Oral Tradition

An argument some make about the credibility of the gospels is that the material they contain all comes from oral tradition, and the Jews at the time had a long tradition for accurately keeping a good oral tradition. There are, in my view, a number of issues with this argument.

Who was doing it?

To say the Jews were good at keeping an oral tradition is a very broad claim. What we know is that collectively they kept their holy texts (i.e., the Old Testament) very accurately, but it is quite a stretch to therefore suppose every Jew of the time was trained in maintaining oral tradition.

Their oral tradition was maintained by specific people, all of whom were in the priesthood, and all of whom were trained presumably from an early age.

Quite different to Galilean fishermen.

But there was an oral tradition!

That said, it seems likely Jesus did teach the disciples to memorise some sayings. We do read about him sending the disciples off to preach.

Mark 6:6... Then Jesus went around teaching from village to village. 7 Calling the Twelve to him, he began to send them out two by two and gave them authority over impure spirits.

It is almost certain he told them what to preach before doing so!

How accurately did they memorise it? We do not know. However, a bigger issue here is: what actually was it? At this point the oral tradition was what Jesus said, not what Jesus did.

What was part of the oral tradition?

This bears repeating: The first oral tradition was about what Jesus said, nit what he did. When he taught the disciples what to say, he was teaching them his words. He would give them a saying, they would practice until they got it right, then they would go and preach to others.

The events in Jesus life - the most important of which was Jesus' death - were very different. Clear Jesus did not teach them how to memorise the story of his own death.

So we have two significantly different oral traditions: what Jesus said, and what Jesus did.

What Jesus said

This is what would have been practiced and controlled. It existed before Jesus died, the words were carefully prescribed by Jesus, and all the disciples were told to say the same thing.

Some of the earliest written works were composed only of sayings. The purported Q document and the Gospel of Thomas were just Jesus' sayings.

What Jesus did

Stories about what Jesus did were quite different. Certainly Jesus did not prescibe the words of the passion account - the disciples were left to do tat themselves. We have no reason to suppose the same controls were in place, or that the disciples were all saying the same thing; it seems likely each disciple told his personal story in the first few years, ad with no compulsion to tell it the same each time.

That is not oral tradition, that is gossip.

That does not make it false, but it makes it less reliable.

The rumour mill

In such a culture, what is to stop new rumours appearing and getting adopted as fact?

If the enemies of Christianity are claiming the disciples stole the body, and some guy speculates that maybe there was a guard on the tomb, how long until the community take it as fact that there was a guard on the tomb?