PhilosopherJay

Hi DCHindley,

Very interesting, thanks.

As a child of age four, I received lessons in oral story-telling from my mother almost every day. She would spend five or six hours on the telephone talking to relatives. She had ten brothers and sisters who she kept informed almost daily of her life's events and details.

The first telephone call would contain a rather simple mundane repetition of an event that had taken place that morning. It could be something as simple as my father saying that he would be home late for dinner. With each phone call the innocent remark would be embellished and colorful details added by my mother. By midday and the fifth phone call, the account would include imagined insults for several minutes that my father had hurled at her. By late afternoon, and the 10th phone, it had become a full blown tale wherein my father shoved her, cursed her and told her he wanted a divorce. She would be crying as she recited the incidents that I knew never happened. She really believed the fantasized incidents had occurred.

At the time, I saw her as a big liar. I now realize that her relatives had manipulated her into getting a more and more dramatic and salacious story every time she spoke. She was just embellishing and changing her story each time to please her audience.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Yellum Notnef

Maybe the oral tradition these kids of Judea were trained in was the other, much more popular kind of oral tradition.

outhouse

well practiced for generations due to the high illiteracy rate's.



so far only those lacking kowledge on the subject at hand are questioning it.

DCHindley

Yellem,

And what tradition was that?

DCH

Steven Carr

But would hearers want to hear ever more dramatic stories about a holy man they regarded as existing before Abraham and who had seen Moses and Elijah return to Earth?

Surely they would demand that storytellers stick to the facts and embellish nothing.

judge

Don't encourage him

PhilosopherJay

Hi Steven,

I think story-telling can go in either direction towards the more fantastic or the more realistic. It depends on the story-teller and the audience. It is also possible for substitutions to be sideways, just changing names. For example, I believe John the Baptist was inserted into Josephus 18 from another name.

The present passage of 18.5 reads:

If we take out the John the Baptist material we get:

We may ask what name was originally there if it was not John the Baptist. A possible answer would be the last name of the last person that Herod was associated with that he could have killed who could have become popular. This person is a man mentioned in the previous section. From Ant. 18:4.5:

There is no story attached to Eleazar, the Giant. It is hard to understand why a story-teller like Josephus would introduce a giant into his text and not tell a story about him. I will suggest that Josephus did tell a story about him. The story was the original story that became the John the Baptist story.

Josephus describes Eleazar as seven cubits (over ten feet tall). This was doubtless an exaggeration that had been built up over the years. What is important is that he was considered a giant. He would have easily attracted a popular following that had grown over the years.

Substituting John the Baptist for Eleazar doesn't make the story more or less realistic, only different.

What is important here is that the Jews are looking for a scapegoat for Herod's loss in the 34-35 war against Aretas of Arabia Petrea. Herod becomes the scapegoat for his putting a good man to death. This triggered God's anger and the subsequent defeat. In the same way, the Jews needed to find a scapegoat for their loss to the Romans. Who had been killed that triggered the anger of God against the Jews?

This became the Jesus Christ story where the Jewish leadership was scapegoated because they executed the innocent man Jesus. The setting of 29 CE was chosen because it was 40 years before the Roman-Jewish War in 69 CE. Forty years was considered one generation. It showed that God had punished the Jews for what was done in the previous generation. Why did the Christians push the scapegoating back an entire generation? The answer is that the Christians had, in historical truth, been responsible for the war. Of course these Christians did not know of any crucified man prior to the war, but simply deduced him out of Biblical prophecies.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Steven Carr

I think I understand.

People 2000 years ago had amazing memories and would memorise sayings and repeat them 100 percent accurately.

Jesus himself, of course, would often vary his sayings from one sermon to the next, which is why there are 2 different versions of the Lord's Prayer.

Because Jesus spoke on 2 different occasions, there are bound to be differences.

Come on, do you expect the guy to remember exactly what he had said previously? Cut him some slack, will you?

PhilosopherJay

Hi Steven Carr,

Precisely.

The New Testament gospels show no evidence of being eyewitnesses accounts, but every evidence of being fantastic tails cured from the Hebrews Scriptures and undergoing a half to two centuries of changes by a host of authors and editors.

To save the phenomena, "oral tradition" gets invented/cited. This oral tradition does not match ordinary historical oral tradition which leads to mythology or usual experiments in oral communication which leads to far more distortion than ordinary written communication. It is a magical "oral tradition" where super brains of the past act like xerox machines and give copies of sayings and speeches in the 100th generation as accurately and perfectly as the original.

When one points out the absurdity of the thing, one is pointed towards the one in 10,000 people who has memorized a long written text accurately. The 9,999 out of a 10,000 who can't remember accurately what they heard or said two days ago are ignored.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

AtheistGamer

Did you ever respond to me? I questioned it and even refuted the article that you cited. You seem to have just given up. I'll give your Oral tradition a fair shake.