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.

Are the Gospels Reliable?

Some time ago, Mark Roberts posted a fine series on this subject.  This has since into a book published by Crossway.  Mark’s work is in the tradition of F.F. Bruce’s The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable and also has affinities with Craig Blomberg’s Historical Reliability of the Gospels.

You can listen to an interview with Mark on this subject here.  And here are the links to his very helpful series:-

The Myth of Christian Origins 3

The myth popularised by Dan Brown and others is that Jesus was just a good man who went around inspiring others to be good people.  The canonical Gospels suppressed these very human characteristics, in order to present Jesus as divine.

The Myth of Christian Origins 2

So, was there a multitude of ancient documents relating to Jesus, the majority of which were suppressed?

There is no point in looking (as some popular writers suppose we can) at the Dead Sea Scrolls.  They are Jewish documents, and have little or nothing to do with Jesus.  But, at about the same time that they were discovered, the Nag Hammadi documents came to light.  These include the well-known Gospel of Thomas.  Are the Nag Hammadi documents the earliest Christian writings, perhaps taking us right back to to Jesus himself?  In a word – no.  The Nag Hammadi documents represent a form of Gnostic literature, and date from the late 2nd century at the earliest.  They represent dependence on, and a theological departure from, the canonical literature.

The Myth of Christian Origins 1

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is well past its sell-by date now.  But it has given wings to a fanciful myth about Christian origins which had being crawling around in the academic world in the US and elsewhere but has now, thanks to Brown’s book, nested in the public consciousness.

What is this myth?  The redoubtable New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, in the course of a lecture given in 2005 which exposes the sillinesses of the above-mentioned book, outlines the five elements of the Myth of Christian Origins:-