Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
That the stories and sayings of Jesus were circulating by word of mouth before the Gospels were written is generally a “fact” taken for granted today among New Testament scholars. That the first Gospel was “made up” the way other fanciful tales of miracle-working heroes were fabricated seems to be a contraband thought in mainstream … Continue reading “Taking Oral Tradition For Granted: Bultmann (1)”
Barry W. Henaut argues that the scholarly belief that “an extensive oral tradition existed behind the Gospels” has been essentially taken for granted rather than argued. In Oral Tradition and the Gospels: The Problem of Mark 4 Henaut introduces his study with reference to what even secular historians claim they can “know” about Jesus. Historian … Continue reading “The Problem of Oral Tradition and the Gospels: Barry Henaut’s introduction”
This post concludes Thomas Brodie’s critique of the role oral tradition has played in Biblical studies, especially with respect to accounting for the Gospel narratives about Jesus. It is taken from chapter 6 of The Birthing the New Testament: The Intertextual Development of the New Testament Writings. Even if a hypothesis is unclear in its … Continue reading “Oral Tradition Is Unnecessary to Explain the Gospels”
Thomas Brodie has shown that the theory that the Gospel narratives began as oral traditions is not founded on valid logical argument. Nonetheless, he recognizes that an idea that rests on little more than mere presumption “may still be useful as a working hypothesis.” So he proceeds to explore whether the theory of oral tradition … Continue reading “Oral Tradition in NT Studies is Unworkable”
My last post in this series ended with Thomas Brodie’s question: On what basis, then, is it possible to go on claiming oral tradition? Brodie asked this after surveying how Hermann Gunkel’s paradigm of oral tradition came to dominate biblical, and especially New Testament, studies, while at the same time pointing out the logical fallacies … Continue reading “Oral Tradition is Unfounded: from Kelber to Koester”
As signalled in a comment on my recent post on the single authorship of Genesis to 2 Kings, I have decided it best to back-track a little before continuing that series and posting a little on how oral tradition came to be a ruling paradigm among Biblical scholars and why an increasing number of scholars, … Continue reading “Oral Tradition Behind Gospels and OT: Unfounded, Unworkable and Unnecessary”
Thomas L. Thompson has hit the nail on the head when he explains why “historians” of the Bible place so much emphasis on oral tradition. Oral tradition, of course, is not a fact. That it existed cannot be verified. It is nothing more than a hypothesis, or really more an assumption of necessity than a … Continue reading “The origin of the ‘Oral Tradition’ hypothesis”
Bart Ehrman (BE) in Jesus, Interrupted, summarizes the standard view of how a long period of “oral tradition” preceded the writing of the first gospels. The Gospels of the New Testament, he writes, were written thirty-five to sixty-five years after Jesus’ death by people who did not know him, did not see anything he did … Continue reading “The “oral tradition” myth of gospel origins”
The Old Testament has traditionally been thought to have evolved in fits and starts over centuries, usually said to be from around the tenth to the third century, under the influence of Canaanite, Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures. One problem with that conventional view is that there is no material evidence for it. Prior to the … Continue reading “What Hellenistic Hebrew Bible origins explains more simply than the traditional view”
Theological Explanation of the Gospels Die theologische Erklärung der Evangelien by Bruno Bauer 1852 II. Strauss’ tradition hypothesis. Topic headings in the text below are my additions to Bauer’s text. 68 The proposition that language is the man and the word is the thing remains valid even when the language of a point of view … Continue reading “BRUNO BAUER: Theological Explanation of the Gospels – II. Strauss’s tradition hypothesis”
All posts reviewing Nathanael Vette’s Writing With Scripture are archived at Vette : Writing With Scripture With thanks to T&T Clark who forwarded me a review copy. The claim that the scriptural character of early Christian narrative illustrates its non-historical character is one conservative exegetes have been anxious to dismiss and radical exegetes have been … Continue reading ““Some Underlying Tradition” — a review of Writing With Scripture, part 10″
I wrote in the previous post that certain New Testament scholarship comes across as trying to establish the historicity of this or that detail in the Gospels by relying upon a naive reading of the text and concluding that if we cannot trace the event to some other literary influence then, by default, it is … Continue reading “A side-note on evidence for “scripturalized tradition” behind the gospels”
3. The Incarnation of the two forms of the Torah, the Written Torah and the Oral Torah Nanine Charbonnel stresses the Jewishness — the “Jewish rootedness” — of the interpretations that have been discussed in this series of posts. In the words (translated) of Jacqueline Genot-Bismuth, The principle of the dissociation of the Message and … Continue reading “Jesus: Incarnation of Written and Oral Torah. part 3 of 3 (Charbonnel contd)”
Nanine Charbonnel’s thesis: Jesus of the gospels originated as a natural product of Jewish interpretation of their Scriptures and belief that the Divine Presence was to be found in the words of the Torah. The Oral Torah was understood to teach how to apply the Written Torah and Jesus was created as the personification of … Continue reading “Jesus: Incarnation of Written and Oral Torah. part 2 of 3 (Charbonnel contd)”