Tom Tozer reviews Bart Ehrman’s book Jesus Before the Gospels, Part 1

But the bottom line is, whatever the evidence is about who authored the Gospels and whether they contain eyewitness testimony, for Christians the ultimate source of the information contained therein is the Holy Spirit. As Jesus promised “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” John 14:26.

Based on this, Christians can be assured that the Gospels “firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.” But we don’t have to stop there. We also have good historical reasons to believe the Gospels are reliable as ancient sources grounded in eyewitness accounts of the events recorded.

That said, here is my review.

Bart Ehrman

Introduction – Ehrman’s Introduction to the book is odd. The introduction notes that Lincoln and Columbus are remembered today differently than they were remembered then. Lincoln was hated by many in his time, yet now is universally acclaimed; Columbus 100 years ago was a hero, and now is reviled by many as a tool of oppression. Which is true, but that has nothing to do with the issue he’s talking about in this book, which is the memory involved in the Gospels. If those documents are early and involve witness accounts, then that’s what those documents are.

Just like a record of a Lincoln-Douglas debate is a record of a witness account of that event, it’s the documented memory we’re talking about. Ehrman says at one point, “my ultimate point is not directly related to Lincoln or Columbus.”

Well, it’s not actually directly related to the Gospels either. Oddly enough, too, he talks about form criticism, and says “that is, however, what this book is about” (p. 13) after decrying the lack of popular level books about form criticism. Yet on the “Unbelievable” radio program, Ehrman told Bauckham the his book wasn’t about form criticism.

Chapter 1 – Ehrman’s fundamental theme in the book is that “we do not have direct access to what Jesus said, did and experienced but only to later stories told about him.” (page 14)

But he never establishes this assertion. And unless he can prove conclusively that the Gospels are not sourced in eyewitness accounts this entire book fails. I think the Gospels are sourced in eyewitness accounts, and that Bauckham makes a solid case for that in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. But Ehrman is going to have to prove the opposite.

Rather than do that, instead he immediately fabricates a scenario where eyewitnesses told someone, who then told someone else, and so on, and then somewhere down the line a Gospel writer hears the story 20th hand or worse. In Chapter 1, Ehrman never considers the possibility that the Gospel writers could have spoken directly to the eyewitnesses and cut out all the middlemen.

The chapter does have a nice little introduction to memory and different ways of classifying it in different categories. Ehrman seems to be under the impression that by classifying something you have actually described its essence.

You haven’t. You’ve pared away something to fit it into your classification.

In any case, the discussion of semantic and episodic memory is handy. Episodic memory is memory of something you experienced.

Semantic memory is a memory of something you have learned.

Ehrman gets himself into a bit of a fix when he describes Reza Aslan’s book Zealot (in which Jesus was portrayed as an anti-Roman revolutionary) as a “memory” of Jesus. “Aslan was not the first to remember Jesus in this way,” he says.

Ehrman can only use the word “remember” here because he has snuck it in through the semantic memory door.  However, he’s mixing up his categories here.

Semantic memory isn’t really memory. It’s learning. Your memory of what you learned, however, is episodic memory because the learning was your experience. The content of what you learned is not an episodic memory of the thing represented by the content.

For instance, If I learn that Abraham Lincoln was President of the US, I don’t have an actual memory of Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency.

I have a memory of the information I learned. So when Ehrman says people who read Aslan’s book will “remember” Jesus this way, he’s wrong. They will not “remember Jesus” at all. What they will remember is the (false) information they obtained from Aslan’s book.

Thus, contrary to Ehrman’s case, Bill Reilly’s and Aslan’s books are not “memories of Jesus.” They are “memories” of badly mistaken misinterpretations of historical evidence they learned about Jesus.

These are not “authors recalling who Jesus was.” They are not episodically recalling Jesus, but only information about him, well or badly. This semantic trick of calling both episodic and semantic memories of something “a memory of the thing” when they are not is a critical misstep in Ehrman’s later analysis.

For Ehrman, this is all to get us to this point: “As far back as we have recorded memories of Jesus, we have widely disparate accounts of his words and deeds.”

He can only say this because he wants to include as “recorded memories of Jesus” books that the Church long ago rejected as in fact not containing episodic memories of Jesus. But if we look at the canonical Gospels, we don’t have “widely disparate accounts” of Jesus. The Jesus of the four Gospels is an exceedingly consistent character, despite the differences between them.

As if to prove my point, Ehrman then spends several pages talking – not about the Gospels – but about portrayals of Peter, Judas and Pilate in late apocryphal books which were rejected from the canon. These, he says, are “early Christian memories” of Jesus. But they aren’t. They were rejected on exactly that basis – they were not sourced in testimony from apostolic, that is, witness sources. Ehrman insists otherwise because he is intentionally trying to distort the meaning of “remembering” to help him cast doubt on the actual memories contained in the Gospels.

Chapter 2 of Ehrman’s “Jesus Before the Gospels” begins, egregiously enough, with these words: “When memory researchers speak about ‘distorted’ memories they do not necessarily mean anything negative by it. They are simply referring to memories of things that did not really happen. Most, probably all, of the memories of Jesus discussed in the previous chapter are distorted in that sense. People brought to mind words and deeds of Jesus that the historical Jesus did not actually say and do.”

Which “memories” of Jesus is he talking about here?

The “memories” that are not actually memories of Jesus (not episodic), but memories of learned information? The apocryphal books? Ehrman goes on to talk a bit about the apocryphal stories, but as we’ve established, the Church rejected those as memories. So why does he continue to act like they are? More to the point though, what basis has Ehrman established so far to apply such a statement to the Gospels themselves? Without any real support, he has simply lumped the Gospels in with those books that everyone agrees are not eyewitness memories.

Nice trick. But he hasn’t established anything to show that the Gospels are anything other than eye- witness accounts written in living memory of the events. If they are, all his issues with memory in the prior chapter and introduction are irrelevant.

Next Ehrman discusses a seventeenth century writer named Reimarus. I honestly have no idea why. Reimarus was not an eyewitness. He reviewed the Gospels and decided that Jesus never intended to be the savior of the world, but was just a firebrand revolutionary who wanted to be king. Then he was crucified. Then the disciples hatched this great plan that would allow them to continue to reap the rewards of preaching and missionary work. All they had to do was pretend Jesus rose from the dead.

Seriously. That’s Reimarus’ story. Personally I find that less credible than a resurrection. But Reimarus certainly didn’t have any personal memory of Jesus.

Anyway, the next section is about “a major breakthrough” in critical analysis of the Gospels – form criticism. That thing that Ehrman told a radio audience on the “Unbelievable?” show he wasn’t do- ing in his book. Ehrman asserts that form critics began to realize “that the Gospels could not all be eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus and that there were, in fact, serious discrepancies among them.” The form critics as he describes them seem to have made up criteria for things they cannot possibly know to be true, and reached conclusions based on that speculation. For instance, Ehrman says there is no basis to believe that the disciples memorized his sayings because the Gospels don’t have scenes of Jesus grilling the disciples in memorization drills (Page 69). “Therefore,” Ehrman says, the view that the disciples memorized things “was anachronistic.” That is possibly one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. Apparently Ehrman thinks the Gospels should have included Jesus’ top tips on memory drills for rabbinical students. Because that is clearly the focus and message of Jesus’ life, how to memorize sayings. Oy.

Ehrman also discusses the theory of a scholar named Bailey of “controlled” oral tradition. The basic idea is that Bailey attended haflat samar, local gatherings where stories were told. The tellers were given some freedom in the telling, but important facts and details were carefully policed by the community, and the tellers shamed if they misstated something. In any case, whether or not this was a widespread thing is unimportant, again, if the Gospels are in fact sourced in eyewitness accounts. The rest of the chapter continues about various “must have beens” imaginings of how the stories about Jesus spread. Once again, if the point of this is the Gospels, then it is irrelevant how some stories spread if the Gospels are sourced in eyewitness accounts. Why? Because if stories were spread as Ehrman imagines, then if they accurately portray an eyewitness account they are included in the Gospels. If they do not, then they are not included. Simply put, we do not need to worry about the accuracy of stories that are NOT in the Gospels when deciding about the accuracy of the Gospels.

Next: Part 2 of Tom’s review.