Secular scholars, especially those who attack the historicity of the New Testament, claim it is difficult to establish historical knowledge that is valid and reliable because of the infallibility of the human memory. People do not recall information accurately, especially if the account is written years after the event. However, historians and archaeologists have been able to make strong cases for their accounts considering several factors, such as the closeness of the written document to the event, multiple attestations to the incident, and so on.
In this article, I will discuss the factor of oral tradition communities, how literate people recorded their history, and whether their methodology is reliable or not. Western and advanced societies might not realize that there is a pattern that oral communities usually follow to preserve their history and pass it on to the next generation. The first-century Middle Eastern people were no exception, and we can today trust their recordings despite the minor variations we have in the written accounts of the New Testament.
The Secular Theory of Oral Tradition
Secular philosopher Paul Ricoeur describes the reference modes of history and fiction as interweaving. He believes that when historians try to make sense of an artifact to understand the historical event, their imagination imposes itself making them come up with their own fiction about history. [i] Schröter explains that “the narration of history represents a fictionalizing of the past, whereas the fictional narrative imitates the historical narrative.”[ii] Therefore, the final product is never accurate. It is a mixture of the history and imagination of the writer.
Bart Ehrman generally agrees with this view accusing the writers of the NT of not being reliable and the Gospel accounts being recorded as people were playing a telephone game. He states,
“Nearly all of these storytellers had no independent knowledge of what really happened [to Jesus]. It takes little imagination to realize what happened to the stories. You are probably familiar with the old birthday party game ‘telephone.’ A group of kids sits in a circle, the first tells a brief story to the one sitting next to her, who tells it to the next, and to the next, and so on, until it comes back full circle to the one who started it. Invariably, the story has changed so much in the process of retelling that everyone gets a good laugh. Imagine this same activity taking place, not in a solitary living room with ten kids on one afternoon, but over the expanse of the Roman Empire (some 2,500 miles across), with thousands of participants.”[iii]
Ehrman’s analogy might seem appealing to some people; however, the question that we should investigate is whether preserving history in an oral culture is like a telephone game, as Ehrman claims.
What Is Oral Culture?
Oral culture is a term that refers to preliterate cultures to characterize the thought and expressions that carry over into manuscript and print culture. People talk to one another about certain events until these events are written. Robert Cochran makes a distinction between oral culture and oral history. He states, “Oral culture is culture based on the spoken rather than the written word; oral history is a record of the past based on spoken accounts.” [iv] In our times, an estimated one billion people do not know how to read or write any language, and so they live in what we call oral culture. [v]
It is important to explain also what oral tradition is not. According to Lynne Kelly, oral tradition is “not teaching how to hunt or how to gather during daily excursions. It is not about stories casually told around the campfire at night – these are more folk tale than myth and are usually for children. Oral tradition is about formal knowledge, about the way oral cultures store, maintain and transmit knowledge which is central to their physical and social worlds.” [vi] In other words, oral cultures are not a bunch of savages uneducated societies. They are people whose lack of written language and advanced education forced them to find alternative ways to remember and record their history accurately and reliably.
How Do Oral Cultures Save Their Knowledge?
Literate cultures record their knowledge on paper, books, or electronically. If they cannot write, then the knowledge must be committed to memory—practiced, repeated, and saved for future use in human memory. According to Kelly, the way formal knowledge is stored in literate culture is similar to oral culture,
We can assume that the individuals within oral cultures have the same range of intellectual potential, physiology and memory ability that has been typical of all humans for at least the last few millennia. We need to look beyond superficial differences and accept our similarities. It is only when the complexity of oral tradition is acknowledged that the control of knowledge can be seen as a tool for power. [vii]
People who lived under oral culture were also human beings with the same abilities to find accurate ways to record and pass on their knowledge.
Different elements were used to save knowledge in oral cultures, such as repetitions, rhythm, poetry, narratives, and stories that were transmitted in social gatherings. De Costa adds that “in oral cultures many constructions are aggregative rather than analytic, that is to say, remembered information is not systematized individually but in groups or series of related groups by means of parallelisms, antitheses, and epithets.” [viii]
So, oral cultures created and used different methods to repeat information and learn it. Basic knowledge is acquired in daily interaction to learn what is appropriate and how someone should act in a certain circumstance, and Specialized knowledge is acquired by participating in ceremonies and discussions with elders. [ix] This is why early Christians formed liturgy and creeds. The whole purpose was to keep repeating the basics of their faith over and over so it is not forgotten.
Is All Oral History Mixed with Myths?
The ancient Near Eastern civilization left one of the oldest writings (cuneiform), which included different information, such as migrations of people, chronology of political states, foreign relations, internal governance, legal institutions, and official acts. [x] Moreover, a variety of inscriptions from different places in the world distinguish between mythical, folklore, historical, political, and religious. Wiessner notes that the Enga of Papua New Guinea distinguishes clearly between myth and historical traditions. [xi] Historical information includes news about “wars, migrations, agriculture, the development of cults and ceremonial exchange networks, leadership, trade, environmental disasters, and fashions in song and dress.” [xii] In other words, because of inscriptions, historians are able to differentiate between myths and other genres, which is a piece of evidence that not all oral tradition is mixed with myths.
Were The Gospels Written According to the Telephone Game?
The majority of first-century Middle Easterners were literate people who lived in oral cultures. The New Testament was written within the first century after the death of Christ. The first written book of the NT was the First Letter to the Corinthians, which Paul wrote AD 53-55. The Gospels were written between AD 70-95, about 40-65 years after the death of Jesus. According to Bart Ehrman, this period of time is enough for people to forget what Jesus had said and done, and consequently, corrupt the Gospels.
The Purpose of the Telephone Game vs. Written Oral History
As per the previous information about oral tradition, it seems that Bart Ehrman has not done a good job investigating the culture of the first-century Middle East; otherwise, he would not have depicted the process of writing the NT books to the telephone game. The purpose of the telephone game is totally different from the purpose of written oral history. The purpose of the telephone game is to have fun, so people purposely disrupt the process of communication to laugh at the end results. Writing the Gospels tradition was precisely the opposite. The men of God wrote purposely to preserve the words and deeds of Jesus from disruption (Luke 1:1-4).
One-Way Chain of Communication
I am not sure if first-century people played the telephone game; however, this game represents a single one-way chain of communication, whereas, oral tradition is like a web or network. It does not pass information from one person to another person, but it passes information from many people to many people. When Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians, there were many people alive who witnessed and testified Jesus resurrected and ascended to heaven, and there were multiple opportunities for skeptics to investigate: “Did this really happen?” (1 Cor 15:6).
Liberal scholars who support Ehrman’s theory believe that “oral history reveal that cultures do not tend to remember events over much more than two generations and that memories ‘become increasingly inaccurate until they are so corrupt that they can hardly be distinguished from myth.”[xiii] If a generation lives for 20-30 years, and information is corrupted after the second generation, then it is reasonable to conclude that the NT books are reliable by secular standards because they were written within the first two generations after the death of Jesus.
Conclusion
It is simply impossible for any culture to retain all their knowledge without some formal information system. Therefore, literate cultures came up with ways to retain information, such as repetition in special ceremonies, conversations with elders, and social gatherings to pass on their knowledge. If Western culture found different ways to store information, that does not mean Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures have never done so. Further study of oral culture tradition shows that depicting the process of writing the NT books with telephone games is emphatically wrong.
References:
[i] Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, vol. 3, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984– 1988), 190-192.
[ii] Jens Schröter, From Jesus to the New Testament: Early Christian Theology and the Origin of the New Testament Canon, (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013), 34.
[iii] Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 72-74.
[iv] Robert Cochran, “Oral History and Oral Culture,” In The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Michael Ryan, 2011.
[v] Thomas Farrell, J. “Oral Culture,” in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, ed. Patrick Colm Hogan, (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
[vi] Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 15.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Elena De Costa, “Orality,” in Concise Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, ei. Verity Smith, ed. Routledge, 2000.
[ix] J. Goody, The Interface Between The Written And The Oral (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,1987), 156-7.
[x] J. Puhvel, “epigraphy,” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed, July 28, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/topic/epigraphy.
[xi] P. Wiessner, “The vines of complexity: egalitarian structures and the institutionalization of inequality among the Enga,” Current Anthropology, vol. 43, no. 2, (2002): 233–69
[xii] Ibid, 237.
[xiii] Richard Bradley, “The Translations of Time,” in RM, Van Dyke & SE Alcock, eds., Archaeologies of memory, Blackwell, (2003): 221–7.
Recommended Resources:
Why We Know the New Testament Writers Told the Truth by Frank Turek (mp4 Download)
The Top Ten Reasons We Know the NT Writers Told the Truth mp3 by Frank Turek
The New Testament: Too Embarrassing to Be False by Frank Turek (DVD, Mp3, and Mp4)
Cold Case Resurrection Set by J. Warner Wallace (books)
Sherene Khouri was born into a religiously diverse family in Damascus, Syria. She became a believer when she was 11 years old. Sherene and her husband were missionaries in Saudi Arabia. Their house was open for meetings, and they were involved with the locals until the government knew about their ministry and gave them three days’ notice to leave the country. In 2006, they went back to Syria and started serving the Lord with RZIM International ministry. They traveled around the Middle Eastern region—Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and United Arab Emirates.
Sherene was also involved in her local church among the young youth, young adults, and women’s ministry. In 2013, the civil war broke out in Syria. Sherene and her husband’s car was vandalized 3 times and they had to immigrate to the United States of America. In 2019, Sherene became an American citizen.
Sherene is an Assistant Professor at Liberty University. She teaches Arabic, Religion, and Research classes. Additionally, she holds a Ph.D. in Theology and Apologetics, M.A. in Christian Apologetics from Liberty University, and B.S. in Biblical Studies from Moody Bible Institute. Currently, Sherene is also working on a Master of Theology in Global Studies at Liberty University and M.A. in Arabic and linguistics from PennWest University.
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