By: Brian G. Chilton, Ph.D., M.Div. | November 2, 2023

S7E9 Oral Traditions and the Dependability of God's Word on YouTube



 

S7E9 Oral Traditions and the Dependability of God’s Word (Article)

What Do We Mean by “Oral Traditions?”

When we speak of “oral traditions,” we are speaking of stories that are important to a person and community that are passed along from one generation to another. Before stories were written down on paper, communities often transmitted stories to their children that existed from numerous generations of the past. Most assuredly, most of the stories that we find in the Bible originated with oral traditions. Even in the most literate of cultures, a person does not walk around with a pen and paper, documenting everything that is seen. Neither do most normal people walk around with a video recorder, taping everything they see.

When important events transpire, historians—serving as detectives—interview eyewitnesses to compile information to accurately recreate the event. Since the reports stem from eyewitness accounts and may not be recorded for some time after the event, then the story is initially told and spread by an oral tradition, or an oral account, of what happened.

 

Do Oral Traditions Work the Same as the Telephone Game?

Living in a written culture, I was suspicious when I first learned about oral traditions. Like many, I assumed that oral traditions must work comparably to the old schoolyard game “Telephone.” Telephone is played when a person tells Person A a story. Then, Person A tells Person B, Person B tells Person C, and so on until it reaches the last person in the line. By the time the information is told by the last person, the story has completely changed from what Person A said.

The funny game shows that information is not always accurately and precisely communicated from one person to another. However, oral traditions do not operate in the same manner because communities are involved with storytelling. People from the group can correct the storyteller if he or she tells the story incorrectly. Anyone married knows that our wives will quickly correct us if we say something that is not right. Imagine how much more self-correction occurs within an entire community.

 

Is There a Model That Best Describes How Oral Traditions Work?

Three models have been offered to describe how the transmission of oral traditions works.

Informal Uncontrolled Model (Bultmann and German School)

First, there is the view held by the German theological school which was defended by one Rudolf Bultmann. The German school defended a position known as the informal uncontrolled model. By “informal,” they indicate that no one was assigned the role of the guardians of the tradition. As such, no hierarchy existed, and no one necessarily preserved the story. By “uncontrolled,” the information was not necessarily memorized, resulting in each group adding to the tradition as they saw fit.

Bultmann notes the existence of NT prophets who likely held that when they spoke, they spoke for Jesus. To a great degree, Bultmann’s model does resemble the classic game of Telephone more than the others. Most troubling, Bultmann asserts that “I do not indeed think that we can know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary; and other sources about Jesus do not exist” (Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, 13).

When examining the NT texts and the similarity they hold with rabbinic practices, strong doubt is cast upon the Bultmannian viewpoint. This was true of the Scandinavian school led by Harald Riesenfeld and Birger Gerhardsson. They advocated a view known as the formal controlled model. The transmission of the Jesus traditions was formal in the sense that they were entrusted to the disciples...