Is there an evidence-based argument for oral tradition behind the gospels?

[neilgodfrey]

Spin recently suggested that my questioning of traditions about Jesus (oral and written) being the sources of the gospel narratives was inspired by my bias in not wanting the gospel narrative to have any historical basis. (I admit to having biases, but none of them is against historicity per se.)

Oral traditions are seen as the link between the gospel narratives and the historical events they relate or rely upon in some sense.

My response would be that a historian ought to approach the gospels like any other historical source. In order to know how to interpret a document we need first to establish the kind of writing that it is. Provenance and authorship are also obviously significant.

We need to have evidence to support any notion that the narrative is based on historical persons and events and that the narrative was sourced from traditions that originated with those historical persons and events.

If we don't have that evidence then (on that basis) we cannot conclude that the narrative has no historical core. At the same time we cannot say that it "probably" does or does not have a historical kernel of some sort. Without evidence we have to remain agnostic.

I think it follows that the conventional view that traditions (especially oral ones) lie behind the gospel narratives should also be open to question and not accepted as a default.

I think that several arguments that certain characteristics of the gospel narratives indicate a derivation from oral traditions are possibly circular. It is too easy to find in the gospels themselves what we are looking for to support our preferred model of their origins.

Arguments concerning gospel sources and origins ought to be grounded in evidence independent of the gospels and not drawn from the gospels alone.

[MrMacSon]

Arguments concerning gospel sources and origins ought to be grounded in evidence independent of the gospels and not drawn from the gospels alone.
.

Yep, and the main or only evidence would seem to be other written accounts with similar narratives: the apocrypha; the Church Fathers; & other theological texts of the times, especially 100 BC/BCE to 300 AD/CE.

Oral traditions are seen as the link between the gospel narratives and the historical events they relate or rely upon in some sense.

edited: That begs the question as to whether they do relate to real, historical events. One thing I think the NT gospels and inter-testamentary & apocryphal texts may reflect or relate to is the midrash tradition developed and applied as the oral Torah was being written down: from the mid 1st C to ~200 AD/CE.

[Bernard Muller]

I always maintained that "Mark" had the benefit to have heard from Peter when he was in Corinth.
Peter in Corinth is evidenced from Paul's 1 Corinthians (Peter/Cephas had followers there, so he had to visit the city).
The "info" from Peter was rather trivial and anecdotal, and not about a Jesus who was seen by him as Christ, or Son of God, or Son of Man, or anything divine, just a poor Jew credited healer, and preacher. And that caused problems for "Mark" when writing his gospel, making Peter a hostile witness, who, for various reasons, was not saying all, more so the "good" stuff.
Of course, I cannot absolutely prove from the Pauline epistles that Cephas was Peter, and also that Peter/Cephas was an eyewitness of Jesus. But Peter/Cephas was close in Jerusalem to James, the brother of Jesus (according to Galatians and Josephus).
Anyway the info from Peter was greatly embellished, with lot of added fiction, to have the historical Jesus measure up with Paul's rosy picture of the resurrected heavenly savior. The gospel main goal was to answer doubts, disbeliefs, concerns, disagreements, and to offer hope for a community in turmoil, subjected to Jerusalem fall and false Christ & prophets, and having waited a long time for the Great Day to come.

It is unfortunate that nobody told Paul he had to mention in his epistles Peter was Cephas and that Peter was an eyewitness of Jesus. Paul did not think he had to (maybe his audience knew already about it ) and he was not thinking about future generations, millennium(s) after his time. He addressed his contemporaries and only them.

Corinthians subjected to eyewitness(es) testimony: http://historical-jesus.info/20.html
The historical Jesus according to Paul: http://historical-jesus.info/6.html
The problems of "Mark" about Peter's testimony: http://historical-jesus.info/28.html
Peter, James not Christians: http://historical-jesus.info/108.html

Cordially, Bernard

[John2]

Bernard wrote:

The "info" from Peter was rather trivial and anecdotal, and not about a Jesus who was seen by him as Christ, or Son of God, or Son of Man, or anything divine, just a poor Jew credited healer, and preacher.

It's slow at work for me now and I'm just yakking it up, so don't mind me. But I wanted to say that I've spent the last twenty years thinking there was no way that Jewish Christians believed that Jesus was divine, but ever since I read Boyarin I've done a complete 180 and Christianity makes a lot more sense to me now. I'm even starting to think that Jesus (if he existed, and I strongly lean towards that, but if he didn't, oh, well) thought this about himself too.

[John2]

Again, I'm just wasting time at work and thinking out loud. And I recall debating this issue with you here before, Bernard, but I thought I'd highlight something in your last link that I take issue with:

What can we learn about James through the James' epistle?
The letter has very little Christianity in it (mostly two occurrences of "Jesus Christ") and is very much Jewish in character

To me (and maybe I even said this when we talked about it before) this is like saying someone is a little pregnant. The fact that it says Jesus Christ (and even "our glorious Lord Jesus Christ") is enough for me to think that James was a Christian. Why can't something be "very much Jewish in character" and Christian? To me Christianity is just another form of Judaism, albeit one that came to have a greater influence on (and was ultimately usurped by) Gentiles than other forms.

[Bernard Muller]

to John 2,
Very few believe the James' epistle was written by James. I certainly don't. Rather by a Christian who dared to slightly christianize for his audience a very much Jewish James.
Hegesippus about James did the same.

Cordially, Bernard

[John2]

I guess we will have to agree to disagree on that, Bernard, because I think it is genuine (and the James in Hegesippus too).

[Kunigunde Kreuzerin]

Arguments concerning gospel sources and origins ought to be grounded in evidence independent of the gospels and not drawn from the gospels alone.

Personally, I don't believe in oral and written Jesus-stories as sources of Mark's stories. But it seems that the case for sources is stronger than one might hope.

external „evidence“ (so to speak): Luke's prologue explicitly mentions sources
external „evidence“: Papias and Justin, then the Church fathers
external „evidence“: GJohn, non canonical gospels and fragments with different Jesus-stories
internal „evidence“: the double tradition (Matthew, Luke/Marcion) seems to point to sources, for example „Q“, GThomas gives an impression of such a source
internal „evidence“: Mark's Gospel seems to contain signs of layering (different kinds of arguments – syntax, grammar, sense of the stories ...)

Something to add?

[DCHindley]

Selected books relevant to NT research on Oral tradition, from Lee Edgar Tyler, Juris Dilevko, and John Miles Foley, “Annotated Bibliography.” Oral Tradition, 1:767-808. 1986. It takes Foley’s original bibliography to 1985, with annotations, and there may be something in there from Crosstalk2 discussions in the decade before and after 2000 CE:

Rudolf Bultmann. Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition. Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments. Neue Folge, 12. Heft. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1957. Trans. by John Marsh as The History of the Synoptic Tradition. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell and Harper.
*A methodologically pre-Parry study of oral tradition in Gospel materials. Interested in recovering the synoptic tradition that preceded and gave shape to the gospels, he describes a number of laws or tendencies of oral composition and transmission (espec. pp. 307-43, trans.) reminiscent of some of Olrik's laws of folk narrative. Conceives of tradition as the inevitable complication and growth of smaller to larger units. Sees no incongruity between oral and written media, and so postulates a smooth transition from oral tradition to written text.

Birger Gerhardsson. Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity. Acta Seminarii Neotestamentici Upsaliensis, 22. Lund: C.K. Gleerup, 1961.
*Proposes the memorization of a fixed and consequent oral rote transmission by disciples in connection with the rabbinic schools and the New Testament. Describes memorization followed by interpretation as a major pedagogical principle throughout history. The process involved elements arranged associatively to facilitate remembering, an ancient method of ordering oral traditional materials. Written notes were sometimes used to aid in learning texts, as was the practice of recitation with a rhythmical melody. Jacob Neusner's forward to the 1998 reprint of this book apologizes for his scathingly negative review of the initial edition.

Albert B. Lord. "The Gospels as Oral Traditional Literature." In The Relationships among the Gospels: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. Ed. William O. Walker, Jr. San Antonio: Trinity University Press. 1978. pp. 33-91.
*Applies oral methodology to the gospels, locating generic life-patterns of a mythic nature common to oral texts. Also discusses each gospel as a traditional multiform and undertakes a comparative analysis of traditional motifs and verbal correspondence among the Matthew, Mark, and Luke texts.

Birger Gerhardsson. [Evangeliernas förhistoria] The Origins of the Gospel Tradition. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979.
*Considers the problem of the origins and history of the tradition from the time of Jesus to the appearance of the written texts, with a discussion of the oral aspects of the Torah tradition.

Werner H. Kelber. "Mark and Oral Tradition," Semeia, 16:7-55 (1980).
*Although fully acknowledging a pre-Markan synoptic oral tradition, he takes as his central thesis that "the gospel is to be perceived not as the natural outcome of oral developments, but as a critical alternative to the powers of orality" (46). Thus he disagrees with Bultmann's (1957) hypothesis of a smooth, organic transition from orality to writing and posits instead a shift from collectivity to individual authorship and a "crisis" of oral transmission brought on by the retreat of Jesus' oral presence into a necessarily textual history. Notes the oral traditional features of Mark's gospel (formulaic and thematic patterning, variants with other gospels, modulation in the order of events with relation to other sources) and the fact that Mark's chirographic enterprise went on in a milieu that included a contemporary synoptic oral tradition. An imaginative and stimulating article that takes account of current research on oral literature.

Werner H. Kelber. The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983.
*Continuing along paths blazed by Ong outside the field of Biblical studies, he aims to illustrate the importance of the oral roots of Biblical texts and to liberate those texts from the cultural bias toward the authority of print: "We treat words primarily as records in need of interpretation, neglecting all too often a rather different hermeneutic, deeply rooted in biblical language that proclaims words as an act inviting participation" (p. xvi). Chapter 1 ("The Pre-Canonical Synoptic Transmission," pp. 1-43) reviews the theories of Bultmann and Gerhardsson and seeks to integrate the contemporary oral literature research of Parry and Lord, Ong, and others; it is concerned with establishing the phenomenology of speaking. Further chapters treat the oral legacy and textuality of Mark and Paul. Argues that "the decisive break in the synoptic tradition did thus not come, as Bultmann thought, with Easter, but when the written medium took full control, transforming Jesus the speaker of kingdom parables into the parable of the kingdom of God" (p. 220). Contains a sizable bibliography of oral literature studies and apposite Biblical research (pp. 227-47)

Kenneth E. Bailey. "Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels." Asia Journal of Theology 5(1), 1991, 34-54.
*Bailey writes, "To remember the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth was to affirm their unique identity. The stories had to be told and controlled or everything that made them who they were was lost." Ted Weeden summarizes the theory thus: " Bailey contends, on the basis of the biography of John Hogg, written by his daughter, Rena Hogg, in 1914, that the stories Bailey heard recited in the *hafalat samar* in the 50's and 60's were the same Hogg stories that Rena Hogg recounted about her father when she visited the Hogg-founded communities in 1910 seeking material to write her father's biography. From Bailey's comparison of the stories and the dynamics of control on the way the oral tradition was recited in the *hafalat samar* Bailey attended, he concluded that these oral societies had from their beginning employed a methodology which Bailey labeled as "informal controlled oral tradition," as the means by which those oral societies sought to assure the historical accuracy of the recitation of their oral tradition and its authentic and faithful transmission from generation to generation. Bailey then extrapolated from that conclusion the premise that this oral methodology historically was employed by all oral societies of the Middles East from generation to generation to preserve the historical authenticity of their oral traditions. Bailey then extends this premise to the earliest Palestinian Christian communities and posits that they must have employed that same methodology in the attempt to preserve accurately the authentic historical tradition about Jesus. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/18406 )

These are just the ones directly related to oral tradition as it relates to the Gospels, listed in chronological order.

As anyone who has read the Bailey article as well as Rena Hogg's renditions of the lore about her missionary father John Hogg, shows, "the latest ain't always the greatest."

DCH

[Ben C. Smith]

As anyone who has read the Bailey article as well as Rena Hogg's renditions of the lore about her missionary father John Hogg, shows, "the latest ain't always the greatest."

IIRC, Weeden essentially murdered Bailey's central contention that the transmission of stories was controlled in any way which would guarantee accuracy.