aa5874

But, there are no other no source that is more reliable than an eyewitness.

What source would you use to confirm an event, an eyewitness or a person who heard about the event?

An eyewitness.

S.C.Carlson

Their (non-written) sources.

Stephen

Analyst

What makes you think that? Like most in those times they could dictate to someone who could write without being literate. This may explain why the gospels appear to need more editing.

Toto

Perhaps we are getting off on a tangent, but there are historians and anthropologists who do try to study marginalized and illiterate peoples. They record "traditions," but they do not accept them as "history," because they generally are not any more reliable than urban legends. My original point was that no other discipline that has any claims to academic respectability takes "tradition," whether oral or written, and tries to extract history from it.

Are you trying to claim that the gospel writers were historians working with non-written sources? The only gospel writer who might fit the category of "historian" is the author of Luke-Acts, but his sources were Mark, either Matthew or "Q," Josephus, the LXX, and possibly other written sources. Where is the tradition?

Toto

It appears that they could read, since they use written sources. CS Lewis claimed that the gospels were obviously written by rude, uneducated fishermen, who only spoke bad Greek and were too simple minded to make stuff up, and therefore they must be true. But the current trend in NT studies holds that they are very sophisticated literary creations.

bacht

I've seen a theory (sorry no cite) that posits dreaming as the origin of religion: the suspension of normal spatial/temporal laws, the emotional intensity of the experience, possible pre-cognition or extra-sensory/subconscious intuition - some kind of magic to pre-scientific mankind?

S.C.Carlson

A specific example might be helpful to understand what you're talking about, because I expect all critical scholars to evaluate their sources critically, instead of merely accepting traditions as history.

Perhaps we're having a definitional dispute, but for me historians definitely work with written traditions (something passed down in writing).

I'm not making any claim here about whether the gospel writers were "historians" in whatever sense that might be. As for Luke, there is plenty of L material that is commonly thought to come from oral tradition (though scholars like Michael D. Goulder think that at least some of it, if not most or even all of it), is due to Lukan creativity). Obviously, the first written gospel, which is not Luke, will have even fewer written sources.

Stephen

Toto

The first gospel does have a written source - the Hebrew scriptures.

Is there any reason to think that the so called L material is "oral tradition" other than a pious hope to turn it into something that can possibly be historical?

Analyst

That's very similar to the religion of the Australian Aborigines - which they have held for 40 to 60 thousand years. And it is believed they were the first to migrate from Africa.

Ben C Smith

I have not read the book, but I suspect that Oral Tradition as History (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Jan Vansina might be relevant to this issue.

Gilbert Gallaghan lists several conditions for the use of oral tradition as history on pages 261-262 of A Guide to Historical Method. Wikipedia has a summary of these conditions on its historical method page, which I think was either created or modified by Peter Kirby.

Ben.