Jesus Before the Gospels audiobook

I was expecting this book to be a portrayal of the "historical Jesus" using the findings of human memory research. It was that, however I believe that a more descriptive title for this book would be "What we can know about the nature of the various communities that produced the multiple Gospels using modern tools of historical scholarship and recent memory research." That title is probably too long, but it is a worthwhile endeavor because the remembered Jesus is what Christianity is based upon, not the historical Jesus.This book includes an extensive description of the nature of memory and how it can lead to inventions. Findings of research on oral traditions and their tendency toward invention are explained. These limitations apply to the Gospels because they were written between forty to eighty years after the crucifixion of Jesus by writers who were writing in Greek about what was remembered and repeatedly retold about Jesus who lived within an Aramaic speaking community.The limitations of eyewitness testimonies is explained by this book. It's a moot point to ponder the accuracy of eyewitness testimony in the case of the Gospels since they were not written by eyewitnesses to the events being described anyway. Nevertheless it's interesting to wonder why the Apostle Paul didn't say more about Jesus. His writing is the earliest surviving descriptions we have of Jesus. He himself was not an eyewitness, but he had met with two of the apostles (Gal. 1:18-20) and at a later date he also met with the disciple John (Gal. 2:9).It is incredible how little Paul said about Jesus in his writing. The following "view spoiler" contains a list of ALL that Paul says about Jesus in the thirteen books ascribed to him (six of which most scholars don’t think he wrote).(view spoiler)[The following list of things Paul says about Jesus is a quotation from the book:Jesus was born of a woman (Gal. 4:4 ... )He was born of a Jew (Gal. 4:4).He was descended from the line of King David (Rom. 1:3).He had brothers (I Cor. 9:5), one of whom was named James (Gal. 1:19).He had twelve disciples (1 Cor. 15:5).He conducted his ministry among Jews (Rom. 15:8)He had a last meal with his disciples on the night he was turned over to the authorities (1 Cor. 11:23).Paul knows two things that Jesus said at this last supper (1 Cor. 11:23-25)Paul knows two other teachings of Jesus, that Christians should not get divorced (1 Cor. 7:10) and they should pay their preacher (1 Cor. 9:14).Jesus appeared before Pontius Pilot (1 Tim. 6:13).Jesus died of crucifixion (1 Cor. 2:2)Those responsible for his death were Judeans (1 Thes. 2:14-15) (hide spoiler)]There're chapters discussing the different accounts of the life and death of Jesus contained in both the four canonical and several non-canonical gospels. Then Ehrman provides reviews of the Gospels of Mark, John and Thomas that could pass for biblical meditations. From these he reaches conclusions about the nature of and problems faced by the communities from where these gospels originated.At this point Ehrman summaries the information contained in this book thus far with the text shown in the lengthy excerpt from the book that I've hidden in the following "view spoiler." It's not really a spoiler but it's the tool I have available for hiding some text. I've hidden the excerpt there because I assume many readers of this review may prefer to skip over it.(view spoiler)[The following is an extended excerpt from the book: To this point we have seen three sets of memories of Jesus from three different communities and three different situations. All these communities were remembering the past because of and in light of their present. There can be no doubt in many instances their memories were frail or faulty at least in the historical sense that what they remembered about Jesus was not true to the Jesus who really lived, taught and died in Roman Palestine. To be sure it can probably be assumed though it can never be proven that people in these communities thought their memories of Jesus were historically true. For them these really were the things that Jesus said and did. But obviously all three communities cannot all be right about that. Their memories are very different, even contradictory. The historical question of what could be shown to of actually happened in the life of Jesus was not the ultimate concern of people living in these churches. Their communities were not made up of historians interested in applying rigorous historical criteria to establish what Jesus really said and did. They were for the most part simple Christians who had heard stories about Jesus that had long been in circulation, stories about who he was, what he taught, what mission he came to fulfill. These stories about the past had always been told in light of how the storytellers perceived the relevance and significance of Jesus for the present. Those who held, preserved, and shared memories of Jesus did so because he meant something to them and their struggles. It was precisely those memories, stored, recalled, and shared by Christians encountering these struggles, that made it possible for them to make sense of the world and their lives. I do not want to leave the impression that there are basically three kinds of memories of Jesus that have come down to us from the early church as laid out in the preceding Chapter, those represented by the gospels of Mark, John, and Thomas. On the contrary each author we know about from the early centuries of Christianity has a different memory of Jesus, either a greatly or slightly different memory from everyone else. Our ancient Christian texts provide us with a whole kaleidoscope of images of Jesus. This obviously is not the place to provide a detailed sketch of all the ancient memories of Jesus. But I would like to say just a few words about several of them just to give a sense of this rich variety. (hide spoiler)]At this point Ehrman examines six important Christian texts and/or figures, three from within the New Testament and three from outside to explore the distinctive features of their memories.At the end of the book Ehrman makes a plea for seeing the truth in the New Testament writing even if the stories are not necessarily historically accurate.Literature speaks to us quite apart from the facts of history. So does music. So does sculpture. So do all the arts. The Gospels are not simply historical records about the past. They are also works of art. In addition, they are written forms of memory. Below is a link to an article on Ehrman's blog discussing this book:http://ehrmanblog.org/hnn-news-story-...Below are some links to multiple parts of a long academic review of this book:Jesus before the Gospels: a serial review (pt. 1)Jesus before the Gospels: a serial review (pt. 2)Jesus before the Gospels: a serial review (pt. 3)["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>

This is a very thorough, immensely readable book about how the earliest Christians shaped the memory of Jesus based on their own needs and reality. This is evident just from looking at how the four gospels differ from another. The author does a great job of showing how frail and imprecise human memory is and that it wasn’t better in pre-literal societies either. The conclusion is that the historical Jesus did not change the world but for a few, but the remembered Jesus changed everything.Now, I am not a Christian. I used to be. My parents were missionaries in Thailand when I was growing up and I grew up completely indoctrinated. It’s endlessly fascinating how transmittable religion is. So although I have no faith, I find early Christianity very interesting. After all, it changed the world. It has deeply influenced my life. This change and this influence may not have been positive - quite the contrary- but it was profound. It must be said this author is a professor in early Christianity, he is not a belligerent atheist. If you are at all curious about the origins of your own faith, should you have one, he can be read without any deep offense as he is very respectful and erudite. Of course, the facts may still be too much for some.

Believe it or NotI used to invision 1 of gods disciples sitting at a table transcribing every word that God has spoken to him, therefore, the bible was correct in every word. There were no mistakes. When, I was a Buddhist I was told that people back in 500 BC Had great memories and remembered every word that the Buddha had spoken. In later years they could write every word down, exactly. The author of this book shows, through studies, why memories of people are so bad and always have been. This is when the devil of confusion a sended upon my head.You mean to tell me that I cannot believe in my childhood memories or in people's autobiographies? You mean I can't even believe and I witness accounts? Do you mean to say that the things that people say about trump that are horrible may not be true? Are you telling me that he did not throw his lunch against the wall which left ketchup marks? Well, maybe he never was in power. That would be good. Was all a dream. The bible to, was all a dream., I can rewrite history of the last 6 years. Then I will feel fine mentally.Note. This review was dictated.

I enjoyed this one more than the author's previous book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. Instead of painting in broad strokes, he takes a look at the first centuries of Christianity through the prism of human memory and it's probable effects on the oral traditions leading to the modern day gospels.I read this purely from a historical perspective but there is plenty of psychology and theology here as well. Recommended to those with an interest in the topic.

Bart D. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is an excellent writer who has popularized some of the historical research about early Christianity. His books, while tending to make similar points as more academic treatises, are a joy to read. His latest book, Jesus before the Gospels,, is an investigation of yet another way of questioning the historical accuracy of the gospels. Ehrman points out that the earliest of the canonical gospels, the one known as Mark, was written at least 40 years after the crucifixion. Other scholars date Mark as having been written between 60 and 70 C.E. Moreover, it, like the other three canonical gospels, was written in Greek. But Jesus and all the other major characters in the gospels spoke Aramaic. So it is very likely that the authors of the gospels [all of whom are actually anonymous] were writing based on hearsay from people who were not eyewitnesses to the events described. Nevertheless they purported to be “according to” eyewitnesses, a naming convention intended to add to the trustworthiness of the accounts. [It must be added, in spite of the fact that Ehrman does not address this issue in this book, that the gospels were never intended to be “empirical” histories - in fact, the idea of a “neutral” history only developed in relatively recent times; most previous “histories” were homiletical - i.e., serving the functions of sermons or catechetical instruction. According to scholar Robert Bonfil, there was no substantial difference in how Jews and Christians construed the purpose of “history” until the sixteenth century. (Robert Bonfil, “Jewish Attitudes toward History and Historical Writing in Pre-Modern Times,” Jewish History, Vol. 11, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 7-40.)]In Jesus before the Gospels, Ehrman tackles the question of the veracity of the gospels from the point of view of psychology. In the past 30 years a great of research has been done on the [in]accuracy of individual memory, but until this book, virtually none of its findings have been applied to writings in the Bible. [The subject of collective memory is another matter. This is the practice of constructing histories so that they contribute to the present and future social and political consciousness and cultural identity of a people. The determination of what is declared significant is made to sustain a set of myths and ideologies. In that respect, much analysis has been applied to biblical stories in both the Old and New Testaments.] Ehrman’s concern is with so-called biological memory - a study of the way in which the individual mind sorts, stores, and retrieves information. Though not a psychologist, Ehrman has read extensively in the field. He distinguishes between episodic memory, relating to things we actually experience, and semantic memory, relating to things we learn through hearing, reading, or some other indirect method. The authors of the New Testament were recording the semantic memories of people who were retelling oral histories of Jesus in circulation at the time. Although all memory gets distorted with the passage of time and because of the different perceptual lenses of observers, even semantic memory can seem credible where the events related are inherently plausible, they can be confirmed by other sources, and perhaps most importantly in this case, when there simply are no other sources of information. Ehrman states that modern psychology debunks the notion that ancient illiterate people had better memories than modern man, and so were able to keep the stories of Jesus accurate in many retellings over at least 40 years. But as Ehrman observes, that may be a moot issue:"…the historical Jesus did not make history. The remembered Jesus did . . . . Does it matter if Jesus considered himself to be God on earth? As a historian, it matters to me a great deal. But if he did not — and I think he did not — the fact that he was remembered that way by later followers is terrifically important. Without that memory of Jesus, the faith founded on him would never have taken off, the Roman Empire would not have abandoned paganism, and the history of our world would have transpire in ways that are unimaginably different. History was changed, not because of brute facts, but because of memory."When two or more of the gospels tell pretty much the same story, Ehrman credits at least the gist of the story with plausibility (in spite of the fact that the authors of Mark, Matthew and Luke used each other for sources and so of course there would be overlap). Matthew borrows from as much as 80% of his gospel from Mark, and Luke borrows from as much as 65%. While that may seem to modern readers too much like a game of telephone (in which one person whispers a message to another, which is passed through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group), for centuries this overlap was enough to add credence to the stories.Thus Ehrman contends that if we look at the parts of the stories that are basically the same (ignoring that they used one another as sources), we could possibly agree that a Jewish man named Jesus lived in Galilee in the first century C.E., that he was baptized, that he attracted a band of enthusiastic followers, that he proclaimed an apocalyptic message of the coming Kingdom of God, and that he was crucified by the Roman overlords of Judea. He also asserts that we can be certain that his followers taught that he rose from the dead and appeared to them. Beyond that, things get pretty dicey.Although the Gospels overlap quite a bit, they are also filled with discrepancies. These discrepancies encompass some very important aspects of Jesus’ life and teaching. Ehrman argues that it is not even clear what Jesus actually taught. For example, In the gospel of Mark, Jesus is careful not to make any claims of divinity, and his apostles never quite “get” who he is despite his astounding words and deeds. Ehrman writes:"Jesus himself seems to want to keep [his true identity] a secret. Not only does he command demons not to reveal who he is (3:11; see also 1:34), when he heals someone he orders him not tell anyone (1:44); when he performs miracles he sometimes does not let the crowds observe (5:40); when his disciples see his revealed glory he orders them not to divulge it (9:9); [and] when any one starts to have a sense of his identity he commands their silence (8:30)."Contrast the Jesus of the gospel of John, the last of the gospels to be composed (written around 90 A.D.):"Jesus spends almost his entire preaching ministry in John talking about who he is, where he has come from, and what he can provide. There is nothing like this in the Synoptic Gospels. The very gist of Jesus’s teaching has come to be transformed." The gospels are also totally inconsistent on a number of doctrines supposedly promulgated by Jesus, such as what Jesus taught about divorce. Ehrman points out five different versions of what Jesus said about breaking up a marriage, with striking differences among them.Ehrman also notes that some of the gospel stories are simply inherently implausible, and that is not limited to the “miracle” anecdotes. [For a detailed elucidation of what portions are implausible, an excellent source is the also-very-readable book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan] Finally, additional problems arise from the vagaries of translation. As one particularly interesting example, the Gospel of John has Jesus say we must be “born again” to enter the kingdom of heaven. What the text says in the original Greek is that a person must be born anothen. The Greek word has two different meanings, depending on context: it can mean “a second time” or it can mean “from above.” The reason this is important is that Jesus is speaking to Nicodemus, who thinks Jesus told him he must be born a second time, which seems a bit tough to accomplish. But Jesus tells him that he does not mean a second, physical birth — he is talking about a birth from heaven made possible by the spirit of God, who comes from above. Modern readers don’t “get” the story because they don’t read it in the original Greek. Moreover, it would have been impossible for Jesus to have said this in Aramaic, where the word for “from above” does not mean “a second time.” The story just makes no sense in Aramaic, and not much sense in English. Ehrman concludes that a Greek speaker, probably the author of John, just made up the story to make a point.Evaluation: Ehrman as always makes a number of interesting and thought-provoking points about a subject that continues to fascinate both believers and doubters. However, religions clearly benefit from the fact that many believers do not undertake critical analyses of religious texts.

61. Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior by Bart D. Ehrmanreader: Joe Barrettpublished: 2016format: 10:04 Audible audiobook (~279 pages equivalent, 336 pages in hardcover)acquired: Novemberlistened: Nov 9-14rating: 4Erhman tries to bring in the sciences of memory, cultural memory and evolution of oral story telling into an understanding of the Christian gospels, written down several decades after the death of Christ. It makes for an interesting book, an author having fun mixing several different fields, but writing with his casual formal tone. The first half of this book is basically a popular science book on memory, cultural memory and another take on Milman Parry's work on oral story telling. It's a little disheartening to learn just how our memory works, our brain scattering memory into different places, and then processing these bits and pieces together, filling it whatever is necessary. Not only is our memory pretty awful, and easily manipulated, but even those really vivid memories, the especially real ones we are most emotionally attached to (for better or for worse) are mostly mental constructs and mostly wrong. In one fascinating study, university students in the Netherlands were asked if they recall the film of a traumatic plane crash into a building as it tried to land. Roughly 50% remembered the footage, which didn't exist. It was never captured on any visual medium. At the end of this section, one is left to wonder whether anything they remember is true, much less anything written 2000 years ago, and 40 or 50 years after the events they describe.Eventually Ehrman gets to actually looking at the gospels, analyzing several along with various non-canonical writings, most interesting being the Gospel of Thomas, found only in 1945. The Gospel of Thomas is not really a gospel, but a list of sayings, just like what had long been theorized was the source the other gospels. Of course he goes into the differences, and he brings in the Pauline letters, which are much older, but actually have very little to say about Jesus's life, other than he was the messiah, he died and came back. If you like, that is essentially the base story. Well, it's even more basic than that, since, historically, we can't accept anything supernatural. So, the gist (or gist memory) is that Jesus came into Jerusalem, and caused enough trouble that he was later executed by crucifixion. The rest is a build off that gist memory - all the parables, and exorcisms, and sermons (even, sadly, the Sermon on the Mount) are ways that later groups of Christians found to remember Christ and his message. Not that that needs to surprise anyone. (And Ehrman argues, at some length, it shouldn't bother any Christians either. What is meaningful to us doesn't need to be historically verifiable or historically true. There are other planes of meaning.)As I'm reading the New Testament, one thing that stood out to me was Ehrman's take on why there are four anonymous gospels. He has an unprovable idea, but one I found made a lot of sense. To some extent you can trace in Rome when the gospels were given a name. There is a point where they are referenced, without any names, and there is a point where they are referenced by name. Roughly, in Ehrman's view, different groups would collect the writing of the gospel and put them together. There was no author, exactly, just a communal collection of writings. (They must have been shaped, though). The communities in Rome would have had these various versions circulating around. The Romans are both the cultural center of the empire and really far away from the origin of these stories. So, some group collected four of these gospels, gave them the most logical names they could come with as authors, basically formalized them as the official gospels. It's a curious thing to me, because they must have made the decision that they didn't know exactly what had happened, so instead of selecting one version, they chose four somewhat consistent, but also somewhat contradictory variations. Overall this book makes good use of a curious mixture of fields and perspectives. Recommended to those interested.

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.==Specifics:1. First, looking at Elizabeth Loftus, et al, she shows the fallibility of memory.2. He shows that claims of oral transmission NT critics are not sustainable, and that Millman/Lord on Balkan bards, as well as other study elsewhere, show both that poetry and song do not reinforce the literal transmission of orality, nor are they designed to.3. From there, he goes to scholars of what might be called sociology of memory to show how oral tradition in general is shaped in specific ways for specific reasons.4. From here, it's off to biblical form criticism, etc.

This completes my run of Ehrman's major works. This is different from 'Misquoting Jesus' 'Jesus Interrupted', and 'How Jesus Became God'. It is much less of the textual criticism of the previous works. Instead, Ehrman's focus is the oral tradition and its role in shaping the stories about Jesus that we encounter in the New Testament. IE the impact on memory, and the context in which it formed.In some ways, I think this would make a better first read for those brave enough to entertain the challenges Dr. Ehrman brings to Christ and how he was remembered; Christianity and how it was formed.

I don't give 5 stars often, but Ehrman really delivered on this one. Personal takeaways aside, he delivered on his titular promise and explored how the earliest Christians remembered, changed, and invented their stories of The Savior. He builds a case through comparing sources, whether from the New Testament, historians like Philo and Josephus, as well as the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha (Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Judas, etc.). I knew that there were some inconsistencies within the 4 gospel accounts in the New Testament, but many direct contradictions are described to the point that it is hard to maintain academic integrity and believe that absolutely nothing was changed from the actual events of Jesus' life and that the Gospels are 100% historically accurate. Logic tells us that they are not, and only if we chose to do highly improbable logical acrobatics (like Jarius' daughter must have died and been risen by Jesus twice to account for the two different stories of her resurrections) or simply chalk it up to faith and not try to make sense of it...once you are shown the inconsistencies, it is hard to say that the Gospels are a pure historical account of Jesus.Outside of the writings around the time of Jesus, Ehrman delves modern studies in the realms of psychology, memory, and oral traditions. Common sense tells us that a word-for-word recall of events that happened 40 or more years ago (the breadth of time between the life of Jesus and the authorship of the Gospels of the New Testament according to academic consensus) will be hard to make completely accurate. Let alone the fact that the authors themselves (who never declare themselves Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, but are in-fact anonymous) were likely not even eyewitnesses to the words of Jesus, but are instead writing down the stories that were being passed around about Jesus at that time. Also, let's not forget that Jesus and his followers spoke Aramaic, and the Gospels are written in Greek, so right off the bat we cannot have a word-for-word recall of what Jesus said.Finally, I am happy that Ehrman ends this book with a disclaimer that we shouldn't throw out the entire narrative of the Gospels simply because there are inconsistencies, or that the words and deeds of Jesus might not be 100% accurate. First of all, there are many parts of the Gospels that likely are accurately told stories of Jesus. We might not know exactly which ones are and which ones aren't, but there certainly is truth contained within them. Second of all, even if they were not 100% historically accurate, are not the stories and sayings of Jesus told through the Gospels still worth reflecting upon? I find this an appropriate ending to the thoughts laid out within the book, and a great way to see the Gospels.

Although some repetitive points from his other books, I liked the different POV related to “remembering”, what it actually means from different perspectives and how it’s meaning explains some of the stories of the New Testament.

It’s truly impressive how Bart Ehrman can always find something interesting and fresh in such an old topic. And my appreciation of his work is even greater now that I just finished a terrible apologetics book that served both to disappoint and confuse me. Luckily, Ehrman is dedicated to the academic approach in answering questions about Christianity and he does so in a very clear and lucid way.Jesus Before the Gospels deals with the important questions of human memory and how they affected the period during/after Jesus’ life until the gospels were finally written down and the “correct” ones picked for the New Testament. This time, Ehrman takes the time to actually discuss the nature of human memory and how it affects our perception of the past. As you can imagine, our memories work well in functional settings in our daily routine, but are much less reliable when we need to remember a single event. It’s interesting how our memories essentially reflect the individual who is doing the remembering and how this affects their perception of how events actually took place.Needless to say, this is food for thought when we consider that the New Testament documents were written decades after the events they cover. The gospels each are different and throughout Jesus Before the Gospels it clearly lays out the idea that each of our gospels are merely a reflection of the community they were written for. Non-Jewish communities focus essentially on how one does now need to be a Jew to be saved. Jewish communities taught the opposite because they expected the end-times to occur much sooner. But what actually happened? And as he discusses these documents, Ehrman even finds interesting points in these discrepancies, like who was documenting Jesus’ private conversation with Pontius Pilate? How could everyone possibly hear Jesus' sermon on the mount? But that’s just the tip the iceberg.A very rewarding read for both believers and heathens.

Another excellent book by Bart Ehrman exploring how oral traditions and memory, especially group memory, may have influenced and guided the creation of the four Gospels. Professor Ehrman notes in the closing of his book that the Gospels should be considered not as historical but as the memory-history of specific early Christian communities and how each of those communities remembered the Jesus that lived and died..."The historical Jesus did not make history. The remembered Jesus did."

An excellent book. Ehrman spends two years in extensive study of memory and how it works. He then applies the results of this research to the gospel stories about Jesus. He is able to reach some amazing insights about the workings of the oral tradition and about how the gospels were written. The book is written for a general audience. I highly recommend it. Rick Herrick

The book was a bit repetitious, such that I felt Dr. Ehrman was belaboring points to make sure the reader “gets it”. Information present was informative, but I like it a bit less than many other books of his that I have read.

Review to come.