Brian Buthane wrote on 'Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior' and concepts arising out of it - http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/did ... y-exist-2/
Buthane, in the next sentence, then saysNow, for the first time, one of America’s most prominent New Testament scholars has gone outside of his narrow field, driven as much by frustration as curiosity, to examine what the science of memory might offer to separate the historical wheat from the theological chaff in the Gospels. In so doing, University of North Carolina religious studies professor Bart Ehrman may have opened a new front in the currently quiescent Jesus wars, a quarter-century of devout and secular scholars battling over what, exactly, is the gospel truth.
Ehrman’s aim was to illuminate the role of memory in crafting the stories of Jesus that would appear in the Bible, and to see how well the assumed role of eyewitnesses in supporting miraculous events stood up ...
“For the past two years I’ve been reading what I can about memory,” says Ehrman in an interview, “and learning that what we were taught in grad school—what’s still taught in grad school—is untrue.” Changes in oral memory, psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists have found, are actually more radical than in literary transmission, because the literary tends to fix, unchanged, the received text. But every act of oral transmission, Ehrman cites one memory expert as declaring, “is also an act of creation.”
I'm not sure that "that the [alleged] oral transmission of stories about Jesus in the time between his [alleged] death and the composition of the Gospels could be (more or less) trusted".That means one of the few pieces of common ground between believers and skeptics—that the oral transmission of stories about Jesus in the time between his death and the composition of the Gospels could be (more or less) trusted—is turning to quicksand.
But Buthane is right about the next sentence -
Buthane's next sentence is interesting too -The crucial gap in written records, lasting four decades or more, between the death of Jesus (which is established today at no later than 36 CE) and the earliest gospel, that of Mark (in scholars’ near-universal view, some time after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE), was never a serious issue in New Testament studies.
Yes, the faithful do 'tend to shorten' the gap between the alleged time of Jesus death and the time the gospels were allegedly written, but what intrigues me, and rightly so, is the allusion to "correction by Apostles or other eyewitnesses". As many threads in this BC&H Forum show, the written records are highly variable, too. Assumptions by believers that Apostles or eyewitnesses sought to provide correct accounts when these things were written down are likely to be unfounded.The faithful have always coped with it by assuming that however long it lasted —and they do tend to shorten it— the inerrant Word of God was still passed on in oral form subject to correction by Apostles or other eyewitnesses.
Buthane's article is a good read, to me, at least.