A couple of weeks ago I posted about a youth pastor who bragged on video about recommending the Bible to a middle-school girl and then scampering away. ("And I was like, I just teed off on that one, you know," mic drop.) An atheist podcaster / blogger was upset about it; I wondered how much of the glorious tale was true.
Then the Internet forced this story down my throat: a MAGA-adjacent TikTok pastor / therapist named Stuart Knechtle bragged to another "faith-based podcaster" that he had brought 19-year-old Barron Trump to the very brink of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Or maybe not: "And he’s very close to putting his faith in Christ. Very close." (I almost had that 100-pound marlin in the boat, that 12-point buck was in my sights!)
The whole story was dodgy. Why was this guy on the phone to a teenager, let alone a president's son, at 12:30 a.m.? Who called whom? Numerous commenters on the Daily Beast story were upset about Knechtle's talking publicly about his missionary activity, but bragging about hooking high-profile converts is as old as Christianity: the New Testament contains numerous such stories. One can question the ethics of publicizing a phone conversation, but without knowing the circumstances of the call I can't say. Besides, this guy is a MAGA Christian: what has he to do with ethics? I expect both of Barron's parents have staff whose job it is to monitor media about him, and if I were Stuart Knechtle I'd watch my back.
Anyone who's been exposed to missionary propaganda will recognize the form of these stories, though usually they end with the target joyously giving himself or herself to Jesus; the conversio interruptus these guys recount is, I admit, less familiar to me. But this all reminded me of a book I read a couple of years ago, Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition by Eric Eve (Fortress Press, 2014). As I've written before, biblical scholars have long been interested in the ways the early Christians preserved teaching by and about Jesus in the period before the gospels were written. "Oral tradition" is a catch-all term for the practices supposedly used, but not much was known about how they worked, and Eve's book is a good introduction to the present state of scholarship.
I was particularly interested in chapter 5, where Eve discusses some recent work, which draws on accounts of a 19th-century Christian missionary, John Hogg, as reported by his daughter. Hogg worked in Egypt, building Christian communities there. (Although Egypt is primarily Muslim, it was a hotbed of early Christianity and still has a significant Christian minority that long predates John Hogg.) The discussion is too long to detail here, but briefly, as a late 20th century scholar named Kenneth Bailey tells one of the stories:
Before the first World War John Hogg’s daughter dipped into this same oral tradition and in her biography of him told of how he was waylaid at night by a band of robbers who demanded valuables. He quickly surrendered a gold watch and his money but indicated that he had a treasure worth far more. They were curious. He pulled a small book from his pocket and spent the entire night telling them of the treasures it contained. By morning the band, convicted of the evil of their ways, sought to return his watch and money and pledged themselves to give up highway robbery. Hogg took the watch but insisted that they keep his money, and indeed then financed the gang personally until they could establish themselves in legal employment. [quoted in Eve, p. 69]
This is the familiar come-to-Jesus story. But Eric Eve looked at the daughter's biography of her father and found that she had another version of the encounter. She dismisses the version Bailey used as a "romantic tale," and gives a much longer and "rather more mundane" one without the edifying conversion (pp. 70ff.). Rena Hogg, the daughter, "regarded the discrepant versions of this tale as evidence of how 'fact and fancy mingled in lore'. A more accurate way of putting it might be to say that the discrepant versions show how fact is transmuted into legend" (p. 72). Eve points out that the polished, edifying version was preserved more or less intact for several decades, and it's easy to see why. Kenneth Bailey hoped to establish that such preservation was involved in the early churches and supports the reliability of the gospels and Acts. What it seems to show is that considerable editing may have been applied to the material the churches passed along, to make it suitable for preaching and proselytizing, and it sounds to me like the processes assumed a century ago by form-criticism, as passé as it's commonly said to be.
In the case of the stories told by Friendly Atheist's youth pastor and Stuart Knechtle, we aren't even looking at supposedly inerrant Bible stories, just self-aggrandizing tall tales told by would-be fishers of men. It's not only appropriate but necessary to be skeptical of them, especially when they fit such a recognizable pattern. If you're at all interested in this subject, I urge you to read Behind the Gospels. If it seems too scholarly, another recent book, Elijah Wald's Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories (Da Capo Press, 2024), shows oral tradition at work in the development of the blues in the late 1800s to early 1900s. Be aware that, as its title suggests, it's often pretty raunchy, but if you're reading this blog that shouldn't be a barrier; and remember that, according to Friendly Atheist, the Bible itself is full of filth and nastiness. In reading Jelly Roll Blues I saw a lot of parallels to the development of early Christian tradition, but it's fascinating in its own right.
