Oral gospel traditions

The tradition & historical record

Oral gospel traditions is the hypothetical first stage in the formation of the written gospels as information was passed by word of mouth. These oral traditions included different types of stories about Jesus. For example, people told anecdotes about Jesus healing the sick and debating with his opponents. The traditions also included sayings attributed to Jesus, such as parables 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. ¹

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, formulated by Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann, dominated Biblical scholarship. Modern media criticism began with Birger Gerhardsson, a Swedish scholar who was the first to challenge 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. Two decades later, Werner Kelber drew on various fields such as communications media and cultural studies and applied them to the Bible, opposing form-critical views of a steady evolution of the Jesus traditions. He argued instead that the transition from oral tradition to the written gospels, namely the Gospel of Mark, represented a disruption of transmission. Kelber compared oral tradition to a "biosphere" rather than a medium; oral tradition provides a context, not just a medium, of tradition. Kenneth Bailey published in 1991 an essay titled "Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels". In it, Bailey presented a model of oral tradition based on contemporary traditions in the Middle East. Bailey argued that communities, especially leading members, informally controlled oral traditions to a degree, preventing core parts of stories from major change. ¹

Biblical scholars use a variety of critical methodologies known as biblical criticism. 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 studies, but other scholars soon adopted and adapted his methods to the study of the New Testament. 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. 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, 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. 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 orally. ¹

Burkett writes that modern scholars posit the formation of the gospels to an oral stage including stories and teachings of Jesus, a stage where the oral traditions were written down in collections, written proto-gospels, and the canonical gospels composed with such sources. According to Chris Keith, there is no incontrovertible evidence the gospel traditions circulated as written narratives, testimonia, or notes prior to Mark. Nicholas Elder argues that Mark is an oral work involving a speaker and a writer who composed the text. Werner Kelber argued that the transition from oral sources to the written Gospel represented a break in transmission, though James Dunn and Rafael Rodriguez argues that Mark largely preserved the Jesus tradition back to his lifetime. Mark, Matthew and Luke are known as the Synoptic Gospels 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. Helen Bond observes a scholarly turn against source-criticism of the gospels, such as a “pre-Markan passion narrative,” while she agrees Mark had access to a body of oral tradition. The most popular scholarly theory is the Two-source hypothesis, where the authors of Matthew and Luke used the gospel of Mark and a hypothetical Q source. Alternative theories that posit direct use of Matthew by Luke or vice versa without Q are increasing in popularity within scholarship. Modern scholarship emphasizes the evangelists' authorial activity over positing hypothetical sources. ¹

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. 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. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Oral gospel traditions”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Oral gospel traditions is Oral stage in the formation of the gospels, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 2 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²