spamandham

Why would we presume anything even remotely like this? We don't witness such things today. Instead, what we see is that oral tradition tends to exaggerate itself upon each retelling. It's the least reliable form of witness known to man.

If you start with an oral tradition, it's trivially easy to spin a written tale that suits whatever position you choose to promote, and then claim that's the basis of the oral tradition. It's impossible for anyone to counter such an argument except to replicate that approach with an alternative text. Oral tradition is completely unreliable, and even written tradition is easily manipulated by adding details.

The idea that hundreds/thousands of years of oral traditions, writing them down, copying and editing could go by without drastic changes that render the original story unintelligible, is simply absurd.

BALDUCCI

Isnt it odd that

(a) our tribal god is the best and we will follow him exclusively...

(b) became known as "monotheism" ??

Amedeo

The basic presumption I made is most simple and most logical: Israel was formed by Abraham out of the Hebrews (a faction of the Canaanite people). As chieftain and priest of the Hebrews, Abraham did not givem them a new religion. He established a covenant with his and their God. So, we have the beginning of Israel, which HAD religion doctrines from at least one source [but I know of two sources -- which is NOT the point of the discussion here]. Their doctrines were oral doctrines, spoken to them by the earlier priests/prophets.

What is uniquely Israelitic doctrine consists of the teachings (beginning with Abraham) to the brotherhood of the Covenant. There were teachings from generation to generation. Eventually somebody started writing the heard doctrines (stories, anecdotes, reports of god's voice to the prophets, etc.) I suppose that the HebrewBible available today goes back to the middle of the 7th century B.C. (Additions were made as late as 450 B.C.) These DATES may be inaccurate, but MY POINT is that it is false to say that what WAS WRITTEN DOWN came straight from God and was unknown to the Israelites. I do not accept this nonsense that the written Bible consists of divine revelations to scribes. The Israelites had prophets and teachers before the scribes, and it is THEIR stories that, accurately or not, were handed down and eventuallty written down.

I would expect that the scribes did editing, omitted some oral traditions, changed stories, made interpolations, but I give them the greatest benefit of the doubt that they were not fable-inventors, that they stated certain "skeletal facts" they inherited from oral traditions. [If they had been clever editors, they would not have reported contradictory accounts.] If we deny this, then call the Bible a work of fiction, and don't bother trying to figure out when and where Abraham lived, where the stories of creation came from, or whether the Islaelites were ever in Egypt. (There is no ground for supposing that the content of the Torah consists of the teachings of Moses, as if there had been no humans before him, Israelites and not, that knew about the Elohim or his lord Yahweh. Moses may have written the Commandments in hieroglyphs, but not in the Phoenician letters in which some bible parts were written later on. The WRITTEN Bible is simply not the prophetic messages and the teachings which the Israelites received from their very beginning.)

From Bible-texual information unwittingly presented in stories, one can correlate their original composition and delivery with the calendar chronology which modern man has been defining in the last few centuries. (We know, for instance, that the earliest humans were not shepherds and farmers. So, the story of Adam and Eve is not older that the agriculture which was established in the Middle East. And so on to infinity.)

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What was the job of the priesthood but to keep memories alive?

spamandham

A simpler assumption still, is that Abraham is a legendary figure who never actually existed. He is a character from a story. What's so complicated about that, that requires assuming a historical figure who spoke with a god instead?

I'm not aware of any serious historian who thinks the Biblical Abraham was a real person.

Amedeo

Let us assume that the Trojan war, whose last days became the subject of an epic (The Iliad) never occurred and that, therefore, all the names of its heroes are fictitious. So, Homer or somebody later called Homer, composed the Iliad. It is possible, though that Homer collected, organized, and retold legends which had been composed by bards at earlier times. Of course, many details and speeches he reports may be his own inventiones, but names os people, peoples, places, gods, and bsic events, maybe items he inherited from an oral or partly written traditions. I see the Iliad, the bible, and other ancient works as being in nature like the modern "historical novels."

There are other written stories about the Iliadic war and personalities outside the Iliad. They have some corroborative value. Perhaps Abraham is attested only in the Bible. Perhaps Jesus is attested only in the Gospels (until after the writing of the Gospels).

My question is, When were the Gospel anecdotes first told? When were the Bible stories first told? When were the Iliad episodoes first told?

In all three cases, I do not see any reason for supposing that the author of the written works we have were the inventors of what is contained therein; there are many reasons to the contrary -- which somebody can take the time to expound.
So, if there were oral traditions as the basis of the contents in those books, when were the oral storis originally told?

Again, but looking at incidental information given in the Bible stories, we can dermine at least the time before which they could not have been told. Those incidental informations are facts we know from other sources. The story of the Garden of Eden was told after the names of the Tigris and the Euphates and some named countries or cities already existed. The sequence of people and peoples in the Bible need not be accurate at all [from our historical standpoint], but, for example, Abraham -- whether a real person or a fictional charater -- is in a time-place slot. And from incidentally mentioned facts, we can determine a period of time when the story of Abraham was told,
(By using the internal genealogies of people and the number of years they lived, others have come up with different dates as to when tha Abraham character lived. The evidence from incidental facts is more cogent, since the longevity of Bible people may be entirely fictitious; the mentioned places, cities, or rulers are not fictitious.)

ANYWAY, the main point in the whole thread is that there were people and nations and supernatural beings before and apart from the biblical beginning of mankind, and that the narrators of the early Biblical anecdotes used information from ethnic oral traditions or a pre-history which is of course absent in the Bible.

spamandham

No-one knows of course. But I see no reason to suspect that what we have in written form today is substantially similar to whatever oral tradition, if any, originated it.

We really don't know that these stories were based on oral traditions. There's certainly nothing outlandish with the idea, but it can't be supported. They very well could be based on lost prior written sources combined with some imagination.

In the case of the gospels in particular, considering how heavily they refer to the Jewish scriptures, it seems unlikely they are the result of an oral tradition. They appear to be constructed directly from the Jewish scriptures.

Some of the stories in the OT have paralells in other traditions, such as the story of Noah and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Oral tradition would certainly account for the differences, but so could the reauthoring of an older written source.