Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior Hardcover – Big Book, March 1, 2016

With remarkable insight and lifelong historical research, Bart Ehrman has produced a book offering lasting value to those with a secular perspective and to the Christian faithful. It’s a significant and unique accomplishment well worth your time.(When or if the book gets a little too detailed, it may be useful to skip to the next section which will probably renew your interest and continued reading.)

Overall it was a good read: Ehrman discusses places where we can be fairly certain that claims in and outside the Gospels represent "distorted memories" (where "distorted" means they aren't historically accurate). As interesting as those are, I expected much more discussion of the research on specifically oral traditions. Ehrman did spend a lot of time discussing what we know from psychology about memory and sociology about collective memories (how social groups remember events in the past), but I was hoping he'd spend a lot more time delving into research done on oral traditions (for this is where the Gospels sprung from).Ehrman talked about some work done by scholars that study oral traditions. Basically oral cultures don't fare any better than literary cultures in terms of keeping stories accurate, and in fact, oral cultures tend to do worse because it isn't the details of a story that matter (you can't go and check them anyway!) but the context in which the stories are told.Don't get me wrong: it was a good read. I just expected more. Maybe this is due to the book being for a popular audience, but given the gap between the death of Jesus and our earliest sources is nearly forty years, I expected more on oral traditions and cultures (granted: we don’t have much information about this time because, well, the information was transmitted orally!). He does talk a lot about the contexts in which these so-called "distorted memories" arose, i.e., why different Christian communities revolved around what we now know aren't historical truths. Ehrman argues that even though we don’t have any good grounds to think such memories represent history, he does think these memories give us a lot of information about what was happening in these communities, what they believed, and what they used the Jesus stories to represent.A similar book that I recommend to everyone is Matthew McCormick’s “Atheism And The Case Against Christ.” He makes a very strong case that we have no good reasons to think the resurrection occurs, and he basis his argument on the fact that we have more and stronger evidence for the existence of witches at Salem than the resurrection. McCormick has a stronger thesis, but he covers similar ground and represents a strong challenge to Christianity.

Bart Ehrman, a prominent New Testament scholar, has performed a valuable service bringing NT scholarship to general readers in a number of short, readable, satisfying books. JESUS BEFORE THE GOSPELS: HOW THE EARLIEST CHRISTIANS REMEMBERED, CHANGED, AND INVENTED THEIR STORIES OF THE SAVIOR (2016) is especially valuable because he brings some new science to bear.Of thousands of books on Jesus, Ehrman says that "the vast bulk of them" have not explored this research in psychology, sociology, anthropology on the transmission and construction of memory. This knowledge is highly relevant to the search for the historical Jesus because our main source, the Gospels, are edited compilations of long chains of memories, word of mouth stories told by numerous unknown persons over four to seven decades before the Gospels were written. He notes the remarkably wide variety of memories, versions of the story of Jesus, held today by worshippers and scholars. This variety is explained by the science on how memories are constructed. This knowledge is useful for evaluating all our knowledge of history and biography, as everything we think we know is what others have told us, most of which does not come from eye-witnesses, or interviews of witnesses, or even complete mastery of all available evidence. One of the key findings of the science is the highly unreliable nature even of eye-witness testimony.Ehrman effectively presents an overview of the science and makes his point succinctly with selected passages from the Gospels. The same approach is taken comprehensively by Dale C. Allison Jr. in CONSTRUCTING JESUS: MEMORY, IMAGINATION, AND HISTORY (2010). In his first 17 pages he cites nearly all the scientific studies cited by Ehrman. Allison is more explicit about the shortcomings of scholarly work on the life of Jesus over the past century. He says he has come to the "conviction that the means that most scholars have employed and continue to employ for constructing the historical Jesus are too flimsy to endure ... After many years of playing by the rules, I have gradually come to abandon them. I am trying something else."

Great author, historian, researcher and communicator. How are memories preserved is what he delves into in this book. Are oral cultures preserved in an unchanging way from one to the other relating it?One of his major works.

The Christian Gospels are derived from memories of Jesus, and these memories, like all memories, are fallible and prone to distortion. Yet underlying these memories are a bedrock of facts that can be discerned from looking at memories with a historian's eye. Bart Ehrman navigates these issues in a manner that modern Christians should find enlightening and sympathetic.

Everything done well. Just took a long time to get here.

Ehrman prosegue nell'analisi del primo cristianesimo.Da anni pubblica libri molto interessanti sull'argomento.In questo suo ultimo lavoro,utilizzando i risultati degli ultimi studi sull'attendibilità della memoria e della sua trasmissione orale,Ehrman passa al setaccio le testimonianze dei primi "diffusori" del cristianesimo,siano essi gli evangelisti ( i 4 canonici e non) o altri autori delle origini.Le conclusioni a cui l'autore giunge mi sembrano valide e convincenti : buona parte dei miti cristiani nasce da una "memoria distorta" di fatti comunque avvenuti; per esempio l'autore sostiene che molto difficilmente il "discorso della Montagna"( Matteo) è davvero stato pronunciato,ma si tratterebbe di una sorta di "compilation" (absit iniuria verbis) di frasi e sentenze davvero pronunciate da Gesù.In taluni casi fatti relativi a Gesù venivano deformati o alterati sulla base delle necessità teologiche e sociali delle prime comunità cristiane, in particolare rapporto con il crescente distacco dall'ebraismo.Questo spiega il forte accento antiebraico di alcuni passaggi dei canonici,la luce negativa in cui appaiono i Farisei (corrente dell'ebraismo in polemica coi primi cristiani) e il ritratto quasi assolutorio di Pilato.In questo vi è ben poco di storico.In conclusione Ehrman mi pare anni luce avanti rispetto alle posizioni reticenti ed arretrate della chiesa cattolica.La cosa non mi pare sorprendente...

it was a revelation. understood the whole history of Jesus in a new light. The gospel of St. Thomas was a revelation.