In the last post, I introduced the quest for the Historical Jesus defining it as “the reconstruction of the life and teachings of Jesus by critical historical methods, in contrast to religious interpretations”. Furthermore, I have shown the basic (minimal facts) about Jesus’ life based on the writings of Paul. Most importantly, I gave the chronology of Jesus’ life and the development of the movement after his death with emphasis on the relevant sources. Since the latter is crucial for just about every aspect of this quest, I’ll put the same illustration here.

TRANSMISSION OF THE STORIES ABOUT JESUS BY THE WORD OF MOUTH

Perhaps the most startling thing about these dates for the historian is the long interval between Jesus’ death and the earliest accounts of his life. As you can see, our first written biographies of Jesus appear to date from 35 to 65 years after the fact. It’s like having the first written record of Tito’s death appear today! With regards to John’s Gospel, it would be like having stories about a famous preacher from the end of World War II show up in print for the first time this week! What was happening over these 30, 40, 50, or 60 years between Jesus’ death and the writing of the Gospels? Without a doubt, the most important thing that was happening for early Christianity was the spread of the religion. Christianity spread by the word of mouth. People like Paul actively propagated the faith thus converting Jews and Gentiles to faith in Christ as the Son of God who died for our sins but then was resurrected from the dead by God himself. Was every story about Jesus told by one of the apostles or eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life? Impossible. The mission went on for years and years all over the map of the Roman Empire. The stories were told in different countries, from Judea and Antioch to Egypt, Galilee, Syria, and all the way to Italy, and Spain. These stories were told in a language other than Jesus’ own. Jesus spoke Aramaic while most of the converts spoke Greek. But how does the oral tradition actually works?

WHAT CAN STUDIES IN ORAL TRADITION TELL US ABOUT THE STORIES THAT GET TRANSMITTED FOR YEARS BEFORE THEY ARE WRITTEN DOWN?

Couple of years ago, I got really interested in this question. Actually, I was writing a scholarly article about the Historical Jesus and I wanted to know more about the ways in which the oral transmissions of the stories actually works. For several months I’ve read only about that! And there is in fact massive research done on oral traditions. By people who are interested in antiquity, but also by people who are interested in a modern world. From Milman Perry (who actually studied traditional Yugoslavian songs and how they are transmitted) and Albert Lord (who was his student) to Walter Ong, Jack Goody, and Jan Vansina. All of these people (and countless others) wrote detailed studies on oral traditions. They all agree that when traditions get passed down orally, even in oral cultures where you would think that they will keep everything 100 % right, they are prone to change! Often quite significantly. What about the narrative traditions (stories about someone’s life)? A classical study of narrative traditions in oral cultures by Jan Vansina (“Oral Tradition: A Study of Historical Methodology“) illustrates this phenomenon. A key point for Vansina is that tradition involves a chain of transmission that can be charted as follows: observer – prototestimony – the chain of transmission – final informant – recorder – earliest written record. The problem with this chain of transmission is that something in the narrative can get changed at every point. In other words, every time a tradition is recited the testimony may be a variant version. This fits well with what psychologists have been telling us about human memory and how we tend to forget things from the past. This is a whole other area of research that can be summed up with the following conclusion: People are inclined to distort their memories, especially the details of the stories they heard or saw. The gist of the event usually stays imprinted, but the details are prone to change without even realizing that the change has been made. Traditions experience massive changes not simply because people have bad memories. That may be true as well, but even more important, as Vansina discovered, when people pass along “testimonies” about the past, they are telling the stories for a particular reason to a particular audience, and “the amount of interest [the teller] can arouse in his audience largely depends on the way he tells the story and on the individual twist he gives it.” As a result, “the tradition inevitably becomes distorted.”

FIRST CHRISTIANS: PASSING THE STORIES ABOUT JESUS’ LIFE

So, that’s what happens in every oral culture that has been studied (from Africa to Palestine). Is this true with the early Christians and their stories about Jesus as well? Did they change and distort stories during the transmission period? There is only one way to find out! You have to carefully compare the stories between the Gospels. When two authors (e.g. Mark, and Matthew) tell us the same story about Jesus’ life, do they tell it in the same way or not? Are there any discrepancies or not? Needless to say, if two people tell a story that is at odds with each other, both can’t be right! They are either both wrong, or one of them is. If I tell you that on June 29th I gave a lecture at the Summer School for Latin Language and Culture in Zadar where I talked about the history of the Christian belief in Heaven and Hell, but my friend who was also there, claims that the lecture actually took place on June 28th, then both of us can’t be right! Either we are both wrong, or one of us is! As a historian, I do see examples of discrepancies in the Gospels. In a recent post, I gave my favorite example of that related to the death of Judas. But there are other examples as well. Let’s take my second favorite: Jairus’s daughter! According to Mark, a leader of a local synagogue named Jairus came to Jesus asking him to heal his daughter who was seriously sick. Jesus agrees but before he could get to her, a woman with a hemorrhage interrupts him asking to heal her first. In the meantime, servants from Jairus’s house arrive to tell him that it is to late – the girl has died. Jesus assures them that everything will be okay. He goes to the house and raises the girl from the dead (Mk 5, 21-43). Matthew has the same story, but with a crucial difference. In his version, Jairus comes to Jesus informing him that his daughter is already dead. Therefore, he doesn’t ask Jesus to heal his daughter but to raise her from the dead – which Jesus manages to do (Mt 9, 18-26). So, did Jarius’s daughter die before he came to Jesus or after that? I think that this is a contradiction that can’t be roconciled in a plausible way!

And it’s not like others haven’t tried to do that. Recently, an Anglican theologian and a priest Matthew Firth gave his own solution to this conundrum. To explain what he did, I have to dig a little bit into the grammar of the Greek language, but hopefully, you won’t fall asleep! In the Gospel of Matthew, Jairus said to Jesus: Ἡ θυγάτηρ μου ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν. Instead of a classical translation “My daughter has just died“, Firth thinks that the death hasn’t happened yet. To be more precise, Firth claims that the word ἐτελεύτησεν can mean two things: a person has died or a person is just about to die (he/she is on the verge of death). To prove that, Firth uses an example from the Epistle to the Hebrews (11,22) where, as he claims, the same verb is used to denote someone who is at the very point of death, but hasn’t died still! He also asserts that ἄρτι could denote a feeling of an inevitable reality that is just about to happen. Howerer, the rule of Greek grammar works against Firth’s position. In a nutshell: ἄρτι can denote things that didn’t happen yet, but only if the word is in a particular grammatical construction. In the case of Matthew’s Gospel, ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν is aorist active indicative (third person singular) construction that usually indicates something thas has already happened. Simply put, it’s a past tense. Moreover, when you have ἄρτι + verb in aorist active indicative you can be sure that the author is reporting something that happened. Finally, the example from the Epistle to the Hebrews that Firth uses is a flaw one because there you don’t have a verb in aorist active indicative tense, but the present participle (τελευτῶν) which is totally different thing!

All of the discrepancies posit a particular problem to a historian. We can’t just read the four Gospels from the beginning to the end and accept everything as a historical event described accurately. The reasons for discrepancies are, in my opinion, numerous, but the main ones are the nature of the oral tradition and the way human memory works. People told stories about Jesus day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade up until the evangelists put those stories in writing. In that process a lot of details got mixed up, changed or even invented. Consequently, we have four different biographies of Jesus written by four different authors from four different areas of the Roman Empire. Of course, there is a lot of agreement between them as well (especially between Mark, Luke, and Matthew) – but there are also differences and contradictions, especially in the details of Jesus’ life. Finally, the authors of the Gospels weren’t eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life but later followers who collected those oral traditions (plus some earlier written accounts probably) thus constructing their own portray of Jesus’ words and deeds, his life, death, and the resurection. But, more on that in the next post!