Tom Tozer reviews Bart Ehrman’s book Jesus Before the Gospels, Part 3

 [This is the third installment of a four-part series of articles written by Tom Tozer that reviews Bart Ehrman’s book Jesus Before the Gospels.]

See also:

Tom’s review, Part 1

Tom’s review, Part 2

Chapter 5 is called “Distorted Memories and the Life of Jesus.” There is something strange about the story Ehrman begins with, about a man with a remarkable memory. He says a Doctor Luria studied a man “named S, to protect his privacy.” S could memorize long lists of data effortlessly, and even recall lists memorized years before that he had not thought about in all that time, backwards or forwards, again without effort. But, Ehrman says, this ability was detrimental to S’s life and he could never hold a job, even when he toured as a professional mnemonist (memory freak). See any- thing odd there? Why did Luria need to protect the identity of someone who toured the country highlighting his abilities? It’s odd that Ehrman doesn’t ask this question. It makes me wonder if S is a fiction?

Anyway…..Ehrman spends most of this chapter making the case that oral cultures (which he has so far failed to established is what the first century Jewish or surrounding Greek and Roman cultures were) did not have better information strategies for oral material than literate cultures do. This is aimed at, again, showing that when person A tells person B a story, it morphs a little, and then B tells C, with more morphing, and C tells D, etc etc etc. And again, this is irrelevant if the Gospels derive from eyewitnesses.

Some of this is interesting anyway. There was a study of oral performances, and although the artists and audiences claimed the performances were “the same,” data showed there were huge changes in the length and substance of the stories. Ehrman postulates that oral cultures didn’t view sameness as we do, i.e., verbatim the same, but as “the same basic thing.” Interesting. But as he admits, the Gospels were not oral performances.

But Ehrman tells this story so he can get to this: “As Lord [the study author] himself notes, the kinds of epic tradition that are recorded are quite different from ‘when A tells B what happened, and B tells C and so on with all the natural errors and exaggeration and distortion.’ It is obviously the latter sort of tradition we are interested in when dealing with stories and saying of Jesus.”

That is so ridiculously presumptuous it made me laugh out loud. “Obviously” we should be interested in this thing that has failed to show has any relevance to the Gospels. Good grief!

Next Ehrman describes the narrative tradition of oral cultures. Now, keep in mind, he hasn’t yet demonstrated that Jewish culture or the Greeks or Romans were oral cultures. I doubt he can. All he’s shown is that he assumes the early Christian community was illiterate because the main twelve disciples were from Galilee. That doesn’t seem like enough, but anyway, this culture involved “pro- to-testimony of an observer – chain of transmission [A to B to C etc] – final informant – recorder and earliest written record.” Ehrman asserts “this is exactly what happened with the traditions about Jesus as passed down from eyewitnesses to authors of our earliest written accounts.”

Ehrman’s assertions are baseless. Jewish, Greek and Roman culture was not exclusively oral, and he hasn’t demonstrated otherwise. Nor is there evidence (how could there be written evidence?) that there was a long chain of oral transmission from original witnesses to the authors of the Gospels. That is speculation. And there is evidence contrary to both of his assertions. There is evidence that there were many literate early Christians, and evidence that the Gospels record eyewitness accounts. He doesn’t deal with any of this.

The remainder of the chapter is Ehrman telling more just-so stories about how Jesus’ teachings “must have been” changed, and why, and this or that agenda, etc, but really he was just an apocalyptic preacher who wanted to be the king.

Ehrman bases this specious garbage on the claim that, the early Gospels (assuming we know the order) are about the kingdom of God coming on earth, but that in the later Gospels, namely John, it was clear by then that Jesus wasn’t coming back right away, so they changed the message to “the kingdom is something you’ll get after you die.”

Ehrman’ s claim is nonsense. Paul’s letters are filled with references to the afterlife and attaining the kingdom then. And even Ehrman admits that Paul’s letters probably predated the Gospels. See Romans 5:21, 6:22-23, Galatians 6:8, Titus 1, etc. The message didn’t change the way Ehrman claims.

Chapter 6: Collective Memory: Our Earliest Gospel of Mark.

I have to wonder after reading this chapter why Ehrman is taken seriously by anyone but his most fervent fans. At the outset, Ehrman confesses that until 1988 he was unaware that there was anoth- er, reasoned side to the American Civil War. Ehrman was born in 1955. That means that until he was 33 years old, he had no idea that the South understood the Civil War as an issue of State’s rights and local sovereignty. Think about that. This is the guy who wants to be your guide into history. And that’s not the only thing that makes me wonder.

The Civil War issue is Ehrman’s way of backing into the assertion that groups of people share common stories about the past, some of which may or may not be accurate. This bridges to the “collective memories” of early Christian communities. And again, those collective memories are of no relevance whatever if the Gospels are derived from eyewitnesses, which he still has not disproven.

This of course leads us to another groundbreaking, breakthrough work from the 1920s, a book titled “On Collective Memory” by Halbwach. Ehrman uses Halbwach to assert that we recall the past be- cause it is relevant to the present. This is simply nonsense. There are history departments at colleges in every city, town, state and country on this earth, studying every aspect of every era of the human past. All of it is being “recalled” somewhere. To be as generous as possible to Ehrman, perhaps he means that collective polities attempt, at the popular level anyway, to construct historical stories that serve their present interests, although the attempts may be as imperfect as is their understanding of their actual interests.

At least that might explain why Lincoln is recalled in such and such a way today that he wasn’t in the past, or why, as will be discussed, Israel has massaged the story of Masada into the tale of an heroic, surrounded and courageous people. But these are popular level semantic “memories.” And there are alternative views of these stories available in those same polities. In fact, we know the Masada story is propaganda. The Israelis know it too. They don’t actually “remember” Masada the way the propagandists want them to. They simply make use of the symbol. But to put the matter this way makes mincemeat of Ehrman’s assertion that groups actually change their memories of the past in order to deal with the present.

If you don’t know the story, Masada was a last ditch hide out for a group of Jewish rebels who fled there after Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD. These were not nice people. They assassinated fellow Jews who cooperated with the Romans. They raided Jewish villages to gain supplies. They attacked and killed Roman soldiers. The Romans hunted them down to Masada, a hilltop fortress in the desert. Because the only way up was a narrow path easily defended, the Romans instead built an earthen mound all the way to the top. But when they got to the top, they found that the Jewish rebels had all killed themselves, soldiers killing women and children, then each other, and then the few survivors committing suicide. The nascent Jewish state took on this story as an heroic story of national will, turning the tale into one of courageous resistance to oppressive outside forces. How- ever, within a single generation an Israeli historian wrote about the actual story of the protagonists as assassins and of the mass suicide.

Ehrman says this shows that groups shape their recollection of the past to fit their present needs. Therefore, “memory historians” can “show how the past is being remembered and for what reasons.” But it doesn’t. What it shows is that national propagandists will try to reconstruct the past to serve national interests, but that the actual history remains, and most informed Israelis are perfectly aware of the facts of Masada. They may choose to embrace it as a symbol of resistance, but their memory has not been changed, nor have the actual facts.

This leads us to Mark, which Ehrman says is the Gospel of “Jesus as the Messiah that no one understood.” He actually has a nice little essay on the first line of the Gospel – The Good News of the Anointed One – and how completely upside down the story was from what the world actually expected would be either good news, or the anointed one. But the rest of it is either sheer speculation or utter malarkey.

Ehrman writes that Mark “was narrating a memory of the Christian community in which he lived.” Not a shred of evidence is offered for this. He doesn’t say who the author was or what community it is, just for starters. Then there is a long discussion of how Mark presents Jesus as showing that we will suffer now, but later be rewarded if we keep to his message. Doesn’t this directly contradict what he said earlier about how the “pie-in-the-sky” message came in the later Gospels?

“We remember the past because it is relevant to our present, and what we are experiencing in the present radically affects how we remember the past,” says Ehrman.

And now for the punchline: “It is unfortunate that we don’t have any other information about Mark’s community and its experiences.” Other than what? He hasn’t presented a shred of evidence!

Does this utter lack of evidence cause Ehrman even a short pause in his “exposition” about what the Gospel of Mark means, how the memories in it were “radically affected” by the experiences of Mark’s community – of which he knows nothing?

Not for a second. Knowing nothing about the community, but having concocted a meaning that now needs an experience to explain this concocted meaning, Ehrman concludes the chapter by saying that “This appears to be a community that is suffering hardship.”

Well it would be, wouldn’t it, since he has:

1. made up a rule that communities falsify the past because of their present experiences
2. assumed that Mark was written for some community somewhere, and
3. asserted that Mark is about how to get by when you’re suffering hardship.