The drawbacks of overlooking oral tradition as an option.

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
User avatar
Ben C. Smith
Posts: 8994
Joined: Wed Apr 08, 2015 2:18 pm
Location: USA
Contact:

The drawbacks of overlooking oral tradition as an option.

Post by Ben C. Smith »

Subject: Thomas L Brodie on Ehrman's 'Did Jesus Exist?'and oral traditions
Ben C. Smith wrote: Sat Nov 24, 2018 8:53 amAll 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.
This thread is intended to give an example of what I am talking about here: to wit, an example of an option involving oral transmission of a tradition being ignored in favor of two mutually exclusive, yet pervasive, hypotheses of a purely documentary nature. I will outline the two different approaches before pointing out another possible option; I will mount an argument for this option, but only in order to show that it is viable, not necessarily to show that it is the best one of the three, though I do lean in that direction. It is one thing to consider an option and reject it for sound reasons, quite another not even to consider it at all because of a blind spot. (To clarify, I am not even going to argue that the authors in question suffer from this blind spot, though it is entirely possible that they do. Rather, my point is that these kinds of options — options involving either an oral component in the transmission — are the ones that I see ignored time and time again.)

The mutually exclusive options in question for this thread involve exactly how Papias of Hierapolis might have "known" that Mark wrote his text out of order. If you think that Papias is the fraudulent invention of Irenaeus, of Eusebius, or of the Medici, this thread is not for you; the scholars I am quoting here take both his existence and the following quotation seriously:

Eusebius, History of the Church 3.39.15-16: 15 «Καὶ τοῦθ' ὁ πρεσβύτερος ἔλεγεν· Μάρκος μὲν ἑρμηνευτὴς Πέτρου γενόμενος, ὅσα ἐμνημόνευσεν, ἀκριβῶς ἔγραψεν, οὐ μέντοι τάξει τὰ ὑπὸ τοῦ κυρίου ἢ λεχθέντα ἢ πραχθέντα. Οὔτε γὰρ ἤκουσεν τοῦ κυρίου οὔτε παρηκολούθησεν αὐτῷ, ὕστε ρον δὲ, ὡς ἔφην, Πέτρῳ· ὃς πρὸς τὰς χρείας ἐποιεῖτο τὰς διδασκαλίας, ἀλλ' οὐχ ὥσπερ σύνταξιν τῶν κυριακῶν ποιούμενος λογίων, ὥστε οὐδὲν ἥμαρτεν Μάρκος οὕτως ἔνια γράψας ὡς ἀπεμνημόνευσεν. Ἑνὸς γὰρ ἐποιήσατο πρόνοιαν, τοῦ μηδὲν ὧν ἤκουσεν παραλιπεῖν ἢ ψεύσασθαί τι ἐν αὐτοῖς». 16 Ταῦτα μὲν οὖν ἱστόρηται τῷ Παπίᾳ περὶ τοῦ Μάρκου· περὶ δὲ τοῦ Ματθαίου ταῦτ' εἴρηται· «Ματθαῖος μὲν οὖν Ἑβραΐδι διαλέκτῳ τὰ λόγια συνετάξατο, ἡρμήνευσεν δ' αὐτὰ ὡς ἦν δυνατὸς ἕκαστος». / 15 "And the elder would say this: 'Mark, who had become the interpreter of Peter, wrote accurately, yet not in order, as many things as he remembered of the things either said or done by the Lord. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but later, as I said, Peter, who would make the teachings to the needs, but not making them as an ordering together of the lordly oracles, so that Mark did not sin having thus written certain things as he remembered them. For he made one provision, to leave out nothing of the things that he heard or falsify anything in them.'" 16 These things therefore are recorded by Papias about Mark. But about Matthew he says these: "Matthew therefore in the Hebrew dialect ordered together the oracles, and each one interpreted them as he was able."

Two different hypotheses are very common among scholars. First, there is the hypothesis that Papias was comparing Mark's order to that of John. Second, there is the hypothesis that Papias was comparing Mark's order to that of Matathew.

Here is an example of the first hypothesis, Mark versus John:

Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, chapter 9: Some scholars have supposed that Papias was comparing Mark’s Gospel with Matthew’s to the disadvantage of the former. Certainly, Papias might have thought Matthew, in the Greek version he knew, somewhat preferable to Mark in its literary order: it begins with an account of the birth of Jesus, as biographies were generally expected to begin, and much of Jesus’ teaching is collected into several lengthy discourses. But if, as we have argued, the kind of literary order Papias missed in Mark was primarily chronological, then Matthew could not have seemed much of an improvement on Mark, since it largely follows the same sequence of brief narratives. If we take seriously the implication that the order originally given to his Gospel by Matthew was spoiled by the translators, then it becomes much more plausible to suppose that Papias is comparing the lack of order in both Mark and Matthew with the presence of order in another Gospel: that of John. / There should be no doubt that Papias knew John’s Gospel. We noticed in chapter 2 that Papias’s list of seven disciples of Jesus (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 3.39.4) is a distinctively Johannine list, following the order in which six of them appear in John’s Gospel (John 1:40-44; 21:2: Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, James, John). From that Johannine sequence only Nathanael is omitted, because doubtless Papias wished to keep the list to the symbolic number seven and wished to include the non-Johannine disciple Matthew on account of his importance as the author of a Gospel. In addition, we may note that Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses 5.36.1-2) ascribes to “the elders” a passage including a quotation from John 14:2, a passage Irenaeus probably derived from Papias. (There is also an Armenian reference to Papias which seems to depend on a comment he made on John 19:39, though the reliability of this evidence may be not entirely secure.) Eusebius doubtless had his own reasons for not quoting what Papias said about John’s Gospel, especially if, as I believe, Papias ascribed the Gospel not to John the son of Zebedee but to the disciple of Jesus he calls John the Elder.

By this argument, Papias must have known the gospel of John because his list of seven disciples seems like a Johannine list, and also because Irenaeus probably got a dominical saying from Papias which appears in the gospel of John. Matthew and Mark are not very different in order, at least compared to John. Also in favor of this proposal are the many examples from century II in which the church fathers noticed the differences in order between John and the synoptics, as opposed to the very few in which they noticed or cared about the differences between any two of the synoptics. Therefore, Papias knew both the gospel of John, even though Eusebius does not credit him with such knowledge, and Mark is out of order by comparison with John. Neat.

Here now is an example of the second hypothesis, Mark versus Matthew:

Dennis R. MacDonald, Two Shipwrecked Gospels, pages 13-15: Whereas Mark did not compose "a sequential arrangement [σύνταξιν]," this is precisely what Matthew, writing in "Hebrew" or Aramaic, did (συνετάξατο). His original sequence, however, was compromised by a few—perhaps only two—Greek translators. Papias seems not to have been concerned with the relative dating of Mark and Matthew because he assumed that neither served the other as a source. Both collections of logia derived independently from Jesus’ disciples, through Peter’s preaching or Matthew’s composing. What bothered him and his informant John were the incompatible sequences in the two books, and they gave the nod for accuracy to Matthew, at least to his putative Aramaic original. / Papias tried to make sense of at least three books about Jesus with differing content and sequences. In other words, he had a Synoptic Problem. As we shall see, Papias did not know the Gospels of Luke and John, but in addition to Mark and Matthew, he did know at least one other text, now lost, that apparently was more similar to Matthew than to Mark. According to Richard Bauckham, with respect to the composition of both Matthew and Mark "there are two stages, one the activity of an eyewitness, the other the activity of one or more non-eyewitnesses. … Mark’s Gospel is 'not in order' because Peter did not relate the material in order, while Mark, not being an eyewitness, rightly did not attempt to put it 'in order.i Matthew, on the other hand, was an eyewitness who was able and did put the logia in order in his original Gospel, but this order was spoiled by those who translated his work into Greek. Thus Papias is concerned throughout with two aspects of each Gospel: its origin from eyewitness testimony and the question of 'order.' In both cases he wants to explain why a Gospel with eyewitness origins lacks proper 'order.' / Apparently Papias thought there had been more than one translation of Matthew’s original work into Greek. … He referred to these various Greek Matthews … in order to show that none of them could be presumed to preserve accurately the "order" (syntaxis) of the original Hebrew or Aramaic Matthew." / Bauckham surely is right in noting that Papias’s statement about Matthew requires three or more compositional moments: the apostle’s composition of the Semitic original and at least two differing Greek translations of it. He suggests that the elder John and Papias knew three such translations—the canonical Matthew, the Gospel of the Nazarenes, and the Gospel of the Ebionites— but this would require the dating of the last two books earlier than many experts would grant. Bauckham also is wrong in thinking that the elder John and Papias faulted the sequences of logia in Mark and Matthew’s translations because they preferred the sequence in the Gospel of John; the Fourth Gospel was written much later. / Norelli agrees with other scholars that there never was a primitive Semitic Matthew; it was invented to explain similarities and differences in two or more texts or books in circulation that differed from each other and that were attributed (at least by some) to Matthew. It is more likely that the elder and Papias had in mind a Greek Gospel that resembled our Matthew but whose sequential differences required a creative solution. I would paraphrase the elder John’s enigmatic sentence as follows: "Matthew, for his part, set in order the logia in the Hebrew language, but [those responsible for the Greek Matthew and another Greek book] each translated as he was able."

Because MacDonald is sure that John postdates Papias, the comparison in Papias must be between Mark and Matthew, the only two gospel texts which he actually names. This makes sense. Furthermore, MacDonald disposes of Bauckham's certainty that Papias knew the gospel of John by calling the list comparison a "a house of cards. To be sure, the first three names are in the same order (though Peter in John initially is called Simon), but then the Fourth Gospel mentions Nathaniel..., Nicodemus..., and Thomas.... The names James and John never appear in the Gospel, and in chapter 21, generally considered an epilogue, they are called simply 'the sons of Zebedee' .... Matthew's name, too, is absent. In other words, there is no list of the Twelve in John, and to make Papias' list conform to John's order, one must omit two names from John's account (Nathaniel and Nicodemus), add three (James, John, and Matthew), and monitor the introduction of characters from the first chapter to the epilogue" (page 17).

MacDonald is correct that the procedure required for tracing Papias' seven names throughout the gospel of John is too complicated, but what he fails to reckon with is that Papias' list is Johannine in character. It is not just a random selection of the disciples' names from the synoptic lists. I have already pointed out elsewhere how well the list of seven disciples fits a matrix of tradition rather than any single text, and this is what Bauckham fails to appreciate: that Papias' references to persons or concepts now found in the gospel of John do not have to come from the gospel of John itself. Why can they not have come from exactly the source that Papias himself names?

Eusebius, History of the Church 3.39.4: 4 εἰ δέ που καὶ παρηκολουθηκώς τις τοῖς πρεσβυτέροις ἔλθοι, τοὺς τῶν πρεσβυτέρων ἀνέκρινον λόγους, τί Ἀνδρέας ἢ τί Πέτρος εἶπεν ἢ τί Φίλιππος ἢ τί Θωμᾶς ἢ Ἰάκωβος ἢ τί Ἰωάννης ἢ Ματθαῖος ἤτις ἕτερος τῶν τοῦ κυρίου μαθητῶν, ἅ τε Ἀριστίων καὶ ὁ πρεσβύτερος Ἰωάννης, τοῦ κυρίου μαθηταὶ, λέγουσιν. Οὐ γὰρ τὰ ἐκ τῶν βιβλίων τοσοῦτόν με ὠφελεῖν ὑπελάμβανον ὅσον τὰ παρὰ ζώσης φωνῆς καὶ μενούσης». / 4 And if anyone should chance to come along who had followed the elders, I was inquiring as to the words of the elders, what Andrew or what Peter, or what Philip or what Thomas or James or what John or Matthew or any other of the disciples of the Lord said, which things both Aristion and the elder John, disciples of the Lord, say. For I did not suppose that things from books would profit me as much as things from a living and remaining voice."

Papias attributes his most valuable information, not to any written gospel text, but to travelers claiming to be handing down quotes from the seven disciples on his list. This would explain why Eusebius does not quote Papias mentioning the gospel of John: that gospel, as MacDonald suggests, postdates Papias (and probably relies upon him to some extent!). It would explain why the names on Papias' list are the ones with solid speaking parts in John but in few other texts: Papias learned about those disciples from his travelers, and John drew some of their words from what Papias recorded about them. It would explain why Irenaeus may have gotten a dominical saying now found in John from Papias (he actually attributes it to "the elders," but this may at least include Papias): Papias got that saying from his travelers, and John got it from Papias. Finally, it would explain why Papias thought that Mark was out of order: most of the examples of church fathers from century II noticing the differences between John and Mark could easily have been gleaned from know-it-alls passing down stories. The timing of the temple incident (right at the beginning or very near the end?), the length of Jesus' ministry (three years or only one?), the calling of the disciples (before John was arrested or after?)... all of these matters of chronological order are the kinds that would play into the retelling of the stories. "At the beginning/end of his ministry, Jesus went into the temple...." "After/before John was arrested, the disciples met Jesus...." Most obviously, the timing of the Last Supper (Passover feast or not?) figured into the Quartodeciman observation of the feast in Asia Minor; every knowledgeable Asian Christian would know on which day the Asian churches celebrated their spring feast!

Now, you may still not be convinced that Papias knew, not John, but rather Johannine tradition (and indeed helped to develop it), but that is fine. My point, again, is that this scenario is possible. It ought to be considered. But neither MacDonald nor Bauckham considers it.

MacDonald even ties himself up into a knot of sorts in overlooking the possibility that I have sketched out. He agrees with Bauckham that Papias was suggesting that, while the original Hebrew Matthew was in order, the translations (into Greek) were not. So Greek Matthew is, like Mark, actually out of order. Yet MacDonald then goes on to assume, throughout the rest of his work, that Papias followed Greek Matthew's order (as superior to Mark's) as he presented his material! This awkward conundrum arises only because MacDonald has to dismiss the more obvious "correct" order, the Johannine order, on the simplistic grounds that the gospel of John had not yet been composed; I agree with him on that point, but just because John's implied order was not yet in writing does not mean it was not on the lips of Asian travelers chattering into the eager ears of Papias.

The entire enterprise, both for MacDonald and for Bauckham, is one of finding or not finding connections between Papias and John. Bauckham sees them and thinks that Papias must have known John; MacDonald does not see them, which lines up with his thinking that John postdates Papias. Too many things wind up toggling back and forth between two options: (A) if Papias has connections with John, then Papias must know the text of John and the connections mean everything; (B) if John postdates Papias, then the connections with John must be an illusion and mean nothing. Both options equally assume that the order of which Papias speaks must have derived from a text. Neither considers that Papias may have received a different picture from his travelers and from his own local liturgical practices than he received from the text of Mark.

I cannot be sure why Bauckham and MacDonald overlook this option, of course, but I know I have seen, on this very forum, similar oversights from amateur researchers (not a slur: I am one too) who, probably not coincidentally, are not very keen on oral traditions being a possible explanation behind any part of the NT texts. That, I submit, is the peril of reading a book which for the most part correctly argues that many/most pericopes in the extant gospels do not have to derive from oral tradition and then concluding from that book that one no longer has to reckon with oral tradition as a possible explanation for any given pericope: obvious options of high explanatory value get overlooked.

YMMV.

Ben.
Last edited by Ben C. Smith on Wed May 01, 2019 10:36 am, edited 6 times in total.
ΤΙ ΕΣΤΙΝ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ
John2
Posts: 4309
Joined: Fri May 16, 2014 4:42 pm

Re: The dangers of overlooking oral tradition as an option.

Post by John2 »

Now, you may still not be convinced that Papias knew, not John, but rather Johannine tradition (and indeed helped to develop it), but that is fine. My point, again, is that this scenario is possible. It ought to be considered.
I am up for considering it. I like where taking Papias seriously is leading (especially if we can dispense with the Judas account), and I think what you write below is very sensible:
Papias attributes his most valuable information, not to any written gospel text, but to travelers claiming to be handing down quotes from the seven disciples on his list. This would explain why Eusebius does not quote Papias mentioning the gospel of John: that gospel, as MacDonald suggests, postdates Papias (and probably relies upon him to some extent!). It would explain why the names on Papias' list are the ones with solid speaking parts in John but in few other texts: Papias learned about those disciples from his travelers, and John drew some of their words from what Papias recorded about them. It would explain why Irenaeus may have gotten a dominical saying now found in John from Papias (he actually attributes it to "the elders," but this may at least include Papias): Papias got that saying from his travelers, and John got it from Papias. Finally, it would explain why Papias thought that Mark was out of order: most of the examples of church fathers from century II noticing the differences between John and Mark could easily have been gleaned from know-it-alls passing down stories.


The Eusebius part looms large for me. It seems like if Papias knew John Eusebius would have not failed to mention it. And since MacDonald persuades me that Acts used Papias, then why not the gospel of John too (all the more so if it was written in Asia where Papias was from)? That's a great way of explaining the similarities between Papias and John without Papias knowing John. :cheers:
You know in spite of all you gained, you still have to stand out in the pouring rain.
User avatar
MrMacSon
Posts: 8798
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 3:45 pm

Re: The drawbacks of overlooking oral tradition as an option.

Post by MrMacSon »

Ben C. Smith wrote: Fri Dec 07, 2018 6:31 pm Subject: Thomas L Brodie on Ehrman's 'Did Jesus Exist?'and oral traditions
Ben C. Smith wrote: Sat Nov 24, 2018 8:53 amAll 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.

This thread is intended to give an example of what I am talking about here: to wit, an example of an option involving oral transmission of a tradition being ignored in favor of two mutually exclusive, yet pervasive, hypotheses of a purely documentary nature. I will outline the two different approaches before pointing out another possible option; I will mount an argument for this option, but only in order to show that it is viable, not necessarily to show that it is the best one of the three, though I do lean in that direction ...

I think it's worth contextualising time and place for discussions about things like 'oral traditions'.

In biblical or early Christian studies the general phrase is, as I understand it, traditionally applied to an assumed tradition that accounted for and resulted in narratives of and about an early first century Jesus of Nazareth eventually being recorded in the books of the New Testament.

Some of what you have previously alluded to seems to be also about later orations and possible influences and transmission of them. And of accounts specifically around Papias.

My OP in Subject: Thomas L Brodie on Ehrman's 'Did Jesus Exist?'and oral traditions was about what Brodie said what Ehrman has said about oral tradition in an Epilogue of Beyond the Quest ..., which Ben posted here viewtopic.php?p=94222#p94222. Brodie alluded to having discussed oral tradition more Chapter 12 of that book, but I don't have it in front of me (or notes about it; see later in this post for what Brodie says in The Birthing of the New Testament ...).


Irish1975 made a comment -
What is the theory of oral tradition? This is more than what Brodie offers, but in line with his argument:
  1. There are 4 Gospels, but only one Jesus.
  2. The historical Jesus died in 30 CE, but the Gospels were composed in 70-100 CE.
  3. The 4-Gospel portrait of Jesus Christ in the NT is to some large extent mythical, but the historical Jesus was a real, definite, human, non-mythical person.
  4. Conclusion: "Something is needed to bridge the gap," and an evolving but essentially reliable oral tradition process is the only plausible candidate.
So, oral tradition produces multiple streams of remembrance, which diverge because of both time and anthropological plurality. It connects The Bible Jesus with a postulated historical figure. And it generates both faith and memory, which are not exactly mutually reinforcing, but are also not essentially at war with each other. The hidden premiss, of course, is that theory of oral tradition is a great boon for historical jesus questers, at least in their questing careers if not in the moment of intellectual honesty when they have to arrive at conclusions and synthesis.

Andrew Criddle talked about distinguishing between the existence of oral tradition and the reliability of oral tradition. (I think the reliability of the proposition of an early oral tradition might be a factor too).


In The Birthing of the New Testament ..., Brodie refers to
Hermann Gunkel's theory of oral traditions and forms - a theory taken up by Bultmann and reinforced apparently by his general theology of the Word and particularly of the spoken word which genders faith - suggested that the origin and composition of the gospels is to be sought in an oral rather than literary context.

Gunkel's theory of oral tradition has been shown to have been built on an anthropology that is fundamentally flawed.97

He has a chapter on it in Birthing, Chapter 6, pp. 50-62 (inclusive), available here


As for Papias, I'll defer to Ben (though will say Eusebius seems very keen to use people like Papias to reify an early church 'history').
User avatar
Ben C. Smith
Posts: 8994
Joined: Wed Apr 08, 2015 2:18 pm
Location: USA
Contact:

Re: The drawbacks of overlooking oral tradition as an option.

Post by Ben C. Smith »

MrMacSon wrote: Sat Dec 08, 2018 4:08 pmI think it's worth contextualising time and place for discussions about things like 'oral traditions'.
Thanks for this.

Overall, I am not so much concerned with the terminology as I am with the pattern that I am trying to describe: (A) someone decries oral sources behind the gospels, (B) often on the grounds that the gospel pericopes bear obvious signs of derivation from the scriptures, and then (C) that someone proceeds to fail even to discuss an obvious option involving oral sources behind the gospels.

Consider for yourself, MrMacSon, the scenario I laid out in the OP: Papias interviewed travelers as to what they might know about the seven people on his list, especially if what those travelers knew ultimately derived from two apparently trusted sources (John the elder and Aristion). Then he wrote up his findings, often disagreeing with the order of the gospel of Mark based on what he himself had heard ("the living voice"); and then, finally, the gospel of John was published, based at least in part upon Papias' own treatment of the information he got from his travelers. What would you call the process by which information passed on orally to Papias eventually came to be written up in the gospel of John? And how would you explain those cases, including the one outlined in the OP, in which a reconstruction which entails oral information being passed on gets thoroughly ignored, as if it were not even an option? What do you think is going on?
ΤΙ ΕΣΤΙΝ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ
User avatar
MrMacSon
Posts: 8798
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 3:45 pm

Re: The drawbacks of overlooking oral tradition as an option.

Post by MrMacSon »

Jason BeDuhn had this to say in his 2015 article about Marcion -

.
... The earliest Christians lived in an oral society that only flirted with literacy, and transmitted the teachings of Jesus and the exemplary stories about hima primarily by word of mouth. The written word entered their world only sporadically, and even then only as a script to be read aloud. There were always a small number of more literate followers of Jesus who sought to put his ideas into conversation with textual traditions, but they could hardly be representative of the spirit of the larger movement.

Its fixity and referentiality gives text distinct advantages in shaping our perception of the time and place from which it comes, with the result that the writer, however idiosyncratic in his or her own time, wins out historically over the now silenced voices of illiterate contemporaries. The study of early Christianity continues to suffer from this bias towards text, because that is literally all we have. But our conceptualization of what early Christianity was like needs to compensate for it by comparison to other religious clubs and associations of the Roman world.b Against this comparative background, the conscious, deliberate adoption of text as a defining feature of a religious community marks an atypical, dramatic transition in the shape of beliefc and the character of authority over it.

One window into the predominantly oral form taken by authoritative traditions in earliest Christianity can be obtained, ironically enough, from the texts produced by other Christians roughly contemporary with Marcion’s own lifetime. When those writings make reference to the teachings of Jesus, “the custom is to refer not to documents” but to free-standing sayingsd known and remembered in the community, “applied rather than quoted, in the strict sense of that word; and never are they explained or ‘expounded’ in their fixed form like a sacred text.”18 No distinction is made between sayings now known from gospel texts and so-called agrapha, free-floating sayings of Jesus in the oral tradition.d Writers such as Barnabas, Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Justin Martyr, and Polycarp certainly know of the existence of Christian texts, but it is of no interest to them to cite these texts as sources of authority.e Papias is the earliest writer to explicitly comment on individual gospel texts, but he does so to critique them as limited, incomplete, and ambiguous compared to the full riches of the oral tradition.f

In the face of strong disagreement over the Christian message to be distilled from such fluid oral resources, Marcion can be understood to have sought to codify and secure an authoritative body of knowledge in a written form that would serve as a reliable touchstone of faith. Thus, Marcion could have taken the step to form a distinctively Christian canon, in the words of Helmut Koester, as a “conscious protest against the still undefined and mostly oral traditions to which the churches of his day referred as their dominical and apostolic authority.”19

BeDuhn, JD (2015) The New Marcion: Rethinking the ”Arch-Heretic”, ForumWestar Institute's Academic Journal

18. Campenhausen, Hans von. The Formation of the Christian Bible. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1972, 121.

19. Koester, Helmut. Ancient Christian Gospels. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990, 37.
.

  1. How many of 'the stories about Jesus' included 'teachings of/by him' is what is contentious in this 'space'.
    .
  2. Jörg Rüpke addressed this in Pantheon:A New History of Roman Religion, but he merely asserted the Christian stories were the result of individual writings, before communities had established.
    .
  3. I'm not sure how "deliberate adoption of text", as 'a defining feature of a religious community', would "mark an atypical, dramatic transition in the shape of belief" ...
    .
  4. I certainly wonder if "free-standing" and "free-floating" sayings were a feature of the time of Justin Martyr, and I think such a feature might negated BeDuhn's next point -
    .
  5. ie. that "Barnabas, Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Justin Martyr, and Polycarp certainly know of the existence of Christian texts" is debatable.
    .
  6. that "individual gospel texts [were] limited, incomplete, and ambiguous" in the early-to-mid 2nd century is likely, but the exact nature of texts available to Justin Martyr, and Polycarp is largely unknowno, and whether they "compared to the full riches of the oral tradition" is also debatable.
    • and whether Barnabas, Clement of Rome, or Ignatius would have known of the existence of substantial Christian texts is also debatable.
User avatar
MrMacSon
Posts: 8798
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 3:45 pm

Re: The drawbacks of overlooking oral tradition as an option.

Post by MrMacSon »

Ben C. Smith wrote: Sat Dec 08, 2018 5:43 pm Overall, I am not so much concerned with the terminology as I am with the pattern that I am trying to describe:
Yes, I got that. And that is important. And it would be good to contextualise such patterns (for time-period and possibly geographic region, but such spatial assignment seems more elusive).

Ben C. Smith wrote: Sat Dec 08, 2018 5:43 pm (A) someone decries oral sources behind the gospels, (B) often on the grounds that the gospel pericopes bear obvious signs of derivation from the scriptures*, and then (C) that someone proceeds to fail even to discuss an obvious option involving oral sources behind the gospels.
We've crossed with me posting that passage from BeDuhn, but that passage does go a little way to addressing that.

( * when you say "(B) [someone decries oral sources behind the gospel] often on the grounds that the gospel pericopes bear obvious signs of derivation from the scriptures", I presume you're referring to use of the Hebrew scriptures).

Ben C. Smith wrote: Sat Dec 08, 2018 5:43 pm Consider for yourself, MrMacSon, the scenario I laid out in the OP: Papias interviewed travelers as to what they might know about the seven people on his list, especially if what those travelers knew ultimately derived from two apparently trusted sources (John the Elder and Aristion). Then he wrote up his findings, often disagreeing with the order of the gospel of Mark based on what he himself had heard ("the living voice"); and then, finally, the gospel of John was published, based at least in part upon Papias' own treatment of the information he got from his travelers. What would you call the process by which information passed on orally to Papias eventually came to be written up in the gospel of John? And how would you explain those cases, including the one outlined in the OP, in which a reconstruction which entails oral information being passed on gets thoroughly ignored, as if it were not even an option? What do you think is going on?

I think it suggests that Papias was in the middle of 'the action' - the gospel-writing action.

I think it adds weight to Markus Vinzent's and Matthius Klinghardt's general propositions that these gospels were written in close proximity time-wise and spatially and in reference to each other; and that Papias could well have been a significant communicator of the transmission of information from Mark to John.

Interestingly, BeDuhn has never (as far as I'm aware) postulated about the development of canonical gospels other than just Luke in relation to Marcion, but he does say in that 2015 article -


... In closing a canon, Marcion suddenly and exponentially elevated the status of particular texts, and launched them into an undeniably superior authority relative to any others in a way no one before him had dared to do.23 That is, he accentuated their place as scripture precisely by including them within a limited canon. In doing so, he set boundaries on what could be used as touchstones in evaluating various positions put forward as “Christian,” narrowing the range of permissible variety with the Christian movement. Marcion’s shift to text and canon ran closely parallel to a similar development taking place among non-Christian Jews in his time, as the rabbinic movement established its biblical canon and began to cite and comment on it directly. ...

By rooting authority in text, Marcion displaced it from the personal and individual. This shift implied that the personal authority of Christian teachers, even Marcion himself, could no longer be self-sufficient, but should be dependent on and subordinated to an impersonal, objectified repository, on the basis of which any claim on the tradition would have to be made and assessed. Marcion’s act of canon-making was simply the first of a whole set of subsequent efforts to define Christianity through rival canons.


23. Barton’s suggestion that Marcion did not necessarily regard these texts as sacred scripture, but rather “abolished the category of ‘Scripture’ altogether” (Barton, Holy Writings, 40) is poorly grounded on the assumption that Marcion felt free to edit them (which is unproven), and at the same time ignores the many historical examples of a religious leadership simultaneously redacting and sacralizing a text as authoritative. Nevertheless, his suggestion invites further investigation of what status exactly Marcion’s canon had for his followers and to which if any of the contemporary Christian views of scripture it approximates. Given the historical and cultural context in which this canon was originally promulgated, they may have viewed it more in terms of the Hellenic “classic” than in those associated with “revelation.”
.


BeDuhn also comments in relation to harmonisation of Marcion's Evangelion with Matthew -

.
As much as Marcion may have valued the relative fixity and stability of text, the sources on his NT show that it exhibited the same fluidity of text typical of all early Christian literature. More than a hundred years ago, Theodor Zahn noted variant readings between the various reporters of Marcion’s texts.26 More recently, John Clabeaux and Ulrich Schmid have sifted these variants in the Apostolikon against the quotation habits of our sources, as have David Salter Williams and Dieter Roth in the Evangelion, and shown that many of them must have been in the Marcionite manuscripts they had before them.27 The most interesting of these textual variants involve the evidence of harmonization to Matthew referred to above; in many cases these harmonizations appear to have occurred in some copies of the Evangelion and not others ...

... the existence of such variation in harmonized readings in our witnesses to the Evangelion suggests that, at the time Marcion canonized it, it existed in multiple copies that in their pre-Marcionite transmission had met with varying degrees of influence from Matthew.28

What this means is that even Marcion may not have fully appreciated the implications of the “textual revolution” with its new valuation of the fixed text. He apparently found it sufficient to identify which texts in circulation should be considered authoritative, without carefully monitoring their acquisition and incorporation into canonical sets for use in his communities to be sure that their texts were completely consistent. As a result, multiple copies full of variant readings came into use in Marcionite communities. For all his focus on the merits of stabilizing Christianity in text, Marcion apparently did not fully make the mental shift from the oral to the written gospel and realize the issues regarding the proper fixity of a literary text.


26. Zahn, Geschichte, 613.

27. Clabeaux, Lost Edition; Schmid, Marcion und sein Apostolos; Williams, “Reconsidering Marcion’s Gospel”; Roth, “Towards a New Reconstruction."

28. Compare Schmid, Marcion und sein Apostolos, 15–16, who speaks in general terms of the possibility of textual variants, including even perhaps some of the significant omissions, in the manuscripts on which Marcion based his NT.

.

User avatar
Ben C. Smith
Posts: 8994
Joined: Wed Apr 08, 2015 2:18 pm
Location: USA
Contact:

Re: The drawbacks of overlooking oral tradition as an option.

Post by Ben C. Smith »

MrMacSon wrote: Sat Dec 08, 2018 6:45 pmWe've crossed with me posting that passage from BeDuhn, but that passage does go a little way to addressing that.
So, just to be clear, are you agreeing that Christians often passed on the sayings of and stories about Jesus orally? That snippet from BeDuhn says, "The earliest Christians lived in an oral society that only flirted with literacy, and transmitted the teachings of Jesus and the exemplary stories about him primarily by word of mouth."
( * when you say "(B) [someone decries oral sources behind the gospel] often on the grounds that the gospel pericopes bear obvious signs of derivation from the scriptures", I presume you're referring to use of the Hebrew scriptures).
Yes, the Hebrew scriptures. And note that what I am talking about can be true even if every single word of the gospels happened to find its ultimate derivation in the Hebrew scriptures.
I think it suggests that Papias was in the middle of 'the action' - the gospel-writing action.
I agree with this.
I think it adds weight to Markus Vinzent's and Matthius Klinghardt's general propositions that these gospels were written in close proximity time-wise and spatially and in reference to each other
Not so much with this, though, unless I am misunderstanding what you mean by "in close proximity" so far as time is concerned. If we take the process seriously, we get Matthew/Mark (Papias does not specify the order) > the elder John > Papias himself > Luke/John. Even if we cut out the elder John as an invention of Papias' (I do not do this, but just go with it) and treat Peter's association with the author of Mark as a fiction (which it very well could be), Matthew and Mark could still be very early, Papias in the middle, and Luke and John very late. I am not saying that they necessarily are, but they could be, just going by the lines of dependence.
ΤΙ ΕΣΤΙΝ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ
User avatar
MrMacSon
Posts: 8798
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 3:45 pm

Re: The drawbacks of overlooking oral tradition as an option.

Post by MrMacSon »

Ben C. Smith wrote: Sat Dec 08, 2018 7:13 pm
MrMacSon wrote: Sat Dec 08, 2018 6:45 pmWe've crossed with me posting that passage from BeDuhn, but that passage does go a little way to addressing that.
So, just to be clear, are you agreeing that Christians often passed on the sayings of and stories about Jesus orally? That snippet from BeDuhn says, "The earliest Christians lived in an oral society that only flirted with literacy, and transmitted the teachings of Jesus and the exemplary stories about him primarily by word of mouth."
I honestly don't know. I'm certainly seeing Papias in a new light.

(BeDuhn thinks texts ruled after Marcion).

Ben C. Smith wrote: Sat Dec 08, 2018 7:13 pm
... If we take the process seriously, we get Matthew/Mark (Papias does not specify the order) > the elder John > Papias himself > Luke/John ...

... Matthew and Mark could still be very early, Papias in the middle, and Luke and John very late ...
.
I think that's feasible; I have recently been thinking if Marcion had acquired a pre-existing text (likely a proto-Luke like text), Mark (+/- Matthew and John) could have been produced before Marcion produced his Evangelion (or proto-/ ur- versions of Mark +/- Matthew +/- John).

The eastern Roman Empire in the 2nd century AD/CE would have been a fascinating time and theological dynamic, with the influx and growth of several religions: A Roman version of Mithracism, the Egyptian mystery religions, a Jewish Diaspora, the sudden advent of the cult of Antinous in 130 AD/CE ....
User avatar
MrMacSon
Posts: 8798
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 3:45 pm

Re: The drawbacks of overlooking oral tradition as an option.

Post by MrMacSon »

Vinzent portrays Papias as anti-Marcionite in Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels, 2014, so perhaps Papias was facilitating 'the competition' -

.
[Papias] reports that the Twelve had 'to make up for the traitor Judas', a story known from Acts which indirectly excludes Paul from being an Apostle.65

Papias not mentioning Paul, who is to Marcion the authority and the sole Apostle,66 his insistence upon a distance between the Lord and any author of written accounts, and his avoidance of using Marcion's newly created catchwords (Gospel, Old and New Testament), all contribute to an anti-Marcionite profile.67

... Papias displays further anti-Marcionite features. Irenaeus report[ed] that Papias refer[red] to a Lord's saying that interprets Gen. 27:28f. with reference to Gen 49:12,68 and hence interpret[ed] the Dominical Oracles on the basis of the Jewish Torah.


Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels, 2014, p.13.


65 According to Euseb. Hist. eccl. III 39,10; see Acts 1:17-25.

66 ... to...the ship-owner and mariner Marcion, the term apostle had another connotation, as it derives from the ship trade where it can mean 'ship', 'expedition', 'passport', and 'deliver note', see W. Schmithals, Apostelamt (1961), 85.

67 See Papias Hier., Frg. 4. 7 (... cum se in praefatione adserat non varias opinones sequi, sed apostolos habere auctores) (100, 12: 106 Hübner/Kürzinger/Siegert).

68 See Iren. Adv. Haer. V 33,3-4.
.

User avatar
Ben C. Smith
Posts: 8994
Joined: Wed Apr 08, 2015 2:18 pm
Location: USA
Contact:

Re: The drawbacks of overlooking oral tradition as an option.

Post by Ben C. Smith »

MrMacSon wrote: Sat Dec 08, 2018 10:45 pm Vinzent portrays Papias as anti-Marcionite in Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels, 2014, so perhaps Papias was facilitating 'the competition' -

.
[Papias] reports that the Twelve had 'to make up for the traitor Judas', a story known from Acts which indirectly excludes Paul from being an Apostle.65

Papias not mentioning Paul, who is to Marcion the authority and the sole Apostle,66 his insistence upon a distance between the Lord and any author of written accounts, and his avoidance of using Marcion's newly created catchwords (Gospel, Old and New Testament), all contribute to an anti-Marcionite profile.67

... Papias displays further anti-Marcionite features. Irenaeus report[ed] that Papias refer[red] to a Lord's saying that interprets Gen. 27:28f. with reference to Gen 49:12,68 and hence interpret[ed] the Dominical Oracles on the basis of the Jewish Torah.

I think there may be a lot more than that going on: enough that what may look like Papias reacting to Marcion is actually Papias reacting to a split Asiatic church situation centered upon Ephesus. We can see this split already in how the two sides treat the issue of eating meat sacrificed to idols, a matter which almost certainly predates Marcion. The split was also a matter of John versus Paul: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3221. (I no longer hold to some of what I wrote in that OP, but most of the observations are still valid, and still call for comment.)

I have come to doubt that Marcion created much of what he is credited with in later church literature; rather, he popularized one strand of thought which was current in Asia Minor (he is said to have hailed from Pontus) before he himself ever arrived on the scene.
ΤΙ ΕΣΤΙΝ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ
Post Reply