The problem is one of Chinese whispers and embellishments along the way.

We know that certain kinds of text can survive for long periods in pre-literate societies.  People in such societies earn their living as shenachie / skald / bard / professional rememberer and reciter.

No one of this kind seems to be involved with the gospels.

(Professional rememberers were open to politics and persuasion.  These people quietly changed genealogies, the parties to marriages, the legitimate to illegitimate and vice versa, good guys to bad and vice versa, altered the outcome of battles and trials, and so on, to please their sponsors.  We know they did because in the transcripts that have been made of their lore, they accuse each other of doing so and they tell tales in which such events occur.)

May 6, 2012 -- 7:55PM, Athlyes wrote:

I also see this comment frequently in relation to the oral tradition told about Jesus. Since his death to the composition of Mark, the oral tradition told about him was passed down unaltered in form and content because of the master skills of oral societies. But what study is this based on? Is it just conjecture?

The one study I found regarded an illiterate Balkan bard in the former Yugoslavia in the 1930's. Avdo Meoedovic  was a master performer and reciter, but when recorded although he remembered the story structure, important facts and dates, the arrangement of the content and details changed with each recital, even when the same story was directly recited immediately after the fist telling.

From an interview with the author (and winner of the US Memory Championship) of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything,

"...Moment Editor Nadine Epstein sits down with Foer to discuss the historic relationship between Jews and memory, and the role that memory plays in shaping the Jewish mind.

Jews are known as the “People of the Book.” Before scribes began to write words on scrolls, were we the “People of Memory?”

Much more than being the “People of the Book” we remain the “People of Memory.” The Hebrew word for remember is in the Torah 169 times. There is a terrific book called Zakhor, by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, in which he argues that we are the only people on earth who elevated the act of remembering to a religious imperative. We are commanded constantly to remember this, remember that, don’t forget this, don’t forget that.

How did we remember before literacy became widespread?

Memory was highly valued in all cultures before there was literacy. Jews had an entire oral tradition that was passed down through memory. In fact, for a long time it was forbidden to write down the oral laws. There were actually individuals who were charged with remembering. Rabbis would consult with them and say, “Help me out, I’m missing this one piece of text” or “What did someone say once upon a time?” These guys would circulate from academy to academy just to make sure everybody had the same texts in mind.

Did rabbis welcome the advent of writing?

One of the unique things about the Jewish tradition is that the value of remembering was maintained even long after it was possible to write things down. We still had this notion that it was better to have the oral tradition alive in memory, rather than on parchment or papyrus.

Were there any people who worried that writing might interfere with memory?

Socrates was concerned about the role that writing would have on people’s memory and cognitive capacities. He thought once people started taking memories and ideas out of their minds and putting them down on papyrus, they would become forgetful and the whole culture would be headed down this treacherous slippery slope that would end no place good. Fortunately, somebody had the good sense to write this down—thank you very much, Plato. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have any knowledge of it. But the thought that ideas have to live in the human mind to have true richness, and to sometimes change and evolve, I suppose that’s kind of a Jewish idea..."  www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2011/06/memo...

It was a serious part of Israel's religion and worship to make a point of remembering--and in all reverence, accurately.

Adelphe

"In fact, for a long time it was forbidden to write down the oral laws."

How do we know this? 

If true, it conflicts with the claim you also cite that the Jewish rememberers welcomed literacy.

"There were actually individuals who were charged with remembering."

These are found in all pre-literate societies.

"These guys would circulate from academy to academy just to make sure everybody had the same texts in mind."

Circulating from academy to academy also occurs widely in pre-literate societies.  From time to time there were places where bards, skalds, shenachies &c went to be taught and to teach, most often around a central personality - you learnt to be a rememberer by apprenticeship.

But as to the claim that Jewish rememberers had the express purpose of keeping the stories standard, how do we know this?  And standard according to whom?

"One of the unique things about the Jewish tradition is that the value of remembering was maintained even long after it was possible to write things down."

Hardly unique.  For example, Angus Macdonald, generally recognized as the last fully trained Scots shenachie, was born in North Uist in the Outer Hebrides in 1900.  The Scottish Highlands had literate priests from not later than 1000, some literate nobility and families from the 1500's and general literacy, at least for males, since the public education movements from the mid-1700s.

May 7, 2012 -- 12:34AM, MMarcoe wrote:

May 6, 2012 -- 7:55PM, Athlyes wrote:

I also see this comment frequently in relation to the oral tradition told about Jesus. Since his death to the composition of Mark, the oral tradition told about him was passed down unaltered in form and content because of the master skills of oral societies. But what study is this based on? Is it just conjecture?

The one study I found regarded an illiterate Balkan bard in the former Yugoslavia in the 1930's. Avdo Meoedovic  was a master performer and reciter, but when recorded although he remembered the story structure, important facts and dates, the arrangement of the content and details changed with each recital, even when the same story was directly recited immediately after the fist telling.

Indeed, one of the things I learned in my African storyteller class in college was that storytellers would learn the patterns of stories and then let the details change when they told them, since the details weren't as important.

 

So the question becomes what in the NT was the central part and what was details that could change with recitals?

May 6, 2012 -- 7:55PM, Athlyes wrote:

I also see this comment frequently in relation to the oral tradition told about Jesus. Since his death to the composition of Mark, the oral tradition told about him was passed down unaltered in form and content because of the master skills of oral societies. But what study is this based on? Is it just conjecture?

The one study I found regarded an illiterate Balkan bard in the former Yugoslavia in the 1930's. Avdo Meoedovic  was a master performer and reciter, but when recorded although he remembered the story structure, important facts and dates, the arrangement of the content and details changed with each recital, even when the same story was directly recited immediately after the fist telling.

You've skipped the most immediate problem :) We do not have any sources in the language Jesus spoke: Aramaic.

The first texts we have are in Greek, which means that we don't have the original stories, instead we have the Greek translations of the stories. Entirely equivalent word for word translation can be ruled out because we have examples in the texts that a certain amount of creative interpretation took place with our earliest gospel.

From another thread I wrote:

The passage is the Greek version of Mark 2:27-28

'Then he said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”'

[Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?]

“....That last line doesn't really make sense in the context, for two reasons. For one thing, even if Jesus, who is the Son of Man in Mark's Gospel, is the Lord (master) of the Sabbath, what has that to do with his critics' objection? They are objecting not to what he has done but to what his disciples have done. Even more, the last line doesn't follow at all from the first line. 

I sometimes tell my students that when they see the word therefore in a passage, they should ask, what is the therefore there for? The therefore in this case doesn't make sense. Just because Sabbath was made for humans and no the other way around, what does that have to do with Jesus being the Lord of the Sabbath?

Both problems are solved once you translate the passage back into Aramaic. As it turns out, Aramaic uses the same word for man and for son of man. It is the word barnash. And so the two-liner originally said, “Sabbath was made for barnash, not barnash for the Sabbath. Therefore barnash is lord of the Sabbath....” 

A second point is that we can have no confidence that the stories were preserved in an identical manner in the oral tradition for the first 30+ years by examining what was written.

If the authors of the Gospels felt perfectly comfortable editing and redacting the texts they were using then there is no reason to think that precise replication of the story was important to the communities that used these stories.

Here again is the same passage above as written by the three authors:

Mark:

One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields and as his disciples walked along they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?”

Matthew:

At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them.

Luke: 

One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields and his disciples began to pick some heads of grain rub them in their hands and eat the kernels.

In Mark everyone is picking grain.  In Matthew it is the disciples who were hungry and began to pick grain (a detail different from Mark), in Luke the disciples pick grain rubbing them in their hands (a detail different from Mark).

Given that Mark was the source of this story for Luke and Matthew, and given that both authors felt it no problem to alter the text, this is powerful evidence that the preservation of the accounts word for word was not a practice nor a value in the early Christian communities.

I hope this helps.