Robert
Lyon is a retired clergyman who divides his time between
Guelph, Ontario and Melaque, Mexico. He taught high school
English, Latin, Greek and science, and served as an officer
in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve, retiring in the rank
of Lieutenant-Colonel. His latest book, Don’t
Throw Out Your Bible, from which the essay below is
excerpted, is now in print.
In
Don’t
Throw Out Your Bible
(Graphikos, October 2023*), I have shown that the text
of the Greek New Testament that we currently use reflects
its authors’ originals with something like 99% accuracy.
Those originals were composed by writers who themselves were
either eyewitnesses or had contact with eyewitnesses and with
eyewitnesses’ written records. And whereas we have over
5000 New Testament manuscripts from the first few centuries
after Jesus, 11 of them from the first hundred years, we have
only 7 of Plato, 10 of Caesar, and 49 of Aristotle, all of
those dated more than a thousand years after their respective
authors. Only Homer comes even remotely close, with 649 manuscripts,
the earliest dated 500 years after its author. Even so, there
remains a question of reliability in the gospel accounts,
because the earliest of the gospels was not written until
some 35 years after Jesus. So how can we be sure that the
eyewitnesses reported accurate information untainted by pious
imagination?
In
1961 the late Swedish scholar Birger Gerhardsson created a
watershed in New Testament studies when he presented his PhD
thesis at Uppsala University, titled (in translation): Memory
and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in
Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity. Gerhardsson
showed that both Jesus and the apostles, being Jewish, used
rabbinic methods in teaching their disciples, thereby creating
an oral “tradition” – where the word “tradition”
is technical pedagogical jargon for teachings that have been
deliberately “handed down”. What is significant
is not simply that such tradition existed, but that it was
rabbinic in method. For it is the rabbinic method that makes
it probable that the time between Jesus’ ministry and
the writing of the New Testament was bridged by a body of
authentic – that is, accurately reported – ethical
and narrative traditions.
This
oral tradition was not some Christian novelty but a normal
way of communicating, both formally and informally, throughout
Middle-Eastern societies. Because Jesus taught as an itinerant
rabbi, with his dozen students in tow, we should not be surprised
to find him using the formal oral teaching techniques that
were common among the rabbis. Nor should we be surprised to
find stories about Jesus that use the informal story-telling
techniques that were common in those societies. Both the formal
and the informal techniques were developed to ensure reliable
transmission of information to subsequent hearers.
From
the fact that Jesus was called “teacher” and “rabbi”
by his contemporaries, and his closest followers were called
his “disciples” (students), it is evident that
Jesus and the Twelve comprised an itinerant college among
whom such techniques would have been used. For example, when
Jesus and his disciples were accused of breaking the tradition
of hand-washing before meals, Jesus rejected that tradition
as hypocrisy. But while he rejected traditions that contradicted
the spirit of Scripture, he did not reject the rabbinic method.
Instead, he immediately delivered a hálakah verse of
his own, saying that it is not what goes into people that
defiles them, but what comes out of them. Hálakah,
from a Hebrew verb that means “to walk”, is a
statement about how we ought to conduct our lives.
An
important passage where we find Jesus teaching in a rabbinic
manner is Matthew 11:25-30. After speaking about things hidden
from the wise and revealed to babes, Jesus says that all things
have been delivered to him by the Father. The things that
Jesus says were delivered to him are the same things that
were hidden from the wise and revealed to babes, namely, the
truth about Jesus and God’s kingdom. What makes this
text especially significant is that the Greek word translated
“delivered” is the technical term that was regularly
used for handing on a tradition.
The
rabbis saw themselves as the faithful handers-on of a body
of tradition that had come down from generation to generation
over 1300 years since God’s giving of the Ten Commandments
on Mount Sinai. They did not see themselves as innovators,
for just as (in their view) all humanity was contained potentially
in Adam’s loins, so all Torah, written and oral, was
contained potentially in the Law that Moses received on Sinai.
Try
to imagine, then, how the rabbis must have been scandalized
by Jesus’ claim that “All things have been delivered
to me by my Father.” In football this would be called
an “end run.” Jesus claims not merely to bypass
1300 years of tradition back to Sinai, but actually to bypass
even Sinai itself. In this statement Jesus implies that the
“rabbi” to whom he had been apprenticed was none
other than God himself! Jesus comes into conflict with the
rabbis, therefore, not because he discounts their traditionism,
but because he claims to have the final word on the subject.
Gerhardsson
notes that generations of rabbis had developed instructional
techniques that enabled them to transmit – orally –
substantial quantities of information that their students
could later reliably reproduce. As Gerhardsson notes, a rabbinic
principle says that “It is a man’s duty to state
[a tradition] in his teacher’s words.” So rabbis
regularly condensed a lecture into concise kelal verses which
their students memorized. By means of these catch-words or
headings, which served as outlines to jog the memory, the
students could later recall the whole substance of a discourse,
keeping its subtopics in order. So when Jesus gave his disciples
the Lord’s Prayer in response to their request to “Teach
us to pray,” the several parts of the prayer may also
have been the sub-headings of an explanatory lecture on prayer.
Jesus
used these familiar techniques because he knew they would
ensure the reliable transmission of his teaching. Indeed,
nothing could have been more rabbinic than the midrash, or
commentary, that he delivered during that late-night walk
to Emmaus when, beginning with Moses and all the prophets,
he “interpreted to them in all the [Old Testament] Scriptures
the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27).
One
could, of course, charge that pious imagination was at work
here, rewriting history after the events. But how likely is
it that the students of Rabbi Jesus – who had, as they
themselves report, taught them to distinguish true tradition
from false – would have attributed to their Rabbi traditions
that they knew he had not delivered, especially when they
knew that “It is a man’s duty to state [a tradition]
in his teacher’s words”?
Not
only did Jesus teach in the rabbinic manner, but so did his
first disciples, who were also Jews. Again, what is significant
is not just that this tradition existed, but that its method
was rabbinic. For it is the rabbinic method that makes it
probable that the time between Jesus’ ministry and the
writing of the New Testament was bridged by a body of authentic
– that is, accurately reported – ethical and narrative
tradition.
Paul,
who had studied under the famous Rabbi Gamaliel, includes
in his letters not only numerous references to such a Christian
“oral Torah”, but also numerous examples of it.
References to this oral tradition in Paul’s letters
and elsewhere in the New Testament can be recognized by the
presence of such technical terms as the noun “tradition”
(Greek parádosis, that which has been “handed
on” or “delivered”), the cognate verb “to
deliver” (Greek paradidónai, “to pass along”
or “hand over”), and the verb “to receive”
(Greek paralambánein).
These
are often accompanied by typically rabbinic references to
the recipients as “imitators” or “witnesses”,
not only of the traditionist’s words, but also of his
manner of life. Paul’s Thessalonian letters are full
of such references, which is just what we should expect in
the earliest piece of apostolic writing we possess, since
the apostolic teaching that preceded it would have been mainly
oral.
You
can see at 1 Corinthians 11:23 an excellent example of how
Jesus’ own teaching continued to be handed on among
the early Christians a quarter-century later. In that verse
Paul reminds the Corinthians that he “delivered”
to them what he also “received from the Lord”
– namely, the words of institution of the Eucharist
or the Lord’s Supper. Nowhere do we read of Paul receiving
those words by some special revelation, so Paul must mean
that he received them from other church leaders who in turn
had received them from Jesus. If that is so, then the words
“This is my body . . . This is my blood . . . ”
may be the best attested words of Jesus that we possess.
That tradition, which claims nothing less than eye-witness
authority, is as close as we can get to the historical Jesus.
We could, if we wished, join a string of critics dating back
to the early 1800s who have tried to distinguish myth from
history among the elements of that tradition. But such a task
is necessarily an exercise in subjectivity. For like Procrustes
of old, one finds oneself stretching here or lopping off there
until the evidence fits one’s preconceptions of what
Jesus could or should have done and said. But when we consider
the traditionists’ high regard for “the heard
Word of God” (1 Thessalonians 2:13), their concern for
its accurate transmission (2 Timothy 2:2), their claim to
reliable eye-witness evidence (1 John 1:1-3), and their repudiation
of mythmaking (2 Peter 1:16), perhaps the skeptic will excuse
us if, in the absence of any compelling evidence to the contrary,
we continue to regard the New Testament as the reliable record
of a reliable oral tradition.
A
note from Robert Lyon:
At last Don’t Throw Out Your Bible has
gone to press. But I’ll be pleased to send a free
PDF copy to any Arts and Opinion subscriber who
provides an e-mail address. And for good measure I’ll
include a copy of A Christmas You Can Believe In.
I promise not to distribute your address, nor to pester
you with further notifications (until I write another
book), and I’ll even delete your address if you
so request. To order, click on the link = graphikos@graphikos.ca
Please put DTOYB in your subject line. BTW, you’re
welcome to print what I send you, but not for commercial
purposes.
