Why I Trust My Bible - Lesson 3

Dr. Bill Mounce 
Why I Trust My Bible 
nt119-03 
Oral Tradition: Was Memory of the Writer Accurate? 
Lesson Transcript

This is the 3rd lecture in the online series of lectures on Why I Trust My Bible by Dr Bill Mounce. Bill was a preaching pastor at a church in Spokane, WA, and prior to that a professor of New Testament and director of the Greek Program at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He also taught at Azusa Pacific University and is the author of the bestselling Greek textbook, Basics of Biblical Greek.

1. Challenge

Well, in the second session we’re going to look at the whole issue of oral tradition. oral tradition. The challenge that’s coming these days is basically saying that there was a gap between when Jesus did or said something, and when it was written down. And so, that gap period between the event and when it was written, stories were told by word of mouth: hence, oral tradition. By using the word ‘tradition’ I’m not implying that it wasn’t real. But that’s the phrase; oral tradition. And the challenge is that during that period of oral tradition, between the event and writing it down, that even if the writers of the Gospels were eyewitnesses, memories faulty as one person says, ‘memory leaks.’ And because memory is faulty, we can’t trust that period of time. So, it doesn’t matter what they wrote, their memories would have been faulty by the time they got to writing it down. Kind of the poster child for a lot of the current attacks on the believability and trustworthiness of the Bible comes from a professor named Bart Ehrman. And so let me introduce him so just that I can refer to him. Bart Ehrman is a professor at Chapel Hill in North Carolina. He went to Moody and then to Wheaton, two very conservative schools; went to Princeton and studied with Professor Metzger. And he became an agnostic. He doesn’t think the Bible is true. He certainly doesn’t think that Jesus is God. And Professor Ehrman is really aggressively attacking the historical believability of the Bible right now. And he seems to be writing a book on every different aspect of this whole issue. And he’s a very good scholar. He’s very bright. He’s a very good writer, and he’s an extremely good debater. And if you just go to YouTube and look up Bart Ehrman (E-h-r-m-a-n), you’ll see debates all over the place with him. And as you watch him, you’ll realize why he’s having the impact he is because he’s an extremely good debater. The book he wrote on this particular issue is called, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Teacher from Galilee. So, he is perfectly willing to say that Jesus was a Jewish teacher, but he’s not God, but the church made him into God; and hence, the title of the book, ‘How Jesus Became God.’ In earlier days, the phrases that were often used was historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. The historical Jesus is the Jesus that actually lived. The Christ of faith is what we meet in the Bible. And the implication for many people is that those two people are not the same person. There was an historical Jesus, but the church changed him into something else, and he became the Christ of faith. So that’s just another way, an older way, of talking about this issue.

Before we actually get into this topic, let me just say something, and I said it in the orientation, I think it was. How do you prove this? How do you prove that (a) the church changed the teachings of Jesus, or how do you prove that the church didn’t change the teachings of Jesus? How do you prove that the historical Jesus is the Christ of faith or isn’t? Where is the bar? How high do you have to set the bar to say that I believe these Scriptures actually are true, and that they do accurately reflect the historical Jesus. So where do you set that bar? 

What I wanted to add to that discussion is a slight clarification. Just because you can’t prove something doesn’t mean it’s not true. Now I know there’s a double negative in there, but think about it; just because you can’t prove something doesn’t mean it’s wrong. I’ll state it another way; just because you can’t prove something doesn’t mean it’s not authentic. So, we go through this whole discussion of the issues of memory and how reliable it is, and you may or may not be able to prove something, but that doesn’t make it so. That just means you can’t prove it, alright? So, kind of an important clarification. 

Ok, what is oral tradition? Well, I already briefly said it, but let me repeat it: when it comes to oral tradition, it’s stories of what Jesus did and said were passed on by word of mouth. Sometimes it’s called orality. I mean orality is a broader term, It’s the same kind of thing. So, there was an event and then there was when it was written down, and there was this gap in between where the stories of what Jesus said and did were passed along by word of mouth. That’s called the period of oral tradition. So, let’s just talk about that period of time just a little bit. 

2. Jesus and an Oral Culture

Number 1, Jesus lived in an oral culture. In fact, most cultures in our world today are oral. Most cultures do their teaching like this (Mounce gesturing), maybe not on video, but they do it by word of mouth. They don’t do it by writing. The vast majority of people in Jesus’ day were illiterate. I mean, they couldn’t read or they couldn’t write. They weren’t stupid. They just couldn’t read or write. And so, you have this oral culture where people are used to retelling accounts or stories, whatever word you want to use, by word of mouth. And this partially explains the whole rabbinic method of teaching. The rabbis taught by repetition, and they would say it over and over and over and over again until their students really knew what they were trying to teach. And in fact, we know that Jewish boys, sorry, historically it was Jewish boys that were in the schools, could actually memorize large chunks of the Torah. You know, I know we don’t live in an oral culture, at least in western culture today. We write it down so we can forget it. We can write things down so we don’t have to remember it, right? We just simply don’t live in an oral culture. We live in a written culture. But in that day, it was an oral culture, lots of repetition, and the little kids would memorize huge portions of the Torah, of what we call the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures. And you know, they didn’t have anything else that they were doing. They weren’t texting. They weren’t on Facebook. They weren’t playing soccer and basketball and baseball and football, and…, all the distractions of modern culture. They weren’t doing that. They were learning Torah. And everything they did centered on the Torah. So, whether they were learning to write or spell, or whatever be the case, it was Torah, Torah, Torah over and over and over and over again. And we know that it’s an oral culture. That’s the rabbinical method. And you can actually train your mind to memorize huge amounts of data. It certainly is possible, and we know that they did it. So, this concept of an oral tradition and an oral culture is what’s bridging the gap between the event and when it was written down.

3. Approaches to Orality

Now there’s really three basic approaches to orality, how we view it. And let me just go over those. First of all, there is what’s called an informal uncontrolled. It’s a cultural kind of thing; informal uncontrolled. So, when we talk about informal, what we mean is that anybody can retell the story. Ok, anyone who’s available could retell the story, in our case, of what Jesus did and said. I was uncontrolled in the sense of accuracy. Anybody could tell the story and there was no controls in place. And what happens in that kind of setting is that stories can change dramatically, right? So that is informal uncontrolled. 

The second kind of culture is where it’s formal and controlled. And by formal we mean that only certain people were allowed to retell the stories. Not everybody could retell the stories of Jesus, if this were what was going on in the 1st century. Just not anyone could retell the story; it was formal, only certain people, the disciples or the eyewitnesses, or something like that. And this was the control, and again this is again more rabbinic, and the control was you had, in this case for Judaism, you had rabbis who exerted all this control so that only they could tell the story. And they made sure that the stories were told correctly. Now, if the 1st century Jewish church was characterized by this formal controlled kind of approach to orality, then you get some real problems. You can’t explain the variations among the Synoptics. You look at the same story in Matthew and Luke, sometimes Matthew, Mark and Luke, and what you’re going to see is that they’re not exactly the same. They mean the same thing, but they’re not exactly, they don’t use exactly the same words. If the 1st century Christian culture was formal uncontrolled, you wouldn’t have those kinds of variations. 

So, there is a third kind of cultural approach to orality that most Biblical scholars are comfortable with. It’s called informal controlled, informal controlled, sometimes called guarded tradition as well. And in a culture where orality is characterized by informal control, what it means is that anybody can retell the stories. Ok. It's informal but it is controlled because there are people in the community who are respected, who perhaps were eyewitnesses, or people who had really learned the stories in the past. But they exerted a kind of control over the telling of the stories. So, you can imagine the situation where, again, it’s informal, anybody could retell the stories of Jesus, and someone saying, ‘you know, Jesus said this’. In a controlled kind of culture these respected people would rise up, and they would say ‘no, that’s not what happened at all, I was there’ or ‘that’s not how I was taught it.’ Ok, so informal controlled means that anybody can retell the stories of Jesus, but that there were people in the community that exercised control over those stories, allow some kind of variation in details, but certainly not the core of the passage.

These three different ways of looking at orality really came from a missionary named Kenneth Bailey, and Kenneth Bailey was a missionary in the Middle East for years. And he worked among the Bedouin people. And what he realized was you could go to different areas of the Middle East and hear the same basic story, even though these two groups of people had never met. I go ‘how does that happen?’ Well, the stories are told, anybody can retell the stories. But it was recognized that part of the function in the Bedouin tribe was that there would be respected people who would exert control over the stories that were being told. And he took what he learned from the Bedouin people and applied it to the Gospel stories, and what we find is that it’s a beautiful fit. It’s a beautiful fit in that Matthew, Mark and Luke, that there’s the same basic stories being told. There must have been some kind of control, but it wasn’t so absolutely tight that every single little detail is exactly the same.

Most New Testament, at least evangelical scholars, are comfortable with this informal controlled approach to oral tradition. So, the initial answer to Professor Ehrman and people that are following suit, is that yes, there was a gap, there was a period of time in which the story between the event and writing it down where people remembered. But they lived in an oral culture, they were used to training their minds, they were used to memorizing, exactly, large pieces of data, of stories, and while anyone was able to retell the stories of Jesus, is pretty clear from the text that there were respected people in the community, disciples, apostles, people who had seen Jesus (that would be some groups of people that would exert control), that they apparently exerted control. And they kept the stories as being accurate. 

So, if you apply the informal controlled model of oral tradition to the Bible, it means that you can trust it. Alright, that’s the point I’m trying to make is that you can trust it.

4. Memorization

Now there’s a few other things that I want to point out about memory. Number 1, we remember core events better than details, don’t we? Details might get a little fuzzy over time, but we do a much better job at remembering core information in stories. Again, all you have to do is look at Matthew, Mark and Luke. There is variation on the same story, but not at the core; is that the variations are using different synonyms or some of the little information, or this writer teaches, remembers this one piece of information, this writer omits that. Alright, so you have, the core is the same. The variation is in some of the details. So, we remember core events better than all the details.

The second, and related to that, is that corporate memory or pooled memory is more effective than individual memory. When groups get together, Darryl and his talk talks about a funeral, and when people get together in a funeral, people are telling different stories, but together they have a pooled or corporate memory, and that corporate memory can be very accurate as to the person who’s passed away, because corporate memory is better than individual memory. 

A third factor, and again, I’ve already mentioned this but I’ll say it again for emphasis, is this is rabbinic culture. In rabbinic culture they cultivated skills of memory. I mean, it wasn’t that unusual for a rabbi to memorize the entire Torah, the entire, again what we call the Old Testament of the Hebrew Scriptures, all of it, all of it. That’s pretty remarkable, isn’t it? But it wasn’t an odd event, I mean, we know that this happened, and it happened multiple times, and it was achieved through repetition, through focus, through not focusing on texting and email and Facebook. It’s you're focusing on Scripture. And you’re memorizing, and it’s everything. You know, it’s interesting, that we know that some Greek children, depending on the schools, were encouraged or perhaps forced to memorize Homer’s entire Iliad and Odyssey, all of it. Now there’s about a hundred thousand words in the Iliad and the Odyssey together. Luke’s Gospel is about twenty thousand words. So, it was not that unusual for Greek children to memorize documents five times as long as the Book of Luke. See again, they lived in an oral culture. This is how they remember, how they teach, how they pass their traditions. It’s done orally. And so, the mind is capable of so much more than we in the western world give it credit. Our brains really remember a lot of information even if we don’t push it. So again, rabbinic culture is a big deal.

Fourthly, memory tends to be more precise when something’s at stake. Darryl gives the illustration of the Challenger disaster and some studies that were done several years after the Challenger spaceship blew up, what people remembered, and they certainly remembered the core of it, but a lot of the details were getting fuzzy in people’s minds. And Darryl asked the question ‘I wonder if they polled future astronauts, people who were younger when the Challenger disaster happened, but kids who wanted to become astronauts...I wonder if their memory of the details of the Challenger disaster are more accurate?’ And I think it is very fair to assume that, yes, their memories would have been much better. And to bring this over into Scripture, this is life for us. This is the Living Word of God or usf. In times of persecution, this is what we are being persecuted for. And when something is really at stake, we really remember it a lot better.

5. Presuppositions

Another point that I wanted to make in this whole issue of leaky memory, oral tradition, and that is our assumptions. Now I have certain assumptions. I think that they’re supported by facts. Can’t prove it of course. But I have assumptions. You have assumptions. Liberal critics have assumptions too. That’s a very important point. Nobody comes at this whole debate completely, what’s the word, completely vanilla, not biased at all. Everyone has assumptions, and in liberal scholarship there is a real assumption against Biblical history. A great example of this is the Jesus Seminar. It was a group of quite a few scholars that used to sit down with four different colored beads, and they used to go through the New Testament, and they would vote, ‘Does this saying come from Jesus?’ And so, for example, and then they would vote by putting beads into a bowl, or something. And so, if everyone thought that this verse that Jesus actually said it, they’d put a red bead in. If they think that Jesus said something like this verse, they would put a pink bead in. If they think that Jesus didn’t say it, but he might have said something like it, they would put a gray bead in. And if they think that Jesus could not have said anything like this particular verse, they would put a black bead in. And the result of their voting is that over fifty percent of the Bible was black. In other words, Jesus never said it, never said anything like it. Fifty percent gone. Gone. Well, I’ve got to think that there’s some presuppositions in play for that kind of historical doubting of historicalness.

Let me take an example. Let’s say you don’t think that Jesus ever intended to start a church. Ok, all that he was going to do was going to teach people to be kind and gracious to one another, something like that. Well, if you don’t think that, then when you come to a verse to where Jesus says to Peter ‘you are the rock, here are the keys to the kingdom, I’m going to build my church on you.’ Well, obviously those verses Jesus could never have said them because we all know, “all know”, that Jesus never intended to start a church. Well, we don’t know that. That’s an assumption that the critical scholar is making. Or the Son of Man’s things...if you don’t think that Jesus saw himself as the coming apocalyptic judge, the Daniel Son of Man, then in, Jesus says to Pilate, or to the Sanhedrin, that ‘you’re judging me but I’m going to be coming on clouds.’ The implication is ‘I am the Daniel Son of Man, and you’re judging me now, but someday I will judge you in the heavenly courts.’ You know, you look at a saying like that, well Jesus never thought never thought he was Daniel’s Son of Man. He never thought that he was an apocalyptic divine character. So obviously Jesus could not have said that. That kind of assumption plays a very large role in trying to decide what’s authentic and what’s not authentic. So, there’s a lot of assumptions in play. It’s not just pure science. Ok. It's really not just pure science. It is a lot of assumptions are at play.

6. The Holy Spirit

Sixthly, and this won’t impress a liberal critic, but it should give you some encouragement. And that is the role of the Holy Spirit. Remember in the Upper Room Discourse in John 14:26 Jesus says, “but the paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will instruct you (Mounce says ‘and he’s talking to the eleven disciples at this point’), will instruct you regarding all things, and cause you to remember everything that I have told you.” Now, that verse isn’t going to convince a skeptic that there should be more ‘red’ in the Bible and less ‘black’. But it should encourage you, and it should encourage me. And we think back to this period of oral tradition, and do we really believe that their memories were accurate? The answer is, for Christians I think, at least evangelical Christians, that it was one of the functions of the Holy Spirit, was to keep the memories of the disciples accurate. So do I have any trouble believing that someone in a rabbinic oral culture under the power of the Holy Spirit remember the stories about what Jesus said and did accurately? No, I don’t have any trouble at all. My memory is leaky, but I don’t think their memory was leaky at all.

So anyway, those are some of the arguments that we can make about this. And let me say one more thing in closing. Why did the church take so long to write the Gospels up? We’re going to talk about this in a later lesson. But they didn’t write right away. There was a period of oral tradition. And why wait so long, whether it be twenty, thirty years? Why wait so long? Well, first of all, it’s the nature of orality. They would not have felt the need to write things down. They have an oral culture. And in our culture, yes, it would be really strange not to write it down pretty quickly. But in their culture it wasn’t strange. There wasn’t a real need to because of how they used their memory. 

But secondly, that culture, and I think really all cultures, have a very strong preference for eyewitnesses. In other words, if you could read about the Holocaust, or you could talk to a Holocaust survivor, which one would you want to do? Well obviously, we’d want to hear the story from someone that was actually there, to understand it, and the cruelty, and just everything about the Holocaust. There is a, maybe it’s human nature, but it’s, I think certainly in 1st Century Jewish culture, there was a real preference to hear the firsthand accounts being told. And so, as long as there were firsthand witnesses, the apostles and some of the hundred and twenty that were in Acts at the beginning who experienced Pentecost, there’s going to be a real preference just to have them tell the stories, again, especially in an oral culture. Eusebius is a 4th century Christian historian, and he cites Papias, and Papias was early 2nd century. So, Papias says that he would rather hear the living voice of someone then read it. Well, that’s what we’re talking about. People have a preference to hear firsthand accounts of things. And so, just like in the Holocaust, why do we start having more and more written accounts of the Holocaust? Because the survivors are dying. And so, we need to get it written down. But while they’re around, it’s pretty strong to actually listen to it. 

So, I think those are good reasons why the Gospels weren’t written right away. There was no perceived need to, not really until the eyewitnesses started to die, and the church started to really spread around the world where there wouldn’t be as many eyewitnesses around. So anyway, that’s the whole issue of orality, or oral tradition. And again, the answer is that while my memory may leak, in a rabbinic and repetitive oral culture, superintended by the work of the Holy Spirit, we can trust the memories of the eyewitnesses of Jesus.