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Oral gospel traditions is the hypothetical first stage in the formation of the written
gospels Gospel originally meant the Christian message (" the gospel"), but in the second century AD the term (, from which the English word originated as a calque) came to be used also for the books in which the message was reported. In this sen ...
as information was passed by
word of mouth Word of mouth is the passing of information from person to person using oral communication, which could be as simple as telling someone the time of day. Storytelling is a common form of word-of-mouth communication where one person tells others a ...
. These
oral tradition Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication in which knowledge, art, ideas and culture are received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another.Jan Vansina, Vansina, Jan: ''Oral Tradition as History'' (19 ...
s included different types of stories about
Jesus Jesus (AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, and many Names and titles of Jesus in the New Testament, other names and titles, was a 1st-century Jewish preacher and religious leader. He is the Jesus in Chris ...
. For example, people told
anecdote An anecdote is "a story with a point", such as to communicate an abstract idea about a person, place, or thing through the concrete details of a short narrative or to characterize by delineating a specific quirk or trait. Anecdotes may be real ...
s about Jesus healing the sick and debating with his opponents. The traditions also included sayings attributed to Jesus, such as
parable A parable is a succinct, didactic story, in prose or verse, that illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles. It differs from a fable in that fables employ animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature as characters, whe ...
s and teachings on various subjects which, along with other sayings, formed the oral gospel tradition. The supposition of such traditions have been the focus of scholars such as Bart Ehrman, James Dunn, and Richard Bauckham, although each scholar varies widely in his conclusions, with Ehrman and Bauckham publicly debating on the subject.


History of research

It is widely agreed amongst Biblical scholars that accounts of Jesus's teachings and life were initially conserved by oral transmission, which was the source of the written gospels. For much of the 20th century, form criticism, pioneered by figures such as Martin Dibelius and
Rudolf Bultmann Rudolf Karl Bultmann (; ; 20 August 1884 – 30 July 1976) was a German Lutheran theologian and professor of the New Testament at the University of Marburg. He was one of the major figures of early 20th-century biblical studies. A prominent c ...
, dominated Biblical scholarship. Modern media criticism began with Birger Gerhardsson, a visionary Swedish scholar who was the first to challenge the hegemony of form criticism. Gerhardsson, basing his research off of Rabbinic methods of transmission, argued that the early Christians transmitted the story and teachings of Jesus through strict memorization, claiming that a collegium formed by the twelve disciples could carefully control tradition. While rebuffed for decades, he is now viewed as a pioneer of research in oral Gospel traditions; he was a man Rafael Rodriguez said was "literally decades ahead of his time". Another seminal figure who appeared two decades later was Werner Kelber. Kelber, drawing on various fields such as communications media and cultural studies and applying them to the Bible, opposed form-critical views of a steady evolution of the Jesus traditions, arguing instead that the transition from oral tradition to the written gospels, namely the
Gospel of Mark The Gospel of Mark is the second of the four canonical Gospels and one of the three synoptic Gospels, synoptic Gospels. It tells of the ministry of Jesus from baptism of Jesus, his baptism by John the Baptist to his death, the Burial of Jesus, ...
, represented a disruption of transmission. Kelber is also known for his "brilliant (if awkward) metaphor" comparing oral tradition to a "biosphere" rather than a medium; oral tradition provides a context, not just a medium, of tradition. Indeed, Kelber's groundbreaking works caused what Theodore Weeden called "a paradigmatic crisis" that would reshape scholarship in the years to come. Kenneth Bailey was another scholar who made a tremendous mark on par with Kelber on the study of the Oral Gospel Traditions. First published in 1991, Bailey's essay "Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels" presented a model of oral tradition based on contemporary traditions in the Middle East, which Bailey gathered first-hand. Bailey argued that communities, especially by leading members, informally controlled oral traditions to a degree, preventing core parts of stories from major change. Bailey showed how oral tradition could maintain stability over time while exhibiting variance in detail. Richard Horsley was another major player in New Testament media criticism. Horsley focused on literary criticism and how societal power interacts with media criticism.


Critical methods: source and form criticism

Biblical scholars use a variety of critical methodologies known as
biblical criticism Modern Biblical criticism (as opposed to pre-Modern criticism) is the use of critical analysis to understand and explain the Bible without appealing to the supernatural. During the eighteenth century, when it began as ''historical-biblical c ...
. They apply source criticism to identify the written sources beneath the canonical gospels. Scholars generally understood that these written sources must have had a prehistory as oral tellings, but the very nature of oral transmission seemed to rule out the possibility of recovering them. In the early 20th century, the German scholar Hermann Gunkel demonstrated a new critical method, form criticism, which he believed could discover traces of oral tradition in written texts. Gunkel specialized in
Old Testament The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Isr ...
studies, but other scholars soon adopted and adapted his methods to the study of the
New Testament The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus, as well as events relating to Christianity in the 1st century, first-century Christianit ...
. The essence of form criticism is the identification of the '' Sitz im Leben'', "situation in life", which gave rise to a particular written passage. When form critics discuss oral traditions about Jesus, they theorize about the particular social situation in which different accounts of Jesus were told. For New Testament scholars, this focus remains the
Second Temple period The Second Temple period or post-exilic period in Jewish history denotes the approximately 600 years (516 BCE – 70 CE) during which the Second Temple stood in the city of Jerusalem. It began with the return to Zion and subsequent reconstructio ...
. First-century Palestine was predominantly an oral society. A modern consensus exists that Jesus must be understood as a Jew in a Jewish environment. According to scholar
Bart D. Ehrman Bart Denton Ehrman (born October 5, 1955) is an American New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. He has written and edited 30 books ...
, Jesus was so very firmly rooted in his own time and place as a first-century Palestinian Jew – with his ancient Jewish comprehension of the world and God – that he does not translate easily into a modern idiom. Ehrman stresses that Jesus was raised in a Jewish household in the Jewish hamlet of
Nazareth Nazareth is the largest Cities in Israel, city in the Northern District (Israel), Northern District of Israel. In its population was . Known as "the Arab capital of Israel", Nazareth serves as a cultural, political, religious, economic and ...
. He was brought up in a Jewish culture, accepted Jewish ways, and eventually became a Jewish teacher who, like other Jewish teachers of his time, debated the
Law of Moses The Law of Moses ( ), also called the Mosaic Law, is the law said to have been revealed to Moses by God. The term primarily refers to the Torah or the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Terminology The Law of Moses or Torah of Moses (Heb ...
orally. Early Christians sustained these teachings of Jesus orally.
Rabbi A rabbi (; ) is a spiritual leader or religious teacher in Judaism. One becomes a rabbi by being ordained by another rabbi—known as ''semikha''—following a course of study of Jewish history and texts such as the Talmud. The basic form of t ...
s or teachers in every generation were raised and trained to deliver this oral tradition accurately. It consisted of two parts: the Jesus tradition (i.e., logia or sayings of Jesus) and inspired opinion. The distinction is one of authority: where the earthly Jesus has spoken on a subject, that word is to be regarded as an instruction or command. According to Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans, "the Judaism of the period treated such traditions very carefully, and the New Testament writers in numerous passages applied to apostolic traditions the same technical terminology found elsewhere in Judaism for 'delivering', 'receiving', 'learning', 'holding', 'keeping', and 'guarding', the traditioned 'teaching'. In this way they both identified their traditions as 'holy word' and showed their concern for a careful and ordered transmission of it. The word and work of Jesus were an important albeit distinct part of these apostolic traditions." NT Wright also argued for a stable oral tradition, stating "Communities that live in an oral culture tend to be story-telling communities ..Such stories ..acquire a fairly fixed form, down to precise phraseology ..they retain that form, and phraseology, as long as they are told ..The storyteller in such a culture has no license to invent or adapt at will. The less important the story, the more the entire community, in a process that is informal but very effective, will keep a close watch on the precise form and wording with which the story is told. According to Anthony Le Donne, "Oral cultures have been capable of tremendous competence...The oral culture in which
Jesus Jesus (AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, and many Names and titles of Jesus in the New Testament, other names and titles, was a 1st-century Jewish preacher and religious leader. He is the Jesus in Chris ...
was reared trained their brightest children to remember entire libraries of story, law, poetry, song, etcetera...When a rabbi imparted something important to his disciples, the memory was expected to maintain a high degree of stability." Le Donne disputes the view that the oral traditions are comparable to a 'Telephone Game'. According to Dunn, the accuracy of the oral gospel tradition was insured by the community designating certain learned individuals to bear the main responsibility for retaining the gospel message of Jesus. The prominence of teachers in the earliest communities such as the Jerusalem Church is best explained by the communities' reliance on them as repositories of oral tradition. According to Dunn, one of the most striking features to emerge from his study is the "amazing consistency" of the history of the tradition "which gave birth to the NT". Dunn argues that Kelber exaggerates the divide between orality and written transmission, critiquing the latter's view that Mark tried to override prior oral tradition. Rafael Rodriguez also sees Kelber's media contrast as much too distinct, arguing that tradition was sustained in memory alongside text. Terence Mournet argued that oral traditions provide reliable historical data as well. John Kloppenborg wrote that the variants between the Synoptic Gospels are completely explainable by literary interdependence. Travis Derico, following Dunn's ideas, argues that memorization and oral transmission can potentially account for the Synoptics instead and deserves increased study. Jens Schroter argued that a mass of material from various sources, such as Christian prophets issuing sayings in the name of Jesus, the Hebrew Bible, miscellaneous sayings, alongside the actual words of Jesus, were all attributed by the Gospels to the singular historical Jesus. However, James DG Dunn and Tucker Ferda point out that the early Christian tradition sought to distinguish between their own sayings and those of the historical Jesus and that there is little evidence that the claims of new "prophets" often became mistaken as those of Jesus himself; Ferda notes that the phenomena of prophetic sayings merging with those of Jesus is more relevant to the dialogue gospels of the second and third centuries. A review of Richard Bauckham's book ''Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony'' states "The common wisdom in the academy is that stories and sayings of Jesus circulated for decades, undergoing countless retellings and embellishments before being finally set down in writing." Alan Kirk praised Bauckham for realizing the deep link between true memory and tradition, potentially contributing widely to Jesus research and the demise of form criticism, and his pioneering and underappreciated application of cognition and memory to the Jesus tradition. However, Kirk argues that Bauckham's failure to bridge the divide between eyewitness testimony and the Jesus tradition is detrimental to the overall case the two editions of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses provides against the prevailing skepticism form critics brought in. According to Bart Ehrman, the oral traditions are comparable to a " Telephone game. He says "Invariably, the story has changed so much in the process of retelling that everyone gets a good laugh...Imagine this same activity...over the expanse of the Roman empire...with thousands of participants...some of whom have to translate the stories into different languages." These traditions precede the surviving gospels by decades, going back to the time of Jesus and the time of Paul's persecution of the early Christian Jews, prior to his conversion. Alan Kirk finds Ehrman's writing in Jesus Before the Gospels to cite memory research selectively, neglecting the fact that John Bartlett's experiment discovered that stories quickly took on a stable, 'schematic' form rather quickly. Ehrman also overemphasizes individual transmission instead of community, makes a 'lethal oversight' where
Jan Vansina Jan M. J. Vansina (14 September 1929 – 8 February 2017) was a Belgian historian and anthropologist regarded as an authority on the history of Central Africa, especially of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. ...
, whom he quoted as evidence for corruption in the Jesus tradition, changed his mind, arguing that information was conveyed through a community that placed controls, rather than through chains of transmission easily subject to change. Kirk does sympathize with Ehrman that appealing to memory cannot automatically guarantee historicity. Both Ehrman and Bauckham overemphasize individuality, whether transmission chains or eyewitness testimony, in their studies. According to Maurice Casey, Aramaic sources have been detected in Mark's Gospel, which could indicate use of early or even eyewitness testimony when it was being written.


Oral traditions and the formation of the gospels

Modern scholars have concluded that the
Canonical Gospels Gospel originally meant the Christian message (" the gospel"), but in the second century AD the term (, from which the English word originated as a calque) came to be used also for the books in which the message was reported. In this sen ...
went through four stages in their formation: # The first stage was oral, and included various stories about Jesus such as healing the sick, or debating with opponents, as well as parables and teachings. # In the second stage, the oral traditions began to be written down in collections (collections of miracles, collections of sayings, etc.), while the oral traditions continued to circulate # In the third stage, early Christians began combining the written collections and oral traditions into what might be called "proto-gospels" – hence Luke's reference to the existence of "many" earlier narratives about Jesus # In the fourth stage, the authors of our four Gospels drew on these proto-gospels, collections, and still-circulating oral traditions to produce the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and
John John is a common English name and surname: * John (given name) * John (surname) John may also refer to: New Testament Works * Gospel of John, a title often shortened to John * First Epistle of John, often shortened to 1 John * Second E ...
. Mark, Matthew and Luke are known as the
Synoptic Gospels The gospels of Gospel of Matthew, Matthew, Gospel of Mark, Mark, and Gospel of Luke, Luke are referred to as the synoptic Gospels because they include many of the same stories, often in a similar sequence and in similar or sometimes identical ...
because they are so highly interdependent. Since the twentieth century, scholars have generally agreed that Mark was the first of the gospels to be written (see
Marcan priority Marcan priority (or Markan priority) is the hypothesis that the Gospel of Mark was the first of the three synoptic gospels to be written, and was used as a source by the other two (Gospel of Matthew, Matthew and Gospel of Luke, Luke). It is a cent ...
). The author does not seem to have used extensive written sources, but rather to have woven together small collections and individual traditions into a coherent presentation. It is generally, though not universally, agreed that the authors of Matthew and Luke used as sources the gospel of Mark and a collection of sayings called the Q source. These two together account for the bulk of each of Matthew and Luke, with the remainder made up of smaller amounts of source material unique to each, called the
M source M source, which is sometimes referred to as M document, or simply M, comes from the M in "Matthean material". It is a hypothetical textual source for the Gospel of Matthew. M Source is defined as that 'special material' of the Gospel of Matthew t ...
for Matthew and the L source for Luke, which may have been a mix of written and oral material (see Two-source hypothesis). Most scholars believe that the author of John's gospel used oral and written sources different from those available to the Synoptic authors, although there are indications that a later editor of this gospel may have used Mark and Luke. Oral transmission may also be seen as a different approach to understanding the Synoptic Gospels in New Testament scholarship. Current theories attempt to link the three synoptic gospels together through a common textual tradition. However, many problems arise when linking these three texts together (see the Synoptic problem). This has led many scholars to hypothesize the existence of a fourth document from which Matthew and Luke drew upon independently of each other (for example, the Q source). The Oral Transmission hypothesis based on the
oral tradition Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication in which knowledge, art, ideas and culture are received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another.Jan Vansina, Vansina, Jan: ''Oral Tradition as History'' (19 ...
steps away from this model, proposing instead that this common, shared tradition was transmitted orally rather than through a lost document.


Elite agency

While there is a broad consensus on this view of the process of development from oral tradition to written gospels, an alternative thesis proposed by historian Robyn Faith Walsh in her book '' The Origins of Early Christian Literature'', builds on scholarship from historian of religion
Jonathan Z. Smith Jonathan Zittell Smith (November 21, 1938 – December 30, 2017), also known as J. Z. Smith, was an American history of religion, historian of religions. He was based at the University of Chicago for most of his career. His research included ...
. She proposes viewing gospel authors as individual elite cultural producers in the classical vein, writing for an elite audience instead of early Christian communities, with agency in the composition of their text rather than primarily transmitters of tradition.


Notes


Bibliography

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Further reading

* * * * * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Oral traditions in early Christianity 1st-century Christianity Oral tradition Gospels