His book, "Jesus Before the Gospels" starts from what would be a reasonable premise: That the so-called gospels were not written until some 40-70 years after his presumed death and that any stories about him would have been subject to the vicissitudes of oral transmission. I'm not even going to quibble about his time line. It doesn't matter. With a median life expectancy of 25 years he is effectively allowing for two generations of believers to garble the story.
Here he lays out the premise.
He recaps near the end of the section:
This is all fine and good. Only the dumbest of fundies would argue the point and they can safely be dismissed as lunatics. But Ehrman refuses to carry his own point to its logical conclusion. The gospels are fundamentally flawed because they rely on human memory but the story only exists in the gospel of "Mark" ( the others are copies and expansions of it for different audiences) yet he still insists that we can rely on it at times. Those times of course are of his own choosing.
Instead of concluding that these stories should be dismissed as simply stories - like so many other Greco-Roman myths at the time - he can't let them go.
Why the insistence on the 40-65 year after his death? That death is only depicted in the gospel which he is in the process of dismantling as just flawed human memory of stories which someone heard from someone else and repeated to others. Why treat that as a "fact?" I've read enough of Ehrman to know that he will never address this issue. It would seriously impact book sales!
Here he lays out the premise.
Quote:It was just a few years ago that I came to realize that the study of memory, as pursued by scholars who did not work on the New Testament, could provide some valuable and keen insights into such matters. These other scholars work in a number of disciplines well represented in the academy, such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Their insights may be especially relevant to understanding how the earliest Christians told and retold the stories about Jesus after his death but before the Gospels were written. This was a mysterious period of oral transmission, when stories were circulating, both among eyewitnesses and, even more, among those who knew someone whose cousin had a neighbor who had once talked with a business associate whose mother had, just fifteen years earlier, spoken with an eyewitness who told her some things about Jesus.
How were such people—those people at the tail end of the period of transmission—telling their stories about Jesus? Did they remember very well what they had heard from others (who had heard from others who had heard from others)? Were the stories they told accurate reflections of what they heard? Or, more remotely, of what Jesus said and did? Or had their stories been molded, and shaped, or even invented in the processes of telling, remembering, and retelling the stories? During the forty to sixty-five years between Jesus’s death and the first accounts of his life, how much had the stories been changed? How much was being accurately remembered? Modern studies of memory may possibly provide us with some much-needed insights into the question.
He recaps near the end of the section:
Quote:Once the ancient Christian eyewitnesses told stories about Jesus, their hearers then repeated the stories—obviously in their own words. Those who heard these new stories told them again, in their own words. And others then told these stories to others—and so on, year after year. The stories of Jesus, in other words, were circulated in the “oral tradition” before our Gospel writers produced their accounts. What do we know about oral traditions as circulated in nonliterate or semiliterate cultures? Do oral cultures tend to preserve their traditions accurately, since they cannot write them down to ensure that they remain the same every time?
This is all fine and good. Only the dumbest of fundies would argue the point and they can safely be dismissed as lunatics. But Ehrman refuses to carry his own point to its logical conclusion. The gospels are fundamentally flawed because they rely on human memory but the story only exists in the gospel of "Mark" ( the others are copies and expansions of it for different audiences) yet he still insists that we can rely on it at times. Those times of course are of his own choosing.
Instead of concluding that these stories should be dismissed as simply stories - like so many other Greco-Roman myths at the time - he can't let them go.
Why the insistence on the 40-65 year after his death? That death is only depicted in the gospel which he is in the process of dismantling as just flawed human memory of stories which someone heard from someone else and repeated to others. Why treat that as a "fact?" I've read enough of Ehrman to know that he will never address this issue. It would seriously impact book sales!
