Authorial Intent

It is true that in first-century Greco-Roman culture, would-be prophets sometimes felt no need to distinguish between the words of a great hero during his life and his later oracles to his followers, speaking (so it was believed) from beyond the grave. But in Jewish tradition, great care was exercised to preserve the correct name of a rabbi to whom a famous teaching was attributed and, if that information had been lost even though the saying outlived its author, attributions were left anonymous. In the New Testament, the only three explicit instances of an early Christian prophet’s words (Acts 11:28; 21:10–11; Rev 2:1–3:22) are all clearly distinguished, and distinguishable, from the words of the earthly Jesus. What is more, Paul insisted that all alleged manifestations of the gift of prophecy had to be evaluated by the other Christians present (1 Cor 14:29). From Old Testament days on, one of the central criteria for evaluating supposedly divine words was whether they cohered with previous revelation. So even if some of the teachings in the Gospels did in fact come from later Christian prophets rather than the historical Jesus, the overall portrait of his teaching could not have been materially altered.¹⁵

The argument about many Christians expecting the imminent end of the world at first glance seems more substantial. The Thessalonian epistles show how Paul had to walk a delicate tightrope between affirming that Christ was still coming back soon and yet there were signs of the end that had still to occur. But this was not a new problem for Jesus’ followers. Jews, from the time of the first writing prophets in the eighth century BCE onward, had to wrestle with the declaration of Yahweh’s spokesmen that the Day of the Lord was at hand in a rich variety of ways (e.g., Joel 2:1; Obad 15; Hab 2:3), and yet the centuries continued to march by. The most common solution that pre-Christian Judaism adopted for this dilemma was to cite Psalm 90:4: “For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.” Second Peter 3:8 shows that New Testament Christianity adopted the same strategy, so that the so-called delay in Christ’s return was probably neither the all-consuming issue nor the history-erasing crisis that some have alleged. Moreover, the Essene Jews responsible for most of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumran lived in the belief that they were seeing end-times events unfold before them, and yet they produced a prodigious literature, including enough information to enable us to chronicle a substantial history of their movement. It is unlikely that the first Christians would have behaved any differently.¹⁶

What then of the charge that an ideological agenda necessarily biased the Gospels’ authors and prevented them from writing adequately objective history? There is no question that ideological bias can create severe historical revisionism: witness the one-line entry under Jesus Christ in the old Soviet Encyclopedia that labeled him the mythological founder of Christianity.¹⁷ In more recent days, the overtly anti-Semitic president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has seriously questioned if the Holocaust occurred on anything like the scale it really did, despite the existence of warehouse-sized collections of records attesting the truth. Did the followers of Jesus do something comparable, changing him from a simple Jewish prophet into a cosmic Gentile god?¹⁸ It is not likely. After all, sometimes the very ideology one wants to promote requires careful historical attestation. Holocaust survivors, like many Jewish historians, were passionately concerned that no comparable genocide ever be perpetrated against their people (or any people) again, and for that very reason painstakingly chronicled atrocity after atrocity. First-century Christianity audaciously claimed that God had acted uniquely in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth to provide atonement for humanity’s sins, reconciliation between those who became his followers and Yahweh the God of Israel, and the possibility of eternal life in a re-created and perfected universe in the future. If Christianity’s opponents had been able to show that the central elements of the New Testament data did not closely resemble the true facts about Jesus, this fledgling religion would have crumbled at once. Or as Paul puts it quite simply, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17). In sum, the Gospel writers had every reason to want to preserve accurate history.

Compositional Procedures

But were they able to do so? Even if a thirty-year oral tradition was remarkably short by ancient standards, it still leaves plenty of time for distortion to creep in, perhaps even unwittingly and undetected. Can we seriously believe that documents written no earlier than the early 60s accurately recounted the deeds and teachings of Jesus in the late 20s or early 30s? As it turns out, we can. Ancient Jews honed the art of memorization to an amazing extent. Some rabbis had the entire Hebrew Scriptures committed to memory. A few had quite a bit of the oral Torah (the oral law) under command as well. (For those who find these claims hard to believe, the popular twentieth-century Jewish writer, Chaim Potok, liked to tell of similar, verified feats of learning among orthodox Jewish students in the yeshivas of New York City.) A scribe who had recently completed a new copy of the Torah would often have the most gifted or venerated local rabbi proofread his manuscript by checking it against that rabbi’s memory!

Nor were these feats limited to Jews in the ancient Mediterranean world. Greek schoolboys (and, unfortunately, with rare exceptions, it was only school boys in both Jewish and Gentile contexts) sometimes committed either the Iliad or the Odyssey—Homer’s epic poems that functioned much like Scripture in Greek circles—to memory, with each containing roughly 100,000 words. How was such memorization possible? First, it was an oral culture not dependent on all the print media that dominate our modern world. Second, the main educational technique employed in schools was rote memorization. Jews even had a tradition that until one had memorized a passage of Torah, one was not qualified to discuss it lest one perhaps misrepresent it. Third, in Jewish circles, “Bible” was the only subject students studied during the fairly compulsory elementary education that spanned ages five to twelve or thirteen, and that took place at least wherever there were large enough Jewish communities to have a synagogue. Fourth, memorization thus began at the early ages when it is the easiest period of one’s life to master large amounts of content. Fifth, texts were often sung or chanted; the tunes helped one remember the words as they do with contemporary music, too. Finally, a variety of other mnemonic devices dotted the texts that were studied so intensely. Especially crucial in the Jewish Scriptures were numerous forms of parallelism between lines, couplets, and even larger units of thought.¹⁹ In this kind of milieu, accurately remembering and transmitting the amount of material found in one Gospel would have been comparatively easy.

At the same time, mere memorization cannot be the only factor that lies behind the transmission of the Gospel tradition. If it were, we would not have four different Gospels or, if we did, they would not vary in the precise way that they do. It has long been recognized that the Synoptic Gospels almost certainly reflect some kind of literary relationship among themselves. That is to say, one or more of these three documents utilized one or more of the others and/or other common sources. Only in this fashion can we account for the extensive verbatim parallelism between parallel accounts of the same event interspersed with utterly unparalleled or only slightly paralleled material. A few conservative scholars have argued for complete independence, leaving only divine inspiration to account for the current combination of similarities and differences, but this flies in the face of Luke’s own testimony in Luke 1:1–4 (recall above) and the standard Jewish and Greco-Roman practices of writing history and biography.

Most Gospels scholars therefore believe that, at least in the finished forms in which we now have them, (1) Mark came first, (2) Matthew and Luke each independently relied on Mark wherever they wanted to, and (3) Matthew and Luke each utilized additional sources, both written and oral. One of these may well have been a common source, primarily of sayings of Jesus, to which both Matthew and Luke had access, in view of the approximately 250 verses in these two Gospels common to each other but not found in Mark. This hypothetical source has come to be called Q (from the German word Quelle for source).²⁰

Another factor comes into play here, too, which recent research has been particularly scrutinizing. Prior to a text becoming “canonical”—uniquely sacred and authoritative in written form—revered traditions in ancient Mediterranean cultures were transmitted orally with certain flexibility within fixed limitations. Even into the late twentieth century, preliterate or semiliterate communities or people groups in as diverse locations as Africa, the Balkan states, Lebanon, and Palestine appointed certified “tradents”—oral storytellers (or singers) who were responsible for regularly rehearsing or performing the sacred traditions of that group of people. Yet, far from repeating every last word identically with each retelling of the epic, anywhere from ten to forty percent of the actual words could vary from one occasion to the next. This allowed for varying selections of episodes and portions of episodes to include abbreviation, explanation, application, and paraphrase, in part for the storyteller to demonstrate some creative artistry and in part to keep the audience’s interest fresh. At the same time, sixty to ninety percent of the information remained unvarying, including all elements deemed necessary for the lessons of the stories to remain intact. Tradents who left out or garbled any of these elements were to be interrupted and corrected by those in the audience who recognized the mistakes.²¹

Now turn back to the Synoptic Gospels. Choose all of the passages unambiguously appearing in at least two of these three books. That is to say, limit yourself to accounts that the various Gospel writers assign to the same time and/or place, that cannot be dismissed as Jesus simply doing two somewhat similar things twice or teaching the same basic teaching in different contexts. Count the words that are identical in the Greek in the parallel accounts. Rarely will you find less than ten percent or more than forty percent of the words differing! What has been called “informal controlled oral tradition”²² has almost certainly been at work in the production of the Synoptics and not just verbatim memorization and literary dependence on previously written sources. This kind of tradition does not produce verbatim reproduction of every minor word but is true to the details that make a story or a teaching what its author intended it to be.

Nor dare we underestimate the power of the community in a culture that did not at all value individualism the way we do. Bart Ehrman likens the oral transmission of the Gospel tradition to the children’s game of telephone,²³ in which a long and complex message is whispered to one child who then has the responsibility of whispering what he or she thinks the message was to the next child, and so on. After this “tradition” has been passed on to a number of participants, even over the span of a few minutes, the final child who then speaks out loud the last version of the message usually draws hilarious laughter because of how garbled the message has become. But Ehrman could hardly have chosen a more inappropriate analogy. The Gospel traditions were not whispered but publicly proclaimed, not to children but to adults, in the presence of knowledgeable tradents, or with apostolic checks and balances (see, e.g., how Peter and John function in Acts 8:14–17). Indeed, a burgeoning field of research in the social sciences today is scrutinizing how “social memories” of various subcultures are formed through repetition and interpretation in community, creating certain fixed forms of oral tradition that might well not otherwise be established.²⁴ Even apart from this trend, Bailey’s research tellingly demonstrated that playing “telephone” with groups of his adult Middle-Eastern students did not yield garbled messages but extraordinarily well preserved ones!²⁵ This is exactly what we should expect of the Gospels, too, given the culture in which they emerged.