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Can We Trust the Accuracy of the Oral Traditions About Jesus? Part 3
By Mark D. Roberts | Friday, August 24, 2007
In my last two posts I’ve been developing an analogy that helps to explain why we can trust that the oral traditions about Jesus accurately passed along what He really did and said. Here’s what I have so far:
You are diagnosed with terminal cancer. But your doctor gives you a ray of hope. If you can go and hear a lecture by a famed cancer researcher, you will receive information that will lead to your healing. So you go to hear the lecture. When you arrive at the lecture, the room is filled with others who are in exactly the same predicament as you. They have the same cancer, and have come to learn how to be cured. As it turns out, they didn’t bring any means to take notes either, and there will be no recordings of the lecture. So your task, and the task of those sitting with you, is to listen to the lecture and remember as much as you can. It’s your only hope.
Now you’re not alone, but there are many other ears to hear and minds to remember. After the lecture is over, you get together with the others to reconstruct what the lecturer said.
Still, my analogy needs more work. So here’s a new twist:
You are diagnosed with terminal cancer. But your doctor gives you a ray of hope. If you can go and hear a lecture by a famed cancer researcher, you will receive information that will lead to your healing. So you go to hear the lecture. When you arrive at the lecture, the room is filled with others who are in exactly the same predicament as you. They have the same cancer, and have come to learn how to be cured. As it turns out, they didn’t bring any means to take notes either, and there will be no recordings of the lecture. So your task, and the task of those sitting with you, is to listen to the lecture and remember as much as you can. It’s your only hope.
Now you’re not alone, but there are many other ears to hear and minds to remember. After the lecture is over, you get together with the others to reconstruct what the lecturer said. When you start talking the these people, you discover that they have all been trained to remember oral communications. Strangely enough, they all come from a place that depended on oral tradition rather than writing or visual images. So even though you might forget pieces of the lecture, odds are that your fellow listeners will not.
Obviously, this new twist in the story is meant to emphasize the benefits of oral culture if one is going to remember spoken words. The human brain is capable of amazing feats of memory, especially when it has been trained, either formally or informally, to remember accurately. In my book I mention the case of the Muslim Hafiz, who memorizes the entire Qur’an. Because you and I have other means to record information, and because we live in a literary and visual culture, it’s hard for us to realize that others could far exceed our ability to remember and pass along information with great accuracy. (Photo to the right: Mahyar Hussain Pur made news when, in 1998, at the age of six, he completed memorization of the Quran. The astounding part of Pur’s feat wasn’t the memorization itself, which isn’t unique among Muslims, but rather his age.)
So far my analogy has helped to illustrate three factors that increase the likelihood of the oral traditions about Jesus being accurate:
1. The motivation of the hearers.
2. The fact that the hearing, remembering, and telling happened in the context of a motivated community of eyewitnesses.
3. The influence of oral culture upon those who passed on the tradition.
This analogy isn’t quite perfect. It needs a bit more work, which I’ll explore in my next post.
If you find this discussion helpful, you’ll probably like my newest book, Can We Trust the Gospels? You can order a copy by clicking here. Happy reading!
Topics: Can We Trust the Gospels? |
5 Responses to “Can We Trust the Accuracy of the Oral Traditions About Jesus? Part 3”
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August 24th, 2007 at 6:29 am
Okay, I get to mention it again. That someone can memorize a written (unchanging) page is pretty bad support that a story passed orally over decades is accurate.
And certainly motivation of the hearers is not necessarily a positive. A flying saucer enthusiast is probably one of the least accurate conveyors of what happened at Roswell.
It seems like analogies can lead a person astray here. Is there any reasonable science research that shows people tell accurate stories over decades without access to written materials?
August 24th, 2007 at 7:55 am
Let me take a whack here.
The last time the Telephone Game analogy came up, it was in a discussion regarding how the Biblical canon came to be, and why the Gospel of Thomas and other gospels like it were excluded. This is what I wrote to Dr. Roberts at that time:
/Start quote
Ask anyone your age or older to complete this sentence: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you;”
Virtually everyone will reply, “ask what you can do for your country,” as it was very catchy and sticks in the memory. It was also spoken to a large audience by John F. Kennedy at a time when folks were hanging on his every word (his inauguration.) But suppose I finished the sentence ” ask what you can do for your country by joining the Peace Corps at 11 cents an hour.” The immediate response would be, “What?? That is not what he said!” and my credibility as a recounter of the words of President Kennedy would be shot. Even pointing out that he established the Peace Corps and really did want people to join would not help me.
So when I read in the Gospel of Thomas that Jesus purportedly said, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, render unto God what is God’s and render unto Me what is Mine,” I imagine that the response of the early Christians who had heard Jesus say what is recorded in the Gospels was pretty much the same. The correct rendition was made in front of crowds at the Temple. It was catchy and had no doubt spread like wildfire– this other version immediately rang false. When you add in that it makes a distinction between the Father and the Son that has no logical import here (they, as the Triune God, would “own” everything corporately anyway) then it is no wonder that the Gospel of Thomas was universally rejected as a peer to the Gospels we have. If it could not get the very well-known sayings of Jesus right, what credibility did it have in revealing “secrets”?
/end quote
The point here would be that it is possible to accurately recount verbal sayings without recourse to written materials, even for paper-based folks such as modern Americans, decades later. Dr. Roberts’ point is that if it was a normal part of your culture to memorize such things AND your motivation was high AND you had a corporate joint effort to do so among your social group, it can be done with a high degree of accuracy.
It also points out that if you veer from the group’s collective memory, your version will have very rough sledding. So even if I fervently believe that President Kennedy welcomed UFOs in his innaugural address, the vast majority will reject my recollection.
We arrive back at the same point that was reached with the Christopher Hitchens discussion: you examine the evidence and make your best determination, but ultimately, there is no way to “prove” anything in a way that cannot be disputed in any particular. I have concluded that it is very, very probable that Jesus’ sayings accurately arrived to us in the mechanisms Dr. Roberts is describing. The Jesus Seminar disputes as questionable anything that did not arrive on a High-Density DVD disk. You can go with either camp, but neither has the sort of ironclad proof that ends the matter forever.
August 24th, 2007 at 9:47 am
Have not read the book but have enjoyed the postings and comments…. In support — in the main — of Mark Roberts easy to grasp analogies and arguments Ken Bailey has been cited. Yes. May I suggest that even better is the book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006) by Richard Bauckham who emphasizes the fact that named eyewitnesses in Gospel accounts are there to verify the accuracy of each incident, among other things…. He uses Bailey and Martin Hengel and others and goes further. Most of the argument is so scholarly that most of us will struggle, but in the end it is extremely well done and knocks out the underpinnings of over a century of ‘form critical’ approaches to the Gospels. (My own sense is that some such method may apply to the later gnostic gospels which were community generated but not the canonical ones which reliably recount eyewitness testimony — and therefore were received as such while the others were not). Bauckham show that historical criticism properly used verifies the Gospels as eyewitness testimony (as nearly as anything can).
August 24th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Evan, thank you for your thoughts, and it’s good to see your thought process here at this blog again.
One big problem with your analogy is that Kennedy’s speech was recorded and played over and over, plus hundreds of writeups in the papers for the evening edition. You’re not making a reasonable analogy in my opinion.
Jesus didn’t have that modern advantage. He spoke with small crowds or individuals. The words came out once. I think there’s enough research with memory to show that false memories are common. Probably it’s even worse with groups, as the group argues what was said, until they come up with a group political consensus, which may not have anything to do with the original.
We also seem to have a group that was not impressed by the words—I’ll call them inaccurately “the Jews” to distinguish them from the Christians. They weren’t impressed enough by anything Christ said or did to write his speech down substantively. Right?
I’m not versed on the Jesus seminar, but I believe their point was that small extraordinary phrases probably came from Jesus, since they would be most likely to be remembered with oral tradition. e.g., “Love your enemy.” I think there’s something reasonable about that logic, but I know Pastor Roberts thinks the whole bunch of ‘em are fools.
August 24th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
In my opinion, Mark and Luke were not eyewitnesses. Matthew possibly was. “John” certainly was.
I think it more likely that Mark was indeed written by Mark, who was not an eyewitness, but who was an absolute genius at crafting a very “thick” narrative.
His views and general outlook were a bit controversial in the early church. Matthew and Luke modified Mark somewhat, generally taking a more positive tone, which is understandable since they were written later, after the Roman-Jewish War.