Did people in oral cultures even care if stories were changed?  We do! We have an interest not just in story but in establishing with some kind of accuracy what actually happened in the past, whether it is about the Civil War, the assassination of JFK, or the last election.  Did people in oral cultures have a way to know the past with historical accuracy?  Did they care?

Here I end this thread on what we know about how oral cultures passed along their traditions – not just their myths and customs but also the past events that affected their communities, in what Jan Vansina calls “testimonies” about the past, as shared by word of mouth in non-literate cultures.  Were they concerned to repeat the past “accurately”?

Again this comes from my 2017 book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne).

 

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Traditions that are passed along by word of mouth in oral cultures experience massive changes not simply because people have bad memories.  That may be true as well, but even more important, as Vansina discovered, when people pass along “testimonies” about the past, they are telling the stories for a particular reason to a particular audience, and “the amount of interest [the teller] can arouse in his audience largely depends on the way he tells the story and on the individual twist he gives it.”  As a result, “the tradition inevitably becomes distorted.”[1]

Moreover, since the story is told from one person to the next and then to the next and then to the next, “each informant who forms a link in the chain of transmission creates new variants, and changes are made very time the tale is told.  It is therefore not surprising to find that very often the original testimony has disappeared altogether.”[2]

Anyone interested in knowing about the historical Jesus based on the chain of testimonies about him that eventually came to be written down should certainly sit up and take note.

From his experience, Vansina found very much the same attitude toward keeping a tradition “the same” as Parry, Lord, and Goody:  “It happens that the same persons with regard to the same series of events will tell two different, even contradictory stories.”[3]   Even so, as with these other researchers, Vansina found that despite enormous difference and even discrepant accounts, the “gist” of a report is often retained in the various retellings.   He did note, however, that this was not always the case.

In summing up this assessment of what we now know from such anthropological studies, I think it is fair to say that people in oral cultures do not preserve their traditions intact with verbatim accuracy from one telling to the next.   They not only do not do so, they do not care to do so.   Story-tellers in oral cultures tell their tales in order to communicate with their audiences in very specific contexts.  Both the audience and the context will affect how the story is told or the teaching is recounted – whether it is told expansively or briefly; which entire episodes will be added or deleted; which details will be changed, expanded, or passed over completely.  Someone who then hears that version of the story or teaching will later tell her own version.   Whoever hears that version will tell his own version.  And on it goes, until someone writes it down.

The gist of these stories is more likely to survive relatively intact over the course of time, but not always.   Elements are constantly added to the stories and other elements are deleted or altered.  For that reason it is extremely difficult to separate out the elements that have been added or altered to an “original testimony” (to use Vansina’s term) from the gist that represents an “accurate memory” of the past.

Still, as we saw in the last chapter, there are ways to do so.  If there several written versions of the same event, say, in the life of Jesus, and they evidence differences large or small, especially if those differences create irreconcilable differences, then we know that something has been changed, probably as the stories were circulating by word of mouth among story tellers in the years after Jesus’ death (although possibly some of the changes were made by the people writing the stories down).  In addition, if there are reports that are completely implausible for other reasons, those too indicate where storytellers have been applying their craft in recounting the tradition while passing them along year after year prior to the appearance of the Gospels.

On the other hand, there are certain memories of Jesus extensively and thoroughly documented throughout our sources that are completely plausible and do not appear to represent the biased perspectives of later Christian storytellers.   These would be gist memories that provide a basic outline of what we can say about the historical Jesus.   We have seen all this with respect to the accounts of Jesus’ last days and hours.  We now turn to the written records of his life and teachings, to find altered, and even invented traditions.

 

At this point in the book I start showing in some detail how the findings of experts on oral culture affect how we should understand the Gospel traditions about Jesus, passed on by word of mouth in oral cultures for decades before seeing the light of written day.

 

[1] Oral Traditions, p. 109.

[2] Oral Traditions, p. 109.

[3] Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Rochester NY: Broydell and Brewster, 1985) p. 65.