Thomas L Brodie on Ehrman's 'Did Jesus Exist?'and oral traditions

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andrewcriddle
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Re: Thomas L Brodie on Ehrman's 'Did Jesus Exist?'and oral traditions

Post by andrewcriddle »

Irish1975 wrote: Wed Nov 21, 2018 10:49 pm About Brodie's argument in chapter 12 of Beyond the Quest...

The orality of ancient literature is not in dispute, nor is the fact that past events can be remembered and transmitted in story-telling. Brodie gives as an example his parents' recollections, transmitted to him in story, of important events in early 20th century Irish politics. The issue for biblical criticism is, rather, how to "deduce from a piece of writing that it is based on oral transmission." Brodie quotes James Dunn admitting that the theory of oral tradition is a presumption. Dunn thinks the presumption is necessary, and Brodie doesn't.

What is the theory of oral tradition? This is more than what Brodie offers, but in line with his argument:

1) There are 4 Gospels, but only one Jesus.
2) The historical Jesus died in 30 CE, but the Gospels were composed in 70-100 CE.
3) The 4-Gospel portrait of Jesus Christ in the NT is to some large extent mythical, but the historical Jesus was a real, definite, human, non-mythical person.
4) Conclusion: "Something is needed to bridge the gap," and an evolving but essentially reliable oral tradition process is the only plausible candidate.

So, oral tradition produces multiple streams of remembrance, which diverge because of both time and anthropological plurality. It connects The Bible Jesus with a postulated historical figure. And it generates both faith and memory, which are not exactly mutually reinforcing, but are also not essentially at war with each other. The hidden premiss, of course, is that theory of oral tradition is a great boon for historical jesus questers, at least in their questing careers if not in the moment of intellectual honesty when they have to arrive at conclusions and synthesis.

There is a beautiful analogy in chapter 12 to the long dominant theory in physics that postulated luminiferous ether, a material medium in the sky that transmits light the way that railroad tracks transmit a train. The theory melted away with the accumulation of knowledge about atoms, light, outer space, etc. Brodie thinks that oral tradition is like this ether. We don't need it, because ancient literature didn't need it, and the Gospels fundamentally are literature, not records or memoir.
I've said this before, but I think we must distinguish between the existence of oral tradition and the reliability of oral tradition.

Questioning reliability amounts to saying that the stories told about Jesus c 70 CE were highly legendary.
Questioning existence amounts to saying that there were no stories about Jesus c 70 CE and almost everything in Mark (assuming Markan priority) is Markan creation.

The second position seems less plausible than the first.

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Re: Thomas L Brodie on Ehrman's 'Did Jesus Exist?'and oral traditions

Post by Giuseppe »

andrewcriddle wrote: Thu Nov 22, 2018 9:29 pm Questioning existence amounts to saying that there were no stories about Jesus c 70 CE and almost everything in Mark (assuming Markan priority) is Markan creation.
More precisely:

Questioning existence amounts to saying that there were no stories about an earthly/recent Jesus c 70 CE and almost everything in Mark (assuming Markan priority) is Markan creation.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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Re: Thomas L Brodie on Ehrman's 'Did Jesus Exist?'and oral traditions

Post by Irish1975 »

andrewcriddle wrote: Thu Nov 22, 2018 9:29 pm I've said this before, but I think we must distinguish between the existence of oral tradition and the reliability of oral tradition.

Questioning reliability amounts to saying that the stories told about Jesus c 70 CE were highly legendary.
Questioning existence amounts to saying that there were no stories about Jesus c 70 CE and almost everything in Mark (assuming Markan priority) is Markan creation.

The second position seems less plausible than the first.

Andrew Criddle
Existence and reliability are distinguishable, but there are not two theories or questions here (whether there was oral tradition and whether it was reliable). Oral tradition is postulated, i.e. is thought to exist behind the text, on the basis of a theory of reliability: that it both transmits and distorts the (hypothetical) primal historical events in such a way as to explain the Bible that we have. If we assert the existence of oral tradition independently of a theory of reliability ("bridging the gap"), then we are left with an idle question of whether something in the past existed or not. I don't think Brodie is arguing that there were no stories circulating at that particular time about a particular man named Jesus. That would be attempting to prove a negative. His theory is not about what did nor did not exist in the past, but about what postulates we need in order to read these texts with optimal understanding of their nature and genesis.
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Re: Thomas L Brodie on Ehrman's 'Did Jesus Exist?'and oral traditions

Post by Irish1975 »

Thanks for pointing me to your book, Frans. As I said, it does seem an interesting theory, which also dispenses with the theory of oral tradition. I suspect that its strengths and weaknesses are not directly tied to the debate between Brodie and Ehrman.
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Re: Thomas L Brodie on Ehrman's 'Did Jesus Exist?'and oral traditions

Post by andrewcriddle »

Irish1975 wrote: Fri Nov 23, 2018 5:53 am
andrewcriddle wrote: Thu Nov 22, 2018 9:29 pm I've said this before, but I think we must distinguish between the existence of oral tradition and the reliability of oral tradition.

Questioning reliability amounts to saying that the stories told about Jesus c 70 CE were highly legendary.
Questioning existence amounts to saying that there were no stories about Jesus c 70 CE and almost everything in Mark (assuming Markan priority) is Markan creation.

The second position seems less plausible than the first.

Andrew Criddle
Existence and reliability are distinguishable, but there are not two theories or questions here (whether there was oral tradition and whether it was reliable). Oral tradition is postulated, i.e. is thought to exist behind the text, on the basis of a theory of reliability: that it both transmits and distorts the (hypothetical) primal historical events in such a way as to explain the Bible that we have. If we assert the existence of oral tradition independently of a theory of reliability ("bridging the gap"), then we are left with an idle question of whether something in the past existed or not. I don't think Brodie is arguing that there were no stories circulating at that particular time about a particular man named Jesus. That would be attempting to prove a negative. His theory is not about what did nor did not exist in the past, but about what postulates we need in order to read these texts with optimal understanding of their nature and genesis.
I may be misunderstanding you.

However it does seem a central question about the genesis of Mark whether:
a/ Two thirds or more of Mark was based on stories previously circulating about Jesus.
b/ Over eighty per cent of Mark was Markan creation with no basis in earlier stories about Jesus.
c/ The reality is somewhere between a/ and b/.

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Re: Thomas L Brodie on Ehrman's 'Did Jesus Exist?'and oral traditions

Post by GakuseiDon »

I had the same kind of reaction as Andrew's above. What is meant by 'oral tradition'? Does it mean traditions passed along orally about some original historical event? Or traditions passed along orally, perhaps made up from an earlier source that passed the ideas along to Mark? Or does it mean an earlier written source, compiled by someone who had heard the information from someone else within the Christian community, that is used by Mark?

To set the scenario:

The author of gMark sits down to write gMark. What materials does he (or she or they) use? Assume there was a historical Jesus dying around 30 CE, and the author is writing around 70 CE, and the author is part of a Christian community, and the author is writing literature rather than a biography: it seems reasonable that the author would use at least part of what was being said within the Christian community about Jesus, even if it doesn't go back to some actual historical event (e.g. stories within the community about Jesus performing miracles that never actually happened). Is that 'oral tradition'?
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Re: Thomas L Brodie on Ehrman's 'Did Jesus Exist?'and oral traditions

Post by Giuseppe »

GakuseiDon wrote: Sat Nov 24, 2018 6:00 am it seems reasonable that the author would use at least part of what was being said within the Christian community about Jesus, even if it doesn't go back to some actual historical event (e.g. stories within the community about Jesus performing miracles that never actually happened). Is that 'oral tradition'?
I would call 'oral tradition' the saying given to Jesus by Irenaeus about the vineyard with many branches, etc. It was really (from a mythicist paradigm) received by a revelatory Jesus. And so yes, in that sense there was surely an 'oral tradition' (Paul confirms it with the his 'oracles of the Lord') but it is about a celestial Jesus and the more earthly appearance had by it was just in the form 'The Lord Jesus has said'.


But if you are asking if there was an oral tradition about disciples who saw Jesus and did eat with him, I think that the same 'Luke' denies it, in a cryptic way:

“But he will answer, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from.’
26 “Then you will say, ‘We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.’
27 “But he will reply, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from. Away from me, all you evildoers!’

(Luke 13)
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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Re: Thomas L Brodie on Ehrman's 'Did Jesus Exist?'and oral traditions

Post by Ben C. Smith »

I have made various arguments in the past for Mark and all of our extant gospels being retellings of a story already known, at least to some extent: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3818.

One logical error that I see interpreters of the "no oral tradition" camp falling into time after time (mainly on this forum, but occasionally in the scholarly literature, as well) is the following:
  1. Many/most of the gospel stories about Jesus are based upon scriptural precedents (the feeding of the five thousand, for example, being based upon a similar feeding by Elijah).
  2. Therefore the story of the feeding of the five thousand is a literary creation accomplished without the use of oral tradition.
Or some similar variant of this fallacy in two steps. Yet it is obvious that people can develop such stories orally (in their preaching, for example) as well as in a more literary fashion (pen to parchment, one line at a time, some well-worn scriptural scroll immediately to hand). This leads me to believe that what is actually meant by the term "oral tradition," for many, is a tradition which goes back to an historical Jesus. It is not the original orality of the stories that is at stake, but rather the historicity of the man about whom the stories were being told. Or, at least, to rule out an oral origin for such stories is a bare assumption (in agreement with what Irish1975 seems to assert).

I have given both of these examples before, but I myself grew up in evangelical circles in which it was assumed (A) that Jesus was not very good looking and (B) that his beard was ripped out during his passion. I never read either of these details from the gospels; that was impossible, since they are not there. Rather, the sources for these two data are (A) Isaiah 53.2b and (B) Isaiah 50.6b. Modern churchgoing Christians still play the same game that the early Christians played: they tease details about Jesus out of the Hebrew scriptures. I heard both of these details from Sunday School classes and sermons, not from books. I grew up assuming that both were in the gospels somewhere, and I discovered in early adulthood that this assumption was wrong.

For me, a big question is whether the evangelists themselves originated whichever materials we are considering at the time. We are aware of many cases in which they are probably not. If Mark came first, for example, then much of Matthew did not originate with Matthew! (And vice versa, if Matthew came first.) But we have almost certainly lost more materials than we have had preserved for us, which means that there may be many more cases out there in which none of our extant gospels is the origin of the material at hand. That material might have derived from an earlier gospel text, or it might have derived from stories being told in churches or by wandering preachers. And this is where I have to finesse the following statement a bit:
Irish1975 wrote:If we assert the existence of oral tradition independently of a theory of reliability ("bridging the gap"), then we are left with an idle question of whether something in the past existed or not.
The question of whether the origin of the material was oral or literary may be idle, but the question of whether the origin of the material lies with our author or not is not idle at all. It often makes a difference for interpretation. In general, if our author was the originator of the materials being studied, then our expectations ought to be a bit different than if our author got those materials from someone else and is reworking them. This notion comes into play, for example, in a thread about the parable of the sower: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4212&start=10#p87913, in which I wrote:
Ben C. Smith wrote: Tue Jun 05, 2018 8:09 amWhether Mark got the parable of the sower from tradition or created it himself from scratch, for example, has to make a difference for the kinds of interpretations we are applying to it in this thread, does it not? If Mark created the parable from scratch, I think our expectations are high that its four categories of seed should make sense in its authorial context; if, on the other hand, Mark got it from tradition, then surely it is possible that its four categories might not line up perfectly with categories which Mark elsewhere has established of his own volition (insiders and outsiders, perhaps).

....

This is my current best explanation for the unevenness, and for the parable as a whole with relation to its Marcan context:
  1. The parable is not of Marcan origin. Mark likes to simplify spectra of humans into binary categories: insiders and outsiders, those "with me" and those "against me," those who will enter the kingdom and those who will not. (Mark is not alone in this Christian predilection.) The parable, however, dwells upon nuances. A similar process can be seen in Matthew and Luke with respect to the parable of the pounds/talents, vis-à-vis the version in one of the Jewish-Christian gospels, which I argue to have preceded the canonical version: an original array of three separate outcomes has been flattened into only two outcomes, acceptance and rejection.
  2. But the parable is colorful and meaningful, is part of the growing tradition, and it is a good example of something that a Galilean peasant teacher might have uttered, so Mark includes it in his gospel, the more so because he can both relate it to the kingdom of God and wring an allusion to Peter out of it in the second kind of soil.
  3. The explanation of the parable is younger than the parable itself, however. The explanation does not always fully reflect the parable itself. For example, there is no real sense in which the first seed, which falls by the side of the road and is immediately eaten by birds, can be said to have entered into the ground, yet the explanation speaks of the word that "has been sown into them" (τὸν ἐσπαρμένον εἰς αὐτούς), the hearers. The first soil, for which "hearing" consists of the seed merely falling upon the ground, contrasts with the third soil, for which "hearing" seems to consist of the seed actually starting to sprout.
  4. Mark knows that the disciples would later become apostles and leaders of the church, and he has no desire to mitigate this fact. However, Mark also wishes to use the disciples as foolish foils for Jesus in the gospel. This bifurcation creates a real tension in the gospel: are the disciples insiders or outsiders? In fact, Mark is inconsistent on this score, even within chapter 4. On the one hand, the disciples are given "the mystery of the kingdom of God" in verse 11, explicitly contrasting them with outsiders who receive only parables; the disciples receive, not only the parables, but also the explanations, which Jesus immediately proceeds to give them in verses 13-20. So obviously the disciples are insiders. On the other hand, it is outsiders who are characterized as hearing and not understanding in verse 12; and Jesus immediately expresses frustration that the disciples, despite hearing, have not understood in verse 13. So obviously the disciples are outsiders. Real life does not tend to fall neatly into insider and outsider categories. Just as the disciples' insider/outsider status is ambiguous, due to the uneasy interplay of the fact that they became respected church leaders with the probable fiction that they were bumbling idiots during Jesus' ministry, so too the insider/outsider status of each of the first three categories of soil is ambiguous, because it is hard in real life to force nuance into binary categories.
  5. The whole parable comes off in the end as a warning not to lose one's insider status and become an outsider. Be like the soil in which the seed multiplies manifold, not like the soils in which the seed sooner or later fails to produce. This paraenetic focus is what renders the imperfect fit of the four categories with a simple insider/outsider status irrelevant from the authorial point of view, explaining why the author either did not notice or did not care about the tensions in this chapter.
I believe that this explanation of mine attempts both to understand each aspect on its own (understanding the fourfold parable as a traditional element forced imperfectly into the Christian twofold understanding of one's status in the kingdom) and to understand how it all works together for Mark as an author (whose purpose is not descriptive, as if to map out the different kinds of Christians, but rather prescriptive: do this and not that). It explains both why the numerous discrepancies exist (because the author is adapting materials to uses they were not originally intended for) and why Mark would tolerate them (because the author was instructing, not analyzing).
All of this matters because those in the "no oral tradition" camp sometimes tend to treat the evangelists as dwelling in a vacuum: there were the scriptures, and then there was Paul, and then there was Mark, and then there were Matthew and Luke and John; and every idea in the later texts in this stream just has to derive either from one of the earlier texts or from the author's own vivid imagination, or from some combination of the two. There were no wandering preachers giving instructions or telling stories which may have found there way into the gospels; there were no Christians talking amongst each other, giving each other ideas; there was no liturgy from which details of the passion could have arisen, no ethical instruction which one of the evangelists may have borrowed from his fellow Christians, no lost texts or traditions. But these tacit assumptions fly in the face of the internal evidence of our gospels, that they are not (any of them) individually seamless tunics (John 19.23) woven as a whole without parts; and they fly in the face of analogies involving religious groups and how their ideas grow and change and merge over time. YMMV.
Last edited by Ben C. Smith on Sat Nov 24, 2018 1:19 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Thomas L Brodie on Ehrman's 'Did Jesus Exist?'and oral traditions

Post by Giuseppe »

Ben C. Smith wrote: Sat Nov 24, 2018 8:53 am There were no wandering preachers giving instructions or telling stories which may have found there way into the gospels; there were no Christians talking amongst each other, giving each other ideas; there was no liturgy from which details of the passion could have arisen, no ethical instruction which one of the evangelists may have borrowed from his fellow Christians, no lost texts or traditions. But these tacit assumptions fly in the face of the internal evidence of our gospels, that they are not (any of them) individually seamless tunics (John 19.23) woven as a whole without parts; and they fly in the face of analogies involving religious groups and how their ideas grow and change and merge over time. YMMV.
But R.G. Price has made recently a powerful case for believe that really that was just the case: there was not all that (listed by you above), since all show so obsessively to be based on Mark and only on Mark.
And when they diverge seriously from Mark, the origin is always a revelatory Jesus (as is the case for AoI).
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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Re: Thomas L Brodie on Ehrman's 'Did Jesus Exist?'and oral traditions

Post by Ben C. Smith »

Giuseppe wrote: Sat Nov 24, 2018 9:35 am
Ben C. Smith wrote: Sat Nov 24, 2018 8:53 am There were no wandering preachers giving instructions or telling stories which may have found there way into the gospels; there were no Christians talking amongst each other, giving each other ideas; there was no liturgy from which details of the passion could have arisen, no ethical instruction which one of the evangelists may have borrowed from his fellow Christians, no lost texts or traditions. But these tacit assumptions fly in the face of the internal evidence of our gospels, that they are not (any of them) individually seamless tunics (John 19.23) woven as a whole without parts; and they fly in the face of analogies involving religious groups and how their ideas grow and change and merge over time. YMMV.
But R.G. Price has made recently a powerful case for believe that really that was just the case: there was not all that (listed by you above), since all show so obsessively to be based on Mark and only on Mark.
And when they diverge seriously from Mark, the origin is always a revelatory Jesus (as is the case for AoI).
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