Having watched many of Bart’s debates about how reliably early Christian apostles may have transmitted the Gospel stories before they got written down, I’m surprised that one point has never been raised. There are some oral traditions that are well-known by their ability to faithfully transmit sacred texts, however they use techniques that were never part of the semitic/Judaic or even most western traditions.
The central trick is that oral “scripture” is not composed as prose, it’s composed in verse. Verse is massively easier to memorize than prose because its form (metric, rhyme) is a very efficient error-correcting mechanism; if you forget or misremember an isolated word, the corrupt line will almost always be a noticeable error because it won’t match the rest. And then you can recite that verse with some music background in a ceremonial setting, or in chorus, etc. Even common people who are not trained monks often memorize, over their life, thousands of lines of verse from popular song lyrics.
This kind of oral scripture also uses other tricks, it’s typically very compact, trying to say as many things with as few words as possible, which results in shorter text to memorize but sometimes very significant effort to understand even for local and contemporary listeners — interpretation depends on lots of context about the culture, the background philosophy and related tradition etc. This is the style of the Sutras in Hinduism for example.
Another important consequence of this kind of oral tradition is that it has bigger reliance on professional clergy who makes a very significant effort to memorize all their canon, who subject their disciples to laborious training do the same, it’s not something you can expect from common folk who happen to be enthusiastic about a religion and will sometimes meet people and repeat some stories. Also the scripture has to be composed in this sophisticated style already in the oral phase, so those traditions are not started by a small band of peasants. They are started by prophets, people who are not just religious innovators but who also have the education and skill to craft their “revelation” in that specific form.
I’m not so sure that any eyewitnesses to, say, the sermon on the mount, if that actually happened, would have been sophisticated enough to construct a rhyming metrical account of what they saw and heard. Remember that when various events took place during the life of Jesus, his followers at that time seemed not to realize that there would be any need for an accurate oral history in the future. Some simply didn’t realize what was going on, didn’t expect him to die– certainly not by being crucified, or if they had some inkling of what was to come they probably expected a quick return, within their life times, and no need for an oral tradition.
Events like the Sermon on the Mount probably did happen, because that would be consistent with Jesus trying to get the word out about the Kingdom, and how to be in it when it came. But I’d agree the specific text is probably a compilation of things he was known to say when speaking to crowds (probably smaller crowds than the gospels indicate, but then again, he did get crucified, meaning that there was concern about the number of people he was reaching).
Most verbatim accounts of public addresses from ancient history are to some extent suspect. Not just those related to religion. Doubt across the board, or not at all. Cicero’s speeches are probably close enough to what he said, since he went out of his way to have many of them recorded in shorthand. But who really believes he didn’t edit after the fact? Nobody who has used an internet forum with an edit button. 😉
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