Dr. Travis Williams
The oral transmission of stories about Jesus by early Christians was explored in the final session of the Theologian-in-Residence lecture series at Tusculum College on Tuesday.
Each Tuesday during February, Dr. Travis Williams, associate professor of religion at Tusculum College, has led an exploration of “Jesus in Early Christian Memory: Remember, Reconstructing and Rehearsing the Past.” The college sponsors the lecture series with support from Ron Smith.
As he began his lecture, Dr. Williams noted that the amount of change that may have taken place in the oral transmission of the words and deeds of Jesus among the early Christians prior to the written gospel accounts is a core point of contention between the apologists and critics of the Biblical text.
Critics point to the distortion that occurs as information is passed along human channels. The critics perception of the transmission process can be described as a chain, he continued, and they say that because each link in the Jesus tradition is connected to and dependent on the preceding links, any link that becomes distorted then the remainder are irreparably affected.
However, Dr. Williams said, a problem with this position is that oral tradition encompasses more than just an individual-to-individual sharing of information.
Scholar Rafael Rodriguez has been a leading proponent of a different understanding of oral tradition, proposing that oral tradition involves multiple lines of transmission, he continued.
Dr. Williams noted that the letters of the apostle Paul include evidence of the circulation of the oral Jesus tradition within early Christian communities. Paul makes reference to speaking to the apostles who were eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life in his letters, he explained, as well as his own passing of “what he had received” to the early churches as well as mentioning other traveling Christians who visited the churches.
Instead of a chain as the critics envision the oral transmission, it can be pictured as more like a net with multiple lines of transmission through a number of individuals that provide for self-correction, Dr. Williams said.
Another problem with the view of an individual-to-individual transmission of the stories, Dr. Williams said, is that it does not take into account the multiple ways that the stories of Jesus were shared. The actions and teachings of Jesus became part of the oral tradition that was frequently recited within the community through storytelling and performance.
In contrast to the critics, the apologists of the gospels say that the stories were not changed significantly through oral transmission, Dr. Williams said. The apologists point to the importance the oral tradition played in the social identity of the early Christians and because of that they would have taken special care to preserve the accuracy of the Jesus stories.
One Jesus scholar, Birger Gerhardsson, theorized that the oral transmission of the Jesus tradition was similar to the way sacred tradition was preserved among Jewish rabbinic disciples in that Jesus would have had his followers to memorize his teachings.
However, a major issue with this memorization theory is the large number of variations in the parallel portions of the gospels, which point against the exact memorization of Jesus’ teachings by his disciples, Dr. Williams continued.
In looking at how the Jesus stories were transmitted, Dr. Williams said, the gospels cannot be approached as just written texts detached from the oral tradition from which they were dependent and out of which context they were derived.
“If we think about the roots of the gospel, the oral tradition is all the different ways the stories, the life and reputation of Jesus were transmitted, all the ways the stories of Jesus were committed and preserved in the collective memory of his later followers,” Dr. Williams said.
In addition to the verbal telling of the stories and performances, he continued, the early Christians preserved the life and influence of Jesus through rituals such as the Lord’s Supper, ceremonies such as baptism, bodily practices such as fasting and prayer and calendar observance (Sunday as the Lord’s Day).
The written gospels draw from and repeat words, concepts and stories that were part of the oral tradition, which still presenting them in unique ways for their specific audiences, Dr. Williams said.
“The books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John present different pictures of Jesus,” he said. “They are one-time actualizations of the story of Jesus. If the authors had a different audience, they might tell it again differently.”
“When the gospel authors wrote down the accounts, they used the language, concepts and stories that form part of the larger tradition context,” he also said. “Modern Christians have no access to the vast majority of this ancient Jesus tradition, which circulated within the early church.”
The differences found and even the existence of multiple gospels show that there was great variation in how the story of Jesus could be told, Dr. Williams said. The earliest Christians treated the story of Jesus as happening in the past, but malleable and inspiring enough to address and be shaped by the changing circumstances, which the early church experienced, he added.
While the written gospels were originally understood as expressions of the larger Jesus tradition, that tradition faded over time and these four expressions came to viewed as the totality of the tradition, he said.
However, the change to the written form was needed to help preserve the tradition, Dr. Williams said, noting the work of German scholars Jan and Adelia Assman who developed a theory that a collective memory of the past cannot survive across generational divides without a change in the media in which it is preserved and transmitted, he said.
In summary, Dr. Williams said that the memory and transmission of the Jesus tradition had five important ingredients. First, he said, memories of the words and deeds of Jesus were formed throughout his ministry by those who were eyewitnesses, which include some distortion caused by the memory process and social environment influences.
Secondly, the life of Jesus was memorialized in by his followers in a variety of ways (oral performances, rituals, ceremonies, etc.), he continued, and then was transmitted by Christian missionaries around the ancient world, a process which helped offset some of the deficiencies of memory while still allowing for change and adaptation.
Fourthly, the Jesus story was adapted to fit new and evolving circumstances of early Christian communities as time passed and situations changed, he said. And lastly, different expressions of the larger Jesus tradition were written down in an attempt to transform the communicative memory into a more durable form.
“The memories of Jesus were formed by eyewitnesses but influenced by communities,” he said. “They were grounded in the past but reconstructed in the present, stable through the repetition but malleable from social change and representative of tradition but reflecting singular performance.”