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It must be emphasized that information whether derived orally, recorded electronically or in written text does not determine the truthfulness of the information itself. The main advantage of written text over oral tradition is that the information contained in the text will remain for as long as its integrity is maintained.

If erroneous or false information is transmitted orally or through written text, this information will remain so whether it was transmitted 2000 years ago or just a mere 2 minutes.

With regards to the Gospels, there are two main problems with respect to the information contained in them. They are internally inconsistent, which affects their credibilty, and externally there are no anecdotes by contemporary historians to even support an oral tradition of the Gospels.

For example, Augustus is reported to have been deified and was regarded by some to be the son of the god Apollo, now these anecdotes were written by historians so that it can be considered that there was some information about Augustus being transmitted orally.

Without any anecdotes of Jesus, his followers or his teachings by any-one external of the biblical authors and biblical apologists, I cannot link the Gospels to any oral tradition. I consider the Gospels or the character Jesus to be mere fabricated theological propaganda.

arricchio

Exactly. The only way to know anything at all about oral cultures is to study them in the modern context as Albert Lord and others have done. For an oral tradition that has been extinct for two thousand years, there is no way of knowing anything about it at all. Not only can you not know what its content may have been, you cannot even know if it ever existed at all. So, when someone makes the claim that the New Testament preserves an oral tradition there is no way anyone, Christian apologists included, who can know that to be true. This is what makes the doctrine of inspiration necessary.

Chris Weimer

Did you actually read what I wrote? Try Vernon K. Robbins "The Chreia," in Greco-Roman Literature and the New Testament (or via: amazon.co.uk) ed. David E. Aune, Atlanta: Scholars Press, (1988): 1-23. Therein he discusses the different ways chreiae are preserved.

Yes, I'm well aware. None of this goes against what I said. None of it. I'm well aware that our information from the time period will not be perfect, that information may be missing, or deliberately missing. I think you're also missing the point that Palestine wasn't completely an oral culture. We have tons of literature from that time period that survives, and evidence that much more is lost. The Gospels aren't recitations of dynasties from hundreds of years ago - in fact, contra Doherty, Mark is universally dated to the 1st century (except by those who don't want it there). The fact that by the early first century it had circulated widespread to be used by not one but two other gospels, with a latter one being quoted by an early-to-mid second century apologist is more than enough evidence in favor of a first century Mark. The gospels were penned within a few generations of the purported events. Will they have bias? Yes. Will they be incomplete? Of course. Does that mean they're useless in extracting history? Of course not.

Except in this case it was preserved - within Paul, within the Gospels, within the early church fathers.

I'm willing to bet that large variations occurred. That's not a problem to me.

Here you are misleading - obviously, it does preserve it. The forms are sufficiently close enough to know about what was said. And all of these are unrelated testimonies. You're playing false with this one.

ynquirer

Oral tradition is (almost) always the source for written records, at least in ancient history.

Roger Pearse

If you think of a policeman writing a report on a car accident, it is fairly difficult for what he writes not to have passed through an oral stage first.

Cheerful Charlie

Exactly. It is a usual stunt for law professors when lecturing future lawyers about eyewitness reliability to stage a 'crime' in the class room, a purse snatching or some such. Immediately the professor has everybody write down what they "saw". the carefully staged 'crime' is then examined step by step and people often don't get much right. An object lesson in just how hard it is for an eyewitness to get details right.

The policeman has to sort through this, and more than a few people have been sent to prison and later exhonerated based on bad eyewitness testimony. Police biases and even bigotry has colored reports and sent people to prison.

Its common for such cases to languish in the legal system for years and for the eyewitnesses to later tell very different stories from the day they told a policeman what they "saw". Even rape victims get it wrong, as proven by DNA evidence. Some eyewitness testimony changes under pressure from prosecutors.

There is a rather large literature on these sorts of problems with legal eyewitness testimony and reportage of same.

CC

ynquirer

Different eyewitnesses produce different accounts of the same fact, don't they? Such differences in a murder, for instance, may be conducive to convicting an innocent, right? There is, however, a kernel of facts in which all witnesses agree, say, that there have been a murder, or a death at any rate. That is frequently useless for a court to rule the case, but is perhaps enough for the historian to write a narrative.

Sauron

Ah.

Now imagine that same policeman trying to recall from memory the same car crash 70 years later, and writing an accurate report.

And now imagine that the eyewitnesses are dead, so the policeman has to interview the families of the eyewitnesses, to hear second-hand whatever they might have said about it.

There's quite a gulf of time and believability between your example of a policeman, and what we're dealing with here. But as usual, Roger, your amour for manuscripts blinds you to the obvious flaw in your analogy.

Chris Weimer

All that shows is that there will be errors. That says nothing of the core of the story.

Have you ever interviewed a WWII veteran?

Sauron

I'm afraid it does, Chris. Unless you can place a bright-line boundary between what you consider (1) "core" and (2) everything else, then the net results is that the entire story has to be taken with a grain of salt.

That is, unless you're willing to abstract the "core" away to such a point, that it becomes essentially nondescript and meaningless; i.e., the core of an event (a head-on car wreck at an intersection) becomes "someone died tragically," or even just "someone died."

I've interviewed people within a week of someone's death. Their accounts of events differed dramatically. And upon re-interviewing the same people, the accounts changed several times.

Human memory is notorious for its plasticity. Oral tradition is doubly impacted by this problem:

(a) loss of memory information about the original event before it is committed to oral tradition; and then
(b) loss of information (change) within the oral tradition itself, as it gets passed down from person to person

See the example of the Lay of Atli I posted earlier for a concrete example.