Jesus Before the Gospels!

Our book today is the latest from Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, bestselling author of such books as Misquoting Jesus and How Jesus Became God. His new book is called Jesus Before the Gospels and has the opus-length subtitle, How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior.

As the book’s title right away makes clear, this is familiar territory for Ehrman, who has made a bestselling career out of explicating the historical and literary phenomenon of Jesus Christ. He’s also made a career out of repeating himself, and this latest book makes that fact clearer than usual, almost to an embarrassing degree. Ehrman has been pointing out for a long time now that despite the presence of the Gospels and the Acts, we have far, far fewer reliable even quasi-contemporary records of the life and ministry of Jesus – most of what we have are, as Ehrman frequently writes, copies of copies of copies of copies of anything resembling eyewitness testimony. The derivative nature of the tradition is never far from Ehrman’s concerns:

All of the people who told stories about Jesus – eyewitnesses, people who heard from eyewitnesses, and people who heard from people who heard from people who heard from people who heard from eyewitnesses – remembered what they saw and heard. And their own stories were based on those memories.

The slow transformation of memories into oral tradition is the main subject of Jesus Before the Gospels, and Ehrman does his familiar best to stress the wider importance of the topic. “Remembering Jesus is not simply an antiquarian exercise. It is about today,” he writes. “Not only does the past impose itself on us when we remember; but also our memories of the past are always affected by our views of the present.”

It’s a bit roundabout, a bit tiresome, and Ehrman doesn’t help matters any by delving both into cognition studies and the Christian Apocrypha. No amount of horizon-widening, for instance, can paper over the logical leap in that earlier quote, that all the people who told stories about Jesus were working at some remove or other from things actually seen and heard, and that “their own stories were based on those memories.”

To put it mildly, Ehrman has no evidence to support such a claim – other than conclusions read backwards into non-contemporary sources in search of the claim itself. We have no writings about Jesus dating prior to half a century after the traditionally given date of his death, and the records that we do have aren’t exactly known for their internal consistency or agreement with each other. Looking at those records and saying, “Yes, these are a hodge-podge, but at least they all ultimately derive from a kernel of eyewitness observation” regarding Jesus is about as legitimate as saying the same thing about Hercules or Orpheus.

Ehrman sometimes comes close to acknowledging this himself, although perhaps not as close as some of his readers would like. He knows perfectly well that time and memory can fundamentally alter a story:

The gist of a message can change. Storytellers not only came up with their own ways of expressing traditions they passed on, they not only made up and altered details, and they not only embellished their accounts and added entire episodes. Sometimes their inventiveness went to the very heart of the matter so that what later became the gist of the tradition was not in fact an accurate memory, but one that had been generated as the stories were told and retold, hundreds of times, by hundreds of people, in hundreds of situations.

But in the case of Jesus, there’s no actual, textual reason to stop at the wholesale invention of “details” or “episodes,” and Ehrman’s methodology mostly refuses to countenance that fact. In a very real sense, there was no “Jesus before the Gospels,” hence the catchy, provocative nature of the book’s title. Ehrman does a very entertaining, very readable job of theorizing about the many ways memory and oral tradition could have warped the history of Jesus from what actual eyewitnesses saw – but he doesn’t really doubt that there were eyewitnesses, and that they saw something. It’s only details and episodes that are invented whole-cloth, not Jesus himself. It’s a curious self-imposed limitation: Ehrman very skillfully uses the tools of textual analysis and anthropology to peel back the layers of that have accreted over the story of Jesus … all layers but one. Maybe next time.