Hi Blueblades. I havn't read Ehrman but you can see from the reviews of his book on Amazon.com that he is widely accused of exaggerating and overstating his case. I believe some scholars have formally responded to his book and if you search on the internet you'll no doubt find some counter-arguments.
Are the gospels just midrash?
by yadda yadda 2 25 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Leolaia
This will probably be the last post I will give on this subject (at least for while) at the depth and nuance I think the subject needs, as I simply lack the time to do so, and you have indeed provided a lot of things in your previous post that I would like to respond to. Unfortunately, my response here will be necessarily incomplete. I would first like to acknowledge that we have different philosophical positions that we are starting from, and thus I don't think we are going to convince each other -- although of course the dialogue and discussion is what is valuable for us both. In my first post I wanted to disentangle the issue of historicity from an evaluation of the compositional methods of a text; while the latter may supply some evidence relevant to the former, I don't believe it is methodologically sound to preclude particular conclusions on the latter simply on the basis of an a priori judgment of the former (precisely because the literary character of a text may furnish evidence for or against its historicity). Although strictly speaking you have not made any conclusions on the matter, your argument against the possibility of substantive midrashic influence (that is, midrashic activity helping to shape a text's structure and content) on certain gospel narratives mainly consists of claims bearing on the presumed historical reliability of the gospels.
More important however is your statement on the arrogance of closing "our minds to the possibility that supernatural, miraculous events may occurred in first century Palestine", and your comparison of this attitude to skepticism towards modern-day paranormal phenomena like ouija boards, ghosts, and UFOs. I do not believe this fairly represents the position I have taken in this thread nor the method of skeptical inquiry in historical reconstruction. The reference to closed minds implies an a priori denial of the possibility that a given claim is true. That simply is not the case. I freely admit the possibility that any of these things could be true. That is different from investigating and assessing on the basis of available evidence the probability that a claim is true and the extent to which the claim is supported, whether involving the scientific method or other rational approaches that lead to provisional conclusions. The lottery illustrates the difference between the stance you describe and the one I subscribe to. It is fair to determine in any given case that it is extremely improbable that a particular entrant will in fact win the drawing. That is the conclusion that is best supported by the evidence in every case. This stance is different from denying any possibility that a person can be a winner. For there is a winner every time there is a drawing. It is fallacious to deny this possibility wholesale (and that is why, btw, I consider myself an agnostic and not an atheist), but the burden of proof is certainly on the person who believes that this eventuality is not improbable or that it is guaranteed. That is essentially what a faith position involves. It commits to a claim being true, even extraordinary claims that otherwise would be regarded as unlikely or highly improbable. Inductive generalizations are also beliefs but they attempt to meet the burden of proof; the belief that no pink and purple polka-dotted zebras exist is an unprovable and provisional conclusion (which would be revised if such an animal turns up), but it is a reasonable inference since (in probabilistic terms) the likelihood of the contrary claim being true is exceedingly low, such that non-existence is judged as far more probable than existence. That is essentially what is involved in assessing historicity, i.e. making judgments on the likelihood that (and the extent to which) a given historical claim represents actual events. That applies across the board to literary sources. I do not believe in exempting biblical claims from the same kind of critical and skeptical examination that would be applied to any other historical claim. It is my general experience that virgins don't give birth asexually and people don't rise from the dead; that is a generalization much like the generalization that polka-dotted zebas don't exist. There could well be exceptions. But before I consider this possibility at all likely, or even probable in a given case, the burden of proof for such an extraordinary claim should be met. A faith position doesn't have such a burden of proof and affirms that in spite of its inherent improbability the given claim is true (or probably true). There are many things which are possible but not likely. I don't live in fear that a plane will crash into my house tomorrow, because this is such a remote possibility. That doesn't mean that it couldn't happen (and things like that do happen). But I am skeptical that it will happen, as I must see compelling evidence indicating this before I believe. In the case of historical claims, the evidence is usually much more ambiguous and incomplete than in the case of phenomena that can be directly studied and observed. That gives much more latitude to the possibility that improbable claims may be true, but it equally degrades the opportunity for the claim to meet the burden of proof (as I mentioned a few posts back about having an independent frame of reference such as experiencing the life of Jesus of Nazareth firsthand). But in historical inquiry, burdens of proof are basically beside the point -- the object is to discover the most economical explanation for the available evidence.
I have tried in this thread to bring out the uncertainty involved in assessing the historicity of the stories of Jesus and the subjectivity evident in reconstructions of the historical Jesus. I have not claimed that the gospel narratives are "wholesale" fiction; while this is possible I find it unlikely, just as I find the position that the gospel narratives are 100% historical (or inerrant) also unlikely. I have tried to take a moderating position between these two extremes -- that it is highly likely that there is some non-historical content in the gospels derived from midrashic activity (note that I have tried to avoid the word "fiction", as it is loaded with presuppositions about genre and intentionality). Just how much I don't know although I suspect it was not insignificant; as I pointed out, it is certainly probable that some midrashic appropriation of OT content was done on the basis of "history prophesied". But I do not find it probable that the use of OT intertexts played no role whatsoever in materially shaping the narrative when there are reasons to suspect precisely this. And I should mention also that meditation on scripture is far from the only possible factor influencing the form and content of the narratives.
The objections you raise are imho rather weak grounds for ruling out the possibility of non-historical content in the gospels. They rest on a particular concept of early Christian society which considers the existence of such content as only possible if it results from subterfuge, an intent to deceive, even a conspiracy. I couldn't disagree more....this in my opinion simplifies the complexity of the overall situation. There are many assumptions and claims that I find questionable....that the writing of historiography and biography did not involve imaginative composition, that the authorial intent to give a true account excluded certain creative compositional methods, that the existence of witnesses would have prevented the writing of content that is non-historical, that eyewitness testimony cannot be at variance from history, that there wasn't enough time for non-historical stories to arise in the Christian community if eyewitnesses were still alive, etc. In his exhaustive study of Hellenistic bioi, Klaus Berger has shown that ancient biography (a genre he placed the gospels within) contained a good portion of creative "fiction" (Aufsteig und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, 1984); Richard Burridge also has written at length about the cultural context and the way biographers used what would today be considered "fiction" to give true portraits of their subjects (What Are the Gospels?, 2004). The "fictional" creativity in bioi was intermediate between that of historiography and that of the encomium or novel. What set the gospels apart from other bioi however is their intensive intertextual use of literature (e.g. the OT) that was only secondarily interpreted to describe the life of the biographical subject -- in ch. 11-16 of Mark alone there are more than 57 quotations and 160 allusions to scripture. This suggests that, quite unlike standard biographies, the gospels used non-biographical sources as primary source material about their subject. The gospel writers would have certainly regarded scripture as a true witness to Jesus, perhaps even superior to human witnesses (cf. John 5:31-39, 5:45-27, 12:41, 1 John 5:9). If that is the case, I see no reason why the authors should have viewed themselves as writing "fiction" or fabricating stories if they viewed the prophetic word as a witness to Jesus' life which may be consulted alongside other sources -- whether to augment, clarify, or even correct what the human witnesses say -- and if they regarded their reading of scripture as guided by the same Holy Spirit involved in its writing. It is worth remembering that midrash itself was not construed as a fictional activity but rather as a process to discern the true meaning of scripture; haggadaic readings were thought to lie beneath the surface of the text. Since fidelity to scripture was a measure of the truth of a matter, stories that brought out the scriptural truth of Jesus would not necessarily have been dismissed like pagan fables and myths (which were rejected precisely because they were contrary to scripture) if they were upbuilding and revealed aspects of his character and teaching that were apostolic, "orthodox", or considered true.
Then there is the matter of the memory of eyewitnesses. Bauckham has convincingly illustrated the fundamental flaw of form criticism in omitting actual witnesses and presuming only anonymous tradents, but there is a big difference between (presumed) witness testimony and historical accuracy. It hardly needs to be said that memory is a reconstruction and not a record -- it tends to blur recollections, fill in gaps with pre-existing schemas and memories of other people, it is biased by social environment, and it changes over time and with retelling. Psychologists recognize that witnesses extract from their perceptions an interpretation that is meaningful to their own beliefs and needs and this transformation from raw perception to interpretation is automatic and regardless of conscious effort (so people trust their memories regardless of whether they are accurate). It has been observed from study that witness narratives transform each time they are retold, recollections of unrelated events may be conflated together, and memories commonly incorporate information learned after the event. A good article about this is "Illusions of Memory" by Elizabeth Loftus (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1998), which points particularly to group settings where people come together to share their memories about a common experience as an environment when imaginative transformations of memory unintentionally occur; Loftus points out that this should not be surprising since "perceiving a stimulus and imagining a stimulus appear to involve similar brain mechanisms. That imagination activities can alter autobiography reveals something important about the flimsy curtain that separates imagination from memory" (p. 68). In experimental studies, people were easily induced to remember events that never occurred, and false memory is a well-known phenomenon occurring in social contexts where visualization and focusing of memory are prominent (such as therapy sessions, witness interviewing, support group meetings, etc.), and especially if the memory has important social value and serves to advance a common narrative. Your mention of UFOs reminds me of the recent studies on the development of the Roswell UFO crash legend (such as B. Saler, C. A. Ziegler, and C. B. Moore's UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth, 1997), in which the content of witness testimony changed dramatically over the decades in response to the overarching narrative taking shape in popular culture. I can think of similar examples of witnesses to the JFK assassination or to the events of 9/11 changing their stories to better fit with certain popular narratives that arose after the event. On how false memories could historicize things that never occurred, I recommend Peter Lamont's The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History (2005). One analytic study of memory along these lines is Believed-in Imaginings: The Narrative Construction of Reality (APA, 1998). I am not saying necessarily that these factors definitely played a role in the growth of oral tradition about Jesus, but I believe that there is a very strong possiblity of this -- enough of one that dismisses the idle objection that there would have had to have been a "conspiracy" if witnesses told stories that did not accurately reflect history. What we have in the gospels is the endpoint (or rather, an endpoint) of a long process of people telling and retelling their stories in group settings in a context of a highly focused agenda and evangelical purpose, where one person's memory could influence another's, where some people's memories were more authoritative and important than those of others, where memories that better supported the common theme could be valued more than others out of harmony with it, and especially where the scriptures had such an crucial role in the telling of the story of Jesus. Acts portrays Peter even before Pentacost interpreting recent events in light of the scriptures. How can you be so sure that it had no influence over the telling of stories? It is reasonable to suspect that witnesses were subject to its influence as much -- if not more -- than the influence of other witnesses. In a manner rather similar to "recovered" memories today, a witness could have had his or his memories tripped by reading a passage in the Psalms and recall, "Oh yes, I remember that now," even if that particular detail was not part of their original recollection of the event. In other words, the process of exegetical interpretation probably did not start with the gospel writers. Although they gave the exegetical traditions their final form by directly importing the language and thought from OT texts, they probably in many cases were induced to do so because their own witnesses and tradents preceded them in applying these scriptures to their own memories and traditions. Then there was the problem of witnesses who were really not witnesses at all, but who had a good story to tell. If their story supported the overall community narrative and theology about Jesus, and had didactic value that advanced the gospel, I doubt that such stories would have been necessarily flagged as suspect. Again, I do not wish to be misread as suggesting that the whole shebang necessarily was invented, as that is just as unreasonable as insisting that the gospels must be 100% accurate. I am arguing that there is plenty room for non-historical content -- especially in areas where there was little opportunity for witness testimony, where it would have been hard to identify exaggerations or false memories of witnesses if they had the "ring of truth", and where the author's creativity may have filled in gaps or harmonizing the different traditions of different witnesses. It also should not be forgotten that there was an ideological aim in the gospels to present Jesus as the singular Son of God who stands apart from other miracle workers, so writers likely had a preference for stories of a more remarkable character that emphasized this. It is also worth comparing this situation with contemporary reporting of the news of the bizarre and unusual. There is a lot that is reported in the world, especially by the credulous writers, that relate incredible miracles and wonders every bit as remarkable and wonderful as what is described in the NT. There very well may be genuine unusual, paranormal, unexplained things in the world. But very often these sensational reports are not accurate and have normal, non-paranormal explanations when the facts are closely examined. So how people interpret what they experience in the first place may differ considerably from what actually is going on. Moreover, a great many of the deeds attributed to Jesus are not much different from what was reported of other Mediterreanean miracle workers at the time, so the probability that Jesus had a career of healing the sick and expelling demons (as supposed by most scholars on the "historical Jesus") is not that remarkable comparatively. The emperor Vespasian was said to have healed a blind man in Alexandria by spitting into his eyes (compare Mark 7:33), as well as healing a man with a withered hand by touching it (cf. Mark 3:1-5, 5:25-34), as reported by Suetonius (Vespasian 8.7), Dio Cassius (Roman History 65.8), and Tacitus (Historia 4.81), the latter citing the reports of "eyewitnesses". There are many miraculous stories about the second-century AD rabbis in the Mishnah (completed c. AD 200), written within the lifetime of witnesses of the fourth, third, and possibly the second generation of the tannaim: (1) R Eliezer and R Aqiba b Joseph instantly filling a field with cucumbers and then gathering them all together with a single command (b. Sandedrin 68a; cf. m. Sanhedrin 7.11, y. Sanhedrin 7; 25d), (2) R Eliezer tearing a tree out of its place a hundred cubits by a single command and making water flow backwards (b. Bava Metzia 59b, y. Kil'ayim 3,1; 81c-d), (3) R Gamaliel II calming a storm at sea with a prayer (b. Bava Metzia 59b; cf. Mark 4:35-51), (4) R Joshua b Hananiah being challenged by Emperor Hadrian to prove to him the power of a lion, and after praying a lion roared and all the pregnant woman in Rome miscarried and the walls of Rome fell (b. Hullin 59b), (5) R Simeon b Yohai, who was "experienced in miracles," exorcizing a demon from the Emperor's daughter (b. Me'ilah 17a, b), (6) R Judah h Nasi healing the dumb sons of R Yohanan b Gudgada by prayer (b. Hagigah 3a), (7) R Pinhas finding a lost pearl from a Saracean king swallowed inside a mouse who coughed it up (y. Demai 1; 22a; cf. Matthew 17:27), (8) Yosef Moqir Shabbat finding a lost jewel in a fish's mouth (b. Shabbat 119a; cf. Matthew 17:27), and even (9) R. Judah h Nasi raising the slave in the imperial household from the dead (b. 'Avodah Zarah 10b; cf. Leviticus Rabba 10.4). In addition to their miraculous nature, these stories give highly improbable representations of historical reality; there is no evidence that the walls of Rome fell in the reign of Hadrian, or that all the pregnant women of Rome miscarried at the same time, or that Emperor Septimius Severus or his son Caracalla witnessed a resurrection. And since these are best regarded as legends that circulated in the lifetime of potential witnesses of the Tannaim, the notion that legends can only develop later on is not true....as we already saw in the case of the Roswell legend which blossomed in no small part thanks to the input of witnesses. And it is possible that on account of the parallels of some stories attributed to Jesus, there was a stock of such stories that circulated and could be attributed to different individuals. In fact, b. Berakot 5b preserves three different versions of the same healing story -- applied to three different people! (i.e. R Hiyya b Abba, R Yohanan, and R Eliezer). And in the case of the gospel nativity stories, there certainly was a lot of time depth for storytelling to do its work (some 80-90 years, although it may be more for Luke if this gospel was dependent on Matthew and Josephus as some argue), and there hardly were any witnesses to a wilderness temptation as well. The stories of both show heavy use of OT materials, down to phraseology and narrative plotting.
I am afraid that's all I have time to say for a while....I hope to revisit this thread again to add further comments when I have an opportunity. I am sure I did not address all your points and questions, and again I hasten to add that a lot of these points I haven't quite reduced to writing before so I am not sure if I have expressed my opinions as well as I might if I had more time to think them through more. As far as book recommendations are concerned, I would also have to give that more thought -- as a lot of the examples I have looked at come more from stand-alone articles and commentaries than single tomes devoted to the subject of NT interpretation of scripture. Koester's Ancient Christian Gospels is an excellent read and covers a lot of basic ground but I disagree with a lot of his views as well. The same goes with Crossan. His The Cross That Spoke gives the most detailed analysis of the passion narrative I have yet seen, but it is also dated and I question a lot of his views as well. I like Dale Allison's work a lot -- his The Intertextual Jesus gives a good analysis of the temptation narrative but most of his book is devoted to the sayings and parabolic material (which unfortunately is wedded to the Q theory as well). I side more with Allison than Crossan in viewing the historical Jesus as more likely apocalyptic than not. Davies & Allison's commentary on Matthew is probably indispensible to me in seeing how the gospel uses its OT sources. Of course, I am sure Allison's views are quite different from my own! I am sure there are a lot of journal articles that I have read that also have contributed to my opinion on the matter -- I would have to check my archive to find some examples. And I definitely will have to talk about Papias another time since that is a whole subject in itself. I hope the board will still be around though by then.
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Midget-Sasquatch
I'm so relieved that Simon will be keeping all the posts archived and accesible. This is great material and very much appreciated.
For those of you who are interested in this sort of thing, there's going to be a conference soon called "The Jesus Project". CSER has a web page up for this:
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/amherst/events/sources_of_the_jesus_tradition_an_inquiry/
edit: link is hopefully clickable now.
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yadda yadda 2
Thanks Leolaia. Much food for thought there and great points. I'll try and get some sort of decent response cobbled together before too long (with my limited resources and reading on the subject). I appreciate you wish to conclude on the subject though but I hope not :-).
I will just say at this juncture that while you make some very valid points about the failings of eyewitness testimony and memory, its important to take into account the latest research on ancient orality and group memory. British heavyweight James D G Dunn strongly argues in favour of the latest model, which NT Scholar R T France sums up here: "...the phenomena of informal tradition in a Middle Eastern peasant culture /20/. Here, while the formal controls of rabbinic tradition are lacking, and in some types of oral material a considerable degree of latitude may be allowed in the telling of a story, the main structure and key phrases, sayings, etc. are fixed by community memory to the extent that however often a story may be told in different circles with varying detail or coloring, it will still remain in all essentials the same story, with the same punchline etc., as when it started. Other material in such a culture will have a more unvarying form, where the exact words matter, as in proverbs or poems. This mixture, it is suggested, is closer to the phenomena of the gospels than either of the previously considered approaches, and encourages a strong confidence in the essential reliability of the gospels while allowing for a considerable variation in detail which gives full play to the individual personality and views of each gospel writer."http://www.leaderu.com/truth/1truth21.html
This research has arguably rendered the old Bultmann school of form criticism, which alleged the gospels had more to do with the writers literacy skills and theological agenda than anything else, and which has dominated 20th century scholarship, for all intents and purposes obsolete.
More later and thanks Midget-sasquatch.
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yadda yadda 2
Re-reading this thread now nearly 6 years later, I am amazed at what Leolaia wrote. You can see I was still a Christian apologist back then but Leolaia totally refuted me and without getting proper credit for it. I now agree with everything she wrote.
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cofty
Marking
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Phizzy
Leolaia opened my eyes, and led me to educate myself. As a totally ignorant JW, despite 58 years of their wonderful "education" for the most "thinkingest" of people, I was ashamed of my inadequacy, and worked to rectify it. Before this thread, I had never heard of Midrash.
It put a whole new spin on the writer of Timothy's words about "all these things written for our instruction".
Before reading many others of her posts and threads, I had no idea about how the Bible was structured, and the many influences upon it, or the many genres within it.
I knew I was in the presence of a great mind when I read her posts.
I hope she is doing well, and maybe will return here someday. Even if she never finds the time, or interest, so to do, her contribution here is literally priceless, one cannot put a value on it that would do it justice.
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KateWild
Yadda,
Thanks for resurrecting this thread, to show us how your thinking changed over a few years. I have always just believed the midrash was a narrative explaination of Hebrew texts from the old testiment, it never occurred to me that ones could think the gospels were midrash also. Interesting thread thanks
Kate xx
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cantleave
Leolaia is beyond doubt a true scholar.
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galaxie
Leolaia certainly knows her stuff.Yadda eventually conceded the point but where does that take us?
These ' type ' of studies interesting as they are in terms of biblical, theological, historical study only serve for these purposes.
Do the conclusions actually have a bearing on our contemporary lives? If so how?
Are these subjects offered as a means of understanding ourselves, or as conduit for enlightenment.
If so I personally fail to see it
I think I'll just see it as an interesting subject and live my life without the complexities of ancient irrelevant (apart from historical study)
Texts.