This seminar will almost certainly be postponed due to Alert Level restrictions. Look out for more information later.

All parishioners and anyone interested are invited to a seminar explaining how the stories and teachings of Jesus were passed on orally before Mark's Gospel was written down. This is a fascinating and developing area of scholarship and was the basis of part of the Vicar's study leave. Please register your interest in the Parish Office. The venue will either be the Tui Room or the Church depending on numbers.

The seminar will deal with the following questions;

How were the accounts of Jesus passed on in the first 30 – 40 years before the gospels were written down? Did this process substantially preserve the sayings and deeds of Jesus? What was the role of oral tradition? Under what circumstances did the oral tradition develop? What role did memory play in the traditioning process? And does the picture of Jesus we find in the gospels cohere with the historical figure of Jesus?’

Canon Mark Writes;

"I will first discuss the influential approach to biblical scholarship known as form criticism which developed in the years following the first World War – how it contributed to our understanding of the transmission of the Jesus tradition and why it ultimately failed.

I will then look at the contribution of a number of scholars from the so-called Scandinavian School and their insights regarding rote memorisation and how they believed that this was the primary mechanism for the oral transmission of the gospel.

I will then discuss the work of Werner Kelber who applied the insights of the growing field of oral theory to the gospels and then Kenneth Bailey who developed the so called ‘informal controlled’ model of oral transmission.

Richard Bauckham’s emphasis on the gospels as eyewitness testimony will then be discussed and the penultimate section will cover the role of memory in the oral transmission process. I will finish by offering my own model of how the gospel was transmitted orally in the period from Jesus to Mark."