Tag Archives: Oral tradition

Where are those stories?

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Those opposed to the idea that Jesus was only ever a mythical figure are generally dismissive of those who point to the evidence of the New Testament that this is precisely how the earliest Christians saw him. These critics lambast as ‘amateurs’, ‘pseudo-historians’ and ‘fringe’ enthusiasts those who don’t see any evidence for an historical Jesus. But such ad hominems are not arguments and they’re certainly not evidence that a human Jesus existed. When the books of the New Testament are arranged in chronological order, the very earliest writing about Jesus – Paul in the 50s and the creed of 1 Corinthians 15 – appear to view him only as a scripture-fulfilling spiritual manifestation.

So, was Jesus actually an itinerant preacher who traipsed the Earth in the 30s before rapidly evolving into Paul’s mythical Christ or was he a mythical being to begin with, only later to be cast as an historical figure?

It has to be one or the other. 

Within twenty years of his supposed death, Paul and others had experienced dreams, visions and hallucinations (Acts 2:17) that convinced them Jesus was a supernatural being in heaven. This doesn’t of course rule out that a human Jesus had actually existed, but it makes it unnecessary for him to have done so. Paul and almost all the creators of the New Testament books treat his earthly existence as irrelevant. Even when ‘proving’ their celestial Superman is the promised Messiah, they refer not to his activities on Earth, but appeal exclusively to what they believed Jewish scripture revealed about the Messiah.

According to these men, this is how they knew the Jesus of their dreams was truly the Saviour: the ancient scriptures. Not a single one of them says, ‘I refer you to Jesus’ miraculous birth in Bethlehem; I remind you that he changed water into wine, controlled the elements and miraculously multiplied food.’ Not one of them references his many healings, exorcisms and raising of people from the dead. Not one mentions the historical details surrounding his crucifixion, the empty tomb or the women who first saw him alive again. Not one relates a single resurrection appearance (beyond their own visions) nor do they mention the ascension or a looked for ‘second’ coming. Why not? Surely these would be the definitive indicators that Jesus was the Messiah, instead of, or at least alongside, the so-called prophecies of ancient scriptures.

The ‘why not?’ is because these stories – the birth, the miracles, the healings, the empty tomb, the bodily resurrection, the ascension and the rest – had, at the time Paul was writing, not yet been created. Consequently, they couldn’t be passed on to Paul when he met Cephas and James. There was no much-vaunted ‘oral tradition’ for him to call upon to fill in the gaps in his knowledge about an Earthly Jesus. There was no oral tradition because there was no Earthly Jesus to relate stories about when Paul was active in the 50s. This version of Jesus, created from Jewish scripture, Paul’s teaching and cult rules, didn’t appear until the early 70s. Even after Mark’s gospel and its copycat sequels, most of the writers of later New Testament continued to believe in and refer only to a heavenly saviour verified by ancient Jewish scripture.

But, apologists say today, no-one at the time would be taken in by talk of a Messiah who existed only in the heavenly realm. And that’s true; despite the Bible’s claims to the contrary, very few people were persuaded. But some bought into it, just as others at the time bought into Mithras. Mithraism was, for a while, more successful than the fledgling Christian cult. Yet its adherents knew Mithras himself manifested only in the heavenly plane. This didn’t stop multitudes of military men from joining the cult to worship him. It was the same for the other deities of the day. They too didn’t exist even if stories about their adventures on the Earth were widely circulated and, in all probability, believed by the gullible.

If, however, Jesus’ life on Earth had happened in the early part of the first century, how was it that 20 years after his death he had already become an angelic being without a past? Why had Paul, the writer of Hebrews, the pseudo-Pauls, James and John of Patmos never heard any of the stories about him, or didn’t care about them or felt they weren’t really evidence of Jesus’ Messiahship? Where are those stories? Outside the later gospels they don’t exist. It’s as if, when Elvis Presley died, no one cared any more about all the hit records he’d made and were instead only interested in his post-mortem sightings in laundromats and shopping malls. The process just doesn’t happen this way round.

No, it is far more likely that Jesus went from being a celestial saviour to having stories written about him, stories that are based on prophecies in Jewish scripture and Paul’s ‘revelations’. They are allegorical and metaphorical, wholly made up as the writer of Mark 4:11-12 tells us with the equivalent of a Clark Kent wink:

The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that ‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’

 

Just suppose…

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Let’s imagine that the gospels were all written by eye-witnesses or the associates of eye-witnesses. Let’s suppose that prior to their composition there was a vibrant oral tradition that accurately preserved the Jesus story and his teaching in particular. Let’s suppose that Paul learnt what he knew of Christianity initially from the early believers he persecuted and then, following his miraculous conversion, from his meetings with the disciples. Let’s suppose that the later books of New Testament were written by people who knew Jesus personally or were really by Paul. Let’s suppose that everything in the bible was inspired by God and is truly his word. Let’s imagine that as result of all this, everything predicted and prophesied in the gospels, in Paul’s letters and the later ones by apostles, came to pass.

Because we’d have to imagine this. Even if everything we’ve supposed was true, none of the prophesies, predictions or promises have materialised in reality. Not one. No Son of Man beaming down from heaven while the disciples and Pilate were still alive, (as he promises in Mark 9:1 and Mark 14:62 respectively), no visit from the Messiah while Paul and his acolytes were living (1 Thessalonians 4:17), no final judgement, no Kingdom of heaven on Earth, no Christians performing miracles greater than those attributed to Jesus. Not even any ‘new creations’ imbued with the Holy Spirit (‘by their fruits shall ye know them.’)

Apologists put a lot of effort into explaining away these failures, some even arguing the Kingdom is actually with us now (how incredibly disappointing it is if this is the case!) Most disappointing of all is that no Christian has ever resurrected from the dead. Not Paul, not Peter, Mary Magdalene nor any other early follower, and no-one since: not Martin Luther, Charles Wesley, C. S. Lewis, Billy Graham nor any bishop, minister or evangelist who has ever lived. All have remained resolutely dead, just like everyone else who has ever ‘fallen asleep’ and everyone who will in the future.

However much Christians want to insist the Bible is true, accurate and God-breathed, in the end it simply doesn’t deliver.

Paul and the Oral Tradition

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Much is made of the oral tradition that it is said informs the material in the synoptic gospels, and possibly John too. The tradition of conveying the events of Jesus’ life and the things he said goes back to Jesus’ original followers – the disciples and the apostles (the terms are not necessarily interchangeable) – and continues with a high degree of accuracy, at least until AD70 when the first gospel was written. 

Which must be why we find so much detail about Jesus’ life in the letters of Paul, from his first letter, 1 Thessalonians, written circa AD55 to his last, Philippians (now an amalgam of several letters), written about 62. Paul was aware of the stories about Jesus – as all converts were – and affirms so many of the details of his life in his letters, passing on the vital stories and the traditions associated with him, in written form.

But not in our reality. Our Paul knows nothing of the details of Jesus’ life. Not once does he quote him or refer to the events of his life before the resurrection. There is nothing of the oral tradition. Nowhere in his letters does he draw from it; never does he say he knows for a fact that Jesus said or did a specific thing while on Earth.

Even after his meeting with Cephas and James, a full three years after his conversion, Paul relays not a single thing he learnt from them. After the encounter, he continues to promote only his own revelations and says nothing of what he learnt about Jesus from the man who supposedly spent three eventful years with him.

Fourteen years later, Paul meets again with Cephas and encounters other apostles for the first time. On this occasion, he and Cephas argue about justification and Paul comes away grumbling that ‘those leaders added nothing to me’ (Galatians 2:6) What? Not even stories about their time with the Master? Apparently these weren’t as important as disputes about soteriology.

Later still, Acts tells us that immediately after his conversion, Paul stayed with ‘disciple’ Ananias and other ‘disciples’ for several days. Did Ananias not know any of the oral tradition that he could pass on to Paul? Details about Jesus’ life, a saying or two or an account of a miracle? Apparently not. (This might be because the story is pure fabrication. Paul tells us himself, in Galatians 1: 16, that immediately after his conversion he ‘did not rush to consult with flesh and blood’).

Surely, though, he must have heard some of the Jesus story from those he persecuted prior to his dramatic conversion. If he did, he didn’t see fit to include any of it in his letters. Likewise, Paul had contact with cult communities he didn’t himself establish, such as that in Rome. Surely they conveyed some of the stories about Jesus that they had had passed on to them. He appears too to have known at least one other evangelist:  Apollos. If these other believers did pass on stories of Jesus from an ultra-reliable oral tradition, why didn’t Paul see fit to include any of them in his letters?

So what were Paul’s sources? Certainly not the oral tradition, nor Q, the hypothetical sayings gospel, which he likewise ignores. If the gospel was being spread orally from the time Jesus lived, by the apostles and other preachers, and was being passed around the fledgling cult communities, why did Paul know nothing of it? If in fact he did, why did he choose to ignore it in favour of his own inner-visions? Did he consider it of such little value?

These questions matter, as we’ll see next time when Mark decides he’ll set the Jesus story down on paper.

End Of Term Test

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Which of the terms mythological, symbolic, theological is most appropriate when discussing biblical tropes?

Apparently, it’s ‘theological’ because it has an air of respectability, whereas the other terms suggest something with only theoretical underpinning. In fact, this also applies to ‘theological’, which by definition is the study of deities, for which there is no evidential verification. The use of ‘theological’ therefore is as unsubstantive as arguing that a concept is metaphorical or symbolic. None of these terms represents a sound, reliable way to determine the accuracy, historicity or truth of religious claims.

With this in mind see how you do with these questions:

1. Did the original hearers of the Genesis creation story regard it as –

a) true.

b) a theological statement.

c) an entertaining myth.

Of course we’ve no way of knowing what the story’s original hearers thought but there is nothing in the text that suggests they would have regarded the creation story as anything but true. The creators of Jesus’ script certainly seemed to think so, a few centuries later and its original hearers would not have felt the need to preserve it otherwise. In this belief they were wrong.

2. Which of these gospel stories is true, as in ‘really happened more or less as described’ –

a) The virgin birth with its surrounding detail.

b) Jesus meeting with Moses and Elijah (the transfiguration).

c) Resurrected corpses roaming around Jerusalem.

d) The resurrection.

The answer is that either all of them are true or none of them are. If only one of them is mythic, symbolic or ‘theological’ (and more than one of them most certainly is) then it is highly likely the others are too. If we are scrupulous, we cannot assert that one story is symbolic because it’s making a theological point while another equally implausible story is historically accurate because we want it to be.

The criteria for determining the historicity of any story from antiquity are corroborative evidence and, failing that, plausibility. We have already established that there is no independent corroboration for many of the gospel stories. There is no corroboration for some of them even in the Bible itself. We are left then with plausibility: how plausible is it that a virgin gave birth or that resurrected corpses presented themselves to Jewish authorities? Vanishingly small. Jesus’ encounter with Moses and Elijah is equally improbable.

Is his resurrection the exception? No, because dead people do not spring back to life 36 hours after being buried. If the virgin birth, the transfiguration and the resurrection of dead saints are all highly implausible (and they are) then so is the resurrection. It is at best, a story making a theological point but it is not history. The implausibility it shares with many of the other implausible stories in the gospels discounts it as history. There are no grounds for saying it is the exception.

There is also the cumulative effect of implausibility. It is highly unlikely that one of the implausible events above is historical, but it is impossible that all four of them are. Add all the other implausible stories in the gospels – the other miracles; the healings; exorcisms; Jesus sparring with the devil, walking through locked doors and beaming up to heaven: piling implausibility on top of implausibility doesn’t make any of the component implausibilities more plausible. It makes all of them less plausible and collectively impossible.

The things the gospels tell us happened to Gospel Jesus, and those they say he did himself, are equalled only by heroes of myth. Did Osiris or Romulus rise from the dead, as their stories claim? Did Augustus really become a god once he died? Of course not. These are the implausible, improbable events we find in myth. Jesus’ story is no different.

3. While many or all of the gospel stories are highly improbable as history because they are intended to convey a theological point, the words attributed to Jesus in the gospels –

a) are completely accurate.

b) are more or less what he said.

c) passed through an inestimable number of people, being invented, edited and altered in the process, before being written down 40+ years after Jesus supposedly uttered them.

d) are inventions of the gospel writers and/or their particular sect and frequently copied between gospels.

If you’re opting for a or b, you’re now making the logia the exception; the one oasis of historical truth in a desert of implausibility. That’s a big ask. To get this one off the ground, you have to call upon contrivances like –

completely reliable (but different and conflicting) oral traditions;

     hypothetical lists of sayings;

         Peter’s dictation to Mark;

             eyewitness authors;

                  secret teachings;

                     super-translators and

                         the odd spot of collaboration.

So, c and/or d is far more likely to be the answer to this one, representing the explanation that requires the least conjecture and fewest hypothetical components.

How did you do? I expect most of you aced this end of term quiz. If not, better get down to some extra study and repeat the semester next year.

The Circular Reasoning of Apologists

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This is what what we’ve got so far:

Human behaviour is controlled by beings from an invisible, undetectable spiritual realm. We know this invisible, undetectable spiritual realm exists because of the effect it has on human behaviour (even if dumb old atheists can’t wrap their minds round the fact.)

Circular reasoning, not evidence.

The synoptic gospels rely on an earlier oral tradition. We know there was an earlier oral tradition because the synoptic gospels rely on it.

Circular reasoning, not evidence. (The same applies to Q.)

We know the stories about Jesus are indisputably true because they’re in the gospels that no-one at the time disputed. We know the gospels are indisputably true because they tell us stories about Jesus that at the time no-one disputed.

Circular reasoning, not evidence. There is no corroborative, independent evidence for any of the stories about Jesus. (I’ll get to the indisputable claim soon.)

 

 

Tailor Made

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So where did the stories of Jesus life on Earth come from? The traditional answers to this question are wholly inadequate. As we’ve seen, they didn’t seem to be around when Paul was writing; the hypothetical Q is an unconvincing way of explaining them while unreliable memory, coupled with the so-called oral tradition, don’t offer any means of conveying accurate verifiable information about Jesus.

The writers of the gospels, particularly Mark the creator of the first, would have known this. The gospels are not collections of the speculative tales that were doing the rounds. They might have made some incidental use of them, but all of the gospels are carefully constructed, designed to make theological points about their hero. Particular kinds of stories were required for this and the gospel writers thought nothing of making them up. It’s possible they made use of existing tales, but if they did, they almost certainly retooled them to suit their purposes. The stories we find in the gospels are tailor made to illustrate these purposes. None of the gospels is history: they are all carefully crafted literary creations.

What were the purposes and the agendas of the gospel writers? Propaganda, designed not so much to convert non-believers, but to explain to those who were already part of the cult, and their own sects in particular, what belief in Jesus entailed. To this end, they created allegories, symbolic stories about his life on Earth.

Mark began the process. He constructed his narrative by adapting Paul’s teaching ;and inventing stories based on ‘prophecies’ from the scriptures to create a symbolic narrative every part of which makes a theological point. He may also have retooled existing stories while borrowing features of existing myth that fellow cultists would expect to find in an account of a demi-god’s adventures.

Matthew and Luke then followed his lead, lifting what they thought was of relevance to their own agendas, dropping or amending the rest and inventing their own symbolic stories.

You think they didn’t? I’ll show you that they did, and how, using Mark, Matthew and Luke’s gospels, in a couple of posts time. But before that: a slight and relevant diversion.

The Oral Tradition

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Where did stories about Jesus originate?

Memory and the Oral Tradition, part 2

The passing on of stories from memory is the ‘oral tradition’ that some argue preserved the words of Jesus more or less accurately for forty years. We’re expected to believe that eye-witnesses recalled in precise detail what Jesus said and did; that they all largely agreed on what this was; that none of them embellished or altered their recollections in any way in the telling and that they were passed on to convert after convert after convert in precise and unaltered form. And then, that no-one in forty years amended or refined the stories in any substantial way, because if they did the originators of the tales would be quick to point out any inaccuracies.

We know this isn’t what happened. The stories evolved and were refined and embellished as they were passed along for forty years between numerous converts. The defence that ancient largely illiterate cultures were better at faithfully preserving stories orally than we are today is a myth. (See Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation Of A Jewish Preacher from Galilee)

Even when some of the oral stories about Jesus were eventually written down, as in the gospels, they continued to evolve; Matthew and Luke both altered stories they took from Mark while John’s Jesus, in the latest of the canonical gospels, is a different creation altogether; either the source stories John knew had evolved quite differently from those Mark, Matthew and Luke had access to, or John created his Jesus out of whole cloth himself.

These stories once written down were changed again, both deliberately and accidentally, whenever the gospels were copied. We know this from the myriad of differences in the extant manuscripts. As Bart Ehrman puts it in Misquoting Jesus, ‘there are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament’. The evolution continued. This is why the Jesus seminar concluded, controversially, that only 20% of the words attributed to Jesus in the gospels can be regarded as originating with him. I consider this to be over-generous. 

Even if the writers of Jesus stories took some of their material from the so-called oral tradition (aka, ‘stories that were being passed around’), we have no way of knowing which of it, if any, is an accurate representation of the things Jesus did and said. It’s unlikely much of it is, given how stories are misremembered, reshaped and altered over time. Their evolution makes them less reliable, not more.

By the way, you’ve not read the post I wrote on Cape Cod. Most of it was completed in Boston and I’ve edited and posted it from my home in the UK. In other words, it evolved in various locations. Kind of like the gospels.

 

In Search of the Lost Q

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Where did the stories about Jesus that we find in the gospels come from?

2. Q

Q is a hypothetical document said to be a collection of Jesus’ sayings. It was first hypothesised in the late 19th century and developed by minister B. H. Streeter in 1924. it was intended to explain why Matthew and Luke’s gospels shared material that wasn’t plagiarised from Mark. Streeter speculated they must both have had access to an alternative source that he christened Q (after the German for source, Quelle.)

While the idea caught on and is still assumed by many scholars (including Bart Ehrman) there are numerous problems with it:

Q doesn’t exist and has never existed. There is absolutely no evidence for it, aside from the duplication of material in Matthew and Luke, the very context it was designed to explain. There are no surviving copies, nor even fragments of any written collection of Jesus’ sayings (unsurprisingly for a non-existent document.) Nor is a book of Jesus’ sayings referred to in any form by any New Testament writer (again, unsurprisingly.)

Q is unnecessary. As other scholars, including M. A. Farrer, Mark Goodacre and Richard Carrier, have pointed out, there is a far simpler explanation for Matthew and Luke’s sharing of material they didn’t get from Mark. Either Matthew or Luke had access to the other. It is generally accepted that Matthew’s gospel predated Luke’s by a few years. It is likely therefore that Luke took certain stories from Matthew, as he had others from Mark, and made them his own. Doesn’t he say at the start of his gospel that he intends to collate material about Jesus that was already in circulation? Occam’s Razor also leads to the conclusion that this is a far better explanation of the duplication than a hypothetical third document.

Q doesn’t answer the question of where the stories came from in the first place. Arguably, it moves the solution back a stage but that’s all. If for the sake of argument we assume Q did exist, we still don’t necessarily know where it got its material from. Q really gets us no further forward.

Q is conjectured to be a collection of sayings. They are not set in any context; Q lacks a narrative structure so cannot be where Matthew derived his accounts, for example, of the Temptation in the wilderness (4:1-11), the Sermon on the Mount (5:1-12) or the healing of the centurion’s servant (8:5-13) that Luke would later copy and adapt. These are stories, not mere sayings. Even if Matthew got the sayings they include from some now lost written source from where did he get their context? Eyewitnesses? Unlikely, given he was writing 50 years after the purported events when most eyewitnesses would be dead. He was certainly not an eyewitness himself; he would not have needed to copy large swathes of Mark if he was. Nor does Matthew claim to be using eyewitness testimony. Like all the gospel writers he comes nowhere close to citing his sources.

Matthew is, however, notorious at making up stories he thinks make Jesus fit prophecy. He invents still others to make theological points. It’s quite possible he invented these particular accounts too.

Or perhaps, as apologists like to claim, Matthew and the other gospel writers got at least some of their stories from the so-called oral tradition, a grand name for the tales about Jesus that circulated for the 40-70 years before the gospels were written.

We’ll take a look next time.

Where did Luke get his Bethlehem story from?

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Previously on RejectingJesus:

Matthew creates his nativity story, specifically Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, from Micah 5.2, which prophesies that a ‘ruler over Israel’ will be born there. This prophecy is imposed on Jesus who was not a ruler of Israel – though he may have aspired to be – and certainly was not the Messiah envisaged by the creators of such prophecies. I suggest that subsequently, Luke embroidered Matthew’s fairly basic story and contrived to get Jesus born in Bethlehem by inventing a Roman census that required his parents to travel there.

A Christian commenter (let’s call him Don) then challenged this scenario by claiming, without offering any evidence, that Luke did not have access to Matthew’s gospel, so must have known that Jesus was born in Bethlehem from an independent source. (Christians are fond of attributing suspect gospel material to oral traditions and the hypothetical Q. Don is no exception.)

In fact, a number of scholars, including Michael Goulder, Mark Goodacre, Richard Carrier and others, think that Luke did know Matthew’s gospel. This is the so-called Farrer hypothesis, named after Austin Farrer who first proposed the idea in 1955. As well as his plagiarising 55% of Mark, these scholars show that Luke also used material from Matthew, including the Bethlehem story. The structure of Luke’s version and some of his phrasing is identical to Matthew’s. It is unlikely this would be the case if Luke wasn’t lifting directly from Matthew’s account.

Luke goes further and replaces some of the details in Matthew’s story that don’t suit his purpose (e.g. the magi) with his own (the shepherds), which is why the two accounts diverge. Nonetheless, both versions of the story stem from the ‘prophecy’ in Micah 2.5. Luke doesn’t cite it explicitly but then he is non-specific elsewhere in his gospel about events that supposedly fulfil prophecy. Unlike Matthew, Luke was writing for a gentile audience who would not be as familiar with Jewish scripture; he didn’t need to be as explicit about the source for his stories that were based on these scriptures. Nonetheless, the two nativity accounts, Matthew’s and Luke’s, likely had the same basis (the Micah prophecy) with Luke adapting the narrative that Matthew had already created from it. Moreover, the differences in detail between Matthew and Luke’s accounts demonstrate clearly that both authors were inventing their respective stories. As Neil Godfrey puts it,

Luke, attempting to adapt Matthew’s Bethlehem as the place of birth of Jesus to his more universalist theme, feels obliged to concoct a silly story of everyone being required by imperial edict to return to their places of birth for a special tax registration. Not to mention the necessary anachronism of his Quirinius timing, too. It is not hard to see that Luke is struggling to incorporate Matthew’s Bethlehem setting into his own tendentious narrative.

It’s possible, of course, that all of the scholars who think Luke knew Mathew’s gospel are wrong, but even so, this doesn’t rescue Luke’s nativity from its fictional moorings.

First, it could be argued that both Matthew and Luke knew about Jesus’ birth from their respective sources. Our Christian commenter would say, and does say, that the details of Jesus’s birth were well known in the early, pre-gospel cult (he disputes that Jesus was in any way famous beyond this select few) and that these details were preserved in a reliable oral tradition or in Q. If the former was the case, however, the two nativity accounts would not differ to the extent they do, unless the oral traditions weren’t as reliable as our commenter likes to say they were. On the other hand, Q, if it existed at all, was comprised primarily of sayings and certainly did not include any Bethlehem narrative.

Second, Don will no doubt say that all of this is mere atheist grumbling and is therefore entirely fallacious. He believes that God inspired his anonymous agents to use prophecy, foreshadowing and typology to point the way to Jesus and his birth in Bethlehem. Don believes that both Matthew and Luke had independent knowledge of Jesus’ birth there, which means it must’ve been his birthplace. Of course it indicates nothing of the sort. If Matthew and Luke settled on Bethlehem independently, it would demonstrate only that they had independent knowledge of Micah 2.5.

Third, if the circumstances of Jesus birth in Bethlehem were so remarkable – miraculous, even – then why does Mark not mention them? According to Don (though no serious scholar shares his view) Mark’s gospel is comprised of the recollections of Peter, Jesus’ closest, dim-witted pal in the synoptic gospels. Did Jesus never mention his birth to Peter? Did Peter then fail to pass the details on to Mark? Did Jesus’ mother Mary, who treasured memories of the miraculous birth, never allude to them when she and Peter reminisced together over a glass of water wine? (Yes, Don, I know this is in John’s gospel, but they are meant to be the same characters.) Why does the Bethlehem birth only emerge in Matthew, who built much of his gospel around ‘prophecies’ from scripture, and in Luke, who, in all likelihood, copied from him?

We can be fairly certain that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem. Someone somewhere, other than these two, would have mentioned it outside of symbolic stories that owe far more to myth and legend than they do to fact.

Jesus writes…

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Image: Caleb Havertape (https://www.pinterest.co.uk/calebhavertapei/_saved/)

Ubi Dubium has posed the question, ‘why didn’t Jesus write his own gospel?’ It’s a good question. What better way to ensure his ideas were conveyed precisely without any margin for error or misinterpretation, than to do it himself? If he hadn’t the time or the ability to do so, why didn’t he dictate his message to one of his literate disciples (surely one of them could write) who could then, as an eye-witness, finish off the story accurately once Jesus himself had returned to Heaven. Why, instead, did he leave it to people he’d never met, most of whom wouldn’t be about for another few decades?

It seems to me there are three possible answers.

  1. Jesus believed the world as he knew it was soon to end. He was convinced God was about to intervene and sweep away the old order and inaugurate the Kingdom of God on Earth. If the gospels that have come down to us are to believed, this was the core of his teaching. Jesus mentions its imminence repeatedly across the synoptic gospels and the morality he proposes, wholly impractical in the long term, is designed for the ‘shortness of the hour’. In this scenario, Jesus and his followers had no interest in writing anything down for posterity. There was no posterity; the end was very truly nigh.

  2. God didn’t want his Son to write his own story. He wanted the job left to people whom Jesus never met, who were little more than children during his lifetime and who lived hundreds of miles from where events occurred. God was sure this was the best way to create a record of his Son’s visit to Earth, without inaccuracies, inconsistencies and contradictions. 

  3. The creator of Mark’s gospel bought into Paul’s celestial Saviour, his illusory ‘Lord Jesus Christ’. Mark set about creating a ‘what if’ back story for him, set in Palestine in the recent past and constructed from Paul’s ’revelations’ and Old Testament ‘prophecy’. Mark highlighted Paul’s teaching that the Christ, whom he calls the Son of Man in his gospel, would soon be coming to the Earth (not a second coming or a return) to rescue his Chosen and reset reality.

Are there any other possibilities? I can’t think of any, nor have I read of any. So which of the three is the most plausible?

Scenario 1 leaves us with a Son of God not knowing what he was talking about. This Jesus was wrong about when the Son of Man would appear, wrong about the End of the Age, wrong about the traumatic nature of God’s intervention, wrong about the Final Judgement, wrong about the fate of the unrighteous and wrong about the Kingdom of God being established on the Earth. This scenario gives us a Jesus who is a failure as both a prophet and Messiah. It’s a wonder anything at all was written about such a loser, let alone narratives that preserved his hopeless predictions about the Kingdom’s arrival.

Scenario 2 is of course ridiculous, though it is the one most Christians buy into, more or less. As well as its inherent implausibility, it relies on the hypothetical document Q, for which no evidence exists let alone any extant copy (or even fragment). It, and a supposedly reliable oral tradition, are speculative, needed only to counter the improbability of this scenario.

Scenario 3, while contentious, makes most sense of why neither Jesus nor any of his contemporaries wrote down or otherwise recorded a single thing he said or did. Mark’s gospel, created shortly after 70CE, was the first anyone had heard of a Jesus on Earth. The three subsequent gospels were all based, to varying degrees, on Mark’s fable. In this scenario there was no real Jesus, and no dozy disciples, to have recorded his exploits and teaching.

What you think, Ubi?