How Oral Traditions Were Really Passed On: Podcast 118

This week we look at how oral traditions are really passed on in the area around Judea.  How wrong did the form critics gets it?  The answer is very, very wrong!  This makes much more sense as we look at how the Gospels themselves took shape when they were committed to writing.

Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2006

 “The Gospels are unreliable sources for the history of Jesus not merely because of the fallibility of human memories but more decisively because the Christian communities had no real interest in preserving traditions about the past but formulated Jesus’ traditions for quite the different purpose of witnessing to the present, living Lord Jesus.”  Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2006  page 241

 Bauckham quoting Vincent Taylor “if the Form-Critics are right, the disciples must have been translated to heaven immediately after the resurrection.”  Vincent Taylor, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition, 1935

“The assumption of the comparability with folklore – freely altered and created in transmission – can be questioned at several points.  The time span between Jesus and the Gospels is much shorter than the periods of time spanned by the tradition studied by folklorists.  Moreover the nature of the traditions is very different.  If the analogy with oral traditions in traditional societies is to carry any weight, there must be much more careful distinction between different types of traditions and the different ways in which they are treated.”  “Virtually every element in this construction has been questioned and rejected by some or even most scholars.  Many of these criticisms are rooted in the much better and fuller information that is now available about the way oral traditions operate in predominantly oral societies.”  Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2006  page 247

“That the Gospel traditions were transmitted purely orally for several decades was assumed by the form critics rather than demonstrated.  The world of the early Christian communities was not a purely oral one, but a predominantly oral society in which written texts had a place that was closely related to orality.”  Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2006  page 248

 “The fact that these informants – whether the Twelve or the other disciples – were not the only eyewitnesses but also prominent teachers in the early Christian movement shows, in coherence with what we have learned from Papias, that they did not merely start the traditions going and then withdraw from view, but remained for many years the known sources and guarantors of traditions of the deeds and words of Jesus.”  Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2006  page 30

“The traditional setting is the gathering of villagers in the evening for the telling of stories and the recitation of poetry.  These gatherings have a name: they are called the haflat samar.  Samar in Arabic is a cognate of the Hebrew shamar, meaning to preserve.  The community is preserving its store of tradition.  By informal we mean that there is no set teacher and no specifically identified student.  As stories, poems and other traditional materials are told and recited through the evening, anyone can theoretically participate.  In fact, the older men, the more gifted men, and the socially more prominent men tend to do the reciting.  The reciters will shift depending on who is seated in the circle…I have often been seated in such circles when some piece of traditional oral literature is quoted.  I might not happen to know the story and so proceed to ask what it is all about.  Someone then says, “Elder so-and-so knows the story.”  The ranking social/intellectual figure then proceeds to tell the story with pride.”  K.E. Bailey, “Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels”, Themelios 20 (1995) 363-367.