World Blog by humble servant. . Jesus left NO writings...

Johnnie Ellington II
December 25, 2015
TEACHINGS COME SECONDHAND
Frank W. Beare in the Introduction of his book THE EARLIEST RECORDS OF JESUS
(Abingdon Press, 1962, pp. 16, 18) gives us a glimpse of the problems faced right from
the beginning by anybody researching in the field:
In any serious study of the Gospels, we have always to keep in mind that Jesus himself left
nothing in writing, and that the earliest records of his career which have come down to us
were not put into writing until about forty years after his death. All our knowledge of him is
drawn from the deposit of a tradition which was transmitted for several decades by word of
mouth. We are therefore obliged to raise the question of the relationship between the
documents as we have them and the events and sayings which they report. For it must be
realized that in a generation or more of oral transmission, sayings and stories do not remain
unchanged. Once they have been committed to writing, they are to some degree stabilized, as
it were; though even at this stage, we have to observe that Luke and Matthew do not shrink
from altering the Marcan record which they are both using....
We cannot too lightly assume that what the earliest Christians thought worth preserving
would be identical with what we ourselves would regard as most important, or even that it
would reflect essentially what Jesus himself regarded as central to his message. It must be
regarded as possible that ‘Jesus was over the heads of his reporters,’ and we shall indeed find
indications in the Gospels themselves that he from time to time manifested keen
disappointment and even a certain impatience with the lack of understanding shown by his
immediate disciples...it is not at all unlikely that the...people who followed him may not have
been capable of taking in all the range of his thought, and communicating it clearly to others.
Beare’s first point is that sayings and stories change as they are passed by word of mouth
from person to person and generation to generation. To illustrate, do you remember the
children’s game “Telephone”? Everyone sits in a circle and one person whispers
something into the ear of the next person. The message is passed from ear to ear until it
comes back to the person who first whispered it. By the time it gets back to the original
source, it is totally different from the original message, causing much amazement and
laughter.
We know from the above short history of the Gospels that most, if not all, of the initial
transmission was oral, and that the Gospels were not written down until several years
(perhaps as many as forty or fifty years for the earliest—the Gospel of Matthew) had
passed after Jesus’ departure. In that period of time, many human errors could have
entered the transmission, and indeed did.
To make things more difficult, there are variations among ancient manuscripts of the
same material. Sometimes these variations are minor, but sometimes they are substantial.
Thus, even committing the transmission to writing did not solve all the problems.
Beare’s second point is that we do not know that the apostles always understood Jesus
and correctly and clearly transmitted his teachings. To expand that, the process of
attempting to communicate clearly to others did not stop with the initial writing of the
gospels. The revising and ‘clarifying’ continues even to this day. On almost every page of
any annotated English version of the New Testament, there are variant readings from
ancient texts for one or more verses.
Once the Gospels were committed to writing, they were still fragmented and difficult to
come by, as the following quote from Dr. George Lamsa demonstrates (NEW
TESTAMENT ORIGIN, Aramaic Bible Society, Inc., no date given, p.65):
Even today in Turkey and Persia complete manuscripts of the Scriptures are very rare. Scrolls
containing portions of the Bible are found in the possession of various families. In some
districts one portion may be found in one village and the other completing portions perhaps in
towns many miles away. When family ties are broken, the scrolls books are divided among
the members. The student of the Bible must remember that in Jesus’ day libraries, printing
presses, and paper were unknown and that sacred writings were available only to the priests,
rich men, and rulers.
This continued unavailability of written scripture would have caused oral transmission to
be an important factor in the developing doctrines and attitudes of Christianity, even after
the Gospels were recorded. This fact may also help explain some of the differences
among manuscripts.
In any case, it is certain that there is a great variability among manuscripts of the Gospels.