Toto

Serendipitously, this article has just been posted at bibleinterp:

(see the link for references)

Maxmixer3000

Ok, I could just be missing some major piece of information from this article (I should probably read the book it's based on right ) , but to me it seems to be saying that the original work that was the OT was written before the exile. Fine. I'm not arguing that.

However, the article also makes mention that the lamguage of the people would have been Aramaic when the Isrealites returned from exile. Therefore, did the priets (Ezra and Nehemiah as I understand it) translate these religious works into Aramaic for the lay population to understand them?
Or was the layperson left with the oral tradition, while the elites (those who could read and write) kept their version of the OT in Hebrew?

Just wondering!!!
Maxine

From the article;

rlogan

Hi Amaleq13.

I agree with him. There is more than one cause, and will give examples.

Because the oral traditions and language were vanishing, various researchers in the 60's through 80's held events such as elder's conferences where tape recordings were made of the elders speaking to old traditions. Then they committed them to writing.

I remember specifically reading through an elder's conference up in Barrow, where they could not identify the role of the stick carried between the communities by runners.

Earlier anthropological studies that I found had discussed this tradition, and it was pretty simple. The stick had notches in it indicating what quantities of items the village families had to barter, and what things they were most interested in acquiring.

In this case, the oral tradition had been forgotten.

Another insideous example is the whites coming in and observing the Potlatch, and being aghast at the idea the natives were "throwing away" their possessions.

They completely misunderstood the reciprocal obligation that the potlatch conferred on the recipients. Likewise, with the so-called "communal sharing" of the whales. It is a very detailed assignment of specific parts to each party involved in the whaling operation over an entire year's work in this enormous enterprise.

So sometimes you have ignorant whites writing in a foreign language about a culture they do not understand. Sometimes you have a lost or garbled oral tradition.

It is a situation where there was no real written language, and foreigners over-ran them before the traditions could be adequately preserved.

Amaleq13

I got the impression that he had run into the same sort of discrepancy in other cultures where these specific reasons were not necessarily relevant. In other words, it seemed to me that his experience suggested the written version of oral traditions were generally not reliable. Later in the same lecture, he made reference to Q as likely representing a written version of an oral tradition but no connection to questionable reliability was mentioned. It was, of course, the first thing that occurred to me.

While we don't have the same sort of significant cultural transition from oral to written, I don't think we can say that none would have been involved. The oral tradition would have belonged to a rural, wandering, semi-literate/illiterate(?), poor group while the written tradition would have been created by a more urban, sedentary, literate, and wealthy group. Are those differences enough to call into question the reliability of the effort?

Do you know of any formal studies on the reliability of written versions of oral traditions?

rlogan

I am curious how one determines which is the reliable one, given that there is no means of recording the oral tradition other than writing...


I go strictly by the edicts of the Pope, myself.

We have some idea in this case about the development of Hebrew language, and a clouded history of the Kingdoms in Judea. We're talking centuries of overlapping years, potentially, where oral traditions persevere alongside some early written works...

One would have to agree that the urban/wealthy elite would be monopolizing the written sphere, and have the incentive moreover to alter things in their favor. Centralizing both government and historical/cultural "traditions".


Nope.

Amaleq13

I would think it is only possible when the oral tradition continues to exist. I'll have to ask him about the non-Alaskan cultures.

For HB traditions, that would certainly call into question whether a similar discrepancy could be assumed but I don't think Q has the same "protection".

I think Crossan touches on this subject in The Birth of Christianity when he talks about the transition from wandering rural prophets of the Kingdom of God to groups of folks in the villages those prophets visited utilizing scribes to start creating a written record.

It seems to me that this transition would exist whether we assume an HJ or not.

No charge for the doctoral thesis idea but I would like to be mentioned somewhere (credits, acknowledgements?) if anyone decides to go through with it after being inspired.

aikido7

Walter Ong was a Christian biblical scholar who postulated some profound observations on the transition from a "pre-biblical" oral culture to the written word which purports to extend and enrich the spoken word yet ends up doing the precise opposite. And--he seems to be saying--the process is necessary and ultimately tragic.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2004/004/20.34.html

The link is from a slick, mainstream crypto-evangelical publication, but it is a good resume of Ong's life's major thrust and his contributions to biblical scholarship and, ultimately, to the nature of communication itself.

A book he wrote in 1982 called Orality and Literacy which talks about the dynamics between oral cultures and literate scribal cultures in a biblical setting. I find the book tough-going, but the snippets I read in it from time to time are breathtakingly provocative and make a certain theoretic and plausible common sense.

flintknapper

Wouldn't everything that supposedly trasnpired during the time from Jesus' crucifixion until the first writings of Paul be considered oral traditions? By the time the Gospels had been written, a long enough period of time had passed that only oral traditions could be used to write them...no one was left alive that witnessed any of those events.
It's also interesting that when the court case in WA state about Kennewick man was being argued a few years back, Fundamentalist Christians sided with the Tribes in trying to have the oral traditions of the Native Americans accepted in court. Of course they wanted oral traditions to be accepted as fact...their very own big black book is based on oral traditions!
I know a lady that is a professional storyteller. I asked her what is the difference between a professional storyteller like herself and a liar. She replied, "One gets a paycheck".
The greater the amount of time that passes, the less likely it is that oral traditions are accurate. This is just common sense.

Amaleq13

Theoretically, the "Christian oral tradition" would begin with the first teachings given by Jesus. Those, in turn, would have been repeated by his Disciples both before and after his death.

If Q is assumed real, it would probably be a better "end point" than Paul's letters since the latter really doesn't perpetuate anything taught by the living Jesus. There are only two passages that are typically put forth as such (Eucharist tradition and divorce teaching) but both are arguably post-resurrection revelations.