Oral gospel traditions
Testament studies, but other scholars soon adopted and
Sermon on the Mount, by Carl Bloch Jesus preaching his mes-
sage orally
Oral gospel traditions, cultural information passed on
from one generation to the next by word of mouth, were
the rst stage in the formation of the written gospels.
These oral traditions included dierent types of stories
about Jesus. For example, people told anecdotes about
Jesus healing the sick and debating with his opponents.
The traditions also included sayings attributed to Je-
sus, such as parables and teachings on various subjects
which, along with other sayings, formed the oral gospel
tradition.[1][2]
1 Critical methods: source and the
form criticism
Biblical scholars use a variety of critical methodologies plained by the communities
known as biblical criticism. They apply source criti-
cism to identify the written sources beneath the canonical to emerge
gospels. Scholars generally understood that these writ-
ten sources must have had a prehistory as oral tellings,
but the very nature of oral transmission seemed to rule
out the possibility of recovering them. However, in
the early 20th century the German scholar Hermann
Gunkel demonstrated a new critical method, form crit-
icism, which he believed could discover traces of oral
tradition in written texts. Gunkel specialized in Old
adapted his methods to the study of the New Testa-
ment.[3]
The essence of form criticism is the identication of the
Sitz im Leben, situation in life, which gave rise to a par-
ticular written passage. When form critics discuss oral
traditions about Jesus, they theorize about the particular
social situation in which dierent accounts of Jesus were
told.[4][5] For New Testament scholars, this focus remains
the Second Temple period. It needs be remembered that
the rst century Palestine of Jesus was predominantly an
oral society.[6]
A modern consensus exists that Jesus must be understood
as a Jew in a Jewish environment.[7] According to scholar
Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus was so very rmly rooted in his
own time and place as a rst-century Palestinian Jew
with his ancient Jewish comprehension of the world, and
God that he does not translate easily into a modern id-
iom. Ehrman stresses that Jesus was raised in a Jewish
household in the Jewish hamlet of Nazareth. He was
brought up in a Jewish culture, accepted Jewish ways
and eventually became a Jewish teacher, who, like other
Jewish teachers of his time, debated the Law of Moses
orally.[8] Early Christians sustained these teachings of Je-
sus orally. Rabbis or teachers in every generation were
raised and trained to deliver this oral tradition accurately.
It consisted of two parts: the Jesus tradition (i.e., logia or
sayings of Jesus) and inspired opinion. The distinction is
one of authority: where the earthly Jesus has spoken on
a subject, that word is to be regarded as an instruction or
command.[9]
Prior to the reliability of the printing press, the oral tradi-
tion was considered more trustworthy than written texts.
The accuracy of the oral gospel tradition was insured by
community designating certain learned individuals to
bear the main responsibility for retaining the gospel mes-
sage of Jesus. The prominence of teachers in the earli-
est communities such as the Jerusalem Church is best ex-
[10]
reliance on them as reposito-
ries of oral tradition. One of the most striking features
from recent study is the amazing consistency
of the history of the tradition which gave birth to the
[11][12]
NT.
A review of Richard Bauckham's book Jesus and the Eye-
witnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony states
The common wisdom in the academy is that stories
and sayings of Jesus circulated for decades, undergoing
countless retellings and embellishments before being -
1
2 3 NOTES
nally set down in writing.[13]
You are probably familiar with the old
birthday party game telephone. A group of
kids sits in a circle, the rst tells a brief story
to the one sitting next to her, who tells it to
the next, and to the next, and so on, until it
comes back full circle to the one who started
it. Invariably, the story has changed so much
in the process of retelling that everyone gets a
good laugh. Imagine this same activity taking
place, not in a solitary living room with ten
kids on one afternoon, but over the expanse of
the Roman Empire (some 2,500 miles across),
with thousands of participantsfrom dierent
backgrounds, with dierent concerns, and in
dierent contextssome of whom have to
translate the stories into dierent languages
(see box 3.1).
Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament. A
Historical Introduction to the Early Christian
Writings, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 44
2 Oral traditions and the forma-
tion of the gospels
Modern scholars have concluded that the Canonical
Gospels went through four stages in their formation:
1. The rst stage was oral, and included various stories
about Jesus such as healing the sick, or debating with
opponents, as well as parables and teachings.
2. In the second stage, the oral traditions began to be
written down in collections (collections of miracles,
collections of sayings, etc.), while the oral traditions
continued to circulate
3. In the third stage, early Christians began combining
the written collections and oral traditions into what
might be called proto-gospels hence Luke's ref-
erence to the existence of many earlier narratives
about Jesus
4. In the fourth stage, the authors of our four Gospels
drew on these proto-gospels, collections, and still-
circulating oral traditions to produce the gospels of
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.[1]
Mark, Matthew and Luke are known as the Synoptic
Gospels because they have such a high degree of inter-
dependence. Modern scholars generally agree that Mark [13] Hahn, Scott; Scott, Dave, eds. (1 September 2007). Letter
was the rst of the gospels to be written (see Markan pri- & Spirit, Volume 3: The Hermeneutic of Continuity: Christ,
ority). The author does not seem to have used exten- Kingdom, and Creation. Emmaus Road Publishing. p.
sive written sources, but rather to have woven together 225. ISBN 978-1-931018-46-3.
small collections and individual traditions into a coher-
ent presentation.[14] It is generally, though not universally,
agreed that the authors of Matthew and Luke used as
sources the gospel of Mark and a collection of sayings
called the Q source. These two together account for the
bulk of each of Matthew and Luke, with the remainder
made up of smaller amounts of source material unique to
each, called the M source for Matthew and the L source
for Luke, which may have been a mix of written and oral
material (see Two-source hypothesis). Most scholars be-
lieve that the author of Johns gospel used oral and written
sources dierent from those available to the Synoptic au-
thors a signs source, a revelatory discourse source,
and others although there are indications that a later ed-
itor of this gospel may have used Mark and Luke.[15]
Oral transmission may also be seen as a dierent ap-
proach to understanding the Synoptic Gospels in New
Testament scholarship. Current theories attempt to link
the three synoptic gospels together through a common
textual tradition. However, many problems arise when
linking these three texts together (see the Synoptic prob-
lem). This has led many scholars to hypothesize the ex-
istence of a fourth document from which Matthew and
Luke drew upon independently of each other (for exam-
ple, the Q source).[16] The Oral Transmission hypothesis
based on the oral tradition steps away from this model,
proposing instead that this common, shared tradition was
transmitted orally rather than through a lost document.[17]
3 Notes
[1] Burkett 2002, p. 124.
[2] Dunn 2013, pp. 35.
[3] Muilenburg 1969, pp. 118.
[4] Casey 2010, pp. 1413.
[5] Ehrman 2012, p. 84.
[6] Dunn 2013, pp. 2901.
[7] Van Voorst 2000, p. 5.
[8] Ehrman 2012, pp. 13,86,276.
[9] Dunn 2013, pp. 19,55.
[10] Dunn 2013, pp. 55 & 223 & 309, 279280.
[11] Ehrman 2012, pp. 117.
[12] Dunn 2013, pp. 35960 One of the most striking fea-
tures to emerge from this study is the amazing consistency
of the history of the NT tradition, the tradition which gave
birth to the NT.
 3

[14] Telford 2011, pp. 1329. Bockmuehl, Markus (2004) [1994]. This Jesus:
Martyr, Lord, Messiah. Continuum International
[15] Scholz 2009, pp. 1668.
Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-567-08296-1.
[16] Dunn 2003, pp. 192205.
Dunn, James D. G. (2003). The History of the Tra-
[17] Dunn 2003, pp. 23852. dition: New Testament. In Dunn, James D. G.;
Rogerson, John William. Eerdmans Commentary on
the Bible. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
4 Bibliography pp. 95071. ISBN 978-0-8028-3711-0.
Ehrman, Bart (2005) [2003]. Lost Christianities:
Burkett, Delbert (2002). An introduction to the New The Battles For Scripture And The Faiths We Never
Testament and the origins of Christianity. Cam- Knew. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-
bridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-00720-7. 518249-1.
Casey, Maurice (2010). Jesus of Nazareth: An Inde- Hammann, Konrad (2012). Rudolf Bultmann Eine
pendent Historians Account of His Life and Teach- Biographie. ISBN 978-3-16-152013-6.
ing. Continuum International Publishing Group.
ISBN 978-0-567-64517-3. Kelber, Werner H. (1983). The oral and the written
Gospel: the hermeneutics of speaking and writing in
Dunn, James D. G. (2003). Jesus Remembered: the synoptic tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q. Indiana
Christianity in the Making, Volume 1. Wm. B. University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-21097-5.
Eerdmans Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-8028-
3931-2. Wansbrough, Henry (2004) [1991]. Introduc-
tion. In Wansbrough, Henry. Jesus and the Oral
Dunn, James D. G. (2013). The Oral Gospel Tra- Gospel Tradition. Continuum International Publish-
dition. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. ing Group. ISBN 978-0-567-04090-9.
ISBN 978-0-8028-6782-7.
Ehrman, Bart D. (2012). Did Jesus Exist?: The
Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. Harper- 6 External links
Collins. ISBN 978-0-06-220460-8.
Johnson, David Kyle. Book Review: Bart
Muilenburg, James (March 1969). Form Criticism Ehrmans Jesus Before the Gospels. Psychology
and beyond. Journal of Biblical Literature. 88 (1): Today. Retrieved 6 June 2016.
118. doi:10.2307/3262829. JSTOR 3262829.
Scholz, Daniel J. (2009). Jesus in the Gospels and
Acts. St Marys Press. ISBN 978-0-88489-955-6.
Telford, William R. (2011). Marks Portrait of Je-
sus. In Burkett, Delbert. The Blackwell Companion
to Jesus. WileyBlackwell. pp. 1329. ISBN 978-
1-4051-9362-7.
Van Voorst, Robert E. (2000). Jesus outside the New
Testament: an introduction to the ancient evidence
Studying the Historical Jesus. Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing,. ISBN 978-0-8028-4368-5.

5 Further reading
Aune, David E. (2004). Oral Tradition in the Hel-
lenistic World. In Wansbrough, Henry. Jesus and
the Oral Gospel Tradition. Continuum International
Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-567-04090-9.
Aune, David E. (2010). Form Criticism. In Aune,
David E. The Blackwell Companion to The New Tes-
tament. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4443-
1894-4.
4 7 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

7 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

7.1 Text
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s1600/Sermon_on_the_Mount_Carl_Bloch.jpg and Carl Bloch, p. 313, ISBN 9788798746591 Original artist: Carl Heinrich Bloch

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