JESUS BEFORE THE GOSPELS:
How the Earliest Christians Remembered,
Changed and Invented Their Stories of the
Savior
By Bart Ehrman
HarperOne. 326 pages. £25.50
ISBN 978 0 062 285 201
Bart Ehrman’s literary assault on biblical authority continues with his latest book, Jesus before the Gospels.
The heart of his message is that oral tradition – certainly over a period of decades – is unreliable, and that people’s memories play tricks on them. Since the Gospels did not begin to be written until about AD70 (his estimate), they are not historically trustworthy. Much of Ehrman’s book repeats what he has previously written and, in that respect, for anyone who has read several of his books, certain aspects may be tiresome.
Not a professional
Once again he again refers to Acts 4.13, this time to suggest that John was ‘literally “unlettered” … that is, he did not know his alphabet’ (p.109). In fact, that is not what the passage suggests. The words there do not mean ‘unlearned and ignorant’ (as KJV). To be agrammatoi is to lack scribal training – opposite of grammateus, professional ‘scribe’. An ‘idiōtēs is one outside a group, i.e. of professional scribes and priests – i.e. a layman, not a priest. John was not one of the Scribes.
Yet Ehrman states that John was ‘a peasant fisherman from rural Galilee who was known to be illiterate’. In fact, his father Zebedee must have been a successful fisherman, because he could afford to hire servants (Mark 1.19-20). On this basis, John could have had a reasonable education.
Who wrote the Gospels?
Ehrman claims that the Gospel writers are all anonymous, and that their names were added ‘near the end of the second Christian century…’. One would have thought that he would, at least, have engaged with the writings of Martin Hengel on the subject, who noted that no other names are ever associated with these Gospels, yet, for whatever reason, Ehrman fails to do so and simply proceeds on the basis of their supposed anonymity. He states that, with the exception of Papias ‘writing in about 120 or 130…’ (p.111), the names of the authors are never given until the later second century.
However, this ignores the point that the early Christians tended to refer to the four Gospels together as the one ‘Gospel of Jesus Christ’. Ehrman notes that Justin Martyr (c.150) ‘jumbled’ his quotations from the Gospels, such that some scholars think he was referring to a ‘harmony’ of them (p.119), which surely supports this point. One wonders why Ehrman does not interact with the writings of Graham Stanton on this point (e.g. Jesus and Gospel, p.85), where the latter suggests that by 150 the four-gospel codex was established, which further explains why Justin would handle his material in this way. Ehrman mentions that Justin calls the Gospels ‘memoirs of the apostles’ (p.118), but suggests that the meaning is confusing.
This is a surprising comment, since in 1 Apology 66 Justin writes: ‘For the apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, which are called Gospels… . Stanton (p.76) notes on Justin: ‘In Dialogue 103.8 he refers to “the memoirs composed by the apostles and those who followed them”…’ Matthew and John were apostles; Luke and Mark were among those ‘who followed them’. Is not that a most obvious indication that the early church did indeed know the identity of the authors?
Not apostles
Ehrman’s suggestion as to why the names of the authors were ‘chosen’ – that such were ‘obvious’ candidates – is unconvincing (p. 125). John, obviously, was a prominent apostle, but the same cannot be said of Matthew, who is never mentioned in depth beyond his conversion and who was not present at vital incidents such as the Transfiguration. Mark was not an apostle, and the story of his desertion of Paul and Barnabas on the first missionary journey surely tells against him – unless he were indeed the author of the Gospel. Luke was a Gentile, and most Jews would not have been receptive to a purported Scripture by an outsider, so the appending of his name is unthinkable, unless it was authentic. Yet Ehrman regards the ‘choice’ of names as evidence of ‘distorted memories’.
Central point
Distortion of memory and the unreliability of it is his central point. It is this issue which makes this volume distinctive in relation to his other books. His starting point is the claim that ‘people in oral cultures… had better memories than we do today; and… preserved their traditions about the past accurately…’ (p.1).
It is this assertion that he seeks to challenge. In the course of enabling this, he spent ‘two years’ intensively ‘reading about memory’ (p.2) looking at the writings of anthropologists and psychologists on the subject. Clearly, if the aforementioned claim about oral cultures is invalidated by such studies, then the assertion that the words and acts of Jesus were accurately preserved by oral tradition from the time of Jesus’s departure from this world until the writing of the Gospels several decades later is likewise undermined (unless one falls back on supernatural aid therein).
One problem is that the actual studies quoted by Ehrman are limited in nature. Also, related to this, would not such an approach invalidate all history (save that recently filmed)? How do we know that Caesar did land in Britain? Or that the Vikings stormed Lindisfarne, etc.? What immediate notes were taken as such actions occurred?
Self contradictory author
The other, more serious issue, is that Ehrman seems to contradict himself. For example, he states ‘most of the time our memories are pretty good’ (p.20). Indeed, as the book progresses, the issue of the fallibility of memory become obscured by that of ‘distortion of memory’ – which is not really a matter of recall, but rather of philosophi-cal/theological invention.
For example, Ehrman refers to the legends about Peter in the second-century Acts of Peter, which he presents as an example of such ‘distorted memory’ (pp.26-27). Yet surely the presentation of such a late work as ‘distorted memory’ is itself a distortion. The issue of memory is not germane here; rather, it is that of theological innovation.
Negligence
Ehrman neglects two important points in his work. Firstly, in relation to apocryphal works such as Acts of Peter, the Criteria of Canonicity held that a book must be by an apostle or associate; written in the apostolic age (i.e. the first century); and enjoy a tradition of use in a range of apostolic churches. Yet Ehrman wrongly declares that the reason the Four Gospels were deemed authoritative is because their picture of Jesus was ‘widely acceptable’ (p.123). He does not address the Criteria of Canonicity.
Secondly, Ehrman himself makes the point that ‘We can check an oral report… against a written record’ (p.182). Most scholars – apparently, Ehrman included – believe in the existence of Q as the common source, and Theodor Zahn (d.1933) suggested an Aramaic original of Matthew, which would tie-in with what Papias states. After all, why is Matthew’s conversion singled out when it is? Unlike Peter and Andrew, Jesus never tells Matthew that he would be a ‘fisher of men’; as a tax-collector, he kept records.
Quite obviously, he could have done so as Jesus spoke and acted. This record would therefore be a contemporary account of the ministry of Jesus, and provide both a basis and a rule of measure for any later writings. Probably this is what Papias suggests that Matthew did. Yet Ehrman never even considers this.
Uncomfortable for Muslims
Interestingly, there does not seem to be the usual enthusiasm and continual quotation of Ehrman by Muslim polemicists in regard to this book. Perhaps it is because it is devastating to their traditional claims about the Qur’an and Hadith. The only way we are supposed to know how the Qur’an came into being is through the Hadith – Zaid ibn Thabit is said to have compiled the Qur’an during the reign of the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, from ‘(what was written on) palmed stalks, thin white stones and also from the men who knew it by heart’ (Sahih Bukhari Volume 6, Book 61, Number 509).
The problem is that the Hadith corpus was only compiled 200 years after the event. Ask a Muslim how he can be sure about the information therein and he will answer that it was preserved through oral tradition, specifically through memorisation. Where do we get the information on that? From the Hadith! The circularity of the argument is obvious.
Crucially, there is no contemporary ‘written record’ from the time of Muhammad or Abu Bakr to check that the oral tradition has been accurately preserved. Ehrman’s book is more problematic for Muslim polemicists than for Christians.
