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A review by socraticgadfly
Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior by Bart D. Ehrman
informative
medium-paced
4.0
For someone who's read other Ehrman and knows he can be light and thin at times, or just wrong at times, this book might be a pleasant surprise.
Ehrman is not espousing an oral tradition theory of the synoptic problem or anything like that. Rather, this is about oral tradition leading to, and overlapping with, the development of written tradition, ultimately our synoptics, plus John, plus G Thomas, plus other materials.
As such, Ehrman gets away from traditional biblical criticism and into the moder study of memory and its fallibility. From there, it's into how memory operates largely in a societal background. From there, it's on to how early Christian communities would have shaped, expanded, and orally redacted Christian traditions.
Ehrman is not espousing an oral tradition theory of the synoptic problem or anything like that. Rather, this is about oral tradition leading to, and overlapping with, the development of written tradition, ultimately our synoptics, plus John, plus G Thomas, plus other materials.
As such, Ehrman gets away from traditional biblical criticism and into the moder study of memory and its fallibility. From there, it's into how memory operates largely in a societal background. From there, it's on to how early Christian communities would have shaped, expanded, and orally redacted Christian traditions.