I have made various arguments in the past for Mark and all of our extant gospels being retellings of a story already known, at least to some extent:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3818.
One logical error that I see interpreters of the "no oral tradition" camp falling into time after time (mainly on this forum, but occasionally in the scholarly literature, as well) is the following:
- Many/most of the gospel stories about Jesus are based upon scriptural precedents (the feeding of the five thousand, for example, being based upon a similar feeding by Elijah).
- Therefore the story of the feeding of the five thousand is a literary creation accomplished without the use of oral tradition.
Or some similar variant of this fallacy in two steps. Yet it is obvious that people can develop such stories orally (in their preaching, for example) as well as in a more literary fashion (pen to parchment, one line at a time, some well-worn scriptural scroll immediately to hand). This leads me to believe that what is actually meant by the term "oral tradition," for many, is a tradition which goes back to an historical Jesus. It is not the original orality of the stories that is at stake, but rather the historicity of the man about whom the stories were being told. Or, at least, to rule out an oral origin for such stories is a bare assumption (in agreement with what Irish1975 seems to assert).
I have given both of these examples before, but I myself grew up in evangelical circles in which it was assumed (A) that Jesus was not very good looking and (B) that his beard was ripped out during his passion. I never read either of these details from the gospels; that was impossible, since they are not there. Rather, the sources for these two data are (A) Isaiah 53.2b and (B) Isaiah 50.6b. Modern churchgoing Christians still play the same game that the early Christians played: they tease details about Jesus out of the Hebrew scriptures. I heard both of these details from Sunday School classes and sermons, not from books. I grew up assuming that both were in the gospels somewhere, and I discovered in early adulthood that this assumption was wrong.
For me, a big question is whether the evangelists themselves originated whichever materials we are considering at the time. We are aware of many cases in which they are probably not. If Mark came first, for example, then much of Matthew did not originate with Matthew! (And vice versa, if Matthew came first.) But we have almost certainly lost more materials than we have had preserved for us, which means that there may be many more cases out there in which none of our extant gospels is the origin of the material at hand. That material might have derived from an earlier gospel text, or it might have derived from stories being told in churches or by wandering preachers. And this is where I have to finesse the following statement a bit:
Irish1975 wrote:If we assert the existence of oral tradition independently of a theory of reliability ("bridging the gap"), then we are left with an idle question of whether something in the past existed or not.
The question of whether the origin of the material was oral or literary may be idle, but the question of whether the origin of the material lies with our author or not is not idle at all. It often makes a difference for interpretation. In general, if our author was the originator of the materials being studied, then our expectations ought to be a bit different than if our author got those materials from someone else and is reworking them. This notion comes into play, for example, in a thread about the parable of the sower:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4212&start=10#p87913, in which I wrote:
Ben C. Smith wrote: ↑Tue Jun 05, 2018 8:09 amWhether Mark got the parable of the sower from tradition or created it himself from scratch, for example,
has to make a difference for the kinds of interpretations we are applying to it in this thread, does it not? If Mark created the parable from scratch, I think our expectations are high that its four categories of seed should make sense in its authorial context; if, on the other hand, Mark got it from tradition, then surely it is possible that its four categories might
not line up perfectly with categories which Mark elsewhere has established of his own volition (insiders and outsiders, perhaps).
....
This is my current best explanation for the unevenness, and for the parable as a whole with relation to its Marcan context:
- The parable is not of Marcan origin. Mark likes to simplify spectra of humans into binary categories: insiders and outsiders, those "with me" and those "against me," those who will enter the kingdom and those who will not. (Mark is not alone in this Christian predilection.) The parable, however, dwells upon nuances. A similar process can be seen in Matthew and Luke with respect to the parable of the pounds/talents, vis-à-vis the version in one of the Jewish-Christian gospels, which I argue to have preceded the canonical version: an original array of three separate outcomes has been flattened into only two outcomes, acceptance and rejection.
- But the parable is colorful and meaningful, is part of the growing tradition, and it is a good example of something that a Galilean peasant teacher might have uttered, so Mark includes it in his gospel, the more so because he can both relate it to the kingdom of God and wring an allusion to Peter out of it in the second kind of soil.
- The explanation of the parable is younger than the parable itself, however. The explanation does not always fully reflect the parable itself. For example, there is no real sense in which the first seed, which falls by the side of the road and is immediately eaten by birds, can be said to have entered into the ground, yet the explanation speaks of the word that "has been sown into them" (τὸν ἐσπαρμένον εἰς αὐτούς), the hearers. The first soil, for which "hearing" consists of the seed merely falling upon the ground, contrasts with the third soil, for which "hearing" seems to consist of the seed actually starting to sprout.
- Mark knows that the disciples would later become apostles and leaders of the church, and he has no desire to mitigate this fact. However, Mark also wishes to use the disciples as foolish foils for Jesus in the gospel. This bifurcation creates a real tension in the gospel: are the disciples insiders or outsiders? In fact, Mark is inconsistent on this score, even within chapter 4. On the one hand, the disciples are given "the mystery of the kingdom of God" in verse 11, explicitly contrasting them with outsiders who receive only parables; the disciples receive, not only the parables, but also the explanations, which Jesus immediately proceeds to give them in verses 13-20. So obviously the disciples are insiders. On the other hand, it is outsiders who are characterized as hearing and not understanding in verse 12; and Jesus immediately expresses frustration that the disciples, despite hearing, have not understood in verse 13. So obviously the disciples are outsiders. Real life does not tend to fall neatly into insider and outsider categories. Just as the disciples' insider/outsider status is ambiguous, due to the uneasy interplay of the fact that they became respected church leaders with the probable fiction that they were bumbling idiots during Jesus' ministry, so too the insider/outsider status of each of the first three categories of soil is ambiguous, because it is hard in real life to force nuance into binary categories.
- The whole parable comes off in the end as a warning not to lose one's insider status and become an outsider. Be like the soil in which the seed multiplies manifold, not like the soils in which the seed sooner or later fails to produce. This paraenetic focus is what renders the imperfect fit of the four categories with a simple insider/outsider status irrelevant from the authorial point of view, explaining why the author either did not notice or did not care about the tensions in this chapter.
I believe that this explanation of mine attempts
both to understand each aspect on its own (understanding the fourfold parable as a traditional element forced imperfectly into the Christian twofold understanding of one's status in the kingdom)
and to understand how it all works together for Mark as an author (whose purpose is not descriptive, as if to map out the different kinds of Christians, but rather prescriptive: do this and not that). It explains
both why the numerous discrepancies exist (because the author is adapting materials to uses they were not originally intended for)
and why Mark would tolerate them (because the author was instructing, not analyzing).
All of this matters because those in the "no oral tradition" camp
sometimes tend to treat the evangelists as dwelling in a vacuum: there were the scriptures, and then there was Paul, and then there was Mark, and then there were Matthew and Luke and John; and every idea in the later texts in this stream just
has to derive either from one of the earlier texts or from the author's own vivid imagination, or from some combination of the two. There were no wandering preachers giving instructions or telling stories which may have found there way into the gospels; there were no Christians talking amongst each other, giving each other ideas; there was no liturgy from which details of the passion could have arisen, no ethical instruction which one of the evangelists may have borrowed from his fellow Christians, no lost texts or traditions. But these tacit assumptions fly in the face of the internal evidence of our gospels, that they are
not (any of them) individually seamless tunics (John 19.23) woven as a whole without parts; and they fly in the face of analogies involving religious groups and how their ideas grow and change and merge over time. YMMV.