Oral Tradition and the Historical Reliability of the Gospels

Craig Blomberg has written extensively on the historical reliability of the Gospels.  In the relevant article in the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, he identifies a number of factors that support the probability that the Gospels faithfully preserve the oral traditions on which they are based.

1. Jesus was perceived by his followers as one who proclaimed God’s Word in a way which demanded careful retelling.

2. Over ninety percent of his teachings has poetic elements which would have made them easy to memorize.

3. The almost universal method of education in antiquity, and especially in Israel, was rote memorization, which enabled people accurately to recount quantities of material far greater than all of the Gospels put together.

4. Oral story-telling often permitted a wide range of freedom in selecting and describing details but required fixed points of a narrative to be preserved unchanged.

5. Written notes and a kind of shorthand were often privately kept by rabbis and their disciples, despite a publicly stated preference for oral tradition.

6. The lack of teachings ascribed to Jesus about later church controversies (e.g., circumcision, speaking in tongues) suggests that the disciples did not freely invent material and read it back onto the lips of Jesus.

7. The degree to which Jesus emphasized his imminent return, that is, to the exclusion of envisioning the establishment of an ongoing community of followers, has been exaggerated. Hence, the claim that the disciples would have had no interest in preserving the Gospel tradition until the second generation of Christianity is doubtful.

Significance of Names in the Bible

In biblical times, a name often had a significance far deeper than that of a mere personal label.

1. A name was given by a person in a position of authority, Ge 2:18 ff.

2. The giving of a name signified the appointment of the person to a specific function or relationship, Ge 35:17-18.

3. The giving of a name sometimes expressed a hope, Ge 29:32-35, or prophecy, Ho 1:4.

4. Often, names were given as a result of some circumstance at birth, Ge 10:25 19:22 25:30. In some case, this circumstance was itself prophetic, and described the character of the person to be, Ge 25:26.

5. When a person gives his name to another, this signifies their joining to each other in the closest unity, Isa 4:1 De 28:9-10.

6. In the NT, to ‘baptise into the name’ signifies identification, new ownership, union, loyalty, and fellowship.

7. The Scripture, the name frequently stands for the person himself, and the idea of total personal extinction is expressed by ‘cutting off’, ‘destroying’, ‘taking away’, or ‘blotting out’, the name. To ’forget’ the name is to forget the person, Jer 23:27.

8. God’s name often stands for his manifested attributes. Thus, his name is holy, because he is holy. To declare God’s name is to tell of his character and deeds, Ps 22:22; cf Mt 6:9.

9. God’s name is often suggestive of his active presence, 1Ki 18:24.

10. To go or speak in someone’s name is to go or speak with his authority – as if he were personally present and active.

Satire in the Bible

We tend to think of satire as a rather modern thing.  The 21st century, however, does not have a monopoly on stupidity, and therefore does not have a monopoly on the use of satire as a means to expose that stupidity.

Satire has three main elements: a target, a vehicle, and an implied against which the target is criticised.  Satire s often accompanied by a comical or mocking tone.

The flaws of biblical characters are often exposed satirically.  Satire also occur frequently in the Wisdom literature, where human follies such as greed, laziness are regular targets.

Satire occurs particularly often in the writings of the prophets, as a means of pronouncing God’s judgment on evil.  The Book of Amos is full of satire.

The Gospels contain much satire.  Religious hypocrites such as the Pharisees, are portrayed with satrical scorn.  The speeches of Jesus are frequently satirical (Matthew 23, for example), as are the parables.

The ‘great masterpiece’ of biblical satire is the book of Jonah. This writer attacks the kind of Jewish nationalism that refused to accept the universality of God’s grace.  The protagonist of the story upholds the very qualities the writer is holding to up satirical ridicule.  There is orinical humour in the ignomious behaviour of the wayward prophet.

Based on The Origin of the Bible (ed P.W. Comfort)

Not much laughter in the Bible?

The BBC has an interesting ‘Fact of the Day’:-

Of the 13 uses of the word ‘laughed’ in the Bible: 9 involve people being ‘laughed to scorn’ (usually accompanied by mocking and/or despising); two are bitter or ironic laughs; and one involves someone being frightened to admit to having laughed ironically. Only one of the 13 references can be reasonably described as cheerful, and that is in Job, one of the most miserable and dispiriting books in the Bible, as he recalls his former happiness before God and Satan conspired against him.

Well, that may be factually accurate.  But it is by no means a ‘brute fact’.  If we are meant to infer from this that the dominant mood of the Bible is one of despondency, misery or depression, that would be very far from the mark.  We should not over-generalise, the 66 books of the Bible having been written by many different people in different literary forms and genres over a long period of time.  However,  it would be fair to say that the biblical writers take a characteristically cheerful view of life.  It is true that most of them would probably struggle with our modern notion of ‘fun’.  But if you change the search term from ‘laughter’ to ‘joy’, for example, you would get a very different impression indeed.  ‘Joy’ occurs some 210 times in the Bible, ‘rejoice’ 124 times, and so on.

Serious? Yes.  Morose?  I don’t think so.

Is the Old Testament Ethical?

This is the title of a recent interview with Dr Peter Williams, Warden of Tyndale House.  With the criticisms of Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, ch. 7) particularly in mind, Williams gives a cogent series of responses to some of the more difficult and pressing worries that we (whether we are believers or not) may have about the morality of some of the things we find in the Old Testament.

Of course, Williams cannot offer, in the limited time afforded by an interview, a comprehensive set of answers.  And, in any case, if would be foolish of anyone to suppose that it is even possible to provide a neat set of knock-down arguments.  But I have to say that the lines of explanation offered in this interview are most helpful.  Williams constantly emphasises the contexts of the passages in question, and invites us to ask what the passages really say, not what we think they say either at a cursory glance or (worse still) at second- or third-hand.

To take one example:-

How (not) to interpret the Book of Revelation

I’ve suggested before that some of High Ross’ attempts to harmonise science and Scripture are unconvincing.

In my view, he threatens to brings the Bible into disrepute by imposing interpretative schemes that are untenable.  He writes:

My interpretative approach is to identify a passage in Revelation…as symbolic only it its implied symbol is used and defined elsewhere in the Bible or if certain words within the context clearly indicate that the author intended something other than a literal meaning.

Why The Universe Is The Way It Is, 196

We all know that the interpretation of book of Revelation is fraught with problems.  But Ross, it seems to me, has taken a wrong turn as soon as he gets down the driveway, and so he ends up in completely the wrong place.  Here, for example, is his attempt to subject the description of the New Jerusalem in Rev 21 to a ’scientific’ explanation:-

The walls of the New Jerusalem are said to be 216 feet (66 metres) thick.  The city’s length, width, and height measure 1,380 miles (2,220 kilometres) each.  The city has corners, implying that it is an enormous structure in the shape of a cube or perhaps a pyramid.  Thus, some kind of spacial dimensionality (or its equivalent) must exist in the new creation.  But gravity, mass, or both, at least as we know them, will not exist.  (Gravity turns all massive bodies larger than about 300 miles or 500 kilometres in diameter into spherical shapes).

Why The Universe Is The Way It Is, 197

Great Texts of the Bible – John 3:16

This verse has been called by Luther ‘the Bible in miniature’. It reveals the following aspects of God’s love:-

1. Its Author. God, in all his divine attributes. It is easy to imagine a man-made God, stripped of his moral glory, viewing the world with sentimental affection. But it is quite another thing to believe that the God of the Bible, full of majesty and might, is also full of love. Human love is at its best but a pale reflection of that divine love from which all human love flows, 1Jo 4:9,10,19 Ro 5:8-10. Sometmes God is pictured as a stern, unsmiling father who needed to have his bad attitude changed by a gentle, loving Jesus. But this is a caricature. Behind salvation lies the love of God himself. ‘It is easy to think of God as looking at men in their heedlessness and their disobedience and their rebellion and saying: “I’ll break them: I’ll discipline them and punish them and scourge them until they come back.” It is easy to think of God as seeking the allegiance of men in order to satisfy his own desire for power and for what we might call a completely subject universe. The tremendous thing about this text is that it shows us God acting not for his own sake, but for ours, not to satisfy his desire for power, not to bring a universe to heel, but to satisfy his love. God is not like an absolute monarch who treats each man as a subject to be reduced to abject obedience. God is the Father who cannot be happy until his wandering children have come home. God does not smash men into submission; he yearns over them and woos them into love.’ (DSB)

Biblical Inspiration: What’s Wrong With An Incarnational Model?

Many evangelicals have had a habit of drawing a parallel between the divine and human aspects of Scripture and the divine and human natures of Christ.

This matter is discussed by A.T.B. McGowan, in his book The Divine Spiration of Scripture (Apollos, 2007, pp119-121).  McGowan cites Peter Enns’ book Inspiration and Incarnation as attempting to solve some of the questions facing evangelicals with regard to various issues raised by Old Testament scholarship by appealing to an incarnational model of biblical inspiration.

One of the problems with an incarnational model are, according to McGowan, is that it not taught in Scripture itself.  Another, more fundamental, problem is that only God is divine and therefore only God can have a divine nature.  Of course, the Scriptures have divine characteristics, but they cannot have a divine nature.

John Webster puts it well:-

Like any extension of the notion of incarnation (in ecclesiology or ethics, for example), the result can be Christologically disastrous, in that it may threaten the uniqueness of the Word’s becoming flesh by making ‘incarnation’ a general principle or characteristic of divine action in, through or under creaturely reality.  But the Word made flesh and the scriptural word are in no way equivalent realities.  Moveover, the application of an analogy from the hypostatic union can scarcely avoid divinising the Bible by claiming some sort of ontological identity between the biblical texts and the self-communication of God.

On Spiritualising

To ’spiritualise’ is to assign a unwarranted spiritual meaning to a biblical text.

Graeme Goldsworthy gives, as one example, the following anecdote, in which a Christian teacher was attempting to expound 1 Samuel 17:40-51 (the story of David and Goliath):-

The fellow dressed up as Goliath had progressively revealed a list of childhood sins by peeling card-board strips off his breastplate one by one, as the speaker explained the kind of ‘Goliaths’ we all have to meet.  Then a strapping young David appeared on cue, and produced his arsenal – a sling labelled ‘faith’ and five stones listed as ‘obedience’, ’service’, ‘Bible-reading’, ‘prayer’, and ‘fellowship.  (G. Goldsworthy, Gospel and Kingdom, 10)

Christ and the Spirits in Prison

1 Peter 3:18-20 says, For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit, through whom also he went and preached to the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water.

What does it mean when it says that ’through the Spirit Christ went and preached to the spirits in prison’?

Who were the ’spirits in prison’?

What did Christ preach to them?

What does it mean when it says that he went and preached to them ‘through the Spirit’?

When did this take place?

The Sufficiency of Scripture

Three lines of argument converge to persuade us of the sufficiency of Scripture:-

(a) Jesus Christ. As Heb 1:1-2 asserts, the previous, and partial revelation of God is completed by the final and perfect revelation in Jesus Christ. And the Bible is the divinely-inspired testimony to the person and work of Christ.

(b) Salvation history. All that God has to do, and say, in connection with the bringing of salvation to the world, has been done and said.

(c) Scripture itself. Time and again the writers of Scripture draw attention to the finality of the message they have been given, cf Jer 23:16-18. Christ himself asserted strongly that the word of God could not be supplemented by the traditions of men, Mar 7:8. People who attempted to do so were nullifying the word of God. See also Gal 1:8; 2 Cor 11:4.

Quotes on the Bible

1. Men do not reject the Bible because it contradicts itself but because it contradicts them.

2. The Bible was the only book Jesus ever quoted, and then never as a basis for discussion but to decide the point at issue. (Leon Morris)

3. When you are reading a book in a dark room, and find it difficult, you take it to a window to get more light. So take your Bible to Christ. (McCheyne)