andrewcriddle

The Illiad was passed down by professional Bards/Singers/Rhapsodists who deliberately memorized it. It was deliberately composed in an eay to memorize rhythmical way.

Something rather similar seems to have happened with the Jewish Mishnah in the early centuries CE.

It is technically possible that the tradition of Jesus' sayings was memorized in this way and passed down as a more-or-less fixed oral composition. (Some scholars have suggested something like this.) Some of the sayings are very memorable and could easily have been orally transmitted in a more or less fixed form. However the Q material as a whole does not seem to be adapted to memorization as a fixed-form oral composition. And we have little evidence of a group of trained memorizers in early Christianity in the way we have in early Greece and rabbinic Judaism.

(For many purposes the difference between Q as a written document and Q as a rigidly memorized fixed-form oral composition may not be all that important.)

Andrew Criddle

spin

Naaa, not verbatim. Every rehearsal of the tradition was likely to have been different. It's a bit like DNA duplication, mutations happening all the time. The Iliad almost certainly evolved over a long period of time, eventually to be turned into a literary work in the Peisistratid era and certainly reworked, so that we have no way of knowing what the redactors' raw materials were. There are a lot of questionable assumptions regarding oral tradition. Sure, complex traditions were passed on, but the audience would have helped cause the equivalent to genetic drift. Telling is a creative act between teller and audience. The audience doesn't respond well to a boring tale and a good storyteller has to learn the job and become the owner of the story.

The evidence that we have from the synoptic gospels is that the relationship between Mark and the other two is fundamentally a literary one. The others had the text of Mark and used it, improved it, reordered it, reduced it, all well-known literary acts. This is not to say that the gospels do not contain oral traditions. I think that there are traces to be found, as in the case of the greatly divergent birth narratives which share basic information but which have developed in different traditions before being written down.

Oral tradition is hard to get at if we only have written sources as evidence. We need to be able to construct a functioning backstory to explain the necessity of non-written sources to allow an oral explanation.

DCHindley

(Cromhaut, Markus) The Reconstruction of Judean Ethnicity in Q (PhD thesis, 2006)

Cromhout's Q:

3: (3)	Setting of John's Preaching	11:33-35 (36)	Lamp; Sayings on Light
3:7b-9	John’s Preaching of Repentance	11:39-44,46-52	Woes against Pharisees and Lawyers
3:16b-17	The Coming One	12:2-12	Fearless Confession
<3:21-22>	<The Baptism of Jesus>	12: (13-14,16-21)	Divider Rich Fool
4:1-13	The Temptations	12:22b-31, 33-34	On Anxiety over Life
4: (16a)	Reference to Nazara	12:<35-38>, 39-40	<Watch for the Son of Man>
6:20a	Introduction to Sermon	12:42b-46	Faithful and Unfaithful Servants
6:20b-23	Beatitudes	12:49, 51-53	On Divisions
6: (24-26)	Woes	12:54-56	Weather Signs/Signs of the Times
6:27-33	On Retaliation; Generous Giving; Golden Rule	12:58-59	Settle with a Creditor
(Q/Matt 5:41)	Go the Second Mile	13:18-19, 20-21	Parables of the Mustard Seed and the Leaven
6: (34-35b), 35c	Conclusion	13:24, (25), 26-27	The Two Ways; Closed Door
6:36-37b, 38c	On Mercy and Judging	13:28-29,30	Many Will Come from East and West
6:39-45	On Self-Correction	13:34-35	Lament Over Jerusalem
6:46	Why Do You Call Me Lord?	14:<5>	<A Sheep Who Falls into a Pit on the Sabbath>
6:46-49	The Two House Builders	14:11/18:14	Exalting the Humble
7:1 b-2, 6b-10	The Centurion at Capernaum	14:16-24	The Feast
7:18-19, 22-23	John’s Question	14:26-27; 17:33	Three Discipleship Sayings
7:24-28	Jesus’ Eulogy of John	14:34-35	Savorless Salt
7: (29-30)	John, Tax Collectors, and Prostitutes	15:4-7	The Lost Sheep
7:31-35	Children in the Agora	15: (8-10)	The Lost Drachma
9:57-60, (61-62)	Two (Three?) Volunteers	16:13	God and Mammon
10:2-16	Mission Instructions	16:16	The Kingdom Suffers Violence
10:21-22	Thanksgiving for Revelation	16:17-18	The Torah; Divorce
10:23b-24	Commendation of Disciples	17:1 b-2	On Scandals

DCH

yalla

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_B._Lord


"Lord authored the book The Singer of Tales, first published in 1960. .....

He demonstrated the ways in which various great ancient epics from Europe and Asia were heirs to a tradition not only of oral performance, but of oral composition. He argued strongly for a complete divide between the non-literate authors of the Homeric epics and the scribes who later wrote them down, positing that the texts that have been preserved are a transcription by a listener of a single telling of the story. The story itself has no definitive text, but consists of innumerable variants, each improvised by the teller in the act of telling the tale from a mental stockpile of verbal formulas, thematic constructs, and narrative incidents. This improvisation is for the most part unconscious; epic tellers believe that they are faithfully recounting the story as it was handed down to them, even though the actual text of their tellings will differ substantially from day to day and from teller to teller"

Jaybees

I still lean toward the word of mouth explanation. As others are now pointing out in this thread, my use of the term "verbatim" is overdoing the certainty of memory. Which, of course, would explain the fact that the gospel writers do differ from each other in many ways in the instances of the anecdotes which they share.

Adam

I understand the silence here in FRDB towards my thesis of early written eyewitness records of Jesus. The less knowledgeable of you assume I’m off-the-wall, but the better-informed among you know that current scholarship has nothing to say against me. Though Form Criticism has been very helpful in identifying the very sources of the gospels I work with, the otherwise negative aspects of Form Criticism have withered away as useless in reconstructing Jesus. For MJ purposes this collapse is fine as leaving us with so little to know about Jesus, but that’s not where scholars were content to leave it.
The old argument regarding Q was between those who saw a conflict between Q and Christianity as against scholars who regarded Q as having developed to complement the conventional written texts like Mark. That would explain why Q had neither Passion Narrative nor Resurrection. Heinz E. Todt argued that Q could not have developed in parallel, but must have been teachings of Jesus preserved by a community dedicated to that purpose. Todt’s Son of Man in the Synoptic Tradition was translated in 1965 and its conservative approach has been followed by many recent scholars. See Peter Pokorny The Genesis of Christology in 1987 (see p. 90), A. Polag’s “The Theological Center of the Sayings Source” appeared in 1991 in P. Stuhlmacher’s The Gospel and the Gospels (102), and M. Hengel’s “Jesus as Messianic Teacher of Wisdom” in 1995 in Studies in Early Christology (76). (Daniel A. Smith, The Post Mortem Vindication of Jesus in the Sayings Gospel Q, 2006, p. 8-9) (or via: amazon.co.uk) (However, Smith has his own theory that Assumption, not Resurrection, developed in Q as in Luke 13:34-35 and Luke 12:42-46 redacted on to 12:39-40, and paralleling Mark 16:1-8. See p. 168-69. And I agree that these are Q2, with close verbal exactness.)
The new view of non-complementarity easily splits two ways. The most noise has been made by those who see a Q Community as devising the Q sayings to fit themselves as they went along. The Jesus Seminar and similar scholars acknowledge a core of sayings from Jesus augmented by succeeding layers developing farther and farther afield. The other understanding more simply explains the differences as above, from more careful preservation of the ethical teachings of Jesus about the Kingdom of God.
Intuitive study of Q reveals that it is very different from the way Pauline Christianity developed, with at least a core that must go back to Jesus. There is nothing anyone can present that prevents this having come from an eyewitness of Jesus. A non-eyewitness would have more likely echoed what we know of early Christianity. An eyewitness who wrote while Jesus was still alive would explain the earlier scholarly problem of why there is no Passion Narrative or later.
Scholarship has turned in my direction, so obviously no one in FRDB could give citations to refute me. Not that anything above proves me either. For that matter there is a lot still to be proven. Kloppenborg’s favorite scholar to cite is Ronald Piper (see link below, p. 50)
, and he is still active. Piper points out that the aphorisms in Q have been little studied, thus he wrote in 2004 his Wisdom in the Q Tradition; the Aphoristic Teaching of Jesus (or via: amazon.co.uk). My point here is that there are something over a hundred short sayings of Jesus in the Synoptics (pg. 2), and the easiest explanation for this is that somebody wrote down bits of Jesus’s sayings while Jesus spoke. But the time one sentence was written down, Jesus would have gone on to something else. That could also explain why parables are longer—a story could more easily be kept in mind while writing.

Vorkosigan

That was Crossan's point too in The Birth of Christianity. Benedict's Oral Literature in Africa also says the same thing.

Jaybees

In Nikos Kazantzakis's Last Temptation of Christ, there's a passage where Christ asks Mark if he can see what Mark keeps writing down. I can't remember the exact wording but after Mark reluctantly lets Christ read what he's writing, Christ says, "That's not what I've been saying, but maybe that's what I should have been saying."

The point, for this thread, is that fiction can as easily be trasmitted back and forth as fact.

stephan huller

For those interested in a more modern example of the preservation of an (ancient) oral tradition down to the eighteenth century there is the Swahili example of Kyuo kya Hereḳali (the book of Heraclius) which actually preserves the story of the last Emperor to control Jerusalem and Egypt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utendi_wa_Tambuka

yalla

A bit of a tangent.
I have friends and acquaintances among the indigenous people local to my region and they have , sometimes, shared with me their dreamtime stories.
But, and this is sub textual usually, occasionally tacitly overt, at a low level of intimacy.
I am after all totally uninitiated into their culture and they have practised ceremonies and stories at multi levels of detail and meaning for tens of millenia.
Rather like the mystery religions and levels of introduction for initiates I imagine.

So I have heard, sort of, the same story/song/with movement and expression told differently from different persons at different times and different circumstances as levels of trust increased and the relationship developed.

Oral tradition aint as simple as it is made out to be.