Stories about Jesus Before the Gospels: Oral Traditions in the Early Church

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The New Testament writings were produced decades after Jesus' death, but long before that people were passing along stories about Jesus and devising poems and creeds about their new-found faith. What do scholars know about these Christian traditions that were being passed along and preserved by word of mouth in the years before we had written texts. Scholars call them "oral traditions." How do we know such things existed, and can we be certain that they were passed along reliably before there were Christian writings?

Megan asks Bart:

-What, exactly, is an oral tradition, and what are NT scholars referring to when they talk about an oral tradition in the NT?

-When you’re working with a text corpus, how do you go about identifying components that might have originated in an oral, spoken tradition?

-Are there specific book in the NT that show features of an oral tradition particularly strongly, or books that seem to rely more on an oral tradition than others?

-What about non-canonical works?

-Do academics think that the writers of the NT are reproducing this oral tradition verbatim, or writing based on the stories they’d heard?

-Is there any way to estimate how much of the NT is based on oral traditions?

-Do the oral elements present in the NT hint at an older tradition than the sections that were always written texts?

-Do you think it’s possible to get back to what the earliest Christians believed based on these oral traditions, or have their stories been retold and changed so much that it’s not possible?

-Do you think we can get back to any kind of reliable, historical narrative of Jesus’ life?

Видео Stories about Jesus Before the Gospels: Oral Traditions in the Early Church канала Bart D. Ehrman