Indexed Oral Tradition

December 14, 2009 By 7 Comments
The blog Indexed is famous for its humorous Venn Diagrams, which I assume we’ve all seen at some point. But I didn’t know that it not that long ago made an attempt to intersect with the biblioblogosphere – and perhaps not entirely successfully. But this chart may at least stimulate discussion – what do you think of it?

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  • http://www.blogger.com/profile/03232781356086767207 AIGBusted

    Hi James,I was wondering if you would watch Richard Carrier's Skepticon talk and give some commentary on it, tell us what you think about it:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOGebAEOU2gSincerely,Ryan

  • http://www.blogger.com/profile/00637936588223855248 Joshua

    I'm not sure this has any general validity. A lot of information is still transmitted orally. Look at how many urban legends there are. Moreover, urban legends have a surprisingly high mutation rate even when transmitted by email. I'm not convinced that printing has done as much as one would like to improve transmission.

  • http://cleverbadger.net Jay

    While I would agree that printing, at its best, offers improved transmission over oral methods at their worst, I think that the diagram, as presented, somewhat oversimplifies things. A modern document with a digital master can, in principle, be printed an infinite number of times with no differences between the copies and the original. The same document, typeset by hand from a handwritten manuscript is more likely to contain transmission errors. If the document is reset at a later date for more printings, it's likely to contain different errors than it did in previous printings. I suspect that with oral transmission, there is a similarly wide range of fidelity – cultures that place a very high value on oral transmission might be expected to have well-developed systems to preserve the material (such as rhyme, repeated phrases or grammatical structure.) Joshua's example of urban legends is interesting. In many cases, urban legends evolve by updating – modern details (instant messaging, for example) replace obsolete details (such as telephone party lines), while the underlying framework remains relatively constant.The bottom line, I suppose, is that the accuracy of transmission can vary quite a bit in both oral and written forms, and there is significant overlap between both forms.

  • http://www.blogger.com/profile/02561146722461747647 James F. McGrath

    Ryan, it has some interesting points, and some humor, but there is much that is disappointing.The consensus (particularly since the Arabic quotation in Agapius came to light) is that Josephus did mention Jesus, and that Christians tampered with the reference rather than inserting the whole thing.Paul does mention Jesus' death by crucifixion. It is indeed deserving of discussion why Paul doesn't include parables and other things, and NT scholars have covered that ground repeatedly. But Paul does in fact mention things Jesus is supposed to have said – in 1 Corinthians Paul mentions Jesus' teaching about divorce and the last supper, for instance. And so there is a noticeable dearth but not a complete omission of Jesus' teaching, and it is most easily explicable by noting the difference between the letters Paul wrote and the scenario Carrier envisages. Paul was not writing to tell people about a new teacher he wanted to inform them about. He was writing to people he could assume had already been "introduced" to Jesus and his teaching. And so part of the problem is that Carrier is positing a rather different scenario in his illustration.Another problem is that Carrier lumps together material that historians would agree is not historical (the infancy stories with the Magi, the star and so on) and material that has a strong case in its favor. Showing that a story of miraculous conception is historically problematic has no bearing on the historicity of other material – as we see from countless examples of ancient figures for whom miraculous births were invented but who clearly were nevertheless actual people. Carrier seems to be making the classic amateur blunder of thinking that showing that there are mythical and unhistorical elements in ancient sources means that there is nothing of historical value in them.I did like his paraphrase of the discussion between the women going to the tomb! :)

  • http://www.blogger.com/profile/03089281236217906531 Scott F

    I was bemused by Carrier's treatment of the trial details in Acts as historically reliable while rejecting just about anything that the same author wrote about the life of Jesus or his crucifixion. Perhaps he justified this late in his talk because I only made it through about three of the 10 minute segments.

  • http://ntwrong.blogspot.com +Wrong

    I wonder whether these days it comes down to individual preferences, i.e. whether you prefer to process information by ear or by eye.Also, I had to chuckle that Joshua seemed to imply email transmission of urban legends being oral. Things definitely have become more complicated. Ever since the invention of the tape recorder, oral information can be stored faithfully. And with podcasts and YouTube, an originally text-based and hence visual medium like email and the internet now equally caters to those who prefer the auditory medium.With the technology available to us nowadays, anything can be changed as often as you like it: oral as well as written information, and not even pictures are reliable any more.And for old fogeys like me who prefer the written text, it has become quite a challenge to keep up with all those video and audio links :( +Wrong

  • Lucian

    Oral Tradition has stayed basically the same for two millennia, whereas "Printing-Press Protestantism" has changed innumerable times in the last 500 years. word-verif. = forks