Stories about Jesus Before the Gospels: Oral Traditions in the Early Church

Episode Outline:
0:00 What do New Testament scholars mean by “oral tradition”?
0:25 Megan introduces the topic of Jesus before the Bible
0:55 Bart on the semester rhythm, first-year students, and class timing
3:35 The basics: what an oral tradition is
5:23 How scholars identify material that may have originated orally
7:39 Which New Testament books rely most heavily on oral tradition
9:03 Do the non-canonical Gospels also preserve oral traditions?
10:30 Were the Gospel writers reproducing oral traditions verbatim?
13:28 How much of the New Testament may be based on oral traditions?
14:35 What oral traditions can show us about early Christian beliefs
17:50 Why oral tradition is not like a stable chain of exact repetition
20:23 Can oral traditions still get us back to the earliest Christians?
22:38 Can we recover a historically reliable picture of Jesus from them?
26:07 Why ancient storytellers could sincerely think they were telling the “same” story
28:53 Why memory studies matter for Gospel research
31:29 Weekly Update: Bart’s upcoming November course on scribal changes
34:05 Bart’s Soapbox: bad logic in skeptical arguments
39:31 Final summary: why oral tradition matters, but does not make the Gospels useless

Episode Description

The New Testament writings were produced decades after Jesus' death, but long before that people were passing along stories about Jesus and devising poems and creeds about their new-found faith. What do scholars know about these Christian traditions that were being passed along and preserved by word of mouth in the years before we had written texts. Scholars call them "oral traditions." How do we know such things existed, and can we be certain that they were passed along reliably before there were Christian writings?

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New Testament Scholarship for Non-Scholars

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Megan asks Bart:

-What, exactly, is an oral tradition, and what are NT scholars referring to when they talk about an oral tradition in the NT?

-When you’re working with a text corpus, how do you go about identifying components that might have originated in an oral, spoken tradition?

-Are there specific book in the NT that show features of an oral tradition particularly strongly, or books that seem to rely more on an oral tradition than others?

-What about non-canonical works?

-Do academics think that the writers of the NT are reproducing this oral tradition verbatim, or writing based on the stories they’d heard?

-Is there any way to estimate how much of the NT is based on oral traditions?

-Do the oral elements present in the NT hint at an older tradition than the sections that were always written texts?

-Do you think it’s possible to get back to what the earliest Christians believed based on these oral traditions, or have their stories been retold and changed so much that it’s not possible?

-Do you think we can get back to any kind of reliable, historical narrative of Jesus’ life?