Oral tradition and the historical Jesus

The Oral Tradition, is the cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. Although the Jews at the time of Jesus

Second Temple Judaism

Second Temple Judaism refers to the religion of Judaism during the Second Temple period, between the construction of the second Jewish temple in Jerusalem in 515 BCE, and its destruction by the Romans in 70 CE This period witnessed major historical upheavals and significant religious changes that...

had a writing system, they had also developed an extensive oral tradition

Oral Torah

The Oral Torah comprises the legal and interpretative traditions that, according to tradition, were transmitted orally from Mount Sinai, and were not written in the Torah...

which remained an important aspect of Pharisaic scholarship until the Destruction of the Second Temple.

Sitz im Leben

Jesus was Jewish. Mary, his mother, was a Jew, and Judaism was the religion he practiced
throughout his life. Jesus' teachings focused on the Jewish issues of his day — how to interpret the written Law of Moses, when the Kingdom of Heaven

Kingdom of Heaven

Kingdom of Heaven may refer to:* Kingdom of God, a foundational theological concept in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam* Kingdom of Heaven , a 2005 film, directed by Ridley Scott...

would appear, and how to behave righteously.

Like Jesus himself, his disciples

Disciple (Christianity)

In Christianity, the disciples were the students of Jesus during his ministry. While Jesus attracted a large following, the term disciple is commonly used to refer specifically to "the Twelve", an inner circle of men whose number perhaps represented the twelve tribes of Israel...

were Jewish and Torah-observant. They thought of Jesus as a Rabbi and possibly a Messiah figure. After the Crucifixion of Jesus

Crucifixion of Jesus

The crucifixion of Jesus and his ensuing death is an event that occurred during the 1st century AD. Jesus, who Christians believe is the Son of God as well as the Messiah, was arrested, tried, and sentenced by Pontius Pilate to be scourged, and finally executed on a cross...

, James the brother of Jesus, became their leader. As Jews, this group worshiped at the Temple in Jerusalem

Temple in Jerusalem

The Temple in Jerusalem or Holy Temple , refers to one of a series of structures which were historically located on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem, the current site of the Dome of the Rock. Historically, these successive temples stood at this location and functioned as the centre of...

, revered written Law

Law

Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...

(Torah Shebiktav) and the Oral tradition

Oral tradition

Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...

(Torah sheh-b'al peh). This Oral Tradition interpreted the Law given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai.

The Oral Tradition is often misunderstood as having been given, in its totality, on Mount Sinai along with the Law. Sometimes it is even pictured as a kind of secret lore that was passed on, person to person, whispered to select individuals throughout history from Moses on down to the present day. In fact, the Oral Tradition is analogous to judicial precedent: the ever-growing body of interpretation of the Law, with its cases, judgments and precedents. This tradition of debating, interpreting, agreeing upon, or continuing to disagree about the meaning of the fixed text was "Oral Tradition" of the Jews at the time of Jesus. It was in this cultural context or Sitz im Leben

Sitz im Leben

In Biblical criticism, Sitz im Leben is a German phrase roughly translating to "setting in life".-Origins:The term originated with the German Protestant theologian Hermann Gunkel. The term Sitz im Volksleben was employed for the first time in 1906 and the term Sitz im Leben in 1917...

that the Oral Tradition evolved in Christianity, as Jesus and later Christian rabbis, in true rabbinic style, offered their interpretation of the Torah forming a distinct Christian logia.

Diaspora

A rich Oral Tradition had developed, along side the written one during the Second Temple period. This Oral Tradition was not simply hearsay. It represented the Divine will— an all encompassing Torah that would come to an abrupt end in the year 70. In that year, the Second Temple at Jerusalem was destroyed

Siege of Jerusalem (70)

The Siege of Jerusalem in the year 70 AD was the decisive event of the First Jewish-Roman War. The Roman army, led by the future Emperor Titus, with Tiberius Julius Alexander as his second-in-command, besieged and conquered the city of Jerusalem, which had been occupied by its Jewish defenders in...

, and the Hebrew community of Jerusalem was scattered though out the different nations of the Roman Empire in what is called the Diaspora

Diaspora

A diaspora is "the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland" or "people dispersed by whatever cause to more than one location", or "people settled far from their ancestral homelands".The word has come to refer to historical mass-dispersions of...

. There was a new reality. If the oral traditions of the Second Temple period were not written down, they would be lost. This Oral Tradition (from Palestine before 70 CE) was transmitted orally for over a decade by the Palestinian Jewish Christians in Diaspora before the logia was written down.

From Oral Tradition to written Gospel

Most critical scholars today would accept the view that the texts of the first written accounts of Jesus Christ were based upon the Oral Tradition. Some scholars believe these early writings were based directly upon the Oral Tradition, while others argue others argue that the Christian logia grew into pericopes, which were in turn collected into still larger accounts or proto-Gospels. Then the Gospel authors further developed these proto-Gospels into the final Gospels we have in our canon. Scholars are in general agreement that the Christians up to the destruction of the Temple had no written Gospels being circulated among them.

The writings of the Church fathers also tend to confirm that the Oral Tradition was the basis of the earliest gospels. Matthew was said to have been part of the scattered ie (the diaspora

Diaspora

or Tefutzot תפוצות, "to scatter"). More importantly, the Church Fathers record that when he was about to leave, he reduced the Oral Tradition to written form. Papias stated "Matthew wrote down (synetaxato) the "logia" in the Hebrew language (Hebraidi dialekto), and each interpreted (hermeneusen) them as best he could. Matthew's Hebrew Gospel was believed to be one of the earliest written and was circulated under the title the Gospel of the Hebrews

Gospel of the Hebrews

The Gospel of the Hebrews , commonly shortened from the Gospel according to the Hebrews or simply called the Hebrew Gospel, is a hypothesised lost gospel preserved in fragments within the writings of the Church Fathers....

.

When Peter (one of the twelve disciples and a Jew) left Jerusalem, he preached the Gospel orally to the Jewish diaspora

Jewish diaspora

The Jewish diaspora is the English term used to describe the Galut גלות , or 'exile', of the Jews from the region of the Kingdom of Judah and Roman Iudaea and later emigration from wider Eretz Israel....

in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia Minor and Bithynia and eventually went to Rome.
However it was Peter's scribe

Scribe

A scribe is a person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession and helps the city keep track of its records. The profession, previously found in all literate cultures in some form, lost most of its importance and status with the advent of printing...

Mark

Mark the Evangelist

Mark the Evangelist is the traditional author of the Gospel of Mark. He is one of the Seventy Disciples of Christ, and the founder of the Church of Alexandria, one of the original four main sees of Christianity....

who first reduced the Oral Tradition of Peter to written form. According to Jerome, Mark set down these teachings of Peter in what is now called the Gospel of Mark

Gospel of Mark

The Gospel According to Mark , commonly shortened to the Gospel of Mark or simply Mark, is the second book of the New Testament. This canonical account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth is one of the three synoptic gospels. It was thought to be an epitome, which accounts for its place as the second...

Modern scholars agree that Mark composed the first gospel, in Koine Greek

Koine Greek

Koine Greek is the universal dialect of the Greek language spoken throughout post-Classical antiquity , developing from the Attic dialect, with admixture of elements especially from Ionic....

. Peter is said to have reviewed this work and given it his blessing, elevating the Gospel of Mark

Gospel of Mark

to the level of an eyewitness account. The Gospel of Mark was widely circulated and scholars agree that it was a primary source used in the writing of later gospels.

The Evangelists

Today, most scholars believe the Christian Oral Tradition

Logia

In New Testament scholarship, the term logia is a term applied to collections of sayings credited to Jesus. Such a collection of sayings of Jesus are believed to be referred to by Papias of Hierapolis...

was what the first Evangelists

Four Evangelists

In Christian tradition the Four Evangelists are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the authors attributed with the creation of the four Gospel accounts in the New Testament that bear the following titles:*Gospel according to Matthew*Gospel according to Mark...

drew upon when composing their gospels. This Oral Tradition consisted of several distinct components. Parables and aphorisms were the "bedrock of the tradition." Pronouncement stories, (scenes that culminate with a saying of Jesus), controversy stories (in which Jesus is in conflict with religious authorities) miracles stories (including healing, exorcisms, and nature wonders) and commissioning stories were also important aspect of the Christian Oral Traition.

Although this Jewish/Christian midrash

Midrash

The Hebrew term Midrash is a homiletic method of biblical exegesis. The term also refers to the whole compilation of homiletic teachings on the Bible....

was generally considered reliable it was not historical, but theological in nature. Form criticism

Form criticism

Form criticism is a method of biblical criticism that classifies units of scripture by literary pattern and that attempts to trace each type to its period of oral transmission. Form criticism seeks to determine a unit's original form and the historical context of the literary tradition. Hermann...

(Formgeschichte) was developed primarily by the German scholars Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Martin Dibelius, and Rudolf Bultmann. The oral model developed by the form critics drew heavily on contemporary theory of Jewish folkloric transmission of oral material, and as a result of this form criticism one can trace the development of the early gospel tradition. However, "Today it is no exaggeration to claim that a whole spectrum of main assumptions underlying Bultmann's Synoptic Tradition must be considered suspect."

A number of other models have been proposed which posit greater control over the tradition, to varying degrees. For example, largely in response to form critical scholarship, Professor Birger Gerhardsson

Birger Gerhardsson

Birger Gerhardsson, born 1926, is a Swedish Biblical scholar and professor emeritus in the Faculty of Theology at Lund University, Sweden. His primary academic focus has been on the transmission and development of the oral traditions of the New Testament gospels.-Selected bibliography:* "Memory and...

examined oral transmission in early rabbinic circles, and proposed that a more controlled and formal model of orality would more accurately reflect the transmission of the Jesus tradition in early Christian circles, and therefore that the oral traditions present in the gospels have been fairly reliably and faithfully transmitted. Professor Kenneth Bailey, after spending a great deal of time in remote and illiterate villages in the Middle East, used his experience with orality in such places to formulate a similar model of controlled transmission within the early Christian communities, but posited an informal mechanism of control. Controlled models of the Jesus tradition, and with them an evaluation of the gospels as possessing greater historical reliability, have been accepted by several scholars in recent years.

Reliability

The Oral Tradition may be accepted if it satisfies either two "broad conditions" or six "particular conditions", as follows:

Broad conditions of Reliability.
1. The tradition should be supported by an unbroken series of witnesses, reaching from the immediate and first reporter of the fact to the living mediate witness from whom we take it up, or to the one who was the first to commit it to writing.
2. There should be several parallel and independent series of witnesses testifying to the fact in question.
Particular conditions formulated.
1. The tradition must report a public event of importance, such as would necessarily be known directly to a great number of persons.
2. The tradition must have been generally believed, at least for a definite period of time.
3. During that definite period it must have gone without protest, even from persons interested in denying it.
4. The tradition must be one of relatively limited duration. [Elsewhere, Garraghan suggests a maximum limit of 150 years, at least in cultures that excel in oral remembrance.]
5. The critical spirit must have been sufficiently developed while the tradition lasted, and the necessary means of critical investigation must have been at hand.
6. Critical-minded persons who would surely have challenged the tradition — had they considered it false — must have made no such challenge.

These and other methods of verifying oral tradition must be applied to the Sitz im Leben

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