The literature

This page lists every source the article rests on, and every source worked up for it and not used, with the reason.  The research files behind it are in research/:  lead-verified.md (everything the lead read from the bytes, with page anchors), memory-experiments.md and ancient-practices-primaries.md (helper dossiers, leads until confirmed in lead-verified.md), scholarship-access.md (archive.org identifiers and page offsets), social-memory-and-transmission.md (the supplemental primary-source review), orchestrator-review.md (parent source and argument corrections), and passage-compare.ts with its output.  The companion quotes.md gathers the principal positions.

Direction is whether a source supports, undercuts or complicates the claim that the Jesus tradition was preserved reliably between the events and the Gospels, judged by what it shows, not by its author's views.  Verified is full when the cited passages were read in the source itself, partial when only searched passages were read, citation when only the record was seen.

Primary test case

hogg-1914 Rena L. Hogg, A Master-Builder on the Nile (1914)

method: biography with participants' account direction: complicates verified: full The public-domain biography behind Bailey's John Hogg example, read from the Princeton copy on archive.org and stored.  It prints the village version of the robbers story "to show how fact and fancy mingle" (p. 214) and then the participants' less elaborate account as printed by the daughter (pp. 215-218), which reports no robbery.  It also says the village memory kept Hogg's sermons, songs and gestures while glamorising his deeds (p. 13).  It allows comparison of reported participant accounts, the village legend and Bailey's printed telling.  His possible use of the book prevents treating their resemblance as a controlled half-century oral-transmission test.

bailey-1995 Kenneth E. Bailey, "Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels" (Themelios 1995, from AJT 1991)

method: participant observation, unrecorded direction: complicates verified: full Defines the three kinds of oral tradition and proposes "informal controlled" tradition as the model for the Gospels.  The copy read has no original page numbers, so it is cited by section.  Its one checkable example, the robbers story, matches the version Rena Hogg labelled as legend, and Bailey does not report her correction.

keener-2017b Craig S. Keener, "Weighing T. J. Weeden's Critique of Kenneth Bailey's Approach" (JGRChJ 13, 2017)

method: review of the exchange direction: complicates verified: full A defender of Bailey's general model who concedes that the Hogg material is Weeden's strongest point (p. 45), that the original incident differed from the oral versions (p. 53), and that Bailey was probably recounting Rena Hogg's printed version (p. 54 n. 63).  Supplies the 1873 date of the incident (p. 52 n. 52).

dunn-2013 James D. G. Dunn, The Oral Gospel Tradition (2013)

method: literary comparison read as oral performance direction: complicates verified: partial Read by search-inside on a print-disabled scan, printed page = leaf - 12, anchored by the page map and by the book's own cross-reference to p. 138.  Used for the centurion analysis (pp. 148, 319) and for the reprint of Dunn's 2009 reply to Weeden, which concedes Weeden's "appropriate warning" (p. 256).

Models of the tradition

bultmann-1968 Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (ET 2nd ed. 1968)

method: form criticism direction: undercuts verified: partial Search-inside, leaf - 12.  The founding statement of the editorial-framework thesis (pp. 2-4) and of community creation through prophetic sayings (pp. 127-128, 163).  Also shows Bultmann judging case by case (p. 26).

sanders-2000 E. P. Sanders, The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition (1969, reprint 2000)

method: systematic comparison direction: complicates verified: partial Search-inside, leaf - 18.  Tested form criticism's laws of growth and found the tradition developed "in opposite directions," including "both more and less Semitic" (p. 272).  Cuts against both sides' use of style as a dating test.

gerhardsson-2001 Birger Gerhardsson, The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition (2001)

method: analogy from rabbinic practice direction: supports verified: partial Search-inside, leaf - 26.  The controlled-tradition model in its author's later statement:  disciples learned sayings by heart (p. 84), Paul handed over fixed texts (p. 22), memorisation allows editing (p. 54).  The evidence for Jesus' own method is inference (p. 44).

bauckham-2017 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2nd ed. (2017)

method: patristic testimony, internal features, memory psychology direction: supports verified: full EPUB in the library with print-page anchors.  Used for his thesis (p. 8), his report and qualification of objections to Gerhardsson (p. 251), the notebook argument and its concession (pp. 288-289), the gist argument and its limit (p. 345), and his clarification that eyewitnesses did not always get everything right (p. 610), and his reply to memory-research critics (pp. 609-610).  The second edition does not discuss Weeden's Hogg critique.

ehrman-2016f Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels (2016)

method: popular synthesis of psychology, social memory, anthropology direction: undercuts verified: partial Read by search-inside on the HarperOne print scan jesusbeforegospe0000ehrm (leaf - 12, anchored by the page map and by recto running heads on odd pages) and by the library's ebook OCR ehrman-2016c for context.  Grants accurate gist memories (p. 144);  describes the Hogg versions as vastly different (p. 77), requiring a distinction between the biography's village legend and its participants' account;  quotes Neisser on Dean selectively (pp. 145-146).  The older record ehrman-2016 (unverified pages) is superseded for page numbers by this read.

allison-2010 Dale C. Allison, Constructing Jesus (2010)

method: memory psychology applied to historical-Jesus method direction: complicates verified: partial Search-inside, leaf - 32.  Argues for general impressions over single units (pp. 13-14) and that most single events and sayings cannot be demonstrated (p. 22).

vansina-1985 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (1985)

method: ethnohistory, comparative fieldwork direction: complicates verified: partial Search-inside on the Trent University scan oraltraditionash0000vans (leaf - 18, anchored by the page map, the contents and the index).  The library record gives the other scan (leaf - 16).  Definitions of oral tradition and oral history (pp. 3, 28), repetition and fidelity (p. 41), sanctions and the test by variant versions (p. 42).

Ancient practice

hezser-2001 Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (2001)

method: survey of evidence direction: complicates verified: partial Search-inside, leaf - 12.  "At least ninety percent" could at most sign their names (p. 503).

keith-2011 Chris Keith, Jesus' Literacy (2011)

method: social history of literacy direction: complicates verified: partial Search-inside on jesusliteracyscr0000keit, leaf - 20.  Graded literacy (p. 110);  "illiteracy was the rule of the day" (p. 123).

butler-1920, butler-1920b Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, Latin and English (Loeb, 1920)

method: primary text, about AD 95 direction: complicates verified: full Preface 7 on students' published lecture notes;  preface 8 on how much the author's own version differed.

oldfather-1925 Arrian, preface to Epictetus' Discourses (Loeb, 1925)

method: primary text, about AD 110-130 direction: complicates verified: full A pupil's word-for-word notes that circulated without his consent.  Greek checked in schenkl-1916.

eusebius-1890b Eusebius, Church History 3.39 (Papias)

method: primary text direction: complicates verified: full Papias' preference for "the living and abiding voice."  Greek checked in eusebius-2016b.

eusebius-1890e Eusebius, Church History 5.20 (Irenaeus to Florinus)

method: primary text direction: complicates verified: full Saved for this article.  Irenaeus' vivid recall of Polycarp, "noting them down, not on paper, but in my heart."  Used in the article's table.

kulp-2026 Mishnah Avot 2:8 and Eduyot 1:3 (Sefaria)

method: primary text, compiled about AD 200-220 direction: complicates verified: full The rabbinic ideal of exact retention and of speaking "in the language of his teacher."

irenaeus-5-33 Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.33.3-4

method: primary text, about 180 direction: undercuts verified: full A saying attributed to Jesus through "the elders who saw John" and Papias, absent from the Gospels and parallel to 2 Baruch.

charles-1913 R. H. Charles, ed., Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2 (1913), 2 Baruch 29:5

method: primary text direction: undercuts verified: full The Jewish parallel to Papias' vine saying, pp. 497-498.

metzger-1971 Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 1st ed. (1971)

method: textual criticism direction: background verified: full The two forms of Luke 22:19-20 (pp. 173-174).

Memory research

neisser-1992 Neisser and Harsch, "Phantom Flashbulbs" (1992)

method: experiment, n = 44 direction: complicates verified: partial Search-inside, leaf - 16.  Challenger circumstances scored after 32-34 months:  mean 2.95 of 7, 11 at zero (p. 18);  a statistically non-significant confidence/accuracy correlation of r = 0.29 in this sample (p. 19).  The first-day report is the comparison baseline, not an independent recording of the circumstances.

neisser-2000 Neisser, "John Dean's Memory" (1981, reprinted 2000)

method: case study, one witness direction: complicates verified: partial Search-inside on memoryobservedre0000unse, leaf - 16.  Wrong on words and on one meeting's content (p. 272), right about the situation (pp. 277, 285).  The helper's record neisser-1981 describes the original Cognition article, which was not reached.

hirst-2009, hirst-2015 Hirst and others, the 9/11 memory survey (2009, 2015)

method: longitudinal survey direction: complicates verified: full 391 and 202 respondents across all waves.  Personal circumstances 63% consistent at 11 months;  selected central item scores near .89/.88 at ten years, with overall 2009 scores .88/.77/.78 across the first three surveys;  inconsistent flashbulb memories repeated, inaccurate event memories corrected.  The 2015 pages are those of the authors' accepted manuscript.

talarico-2003 Talarico and Rubin (2003)

method: experiment, n = 54 direction: complicates verified: full Flashbulb and everyday memories equally inconsistent;  only confidence differs.

loftus-1974 Loftus and Palmer (1974)

method: experiment, n = 150 in experiment 2 direction: complicates verified: full Broken-glass reports 16, 7 and 6 of 50 by question wording (p. 587).

mciver-2002, goodacre-2014, poirier-2004 The sixteen-word test and its critics

method: experiment; critiques direction: complicates verified: full McIver and Carroll's experiment 5 has 43 students completing three tasks in counterbalanced orders (pp. 668-669);  the returned-source response analysis never exceeds 15 identical words (p. 679, n = 69 responses in n. 13).  Their rule is on p. 680.  Goodacre argues the English threshold is too high for Greek (p. 795).  Poirier shows how editing breaks long runs (p. 321), then rejects a simple oral/written sorting rule (p. 322).

morphgnt-2026 SBLGNT with MorphGNT tagging

method: data direction: background verified: full Input to research/passage-compare.ts.

fitzmyer-1979, jeremias-1971 The Aramaic argument and its limits

method: philology direction: complicates verified: partial Search-inside, leaf - 22 and leaf - 24.  Jeremias's burden-of-proof principle and its own limit (p. 37);  Fitzmyer on Paul's Aramaic words, "Semitisms," the right period of Aramaic, and Torrey (pp. 1-11).

Transmission experiments and social memory

bergman-1999b Bergman and Roediger, "Can Bartlett's Repeated Reproduction Experiments Be Replicated?" (1999)

method: repeated individual recall direction: complicates verified: full Cited in the main article and quotations companion.  Thirty students read an unfamiliar tale;  only eight completed all three recall tests through six months.  Correct propositions declined and the share of recalled content containing major distortions rose.  This is repeated reproduction by individuals, not transmission between people.  PDF text and the printed tables on p. 943 were checked, with table images read separately.  The authors' autobiographical counterexamples limit generalisation.

roediger-2001 Roediger, Meade and Bergman, "Social Contagion of Memory" (2001)

method: one-step partner influence direction: complicates verified: full Cited in the main article.  Twenty-four students recalled objects from household scenes after a planted partner supplied correct and false objects.  Suggested false objects were recalled at .22 against .06 without suggestion.  Correct reminders also helped (43% against 26%), although that comparison was not counterbalanced.  The PDF's pp. 365-371 were read directly.  This tests a short encounter, not a narrative chain or a community correcting its own traditions.

mesoudi-2004 Mesoudi and Whiten, "The Hierarchical Transformation of Event Knowledge in Human Cultural Transmission" (2004)

method: serial transmission direction: complicates verified: full Cited in the main article and quotations companion.  Forty students formed ten chains of four, each passing on a written recall of three everyday routines.  Detail was compressed into higher-level summaries, some material was invented, and the outline often survived.  The approximate proposition counts come from Figure 3, p. 13, checked from its image;  a falling count is not a proportion of facts falsified.  The experiment uses immediate, unwarned recall after one reading.

mesoudi-2006 Mesoudi, Whiten and Dunbar, "A Bias for Social Information in Human Cultural Transmission" (2006)

method: two serial-transmission experiments direction: complicates verified: full Cited in the main article.  Each experiment used forty students in ten chains of four.  Narratives of people interacting survived more fully and accurately than matched individual or physical information.  Absolute loss remained substantial.  The author-hosted publisher PDF was saved with its YAML;  Figure 3's approximate quantity readings and the authors' limits on p. 419 were checked.  The article omits uncertain interpretations of the accuracy plot's denominator.

kirk-2005b Kirk and Thatcher, eds., Memory, Tradition, and Text (2005)

method: social-memory theory and historical interpretation direction: complicates verified: partial Cited in the main article and quotations companion for Kirk's introduction (pp. 1-24) and Kirk and Thatcher's programme essay (pp. 25-42).  They argue that present interests shape remembering while the past constrains it, rejecting a clean separation of untouched memory from invention.  Targeted archive.org paragraphs from memorytraditiont0000unse were read with bin/iapdsearch.py;  leaf - 12 is anchored on running heads near pp. 27-29 and p. 264 and on chapter openings.  This is an interpretive approach, not an experimental first-century error rate.

schwartz-2005c Schwartz, "Christian Origins: Historical Truth and Social Memory" (2005)

method: historical comparison direction: complicates verified: partial Cited in the main article and quotations companion.  Schwartz argues that stable memories can be either true or false and uses Herndon's Lincoln recollections to dispute overly restrictive rules for delayed testimony.  The Lincoln documents themselves were not re-audited here, so the article reports his argument without treating the romance or a general rate as established.  The essay is pp. 43-56 in kirk-2005b, read by the same anchored paragraph route.  An OCR-damaged short phrase is paraphrased, not silently corrected into a direct quotation.

rodriguez-2010 Rodriguez, Structuring Early Christian Memory (2010)

method: social memory and performance analysis direction: complicates verified: partial Cited in the main article and quotations companion.  He distinguishes stable meaning from accurate event reconstruction (p. 63).  His Luke 4:16-30 analysis asks how remembered teaching constrains a text while explicitly bracketing whether that scene occurred (pp. 153, 159).  Targeted archive.org paragraphs from structuringearly0000rodr were read;  leaf - 16 is anchored by five index correspondences spanning pp. 80-222.  No inference from the approach's lack of a laboratory sample to its invalidity is made.

redman-2010 Redman, "How Accurate Are Eyewitnesses?" (2010)

method: critical review of memory research direction: complicates verified: full Cited in the main article and quotations companion.  Redman grants that memory can explain some Gospel differences without extensive editing (p. 196), but stresses distortion beginning within hours or weeks (p. 193) and the difference between an agreed account and accurate detail (p. 197).  Her claim that Bauckham guarantees accuracy is checked against his own qualifications;  his description of critics as declaring testimony comprehensively unreliable is likewise tested against her concessions.  The PDF was read with odd-page running heads anchoring its folios.

eve-2013 Eve, Behind the Gospels (2013)

method: review of oral-tradition models direction: complicates verified: partial Cited in the main article and quotations companion.  Eve concludes that Bailey's anecdotes do not demonstrate reliable historical preservation (p. 83), while qualifying Weeden's criticism (p. 84) and rejecting a wholly constructed past (p. 94).  Targeted archive.org paragraphs from behindgospelsund0000evee were read;  leaf - 16 is anchored by the public page map and index correspondences near pp. 68-70 and p. 145.  No complete copyrighted book is stored.

Considered and not used

1. Bartlett 1932 (1995 reissue), Hunter 1985 and Rubin 1995: worked up by the first memory helper, but their passages and numbers were not independently verified for this draft. The main article instead uses the four primary experiments reviewed above. They are considered and not used in the main article or quotations companion.
2. Wynn and Logie 1998 and the older Ballard and Erdelyi/Becker studies are mentioned only as counterexamples reported by Bergman and Roediger, not as independently reviewed evidence. Their original reports were not read or cited directly.
3. Cuc, Koppel and Hirst 2007, Hirst and Echterhoff 2012, Kashima 2000: not obtained (helper's Could-not-be-obtained list).
4. Weeden 2009 and Dunn 2009 (JSHJ 7): not obtained; Weeden's arguments are reported through Keener, Dunn's reprint and Ehrman, and checked against Hogg 1914 directly.
5. ehrman-2016d, ehrman-2016e (Ehrman's blog posts on his 2016 radio debate with Bauckham): saved by a helper; they summarise the book and add nothing the book does not say.
6. Gerhardsson 1961 (gerhardsson-1961), Dunn 2003 (dunn-2003) and 2005 (dunn-2005), Dibelius (dibelius-1934, dibelius-1935), other Bultmann printings (bultmann-1957, bultmann-1963, bultmann-1963b, bultmann-1972), Vansina 1965 (vansina-1965), Casey 1998 (casey-1998), Black 1967 (black-1967), Lord 1960 (lord-1960), Ong 1982 (ong-1982), Goody 1987 (goody-1987): located with page offsets by a helper (scholarship-access.md); not read for this draft. The later Gerhardsson and the Dunn essay collection were read instead; the remaining Aramaic monographs are not tested case by case.
7. Kirk 2011: located only; considered and not used because its text was not reviewed for this draft.
8. From ancient-practices-primaries.md: Quintilian 10.3, 10.7, 11.2; Pliny, Letters 3.5; Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 1 preface; Plutarch, Cato Minor 23.3; Lucian, How to Write History 47-48; Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.3.1; Josephus, Against Apion 2.175-178, 2.204 and Life 7-9; Philo, Legatio 210; Avot 1:1 and 3:8; 2 Thessalonians 2:15; Justin, 1 Apology 66-67; Galen, De libris propriis; Cicero, Ad Atticum 13.21a. These are real witnesses to notes, shorthand, memorisation and informal publication among the educated, and to Jewish teaching of the Law. The article uses the two closest parallels (Quintilian's preface and Arrian) and the Mishnah, because the others add the same point about elite practice without bearing more directly on Galilee; the helper dated several of them from memory, which the lead did not check.
9. fitzmyer-1974 (NTS 20): not read; the 1979 collection covers the method.
10. Origen, Against Celsus 1.62, and the tax-collector literacy evidence: owned by Who Wrote the Gospels? and linked rather than repeated.