Stories about Jesus Before the Gospels: Oral Traditions in the Early Church.
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Chris Huntley
4.8 • 745 Ratings
🗓️ 26 September 2023
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The New Testament writings were produced decades after Jesus' death, but long before that people were passing along stories about Jesus and devising poems and creeds about their new-found faith.
What do scholars know about these Christian traditions that were being passed along and preserved by word of mouth in the years before we had written texts. Scholars call them "oral traditions." How do we know such things existed, and can we be certain that they were passed along reliably before there were Christian writings?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. |
| 0:07.4 | The only show, where a six-time New York Times bestselling author and world-renowned Bible scholar, |
| 0:13.5 | uncovers the many fascinating, little-known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity. |
| 0:23.7 | I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. |
| 0:30.5 | Hello, everyone, and welcome back to misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. Today we are talking about Jesus before the Bible. If you've spent any time reading or, you know, listening to podcasts |
| 0:36.4 | about the New Testament, then you'll |
| 0:38.3 | have heard about an oral tradition used by the writers of the Gospels. But what is an oral |
| 0:43.6 | tradition exactly and how do academics know it existed if it's no longer being told? All that |
| 0:50.1 | and more on today's episode. Before we get to that, Bart, how are you doing this week? |
| 0:54.6 | I'm doing well. The semester is kind of clipping along. It's always exciting to begin. |
| 1:00.5 | It's interesting to watch how the students start reacting, especially the first year students, |
| 1:04.9 | because they're all pumped up, you know, the first day of class, and they're all excited. |
| 1:08.7 | Then they start getting tired and not just from |
| 1:11.2 | studying too much, in fact, mainly from doing other things. And they start showing up in class like |
| 1:17.8 | a droopy eye. It's like you've got to work harder in the middle. And it kind of goes from there. |
| 1:23.6 | So we're kind of getting to that point now. Luckily, I've got, my class times are pretty good this time. |
| 1:28.6 | I've got a 9.30 class, which is a little bit early for some of these students, but then a |
| 1:33.8 | 1230 class. |
| 1:35.5 | And for many of these students, that is when they get up. |
| 1:39.8 | And I was an undergraduate. |
| 1:41.5 | I had at one point a seminar at 8 a.m. |
| 1:48.0 | Which I didn't especially, it was a great seminar. |
... |
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