependency between the gospels, the relatively minor variations and ‘contradictons’ between them are a reflection of the natural variation of oral story-telling. I outlined some highlights from Dunn’s 2005 book in an earlier thread on this forum, which can be found here.
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/10/120128/1.ashx [could someone kindly make this clickable]
In his latest book, Bauckham emulates Dunn by giving the subject of the oral tradition a thorough going over that similarly purges certain erroneous views about the oral tradition. He draws on a vast body of academic research to distil the conclusions of recent scholarship and presents a new paradigm for treating the gospels.
Expanding on the recent research of Swedish NT scholar Samuel Byrskorg that examines the gospels in light of ancient oral history, Bauckham comes up with conclusions that echo Dunn but that even more forcefully argue in favour of the essential reliability of the gospels. Here are some of Bauckham’s main conclusions:
· The form critics viewed the gospels as a kind of folklore that developed over many generations. This is no longer tenable. Even the folklorists themselves have abandoned the ‘romantic’ idea of the folk as collectively the creator of folk traditions in favour of recognizing the roles of authoritative individuals in interaction with the community.
A. The many original disciples (and especially the apostles), together with authorized ‘tradents’ in the congregations, acted to preserve the essential accuracy of the tradition in the network of congregations during the formative years of Christianity.
B. The time span between Jesus and the gospels is much shorter than the periods of time spanned by the traditions studied by folklorists. It is now accepted by most scholars that the gospels were written within one generation following Christ’s death. This fact alone seriously undermines the form critics prime assumptions.
C. The form critics assumed that the Jesus traditions quickly lost their link with the original eyewitness testimonies. They felt that the original accounts were soon absorbed into a collective and changing tradition. This view is no longer tenable given the growing body of new research into the nature and characteristics of oral communities. The upshot of this research into ancient orality is that oral community storytelling was a lot more fixed and stable than was previously assumed.
D· Ancient historians sought out and valued eyewitness testimony above all other sources and were convinced that true history could be written only while events were still within living memory. The gospels bear all the hallmarks of the writers having used this same historiographic ‘best practice’.
E. The form critics (mainly from Bultmann onwards) assumed that the tradition was freely created and modified according to the needs of the community and that the gospels represent the end product of an anonymous community tradition. This is soundly refuted by Bauckham (drawing on a wide range of work by other contemporary scholars). The evidence supports Luke’s (Luke 1: 1-3) and Papias’ declarations that they were recording what they had received from first-hand eyewitness testimony. Viewing the gospels as largely ‘eyewitness testimony’ (as opposed to anonymous evolving community traditions), and acknowledging that they were recognized by the early Christians as such, must now be accepted as the correct model for considering the gospels.
Bauckham’s new book is essential reading for anyone interested in leading edge research into the origins of the gospels.
The following is a brief essay style outline on the oral tradition in light of some recent scholarship.
Many liberal scholars maintain that in the decades between the death of Jesus (approximately 33 A.D.) and when the bible books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (“the gospels”) were written (considered by most modern scholars to be between 60 - 90 A.D), the truth about Jesus became corrupted. They claim that in this period of about 30 to 60 years, when the stories were passed on verbally, the ‘historical’ Jesus disappeared under a quagmire of elaboration and myth. The Jesus Seminar, a recent forum of many liberal scholars that received much media attention, put it this way: “Much of the lore recorded in the gospels and elsewhere in the Bible is folklore, which means that it is wrapped in memories that have been edited, deleted, augmented, and combined many times over many years.” If they’re right, then perhaps most of what we read in the gospels never happened and Christianity has no sound historical basis. Just how carefully, then, was the oral tradition about the words and deeds of Jesus transmitted in the early church? Does the evidence indicate whether or not it was corrupted before the Gospels were written? I will outline some reasons, particularly in light of some recent conclusions by scholars in this field, for contending that the original oral accounts about the person, deeds and words of Jesus (the ‘oral tradition’) did not become substantially corrupted in the period before the gospels were written.
Something that gives credence to the claim that the accounts about Jesus remained true during the oral transmission process is the extent and nature of the predominantly oral, memorizing culture that the early disciples lived in. Some prominent New Testament scholars, such as emeritus lightfoot professor of Divinity James D.G Dunn (2003, 2005) and professor of New Testament studies and a fellow of the British Academy, Richard Bauckham (2006) have recently argued that the oral dimension behind the gospels has not been treated adequately by most twentieth century scholars and as a result the last eighty five years of traditional form criticism (the method of analyzing the gospels by deconstructing them in an attempt to rediscover the original kernel of meaning) has suffered from significant flaws (Dunn, 2005, p 35, 42) and is now effectively destroyed (Bauckham, 2006, p 246- 249). But what new insights have led such scholars to these provocative conclusions? I will outline just a few:
Showing how extensive was the scope of the oral culture the earliest disciples lived in, research professor of New Testament studies Darrell Bock states: “If the role of oral tradition was important to the ancients in general, it was especially important to Jewish culture” (1995, p.79). As products of an oral culture, the disciples would have been adept at hearing, remembering, and passing on stories accurately, as distinguished professor of the New Testament Craig Blomberg confirms: “the almost universal method of education in antiquity, and especially in Israel, was rote memorization, which enabled people accurately to recount quantities of material far greater than all of the Gospels put together” (1992, p. 294). Jesus was regarded as a Rabbi and as such it would have been natural for his disciples to memorize their master’s words (Gerhardsson, 1998, 134-135). But oral memorisation techniques were not just limited to Rabbi/disciple relationships, as Bauckham emphasizes: “the actual methods of oral transmission used by the rabbis were not peculiar to them, but were in fact the common educational methods, even at elementary level, of the ancient world. Rainer Riesner’s work has particularly made this apparent.” (2006, p251). This means it wasn’t only the eyewitness disciples of Jesus who employed memorising techniques, but those persons who converted in large numbers after Pentecost (33A.D) and formed congregations would also have been concerned to accurately recall and transmit what they heard in the decades before the gospels were written. Furthermore, some of the traditions about Jesus were evidently passed on in forms that made them especially easy to remember and accurately recount. Australian academic, Dr Paul Barnett, states that “Much of [Jesus’] teaching is cast in poetic form, employing alliteration, paronomasia, assonance, parallelism and rhyme. According to R.Riesner, 80 percent of Jesus’ teaching is cast in poetic form.” (2005, p113-114). Some of Jesus’ disciples may also have written private notes during his lifetime, a practice found in some Jewish religious groups of the time. (Bauckham, 2006, p252; Gerhardsson, 1998, p195).
In addition to the oral, memorization culture the early disciples lived in, another important factor is that the recollections about Jesus were repeated in large group (community) settings where the original, eye-witness apostles and disciples were active. Firstly, a foremost characteristic of ancient oral ‘communal memory’ is that it was not prone to radical change, as in a game of ‘Chinese whispers’. New Testament scholar Kenneth Bailey (1991 & 1995), who spent thirty years researching Middle Eastern oral societies, proposed what he called an “informal controlled” (1991, p34-54) model as the best explanation for how the process of oral transmission would have worked amongst the early Christian communities. In this process, there was some flexibility (informal aspect) in the retelling of oral stories but a stable core (controlled aspect) was always repeated. Bauckham notes that “in this model it is the community that exercises control to ensure that the traditions are preserved faithfully.” and “What is important here is…that specific aspects of the tradition are considered inviolable, while other specific aspects can be varied to a degree. This means that the story cannot change into another. Its basic features are fixed.” (2006, p.255 -256). The significance of this in assessing the historicity of the gospels is summed up by Dunn as follows: “Its variability, the oral principle of “variation within the same,” is not a sign of degeneration or corruption. Rather, it puts us directly in touch with the tradition in its living character, as it was heard in the earliest Christian groups and churches...” (2005, p.125). The oral accounts about the words and deeds of Jesus would also have been etched into the hearers’ memories through repeated retellings, providing a kind of collective recollection and accountability that would have made it difficult for substantial departures from the original to later creep in. In this regard, Bauckham notes “frequent rehearsal…is an important element in the preservation of memories” (2006, p.323).
Additionally, there were numerous eyewitnesses circulating in the earliest church groups who would have acted to preserve the faithfulness of the original messages. This was strongly emphasized by British scholar Vincent Taylor as far back as 1933:
“…the influence of eyewitnesses on the formation of the tradition cannot possibly be ignored. The one hundred and twenty at Pentecost did not go into permanent retreat; for at least a generation they moved among the young Palestinian communities, and through preaching and fellowship their recollections were at the disposal of those who sought information...” (Taylor, 1933, p.41-43).
Dunn echoes the same point: “Nor should we forget the continuing role of eyewitness tradents, of those recognized from the first as apostles or otherwise authoritative bearers of the Jesus tradition” (2003, p.173). Bauckham puts it even more forcefully: “…the traditions were originated and formulated by named eyewitnesses, in whose name they were transmitted and who remained the living and active guarantors of the traditions.” (2006, p.290). Furthermore, Swedish scholar Samuel Byrskog, in his book ‘Story as History – History as Story’, forcefully argues that the writers of the gospels used the same historiographic best practices employed by ancient historians such as Thucydides, Polybius, Josephus and Tacitus, particularly in how they relied on the living testimony of eyewitnesses above all other sources. Bauckham concurs with Byrskog, noting that these ancient historians considered that “good history had to be contemporary history, written in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses” (Bauckham, 2006, p.310).
If the conclusions of these scholars are correct, this ‘eyewitness’ factor presents a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to those who maintain that the gospels represent a hopelessly corrupted version of the real Jesus.
References
Bailey, K. (1991 & 1995) Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels, ARTICLE Asia Journal of Theology 5 (1991), and Middle Eastern Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels, (Expository Times 106 (1995).
Blomberg, C.L. (1992). Gospels (Historical Reliability), in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, eds. Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, and I. Howard Marshall, Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press.
Bock, D.L. (1995). The Words of Jesus in the Gospels: Live, Jive, or Memorex? in Jesus Under Fire, eds. Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House.
Barnett, P. (2005). The Birth of Christianity; The First Twenty Years, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Byrskog. S. (2002), Story as History – History as Story, WUNT 123; Tubingen: Mohr, 2000; reprinted Leiden: Brill, 2002.
Dunn, J.D.G, (2003). Jesus Remembered, Grand Rapids; Eerdmans.
Dunn, J.D.G (2005). A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed, Grand Rapids: Baker.
Funk, R. and the Jesus Seminar (19980, The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.
Gerhardsson, B. (1998). Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity, Grant Rapids: Eerdmans.
Miztal, B.A. (2003). Theories of Social Remembering. Philadelphia: Open University.
Tayor, V. (1933). The Formation of the Gospel Tradition,. London: Macmillan.
Latest Gospel scholarship supports the reliability of the oral tradition!
by yaddayadda 33 Replies latest watchtower bible
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yaddayadda
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Narkissos
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/10/120128/1.ashx
Little to add, except that Bauckham was even more expected than Dunn to jump on this boat...
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Elsewhere
It is now accepted by most scholars that the gospels were written within one generation following Christ’s death. This fact alone seriously undermines the form critics prime assumptions.
Sorry, I don't buy it.
Imagine if no one wrote down anything about WWII, the Holocaust and the use of two nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then today, using only word-of-mouth information, someone started trying to write the history of those events.
I guarantee you the result would be terribly in error when compared to what actually happened. Hell, even with written accounts, Nazi documents, photographs and videos, people still try to deny the Holocaust ever even happened. If history can be warped that much in less than 60 years with so much documentation, how can we possibly trust what is in the gospels from over 2000 years ago that were penned at least 80 years after the actual events occurred and then were translated through multiple languages? If you ask me, the gospels are one of the greatest examples of a worst case scenario.
You can find many other minor examples of how stories can be twisted and changed over a very short period of time by reading the www.snopes.com website about urban legends. They have quite a few examples on how email accounts of events evolved greatly over just a few years... and that is with people literally cutting and pasting text. When recounting a story a lot of people just cannot resist the temptation to make edits in the text. After just a few forwards and edits like that you end up with a very different story than you started with. Imaging what would happen to a story being retold over and over through one generation to another in an illiterate, superstitious and uneducated population?
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DanTheMan
Many liberal scholars maintain that in the decades between the death of Jesus (approximately 33 A.D.) and when the bible books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (“the gospels”) were written (considered by most modern scholars to be between 60 - 90 A.D), the truth about Jesus became corrupted. They claim that in this period of about 30 to 60 years, when the stories were passed on verbally, the ‘historical’ Jesus disappeared under a quagmire of elaboration and myth. The Jesus Seminar, a recent forum of many liberal scholars that received much media attention, put it this way: “Much of the lore recorded in the gospels and elsewhere in the Bible is folklore, which means that it is wrapped in memories that have been edited, deleted, augmented, and combined many times over many years.” If they’re right, then perhaps most of what we read in the gospels never happened and Christianity has no sound historical basis.
I don't need a liberal scholar's backing to conclude that ancient stories claiming that Jesus was born to a virgin, walked on water, could turn water into wine, and came to life after he was dead are "elaboration and myth". Christianity's only "sound historical basis" is that there probably was a real person by that name who was a powerful and charismatic religious teacher.
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veradico
I followed the link you provided. Thanks for giving some excerpts from the books. They really helped me get a feel for this Dunn fellow. I noticed, for example, that he says that the "historical Jesus" was "a Jesus who regularly used the phrase 'the son of man,' probably as a way of speaking of his own mission." I think this is a good example of where Dunn is going wrong. The gospels do represent expressions of oral traditions. Oral traditions are what they are. Those who live in them have, as Dunn helps people appreciate, astounding memories. But oral traditions are also rather fluid. The gospels are also examples of ancient biography. Ancient biographers did not have the same "scientific" attitude towards their art as do modern historians. Ancient biography was consciously subjective. The goal was not to strive after an objective account of a person's life. The goal was to select those aspects of a person's life that best revealed (in the author's opinion) the character of the person. Thus, the gospels should be understood in that light. They are working within the fluid medium of oral tradition, interacting at times with a variety of sources, and are attempts to help readers arrive at the "feel" of Jesus' character, as understood in the social and historical context of that time period. Think of how the titles "Son of God" and "Son of Man" would be understood in the different communities (Jewish and pagan) who preserved and translated the oral traditions. Jesus’ pagan biographers wanted to make him sound like a son of a god. Like the “son of a god” Apollonius of Tyana, his mother knew from before his birth that he would be divine; his religious authority and knowledge was evident even in his youth; he traveled around gathering disciples and urging people to stop being obsessed with physical things; he was an exorcist, a healer, a prophet, and he could even raise the dead; after the Romans killed him, his followers believed that he came back from the dead. (Of course, in a Roman context, the title sounds dangerously like sedition, for the Emperor too has a God as his father. And the king of Israel was God’s son. The pagans would hear "Son of God" and think of a divine man; the Jews would think of a kingly man.) The identity of the "Son of Man" is a good example of the way those who viewed themselves as followers of Jesus reinterpreted his words. It is understandable that Jesus' followers would want to think of him as the Son of Man from the apocalyptic book of Daniel. (For those pagan Christians not aware of Daniel's prophecy, I suppose the expression would have refered to Jesus' humanity.) Thus, when the oral tradition preserves for us a passage like Mark 8:38, in which there is no indication that Jesus is talking about himself, we have reason to trust it. It's not the kind of verse Jesus' followers would have made up. Jesus expected the world to end in his generation and before his followers tasted death. The Son of Man would come, the dead would be raised, and all the injustice being inflicted on the Jewish people would be put to right. The fluidity of the oral tradition can be made clear in the numerous ways each of the gospels subtly alter their material in order to fit the needs and beliefs of their communities. The apocalyptic nature of Jesus’ message is gradually watered down. He starts claiming to be the heavenly character from Jewish Apocalyptic, “The Son of Man.” Finally, he claims equality with God. Instead of people being judged when the Son of Man arrives based on how they treated the lowly (Matthew 25:31-46), people are judged based on whether or not they accept Jesus.
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yaddayadda
Elsewhere: "Imagine if no one wrote down anything about WWII, the Holocaust and the use of two nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then today, using only word-of-mouth information, someone started trying to write the history of those events. I guarantee you the result would be terribly in error when compared to what actually happened. Hell, even with written accounts, Nazi documents, photographs and videos, people still try to deny the Holocaust ever even happened. If history can be warped that much in less than 60 years with so much documentation, how can we possibly trust what is in the gospels from over 2000 years ago that were penned at least 80 years after the actual events occurred and then were translated through multiple languages?"
You guarantee that do you Elsewhere? You are completely wrong. If there were no written records of WW2 the many millions of persons who personally experienced it would be able to provide a formidably accurate account of what happened. In fact, a lot of research has been done on the accuracy of peoples memories of events going back to WW2, and it flat contradicts what you. Bauckham touches on this in his book.
What history has been 'warped'? No one but radical fringe groups deny that the holocaust was real. Of course, some people still fervently believe the earth is flat, but that hardly means this fact has been 'warped'.
Like I said, most NT scholars now accept that the gap was only 30 - 60 years, not 'at least 80'. One of the very reasons why nothing was put down in writing for so long was because there were so many eyewitnesses still living who could corrobate the tradition; that along with the oral memorization culture of ancient Palestine.
Why don't you do yourself a favour and read some real scholarship instead of relying on corny websites for your beliefs.
Veradico, your post looks interesting but I found it incoherent and rambling thus difficult to follow. Can you redo it? -
yaddayadda
Narkisso: "Little to add, except that Bauckham was even more expected than Dunn to jump on this boat..."
Is that all you have to say Narkissos? Resorting to a cheap ad hominem shot. Most disappointing. -
veradico
I would like to know what you mean by "incoherent." If you simply would like some blank space between major thought divisions, I'd love to help you out, but I'm afraid that even though I divide things into paragraphs somehow the formating gets lost when I post. I am essentially saying that, while Dunn has a point about the impressive ability of people in oral traditional societies to memorize things (a point I don't think anyone contests), the people in these societies did not feel that it's "wrong" to modify the tradition to make it relevant to their changing context. A lot of neat work has been done in this area in connection with Homeric studies. On top of the oral traditional origin of the material, the genre of the gospels cannot be neglected. Ancient biographers felt it was perfectly legitimate to arrange (and even manufacture) their facts to create the impression they wanted (cf. Plutarch's intro to his Life of Alexander). Their goal was not to tell what "actually" happened but to reveal the essential character of their subject. They did not believe in anything like what we would call "character development." If they did not have the exact words of a speech and especially if they were working with a whole oral tradition that had been translated from another language, they would have no problem with the task of writing the sort of speech that would best reveal their subject's essential character. The literary inter-dependence of the synoptics is obvious; therefore, while the oral traditional nature of the gospels can't be ignored, they should also be studied from a literary perspective. Various sources (the "signs" source, the source(s) of Jesus speeches, and a Passion narrative) can even be detected in John.
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Narkissos
yaddayadda,
I posted on this thread to make your link clickable, as you requested. -- You're welcome.
On the other thread I have attempted to point out where I feel is the methodological flaw in the general reasoning (to which you responded by a personal attack, lol), and I see no need to do it again.
My comment on Bauckham was absolutely not meant to be derogatory, he belongs to the cream of British Evangelical NT scholarship, and that's nothing to be ashamed of. But, in spite of the etymology, "latest Evangelical Gospel scholarship" doesn't equate "latest Gospel scholarship," which your readers are entitled to know. I hope it doesn't spoil the "argument of novelty"...
(I'm afraid I won't be able to respond to your usual aggressivity in the next few days as I will be away.)
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Leolaia
I just received the book yesterday from Amazon.com, and I look forward to reading it at my leisure. Of course, I already have my own opinions on the matter, so I will certainly be interested in how he adopts his initial scope and assumptions, how he constructs his arguments, and how he interprets the evidence. I have found him to be a very solid scholar in his previous work and so I have no doubt he will give a very competent analysis, but whether his thesis ends up being convincing will depend entirely on how he handles the evidence.
veradico....I just wanted to say that I have been impressed by your posts and I really hope you stick around. I agree especially with your comment about the fluidity of oral tradition, and I would also like to emphasize the exegetical nature of early gospel traditions. In my recent thread on the death of Judas Iscariot, I showed how Papias (who himself stated that he drew his stories from oral tradition) published a more embellished version of the story in Acts 1:18-20 and how the embellishments were not independent pieces of (historical) tradition but were derived from the same OT source text (Psalm 69) that was itself used in Acts 1:20 to describe Judas' final place of habitation. Psalm 69 states that the enemy's eyes would be darkened and go blind, Papias thus states that Judas' face swelled so much his eyes became hidden by the flesh. Psalm 69 states that the enemy's loins would be shaking continually, Papias thus states that worms squirmed out of Judas' privates. Psalm 69 states that the enemy's habitation would be become desolate with no one living there, thus Papias states that the stench of Judas' demise lingers even to his own day. The kind of oral tradition that Papias was exposed to drew on material in the OT, not just putative historical memory. Since the gospels are rife with allusions to the OT, the question is naturally raised whether this same process was involved in the gospels themselves (cf. JD Crossan's work on the passion narrative, for instance).