PhilosopherJay

Hi Toto,

Precisely. We cannot tell if he has triangulated back to the first generation of the stories/sayings or the 5th generation. Even if we could find an early generation of one story/saying, there is no reason the next one could not have come from the 50th generation. Postulating an oral history, just means that the first writer might be constructing any story/saying from the 1st generation, the 5th generation, the 50th generation and the 500th generation of oral stories tellers, with the chances of noise/distortion multiplying with each generation.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Toto

I don't think this happened:

arnoldo

LeDonne relates how going to a Bob Dylan concert helped him write his book. To paraphrase, trying to understand what Bob Dylan is actually singing can be difficult for someone who has never heard him sing before. But for someone who grew up listening to Dylan they can instantly sing along to his old tunes. Why? Because they probably heard the song hundreds of times and the songs have become part of the person’s lives. On pg. 66 Le Donne writes

The gospels, like a rolling stone,changed as memory patterns changed.

PhilosopherJay

Hi outhouse,

Please give any scientific evidence that people of Judea had better memories than the average 10 year old kid today. Since the average Judean had no schooling, did not learn to read or write and never had need to memorize anything, it seems to me likely that the average Judean would have inferior memorization skills than the average 10 year old who has used her memory to at least learn basic reading and writing.

I would also like any evidence that even the 5-10% of males in the cities of Judea that they had any more intellectual capability than the average high school senior today.

The belief that our ancestors possessed great intellectual powers has no basis in science. It is a myth that goes well with the myth that they lived 450 or 900 years.

As for your college professor, how did you test his accuracy in memorizing the New Testament? Do you know which of the many variant versions of the New Testament did he memorize?

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

judge

This is true. One of the things I realised when I was xtian was that many of the saying of jesus we have totally eluded me, apart from the obvious apocalypticsim, and certain sayings.

What does.."the eye is the lamp of the body" mean? I've gone to the trouble of asking tbis sort of thing on christian forums and youre likely get half a dozen answers (none of which are probably right).
If this saying did originate with an Aramaic speaker in the then the meaning may be lost, unless we can know the idioms of the time.

judge

Maybe the average Judean found it easier withour his/her brain filled up with loads of useless information?

PhilosopherJay

Hi Arnoldo,

I too bought Bob Dylan albums and played them every day for months and memorized many of his songs, as millions of other fans did.

The problem is that there were no records albums in Judea in the First century. The analogy of pop superstar to Jesus is not a good one. As noted in Jesus Christ Superstar, Judea in 4 B.C. did not have any mass communication. Rather, for every songwriter who released record albums in the 1960's, there were thousands of songwriters who wrote and sang songs who did not have record contracts. How many unrecorded songs can you or anybody recall or sing now? As a young man, I went to at least a hundred clubs and concerts with singers and bands singing their own unrecorded songs. I can not recall a single lyric from any of them.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

LegionOnomaMoi

We know it's possible; it's done today. There are places where children are taught to memorize the whole of the koran. Of course, this is different, as there is a stable literary version. But most of the research on oral tradition (after the early folklorists and then the oral-formulaic model of Perry & Lord) comes from Anthropological research. Ruth Finnegan, in her book Oral Poetry (Indiana University Press, 1992, revised edition) reports the work of Andrzejewski & Lewis on the creation and transmission of somali poetry, and quotes their study at some length. Here's an excerpt: "A poem passes from mouth to mouth. Between a young Somali who listens today to a poem composed fifty years ago, five hundred miles away, and its first audience there is a long chain of reciters who passed it one to another. It is only natural that some distortion occurs, but comparison of different versions of the same poem usually shows a high degree of fidelity to the original." And that's poetery. Finnegan also discusses the same fidelity in transmission for certain types of Hawaiin poetry, quoting Beckwith's study which demonstrated how "exact transmission" was "secured by group composition." J. Vasina's Oral Tradition as History is devoted to this very question (to what extent, and when, does oral tradtion compare in its rigidity to textual transmission, and how reliable can it be as a source of historical information?). He notes that, for example, dynastic history was preserved faithfully (at least in comparison with the independent versions of the same stories by two different countries) in Rwanda and Somalia. There's an open access peer-reviewed journal Oral Tradition available here: http://journal.oraltradition.org/issues
There are several articles on the oral Jesus tradition.

Diogenes the Cynic

Think about how jokes are passed along. They are not remembered word for word, but the information is condensed enough that the basic gist is remembered and passed on with reasonable consistency again and again. They are basically setups and punch lines. Some of the content of the sayings traditions fits this mold too. The parables follow essentially the same structure as jokes. A minimal narrative set up with a memorable, didactic "punchline." These can be passed on orally without much drift or essential information loss indefinitely. How many ancient jokes have you heard told basically the same way from totally unrelated and independent people miles and years apart. They aren't verbatim, necessarily, but they contain the same information.

The same kind of thing can be said about some of the anecdotal material such as exchanges with Pharisees, the woman at the well, the rich guy who Jesus told to give all his money to the poor, etc. Bite sized stories, little mousetraps with only essential parts. We have plenty of modern examples of people remembering and passing along alleged smackdowns - Winston Churchhill is popularly credited with some of them:

"If I was your wife, I'd poison your coffee."
"If you were my wife, I'd drink it."

Set up, punchline. The details and context, even the identity of the woman don't really matter as long as you can remember the setup and punchline.

I think at least some of the CST material could plausibly have an oral basis, whether it was original to to Jesus or not. I also think it's eminently plausible, at least, that some of the sayings attributed to Jesus could have been generally remembered sayings not original to Jesus, but attributed to him anyway, similar to how famous people even now get credited with things they never said.

outhouse

is one of the better authors on oral tradition