Historical Jesus Studies and Textual Criticism

Historical Jesus studies and textual criticism are two subjects that one does not regularly think of together. But recently I was looking over my copy of Anthony Le Donne’s little book Historical Jesus: What Can We Know and How Can We Know It? (2011) and came across a section which does bring them together. The context is Le Donne’s discussion about the problem of arriving at historical certainty or objectivity (think Lessing’s “ugly ditch”). He writes:

Scholars determined to attain historical certainty will always be frustrated by the limits of modern presuppositions. Modern presuppositions have made skeptics out of a small (but boisterous) contingent of Jesus historians in every generation since Lessing. But the larger portion of historians have been no less guilty of a hunger for certainty. Historians who are more optimistic about historical certainty have tried to attain it through something akin to textual archaeology....

One of the central presuppositions of textual criticism is that priority should be given to the best reconstruction of the “original manuscripts” of the New Testament. Furthermore, textual criticism was founded on the notion that the closer we get to the original manuscripts, the closer we get to the original Jesus.

Why a Written Gospel?

The question is sometimes asked as to why the Gospel tradition was ever written down in the first place. Writing may have obvious advantages to those of us who live in Gutenberg’s world, but some contend that those living in largely illiterate cultures where orality dominates would have felt differently.

Let the reader understand.

This came up yesterday in the NT seminar here where Chris Keith was presenting an interesting paper on the reading of the Gospels in early Christian worship services. During the Q&A, he mentioned that it remains a real question as to why Mark decided to write an account of the Gospel in the first place. The oral tradition had been humming along nicely up to that point, so why the need for a new form?

I find myself on the side of those who see distinct advantages to written transmission and I think some of these hold true even in an oral culture. Christian Vandendorpe summarizes three of these advantages in his book From Papyrus to Hypertext (p. 5):

A listening situation is defined by three constraints: (a) listeners cannot determine the time of communication; (b) they do not control the rate of delivery, but are dependent on the pace chosen by the storyteller; (c) they cannot backtrack and choose to review content that particularly interests them, but must follow the thread of the narrative, which is necessarily linear because it is inscribed in time.

If you add a concern for a connection with eyewitnesses, then a written narrative of the Gospel seems near to an inevitability. Obviously there are distinct advantages of oral communication over against written, but I still find myself unsurprised that the Gospel story was “textualized” as the nascent Christian movement matured and spread.