Minimalist

Heinrich Schliemann believed the traditional tales in the Iliad and found a city on the Hellespont. True, he proved nothing else about the story but he did make a major archaeological find.

Herodotus claimed that the Etruscans were from Lydia originally and Livy repeats the tale by claiming the Etruscans were refugees from Troy.

Recent genetic testing has indicated that Herodotus was right.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...ck=2&cset=true


Of course, balanced against those you have the Fountain of Youth, El Dorado, the Northwest Passage. So traditional tales should be investigated. It seems that only when religion is involved will people cling to them beyond reason.

GenesisNemesis

Anyone remember that game "Telephone"?

Chris Weimer

Let me skip right to the point then. You yourself noticed that historical truths can survive up to five generations, and yes, of course, there are many factors in play.

You remark that: The argument was that the Pueblo indians were not investigated for the time when the Spanish contacted them, because it had been for more than 5 or 6 generations.

That's five or six generations. From the time of Pilate to the Simon Bar Kokhba is only 100 years, at the very most 5 generations, but in actuality likely less. Much more likeky, even, is that Christian writings were earlier than Bar Kokhba. Conservatives, Christian and non-Christian alike, like James Crossley, date Mark to the time of Paul, but overwhelming scholarship place it internally at the beginning or end of the Jewish War. Most likely when Mark was penned, only one generation had passed. The author of Mark, if penned in 70 CE, would have known people who lived in that very era.

On to Amsbury:

I offered this to Toto to be fair - here was a critique. However, he accepted it uncritically. First of all, the above means that a retelling of a tale told by an eyewitness is not going to be perfect. That doesn't mean that it should be disregarded as it is regularly done here.

However, in as April DeConick's research points out, societies in which oral tradition is a dominating force provide points of accuracy far beyond that of a society which is decidedly literate.

Finally, remarking Amsbury, honestly, he compared notes once for one event. I sent you a note, Toto, to keep in mind, not as proof of anything. It wasn't, though, a study of any kind, nor is it generally accepted by anthropologists, historians, or ethnographers. Not revealing this information was a bit misleading of you.

You also remarked that Ruth Finnegan said that in African cultures they're not to be trusted.

Read again:

The oral tradition needs to be described and analyzed as source material. Here, it is often rejected entirely as merely "tradition". You'll find now that Toto offers up a great strawman. Whoever said that all tradition must be accepted uncritically? No one. Is it reliable? Well, that depends.

If anyone followed that thread, when show_me_mercy asked me if I thought it was reliable, I asked him to clarify. It would not be reliable to reconstruct perfectly, i.e. all the oral tradition in the Gospels do not go back to Jesus. However, that doesn't mean that some doesn't.

Now, in light of the above, is it fair that tradition here is unquestionably thrown out? Or should it, as I have been advocating, critically examined first?

Chris Weimer

While the examples are humourous, they don't really reflect what goes on in an oral culture.

Toto

Chris:

1. A statement by a researcher that oral testimony is not valid after 5 or 6 generations is not proof that oral testimony is valid up to 5 or 6 generations. So it is a waste of your time to try to calculate the number of generations between Jesus and the earliest Christian writings.

2. I am not saying that it is impossible for oral traditions to contain some fact. The question here is whether scholars regularly look to tradition - oral or written - for information. So far, you haven't provided me with anything that indicates scholars have some sort of method for extracting historical facts from tradition (other than finding some independent confirmation of the facts - in which case the tradition is superfluous.) Ruth Finnegan's article is full of examples where oral tradition is not in fact reliable, and examples where the tradition is in fact a reflection of the current conditions.

Can you provide a source for this assertion: All I can find is, on her blog, is this reference But I don't see any indication that she has done research in the accuracy of oral tradition, or that she even has much of an interest in that topic. She says: (Could she be referring to the gospels as Greco-Roman theater?)

Oral performance has its own rules, but preserving historical accuracy is usually not the aim, as opposed to connecting with the audience, entertaining them and providing moral instruction.

Chris Weimer

Oh, and I suppose you have a better statement?

Then why are Christian traditions excluded from this?

I gave you Finnegan's article, the first couple pages of which contain many references. In particular: P. D. Curtin, "Field
Techniques for Collecting and Processing Oral Data," Journal of African History 9 (1968), 367-385.

You're right. I just gave you another paper on methodology, something which before you didn't ask for. But nevermind about shifting goalposts, you go ahead keep on asking me for research. I don't mind.

You already found it. It was in that very blogpost you cited, Sweeney's book.

Actually, that was primary aim for most ancient literature. As I said somewhere else very, very recently, modern history is just that - modern!

Toto

The goalposts are where they always have been: can you find a scholar who supports the idea of deriving historical fact directly from tradition?

You can send me Curtin's article if you think it supports that.

Chris Weimer

Oh, hi! I already did that. You can have Curtin's article too.

PS - This interchange is turning me into a staunch advocate of "you must be within the guild" - scholars would never get any work done if they kept giving out free articles!

Roger Pearse

This thread is a good example of why I dislike the use of the word 'tradition' (except for the handing down of manuscript texts) -- it's confusing you all. Try expressing your thoughts without using the word.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Chris Weimer

Moreover, I found a very solid reference stated explicitly:

David M. Pendergast, "The Historical Content of Oral Tradition: A Case from Belize," The Journal of American Folklore 101.401 (1988): 321-324.