The Everlasting Covenant - 8.6 The Oral Tradition

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8.6 The Reliability of the Oral Tradition

by Hubert F. Sturges, www.everlastingcovenant.com, February 17,  2010

Topics:
Gleaned from the Oral Tradition
Oral Tradition Described
Jesus’ Teaching Methods
Jesus’ Teachings were Written Early
Sources

Gleaned from the Oral Tradition

Moses is the writer of the first five books of the Bible. His religious education consisted of his first twelve years with Jochebed, his natural mother. Once he went to live with his foster mother in the palace, he was assailed by the priesthood of Egypt. As the crown prince he was expected to join the priestly caste, and take the name of one of their gods as his own. How could he possibly have known enough of the history of the Bible to write Genesis?

I believe that God directed him to Jethro, priest of Midian. Jethro was probably one of the children of the east, one of the other children of Abraham. He had a knowledge of God. In the hours that Moses and Jethro talked around the fires of the home, Moses learned of the myths and legends of creation, the flood, and of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Most of these legends were mixed with error, but the Spirit of God led Moses to choose what was true. Moses recorded in his books the true story of Genesis gleaned from the oral tradition.

Some have looked on the early patriarchs as illiterate and naive. This could certainly not be said of Adam, created in the image of God. Noah was a remarkable man just for building the immense ark. According to the record, the Tower of Babel was an exhibit of building genius. Why then are their written records so sparse?

We have heard something about the “oral tradition.” We tend to look upon this in the light of what we are capable of doing today. But the early patriarchs were different. In the Bible record they lived over 900 years. The influence of a patriarch would thus extend over many generations. They had recently descended from Adam, created in the image of God. Is it not reasonable to consider that their mental capabilities far exceeded ours.

The Oral Tradition Described

With their long lives and retentive memories, the patriarchs had little need for written records. But did that not lead to corruption of the message or the story? The oral tradition was not haphazard. Communities had leaders who exerted control over the oral tradition, to maintain accuracy. It is rather hard for us, in our day of computers to imagine the capacity of the Oriental memory. In our western culture less and less memory work has attended education.

Boyd (ibid.)(1) also notes that general studies of oral transmission have shown it to be more reliable than critics would presuppose:

    Studies by anthropologists such as Albert B. Lord and Jan Vansina have demonstrated that the transmission of traditions in oral societies follow a generally fixed, if flexible pattern - similar to the type witnessed to in the Gospels themselves. Related to this, contemporary psycholinguistic studies have served to confirm that the techniques that characterized Jesus' oral teaching methods would have made for 'very accurate communication between Jesus and his followers' and would have 'ensured excellent semantic recall.'
And Samuel Byrskog (2) in Story as History [116] comments:

   Writing was usually seen as supplementary to the oral discourse. Orators should avoid note-books that were too detailed. One is reminded of Quintillian's criticism of Laenas' dependence on such notes and his clear-cut advice: "For my own part, however, I think we should not write anything which we do not intend to commit to memory"...Writing was not avoided as such, but functioned mainly as a memorandum of what the person already should remember from oral communication.

Oral recall was far more important in ancient societies, particularly Judaism, than we have commonly allowed for; and the techniques used for memorization by ancient societies as a whole have a remarkable similarity to techniques promulgated by today's "memory improvement" seminars we now pay exorbitant fees to attend. Byrskog notes that "...as we know today from modern studies of visual memory, most people recall -- correctly or not -- the past through images impressed on their memory. The ancient people were aware of this basic, human characteristic." He also reports exceptional examples from ancient texts of memory feats [162-3]:

    1. Plato says that the Sophist Hippias of Elis "was able to repeat fifty names after hearing them only once."
    2. Pliny the Elder reports that Cyrus was able to name every man in his army, and that Lucius Scipio remembered the names of every person in the Roman Empire, and that one named Charmadas "recited by heart any book in the libraries."
    3. Seneca boasted of being able in his youth to repeat 2000 names read to him "and recite in reverse order over two hundred verses his fellow students told him..." He did regard this as miraculous, however!
These comments from Pliny are likely (!) exaggerated. The ideal was to recall exactly, "as detailed as possible," though obviously the ideal would have limits.

Among the Jews, rabbis were encouraged to memorize entire books of the OT, indeed the whole OT, and all of Jewish education consisted of rote memory. Students were expected to remember the major events of narratives - although incidentals could be varied, if the main point was not affected (8– 32). (This is reflected well in the differences in reportage that we find in the Gospels, for there we find an 80% agreement in the words of Jesus (6–106)

Many of the disagreements are cultural variations of the sort we might expect, such as Luke, out of consideration for his Gentile readers, not using the Jewish term "Son of Man" where Matthew or Mark do.) This was a society well-attuned to preserving oral tradition; and as Charlesworth notes, "Oral tradition is not always unreliable; in fact, sometimes it is more reliable than the written word." (3–19) Skeptics who compare oral transmission to the modern children's game of "telephone" are engaging a hopeless anachronism.

...Reisner has done a thorough study both of educational practices within the first-century Judaism, as well as the evidence within the Gospels' tradition related to Jesus and his teaching methods. He has concluded - quite apart from a dependency on Rabbinic parallels - that memory of sacred teachings and traditions was a vital part of both Jewish life in general and Jesus' teaching program in particular (1–121-2).

Jesus’ Teaching Methods

Jesus used teaching forms that encouraged memorization. But even if He did not, the nature of the society within which Jesus taught would still preserve history through memorization. Wright [Wrig.PG, 123] has stated:

   If we come to the ministry of Jesus as first-century historians, and forget our twentieth-century assumptions about mass media, the overwhelming probability is that most of what Jesus said, he said not twice but 200 times, with (of course) a myriad of local variations.
Thus, even if we dismiss the mnemonic nature of Jesus' teaching; even if we ignore the tremendous capacity of the Oriental memory, we still have to consider that whatever Jesus taught, He would, like any teacher, have taught it many, many times - enough times so that His disciples would have the entire set of lessons committed to memory! Given the data above, we have every reason to believe that the material within the Gospels is historically reliable.

And Glenn Miller has added in this regard:

    Part of this growing confidence in the accuracy of oral transmission, is the growing awareness of the easy-to-memorize structure of many of Jesus sayings. (So Stein, 200)
    It is now clearer than ever before that Jesus was a teacher. In fact the Gospels describe him as a teacher forty-five times and the term 'rabbi' is used of him fourteen times.... He also used mnemonic devices, such as parables, exaggerations, puns, metaphors and similes, proverbs, riddles, and parabolic actions, to aid his disciples and audience in retaining his teachings. Above all he used poetry, "parallelismus membrorum", for this purpose.
    In light of all this, it is evident that Jesus 'carefully thought out and deliberately formulated [his] statements' (Gerhardsson).
Jesus’ Teachings were Written Early

We have good reason to believe that Jesus' words were transcribed early, perhaps as early as during His earthly ministry. Christianity was evangelistic, and recorded the words and deeds of Jesus on paper. These documents could be sent all around the Roman Empire, and be left behind when the Apostles moved on! But even without that, as Boyd points out [Boyd.CSSG, 125]:

   It was (and yet is) often assumed that early Christianity would not have been interested in writing down and codifying their ideas and their histories...(but) in Qumran we find a thoroughly apocalyptic group doing just this! Though they expected an imminent end to the world, they nevertheless took great care in composing volumes.
Can we believe that the words of Jesus were recorded in writing earlier than skeptics assert? Again, we offer Miller's analysis, using material derived from Wenham [Wenh.RMML]:

    There is a growing body of evidence and argument that supports the thesis that disciples and followers of Jesus 'took notes' during or immediately after His words/deeds.
The only hypothesis with enough flexibility to meet the requirements is that a body of loose notes stands behind the bulk of the synoptic tradition. The wide use of shorthand and the carrying of notebooks in the Graeco-Roman world, the school practice of circulating lecture notes and utilizing them in published works, and the later transmission of rabbinic tradition through shorthand notes support this hypothesis. As a former publican, the Apostle Matthew would have been admirably fitted to fill a position as note-taker in the band of uneducated apostles.

Goodspeed suggests that Jesus found himself in a similar position to Isaiah, when it became clear that his message was going to be rejected by the people as a whole. He deliberately took steps for the preservation of his teaching among his disciples. He observed the faith and commitment of Levi the tax-collector and recognized him as one who was capable of making a record of his teaching. The other leading disciples could doubtless read and write, but from what we know of them they all seem to have been essentially practical men. The only one who was a professional pen-pusher was Matthew.

Sources:

1. Boyd, Gregory A.: Cynic Sage or Son of God? Chicago: Bridgepoint, 1995.
2. Byrskog, Samuel: Story as History, 116
3. Charlesworth, James H. Jesus Within Judaism. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
4. Kloppenborg, John S.: The Formation of Q. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987.
5. Lentz, Tony M.: Orality and Literacy in Hellenic Greece. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U. Press, 1989.
6. Linnemann, Eta: Is There a Synoptic Problem? Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992.
7. Moreland, J. P.: Scaling the Secular City. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987.
8. Wilkins, Michael J. and J. P. Moreland, eds: Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995.