incarnate! Now where did they get such a notion, which non-LubavitcherJews,
needless to say, do not exactly welcome? If it sprang spontaneously from
messianic adoration, and overnight after the Rebbe's death, there would seem to
be no miracle required to explain how Jewish disciples soon ascribed incarnate
divinity to Jesus, right? Oh no! The cases are not similar at all, Boyd and Eddy
tell us (pp. 150-51). The Lubavitchers must have borrowed it from Christianity !
Yeah, that's really likely. Hasidic Jews borrowing myths from the religion they
hated most! If Jesus' disciples wouldn't have stooped to borrowing theology from
pagans, there is even less likelihood Hasidic Jews would have cribbed from
Christianity.
We are treated to another fine display of nimble apologetical pirouetting when
Boyd and Eddy discuss the question of ancient Palestinian Jewish literacy. They
make a good enough case for widespread literacy (pp. 239-51). I never doubted
it. Why are they interested? Because this fact enables them to speculate (or to
borrow the old speculation of Edgar J. Goodspeed) that the Gospels are not
dependent exclusively upon oral transmission. Matthew might have taken notes
(p. 252). One must infer that Boyd and Eddy would feel uncomfortable with
merely word-of-mouth connections between Jesus and the Gospels. No, written
sources would be a more secure link, so by all means let's posit them. (Myself, I
cannot help thinking of the scene in Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of
Christ when Jesus picks up such a sheaf of notes Matthew has been making, and
he rebukes him for writing lies about him! Just as George Washington's friend
and biographer admitted fabricating stories and sayings that he felt would
communicate "the real Washington" better than any known facts.)
But then it's one hundred eighty degrees around to exploit recent theories of
oral transmission of epics, poems, and sagas. Though we just heard how literate
first-century CE Jewish culture was, now we learn that it was instead a largely
oral culture, like the various African tribes, Balkan shepherd communities, and
Pacific islanders on whom the whole cottage industry of orality studies,
stemming from Milman Parry (The Making of Homeric Verse) and Albert Lord
(The Singer of Tales), base their theories. The point of trying to subsume the
Gospels under this rubric is to maximize the reliability of the underlying oral
tradition. Apologists like to make a great deal of the fact that local history and
lore may be transmitted faithfully for generations within such a closed
framework, under the watchful supervision of both lore-masters who sing or
chant the traditions and their audiences who are like children with a bedtime
story, refusing to countenance any significant variations. So far this sounds like a
folkloristic vindication of the old apologetics dictum that Gospel reliability is
guaranteed by the "retentive mind of the oriental." Except that closer
examination disappoints. The crown jewel of the "controlled local oral tradition"
approach, the work of Kenneth Bailey (Poet and Peasant, etc.), has been
thoroughly debunked by Theodore J. Weeden.1I Boyd and Eddy admit this, but
it doesn't matter to them, since they say it was a crummy example anyway (pp.
238 n. 1, 262 n. 84). They're just asking you to accept Bailey's conclusions,
regardless.
Based on these studies, they insist that oral balladeers were faithful
transmitters of detailed material (pp. 260-66). But then it turns out that these
performers cared little for specific wording, focusing only on the general gist.
Uh-oh. Then it turns out that the order of pericopes varies almost at random with
the whim of the balladeer (pp. 253-54). We are starting to get very close to form
criticism here, though Boyd and Eddy, who hate form criticism (for
understandable reasons) do not seem to see it. We must not, they urge, impose
twenty-first-century standards of accuracy onto ancient oral texts (pp. 256, 260).
Yes: this is exactly the point of the form critics! The only difference is another
parallel to intelligent design creationist arguments: Boyd and Eddy will allow
only differences in wording within a recognizable story or saying. They will not
countenance changes big enough to make one saying into a new one with a
different point, to retell one story so much that it becomes another (say, stilling
the storm becoming walking on the water in order to still the storm). This is
exactly like the creationist willingness to admit the occurrence of "micro-
evolution" within "kinds" of animals so long as one does not posit "macro-
evolution" from one "kind" to another. Boyd's and Eddy's fear of "macro-
evolution" in the Jesus tradition is the dread of having to admit that a saying or
story no longer truly represents what Jesus actually did or said. As they urge
critics to do, perhaps Eddy and Boyd ought to be a bit more critical of the
agendas underlying their scholarly methods.
They sneer at the form-critical axiom that particular forms in which the
sayings or stories meet us in any way reflect the Sitz-im-Leben of their use (p.
295). They fear, rightly, that to admit this would be halfway to admitting the
materials have been designed to serve their purpose and are thus tendentious
fictions. But then they do not mind at all followingJoanna Dewey and
Christopher Bryan in taking certain formal features as implying the public
performance of the Gospel of Mark for evangelistic purposes (p. 358). Isn't that
inference from formal features to Sitz-im-Leben? Maybe it's not so perverse an
approach after all.
Form critic Dennis E. Nineham long ago pointed out how the Gospel
pericopes, short and sweet and streamlined as they are, just do not read like
eyewitness testimony. For that we would expect the kind of "table talk" we get
in, say, the Acts of John: "Once I said to Jesus..., and he said to me..." Our
gospel pericopes sound like they have been rubbed smooth by the currents of
constant repetition. Boyd and Eddy are happy to point to ethnographic studies
that show even actual eyewitness recollections may, the first time out, be put into
traditional forms for transmission, verbal time capsules, and that in this manner
vivid details and distinctive features may be sacrificed from the very beginning
(pp. 274-75). Similarly, they aver, the dynamics of oral tradition dictate that what
is actually stated, preserved in explicit wording, presupposes an informational
background outsiders are unlikely to know, with the result that even good, on-
the-spot recollections may not sound like it (pp. 285-86). Well, that helps a lot!
Boyd and Eddy obviously imagine they have given themselves permission to
read the clipped and stereotyped mininarratives of the Gospels as eyewitness
testimony despite appearances. But all they have actually shown is that, even if
there should chance to be real eyewitness testimony in the Jesus tradition, we
can no longer recognize it as such! Formal considerations will have obliterated
any evidence of eyewitness origin.
Another case of transforming agnosticism into fideism concerns the Mythic
Hero Archetype to which the life of Jesus
in the Gospels conforms in its entirety,
with no incidental, "secular," or genuine biographical detail left over. Boyd and
Eddy point out the obvious: that sometimes known historical figures actually
live up to the archetype (p. 149). Of course: that is why Joseph Campbell and
others have made so much of it. The problem is that the more completely
people's life stories conform to the mythic-literary form, the less likely it
becomes that their stories are genuinely historical. At such a point they risk
becoming lost behind the stained glass curtain, unless they have left a trail of
historical "bread crumbs." Augustus Caesar did; Jesus did not.
It is especially ironic that Boyd's favorite example of a reallive archetypal
hero is Scot William Wallace, whose exploits came to the screen in the film
Braveheart. Boyd likes to make Wallace a real-life Jesus, implying that the
Gospel Jesus could have been just as real (p. 149). It does not occur to Boyd that
we actually have a great deal more historical evidence for Wallace, including
actual documents of the period, thus proving my point: like Augustus Caesar, but
unlike Jesus, we can independently confirm some historical facts about him from
more reliable, nonmythical information. We have no such information about
Jesus. All we have are the myths. And as every Wallace historian agrees, the
mythical narratives about Wallace, which come closest in form and content to
the Gospels, are often wildly inaccurate and invent a great deal, such that if we
didn't have any independent way to check their claims, we would have no idea
what to trust in them.12 That's exactly our situation for Jesus.
Boyd and Eddy are relieved at last not to have to trouble themselves with the
destructive intricacies of redaction criticism. Again, they defend the right of oral
singers and tradition-transmitters to vary details in the telling as they prefer, and
they do not see that this is no different from redaction criticism. They suggest
that some of the differences of which Hans Conzelmann (The Theology of St.
Luke) and Willi Marxsen (Mark the Evangelist) and Gunther Bornkamm (with
Hans Joachim Held and Gerhard Barth, Tradition and Interpretation in Matthew)
made so much are not changes made by writers at their desks, but rather the
slavish recording of whole oral performances in which the oral tridents had made
ad hoc variations (pp. 252-57). Uh, what's the difference? Why could you not
trace a redactional agenda in an oral performance (see especially p. 254)?
But Boyd and Eddy skip past that. Their main point is that oral tradents could
not and would not have expected their audience to notice tiny differences in
details. Lacking the opportunity of the modern TV viewer who can pause and
rewind even a live TV show to catch what was said a moment ago, the listener of
a live oral performance in the ancient world simply would not have been able to
keep up with and catalogue the sorts of changes redaction critics think they
discern when comparing Mark to Luke and Matthew, and so on. So far, this is a
point well taken. But it seems to prove too much: it implies that such oral-
performance variations could never have survived into written transcripts, since
who could have remembered them? I don't think this has occurred to Boyd and
Eddy. Their point is rather that all the tendential patterns of redaction
Conzelmann and company think they have found must be sheer illusion,
completely accidental. Slips of the balladeer's tongue. I find it difficult to credit
that anyone familiar with the work of the redaction critics can believe this. But I
find it quite easy to believe that apologists who do not want to know what the
redaction critics have to tell them would take the easy way out, embracing a
pious know-nothing-ism.
This is a prime example of what I mean when I charge that evangelical
apologists want to know less about the Bible, not more, to turn back the clock on
criticism, to reenter the Sunday School Toyland of fundamentalism. "It was long
ago and it was far away, and it was so much better than it is today."
So if we do not dismiss the findings of the redaction critics as so much
hallucination, we begin to realize that the "orality studies" approach is
inappropriate. We begin to realize that Boyd and Eddy are just shopping for a
paradigm congenial to apologetics. Here Heilsgeschichte has turned into
Bullgeschichte. If the Gospels are in practice so readily understood and
profitably studied as written works amenable to the methods of reading and
analyzing, then I think it is safe to forget about the politically correct "noble
savage" paradigm of African tribal lore-masters and Eskimo chanters. The
Gospels seem to be true literary works, so let's treat them that way. That is what
Burton L. Mack and Vernon K. Robinson are doing when they point out the
similarity of the Gospel pronouncement stories to the Hellenistic chreia so
common in GrecoRoman classrooms, where students demonstrated they
understood the gist of a Socrates or a Diogenes by fabricating a pronouncement
story appropriate to each man's reputation. I'm afraid that's bad news for
apologists, for it provides a natural paradigm accounting for the Gospel materials
independent of any access at all to supposed eyewitnesses.
Does that rule out any possible oral-traditional basis to the written Gospels?
No. I don't mean to discount that, just to point out that the possible parallels
Boyd and Eddy insist on are not the only ones, or even the best ones available.
They seem so sure that oral cultures would not allow for a mass fabrication of
traditional units that would serve only to legitimize this practice or that belief of
some faction of the community. But it was field studies of the Trobriand
Islanders that led Bronislaw Malinowski to formulate his categories of myths,
including legitimization myths.
Closer to home, there is the wellknown mass production of spurious tendential
hadith falsely ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad. The early guardians of hadith
felt it was their job to shepherd the growing tradition into the directions they
thought best by making up opinions and deeds of the Prophet. We do not know if
early Christian tradents engaged in such activities, but neither do we know that
they behaved like Serbian shepherds or African lore-masters! Given the choice,
the Islamic paradigm would seem a lot more likely, if only because it is closer to
home historically and religiously (and, given the contradictory messages of the
different Gospel Jesuses even within the canon, it seems directly confirmed in
the evidence). At any rate, the wholesale hadith-forging industry is at least as
attractive an option for understanding the developingJesus tradition. It is based
on a wellknown oral-traditional matrix and matches perfectly the model adopted
by Bultmann and the form critics. If oral tradition "really" worked as Boyd and
Eddy say it must, we cannot explain the phenomena of the hadith.
Likewise, this same thing applies to the Nag Hammadi Gospels! They, too,
claim to stem from eyewitnesses. They, too, offer us many sayings ascribed to
Jesus. If instead we admit they are historically spurio
us, we admit that it was
nothing for early Christians to ascribe their own best thoughts and revelations to
their Lord. How typically contrived and double-tongued for our apologists to
begin by quoting the old "not I but the Lord" text as the rule for all early
Christians as attesting the universal early Christian tendency to segregate
Christian intuitions from dominical sayings-and then to isolate the prophecies of
the Risen Christ through John of Patmos and his canonical book of Revelation as
some aberration unrepresentative of early Christians generally! For if the latter
were even possibly typical of early Christian practice, then Bultmann would be
justified in chalking up some Jesus-attributed sayings to Christian prophecy. And
then Pandora's box is opened.
Boyd and Eddy gleefully point out what so many other retrenchers before
them have: if the needs of the church dictated what Jesus would be made
retroactively to say, why do we not find so many of the "hot" issues of early
Christianity discussed by Jesus (p. 305)? Why, for instance, was he not made to
mouth someone's opinion on the issue of Gentile conversion and circumcision?
But he was: that must be the point of Mark 7:14-19, where we find a rationalist
repudiation of the idea that nonkosher food renders one unclean. That must be
the point of Thomas 53: "His disciples say to him, `Is circumcision worthwhile
or not?' He says to them, `If it were, men would be born that way automatically.
But the true circumcision in spirit has become completely worthwhile."' Would
not Jesus be made to address the issue at stake in the Cornelius story of Acts 10-
11, missionaries eating Gentile food? But he does address it, in Luke 10:7, where
the seventy, in contrast to the twelve (in other words, future missionaries to the
Gentiles), are told to "eat and drink what they set before you." The Gentile
Mission as a whole? What do you think the Great Commissions, not to mention
the distance-healings of the children of Gentiles, are all about? Table fellowship
with Gentiles, as in Antioch? That's the point of Jesus being shown to be eating
with "sinners." Eating meat offered previously to idols? Someone must have
realized thatJesus could not plausibly be pictured addressing this in Jewish
Palestine, so they left this one in the form of a post-Easter prophecy (Revelation
2:20), a concern for verisimilitude not often observed. The role of women in the
community? That is the point of Luke 10:38-42, where, depending on how one
understands it, the issue is either women serving the Eucharist (Martha) or
women embracing the stipended, celibate life as "widows" and "virgins" (Mary).
Speaking in tongues? Matthew 6:7 ("when you pray, do not say `batta' as the
heathen do") is against it; the late Mark 16:17 ("they will speak with new
tongues") is for it.
By contrast, Boyd and Eddy utterly fail to meet the challenge of G. A. Wells:
if Paul had our fund of Jesus sayings available in oral tradition, why does he not
settle issues at once with a dominical saying, for example, on payment of taxes
to Caesar, on celibacy, on fasting? And when Boyd and Eddy follow James
Dunn and others in the bluff that all the parallels between epistolary maxims and
Gospel sayings are unattributed allusions to the Gospels by the Epistle writers, it
is just pathetic. If the point is to win obedience to the teaching of Jesus, who in
his right mind would not pull rank by explicitly quoting from the words of Jesus
himself?
Boyd and Eddy continue their march into yesteryear with an appeal to take
with renewed seriousness Papias's authorial ascriptions of the Gospels of
Matthew and Mark (pp. 290-91). He was in a good position to get the facts from
the eyewitness apostles, was he not? Well, then, I ask, must we also accept what
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