16.15. Conclusion
Clearly, Jesus’s disciples were eyewitnesses and remained in prominent positions in the Jerusalem church, probably until within a few years of the first Gospel’s writing. But what difference would this fact make for our Gospels? What if the Evangelists drew on other, less reliable sources besides the eyewitnesses?
Since the disciples were highly prominent in the early church, these other sources might also be based on their testimony. But what might have happened to the testimony in the meantime? Should we expect it to have been radically transformed, as Rudolf Bultmann thought?
16.1. Critically Reforming Form Criticism?
More recent scholarship, however, has revisited Bultmann’s radical approach. Bultmann’s approach, no less than the opposite approach of total memorization, is largely inconsistent with “what is known of collective memory.”1 As Oxford scholar Eric Eve notes, “The study of oral tradition has moved on a long way since form criticism represented the cutting edge of New Testament scholarship.”2
Indeed, in many ways traditional form criticism is seriously outdated.3 Thus, for example, Dibelius’s model of folklore followed J. G. Herder’s “romantic” view of orality, a mere ideal contradicted by subsequent empirical study.4 Studies of memory and oral tradition in other disciplines are now roughly a century advanced beyond the concepts on which the early form critics drew.
Bultmann’s more skeptical approach to Jesus tradition followed a model of form criticism based on OT traditions, which in turn followed a model used to explain centuries of transmission of European folk tales.5 As even some of Bultmann’s contemporaries noted, this approach ignored the much shorter time frame between Jesus and the Gospels.6
Most of the tendencies that Bultmann postulated (e.g., expansion, adding names) were later countered by E. P. Sanders, who demonstrated from ancient texts that tradition did not always follow the tendencies in Bultmann’s hypotheses.7 Indeed, as Cambridge scholar Richard Bauckham notes, “The kinds of differences we find between Plutarch and his sources are quite comparable to the differences between the Gospels, and nothing in the least like form criticism is postulated by experts on Plutarch.”8
Modern memory studies, the initial contributions to which were already being published in Bultmann’s day,9 illustrate further that Bultmann was far too skeptical about collective memory.10 In this chapter I draw heavily on the undervalued work of Robert McIver and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Eric Eve, Alan Kirk, Tom Thatcher, and other NT scholars most familiar with memory studies and oral historiography.11
Some recent scholarship in oral history and tradition contends that trying to separate authentic and inauthentic elements of it in the modern, “objective” sense typically exceeds the tools available. For such scholars, modern studies of memory call into question some of the time-honored scholarly criteria of authenticity.12 Having too often observed the periodic swing of the scholarly pendulum, I believe that dismissing the criteria rather than merely using them circumspectly is an overreaction. But while I affirm that most of those criteria can remain valuable (and have applied them in some earlier works), they are already too well-known for rehearsal in this book, and their application would prove more relevant for an actual reconstruction of the historical Jesus than for a prolegomenon of this sort. My focus here therefore remains on how oral tradition generally transmits information and shapes it in the process.
16.2. Oral Tradition: Connecting Past and Present
Some scholars examine oral traditions only in their own right; others try to use them for clues about the past.13 Social-memory approaches are designed not to deal with historical reliability of narrated experiences but to examine how groups reappropriate memories for their own settings.14 The focus of social-memory studies is more cultural than historiographic.15 Nevertheless, those exploring historical questions today cannot ignore contemporary questions about individual and especially collective memory. Historical method cannot guarantee that any given memory or tradition goes back to Jesus, but because there is no unmediated access to the past, no uninterpreted memory on which we may draw,16 contemporary historians cannot speak of historically authentic information about Jesus (or other figures) without acknowledging matters of memory. Because some scholars challenge the possibility of knowledge about the historical Jesus based on the fallibility of memory, those engaged in historical-Jesus research cannot avoid the issue. The limitations of memory limit our access to historical information, but those interested in historical information cannot neglect memories when they are our only access to the past.
Oral sources lack the fixity that written texts can offer, as ancient biographers also recognized.17 Nevertheless, oral history can and often must be used to supplement written records.18 Where written sources are limited, we sometimes possess only oral history—a source that often stands behind the best written research in any case. While spurious information, even if very old, cannot correctly fill lacunae in our historical knowledge (despite the sometimes contrary literary approach of ancient historians and biographers), oral history does often provide genuinely valuable information.19
Westerners’ earlier neglect of such sources has sometimes reflected ethnocentric prejudices.20 Memory is, of course, preserved from the community’s perspective.21 All memory, whether personal or collective, is colored by assumptions, biases, and so forth, yet such memory about persons and events also normally rests on genuine experiences.22
Cultures are typically defined by a shared cultural identity rooted in a shared cultural memory.23 Repetition of shared memories reinforces the shared culture, although these memories may be presented in a variety of fresh ways.24 When communities deem some memories important to their group identity, they usually develop some more formal and deliberate ways of rehearsing these memories.25
Communities not only pass on but also reshape their stories. Because oral cultures use collective memory for identity formation,26 they focus on features most relevant to their present needs.27 Thus collective memories may embellish or exaggerate pleasing elements, omit inconvenient information, and prefer one causal nexus over another.28 (Even individual speakers, both ancient and modern, tend to do the same.)29
Oral tradition often shapes stories in accordance with culturally designed expectations or scripts,30 thus reading one story in light of another, as the Gospels regularly read Jesus’s story in light of the OT.31 Still, Goodacre, Allison, and others are correct to emphasize that biblical allusions need entail fiction in the Gospels no more than John Bunyan’s shaping of his own conversion story in light of Paul’s voids the information in the former.32 We should also keep in mind that Jesus himself may have offered some of these associations (cf., e.g., Mark 9:13) 33 and even very sober historians often followed earlier historical34 and literary35 models.
Individuals and groups reshape memories about the past to meet the needs of the present. Starting from the first witnesses and continuing in subsequent generations, interests shape the elements considered significant and thus sift what is worth preserving from what may be omitted.36 Recounters of traditional stories also want to engage and please their audiences, an interest that affects which elements of a story are told. Community ideals thus shape the passing on of tradition.37 For example, already the Fourth Gospel omits some key elements from the Synoptics such as individual exorcisms;38 with similar selectivity, most church fathers also show far more interest in Jesus’s teachings than in the accounts of his miracles.
Like individual memory (ch. 14), long-term cultural memory also usually collapses chronology. This is especially the case for its older memories, what oral historians consider the period before a culture’s “floating gap.”39 (The floating gap is the period before which memories are blended together and for which no comparative chronology exists.) Characters of the past may be blended and idealized, or features of one character reattributed to another,40 though this is less true of accounts from within living memory and “in historical accounts.”41
16.3. But a Past Actually Happened
A community’s reconstructive consolidation of memory does not, however, mean that communities typically simply fabricate the past.42 The process of reading traditions in light of scripts rereads the present in light of the past, as well as the past in light of the present.43 McIver, who addresses collective memory at significant length,44 cites the warning of researchers on memory distortion: “It seems that by and large outright fabrication of collective memory is rare”; facts partly constrain the collective memory.45 Even over extensive periods of time, “traditions about past events and figures generally correspond in important ways to what actually happened,”46 and the most “essential elements of collective memories resist change.”47
And whatever might be the case for centuries, living memory is, apart from deception or serious memory disorders, rarely wholesale creation. Although our access to it is mediated through interpretive structures, there was an “actual past.”48 Extreme “continuitists” read historical accounts as pure, uninterpreted data, and extreme “presentists” treat all memory as pure constructions for present interests, but the vast majority of social memory theorists today allow for both past and present connections.49
As memory expert Barry Schwartz notes, “the past” is no mere “hallucination pressed to the service” of the present.50 Both personal and corporate memory often omit inconvenient material,51 but given the limits of memory, more material is always omitted than remembered in any case. While such omissions discard information, they do not fabricate the information that remains;52 we may believe that they distort the larger picture, but omissions are not the same thing as mistaken information. As Schwartz notes, “Partial knowledge is not synonymous with faulty knowledge.”53 Ancient audiences would not expect otherwise; as we have noted, omissions were expected also in ancient literature.54
For example, Schwartz has documented how different groups in different periods have reshaped the cultural memory of Abraham Lincoln,55 but Schwartz observes that most of these differences reflect interpretive standpoints rather than falsified information.56 Thus he emphasizes that, “as these memories were passed on, they were modified, but the essence of the events to which they refer remained unchanged.”57 Nor must we dismiss as wholly inappropriate even all interpretive standpoints. Thus some have appropriated Lincoln as emancipator, others as preserver of the Union, others as a man of the frontier who achieved greatness, and so forth, but none of these portraits is necessarily wrong or incompatible with the others.58
And in any case, long-term, multigenerational cultural memory of Lincoln is better compared with long-term cultural memory of Jesus through subsequent multigenerational history59 than with Mark’s Gospel, composed within living memory of Jesus.
In 1889, almost a quarter century after Lincoln’s assassination, his former law partner published a biography of Lincoln. His research included contacting 250 people who had known Lincoln, including many who had known him in the 1830s. “Because thirty-five to forty years had passed,” Schwartz notes, “since these people last saw Lincoln (an interval equal to that separating Mark from the crucifixion of Jesus),” this biographer worked hard to exclude misinformation.60
Nearly three decades after Lincoln’s death another biographer conducted similar interviews but produced a more positive characterization of Lincoln, reconfiguring the popular memory of the former president.61 Schwartz compares this later biographer’s different reading of Lincoln with John’s reading of Jesus that differs from Mark.62 Jesus’s disciples did not vanish at his death; analogously, many who knew Lincoln’s later years survived long afterward to recount their memories. “Each witness need not tell the same story in order for a fair estimate of the ‘real Lincoln’ to appear. . . . Not every valid story about the past has a single point of origin.”63
Observations about George Washington might illustrate the requisite balance between a larger story’s legendary additions and continuing information. Most historians deem fictitious the tale of Washington cutting down the cherry tree.64 By contrast, no one doubts major elements of his military career (such as the disastrous Braddock expedition in 1755), that he commanded the colonial army, served as the first US president from 1789 to 1797, and so forth. As Schwartz points out, “The George Washington that we find in a biography written in 1800 . . . is easily recognizable in a book published in 2000, for expert custodians prevent the Washington biography from being unduly modified.”65
Either-or assertions work best when premises are mutually exclusive; they are logically incoherent when premises may prove complementary. The most extreme postmodern interpreters may reduce all of history to rhetoric, but most historians affirm instead that history, however shaped by rhetoric, remains a valid discipline no less than rhetoric.66 Reception history shows the development of tradition but does not negate the initial events.
Thus Alan Kirk compares denying any history behind witnesses’ memory with “claiming that the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C., because it is the product of politically charged commemorative debates of the 1980s, has no historical relationship to the Vietnam War.”67 Memory encoding efficiently condenses information to schemas, but this “amounts to abstracting from originating occurrences,” not pure invention.68 No one would claim that Holocaust survivors’ vivid recollections of the Holocaust disprove events standing behind their recollections.69 In the same way, interpretation in the gospel tradition does not negate genuine information that was being interpreted.
Schwartz declares that “interpretation is more often forced upon the observer of an event by its inherent quality than imposed by the observer’s worldview and interests. Put another way, reality counts more than bias in the remembering of most events most of the time.”70 “Significant distortions” occur but remain exceptional.71
16.4. Examples of Distorted Oral Tradition
In some cultures without literacy, even some central features of a myth may disappear in retellings in just two decades,72 although such changes are far more common after a floating gap, often marked by major social changes that render aspects of the tradition less intelligible.73
Certainly significant divergences do accumulate in oral tradition over time.74 While retaining a massacre, for example, the Song of Roland poetically transforms the extermination of Charlemagne’s small rear guard by local shepherds three centuries earlier into a valiant stand against 100,000 Muslim fighters.75
In some cases, such as medieval hagiography76 and tales about the Baal Shem Tov,77 significant distortions can arise within a couple generations. Tales of the Baal Shem Tov were written fifty-four years after the Besht’s death but most often refer to purported events many years prior to that death. Since the Synoptics address the final year or years before Jesus’s execution, only the infancy narratives (Matt 1–2; Luke 1–2) would be of comparable distance from the events. Experts note that fanciful tales were characteristic in general of the early Hasidism who revered the Baal Shem Tov.78 As noted in my brief discussion of late antique hagiography and mythography, these patterns do not fit conventions dominant in first-century biography.
Probable influence of Christian models also renders anachronistic some other proposals, though they offer a degree of social analogy. In the seventeenth century a Jewish messianic movement followed Sabbatai Sevi.79 Some of his followers failed to be deterred by his apostasy to Islam,80 and some even by his death,81 but English Christian millenarianism, Kabbalah, and Islam provided them a range of conceptual options that do not seem to have existed in the first century.82
Somewhat more analogously, some compare with Jesus’s early movement that of Simon Kimbangu,83 yet direct Christian influence is explicitly present in this case. Kimbangu himself, a Baptist, naturally had Jesus as a model. Like Jesus, he had a healing ministry that expanded his movement;84 like Jesus, he also confronted repression by the colonial elite.85 There were also some prior Congolese prophetic models86 and a contemporary rise in highly effective African Christian prophets in this period.87
Unlike Jesus, however, Kimbangu was not so much of a sage, and their respective mnemonic cultures differed. Kimbangu did not train disciples by passing on easily memorizable sayings, disciples who then led the movement and cited his teachings. Indeed, many of Kimbangu’s “closest disciples were also arrested,”88 putting out of circulation many of the movement’s key leaders.89 Much more than is evident in our first-century sources about Jesus,90 views about their movement’s founder varied widely among Kimbangu’s followers, especially after his son’s death some forty years later.91
In contrast to Kimbanguism, Jesus’s early Galilean Jewish followers lacked close models for rapid deification; his later Gentile followers in the Diaspora would hardly have invoked the category “Messiah.”92 Despite varying emphases, an exalted core Christology pervades even Paul’s earliest letters, starting some two decades after Jesus’s execution as a suspected royal claimant. Despite serious disagreements on other issues, Paul seems to presuppose shared agreement regarding Jesus’s resurrection and exalted status (1 Cor 8:6; 15:1–8; Gal 2:7–9).
Even the somewhat short-term examples of distortion noted above are all far removed from Jesus’s context. Even apart from the analogy’s risk of anachronism, however, such stark distortions are outliers deviating from the norm in collective memory about community origins,93 especially within living memory.
Granted, I can cite plenty of ancient examples of almost immediate rumors,94 at least on occasion deliberate.95 But having read through ancient sources rather than cherry-picked among them, I can also confirm that these differ from the usual core of information typically accepted in ancient biographies within living memory of their subjects. Short-term rumors are also often falsified by subsequent, better-informed reports.96
In oral tradition generally, rumor transmission differs from the transmission of stories central to the community’s identity.97 Rumor experiments certainly differ starkly from the normal conditions of oral tradition.98 The distorted oral traditions here are far from the norm within living memory; barring significant arguments to the contrary, we should prefer more mainstream analogies for the gospel tradition.
16.5. Examples of Tenacious Oral Tradition
If examples of distortions in oral tradition are possible, counterexamples are no less possible. Ethnic conflicts around the world today demonstrate that communities can remember for generations events that they consider significant. This was no less the case in antiquity. Seven centuries after conflicts between Megara and Athens, for example, Megarians continued to hate Athenians.99
One cannot easily speak of inflexible, universal laws of tradition.100 Yet, contrary to an assumption of some hyperskeptics that memory frailties force complete agnosticism about stories transmitted orally from the past, many societies pass on key stories and wisdom for centuries, despite fluidity of language and details.101 As Eric Eve points out, communities “generally devise more formal means of rehearsing the collective memories they deem important.”102
Although we usually lack external means to evaluate how long traditions have continued, sometimes we do have such sources. Thus for example Guaraní Indians in Argentina orally preserved the tradition of the gospel they had learned from the Jesuit mission before it was dispersed two centuries earlier, in the 1700s.103 Information about cultural contacts suggests that some biblically based stories apparently entered local traditions in some African oral societies three centuries before their next attestation.104 Because of incidental preservation in an old Ethiopian chronicle, we can confirm fairly accurate preservation of oral tradition about a Hadiya leader over the course of half a millennium.105 Geology confirms the transmission over centuries of a New Guinea Highlands tradition about a volcanic eruption.106
Similarly, Vansina points out that the oral traditions of the Abenaki Indians “were not written down before 1869,” but they “confirm both French and British accounts” of a 1759 conflict “and resolve at least one contradiction between the written versions.”107 Many Middle Eastern stories refer to events that investigators outside the communities can date five, ten, or even fifteen centuries earlier.108
Some scholars cite arguments for even far older traditions. Such arguments are not directly relevant for this book’s thesis, but if any are correct, they illustrate more graphically the possibility of shorter periods of oral tradition. In 1865 outsiders reported a story from the Klamath people that described accurately a volcanic eruption in their neighborhood, one that formed Crater Lake. This particular tradition was apparently transmitted orally for millennia, albeit with the help of Crater Lake as a conspicuous, nearby visual aid: ice-dating demonstrates that the eruption occurred nearly 7,700 years ago.109
Some Hawaiian traditions similarly appear to be very ancient. Traditions there include genealogies supposedly going back ninety-five generations, as well as mythical battles of volcano goddesses that formed specific lava flows in specific generations at named locations. To the astonishment of the researcher, “The radiocarbon dates for these lava flows matched not only the relative order of the named chiefs in the genealogical record, but closely matched absolute dates as well if a 22-year period were used for the length of each chiefly generation.”110 Still others recount information reportedly transmitted orally for up to ten thousand years.111
While unbroken tradition chains of such inordinate length are at best plainly exceptional,112 they do suggest that sometimes traditions can be preserved orally for centuries. Even if we discount the possibility of exclusively oral transmission over the course of millennia, the possibility of significant transmission over the course of generations is clearly established. As noted below, transmission within living memory can be especially accurate.
Although traditions are rarely verbatim, on occasion the core can be quite close.113 Ruth Finnegan, for example, notes the somewhat close (but not verbatim) correspondence of two recorded performances by the same griot.114 More relevant for multigenerational transmission, she notes versions of the folk ballad Barbara Allen attested roughly two centuries apart, transmitted orally yet with striking similarities.115 Walter Ong also notes some cases of “more exact verbatim memorization,” even at times among exclusively “oral peoples,”116 although these are, again, exceptional. Nevertheless, similarity in wording is usually far greater than a modern Western reader would guess from our own experience of memory.117
Factors that allow oral tradition to flourish, by keeping it memorable, include the following, most of them analogous to factors for memory in individual, psychological memory:
Oral traditions are also normally concrete rather than abstract.122 Given ancient discipleship practices of rehearsal and the special role accorded Jesus in his movement, such factors were likely at work in the gospel tradition.
Oral tradition generally features both stability and flexibility.123 Eve’s summary of general observations about memory is as difficult to dispute as it is common sense: “(1) oral tradition typically exhibits both stability and change; (2) collective memory reflects both the impact of the past and the needs of our present; and (3) individual memory (insofar as it can be distinguished from social aspects of memory) is both generally reliable and capable of being seriously misleading.”124
Even purely oral cultures usually retain the gist,125 but often only that. Oral tradition does not depend primarily on verbatim, rote memory, which is not the process for which human memory is primarily adapted.126 Gist is usually the best that ordinary memory can offer, but memory does usually preserve the gist of events that it retains.127 Paraphrase and conformity to one’s interpretive schema are far more common than verbatim recall, especially for narratives.128 (Frequent exceptions such as proverbs are noted below.)
In oral cultures, reciters’ insistence that their recall is verbatim really means only “verbatim to the best of unaided human memory.” Balkan singers of epics may insist that their songs remain unchanged, but this claim proves true only for the gist; each performance recomposes some elements of an epic, especially some wording and inessential points.129 In one study of such oral performances, just 60 percent of words were identical130—far higher than most of us in the West would achieve, but nevertheless hardly verbatim by modern standards.
And why would anyone in most cultures expect otherwise? Many of us adults in the West can repeat the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears and may insist that we have told it correctly. We are not, however, reciting it verbatim from some hypothetical original.131 We would not be likely to achieve anywhere close to 60 percent—even if we could agree on the “original” form to recount.
Moreover, not all traditions are equal; some are more relevant to community identity and thus more apt to be preserved with greater attentiveness and group concern.132 Over time, the core of such traditions tends to assume a relatively fixed shape because all previous performances constrain each new performance.133 In many societies oral tradition even limits “the potential for innovation” concerning the core of the story; the tradition “only remains in the cultural memory if it gives expression to something familiar.”134 Any divergence from community tradition or perceived fabrication of the community’s past will normally be rejected outright.135 Likewise, various versions of a story may circulate and influence one another136 and, in so doing, reinforce the core.137
Tradents may also remain more attentive when recounting stories that they believe to be true,138 as would be the case with early stories about Jesus. They also seem more careful with respect to stories “sacred” to their communities.139 In societies where honor and shame are paramount, public communal correction also serves as a deterrent against altering the story line,140 though altering details has entertainment value.
Storytelling naturally takes liberties, and oral tradents often exhibit flexibility each time they tell a story. Flexibility allows for tradition to address the present community “in fresh ways” without inhibiting “the animating moral authority of the salient past.”141 Normally there are recognized limits, however, that require the core to remain stable, even as minor details are varied by telling the story in slightly different ways.142 (Remember Goldilocks: had I told the story to my children, the porridge might have temporarily become highly nutritious broccoli soup, even though that is not what bears, though omnivorous, generally cook.)143 Traditional storytellers exercise creativity, “but not by trying to break the rules”; they follow the expected schema.144 Schwartz finds this pattern of a solid core even in divergent versions of folk tales, noting documentation of “almost ten thousand popular tales representing stable oral traditions spanning many generations.”145
Because stories central to community identity are retold countless times, good storytellers vary details during different tellings; but this “vividness must come in the noncentral details,” because “one is not allowed to tamper with the key information.”146 Audiences may correct deviations, insofar as the story is already property of the community.147 (Usually the result of the error is just shame, which is difficult enough to endure in many cultures. Among one people in Rwanda, however, the penalty was traditionally death,148 certainly a serious incentive to get one’s lesson right!)
Instead of increasing distortion, wider knowledge of stories may constrain their subsequent telling.149 This constraint seems quite probable in the case of at least some of our Gospels. Luke not only affirms that his account about Jesus rests on information going back to the beginning of the movement (Luke 1:1–2) but also expects that Theophilus will find it consistent with what he has already learned (1:3–4). By the time that Luke writes, there were hundreds or perhaps thousands of Christians even in distant Rome.150 The familiarity of Luke’s audience with much of Jesus’s story at the time that he wrote (Luke 1:4) presumably constrained his telling.
With respect to the gospel tradition, scholars normally insist only on the gist, which, given variation among the Gospels, seems to be also all that the Evangelists themselves expected. Nor would their initially anticipated audiences demur; as noted in chapter 15, the standard of accuracy for ancient memory was the gist.151 As Licona observes after collecting various examples in Plutarch, “It is safe to assume that nearly every conversation narrated in the ancient literature, if historical, is [only] a summary of content recalled by the author and/or his sources,” usually as gist or paraphrase.152
16.7. Traditional Middle Eastern Memory
Societies that value memory and traditionally have lacked literary or electronic resources for recall are more likely to exhibit memory skills.153 In the wake of modern technology, such skills are declining. In the West, a person who can recite the Aeneid or the Talmud by heart (already textually based skills) is much rarer today than in the past.154 My wife, who is from Congo and has a French PhD in history, notes that electronic media have virtually displaced such skills and interests among younger-generation Africans. Even traditional Middle Eastern memory culture is quickly giving way to electronic media,155 though at the moment traces of the stronger traditional emphasis on memory persist.
Kenneth Bailey offers a model of oral tradition positioned in the wide gap between Bultmannian skepticism and Gerhardsson’s controlled tradition.156 Arguing that the Synoptics are too much alike for mere fiction and too different for wooden transmission, Kenneth Bailey opts for the sort of oral transmission found in traditional Middle Eastern society.
Bailey’s approach has been both hailed and vilified: British scholars Dunn and Wright have developed his model;157 on my side of the Atlantic, Weeden and Ehrman have challenged it.158 Some of Bailey’s claims were inaccurate, but some of his critics have exaggerated the inaccuracies and caricaturized his position, which is, in the final analysis, fairly mainstream. The gap between Bultmann and Gerhardsson is hospitably spacious, and Bailey identifies his own position as close to that of the renowned British NT scholar C. H. Dodd.159 (I address the strengths and weaknesses of Bailey’s argument more fully in a separate, detailed article.)160
While Bailey was not always current in the secondary literature on NT scholarly opinions, he, unlike his critics, had decades of experience with Middle Eastern perspectives. Diane King, a University of Kentucky anthropology professor with expertise in traditional Middle Eastern oral tradition, observed to me that Bailey was at his best when describing what he saw around him. That is the approach that ethnographers use.161 The usual period of fieldwork for ethnographers and anthropologists is one to three years;162 although Bailey was not trained for ethnography and presumably was not taking ethnographic field notes, his four decades of experience deeply immersed in Middle Eastern culture and language should qualify him to offer sounder observations about that culture than any suggested by his most ardent critics so far.163
Although some of Bailey’s illustrations prove unfortunate, his overall sense that the essential core of stories generally persists in Middle Eastern memory seems to hold true, certainly within living memory.164 Besides his own experience, Bailey cites significant documentation, from a number of works, for the current circulation of thousands of proverbs in Middle Eastern culture,165 perhaps neglected by some of his academic critics because they are comparatively illiterate in Arabic.166
Bailey also offers both Islamic and Christian examples of Middle Eastern memory practices that are either documented in Middle Eastern sources or have been standard practices easily observable, for example, in a Middle Eastern Orthodox seminary.167
Bailey is hardly alone. For example, T. M. Derico more formally interviewed three Middle Eastern leaders who had known a recent historical figure. Although each leader naturally had some accounts not mentioned by the others, they also included numerous parallel accounts based on their direct knowledge of the figure, but independent from one another. They had recited such stories repeatedly among the spiritual communities of which the figure was considered a founder.168 The forms included travel narratives, miracle accounts, sayings, and the like.169
Likewise, Arkan al-Amin, a Lebanese minister trained in both psychology and Scripture, shared with me the core of a story that he heard just once at age twelve nearly thirty years earlier. He then located the full story for me, because it illustrates the value once placed on oral memory. I paraphrase here his translation of the Arabic poem:
The story begins with a princess poet by the name of Daʿd, who offers her hand in marriage to any poet better than she. Whoever married her would also receive a small kingdom [“emirate” in Arabic]. A poet from Tihama heard the news, composed an extraordinary poem, and then went off to see the princess. On his long journey, a man from Hijaz stayed with him and asked him why he was traveling. Trusting him, the poet naively recited his poem. The Hijazi man then killed the poet while he was sleeping, desiring the anticipated bride for himself. The Hijazi man proceeded to Princess Daʿd and recited the poem from memory, until he reached the verse that declared, “If you go to Tihama, Tihama is my nation, and if you go to Najd, then my love will be in Najd.” So the princess asked the Hijazi man where he was from. When he said Hijaz, she shouted, “Capture the killer of my husband!”
I have already noted that oral tradition often includes variations in details. Al-Amin had heard a variant version, which he also was able to locate, which specified that the Hijazi traveler’s accent had given him away (not an implausible guess from this version as well). Both versions assume the ability to memorize a poem while hearing it. Noting this traditional emphasis on memory in Middle Eastern culture, al-Amin concluded, “This type of story doesn’t phase us at all.”170
Scholars often underscore memory’s potential by noting Qur’an memorization, which is widely attested. Although memorizing the Qur’an follows an established text,171 it illustrates the emphasis on memory, and one does not need to be literate, or even to understand Arabic, to memorize it.172 Bailey cites a traditional Middle Eastern expectation for a shaykh to “memorize the entire Qur’an.”173 He notes even wider experience with Eastern Orthodox clergy who recite hours of liturgy representing “hundreds of pages”; he further illustrates his point by mentioning his then-recent encounter with a taxi driver he met who “had recently memorized the entire Psalter.”174 Such practices prevailed also in the nineteenth century,175 and rote memorization remains part of education even in parts of the Middle East today.176
Such recitation differs, of course, from memory of community stories, since textually constrained memorization is usually closer to verbatim memory, whereas oral stories depend only on gist memory.177 Oral tradition can rely more simply on “a system of constraints and cues” rather than rote memorization.178 It does illustrate, however, the value that a Middle Eastern context has traditionally placed on memory of matters central to community identity.
It is not usually disputed that traditional Middle Eastern memory valued and therefore transmitted sayings and stories orally better than do modern Google-driven Westerners.179 After the course of two millennia, the culture has obviously changed, but on the whole, especially outside urban settings, it likely remains much closer to Jesus’s milieu than are the Western approaches that many readers take for granted.
Some weaknesses in Bailey’s methodology and illustrations notwithstanding, Eric Eve is probably correct to suggest that Bailey’s work illustrates concretely the sort of “oral tradition” that others have articulated theoretically.180 Bailey’s approach may be more helpful for Galilee than for Jerusalem, however; most of the Diaspora church traced its origins to Antioch and especially to Jerusalem, while the Twelve were in leadership there, not to Galilee.181
16.7b. The Role of Prominent Tradents
Societies normally highlight the more qualified agents of tradition. Bailey recounts how in one Middle Eastern community that he visited, “The ranking patriarch was given the honour of telling the story to the newcomer” (i.e., to Bailey).182 Enlivening his teaching with anecdotes fits his Middle Eastern setting, but Bailey’s anecdotal observation is not isolated. It is consistent not only with Bailey’s other illustrations where a more prominent person is present183 and elsewhere in Middle Eastern accounts,184 but also in other societies valuing group tradition,185 including in antiquity.186 Some traditions are community property; some others are known or known best by elites.187
Many traditional societies even have special persons known as repositories of community tradition.188 Even modern Western folk tradition sometimes highlights those with special expertise; many singers of traditional North Carolina ballads, for example, “learned orally from other singers.”189 As Rubin notes, the role of such select tradents in oral tradition differs from experiments involving “randomly selected people” transmitting to other “randomly selected people.”190
In Middle Eastern and rural Mediterranean culture, deference to authority and tradition would reinforce the role of Jesus’s designated apostles on both counts. They were both the chief eyewitnesses and the chief leaders of the Christian community in Jerusalem (cf. Gal 1:18–19; 2:7–9), to which even Diaspora Christians looked as the mother church (Rom 15:25–27; Gal 1:17–18; 2:1–2; cf. 1 Cor 16:3). (Where Jewish practice depended on widespread Jewish knowledge rather than special expertise, it was because it was in a matter in which all Jews were supposed to have mnemonic expertise.)191
As the leading eyewitnesses and also leaders of the early Christian movement, Jesus’s chief associates would be accepted as leading authorities on what Jesus said and did. Theirs would be the standard version to which other members of their movement would wish to conform. Their direct influence would be less in many of the northern Mediterranean urban centers where Paul ministered, though even there Paul seems to have made his congregations aware of Cephas, the Twelve, other apostles, and the Lord’s brothers (1 Cor 1:12; 3:22; 9:5; 15:5–7; Gal 1:18–19; 2:7–9; cf. Rom 15:26–27).
The Christian tradition subsequent to the Gospels also maintained an emphasis on connections to the authentic witnesses.192 Thus, for example, Irenaeus emphasized that, as a young man, he saw Polycarp, and Polycarp had learned from the apostles and associated with those who had seen the Lord.193 By the end of living memory, tracing traditions to named witnesses of Jesus had become important, evident already in Papias.194 Such appeal to links to named, authoritative teachers of the past resembles appeals among rabbis, teachers in Greek philosophic schools, and for that matter some modern German scholarship. While it cannot guarantee that all memories or attributions are correct,195 it does underline the high value placed on, and presumably desire for, memory.
16.7c. Ancient Mediterranean Memory
I survey here briefly some evidence for the character of ancient Mediterranean memory; I have provided fuller detail elsewhere196 and have addressed ancient Mediterranean education in the previous chapter.
Writers who drew on multiple written sources had to depend heavily on memory, since even scribes could have open in front of them normally at most one source at a time.197 At least for first drafts, they also normally composed and arranged in their heads before writing.198
Ancient teachers highly valued memory. For example, to an associate who had lost his notes, one philosopher reportedly replied, “You should have inscribed them . . . on your mind instead of on paper.”199 Exhortations to remember are frequent in ancient moralists.200 Ancient Jewish201 and early Christian202 sources emphasize the same value.
In the early second century, even a literate Christian leader with access to written sources still preferred direct contact with oral memories about Jesus. Thus Papias insisted that he “did not suppose that matters written in books would benefit me as much as matters from a living and remaining voice” of eyewitnesses or those who heard them.203 More generally, authors commonly used oral sources alongside written ones.204 Certainly, far more traditions about Jesus circulated in the first century than those that survived (cf. Acts 20:35; John 20:30; 21:23).205
Given the brief period between Jesus’s ministry and the first Gospels, and given what we know of ancient interest in and dependence on memory, the survival of significant testimony should normally be considered far more likely than not.
Scholars usually date the Gospel of Mark between 64 and 75 CE (some thirty-four to forty-five years after Jesus’s ministry)206 and thus well within the period of living memory. Other written sources, probably referred to in Luke 1:1, may have been circulating in the same period. Only a few surviving ancient biographies come from within roughly four decades of their chief character, as Mark likely does. (I date Q earlier than Mark, although I recognize that the date and even existence of Q continue to be a matter of debate.) If we can look to any ancient biographies to preserve reliable memory, surely this should include Mark.
Someone might protest, however, that no ancient biographies, even those close in time to their subjects, preserved accurate memories, at least if not written by eyewitnesses. Answering this criticism could require more than a single book, much less a single chapter, since literature regarding memory and oral history multiplies today at a phenomenal rate.207 Nevertheless, the question warrants at least some discussion. I have responded to some related points in greater detail elsewhere.208
16.8a. Some Eighty Years of Living Memory
To what extent could ancient memory and oral tradition preserve the substance of events and ideas for such a span of time? Ancient historiography almost by definition included collecting oral reports; each generation’s historians established the historical record for their own generation.209 This procedure became problematic only when Romans tried to write ancient history for which they no longer had oral traditions,210 but even Romans valued depending on oral tradition when it remained within living memory. Thus, for example, Suetonius reports what he heard from an earlier generation.211
Although I have argued that apostolic testimony would be the Evangelists’ ideal source, I have not argued that the source was always direct. Let us say that many of the stories come not from the mouths of those who witnessed events forty years before, but from the mouths of those who heard the eyewitnesses, or other teachers who heard them, in the interim period, say, twenty years before. Even in the West, many people remember many stories they learned in childhood or in history classes and the like. Remembering the core in the form of episodes may point to more careful transmission from those who experienced the events, but in any case we are not speaking of a long period of time. This is all the more true for matters that are important to us. I still remember many of the eschatological rumors I heard as a new Christian convert from atheism in the late 1970s four decades ago, for example, because at the time they mattered deeply to me, though within a few years I discovered that they were almost entirely nonsense. How much more do we remember stories that we continue to value and retell as foundational for our activity?
The period within living memory—the period within the lifetime of some eyewitnesses or their hearers—is different in kind from subsequent tradition. This does not mean that stories are not reshaped for good storytelling or moral lessons. Obviously, the generation that inherits the witnesses’ testimony also will not recall as much as the eyewitnesses who experienced events. They will have much less detail, far fewer episodes, and more need to focus on the gist. Studies show that apologetic and other interests may significantly reshape the moral perspectives of accounts already in the third generation.212
Nevertheless, the survival of original witnesses often serves as a control on memory. Today “living memory” can include memories such as survivors’ testimonies of life before Nazi concentration camps213 or apartheid-era forced relocations in South Africa.214 Most scholars consider such recollections fairly stable and reliable within living memory.215
Different disciplines sometimes speak of “memory” in different ways.216 Modern social-memory research frequently distinguishes “collective” or “communicative memory” from “cultural memory.”217 Communicative memory occurs within a period in which direct communication is possible, often taken as three or “four generations or some eighty to a hundred years.”218 (In some more deliberate settings, including some ancient Mediterranean ones, some scholars suggest even 150 years.)219
In fact, in the period of living (i.e., communicative) memory, scholars usually speak not of “oral tradition” at all, but rather of “oral history,” that is, the kind of information that one could in principle (and ideally should in practice) collect from witnesses.220 Oral history depends on people’s memories communicated orally; in virtually any kind of society it lasts no more than eighty to one hundred years.221 “Tradition,” Kirk explains, “is successor to memory; it appears when living memory is not extant.”222
“Communicative memory” includes the individual in his or her social context, whereas “cultural memory” passes on the community’s agreed understanding.223 Memory more recent than the floating gap (i.e., within living memory) may be biographic in character. Cultural memory about periods before the floating gap can include myths of origins preserved institutionally.224 Cultural memory concerning the earlier period is what is remembered as history, but its correspondence to actual facts is usually not verifiable.225
Oral historian Jan Vansina notes that the major weaknesses of oral tradition are far less relevant “for data that are less than a few generations old.”226 Against some earlier generalizations about oral tradition, recent oral traditions include diverse information, with independent attestation, less reinterpretation, and sounder chronology.227 Such “oral sources do not share the limitations of oral tradition,” he observes, “and recent oral tradition—one or two generations beyond the eldest living members in a community—suffers only small damage.”228 Within the first two generations, it is difficult to isolate an event from its impact.229
16.8b. Mark Comes from the Period of Living Memory
By these standards, the period of transmission before the writing of the Gospels is relatively short;230 rather than later oral tradition, they stem from the period of oral history.231 (In this book I nevertheless retain the label “tradition,” which remains standard in our discipline.) Against some scholars, “radical amnesia” in the span of merely several decades is highly improbable.232 The skepticism of some early form-critics about accurate memories of Jesus reflected their treating the gospel traditions like European folk traditions that developed over the course of centuries. Even in antiquity, ancient observers expected centuries of oral tradition to produce variations, even in poetry.233 But the gospel tradition took decades, not centuries, to reach the Gospels. As W. D. Davies notes, probably only a single lifespan “separates Jesus from the last New Testament document,”234 an observation a fortiori all the more applicable to Mark. Schwartz agrees, given the character of oral history; that is, the Gospels “refer to a real historical figure” and “were written shortly (a few decades) after his [Jesus’s] death.”235
In the case of the Gospels, the major upheavals for believers in greater Judea from 66 to 73 (leading to many survivors relocating to the Diaspora)236 could constitute a transition for some elements of the tradition, since the original setting of the gospel traditions would make less sense to audiences born in the Diaspora.237 Nevertheless, the major effect in oral tradition would mostly be felt after the death of nearly all of the last surviving Judean tradents, probably toward the end of the first century.238 The distance of that past floating gap, before which all the past blends together, can vary depending on the culture, but it is, as noted, sometimes about eighty years.239
Before this time, communities often experience a crisis of tradition when the generation of eyewitnesses begins to die out, frequently starting about four decades after the foundational experiences. At this critical juncture, they often seek other forms to perpetuate their traditions.240 (The Roman historian Tacitus thus makes special note of the death of the last known survivor from the period of the Roman Republic.)241 Although ancients also recognized that memory could fade in old age,242 they also recognized cases of sharp memories even then,243 noting that teachers with fading memories might be more diligent in passing on their instruction to a new generation.244
Jan Assmann observes that death ruptures the connection “between yesterday and today”; “posthumous commemoration” of an individual differs from one’s own autobiographic memory.245 Assmann suggests that memory of individuals may continue orally for three to four generations to roughly eighty years, but a crisis often happens midway, at around forty years.246 This situation may help explain why authors began producing written accounts about Jesus within roughly this time frame (cf. Luke 1:1).247
The material that most scholars call Q is probably even earlier than Mark.248 Even if Mark is the first finished story about Jesus, which we cannot know, it stems from within about forty years.249 I have argued elsewhere that, as the majority of scholars hold, the other Gospels also stem from no later than about sixty-five years after Jesus’s public ministry.250
This point is fundamental. The four Gospels and maybe some traditions preserved as late as the time of Papias might stem from within the period of living memory—in the case of Jesus’s ministry, eighty to a hundred years—and this would take us to as late as 110 to 130 CE.251 By comparison, most of what we know about a majority of other events in ancient history derives from surviving historical and biographic sources written far more than four to seven decades after the events that they narrate. This is also true of the noncanonical gospels, probably including Thomas; they are problematic for historians not because they are noncanonical but because they stem from a period after communicative memory.
That Mark’s Gospel or Q originated within living memory cannot guarantee beyond all doubt that their accounts are true. Such guarantees in any case exceed the capabilities of historiographic epistemology.252 Usual standards of historical probability, however, should weight the case strongly in favor of their usefulness as exceptionally valuable historical sources about Jesus.
If we count back from approximately 65–75 CE to Jesus’s ministry, we are thinking of thirty-five to forty-five years. By the standards of oral history, this is a remarkably short time. For a comparable span of time in US history before the writing of this book, we could think of the era when Nixon, Carter, and Reagan were US presidents. We teachers in our fifties or older still know information we learned relevant to our disciplines during those years, and we can probably still recount many events and experiences of our own and from our environment from those years.
Some ancient evidence, which professes to be based on witnesses who knew the first-century apostles, supports this general picture. I have already mentioned the testimony of Papias, and, more important and less disputable, the confidence that Matthew and Luke, who likely knew the origins of Mark’s Gospel, placed in that Gospel as a valuable source for their information-based works.
I do not deny that some diverse traditions about Jesus arose by the later decades of the first century. Even if we explain many Johannine divergences from the Synoptics as homiletical and theological extrapolations that ancient Christian auditors might recognize as such, particularly obvious divergences in our sources surface in the specifics of Judas’s grisly death253 or Jesus’s genealogy (Matt 1:2–16; Luke 3:24–38).254
Nevertheless, and in contrast to such examples, the strong majority of gospel tradition reflected in our first-century sources appears remarkably stable. This is likely in part because our written sources derive from the period of living memory of Jesus.
What we expect of those who passed on the gospel tradition should be consistent with the expectations of their contemporaries. It is anachronistic to expect them to have written by historiographic standards that did not yet exist, as if those later genre expectations are the inspired canon by which all literary endeavors should be judged. As documented in chapters 5, 7, 10, and 11, ancient standards allow a degree of flexibility,255 the sort of flexibility evident in the Gospels themselves. Early rabbis, for example, not only preserved but adapted prior tradition.256 Sometimes they condensed teachings257 or presented apparently similar sayings in different words.258
Greek traditions display similar flexibility.259 As noted in chapter 11, basic rhetorical exercises included paraphrasing sayings,260 and no one objected to recontextualizing or rhetorically improving sayings. Thus one biographer praises a speaker who not only accurately “received” disciple-instruction but “passed it on” more eloquently than he had received it.261 Although writers could expand narratives without introducing new information, unless from another source,262 writers sometimes added details for dramatic effect.263 Philosophic schools could hand on their traditions with much variation “by altering and expanding” them.264 The variation in wording of some of Jesus’s sayings, from Matthew to Luke to the Didache, is therefore not surprising.265
For that matter, Greek and Roman writers quoting earlier texts in new contexts often substituted words, paraphrased, and sometimes even changed the sense by quoting lines out of context.266 For example, they barely ever quote Herodotus verbatim.267 Philo,268 and Josephus,269 and even Judean sources270 paraphrase their sacred Scriptures. Any expectation that the Gospels would necessarily follow their sources verbatim is naive.
16.10. Reticence to Invent Jesus Tradition
As E. P. Sanders concludes, “The gospel writers . . . developed [their material], shaped it and directed it in the ways they wished,” but they “did not wildly invent it.”271 Had the first Christian voices indulged in free invention among their different geographic communities, we would expect Gospels much more diverse than our Synoptics are—more like the later gnostic sources formed under such conditions.272 Or as memory theorist Barry Schwartz emphasizes, it is reasonable to expect that “Jesus’ followers were determined to get his message right.”273 This introduction brings us to the subject of the reticence of Jesus’s early movement to invent Jesus tradition.
Almost all scholars today believe that Paul’s letters represent the earliest documents in the NT. They sometimes attest early traditions about Jesus’s life and teaching (e.g., 1 Cor 7:10–12; 9:14; 11:23; 15:3; 1 Thess 4:15), and in some of these cases Paul explicitly distinguishes his teaching from that of Jesus (1 Cor 7:10, 12, 25).274
Some question why Paul fails to cite the Jesus tradition more often than he does. Paul does appeal to his audience’s prior knowledge of such tradition in 1 Corinthians 11:23; 15:1–3; and probably 7:10; 9:14; 1 Thessalonians 4:15.275 Paul uses formal language for passing on preexisting tradition, tradition typically received from other agents.276 There is good reason to find echoes of Jesus’s teachings elsewhere as well.277 Thus Paul did instruct his churches in some Jesus tradition.
But Paul probably did not instruct all churches equally. Even his appeal to Scripture is uneven in his letters, probably depending partly on the issues and partly on the biblical literacy of the respective congregations. In the same way, his appeal to Jesus tradition varies among churches. He invokes his audience’s knowledge of Jesus tradition most frequently in Corinth, where he had stayed for a particularly extended period (cf. Acts 18:11; 1 Cor 2:3; 2 Cor 11:9).
Yet Paul probably knew the OT more thoroughly than he knew the Jesus tradition, partly because the former was textual, and partly because he was better trained in the former. The Gospels were not available when Paul wrote, and his own knowledge of the Jesus tradition was presumably less complete than that of the Twelve. And as suggested by 1 Corinthians 7:10–12, 25, mentioned above, Paul did not presume to invent teachings for Jesus where he did not have them.
Some have argued for early Christian prophecy generating elements of the Jesus tradition,278 but others demur or at least find it very rare.279 The Jesus tradition was likelier a source for the wording of prophecies than the reverse. Otherwise, with which prophecies would one start as authoritative, unless those of Jesus or his earliest disciples? If an average of two prophecies occurred in each of a hundred house churches in the empire each week in the generation before 70 CE (cf. 1 Cor 14:29–31), we should expect more than 400,000 prophecies during that period.280 How would a particular prophecy gain the traction accorded to the historical-Jesus tradition?
The most explicit NT records of prophecies (Acts 11:28; 21:11; Rev 2–3)281 are distinguished from words of Jesus during his ministry, apart from any prophecies uttered by the historical Jesus himself (cf., e.g., Matt 11:21–24//Luke 10:13–15; Mark 13:2). It would be especially prophecies by Jesus himself that would prove foundational in his movement,282 and subsequent prophecies might often echo the language of the gospel tradition just as they echoed the OT.283 The tradition was also used to evaluate prophecies.284 I have addressed this matter elsewhere in more detail.285
Could someone, hearing secondhand about a word from Jesus, confuse a Christian prophecy with an earlier teaching from Jesus’s ministry? It is possible. We lack evidence, however, that this confusion happened very often, whereas extant evidence suggests that the first Christians avoided doing so deliberately.286
16.11. Examples of Early Judean/Galilean Traits
Parallelomania in the popular sphere today, especially on the internet, often seeks to derive the plot of Jesus’s story from every cultural expression possible (Greek myth, Persian myth, Egyptian myth, and maybe someday Elvis or Godzilla), apart from the ancient Jewish culture that Jesus’s own location and era make most obvious.
The impetus for such approaches in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was an anti-Semitic trend that climaxed with the syncretistic Aryan Jesus promoted by the pro-Nazi “German Christian” movement during the Nazi regime.287 The quest to find non-Jewish backgrounds for Christianity fueled much of the so-called history of religions school:288 “Jesus’s religious teachings originated in Hellenism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Iranian culture,” Susannah Heschel laments; “anything but Judaism.”289 Seeking to distance Jesus from ethnic Jews, she notes, they argued that his region of Galilee was ethnically gentile,290 a thesis that archaeological knowledge today renders absurd.291
By contrast, most voices in what is often called the Third Quest for the historical Jesus recognize that Jesus was a Galilean Jew, and they seek to understand him in that setting.292 The Gospels are written in Greek and contextualized for (at least mostly) Diaspora audiences, which only highlights all the more clearly the frequent non-Diaspora elements that remain. Note, for example, the preponderance of fishing and fishing images in the Gospels, in contrast to the rest of the New Testament.
More significantly, most names in the Gospels are not the names a later Diaspora writer would make up for characters; they are precisely the names that archaeology associates with their time and place, even though no reference works in antiquity collected this information. In general, the most common names in the Gospels were the most popular Judean/Galilean names in that period.293 If later Diaspora Christians were to invent Judean names based on knowledge of Scripture, we would have names such as Ruth and Esther rather than Mary and Salome, names such as Moses and David rather than Simon and Judas. If the names originated in Judea, by contrast, then by default they likelier originate closer to the circles of the eyewitnesses.
Many scholars recognize Galilean traits in Q. Some explain these traits as the result of Galilean memories formulated after Jesus’s resurrection; others contend that these reflect memories from Galilee before the resurrection.294 Our earliest literary evidence shows the Galilean295 disciples leading the church from Jerusalem (Gal 1:18–19; 2:1, 9), which would also be the main conduit through which the stories reached Diaspora Gospels. (Connections in the ancient Mediterranean world were largely urban, and Galilean stories would reach Diaspora cities mostly through the Judean cities of Jerusalem and, on the coast, Caesarea.)
While this information does not contradict the likelihood of a subsequently growing movement in Galilee (cf. Acts 9:31), it does cohere with the idea that Galilean features reflect genuine memories of Jesus, memories mediated to the Diaspora via the Jerusalem mother church. What we can say for certain is that such features are early and not from the Diaspora, and thus that they reflect the earliest memories of Jesus, from the time when eyewitnesses were the prominent leaders of the movement.
Although we cannot expect most preserved material to be preserved verbatim, some sorts of material can be preserved in a format closer to verbatim than others. Since memory often retains rhythm and structure, poetry and songs tend to be remembered in closer to verbatim form than prose narratives.296 (In antiquity, songs and jingles were among the most elementary mnemonic practices.297 Even in prose, rhythm was employed to support memory.)298
Although usually teaching in prose,299 Greek and Roman teachers sometimes spoke in easily memorizable forms;300 this practice was conventional among Jewish teachers, including Jesus.301 While the Gospels are clearly prose narratives, the underlying Aramaic oral tradition behind many of Jesus’s sayings frequently appears to display rhythmic features.302 Although the Gospels are in Greek, Semitic figures of speech (most consistently, “Son of man”) also remain. Such demonstrable (as opposed to some merely possible) Aramaisms and the like thus point to earliness and thus likely the preservation of the gist of Jesus’s teachings. Granted, the earliest traditioning community spoke Aramaic no less than did Jesus,303 but it is that earliest community that we would most expect to have preserved Jesus’s sayings.
More generally, some stylistic features characteristic of oral tradition (and perhaps a teaching style designed to facilitate such transmission) appear to pervade Jesus’s teachings recorded in the Gospels.304 Whereas rural Middle Eastern oral tradition can transmit news and jokes more flexibly than parables or community narratives, it transmits proverbs and poems much more rigidly.305 Most of Jesus’s sayings, which were neither news nor jokes,306 would thus be conveyed with significant continuity. Although no one sought verbatim memory of all a teacher’s words, both Jewish307 and Greek308 sources sometimes preserved elements of a teacher’s distinctive style.309
16.13. Sayings Reflecting Jesus’s Environment
Ancient novels usually reflect the environment of their authors far better than the environment in which the story is set. This tendency is true also of many later apocryphal gospels; for example, the Gospel of Peter’s Jewish priests waiting in a burial plot makes no sense in Jesus’s original environment.310 The Gospel of Thomas’s closing image of a woman being saved by becoming male311 fits Philo’s Platonic Alexandrian milieu far better than that of Jesus.312
By contrast, many of Jesus’s reported sayings in the Synoptics313 (and for that matter, some in John)314 address a setting that fits Jesus’s particular geographic or chronological milieu, even though these Gospels, too, are written for a later audience. Granted, Jesus’s milieu is also the milieu of Jesus’s disciples, but the important point is that most such sayings do reflect an early milieu. Jesus’s disciples were the tradents with the most direct and complete memories of Jesus’s ministry, and their memories are those most likely to be directly accurate. These features likely reflect an origin far earlier than Mark’s, roughly four decades after Jesus was on the earth. Following are just a few examples to illustrate the point:315
Many characteristic features of Jesus’s style, such as story parables,323 “Amen,” and “Son of man” are also distinctively Jewish.324 Meanwhile, more than in the settings of many later rabbinic parables,325 the settings of the majority of Jesus’s extant parables reflect an agrarian environment.326 (Because later Christians did not take up their style, Jesus’s parables are accepted as authentic more often than some other features of the Jesus tradition.)327
Moreover, even though the Synoptics apply Jesus’s ministry and teaching to their audience settings (as rightly emphasized by redaction critics), neither they nor, presumably, their tradents invented new stories about Jesus to resolve even the most burning issues of their day. Otherwise they would surely have addressed circumcising Gentiles (cf. Gal 2:3–4, 12; 5:11).328 When Mark addresses the issue of kosher foods (on the usual interpretation), he does so in an interpretive aside (Mark 7:14), and in his one story about a gentile supplicant, Jesus first insults her (7:27).329 In this respect, the Gospels resemble biographies of Plutarch, who emphasized themes in his sources still relevant for his own day but rarely imposed his own era’s issues into sources that lacked them.330
Although they cannot address every pericope, traditional historical-critical approaches often lend independent support to the antiquity of many traditions about Jesus beyond what I address specifically here.331 I have treated other relevant observations in greater detail elsewhere.332
Aside from such arguments addressing specific pericopes, however, default starting assumptions do shape the standard of evidence that scholars require. What do these larger considerations suggest? Recognizing that individual and collective memories can persist for more than four decades should allow for greater respect for the evidence of the Gospels than we find in circles highly skeptical of preserved memories.333 This does not mean, as Chris Keith warns, “reconstruction of the past” by means of “leftover parts”; rather, “the historian’s task” is “representation of the past, an informed hypothesis about what it could have looked like in light of the sources that remain” and their environment.334 Because all access to the past is mediated, a memory approach leads investigators back to the data supplied by the text.335
Or as Anthony Le Donne summarizes the thesis of his influential study The Historiographical Jesus:
The historical Jesus is the memorable Jesus; he is the one who set refraction trajectories in motion and who set the initial parameters for how his memories were to be interpreted by his contemporaries. If this is so, then the historian does not “find” Jesus in spite of the refractions of the evangelists. Rather, the historian discerns his historical presence and impact on the basis of those refractions. It is because these refractions exist that we can confidently postulate the mnemonic sphere in which the memories of Jesus were located.336
Actually testing in any detail where any Gospel lies on the continuum of flexibility and stability would move beyond the specified limits of this book; I refer readers to my larger Matthew commentary for some of my own earlier (and admittedly less mature) redactional observations and to others’ studies for other views.
Testing Mark, our first Gospel, is more difficult than testing Matthew or Luke because we lack Mark’s sources. Nevertheless, some of Mark’s information is attested independently. Because Paul, our earliest extant Christian source, was not an eyewitness of Jesus’s ministry and wrote pastoral letters rather than biographies, he does not focus on episodes in Jesus’s life as do the Gospels. Nevertheless, he does at times specify that he has passed along some Jesus traditions (1 Cor 11:23; 15:1–7), and where Paul and Mark independently address the same material (1 Cor 7:10–11; 11:23–26; Mark 10:9–12; 14:22–25), the gist remains the same in both, though they also (supporting their independence) include some different elements.337
The default setting that the genre and first-century date of the Gospels offer supports the limited other evidence available: we do know a lot about Jesus’s ministry and teaching. Biographies from within a generation or two of their subjects can be expected to have preserved at least the gist of most of the events they report, whatever details they may have omitted.
As noted before in this book, Luke’s preface reveals quite a bit about what he thinks that he and his audience know. He believes that they share knowledge of narratives about Jesus and of oral sources going back to the original witnesses (Luke 1:1–2). Luke also believes that his own narrative confirms the basic overarching story and presumably many individual stories that at least some of his audience already know (1:3–4). Given that Luke wrote at a time when he had access to such information (Luke 1:2–3; cf. Acts 21:8, 17–18),338 his claim should outweigh the speculations of his modern Western armchair critics (including myself). The dismissal of his claims too often rests on dismissing all the hard evidence we have and arguing the contrary based on the silence that remains, a too-common practice in some sectors of NT scholarship.
Oral tradition sometimes preserves core information accurately for centuries; preservation is most consistent, however, within the period of living memory. This is the period in which the Evangelists composed their Gospels, when eyewitnesses and those who had heard them could challenge their claims.
Many of Jesus’s teachings are in the sort of readily memorizable forms in which sages often offered them to facilitate retention. Moreover, many of Jesus’s sayings reflect their original context in his Galilean ministry far better than they reflect the situations of the churches for whom they were being presented afresh in the Gospels. The Gospels commemorate the collective memory of Jesus and his impact on the movement that he founded.
Furthermore, we must keep in mind the relatively short period between Jesus’s public ministry and the first Gospels. We may compare that interval with what we can learn today about key events a comparable distance in our own circles’ past, based on memories of even Western persons close to us. If we do so, I believe that we cannot escape the likelihood that the testimonies offered in the first Gospels do in fact offer a portrait of Jesus’s character, message, and deeds that brings us into contact with many key features of what his first disciples experienced.
1. McIver, Memory, 120; cf. Byrskog, “Century,” 12, 14, 19; Keith, Scribal Elite, 77 (“New Testament scholarship eventually abandoned the form criticism of Bultmann and others”); Kirk, Memory, 179, 187, 199.
2. Eve, Behind Gospels, xiii. Some complain that current memory studies are closer to form criticism than is the criteria approach (Eck, “Memory,” esp. 1, 9). Many others suggest that, despite its advances, classic form criticism remained bound to a textual paradigm (Boomershine, “Research Unit,” 37) and resists social-memory approaches (Kirk, “Social and Cultural Memory,” 1; Kirk, “Ehrman, Bauckham, and Bird,” 113–14; Kirk and Thatcher, “Tradition,” 29–33; Horsley, “Patterns,” 62–64; Kelber, “Works,” 230–31). Kirk, “Ehrman, Bauckham, and Bird,” 90; Kirk, Memory, 135–36, views Ehrman’s “telephone game” as reflecting his text-critical framework.
3. See already Güttgemanns, Candid Questions, e.g., 335–36.
4. Eve, Behind Gospels, 20–21, following Güttgemanns, Questions, 127, 184–93. Folklore studies today are more balanced and do not require predetermined assessments of historicity (Mournet, Oral Tradition, 166–72, noting and nuancing Dundes, Writ, 5, 10–11; cf. Park, “Folklore,” 140).
5. See Bultmann, Tradition. My remarks here do not apply to all form criticism, such as the less sweeping approaches of, e.g., Taylor, Formation, or Jeremias, Theology.
6. E.g., Davies, Invitation, 116. Today, note, e.g., Bauckham, World, 91.
7. See Sanders, Tendencies. In fact, oral tradition tends to condense, conflate, and remove secondary characters (with, e.g., Rubin, Memory, 36; Small, Wax Tablets, 200), the opposite of Bultmann’s assumptions. E.g., in Acts, Luke includes names of some centurions (Acts 10:1; 27:1) and a tribune (23:26), but he does not therefore invent a name to add to his tradition in Luke 7:2 (cf. Matt. 8:5); Matthew omits Jairus’s name (Matt. 9:18; contrast Mark 5:22; Luke 8:41).
8. Bauckham, “Response,” 237, following Pelling, “Adaptation”; Bauckham, World, 187.
9. Kirk, “Memory Theory,” 809; Kirk, Memory, 179.
10. McIver, Memory, 120, 184, 186; Kirk, “Memory Theory,” 809–15 (esp. 813), 833. Philosophically, meanwhile, radical skepticism on memory is logically self-defeating (Bernier, Quest, 65).
11. For oral transmission more generally, cf. also, e.g., Dunn, Perspective, 45–46, 110–22; Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 325–50; Keener, Historical Jesus, 139–61; Keener, “Assumptions,” 39–53. Although Dunn’s Jesus Remembered uses an approach different from social-memory theory, its model of tradition seems compatible (so Kirk and Thatcher, “Tradition,” 39n4).
12. See, e.g., Rodríguez, “Authenticating Criteria”; Keith and Le Donne, Criteria; earlier, Porter, Criteria; questioning both approaches, Downing, “Researches.”
13. Note the summary in Kelber, “Oral Tradition,” 257.
14. See Keith, Scribal Elite, 83; Kirk, “Ehrman, Bauckham, and Bird,” 100–101, 113–14; Kirk, Memory, 206 (on 207–8 distinguishing “implications for historiographical method” from facile claims of historicity). As Jens Schröter and Samuel Byrskog articulated in dialogue in the memory seminar at SNTS in Athens, August 10, 2018, the social-memory approach corrects naive historical positivism, recognizing that we always reconstruct the past from our own perspective (as even a chronological study of historical-Jesus scholarship will show).
15. Kirk, Memory, 226. Some scholars question the value of social-memory theory for historical-Jesus research; see, e.g., Foster, “Memory,” 173–75, responding to its defense in Porter and Ong, “Memory,” 147–54. For a survey of the state of the question as of 2015, see Keith, “Social Memory Theory.”
16. See, e.g., Le Donne, Historiographical Jesus, 13, 17, 38–39 (esp. 39: “The historian is never able to interpret an uninterpreted past”). Halbwachs was thus wrong to envision objective historiography as beginning where collective memory died out (Le Donne, Historiographical Jesus, 44–45).
17. Eunapius, Lives 453.
18. E.g., Aron-Schnapper and Hanet, “Archives orales”; Hoeree and Hoogbergen, “History.”
19. Cf. Byrskog, Story, 26–40; for Africa, see, e.g., Horton, “Types,” 14; Moniot, “Profile,” 50. My wife, who is from Congo and has a French PhD in history, has confirmed this observation.
20. Chrétien, “Exchange,” 77. Cf. Campbell, Faithfulness, 193–203, on the marginalization by some of Indigenous/Aboriginal perspectives.
21. Communal memory is not comprehensive but selects what it deems relevant (Kirk, “Memory,” 168).
22. Cf., e.g., Thatcher, “Cold Memory,” 58. For a survey of research in orality and Gospels studies to 2009, see Iverson, “Orality”; earlier, Byrskog, Story, 33–40; for a survey of literacy studies in classics, see Werner, “Studies.”
23. See Assmann, Cultural Memory, 2–3. Contested cultural memories thus often produce partisan or sectarian polemic.
24. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 3–4.
25. Eve, Behind Gospels, 92 (offering rituals as an example; 92–93); Assmann, Cultural Memory, 40 (and for rituals, 41–44; cf. commemorative practices in, e.g., Kirk, Memory, 185–87, 221–22; ritual, in Keightley, “Memory,” 144–47; the Lord’s Supper, in Fernandez, “Memory”).
26. McIver, Memory, 88.
27. McIver, Memory, 91, noting selective “structural amnesia”; cf. also 184; Vansina, Oral Tradition, 108, 118, 172–73.
28. McIver, Memory, 106, offering the example of differing Northern and Southern emphases on the causes of the US Civil War; cf. also Eve, Behind Gospels, 181. Bailey, “Tradition” (Themelios), 8, suggests that elements that can be most grossly exaggerated, such as jokes, news, and atrocity stories, normally do not persist in community tradition.
29. With Pelling, Texts, 6.
30. Cf. Schwartz, Forge, 231; Schwartz, “Harvest,” 321; Rodríguez, Structuring, 57–63; Eve, Behind Gospels, 99.
31. For such “keying” (or “types”), see, e.g., Vansina, Oral Tradition, 107; Eve, Behind Gospels, 97, 106, 125, 175, 178; Schwartz, “Smoke,” 15–16; Rodríguez, Structuring, 57; Rodríguez, “Suffering.” Cf. similarly Lukan use of typology in Aletti, Birth, 89–106; Keener, Acts, 1:573–74; 2:1363–64.
32. Allison, Constructing Jesus, 389, offering as examples Matthew’s interweaving such allusions in Mark, and Mark 15:40 employing the language of LXX Ps 37:12, although the presence of the women is rarely disputed historically. On Bunyan, see also Le Donne, Historiographical Jesus, 56.
33. Cf. Le Donne, Historiographical Jesus, 4–5.
34. See, e.g., Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 145–46; Bosworth, “Pursuit,” 447; Croke, “Historiography,” 567–68.
35. E.g., Pelling, Texts, 45.
36. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 118; Rubin, Memory, 36, 157.
37. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 108–14, esp. 108; cf. 190–92; Kirk, “Memory,” 168. Stories may thus be recounted differently to outsiders, esp. when they are thought to hold different values or superior knowledge (Vansina, Oral Tradition, 111). Kirk, Memory, 80, notes that audiences may coax responses to fit local genres, and every retelling molds a story more into an acceptable narrative rather than just arbitrary data.
38. This is not meant to deny that John has a demonology of one sort; see John 6:70; 8:44; 13:2, 27; cf. 7:20; 8:48–49, 52; 10:20–21.
39. E.g., in periods before the floating gap, Vansina, Oral Tradition, 24, 122, 173–88, esp. 176; Bailey, “Tradition” (ExpT), 365; Barber and Barber, Severed, 115–17; Assmann, “Memory and Culture,” 333–34.
40. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 105–6. This feature would be less prominent in Jesus tradition, since it contained only one central figure.
41. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 105.
42. Eve, Behind Gospels, 93–95, citing sources that correct earlier misreadings of Halbwachs; cf. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 122; Rodríguez, Structuring, 45; for further treatment of Halbwachs, see, e.g., Assmann, Cultural Memory, 21–33; Le Donne, Historiographical Jesus, 41–45; Schwartz, “Halbwachs.”. Using a sort of positive criterion of dissimilarity, Vansina, Oral Tradition, 107, suggests that while we cannot certainly discount tradition where it conforms figures to ideal types, we can surely trust tradition behind accounts that run counter to such types.
43. Rodríguez, Structuring, 59, following, e.g., Schudson, “Present,” 113; cf. also Kirk, “Memory Theory,” 819–20; Kirk, “Nexus,” 152 (regarding oral tradition); Le Donne, Historiographic Jesus, 58; Thatcher, “Cold Memory,” 58. For individual memory, the influence of the past on the present is a major premise of psychotherapy.
44. McIver, Memory, 81–121. Cf. Dunn, Perspective, 43–46, 114–15.
45. McIver, Memory, 106, citing Baumeister and Hastings, “Distortions,” 282.
46. McIver, Memory, 109. Distortion increases as narratives are reapplied to new frameworks, but “the initial interpretations of that event” constrain such distortion (Le Donne, Historiographic Jesus, 63). Continuity of memory allows one to link developed trajectories with their initiating contexts (73).
47. McIver, Memory, 184.
48. See Thatcher, “Actual Past”; cf. Pioske, “Retracing,” cited in Person and Keith, “Media Studies,” 11.
49. Le Donne, “Presentism,” 307; Le Donne, “Traditionalism,” 428; cf. Kirk, “Social and Cultural Memory,” 14–15; Kirk, “Collective Memory,” 61–62; Schwartz, “Origins,” 53; Baker, “Identity,” 189; Thatcher, “Actual Past.” Schwartz, “Origins,” 47–49, esp. 47, classifies Bultmann and his brand of form criticism as unrealistically “presentist” (cf. Schwartz, “Jesus in Memory,” 258, for Bultmann as unduly constructionist).
50. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 19, challenging Halbwachs’s treatment of ancient Christian memory in Collective Memory, 35–235; cf. Nikulin, “Introduction,” 16, 18, 24–27.
51. For omissions in individual memory, see, e.g., McIver, Memory, 48; in corporate memory, McIver, Memory, 91, 106; Vansina, Oral Tradition, 122.
52. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 172; cf. 122, 188, 190–92.
53. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 18; in personal memory, see Brewer, “Recollective Memory,” 42.
54. See ch. 10. In ancient biographies, see Bosworth, Arrian, 211; Licona, Differences, 2, 20, 51, 56, 72, 75, 77, 95, 109; in ancient historiography, see Polybius, Histories 6.11.7–8; Derrenbacker, Practices, 91, 93; Keener, Acts, 194–96 (including Josephus, Life 339; Against Apion 1.60–66; Dio Cassius, Roman History 1.1.1–2).
55. Ehrman, Before Gospels, 5–7. The vast majority of Ehrman’s comparisons for reshaped tradition, though useful for understanding cultural memory, are from periods subsequent to the first century (see Keener, “Ehrman vs, McIver,” 272–73, 293–97), and/or represent a process beyond living memory.
56. Addressing cultural memory, McIver also (Memory, 89–91) notes Barry Schwartz’s study of Lincoln, commenting (160) that present needs largely reshape, rather than fabricate, memories of Lincoln, following Schwartz, Forge, 293–312; Schwartz, Post-heroic Era, 219–68.
57. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 9; see further 7–9; cf. Schwartz, “Harvest,” 322, 327–28; Schwartz, “Origins,” 49.
58. Schwartz, “Harvest,” 327–28.
59. As in Rodríguez, “Suffering,” 241.
60. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 7.
61. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 7–8.
62. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 8. One difference in the analogy is that whereas Lincoln’s first biographer knew him, it is the later, Fourth Gospel’s beloved disciple who claims to have known Jesus. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 8–9, compares the Gospels with the work of historical novelists like Sandburg on Lincoln, since they bring the character to life by dramatizing his “personality, motives, character, aims, and priorities.” The Gospels, however, notoriously fail to do much of that (cf. Keener, Acts, 1:135–37), a “deficiency” (by modern literary standards) that various Jesus movies have struggled to compensate for in very diverse ways.
63. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 13.
64. So Ehrman, Introduction, 53.
65. Cf. Schwartz, “Harvest,” 322.
66. Cf. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 23, who also cites here Ricoeur, Memory, 21 (cf. 257, 278), against the radical constructivism of White, Content. (Ricoeur, Memory, 257–58, 556n34, also cites against White the critiques of numerous historians.) Reasoning from memory frailties to the illegitimacy of history tends to produce “a conceptual and procedural dead end” (Bernier, Quest, 67). Ironically, some (e.g., the controversial Sardar, Postmodernism) argue that such extreme postmodernism can become culturally insensitive.
67. Kirk, “Memory Theory,” 837; Kirk, Memory, 202.
68. Kirk, Memory, 217; see also (cited there) Koriat, Goldsmith, and Pansky, “Psychology,” 489. Kirk, Memory, 8n30, 69, elsewhere cites helpful observations of Ruben Zimmermann (Zimmermann, “Formen,” 164; Zimmermann, “Gleichnisse,” 113–14).
69. Cf. Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 493–505.
70. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 20–21, as also noted earlier.
71. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 21.
72. Ehrman, Before Gospels, 188.
73. On the floating gap, see Vansina, Oral Tradition, 23–24, 168–69, 226n10 (cf. also 122, 177); Assmann, Cultural Memory, 34–35 (aptly comparing ancient Greece’s “dark ages,” ca. 1100 to 800 BCE); King, Kurdistan, 94–96 (cf. also 66, 68, 187–88); King and Stone, “Lineal Masculinity,” 328–29; Barber and Barber, Severed, 115–18, 139. On the original schema necessary for intelligibility, see, e.g., Schwartz, “Smoke,” 23–24. On social changes inevitably requiring new understandings of religious movements (and often institutional interpreters or clergy) by the third to fourth century, Assmann, Cultural Memory, 49, cites Halbwachs. Even after the floating gap, some material that is no longer intelligible may be preserved verbatim if appropriate constraints exist (Ong, Orality, 62–63).
74. See, e.g., Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 296–97 (noting limitations in Goody and Watt, “Consequences,” 310; Goody, Logic, 9, but recognizing the balanced approach of Rodriguez, Structuring, 41–80); Harms, “Tradition”; Raphael, “Travail”; Iglesias, “Reflexoes”; Henige, “History,” 103; though cf. Eddy and Boyd, Legend, 260–64. Goody’s examples of wide variation are deliberately from purely oral cultures that he explicitly distinguishes from ancient Mediterranean culture even in the Homeric era (Goody, Interface, 78–79, 98, 107).
75. See Barber and Barber, Severed, 90.
76. For mostly Christian examples, most evolving over centuries but some arising more quickly, see Keener, Miracles, 857–66; e.g., Budge, Takla Hâymânôt; cf. Aune, “Aphorisms,” 224 (following Thomas Becket’s death).
77. See Ehrman, Before Gospels, 95–100. I earlier associated the pattern of tradition in the tales of the Baal Shem Tov with the contemporary hagiographic tradition (Keener, Miracles, 205n213); see now much more fully Keener, “Ehrman vs. McIver,” 293–97. For some possible historical value in the traditions, see Etkes, “Besht,” 300–301, cited in Kirk, “Ehrman, Bauckham, and Bird,” 98n38); but esp. now the balance in Dynner, “Tale.”
78. Ben-Amos and Mintz, “Introduction,” xxiii. Kirk, “Ehrman, Bauckham, and Bird,” 98–99, instead counters the Besht analogy by noting that the Besht, unlike Jesus, lacked an immediate community of followers.
79. Price, Shrinking, 29.
80. Grayzel, History, 516; Bamberger, Story, 240.
81. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 920; Greenstone, Messiah, 225–30.
82. Despite its (different) range of messianic options; see discussion in Keener, Historical Jesus, 153, 256–67; Keener, “Parallel Figures.”
83. Price, Shrinking, 29.
84. Koschorke, Ludwig, and Delgado, History, 260.
85. See, e.g., McClenon, “Miracles,” 188.
86. McClenon, “Miracles,” 185–86; Hanciles, Beyond Christendom, 103.
87. See Hanciles, “Conversion,” 169–70; Sanneh, West African Christianity, 123–25, 181–83; Yates, Expansion, 170, 172; Kalu, African Pentecostalism, 31, 36, 38–39.
88. Gray, “Christianity,” 158.
89. Less directly, Kimbangu influenced Daniel Ndoundou, a leader in a revival movement in Congo-Brazzaville (Keener, “Ndoundou”) and a friend of my Congolese father-in-law (Keener, “Moussounga”).
90. Some early Christian sources say little about matters emphasized in other sources, but this silence differs from widely conflicting views such as found among Kimbanguists. Those who speak of communities of Jesus-followers who denied his messiahship or resurrection always must argue from silence.
91. Gondola, “Kimbangu,” 767; Kalu, African Pentecostalism, 70, 78–79. Keep in mind that the basic contours of earliest Christian theology already appear in Paul and Mark, within forty years of the beginning of the Jesus movement.
92. See Keener, “Parallel Figures.”
93. See McIver, Memory, 109, 157.
94. E.g., rumors of conspiracy (Tacitus, Annals 14.58), battle outcomes (Plutarch, Camillus 24.1; Tacitus, Histories 4.12), and mass exile (Annals 4.46); rumors exaggerating enemy numbers (Annals 4.23); a false rumor of a leader’s death (Histories 1.34; 4.34) or survival (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 19.134; Tacitus, Annals 2.82–83) or that the enemy had fled (Tacitus, Histories 2.42); or even deliberately false rumors (disinformation; Justin, Epitome 31.1.7; Tacitus, Histories 4.38, 54; Annals 4.24). See further discussion in Keener, Acts, 3:2836.
95. I hope that those who borrow my citation, Lucian, Peregrinus 39–40 (see A. M. Harmon in LCL 5:45; also see König, “Lives,” 241), will be fair enough to borrow my broader observation that this case does not reflect the norm.
96. Some rapidly propagated rumors, however, also proved true; see, e.g., Pindar, Nemean Odes 5.2–3; Justin, Epitome 2.14.8–9; 20.3.9; Cicero, Letter to Brother Quintus 1.1.1; Tacitus, Agricola 9.
97. See Byrskog, Teacher, 308n2; Rubin, Memory, 130; Kirk, “Memory Theory,” 822–23; Kirk, “Ehrman, Bauckham, and Bird,” 93. Experiences of atrocities spread quickly (Bailey, “Tradition” [Themelios], 8) but often lack an initially adequate narrative schema (cf. Barclay, “Autobiographical Remembering,” 94). McGrath, “Islands,” 8, compares rumor transmission but notes that such transmission disseminates most widely, far from wild elaboration, “the least common denominator, the basic outline.”
98. See, e.g., Rubin, Memory, 130.
99. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 1.24.529; cf. the oft-cited earlier accounts in Aristophanes, Acharnians 530–40; Thucydides, History 1.139.
100. Eve, “Orality,” 261; cf. Kelber, “Oral Tradition,” 257, on Ruth Finnegan’s warnings.
101. Cf. Lord, Singer, 138; Lewis, History, 43; Vansina, “Afterthoughts,” 110; Yamauchi, “Historic Homer”; see, e.g., Eddy and Boyd, Legend, 260–64. Still, in some such cases, poetic or musical form aids retention (Redman, “Eyewitnesses,” 191–92; cf. Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 143).
102. Eve, Behind the Gospels, 92.
103. Riesner, Lehrer, 451.
104. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 155. Cf. African traditions noted in Lewis, History, 43.
105. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 188.
106. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 188–89 (the transmission period is roughly 180 to 340 years).
107. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 189, noting from another example that sometimes an oral version is even superior to a written one.
108. See, e.g., Bailey, “Tradition” (ExpT), 365; Bailey, “Tradition” (Themelios), 6–8. For my more detailed engagement with Bailey and his critics, see again Keener, “Weeden’s Critique.”
109. Barber and Barber, Severed, 7–8, citing Zdanowicz, Zielinski, and Germani, “Eruption.”
110. Masse, “Earth,” 55, as quoted in Barber and Barber, Severed, 9. Less persuasively, Barber and Barber, Severed, 144, 217, also follow Masse (“Basis,” 466–67) regarding a Hawaiian story that can be connected with tenth-century celestial phenomena.
111. Barber and Barber, Severed, 9, noting additionally a lengthy oral tradition in Australia in Dixon, Searching, 153–55, 295; cf. Lulu Morris, “7,000 Year Old Indigenous Story Proved True,” National Geographic, May 1, 2017, http://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/australia/7000-year-old-indigenous-story-proved-true.aspx.
112. Barber and Barber, Severed, 9–10, emphasize the sort of factors necessary for long-term persistence of tradition.
113. Byrskog, Teacher, 324n2, cites here Finnegan, Oral Poetry, 73–86, 142; Finnegan, Literacy, 90, 158, 166–67, 172–73. Cf. cases of roughly 50 percent verbal correspondence in Derico, Tradition, 156, 170 (less in some other cases, e.g., 160), following and evaluating Baum, Faktor (Derico, Tradition, 142–71, engages Baum’s extensive evidence from various cultures). For griots, cf. Goody, Interface, 101–3.
114. Finnegan, Oral Poetry, 76–78. She notes (78) that compositional variation is usually greater for extended epics than for shorter performances and then cites (79–80) cases of (nonverbatim) memorization in various cultures.
115. Finnegan, Oral Poetry, 136–37, though emphasizing that this is not the norm (139) and that the versions are not identical (140). See also examples in Rubin, Memory, 5–6; on folk ballads more fully, see 257–98.
116. Ong, Orality, 61.
117. Rubin, Memory, 37. See now also Finnegan, Beyond, 220 (as noted in Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 597).
118. With, e.g., Vansina, Oral Tradition, 118; Barber and Barber, Earth Severed, 9; Bailey, “Tradition” (ExpT), 365.
119. With, e.g., Rubin, Memory, 11, 39–64, 305 (for antiquity, 39, 46); Barber and Barber, Earth Severed, 10–11, 156. Cf. the train wreck in Rubin, Memory, 282.
120. See, e.g., Assmann, Cultural Memory, 3–4, 81; Finnegan, Oral Poetry, 78; Barber and Barber, Severed, 10; Kirk, “Memory Theory,” 823; Eve, Behind Gospels, 92; Rubin, Memory, 72–75, 124–29, 144, 155, 170, 228; Byrskog, Teacher, 397; Mournet, Oral Tradition, 174–79, 190; Schwartz, “Smoke,” 14; for redundancy, see also Anderson, “Oral Tradition,” 32.
121. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 171; Rubin, Memory, 36; Kirk, “Memory Theory,” 825; Barber and Barber, Severed, 115–18; Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 289. Sometimes minor characters are conflated into the central heroes (Barber and Barber, Severed, 115, 124).
122. Rubin, Memory, 60–61.
123. So, e.g., Mournet, Oral Tradition, 174–90, 292.
124. Eve, Behind Gospels, 178.
125. See Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 293–94.
126. Ong, Orality, 22; Rosenberg, “Complexity,” 82; Kirk, “Memory Theory,” 829. Cf. Kirk, Memory, 111: although “oral genres frequently enable close replication,” it is not verbatim, a skill associated more with written media.
127. See Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 327, 333–34, 345; Allison, Constructing Jesus, 11–13; Eddy and Boyd, Legend, 275–85; Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 289, 293–94.
128. See here Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 291, following helpfully DeConick, “Memory.” Cf. again Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 318: “The Jesus tradition was” likely “condensed, schematized, paraphrased, and occasionally elaborated in the course of transmission.”
129. Ong, Orality, 60, 64–65; Rubin, Memory, 7–8, 137–39; Small, Wax Tablets, 5–7; Kirk, “Memory Theory,” 832; Ehrman, Before Gospels, 185–86, 192; cf. Kwon, “Reimagining,” 137–38. Cf. similarly Allison, Constructing Jesus, 29: “Tradents are always introducing changes.”
130. Ong, Orality, 60.
131. With Small, Wax Tablets, 4.
132. Those “who have a stake in a person’s or event’s memory being maintained . . . form the ‘carrier groups’ ” (Schwartz, “Smoke,” 11), a stake particularly relevant to sacred histories (11–12); cf. Bailey, “Tradition” (Themelios), 7. On some scripts being more accurate than others, see Schwartz, “Harvest,” 323.
133. Rodríguez, Structuring, 87.
134. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 81; see also Rubin, Memory, 135: “An audience knowledgeable in a tradition is a strong conservative force that keeps the singer within traditional bounds.” Cf. similarly Dunn, Tradition, 54; regarding written sources, Eve, Behind Gospels, 142.
135. Le Donne, Historiographical Jesus, 58.
136. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 153; cf. 158–60.
137. Kirk, “Memory Theory,” 823.
138. Cf. Rubin, Memory, 141.
139. Anderson, “Oral Tradition,” 35, following Kiparsky, “Oral Poetry,” but both noting that there are exceptions. Early generations, which have greater access to actual information, are also in many cases less apt to create fictitious folk stories about their protagonists; contrast Josephus’s Jewish War with the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.
140. Rubin, Memory, 135 (cf. 228); Bailey, “Tradition” (Themelios), 7; Bailey, “Tradition” (ExpT), 365–66; Bird, Gospel, 96, 110; David Instone-Brewer, personal correspondence, May 22, 2017; Arkan al-Amin, personal correspondence, July 4, 2017 (going beyond Bailey in noting the correction even of jokes).
141. Kirk, Memory, 199.
142. Bailey, “Tradition” (Themelios), 7–8; Arkan al-Amin, personal correspondence, July 4, 2017.
143. Unlike traditional folklorists, I belong to the more freewheeling era of Disney and Shrek.
144. Rubin, Memory, 36.
145. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 13–14.
146. Barber and Barber, Severed, 11; cf. 156.
147. As noted above, e.g., Rubin, Memory, 135; Rosenberg, “Complexity,” 83, 85–86.
148. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 40, citing on the culture Borgeaud, “Approche,” 13.
149. See Rodríguez, Structuring, 87.
150. See Tacitus, Annals 15.44; cf. Rom 1:8.
151. Small, “Artificial Memory”; Rhoads, “Performance Events,” 175. For paraphrase, see, e.g., Theon, Progymnasmata 1.93–171.
152. Licona, Differences, 117.
153. Cf. Thatcher, Why John Wrote, 132: “Historical documents . . . make it unnecessary for us to remember.” Pace Byrskog, Story as History, 110–11, however, oral cultures are not superior in verbatim memorization, since they lack the resources necessary to test it; see Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 293–94.
154. Small, Wax Tablets, 287n76, noting esp. Jousse, Style, 167, and referring also to Neusner, Memorized Torah.
155. Bailey, “Tradition” (Themelios), 9; Bailey, “Tradition” (ExpT) 363–64; cf. Hamilton, “Story-Tellers”; Hamilton, “Storytelling”; Davies, “Storytellers”; Dunn, “Theory,” 46, 62; McIver, Memory, 115, 121.
156. Bailey, “Oral Tradition”; Bailey, “Tradition” (Themelios); Bailey, “Tradition” (ExpT). For such a centrist position, cf. also Chilton, Study, 21–50, noted in Chance, “Fiction,” 126.
157. Wright, Victory, 133–37; Dunn, Tradition, 2, 52–53, 59, 205, 219, 239, 279, 320, 322; Mournet, Oral Tradition, 187–90, 292. Balanced evaluations include McIver, Memory, 115; Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 300–303; Eve, Behind Gospels, 66–85.
158. Weeden, “Theory”; Ehrman, Before Gospels, 71.
159. Bailey, “Tradition” (Themelios), 5; Bailey, “Oral Tradition,” 36–37; Bailey, “Tradition” (ExpT), 353–54. McIver, Memory, 120, straddles the same chasm.
160. See Keener, “Weeden’s Critique.” See also quite fully (though I discovered it too late for engagement in my own article), Derico, Tradition, 63–101, including his evaluation of Weeden’s critique on 89–114.
161. Personal discussion with Diane King on this topic, Wilmore, Kentucky, March 14, 2017.
162. E.g., Bronisław Malinowski stayed two or three years with Trobriand Islanders.
163. Derico, Tradition, 79, notes Bailey’s lack of formal field notes, but on 90 warns that Bailey’s harshest critic “demands from him a level of descriptive precision that no professional ethnographer or folklorist ever attempts to meet.” Turner, Experiencing Ritual, 4, complains about some fellow anthropologists ethnocentrically supposing that their training qualifies them to “understand aspects of a culture better than field subjects.”
164. Again, argued at length in Keener, “Weeden’s Critique.” Professor King notes (again, our discussion, March 14, 2017) her own quarter century of experience with oral memory in Kurdistan.
165. Bailey, “Tradition” (Themelios), 6–7; Bailey, “Tradition” (ExpT), 365; cf. Bailey, “Oral Tradition,” 41.
166. In an online lecture, Bailey dismisses those who write about “Mediterranean peasants” without having met any.
167. Bailey, “Tradition” (Themelios), 5–6; Bailey, “Oral Tradition,” 39.
168. Derico, Tradition, 205–11; for the transcripts, 267–90; for their repeated recounting of the stories, see 208. I regret discovering this work too late for Keener, “Weeden’s Critique”; I learned of it only through Zwiep, “Review of Derico.”
169. Derico, Tradition, 207.
170. Arkan al-Amin, personal correspondence, July 4 and 26, 2017.
171. Traditionally established under Caliph Uthman, although some argue for earlier variants; see Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 44; Cook, Muhammad, 67–69, 74; Koren and Nevo, “Approaches,” 104–5; Peters, Muhammad, 257.
172. Cf. Wagner, Literacy, 47, 269 (noting recent decline, 48); Zubaida, Law and Power, 27–28; Touati, Literacy, 12; Goody, Interface, 194, 234–35 (to some extent); Rosenberg, “Complexity,” 81 (following Clark and Clark, Psycholinguistics, 136); Anderson, “Oral Tradition,” 34; Graham, Beyond, 79–80, 101–2, 105 (cf. 131 for illiterate Christians memorizing Scripture as a prerequisite for the monastery; cf. also 43, 124); Johnson and Musser, Story, 101; old Arabic poems in Janin, Pursuit, 49. For Qur’an memorization, see also Small, Wax Tablets, 287n76; Eickelman, Middle East, 41, 50, 63–65, 70 (fading in newer times, 171); Bailey, “Tradition” (Themelios), 5–6 (including personal acquaintance with such reciters); McIver, Memory, 115.
173. The estimate that it is two-thirds the length of the Hebrew Bible, however, is amiss; it apparently contains just over half the word count of the New Testament (and over three-quarters the number of verses) and roughly the same number of letters as the Torah.
174. Bailey, “Tradition” (ExpT), 364.
175. Hogg, Master-Builder, 156.
176. Arkan Al Amin, personal correspondence, July 4, 2017, also noting that until the mid-1800s storytellers had to provide most education for typical Lebanese village children.
177. Note the studies in McIver, Memory, 61–62; cf. also Bailey, “Tradition” (ExpT), 364; Kelber, Gospel, 9.
178. Kirk, Memory, 111, 196, 199.
179. See Redman, “Eyewitnesses,” 192–93; Dunn, Tradition, 305; Dunn, Perspective, 45–46; Mournet, Oral Tradition, 190; Eve, Behind Gospels, 84–85.
180. Eve, Behind Gospels, 83–84; cf. also Mournet, Oral Tradition, 187–90, 292; Dunn, Tradition, 305.
181. Rom 15:19; Gal 1:17–19; 2:1–2 (and in light of these passages, 1 Cor 9:5; 15:5); cf. Acts 11:19 (although Manaen in Acts 13:1 may have originated in Galilee, as did the Twelve). For what it is worth, Acts 9:2 suggests that this was true even in Damascus. Galilee’s two minor cities were “not large enough to attract substantial international trade” (Reed, Archaeology, 96).
182. Bailey, “Tradition” (Themelios), 6–7; Bailey, “Oral Tradition,” 43. In antiquity, the eldest member of a community usually knew the most about the people who had lived there (Lysias, Orations 23.5, §167).
183. E.g., Bailey, “Tradition” (Themelios), 6, noting both formal settings (such as those with teachers and disciples) and the informal settings on which he focuses; Bailey, “Tradition” (ExpT), 364.
184. See Derico, Tradition, 206. Unlike Bailey, Derico recorded and archived his information in forms accepted for ethnographic fieldwork.
185. On such social control of information, see Vansina, Oral Tradition, 96–97; Assmann, Memory and Civilization, 39. See here esp. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 17, citing Katz and Lazarsfeld, Influence; for Brahmans alone reciting the Vedas, see Finnegan, Oral Poetry, 234, although variants show (Ong, Orality, 64–65) that the Vedas were transmitted less precisely than their tradents supposed, and some challenge the pure orality of their transmission (Goody, Interface, 110–22, esp. 122). Cf. Rosenberg, “Complexity,” 81, who notes that Finnegan is more accurate when addressing Africa (the accuracy of Finnegan’s work is respected in Africa; see, e.g., numerous references in Mburu, Hermeneutics).
186. Bockmuehl, Seeing, 176; for churches, cf. Byrskog, “Century,” 21.
187. Anderson, “Oral Tradition,” 37.
188. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 36–39; Assmann, Cultural Memory, 38–39 (for cultural, not communicative, memory); Dunn, Tradition, 55, 279–80, citing Havelock, Muse, 57–58.
189. Rubin, Memory, 265.
190. Rubin, Memory, 132.
191. See Assmann, “Memory and Culture,” 341, noting (without the reference) Josephus, Against Apion 2.188–89.
192. See Bockmuehl, Seeing, 180–89, esp. on Papias (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39.3–4; p. 186), and, on 184–85, Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1–5, and Irenaeus’s memories of Polycarp in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.20.5–7 (the narrated elements presumably made a large impression because of their significance).
193. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.4 (I have rendered συναναστρέφω [synanastrephō] as “associate with”).
194. See Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 294–95. Papias may commit his material to writing because the oral tradition is fading (Nicklas, “Literature,” 94).
195. See, e.g., Neusner, Traditions.
196. Keener, Historical Jesus, 139–64; Keener, “Assumptions”; Keener, “Biographies of a Sage.” I draw especially here on my work in Keener, Historical Jesus.
197. Small, Wax Tablets, 151–55, 163–70, 176, 185–87, 189, 201.
198. Small, Wax Tablets, 180–87.
199. Diogenes Laertius, Lives 6.1.5 (LCL 2:7).
200. E.g., Epictetus, Discourses 4.13.23; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.36; Porphyry, Letter to Marcella 8.139–41; 10.187–89; note also P.Mich. 202.3 in Hansen, Abraham, 28; see also Aune, Environment, 191.
201. Cf., e.g., Exod 12:14; 13:3, 9; Deut 7:18; 8:2; Jub. 36:6; 49:1; Let. Aris. 154; 2 Macc 2:25; 4 Macc 17:8; Philo, Studies 170; Josephus, Jewish War 5.377; 4 Ezra 2:8; 2 Bar. 20:3; 84:2.
202. See Mark 8:18; Luke 17:32; 22:19; John 14:26; 15:20; 16:4; 2 Thess 2:5; 2 Tim 2:8; Jude 5, 17; see here esp. Acts 20:35; Rom 15:15; 1 Cor 11:24–25; 15:1; 2 Pet 1:15; 3:2; Papias, frag. 3.3, 15 (cf. also 3.7, 9); 1 Clem. 53.1; 2 Clem. 17.3; Pol. Phil. 2.3.
203. Papias, frag. 3.4. Papias’s “elders” in 3.4 seems to refer especially to apostles past and (for Aristion and John) still living into his own time (taking his knowledge of the “elders” in 3.3 as indirect; but “elders” applies to those who knew John in 14.1). Against most, I take the distinction between the two Johns in 3.5–6 as Eusebius’s interpretation of Papias based on later tradition and Eusebius’s negative view on Revelation. Plato’s preference for oral instruction persisted into the early empire (cf. Alexander, “Voice”; Tieleman, “Orality,” 35); cf. Plutarch’s Middle Platonic adaptation in Zadorojnyi, “Ethico-Politics.” Despite Papias’s preference for orality, he may write traditions because he recognizes that the oral voice is fading (Nicklas, “Literature,” 94) or because he seeks to be more comprehensive than Mark (Carlson, “Papias,” 269).
204. Derrenbacker, Practices, 75. Against incompatibility, cf., e.g., Henderson, “Didache,” 306.
205. Some eyewitnesses survived for many years; see Quadratus in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 4.3.1–2; Evans, World, 7–8. Kee, Origins, 134, notes invitations to “remember” Jesus’s words in Acts 11:16; 20:35; 1 Clem. 13.1; 46.7; Pol. Phil. 2.3; cf. also Papias, frag. 3.3; 2 Clem. 17.3.
206. For 65–70, see, e.g., Ehrman, Introduction, 82; Collins, Mark, 11–14; Spivey, Smith, and Black, Anatomy, 60–61; for shortly after 70, e.g., Marcus, “War,” 460; for mid-60s (my own tentative view), cf. Lane, Mark, 17–18; Bock, Mark, 21; for earlier, while Peter remained alive, see France, Mark, 37–38.
207. On the use of, and methodologies for, oral history in historiography, see Byrskog, Story, 26–33; on its use in NT scholarship, see 33–40.
208. Keener, “Before Biographies”; “Ehrman vs. McIver,” 273–93; and “Weeden’s Critique.”
209. Fornara, Nature, 48.
210. Fornara, Nature, 166–67.
211. Suetonius, Vergil 42; Grammarians 4. Such memories were often preserved even for debates in rhetorical schools (Suetonius, Rhetoricians 1).
212. Bockmuehl, Seeing, 179–80, citing European examples, including “grandchildren of Nazi-era Germans”; Bird, Gospel, 53.
213. E.g., Schwartz, Living Memory; Jilovsky, Remembering Holocaust, 103. Such accounts began to proliferate esp. four decades after the Holocaust, as the generation began to disappear (Assmann, Cultural Memory, 36).
214. Field, Communities; Field, Oral History.
215. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 192–93, 197; cf. 158–59; Bockmuehl, Seeing, 161–88; Kirk, “Nexus,” 144. Because we have written sources, our culture often neglects oral sources, but potential connections exist; e.g., I belonged to one African-American church in North Carolina where some people had known persons born in slavery (i.e., born before 1865), and I sometimes attended another that sang some spirituals passed down since the days of slavery.
216. Nikulin, “Introduction,” 4.
217. Assmann later changed the wording from “communicative” to “collective” memory (Hubenthal, “Communicative Memory,” 65), but since the latter phrase in English can be confused with (and I sometimes use it interchangeably with) the “communal” memory, even among Jesus’s hearers, I have retained the older expression. The German nomenclature currently lacks precise and standardized English equivalents (Hubenthal, “Cultural Memory,” 70; Hubenthal, “Social Memory,” 369). Cultural memory refers to “a community’s canonized memory of the remote past” (Hubenthal, “Cultural Memory,” 69).
218. Galinsky, “Introduction,” 12. See Assmann, Cultural Memory, 6, 19, 35–38 (esp. 36); Assmann, Religion and Memory, 3–30; Assmann, “Memory and Culture,” 331, 338; Keith, “Prolegomena,” 170; Kirk, “Social and Cultural Memory,” 5–6; Kirk, “Memory Theory,” 840–41 (noting the ancient example in Thomas, Oral Tradition, 125–29); Kirk, Memory, 16; Dunn, Tradition, 236; Hubenthal, “Communicative Memory,” 65. As early as 1936, cf. Raglan, Hero, 27–28.
219. Bockmuehl, Seeing, 169–72 (noting Murray, “Herodotus,” 19, 21, for Herodotus and oral history); Kirk, “Nexus,” 144. Citing Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.4, and Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.20.6, Bockmuehl, Seeing, 178, argues that Irenaeus knew people who knew the first apostles; cf. further connections on 180–89. Raglan, Hero, 13, allowed only 150 years for oral memory, but Barber and Barber, Severed, 244, note the resilience of oral tradition beyond this length of time.
220. See, e.g., Morrison, “Perspective,” 2; Hamilton and Shopes, Oral History, xi; Field, “Dialogues,” 269; Sheppard, “Historiography,” 176. Even the history of medicine now often takes into account oral sources if they lie within living memory; see Winslow and Smith, “Challenges,” 372. Some scholars, however, contend that oral history and tradition overlap, inviting greater consideration in the social context of the former (Byrskog, “Eyewitnesses,” 159); cf. the nuanced position of Eve, Behind Gospels, 1.
221. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 37; and “Memory and Culture,” 334, 338.
222. Kirk, Memory, 56.
223. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 6. For the political and power dimensions, see, e.g., Kirk, “Social and Cultural Memory,” 11–14.
224. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 37, and “Memory and Culture,” 338.
225. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 37–38, noting that even factual information becomes community myth. “Myth is the past condensed into foundational narrative” (61).
226. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 173.
227. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 192, 197.
228. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 192–93.
229. Le Donne, Historiographical Jesus, 61.
230. Thucydides complained about the potential bias and diversity of eyewitness reports of some events (History 1.22.2–3) but recognized that he could nevertheless provide a fairly reliable account by identifying shared features among these accounts.
231. Bauckham, World, 95, following also Byrskog, Story; Hengel, “Memory,” 87.
232. For the idea, see already Taylor, Formation, 41; for “amnesia,” see Witherington, Christology, 14; Keener, Matthew, 29; Bird, Gospel, 111, who adds Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:169–70.
233. On Homer, see Josephus, Against Apion 1.12; Diogenes Laertius, Lives 9.12.113.
234. Davies, Invitation, 116; cf. similarly Benoit, Gospel, 33; Sanders, Tendencies, 28; Dunn, Tradition, 234–35, 314; Bauckham, World, 93.
235. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 14.
236. See Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.256; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.5.3; cf. Pritz, Nazarene Christianity, 122–27; Aune, Revelation, 164; perhaps Smith, “Sarcophagus.”
237. Note Luke’s contextualization of Mark’s Galilean roof (Mark 2:4; Luke 5:19).
238. This conclusion is consistent with the floating gap often following living memory of up to eighty years (Assmann, Cultural Memory, 37).
239. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 24, citing the example of the Tio tradition in Congo.
240. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 36; cf. 85, 187, 206; many cite the language of the earlier German version, Assmann, Gedächtnis, 11, 218–21; see Kirk, “Memory Theory,” 824, 840–41; Dunn, Tradition, 236–37; Keith, “Prolegomena,” 170–71; Schwartz, “Jesus in Memory,” 249 (comparing early nineteenth-century US history-writing); Kelber, “Works,” 244; Hubenthal, “Communicative Memory,” 65; Kirk, “Traditionsbruch.”
241. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 36, citing Tacitus, Annals 3.75, for the year 22, about half a century after the end of the Republic.
242. E.g., Theophrastus, Characters 27.2; Cicero, Letters to Atticus 12.1; Iamblichus, Pythagorean Life 5.21; Philo, Creation 103; Jub. 23:11.
243. E.g., Xenophon, Agesilaus 2.28; 11.14–15; Polybius, Histories 36.16.1–5, 11; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 32.16.1; Cicero, Brutus 20.80; 64.229; Livy, History 4.14.2; Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings 8.7.1; 8.7.ext.5, 8–13; 8.13.2–3; 8.13.ext.1; Plutarch, Marcus Cato 15.4; Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 1.11.495; Eunapius, Lives 482.
244. Iamblichus, Pythagorean Life 5.21.
245. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 19; cf. Traditionsbruch also in Kirk, Memory, 204. On Assmann’s influence, see Keith, “Assmann.”
246. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 36. Kirk, Memory, 205. Hubenthal, “Communicative Memory,” 65, defines the span more precisely as thirty to fifty years. Kirk, Memory, 205n141, notes how ancient Athenian family traditions fit the three- to four-generation model, citing Thomas, Oral Tradition, 125–29. Note that many writers speak of generations as reproductive eras (today often thirty to thirty-five years in the West; Assmann and others use twenty-year generations for the more common ancient pattern). The Greek term commonly translated “generation” in English Bible translations (e.g., Matt 23:36; 24:34), sometimes envisioning an adult lifespan (Num 32:13; Ps 95:10; cf. Philo, Moses 1.238), represents roughly forty years in biblical parlance.
247. See Keith, “Prolegomena,” regarding Mark and citing patristic sources (esp. 174, 179–80); cf. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 17; Kirk, “Traditionsbruch,” 429.
248. Maybe as early as the 40s; see Theissen, Gospels, 220–21, 230–32. Others suggest the late 50s or early 60s for the majority of Q (as a possibility, Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, 87).
249. Even aside from the tradition in Papias, scholars date Mark this early (and sometimes earlier) partly because Matthew and Luke most likely depend on Mark, and Matthew, at least, must be sufficiently early for its widespread use in the earliest of the Apostolic Fathers.
250. A growing minority of scholars now date Acts to the second century; I cannot digress here, but I address this question more fully in Keener, Acts, 1:383–401; cf. 1:402–22; 3:2350–74.
251. Whether or not Papias is correct, it appears noteworthy that he himself writes within living memory of the Gospels’ composition.
252. In contrast to positivist historiography, historians today recognize the provisional and probabilistic character of historical reconstruction; see the thorough survey of recent thought in Schröter, Jesus to New Testament, 9–27.
253. Matt 27:5; Acts 1:18; Papias, frag. 18.1–7 Holmes; cf. Mart. Pol. 6.2. See discussion in Keener, Matthew, 657–60, and Acts, 1:760–65, where parallels among the accounts are noted and preference on details (from the standpoint of modern historical method) is given in both cases to Luke’s account.
254. See discussion in Keener, Matthew, 73, 75–77; Ehrman, Introduction, 94–95; Ehrman, Interrupted, 35–39, esp. 39.
255. E.g., whereas some Q pericopes exhibit more than 80 percent verbal correspondence, more than one-third exhibit “less than 40 percent” (Dunn, Perspective, 110). (Where close verbal correspondence exists, it probably typically suggests a written source, and even divergences can simply reflect memory rather than consultation of texts; see Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 292, 304, following DeConick’s research).
256. Davies, “Reflexions,” 156.
257. Gerhardsson, Memory, 136–48, 173–74; Goulder, Midrash, 64–65. Everyone recognized that they and their sources could at best provide selections of what was said (Acts 2:40; Xenophon, Apology 22; Musonius Rufus 7, p. 58.29–30; Gen. Rab. 55:7; 93:8; Exod. Rab. 44:5; Van der Horst, “Parallels,” 57; Kennedy, “Survey,” 15).
258. E.g., m. Šabb. 9:1; ʿAbod. Zar. 3:6.
259. Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 132–33.
260. Theon, Progymnasmata 1.93–171; cf. also Libanius, Anecdote 1.4; 2.3; Maxim 1.2–5; 2.3; 3.2; Hermogenes, Method in Forceful Speaking 24.440.
261. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 2.29.621.
262. On expanding material rhetorically, see Theon, Progymnasmata 3.224–40; 4.80–82; Longinus, On the Sublime 11.1; Hermogenes, Invention 2.7.120; cf. Theon, Progymnasmata 2.115–23; Hermogenes, Progymnasmata 3. On Chreia, 7; Menander Rhetor, Epideictic Treatises 2.3, 379.2–4; Aphthonius, Progymnasmata 3. On Chreia, 23S, 4R; 4. On Maxim, 9–10.
263. Plutarch, Alexander 70.3. Even such augmentation elicited some protests; see Lucian, How to Write History 7–13; Shuler, Genre, 11–12.
264. Riesner, “Preacher,” 203, citing Seneca, To Lucilius 33.4.
265. See Draper, “Tradition.” For possibly independent Jesus tradition in what he views as the original part of the Didache, see Rordorf, “Didache”; cf. also Janicki, Way, 9.
266. Stanley, Language, 267–91, esp. 290–91; Hill, “Words,” 268–73, 280–81, noting also esp. Turner, Greek Papyri, 106–7.
267. Hill, “Words,” 269, citing Lenfant, “Fragments,” 119.
268. Stanley, Language, 334–36; Hill, “Words,” 274–75.
269. Hill, “Words,” 275–76, following esp. Inowlocki, “Adding.”
270. Stanley, Language, 292–323, 336–37, esp. 304–6, 322–23.
271. Sanders, Figure, 193.
272. Cf. Hill, Prophecy, 163, 172; Sanders, Figure, 193.
273. Schwartz, “Origins,” 55.
274. On Paul and the Jesus tradition, see, e.g., Allison, “Parallels”; Allison, Constructing Jesus, 346–48; Wenham, Rediscovery; Wenham, “Story”; Richardson and Gooch, “Logia,” 52; Sauer, “Erwägungen”; Holtz, “Paul and Tradition”; Dunn, “Jesus Tradition”; Dunn, Theology of Paul, 189–95; Taylor, “Quest”; Eddy and Boyd, Legend, 216–28; Kim, New Perspective, 259–90; Keener, Historical Jesus, 361–71; Blomberg, “Quotations”; Fee, Jesus the Lord, 64–73; Sumney, Steward, 4, 137–56; see esp. Dungan, Sayings (e.g., 83–131, on Jesus’s divorce saying); Hiestermann, Tradition (noting the frequent Matthean form).
275. Also see 2 Thess 2:5, 15. See discussion in Keener, Historical Jesus, 361–71; likely also in Galatians, notably including Q material that was apparently already in circulation, at least orally: see Keener, Galatians (Baker), 538–39.
276. E.g., Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 13.297, 408; cf. Eve, Behind Gospels, 179.
277. See, e.g., Thompson, Clothed.
278. Beare, “Sayings,” 181; Bultmann, Tradition, 163; Boring, “Oracles,” 501–2; Boring, Sayings; Miller, “Rejection.”
279. See Aune, Prophecy; Hill, “Evidence”; Hill, Prophecy; Bauckham, “Parables”; Dunn, “Sayings”; Byrskog, Teacher, 350–68; occasionally but rarely, Sanders, Figure, 62–63.
280. I take 100 as a median figure, with the number fewer early and greater later in the period.
281. Our few clear examples of prophecies in the NT are always explicitly identified as such (cf., e.g., Hill, Prophecy, 160–70; Aune, Prophecy, 243–44; Stanton, Gospel Truth?, 97).
282. See Hill, Prophecy, 180–81; cf. even Boring, Sayings, 138–39. On eschatological prophets and Jesus as one, see, e.g., Barnett, “Sign Prophets”; Gray, Prophetic Figures; Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 173, 238–39; Ehrman, Prophet; Keener, Historical Jesus, 238–55.
283. See, e.g., Rev 1:7 (with Matt 24:30); Rev 1:13 (“one like a son of man,” probably evoking the regular title in the gospel tradition); Rev 2:7a and 13:9 (Mark 4:9, 23; cf. 8:18); Rev 3:3 and 16:15 (Matt 24:43//Luke 12:39); Rev 3:5 (Matt 10:32//Luke 12:8); Rev 13:13 (Mark 13:22); Rev 18:21 (Matt 18:6//Luke 17:2).
284. Dunn, Tradition, 323.
285. Keener, Historical Jesus, 364–65; Matthew, 57; and Acts, 2:1851–52.
286. While probably not incorporating prophecies, John undoubtedly trusts the Spirit’s inspiration as he expounds Jesus’s message (John 14:26; 15:26; 16:7–15), perhaps not unlike Greek epic poets or Israelite prophet-historians (in this period, cf. Hall, “History,” 13–46; Hall, Histories); but regular ancient historiographic speech-writing practices would also make such exposition uncontroversial, even without claims of inspiration; see further, e.g., Keener, John, 60–62; Bauckham, “Historiographical Characteristics,” 30–36; cf. Keener, Acts, 258–319, esp. 271–82.
287. Heschel, Aryan Jesus, 8, 16, 19, 24, 26–66, 191, 285–86; cf. Head, “Nazi Quest”; Poewe, Religions; Theissen and Merz, Guide, 163. Earlier, even Schweitzer praised the unique “German temperament” (Quest, 1), yet without affirming an Aryan Jesus (a thesis that he rejects on 329).
288. Heschel, Aryan Jesus, 58–60, 202, 225, 227, 272.
289. Heschel, Aryan Jesus, 27; cf. 29–30, 33, 40–41, 64, 59–60. Pagan Germanic religious ideology drove some of the pressure (see Poewe, Religions, e.g., 5, 11–14, 112–13).
290. Heschel, Aryan Jesus, 32, 35, 60–63, 286. See esp. Grundmann, Jesus der Galiläer.
291. For the thoroughly Jewish character of most of Galilee, see, e.g., Chancey and Meyers, “Sepphoris”; Reed, Archaeology, 43–51; Reed, “Contributions,” 53; Dunn, “Synagogue,” 207–12; Chancey, Galilee; Chancey, “Jewish”; Deines, Acts of God, 53–93; Keener, Acts, 2:1697–1701.
292. With Meier, Marginal Jew, 3:3; Charlesworth, “Theology”; Holmén, “Introduction,” 4, 8; Tuckett, “Sources and Methods,” 133; Bird, “Quest.” See, e.g., Sanders, Jesus and Judaism; Figure; “Know,” 57; Kee, “Century of Quests”; Meier, “Project”; Theissen and Merz, Guide, 240–80; Allison, “Eschatological Jesus”; Allison, Jesus of Nazareth (esp. 96–171); McKnight, Vision; Ehrman, Prophet, 125–39; Chilton, Rabbi Jesus; Charlesworth, Jesus within Judaism; Levine, Misunderstood Jew; Evans, “Context”; Tomson, “Jesus and Judaism,” 25–40; Deines, Acts of God, 95–102.
293. See Williams, “Names”; Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 39–92, using the database of 2,826 persons in Ilan, Lexicon; Bauckham, World, 97–98.
294. Dunn, Perspective, 27; Dunn, Tradition, 272, favoring the latter. Against a special Galilean “Q community,” see, e.g., Taylor, “Q and Galilee?”; Pearson, “Community”; favoring a Galilean context for the earliest material in Q, see Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, 255–61. The movement’s backwater Galilean origins were not quickly forgotten (cf., e.g., Epictetus, Discourses 4.7.6; later, for Julian the Apostate, see Judge, Jerusalem and Athens, 222; also Lucian’s association of Christians with Palestine in Peregrinus 11, though he also recognizes their presence elsewhere, 13).
295. Because reconstructing the setting in which one first experienced something aids recall (Small, Wax Tablets, 121), the disciples’ own Galilean background should have aided their memories of experiences with Jesus there.
296. McIver, Memory, 167, following Rubin, Memory, 65–121; cf. meter in Ong, Orality, 22, 62; also (for Homer) epithets in Rubin, Memory, 199–200, 301; cf. Homer in Nikulin, “Introduction,” 8–9; Nikulin, “Memory,” 39–41; OT passages in Carr, Writing, 128, 152.
297. Small, Wax Tablets, 123. For poetry memorization in classical Athenian education, see Joyal, McDougall, and Yardley, Education, 31.
298. See Vatri, “Writing,” 752–56, noting esp. Plato, Phaedrus 267a2–5; Aristotle, Rhetoric 1409a35–b8; Ps.-Scymnus, Ad Nicomedem regem 33–35; Ps.-Longinus, Rh. 310.20–25 (Spengel = Concerning Memory 122–26 Patillon-Brisson); Galen, On Antidotes 14.32.5–9 Kuhn; 14.89.10–17; 14.191.2–3; De compositione medicamentorum per genera 13.455.7–9. This was the only mnemonic device directly supporting verbatim memorization (Vatri, “Writing,” 771).
299. Some used poetry to reinforce their teaching for rudimentary students (Seneca, To Lucilius 108.9–10).
300. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 1.22.523.
301. Allison, Constructing Jesus, 375–77; Keener, Matthew, 25–29.
302. See Jeremias, Theology, throughout; cf. also Dunn, Tradition, 238, citing further Burney, Poetry; Manson, Teaching; Black, Aramaic Approach; Riesner, Lehrer, 392–404.
303. Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:178–80. Nor was linguistic influence unidirectional (see Stuckenbruck, “Influence,” cited in Keith, Scribal Elite, 79; cf. Porter, Criteria); the author of Revelation, which probably stems from the end of the first century, may have felt at home in a Semitic linguistic milieu.
304. See, e.g., Dunn, Perspective, 115. Pryke, Style, looked for pre-Markan material on stylistic grounds; Zwiep, “Orality,” offers an initial attempt to distinguish orality markers pointing to pre-Markan material (cf. also others, such as Hearon, “Mapping”). These attempts are useful but necessarily hypothetical, since similar markers may appear in both oral and written sources (Mournet, Oral Tradition, 153–54; cf. Rosenberg, “Complexity,” 74; Wansbrough, “Introduction,” 12; Tate, “Formulas,” 147; Niditch, “Hebrew Bible,” 6–7).
305. Bailey, “Oral Tradition” (cf. Bailey, “Tradition” [Themelios], 7; Bailey, “Oral Tradition,” 42); also noted in Aune, Dictionary, 326; cf. Bauckham, World, 93. Weeden’s critique (“Theory”) of Bailey’s argument does not undermine its essential insights about significant continuity (see Dunn, “Critiquing”), but it does undermine some of his key examples, which should illustrate rumor rather than controlled transmission (see also Kloppenborg, “Memory,” 300–303); cf. Keener, “Weeden’s Critique.”
306. The Jesus tradition includes humor (e.g., Matt 7:3–5//Luke 6:41–42), sometimes at opponents’ expense, as often in ancient debate (cf. Rabbie, “Wit,” 207, 213), but not jokes for jokes’ sake; so also news (cf. Luke 13:2, 4).
307. See Keener, Historical Jesus, 187–88; m. ʿEd. 1:3.
308. Xenophon, Apology 1; Epictetus, Discourses 1.pref.
309. Sayings may have often been transmitted with greater attention to preserving wording than were narratives (Witherington, Christology, 28–29; Theissen, Gospels, 60), as often in oral societies (Bauckham, World, 92).
310. Evans, Fabricating Jesus, 79–85, esp. 83 (citing Gos. Pet. 8.31; 10.38); cf. discussion in Brown, Death, 1317–49; Wright, “Apologetic.” Still, a case can be made for a second-century Syrian Jewish Christian origin (see Marcus, “Gospel of Peter”).
311. Gos. Thom. 114.2–3.
312. Cf., e.g., Baer, Categories, esp. 45–49, 55–64, 69; briefly, Meeks, “Androgyne,” 176–77.
313. See Theissen, Gospels, 25–59.
314. E.g., John 7:37–38; see Keener, John, 722–30 and sources cited there.
315. I borrow these examples from somewhat fuller treatments in Keener, “Suggestions” and “Assumptions,” 49–52. Cf. now more fully Williams, Trust, 51–86.
316. See m. Giṭ. 9:10; Sipre Deut. 269.1.1.
317. For various approaches, cf. Neusner, “Cleanse,” 492–94; McNamara, Judaism, 197; Sanders, Jesus to Mishnah, 39. For an Aramaic wordplay or confusion behind the variation in Matthew and Luke, see Black, Aramaic Approach, 2; Burney, Aramaic Origin, 9.
318. Smith, Parallels, 135.
319. E.g., m. ʾAbot 3:17; Sukkah 2:10; t. Ber. 1:11; 6:18; Sanh. 1:2; 8:9.
320. Vermes, Jesus and Judaism, 43. Liturgical repetition would also preserve memory of the Lord’s Prayer; cf. Le Donne, Historiographical Jesus, 229.
321. Abrahams, Studies, 2:208; Dalman, Jesus-Jeshua, 230; Jeremias, Parables, 195.
322. Charlesworth, “Sketch,” 97–98.
323. See, e.g., Johnston, “Observations,” 355; Johnston, “Interpretations,” esp. 43, 628–35; Abrahams, Studies 1:106; Young, Parables, 1, 317–18; Stewart, “Parable Form”; Cave, “Parables,” 387; Barth, “Ethik”; Maisonneuve, “Parables”; Goulder, Midrash, 47–69; Scott, Parable, 14; D’Angelo, “Background”; Gerhardsson, “Illuminating”; compare Stern, Parables in Midrash. (Greeks did use other kinds of moral stories such as fables; see, e.g., Phaedrus and Babrius, Fables.) Before Jesus, see, e.g., 2 Sam 12:1–7; Isa 5:1–7; 1 En. 1:2–3; 37–71; 4Q302 f2ii.2–9; Sir 1:24; 3:29; 20:20; 39:2; 47:17.
324. Dunn, Tradition, 286.
325. Fields do figure prominently as settings in rabbinic parables, though their meaning is ad hoc rather than standard (Johnston, “Interpretations,” 596). But whereas royal courts appear in only a few parables attributed to Jesus (Matt 18:23; 22:2; cf. Matt 25:34; Luke 14:31; 19:12), they are common in Tannaitic parables, where the king represents God: e.g., t. Ber. 6:18; Sukkah 2:6; Mek. Beshallah 6.8–9; Shirata 2.131ff; 3.30, 65; 4.54ff; Amalek 2.22–23; Bahodesh 5.2–3, 82–83; 6.114ff; 8.72ff; Sipra Shemini Mekhilta deMiluim 99.2.2, 5; Behuq. pq. 2.262.1.9; pq. 3.263.1.5; Sipre Num. 84.2.1; 86.1.1; Sipre Deut. 3.1.1; 8.1.2; 11.1.2; 28.1.1; 29.4.1; 36.4.5; 43.8.1; 43.16.1; 45.1.2; 48.1.3; 312.1.1; 313.1.1; 343.5.2.
326. Earlier biblical prophets had also depicted judgments, esp. those of the end time, in agricultural terms (Isa 32:13–17; 35:1–2; 44:3–4; Jer 31:28; 51:33; Joel 3:13; Amos 8:1–2; Riesenfeld, Tradition, 150).
327. E.g., Dodd, Parables, 1; Jeremias, Parables, 11; Stein, Method, 44–45; Vermes, Religion, 90–91; Snodgrass, Stories, 31; see more fully Payne, “Authenticity of Parables”; Payne, “Sower.” Contrast Meier, Marginal Jew, 5, whose rigorous but more limited criteria do not allow for these prima facie formal considerations. In Q, see, e.g., Matt 7:24–27//Luke 6:47–49. “Authenticity,” of course, does not preclude adaptation (Jeremias, Parables, throughout; Johnston, “Interpretations,” 621–24, 639).
328. Theissen and Merz, Guide, 105; Wright, People, 421; Stanton, Gospel Truth?, 60–61.
329. For one interpretation, see Cotter, Miracle Stories, 148–54. On dogs as an insult, see, e.g., Homer, Iliad 8.527; 11.362; 20.449; 22.345 (cf. 9.373; 21.394, 421); Odyssey 17.248; 22.35; Callimachus, Hymn 6 (to Demeter), 63; for its harshness when addressed to women, cf., e.g., Homer, Odyssey 11.424; 18.338; 19.91.
330. Pelling, Texts, 58.
331. See fuller recent discussions about historical-Jesus research in Porter and Holmén, Handbook; Charlesworth, Rhea, and Pokorný, Jesus Research.
332. Esp. in Keener, Historical Jesus, throughout.
333. Keener, “Assumptions.”
334. Keith, Scribal Elite, 82.
335. Keith, Scribal Elite, 81, 83.
336. Le Donne, Historiographical Jesus, 268.
337. See, e.g., Eve, Behind Gospels, 166–67. He prefers Josephus over Mark on 169–75 (while acknowledging that both reflect their own interests), but most of the variations involve one’s omissions of elements in the other, and Mark is earlier; cf. also observations in Meier, “John the Baptist”; Sumney, Steward, 137–56; Jensen, “Josephus.”
338. See Keener, Acts, 1:51–422; 3:2350–74.