Category Archive

As I indicated in a previous post Robert McIver and Marie Carroll have also had an article on their research printed in JBL. The reference to that one is McIver, Robert K. and Marie Carroll. “Experiments to Develop Criteria for Determining the Existence of Written Sources, and Their Potential Implications for the Synoptic Problem.” Journal of Biblical Literature 121, no. 4 (2002): 667-687, so it’s earlier than the Cognitive Psychology one. It deals more specifically with the biblical material, as you would expect of an article in JBL.

John Poirier has commented on my previous post and has indicated that he has also published a response to McIver and Carroll’s JBL article. The reference for that article is Poirier, John C. “Memory, Written Sources, and the Synoptic Problem: A Response to Robert K. McIver and Marie Carroll.” Journal of Biblical Literature 123, no. 2 (2004): 315-322.

James (not Alistair, as I initially typed) McGrath has also posted on oral transmission and invited conversation over on his Exploring our Matrix blog. I’ve arrived back at work today to a pile of more or less urgent paperwork, so won’t be doing anything about this for a day or three, but it’s definitely interesting.

As Tim Bulkeley indicated, quite a number of presenters didn’t arrive. One of the major disappointments for me was that Jon Ma Asgeirsson was unwell and unable to get here from Iceland to present Constructing Memory of No(-)Thing and the Need for Societal Ethos, both because the paper looked interesting and because I wanted to put a face to his writings. I do hope he recovers quickly. He did, however, let SBL know that he would not be there.  Some presenters didn’t bother - they just didn’t arrive.

The other (and therefore the only) paper in that session was Robert McIver from Avondale College, the Adventist theological college in New South Wales, and I was very pleased to have heard it.  His topic was Skilled Memory and the Jesus Traditions. I was a bit perplexed when he began because he was presenting research with which I was familiar about the difference between copying and recalling from memory and I then realised that in preparing for my own paper, I had actually read the paper in Applied Cognitive Psychology where he and his colleague, Marie Carroll, had written this research up.  It’s well worth reading (McIver, Robert K. and Marie  Carroll. “Distinguishing Characteristics of Orally Transmitted Material When Compared to Material Transmitted by Literary Means.” Applied Cognitive Psychology 18, no. 9 (2004): 1251-1269), although apparently he has published something similar in JBL, which may be more accessible to biblical scholars.

He was providing evidence that the kinds of differences in wording between gospel accounts could not be the result of copying errors, but could quite easily be the result of oral transmission.  He also suggested that Jesus may well have used some of the techniques employed by rabbis to transmit oral tradition to train his disciples to pass on his teachings.  For me, it was one of the best papers at the conference, in the sense of most useful to my research, but also well presented.

Earlier that day, I head a couple of other papers in the same Program Unit (Mind, Society and Tradition). One was by Risto Uro, entitled Ritual and Cooperation:  Evolutionary Explanations for Early Christian Rituals, which was somewhat outside my area of expertise, but it was good to be able to put a person to the books that he’s written and edited on Thomas.  The second was A Cognitive Perspective on Identity and Behaviour Norms in Ephesians, presented by Rikard Roitto, a PhD student from Sweden.  He explained the structure of Ephesians very credibly in terms of beginning by describing the protoypical Christ-believer (the author of the book), to which the Ephesians should aspire, and then advice about what they needed to do in order to get there.  I liked the concepts he presented and also enjoyed the notion that Christians might be “clients of God” - said at least partly tongue-in-cheek.  The paper after morning tea in that session also sounded interesting, but I had a session booked with my doctoral supervisor, who is now based in New Zealand.

I will try to write more over the next few days, but it appears that I am now the only person awake in the household - I am staying with my brother and his family - which probably means that everyone will be up and enthusiastic quite early tomorrow morning.

I’m looking forward to going to Auckland for this year’s SBL International Conference. As well as presenting my own paper, I’m looking forward to hearing quite a number of others, to being able to catch up with friends and colleagues whom I don’t see very often and to find out a bit more about Maori culture. The conference begins with a Powhiri (welcome ceremony) at the Marae at Auckland University and I am booked on the Tamaki Hikoi guided tour which introduces Maori culture. When I was in Christchurch last year on my way home from Texas, I was able to get a tiny taste of Maori culture and am really interested to hear more. It is particularly interesting that there are significant similarities between Maori art and the art of the Canadian First Nations people in British Columbia.

I have found the research that I’ve been doing for my paper really fascinating, if slightly “off topic” for my thesis. The topic is “Eyewitness Testimony in Psychological Research: Some Consequences for Richard Bauckham’s Work.” The work I’m referring to is, of course, his Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Eerdmans, 2006). If you’re interested, you can read the abstract on the SBL conference website.  I didn’t realise just how huge the corpus of psychological eyewitness/memory literature is until I started reading.  You could read until the cows come home and still not be on top of every aspect!

It’s interesting that there is so little cross-pollination between the disciplines.  There are books on memory in oral traditions, on memory and retelling of stories, how culture affects memory, things that psychologists take for granted about eyewitness accounts (or autobiographical/recollective memory) that just don’t appear in the literature of biblical studies.

I know - so many books to read, so little time, but still…

What with the end of semester busyness, our university Council (of which I am a member) being in a “crisis of governance” and my need to work on my paper for SBL Auckland, my blog has been neglected of late. I have, however, been following the discussion on Orality and Literacy going on on Mark Goodacre, April DeConick and Stephen Carlson’s blogs. I’d like to offer a few observations:

1. When I was studying theology, one of our lecturers described the way in which written texts were used in the first century thus, based on the training of Greek rhetoricians: The letter was received by a literate member of the community, who read it through a number of times and prepared to “orate” it to the community. Once the designated reader was sufficiently familiar with the text, the community was called together and given what amounted to a dramatic reading of the text. Thus, the fact that only 10% (or whatever the figure was) of the community were literate did not stop them from having access to the content of the letter. I assume that it is to this process that Dunn is referring in Mark’s quote.

In this situation, the people charged with communicating the message were literate, possibly extremely so, but the way in which the material in the text was communicated to the vast majority of its intended audience was orally, and it was written so that it could be read aloud. Thus, although the initial communication was written, it would then have been passed around the community orally, by those who had been present at the reading. In contrast, in the twentieth century when information was provided in written form, it was usually shared with others by handing on paper copies of the text. In today’s society, electronic copies of the text are forwarded to others, so text is transmitted to its intended audience (and often to many others) in written form. While we are also able to transmit information in oral/aural and visual form, normally the oral/aural continues to be transmitted aurally and the visual stays visual. There is very little crossover.

Of course, modern technology makes it very easy for people to record and send information to others in oral form. Mobile phones and MP3 players can be used as recorders and the rules of oral expression are much less strict than those for written expression, so it’s faster to produce oral communications.  As I alluded to in my previous post on this issue, however, it is much faster for most people to acquire information in written rather  than oral form because most of us can read much faster than the average person can talk.  (As an aside, visually impaired people who use “talking text” software are able to speed up the rate at which their text is read back to them and one of my colleagues listens to his emails at significantly faster than talking speed, although he tells me that he needs to slow the machine down when the content is complex.)  The way in which we communicate information is changing, but I still don’t think we’re moving back to being an oral society.

2. After having spent months reading the psychological research literature on eyewitness testimony, it is my considered opinion that we need to make a distinction between the transmission of community tradition by skilled oral tradents (very accurate) and the passing on of experiences and teachings by ordinary members of the community who happened to hear and see Jesus (much less accurate, even in an oral society).

In the last few days, Mark Goodacre has begun and April DeConick (here and here) and Loren Rossen have joined in on a discussion on how text-based our culture really is.

Mark says:

Outside of that academic sub-culture, the world we live in is a world still dominated by orality. Many more people receive their news through television and radio, oral media, than through newspapers. And many who do use newspapers are now no longer simply reading them but they are combining the reading experience with watching online videos, listening to podcasts and so on. I describe myself as an avid Guardian “reader” because of the familiarity of that expression, but my “reading” in fact incorporates Guardian podcasts and sometimes also video material.

While I agree that there is a lot of non-text material out there, I think that the big difference is in how we choose to preserve information that we think is important. We clearly didn’t stop using oral communication just because we could now write. What we did was to choose a more reliable way of passing on information that we regard as important.

In an oral culture, words are spoken and once they have been said, the only “record” of them is in the memories of the speaker and any audience. Because untrained human memory is not a particularly reliable medium for the accurate preservation of information, oral cultures typically train(ed) people so that information that the community considered important is/was retained more reliably.

All the things that Mark mentions are not ephemeral in the same sense as is the spoken word. Podcasts are made available precisely because the people who make them want to make it possible for those who were unable to attend to know exactly what was said. They can be downloaded and played over and over or transcripts produced, if the podcast wasn’t presented as a script. The same with videos. They can be bookmarked or downloaded and watched as often as is necessary to glean the information contained in them.

You can tell when a podcast or video hasn’t been tightly scripted beforehand - it tends to ramble and make poor viewing, especially for the time-poor. My denomination’s national youth convention has chosen to provide information updates as podcasts. The people who do them are clearly delightful human beings, but even the GenYers at whom they’re aimed complain that they don’t have time to watch three hours of podcasts (that are very heavy on your download limit) in order to get four pieces of information and are asking that a summary be put up on the website!! The shift to oral/video is by no means complete.

I think that one of the big shifts that has been made for those (only about 3% of the world’s population) who have easy access to the internet is that it is now possible for more people to preserve the things that perhaps only they or a very small group of people think are important and make them available to a much wider audience than was possible before. I am not sure that this is necessarily a good thing, but it’s very post-modern.

Picking up on one of the things that Loren quotes Robert Fowler as saying about characteristics of oral cultures, another significant shift is the development of sense of knitting people who have never met together into community. This, however, is largely illusory, at least in my opinion and experience. It is very much easier to maintain community with people you don’t have to get along with in real life. I have quite a number of e-acquaintances whom I’ve “known” for years and about whom I know quite a bit, assuming that what they share on the email list to which we belong is true. While there are several that I think I’d get along with in real life, many of them are so different to me in so many ways that the interest we share that keeps us together on the list simply wouldn’t be enough to keep us together in real-time. The only demands we make of one another on the list are to read the posts and even then, I can decide that I don’t like X and ignore all her/his posts, or that I have no interest at all in topic Y and delete all the posts on that thread unread and no-one else will know, whereas ignoring people in public in real time is much more obvious and destructive of community. There is community of a sort, but it isn’t tightly knit, like the communities to which I belong physically. From what I can understand communities in oral cultures tended to be significantly more tightly knit than the real-time communities in which we live now.

In summary, I think that in the end what is important in defining whether a culture is oral or literate, we need to look at what the culture does to preserve the information that it thinks is important. An oral culture will use the spoken word. A literate culture will use text-based media. We may be shifting towards being a multi-media culture, but I don’t think we’re going back to being oral.

This afternoon I went to the library to borrow a copy of the collection of Milman Parry’s work that appears in The Making of Homeric Verse and the librarian who checked it out for me commented that it was a fairly hefty book on a topic about which arguably little could be known. He also wanted to know if I thought it had anything to do with the material I’m working on (which he knows to be the Gospel of Thomas).

When I said that it was one of the classics on oral transmission and that the gospels are thought to have been transmitted orally for years before they were written down, he said “Well, yes, but Homeric verse is poetry and surely there are significant differences between the kinds of things you’d use to flesh out the story line in poetry and prose?” This is something that had also occurred to me and is part of the reason for my failure to read Parry before this, despite my interest in oral transmission.

That and the fact that Parry is on reserve in our library which means that during term time you have to compete against undergrads for access and can only take it out of the library overnight. During the holidays, however, you can liberate it from the library after 4 pm on Friday and not have to have it back until 9 am on Monday because the library is closed on the weekend. There are occasional advantages to the reduction in library services when the undergrads are away!

So, this weekend I plan to read Parry, or at least some of it, and try to decide for myself how much of his work on oral transmission of Homeric poetry has any direct application to the oral transmission of the gospels. Of course, seeing I’m also leading worship on Sunday morning and don’t have it fully prepared yet, I may need to borrow Parry again next weekend. Fortunately, normal library hours don’t resume until 18 February. I don’t imagine I’ll come up with any earth-shattering insights, but I will have read it, which, as noted in my last post and James’ response, is the important thing.

There is an interesting discussion on Tim Bulkely’s Sansblogue about preaching. In it, one of the people who has posted comments talks about the need for expository preaching - preaching based on the text - rather than simply using the text selectively to back up personal opinions.

While I agree that it is good to base one’s sermons on a biblical text, I think there are a range of ways of doing this, and some of them are more valid than others. I am reminded of some sermons and talks at Christian conventions that I’ve attended, where the preacher/speaker takes the text serious in minute detail. He (it is always he) takes a few words from the text and expands on them, telling us how important a particular adjective or adverb is to how the text applies to the lives of the audience. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I used to find this fascinating and be quite awestruck by the depth of the speaker’s biblical understanding.

Looking back, though, this kind of speaker was rarely looking at the Greek/Hebrew text for his source, so he was basing his exposition on English synonyms and grammatical structure, which is quite often problematic. In addition, the more I look at oral transmission and the psychological literature on eyewitness testimony, the more convinced I become of the invalidity of this kind of text work. What people remember about an event they’ve witness can be so skewed by a range of factors that attributing some divine importance to one or two particular words is simply not on, unless you subscribe to the “divine secretary” theory of inspiration of Scripture (ie that the writers of the biblical texts simply took dictation from God).

I believe that we need to look at the big picture - the themes that are consistent throughout scripture - not the fine detail, for our understanding about authentic Christian lifestyles. Fine detail analysis of text is essential to ensure that we have the big picture right, but the fine detail analysis needs to be of the texts in their original languages as far as possible, and in the context in which they were written.

However, a day or three ago, Chris Tilling’s Quote for the Day over on Chrisendom was from Andrew Perriman and it reminded me of another problem with expository preaching. Perriman talks about the fact that the Bible is not a modern text and was not written to address modern circumstances and therefore should be strange and irrelevant, not immediately accessible to the modern reader/hearer. I’m not sure that I agree with the “should” but it often is and I think that one of the problems of the person who has grown up with or has extensive experience of Christianity from within the church is that they simply don’t realise just how inaccessible the Bible is to the modern reader without a church background. In your average church service, there simply isn’t the time to spend providing the background to help the congregation understand why you are saying that the big picture is what it is - at least in the churches I attend where people start fidgetting after about 15 minutes and cannot be guaranteed to come week after week so they will get all the parts of a series.

A preacher who is trying to work from the text is therefore left with no option but the “trust me - I’m ordained/have studied theology” line, and generally most members of most congregations do trust the preacher not to be making stuff up from thin air, which is quite a sobering thought, really. I mean, how many “biblical facts” have you believed for years on the basis that some preacher years ago said they were true only to find that they actually are not? Preaching is actually quite scarey if you stop to think about it for too long!

Update: Thanks to Pat McCullough of kata ta biblia for explaining how to get a direct link to the Sansblogue post.

As I was driving to the university this morning, it occurred to me that my response to the notion of Thomas from a Christian theological perspective was just a tad too cavalier. (I am blaming this on jet lag, because I can. ).

I am very dubious about our ability to recover the exact words that Jesus spoke. I am more confident that we can recover authentic Jesus content in terms of ideas and teachings, but not necessarily as Jesus said it. What we have available is manuscripts that give us some idea of how various early Christian communities understood Jesus’ teachings. How relevant they are for the Christian church today depends to a large extent on the framework in which they were understood at the time. How close was the framework to that which the Church currently understands as orthodox?

Michael Williams calls into question the usefulness of the term Gnosticism, as does Karen King. Williams suggests that there was a group of people who

1. accepted the biblical demiurgical proposition that the cosmos was not created as a result of the initiative of the highest God,
2. were intensely interested in speculation about the true nature of divinity and the supracosmic realms
3. were focussed on the soul’s eventual transcendence of the created order and on patterns of spirituality that would contribute to this goal
4. saw nothing un-Christian in these views. (Rethinking Gnosticism Princeton University Press, 1999, 261-262)

He calls this position “biblical demiurgical”. Orthodox Christianity clearly does see something un-Christian in these views and non-canonical manuscripts that come out of this framework are not of much use to the Christian theologian, but I don’t see Thomas as fitting into this category because I don’t see evidence of 1. or 2. in the text. So, if it is not biblical demiurgical/gnostic, is early and is likely to contain authentic Jesus tradition, I think that the Church needs at least to ask questions like: What if the councils of the early Church got it wrong? How different would our practice of the faith look if we added Thomas to our mix of Scripture? Thomas was condemned as heresy by some of the early Fathers, but is there a problem with the text itself or was it with how the communities who held it to be authoritative used it? How important is the tradition of the Church in determining what we believe and how we live today? (Of course, different branches of the Church will answer this last quite differently.)

I recently received an email which asked me what I think the implications of assuming an early dating for Gospel of Thomas might be on our understanding of the canon, given that one would assume that an early manuscript would (likely) contain significant amounts of authentic Jesus tradition. I found this a very interesting question and thought I might share my musings about it on this blog. This is what I think at the moment. I make no promises that I will still hold this position in six months’ time and am very happy for readers to disagree with me.

I don’t think that this is a question that has been addressed in any systematic way by scholars, although it is the logical question to ask about material that has been named as early and independent of the canon. My feeling is that the original Thomas scholarship was largely done by Christian Biblical scholars who really, really, really hoped that they would not need to revise two milennia of Christian scholarship, so they began with the hope that they could show that Thomas was not “more authentic” (whatever that might mean) than the canonical material and they breathed a huge sigh of relief when they decided that it was dependent on one or more of the synoptics and/or clearly gnostic. Since then, there has been a lot of debate about whether or not Thomas is “dependent” on the canonical gospels (although I don’t see people suggesting that Matthew and Luke are “dependent” on Mark) but I don’t recollect any of those people who have argued that Thomas is independent suggesting that this might have any effect on how we view the canon.

I think before we answer the question, though, we need to ask what we think an “authentic Jesus tradition” actually is and what it signifies.

I think that Christians in general tend to read the canon and gain the impression that Jesus only ever taught any of his teaching or told any of his parables once, so there is only one authentic original version of Jesus’ teachings. I don’t, however, think that this is particularly likely. Given that Jesus was an itinerant preacher/teacher/miracle worker who was trying to convince the Jewish people of his day that they’d strayed quite a distance from God’s desired path for them, it seems far more likely to me that he had a core of teachings that he used in most places, complete with a set of illustrations that went with them, but that he would have made adjustments to how he told them according to the audience he was talking to. So, he told his agricultural illustrations somewhat differently to a group of farmers to the way he did to a group of town-dwellers etc and he may have used different illustrations to make the same point depending on his audience. Thus, different audiences would have heard somewhat different versions of the same stories - same general thrust but different details. In other words, there could well have been several authentic versions of at least some of Jesus’ parables and sayings and we have no way of deciding which, if any of them, is the “best”, most “authentic” version. If we don’t accept this, then what do we do with the parallel versions of parables and sayings within the synoptic tradition?

In addition, as Bauckham points out in his book, the way that eyewitnesses retell stories varies. If you ask a group of people who have witnessed an event to tell you what happened, you’ll get a range of different accounts because of things like vantage points, personal situations and interest etc. So, four different people going away from hearing Jesus and telling their friends/family/local community about it, would result in four different accounts, even if the people were doing their best to give an accurate account of what they witnessed/heard. There is no guarantee that anyone was trying to produce an accurate, unbiased account of what they witnessed/heard because they didn’t see themselves as being witnesses in a court of law. Rather, they were bearing witness to a significant experience which they may or may not have discerned as being an experience of God.

So, if we accept that the Gospel of Thomas was early, it tells us that there were other versions of Jesus’ teachings in circulation in the early church and that some of the early Christians were happy to treat them as authoritative - otherwise they would not have given them the title “gospel”. Even taking into account the fact that Thomas is in Coptic and the canonical gospels are in Greek, Thomas has very little of the verbatim repetition of material that you see between Mark and Matthew and Luke, so I think it’s pretty unlikely that Thomas used one of the canonical gospels as a source ie Thomas is not dependent on the canonical gospels. However, that doesn’t mean that some communities a little later on did not have access to Thomas and one or more of the other gospels.

I don’t think that the dating of the various gospels alone tells us much about what might or might not be authentic Jesus tradition, but I suspect that the differences between parallels in different gospels are less due to deliberate redaction and more to oral transmission and Jesus having taught the same things slightly differently in different places than many scholars have suggested in the past. That is, I think that more than one of the variants we have available could be “authentic Jesus tradition”.

So, what implication does Thomas being early and potentially containing authentic Jesus tradition have for our understanding of the canon?

I think that what you finally conclude about Thomas and the canon depends to a significant extent on whether you are working from inside or outside the Church and therefore what weight you are prepared to give to the work of the Spirit in guiding the Church to select material for the canon. Those working within a secular framework tend to talk about what ended up in the canon in terms of political winners and losers, whereas those working within a Church framework tend to be somewhat more hopeful that the Councils of the Church actually tried to listen to the leading of the Spirit and even did a halfway reasonable job of hearing God (which requires a belief that there is a Spirit to do the leading in the first place, of course). I belong to a denomination that tries to take very seriously the notion that consensus decision-making in the councils of the Church should be in response to the Spirit and I have seen some radical changes in opinion and attitude taking place in church meetings as we listen to one another, so I tend to be more hopeful that the development of the canon involved more than politics, but that’s a faith stance rather than one for which I can produce empirical historical evidence. And there are times in church meetings when I wonder…

However, when I read the canon through the eyes of a Christian theologian/preacher/teacher, I am asking the question “in the light of what this says, how should I and other Christians live our daily lives?” My faith stance says that I do not need to take Thomas into account when I answer this question, or at least do not need to give it anywhere near the weight that I do those texts that the Church has declared to be canon.

When I look at Thomas in connection with my doctoral research, though, I am asking a different question. I am asking “what does this tell me about how early Christians understood the Christ event and what it meant for their daily lives?” My faith stance is irrelevant when I try to answer this question because I am not looking at Christians now, but at Christians then and I am not starting with the assumption that I need to be able to harmonise the teachings in all of them, but rather working on the assumption that the people who held these texts to be authoritative quite probably didn’t have access to the others so didn’t try to harmonise the teachings in them. It doesn’t matter what I think about the authenticity of the Jesus tradition contained in each of “my” texts, because the people who wrote and used them held them to be authentic and acted upon that belief.

I think that the fact that we are dealing with written records of orally transmitted eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ ministry and teaching means that we have no accurate way of making empirical decisions about what is and isn’t authentic Jesus tradition, but I don’t think it actually matters. We are not, in the end, going to be able to prove Christianity (or any other religious belief system) - it will always require some level of faith commitment. While I think that Christianity is far more logical than a requirement to “believe five impossible things before breakfast”, it isn’t science, either. Historians of early Christianity will choose a different standard for evaluating the reliability of different versions of Jesus’ teaching than does the Church, but they are using the texts for a different purpose, so that, I think, is OK. The problem comes when Christian theologians want to use their standard for evaluation as a yardstick to measure history and historians want to use their standard to judge theology.

Please note that I am not saying that it is perfectly OK for Christians to believe any bizarre thing that takes their fancy and justify it as a “faith” stance, nor for historians to totally disregard what a body of believers have thought over the course of two thousand years - there needs to be some overlap between standards.