Does Anyone Remember Jesus?
It’s nice when one reads in the paper that some new study confirms a hunch you had all along but never had the lab equipment to test. That must be how chocolate lovers felt about recent studies showing this magic edible to be an antioxidant. And that was how I felt recently when I picked up a book by James Dunn, the British doyen of New Testament studies.
In his recent book, A New Perspective on Jesus, Dunn thrashes a great deal of the presuppositions about the gospels that have gained ascendancy among scholars during the last half century. In particular, he takes on two major ideas that have become bedrock for criticism of the gospels: (1) that we can think of the gospel writers as working with written sources (sometimes another gospel, such as Mark) and deciding to use or edit these sources for theological reasons in the way that a modern writer might do; and (2) that the original form of Jesus’ sayings was hopelessly blurred and deliberately altered in the period before the gospels were written down, but after Easter. We call this the era of “oral tradition,” when the gospel was told but not written, and these gospel stories are usually thought of by radical critics as having little connection with the historical Jesus. Instead, they are believed to be largely the free creation of the early church, with a little help from distant memories of Jesus.
Dunn does not totally reject this picture—he still thinks there was some literary borrowing, and even some variation of traditions—but he does a kind of intellectual flank-attack on the problem that leaves the old ideas stranded and looking badly outdated.
He calls on us to envision the society in which Jesus moved as largely an oral society, in which few people (even Jews) read or wrote. Using recent studies on ancient literacy and on modern oral cultures, he describes the nature of such societies and invites us to imagine how it was with Jesus and his audiences, who were largely illiterate. He reminds us that, in such a setting, every teaching is a performance with its own magic. He reminds us that, in such societies, people talk, repeat what they hear, and are trained from youth to commit to memory anything important—because they have no other capacity to record them. He reminds us that Jesus’ disciples must have talked about his teachings with each other and with others.
In such societies—like the early Christian church—teaching and memory of important traditions are community affairs. Teachers teach a community of people, who may have heard the stories before (in this case, either from Jesus himself or from his disciples). In such a setting, there is freedom to vary the order or details a bit—but only so far. Like a child who is given a familiar bedtime story with the wrong details, such a community would not have tolerated a telling of Jesus’ story that went too far from what they knew to be true.
Dunn savages the common picture of the gospel writers, which is more like a shell-shocked World War II veteran who after fifty years decides to open up and share hazy memories of things that happened long ago. Instead, we must imagine that the process of repeating what Jesus taught and memorizing it began in Jesus’ own lifetime, well before Easter. And we must imagine that, for the next fifty years, there was a community of believers who had heard Jesus, remembered his teachings, and repeated them to one another and to newcomers. This was the source of the gospels’ information. And this source did not stop the moment the gospels were written. We see traces of it in the Didache about A.D. 95-110.
This community of knowledge served as a bulwark for the church against gospels that violated the memory of Jesus. To put it bluntly, it would have been hard to pass off a pseudo-Jesus because the community would be able to spot a fraud a mile away. Eyewitnesses were still alive when the gospels were committed to writing, and those witnesses—along with all the other people who had heard and remembered and passed on the tradition—were the early church’s critical “check” against false teaching. This is why the church as a whole never accepted gospels like the Gospel of Thomas. And, by the way, this is what I have been teaching Houghton students in my Life of Christ class for the last twelve years.
Now you’ll have to excuse me while I go have a coffee and some chocolate.
Terence Paige, Professor of New Testament
In his recent book, A New Perspective on Jesus, Dunn thrashes a great deal of the presuppositions about the gospels that have gained ascendancy among scholars during the last half century. In particular, he takes on two major ideas that have become bedrock for criticism of the gospels: (1) that we can think of the gospel writers as working with written sources (sometimes another gospel, such as Mark) and deciding to use or edit these sources for theological reasons in the way that a modern writer might do; and (2) that the original form of Jesus’ sayings was hopelessly blurred and deliberately altered in the period before the gospels were written down, but after Easter. We call this the era of “oral tradition,” when the gospel was told but not written, and these gospel stories are usually thought of by radical critics as having little connection with the historical Jesus. Instead, they are believed to be largely the free creation of the early church, with a little help from distant memories of Jesus.
Dunn does not totally reject this picture—he still thinks there was some literary borrowing, and even some variation of traditions—but he does a kind of intellectual flank-attack on the problem that leaves the old ideas stranded and looking badly outdated.
He calls on us to envision the society in which Jesus moved as largely an oral society, in which few people (even Jews) read or wrote. Using recent studies on ancient literacy and on modern oral cultures, he describes the nature of such societies and invites us to imagine how it was with Jesus and his audiences, who were largely illiterate. He reminds us that, in such a setting, every teaching is a performance with its own magic. He reminds us that, in such societies, people talk, repeat what they hear, and are trained from youth to commit to memory anything important—because they have no other capacity to record them. He reminds us that Jesus’ disciples must have talked about his teachings with each other and with others.
In such societies—like the early Christian church—teaching and memory of important traditions are community affairs. Teachers teach a community of people, who may have heard the stories before (in this case, either from Jesus himself or from his disciples). In such a setting, there is freedom to vary the order or details a bit—but only so far. Like a child who is given a familiar bedtime story with the wrong details, such a community would not have tolerated a telling of Jesus’ story that went too far from what they knew to be true.
Dunn savages the common picture of the gospel writers, which is more like a shell-shocked World War II veteran who after fifty years decides to open up and share hazy memories of things that happened long ago. Instead, we must imagine that the process of repeating what Jesus taught and memorizing it began in Jesus’ own lifetime, well before Easter. And we must imagine that, for the next fifty years, there was a community of believers who had heard Jesus, remembered his teachings, and repeated them to one another and to newcomers. This was the source of the gospels’ information. And this source did not stop the moment the gospels were written. We see traces of it in the Didache about A.D. 95-110.
This community of knowledge served as a bulwark for the church against gospels that violated the memory of Jesus. To put it bluntly, it would have been hard to pass off a pseudo-Jesus because the community would be able to spot a fraud a mile away. Eyewitnesses were still alive when the gospels were committed to writing, and those witnesses—along with all the other people who had heard and remembered and passed on the tradition—were the early church’s critical “check” against false teaching. This is why the church as a whole never accepted gospels like the Gospel of Thomas. And, by the way, this is what I have been teaching Houghton students in my Life of Christ class for the last twelve years.
Now you’ll have to excuse me while I go have a coffee and some chocolate.
Terence Paige, Professor of New Testament
posted by Religion and Philosophy at Houghton at
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