Oral Tradition in the New Testament

If I had come to the presentation this past Thursday when I was a student, I think I would have been looking for that one "silver bullet"--the irrefutable piece of evidence or idea that would convince everyone beyond a shadow of a doubt that the New Testament doc's were reliable.

Of course, that doesn't exist. That's why we have these conversations.

But there was a pretty compelling piece that Timothy Paul Jones presented last Thursday that I thought I'd pass along. In essence much of the conversation comes down to this question: can we trust that the oral tradition that was passed along about Jesus for many years before things were written down?

One issue that is regularly raised among New Testament critics is that the gospels circulated for many years before there were names attached to them. Then (the charge goes) in the second century in order to gain credibility and authority, they were randomly assigned names that were affiliated with people who had credibility and authority.

Dr. Jones countered that argument with a couple of important challenges. First, if you were going to start randomly assigning authors to the gospels, you'd pick more compelling and authoritative figures than Mark, Luke and Matthew. They're mostly bit-characters in the Biblical story. Peter and James and other apostles had more street cred than Mark and Luke and Matthew. John's the only one that you might fabricate, but the other three? A bit odd.

Secondly, the idea that the names assigned to the gospels were selected at random doesn't fit with the evidence. By the time the gospel manuscripts start surfacing with names attached to them, they are scattered across Italy, Egypt and Turkey. And here's what we find: every single copy of what we call Matthew has Matthew's name written across the top of it. If the early church was indeed just randomly assigning authorship at the very least we'd expect to find a difference in who's being credited as the author. But we don't. Every copy of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John has their names across the top, from Italy to Egypt to Turkey.

And so this not only lends credibility to the authorship being genuine but it also ties back into the reliability of the oral tradition. In a pre-literate culture, the primary way most people were oriented to their culture and history was through hearing their history, not reading it. And here we have a piece of concrete evidence that in this specific case of the authorship of the gospels, the oral tradition that went with each of the manuscripts across the Roman Empire for many years was extremely consistent--even when it might have been in the best interest of the powers-that-be to change the authorship to lend the manuscripts more credibility.