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 fr