Oral Tradition and Memory: scholarly quotations

Bultmann, Rudolf.  The History of the Synoptic Tradition.  Oxford:  Basil Blackwell.  2nd edition.  Translated by John Marsh.  1968.  The founding work of form criticism for the sayings and stories of Jesus, first published in German in 1921.  Classifies every Synoptic unit by form, separates editorial links from tradition, and judges each unit's origin in Jesus' ministry, the Palestinian church or the Greek-speaking church.

1. 1a.

   Page 4:  “to rediscover the origin and the history of the particular units and thereby to throw some light on the history of the tradition before it took literary form”.  Bultmann is quoting his own earlier definition of the task. ↩

2. 1b.

   Page 128:  “even the dominical sayings in the tradition were not the pronouncements of a past authority, but sayings of the risen Lord, who is always a contemporary for the Church.” ↩

3. 1c.

   Page 26:  “There is no reason, in my view, for supposing that this is a community product.” ↩

Sanders, E. P.  The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition.  Eugene, Ore.:  Wipf and Stock.  2000.  First published by Cambridge University Press in 1969;  the reprint keeps its pagination.  A test of form criticism's supposed laws of oral development against the changes Matthew and Luke made to Mark and the changes in later Christian texts.  Found that no tendency ran consistently in one direction.

1. 2a.

   Page 272:  “There are no hard and fast laws of the development of the Synoptic tradition. On all counts the tradition developed in opposite directions. It became both longer and shorter, both more and less detailed, and both more and less Semitic.” ↩

Jeremias, Joachim.  New Testament Theology, vol. 1:  The Proclamation of Jesus.  New York:  Scribner.  Translated by John Bowden.  1971.  A synthesis by the Göttingen scholar who did most to argue from Aramaic idiom and Palestinian setting to the words of Jesus.  Its first chapters set out the linguistic features he took as characteristic of Jesus' own speech.

1. 3a.

   Page 37:  “In the synoptic tradition it is the inauthenticity, and not the authenticity, of the sayings of Jesus that must be demonstrated.”  “The question of authenticity cannot, therefore, be settled in a purely schematic way on the basis of the linguistic and stylistic evidence.” ↩

Gerhardsson, Birger.  The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition.  Peabody, Mass.:  Hendrickson.  2001.  Reprints three shorter works (1977-1990) in which the Swedish scholar restates the model of his Memory and Manuscript (1961):  Jesus taught like a Jewish teacher, his disciples learned his sayings by heart, and the tradition was transmitted with care, though not without editorial change.

1. 4a.

   Page 44:  “Among the rabbis we can see how evident it was that a teacher would repeat the texts until his pupils knew them by heart; four repetitions seems to have been common.” ↩

2. 4b.

   Page 54:  “Careful oral transmission—with texts learned by heart—thus does not exclude alterations in texts.” ↩

Bauckham, Richard.  Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:  The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony.  Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans.  2nd edition.  2017.  The fullest case that named eyewitnesses stood behind the Gospel traditions and remained their authorities until death, by a St Andrews New Testament scholar.  Draws on Papias, the naming of minor characters, models of oral tradition and the psychology of memory;  the second edition adds a long chapter answering critics.

1. 5a.

   Page 8:  “the period between the "historical" Jesus and the Gospels was actually spanned, not by anonymous community transmission, but by the continuing presence and testimony of the eyewitnesses, who remained the authoritative sources of their traditions until their deaths”. ↩

2. 5b.

   Page 251:  “(1) this model of memorization and the transmission of exact words is too rigid to explain the actual extent of variation in the Jesus traditions as we can observe them in the Gospels”.  Bauckham is reporting the reasons most scholars gave for rejecting Gerhardsson.  He goes on to argue that Gerhardsson's work still has value. ↩

3. 5c.

   Page 345:  “the gist of an eyewitness memory, preserved in all tellings even if other details are not accurately preserved, and the gist of an oral tradition, preserved in all performances even when other details are varied, can readily coincide.” ↩

4. 5d.

   Page 610:  “it was never my intention to claim that eyewitnesses always get everything right or that the eyewitnesses behind the Gospels always got everything right.”  From the chapter added to the second edition in reply to critics, among them Judith Redman and Dale Allison. ↩

Bailey, Kenneth E.  “Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels.”  Themelios 20(2):4-11.  Jan 1995.  Reprint of an essay first published in Asia Journal of Theology 5 (1991) 34-54.  Bailey, who taught New Testament in Egypt and Lebanon for decades, sorts Middle Eastern village tradition into informal uncontrolled, formal controlled and informal controlled kinds, from personal observation rather than recorded fieldwork, and proposes the third as the model for the Gospel tradition.

1. 6a.

   Section The three types of oral tradition, (ii) Some flexibility:  “Parables and recollections of historical people and events important to the identity of the community fall into this category. Here there is flexibility and control. The central threads of the story cannot be changed, but flexibility in detail is allowed.” ↩

2. 6b.

   Section Techniques for assimilating new material:  “Rena Hogg dipped into that tradition in 1910. I dipped into the same tradition in 1955-65 and found the same stories told in almost the same way.”  Rena Hogg's book was published in 1914.  Bailey's later version may depend on it rather than on independent village memory. ↩

Hogg, Rena L.  A Master-Builder on the Nile:  Being a Record of the Life and Aims of John Hogg, D.D., Christian Missionary.  Pittsburgh:  United Presbyterian Board of Publication.  1914.  A biography of the Scottish missionary John Hogg (1833-1886) by his daughter, written 28 years after his death from his letters and papers and from stories told in the Egyptian churches he founded.  It is the printed source behind Kenneth Bailey's best-known example of oral tradition, and it prints both a village version of one story and the participants' own account.

1. 7a.

   Page 214:  “Of one of the most popular his own account remains to show how fact and fancy mingle in such current lore.”  Page 215:  “It seems heartless to destroy so romantic a tale, but the original story itself deserves preservation as recounted by the chief actors Dr. Hogg and Mr. Shenoodeh Hanna, his companion on the historic occasion.” ↩

Dunn, James D. G.  The Oral Gospel Tradition.  Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans.  2013.  Collected essays by the Durham New Testament scholar whose Jesus Remembered (2003) argued that the Jesus tradition is best read as oral performance with a stable core.  Includes his 1991 essay on John and the oral tradition and his 2009 reply to Theodore Weeden's critique of Kenneth Bailey.

1. 8a.

   Page 255:  “strikingly similar to the synoptic parallels which typify a Synopsis of the first three Gospels.”  Page 256:  “provides an appropriate warning against reading historical events too quickly from the stories to which the events gave rise.”  From Dunn's 2009 reply to Theodore Weeden, reprinted in this collection. ↩

Keener, Craig S.  “Weighing T. J. Weeden's Critique of Kenneth Bailey's Approach to Oral Tradition in the Gospels.”  Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 13:41-78.  2017.  A detailed assessment by an Asbury New Testament scholar who generally defends Bailey's model.  Compares Bailey's and Rena Hogg's versions point by point and concedes that the original incident differed from both.

1. 9a.

   Page 53:  “So far as we can tell from Bailey's report, the gist of the oral tradition about John Hogg and the robbers seems to have changed little between 1910 and the time that Bailey heard it a generation later”.  “The original story on which both were based, however, warns us that what is orally transmitted may not always be correct historical information.” ↩

2. 9b.

   Page 54, note 63:  “The similarities are so great that they either indicate very close traditions reported independently or simply that, much more likely, Bailey is recounting Hogg's version and noting that his is quite similar”. ↩

Ehrman, Bart D.  Jesus Before the Gospels:  How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior.  New York:  HarperOne.  2016.  A popular book by a University of North Carolina New Testament scholar and agnostic that applies experimental psychology, social-memory theory and anthropology of oral cultures to the Gospels.  Grants that much of the Gospels' gist is accurate and argues that many details and whole episodes are distorted memories passed through non-witnesses.

1. 10a.

   Page 3:  “They are memories of memories of memories.” ↩

2. 10b.

   Page 77:  “Were the stories the same? Not even close.”  Ehrman is following Theodore Weeden's 2009 comparison of Bailey's and Rena Hogg's versions with the account of the participants. ↩

3. 10c.

   Page 144:  “there are gist memories of Jesus recorded in the New Testament Gospels that are almost certainly accurate. At the same time, there are a lot of details—and in fact entire episodes—that are almost certainly not accurate.”  “Much of the gist is correct.” ↩

Eve, Eric.  Behind the Gospels:  Understanding the Oral Tradition.  London:  SPCK.  2013.  A survey of the main models of oral tradition behind the Gospels, from form criticism to Bailey, Dunn, Bauckham and social memory, by a New Testament scholar who does not belong to any of the schools he reviews.  Useful here as a referee of the Weeden, Dunn and Bailey exchange.

1. 11a.

   Page 83:  “Taken together, the Bailey anecdotes we have discussed do not demonstrate that oral tradition in the Middle East is typically controlled in a way that reliably preserves historical fact.”  Page 84:  “In places, Weeden's criticism of Bailey is a little harsh”. ↩

Redman, Judith C. S.  “How Accurate Are Eyewitnesses?  Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research.”  Journal of Biblical Literature 129(1):177-197.  2010.  A review article that sets Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses against the psychology of eyewitness testimony, collaborative recall and Bartlett's retelling studies.  It reports no new data.  It grants that memory research explains many Gospel differences without editing, and denies that it supports the Gospels' historical accuracy in detail.

1. 12a.

   Page 196:  “Psychological research into memory supports Bauckham's contention that at least some of the differences attributed to redaction in fact arise from the normal processes of remembering, and that the editing may have contributed far less to the content than the form critics suggest.”  Page 197:  “is a guarantee only of the preservation of the community's agreed version, not of the exact details of the event itself.” ↩

Allison, Dale C.  Constructing Jesus:  Memory, Imagination, and History.  Grand Rapids:  Baker Academic.  2010.  A historical-Jesus study by a Princeton New Testament scholar whose first chapter surveys memory research and argues that the reliable layer of the Jesus tradition is its recurrent general impressions, not individual sayings or scenes.  A critic of over-confident uses of eyewitness testimony, and of minimalist reconstructions built from a few "authentic" sayings.

1. 13a.

   Page 14:  “If general impressions are typically more trustworthy than details, then it makes little sense to reconstruct Jesus by starting with a few of the latter”. ↩

2. 13b.

   Page 22:  “I am haunted by what we now know about the frequent failings of human memory. This instills modesty and reinforces my conviction that the historicity of most—not all—of the events associated with Jesus and the origin of most—not all—of the sayings attributed to him will always fall woefully short of demonstration.” ↩

Neisser, Ulric.  “John Dean's Memory:  A Case Study.”  Memory Observed:  Remembering in Natural Contexts, 263-286.  New York:  Worth.  2nd edition.  Edited by Ulric Neisser and Ira E. Hyman.  2000.  First printed in Cognition 9 (1981) 1-22.  A comparison of John Dean's 1973 Senate testimony about two Oval Office meetings with the White House tapes, by the founder of "ecological" memory research.  One witness, two meetings, no statistics:  a case study of what a confident witness gets wrong and right.

1. 14a.

   Page 277:  “His testimony had much truth in it, but not at the level of "gist." It was true at a deeper level. Nixon was the kind of man Dean described, he had the knowledge Dean attributed to him, there was a cover-up.” ↩

Bergman, Erik T., and Henry L. III Roediger.  “Can Bartlett's Repeated Reproduction Experiments Be Replicated?”  Memory & Cognition 27(6):937-947.  1999.  A laboratory replication of Frederic Bartlett's 1932 experiments by two Washington University memory researchers.  Thirty students read Bartlett's Native American tale "The War of the Ghosts" and wrote it out 15 minutes, 1 week and (for 13 of them) 6 months later;  each of the story's 42 propositions was scored as accurate, distorted or new.  It measures one person retelling a story to the experimenter, not a story passed between people.

1. 15a.

   Page 945:  “After 6 months, most of what people recalled of the story was distorted in some form.”  The six-month figures rest on the 13 students who came back, 8 of whom had taken all three tests. ↩

Mesoudi, Alex, and Andrew Whiten.  “The Hierarchical Transformation of Event Knowledge in Human Cultural Transmission.”  Journal of Cognition and Culture 4(1):1-24.  2004.  A transmission-chain experiment by two St Andrews researchers on cultural transmission.  Forty students in ten chains of four each read a description of three everyday routines once, with no warning, and wrote it out at once;  each version became the next person's text.  It tests serial retelling of written text between strangers, with no delay.

1. 16a.

   Page 17:  “Although the script shows a drastic reduction in length, there is an intuitive sense that the 'gist' or 'core' of the story has been preserved right through the chain.”  Read once, written out at once, and passed on in writing between strangers.  Most of the original detail was gone after the first reader. ↩

Vansina, Jan.  Oral Tradition as History.  Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press.  1985.  The standard handbook on using oral traditions as historical sources, by a historian of Central Africa who spent decades collecting and testing Kuba, Rwandan and other traditions.  Defines oral tradition, sets out how traditions change, and how versions should be compared.

1. 17a.

   Page 41:  “frequent repetition does not itself guarantee fidelity of reproduction. Tales told many nights in the month may in fact change faster than tales which are told more infrequently.” ↩

2. 17b.

   Page 42:  “The only acceptable standard was the remembered performance of the teacher of the performer. If he said it deviated, then the sanction could be applied, and it was death.”  “were not ready to point out a failure that would have such drastic consequences. No failure is remembered.” ↩

Memory, Tradition, and Text:  Uses of the Past in Early Christianity.  Atlanta:  Society of Biblical Literature.  Edited by Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher.  2005.  The volume that brought social-memory theory into Gospel studies, in the Semeia Studies series.  Cited here for Kirk's introductory essay "Social and Cultural Memory" (pp. 1-24) and for Kirk and Thatcher's programme essay "Jesus Tradition as Social Memory" (pp. 25-42).  Both are reviews of sociological theory applied to the Gospels;  neither reports data on an early Christian tradition.

1. 18a.

   Page 32:  “Consistent with the form-critical model, social memory theory views present social realities as decisive factors in the constant rearticulation of a community's salient past”.  “But social memory theory departs significantly from the form-critical legacy by refusing to authorize any sharp distinction between memory and tradition.”  From Kirk and Thatcher, "Jesus Tradition as Social Memory." ↩

2. 18b.

   Page 34:  “remains convinced that the commemorated past bore upon the traditioning activities of the early communities in a far more thoroughgoing manner than the form critics envisioned.”  From Kirk and Thatcher, "Jesus Tradition as Social Memory."  The same paragraph says that social memory analysis "is less confident that a putatively authentic deposit can be cleanly refined out of a given body of tradition." ↩

Schwartz, Barry.  “Christian Origins:  Historical Truth and Social Memory.”  Memory, Tradition, and Text:  Uses of the Past in Early Christianity, 43-56.  Atlanta:  Society of Biblical Literature.  Edited by Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher.  2005.  An essay by a sociologist of commemoration whose books include a study of how Americans remembered Abraham Lincoln.  He criticises the "presentist" view in his own field that remembered pasts are mainly inventions of present interests, and tests it on William Herndon's collection of Lincoln reminiscences.

1. 19a.

   Page 44:  “Stable images of the past are often, but not always, demonstrably true images. Sometimes false ideas are transferred across generations and accepted as if they were true; sometimes true ideas are rejected as if they were false.” ↩

Rodriguez, Rafael.  Structuring Early Christian Memory:  Jesus in Tradition, Performance and Text.  London:  T&T Clark.  2010.  A monograph in the Library of New Testament Studies that combines social-memory theory with research on oral performance and applies both to Jesus' healings and exorcisms in the Gospels.  An advocate's statement of the approach, including where it stops short of historical verdicts.

1. 20a.

   Page 63:  “Thus the stability of social memory does not ensure its accuracy, but memory's stability, especially in the face of social change, has been underemphasized in Jesus research”. ↩