[This is the second installment of a four-part series of articles written by Tom Tozer that reviews Bart Ehrman’s book Jesus Before the Gospels.]
See also:
buy Latuda without prescription Tom’s review, Part 1
Porto Calvo Chapter 3 is about eyewitness testimony, and it’s good that we’re finally going to get to that. I couldn’t resist a sneak peek though. In the first couple of pages Ehrman tells the story of a staged event to test eyewitness accuracy. A teacher was giving a lecture when two students stood up and started to argue, the teacher intervened, and a gun went off. Then the teacher explained it was all for show. Over the next few weeks, they had people write down what happened. There were errors. (So why the shock about discrepancies in the Gospels?)
It’s the von Liszt experiment which you can look up. I didn’t find a description of what the people got right and what they got wrong, but I bet they all correctly described the basics, a fight, intervention, and a gunshot. Now why would that be and what kind of event in the Gospels might resemble that?
Chapter 3 begins with the von Liszt experiment which I already mentioned. It doesn’t get much better. Ehrman mentions some other “memory studies,” although I’m not entirely sure that’s what they amount to. One, for instance, involved a plane crash into a building in the 1990s, before phone video and other ubiquitous handheld video was available. There was no film of the crash. Nevertheless, weeks after the crash, someone asked hundreds of people whether they had seen video of the plane crashing into the building. A significant percentage said yes. Ehrman thinks this is a big deal, but I fail to see how. No one doubts that the plane crashed into the building. The only issue this might expose is whether people who claim to witness an event actually were direct witnesses. However, there is nothing here to suggest they were inventing events.
Next he discussed something about alien abductions, which Ehrman claims involve “many” people. He mentions the number 100. That doesn’t sound like many in a nation of 300 million. That “study” does seem to go more directly to the issue of eyewitness credibility, and it is most interesting for the fact that no such events were reported prior to movies and television shows about aliens. In other words, the “memories” had to be socially plausible before they started occurring. People didn’t invent stories of experiencing aliens until the existence of aliens had been suggested to them. That’s pretty interesting. But I think it actually cuts the other way for Ehrman’s thesis. The question, as applied to Jesus, is this: Were resurrections of crucified Messiahs ever socially acceptable? Was this a widespread idea that would have created the suggestion in the disciples, like TV shows created the suggestion in the abductees? For this alien abduction study to tell us much about Jesus, Ehrman would have to offer evidence that resurrected-Messiah stories were widespread prior to Jesus’ time so as to create the suggestion in the apostles. Of course, he doesn’t offer such evidence.
Ehrman only glancingly deals with Bauckham’s ‘Jesus and the Eyewitnesses’. He really deals with none of Bauckham’s research, but just asks a lot of “oh really?” questions, as if those were responses. What “response” he does give is utter speculation stated as though it were known fact- who the Gospel writers were (not Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, clearly!), what their sources were (not eyewitnesses! No sir!), none of which Ehrman can possibly know. In fact, he concedes, on page 103, that “some of the basics about Jesus” were well known, especially the crucifixion and resurrection, in the early church as made plain by Paul’s letters. Seems to me those are the most important facts of all about Jesus. The lack of stories about Jesus’ life in Paul’s letters is a non-event, I think. Paul did not need to retell stories that were well known, and the purpose of his letters were more along the lines of encouraging church leaders and church governance. He was not writing homilies about one of Jesus’ parables or healings.
Several items in the chapter stand out.
First, Ehrman attacks Papias’ credibility. Papias states that Mark wrote Mark as the memoirs of Peter. Ehrman cannot allow this to stand because it destroys his entire hypothesis. If the Gospels record eyewitness accounts, 95 percent of Ehrman’s book is irrelevant. But the way he attacks Papias is utterly ineffective. Ehrman notes that Papias records a saying of Jesus that is not recorded in any of the Gospels. It goes something like this: The days will come when a vine has ten thousand boughs, and each bough ten thousand branches, and each branch ten thousand clusters, and each cluster ten thousand grapes, and each grape will cry out to bless the Lord. Ehrman seems bemused by this. “Really? Jesus taught that?” he asks mockingly.
Uh, yeah, I don’t know why Jesus would not have taught that. That parable – which I’d never heard before – works perfectly with the parable of the mustard seed becoming the bush that takes over the field. Jesus could have meant it as a description of the church in 100, 1000 or 2000 years later and he was using it to encourage the disciples. Who knows? But there’s nothing weird about the parable at all. It may well be genuine. It is not inconsistent with anything Jesus said. But Ehrman thinks it “sounds weird” and so must be false, I guess.
The second thing that stands out is how Ehrman picks a Lukan introduction to make it seem as though Luke did no personal investigation of the facts. There are translations of Luke 1:1-3 which state that Luke investigated, and some which state that he “followed” the facts. The word used in Luke 1:3 is parēkolouthēkoti, a combination of “para” which one Biblehub’s lexicon defines as “be- side, or in the presence of” and akoloutheó, defined as “accompany, attend or follow.”
Seems to me “investigation” is closer than mere “following” and the word definitely conveys personal presence of the author in the following.” But Ehrman can’t have Luke investigating anything, and so, unsurprisingly, chooses the latter translation. It isn’t even tricky.
Next, Ehrman’s response to the fact that all four Gospels had names when Irenaeus was writing (and another list, from the same time, found hundreds of miles away) is to fabricate a scenario where someone writes a book for his church from stories they tell there, and then that gets passed around, and so on. Ehrman writes, “there was no name attached to the books” [what books?] “The author was writing an account based on what he heard.” [what author? What did he hear? From whom?] “Within months most of the people reading the book would not know its author” and “no one cared who the author was” and “there was no discussion of the matter for many many decades.” Etc. etc. etc. Evidence?
The most egregious part of the chapter is in the last four pages. Ehrman backs his way into agreeing that names of the Gospel authors and their association with each book makes sense. (pp. 125- 128).
But he does so by assuming that later name-suppliers combed through the books for clues about what names to invent for them. For instance, he admits it makes sense that Matthew is called Matthew because it contains the call of Matthew, and seems the “most Jewish” of the books. He claims that the Gospel of John had to be named John because, well, it couldn’t be named for Peter because Peter is named in it alongside the beloved disciple who claims authorship at the end.
He says Luke makes sense for Luke because it appears to be written by Paul’s traveling companion, who appears to be a gentile, and since Paul mentions his companion the gentile Luke in a letter, that name fits. Finally, Ehrman says Mark makes sense to be named for Mark, because since the time of Papias everyone thought Mark wrote down Peter’s memoirs, and they couldn’t name it Peter because there already was an heretical Gospel of Peter, so they adopted the name Mark for it since Mark was already associated with Peter through Papias.
Hilariously enough, all of that actually explains exactly why the traditional authorship makes sense. But you can either assume the names make sense because of the historical data, or you can assume that a cabal of later editors conspired in a fascinatingly byzantine fashion to make up names because it matched that historical data. I guess you’ve got to do the latter when you’re Ehrman and you’re trying to sell books. But the former seems simpler.
Chapter 4 is titled “Distorted memories and the death of Jesus.” Some of this chapter just makes no sense. Ehrman talks about people who can memorize hundreds of cards or numbers, and then says “we all forget stuff.” Another, someone named Ebbinghaus, used himself as the sole subject, and made up hundreds of nonsense syllables and memorized them. He showed that he – and by extrapolation others I guess – tended to do most of his forgetting right away, with memory stabilizing at about six months.
In other words, what you remember at about six months after an event stays stable. Next is another “breakthrough” from 1932 by Bartlett, who shows that memories are stored in multiple places in the brain, and then reconstructed when we recall an event. If we do not have data for part of a memory, the brain will fill in the missing data with “typical” data. It seems to me that Bartlett helps explain why people have slightly different recall of events and there can be discrepancies between eyewitness accounts.
Person A was not paying attention to the color of the table cloth, so his mind filled in “white” for that detail. Person B noticed the table cloth was red, but wasn’t drinking the wine that night and so has no data for that and recalls only water on the table. This seems to support, not undermine, the nature of the Gospels as eyewitness accounts.
From Bartlett, Ehrman floats over to the telephone game. Basically, A was a witness. He tells B. B forgets some of what A said and fills in with “typical” data. He tells C. C forgets some, fills in, and tells D, and so on. But, yet again, all of this is irrelevant if A talks to the person taking down the events and writing, oh, say, a Gospel. Then the only filling in is whatever A’s mind did. So really we’re back to the original question: were the Gospels sourced in eyewitness accounts? If so, all of this telephone game stuff is irrelevant.
Next Ehrman talks about “flashbulb” memories. These are memories of unusual or important events that leave a vivid impression. In one study, 44 students were asked to take a quiz multiple times after the Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986. They misremembered where they were when they heard about it, who they heard from, and some didn’t recall taking the prior quizzes. What’s weird about drawing conclusions from this is that none of the things they misremembered was the actual unusual event at issue.
Now if some of them thought the Challenger did not explode, or that something else had happened, that would seem to undermine the “flashbulb” memory idea. But none of them failed to remember the actual unusual event. Similarly (just spit-balling this) we might find that someone vividly remembered seeing a resurrected man, but didn’t recall everyone who went with them to a tomb, say.
Next Ehrman talks about “gist memories,” which he agrees can be reliable. However, I can see now why someone from his fundamentalist background might have been deeply disturbed by finding out that the Gospels are not word-for-word transcripts of events, but instead are human documents about human events. But even if the Gospels can only be said (and I don’t think this is correct, but arguendo) only to record “the gist” of Jesus’ life, what is “the gist” of a resurrected man? Seems to me, if that gist is correct, the details are somewhat less important.
Anyway, to attack gist memories, Ehrman misrepresents a paper by Neisser about John Dean, a Watergate witness who testified at length before Congress about the Nixon Watergate matter. Ehrman asserts that Dean’s failed memory for specific conversations shows how poor gist memory can be. Neisser, at the conclusion of his paper, says the opposite. “[Dean] is not remembering the “gist” of a single episode by itself, but the common characteristics of a whole series of events. … Nixon hoped that the transcripts would undermine Dean’s testimony by showing that it had been wrong. They did not have this effect because he was wrong only in terms of isolated episodes.
Episodes are not the only kinds of facts. Except where the significance of his own role was at stake, Dean was right about what had really been going on at the White House. What he later told the Senators was fairly close to the mark: his mind was not a tape recorder, but it certainly received the message that was being given.”
Likewise, disciples who had been with Jesus for an extended period may not have been tape recorders, but they could “certainly [have] received the message that was being given.”
Having misrepresented Neisser, Ehrman now describes his “method” for assessing the evidence about the trial and death of Jesus. It is this:
- 1) If there are contradictions between two stories, one must be false.
- 2) If an account includes events “that are simply implausible” or “utterly beyond what seems likely” then it must be a distorted memory (i.e.false).
Neither of those propositions is true. As we’ve seen from this very book, people fill in details about things they were not paying attention to, based on “typical” events. That does not mean that the overall story they tell is false, but only that some of the details may be incorrect. Nor is it the case that nothing “implausible” ever happens. What in the world would anyone ever write about or tell stories about if nothing “beyond what seems likely” ever happened? The implausibility of an event can’t, by that fact alone, demonstrate that the event did not occur.
Given this, let’s look briefly at one aspect of the death of Jesus that Ehrman examines. He first looks at the trial before Pilate. He sets out a long list of things the Gospels agree about, which is helpful, and he seems, I think, to agree that these things probably took place. He has problems with the accounts though, because:
- Matthew adds facts that Mark did not have (which doesn’t contradict anything nor seem unusual if Matthew also had other eyewitness sources);
- Luke adds the detail of sending Jesus to Herod (which is not a contradiction and is not implausible);
- John places the trial on the morning of the Passover meal.
Ehrman has a valid point about the Gospel of John. There are several “timing” issues with John, that seem to a lot of people – I’ve read this elsewhere – to focus on showing Jesus as the slain lamb of the Passover. So John’s placement of the trial on the morning of the meal, when the sacrifice and meal would be made later, makes sense from a story telling point of view.
Recalling that ancient historians were more concerned with conveying the character of their subjects than with detailing minutia, this doesn’t seem to undermine the truth of the matter that Jesus was tried before Pilate, that Pilate found him innocent, but allowed his crucifixion anyway, and that Jesus died on the cross. Those are the events that matter. Ehrman then uses his “method” to examine the cleansing of the temple, the entry into Jerusalem, the tearing of the curtain to the holy of holies, and such, none of which seems very interesting.
Next: Tom’s review, Part 3
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