Chapter 120 of 404

Oral Traditions Besides Written Sources

Even the Gospels that used written sources appear to have used oral sources as well. Over one third of the “Q” material shared by Matthew and Luke shows “less than 40 percent” verbal correspondence.²¹ The content and often sequence show that this is clearly the same material, yet the flexibility in communicating it fits what we expect of “oral performance.”²² Certainly the Gospel writers must have had access to oral material beyond what appears in their written sources. As James D. G. Dunn warns, “What kind of failure in historical imagination could even suggest to us that Matthew, say, only knew the Lord’s Prayer because he read it in Q? Or that Luke only knew the words of the Last Supper because he found them in Mark? The alternative explanation positively cries out for consideration: that these were living traditions, living because they were used in regular church assemblies.”²³

Dunn argues that features characteristic of oral tradition more generally also characterize the material in our Gospels.²⁴ Though a sufficient number of persons could read and write, the majority of people were illiterate and would know the stories about Jesus from hearing them repeatedly.²⁵

From a comparative historical standpoint, it is surely nonsense to assume that the surviving documents represent the entirety of the stories told about Jesus, and that whatever Matthew and Luke did not find in Mark or Q they must have invented.²⁶ No one would assume such a position for other ancient sources. Thus, for example, our collection of orations by the famous ancient orator Dio Chrysostom (c. 40/50 to after 110 CE) includes only some of his material, as is made clear in the many additional fragments found in Stobaeus (c. 450 CE) and Maximus the Confessor (580-662 CE).²⁷ Pliny the Elder explored some two thousand volumes (focusing on about a hundred) as sources for his own encyclopedic Natural History,²⁸ yet barely any of these other sources have survived.

In the ancient Greek world, some writers felt free to add information from centuries-old oral traditions that did not appear in their written sources.²⁹ The countless allusions to other stories in Homer³⁰ lent themselves to later development, but clearly refer to fuller stories that Homer’s works did not record, and which we have in forms developed from such traditions. In the case of the Gospels, the writers themselves assume knowledge of traditions about Jesus not recorded in their Gospels (e.g., Acts 20:35; Jn 20:30).

Jewish storytellers also passed on traditions informally over long stretches of time, ultimately contributing to many of the documents now collected as “Pseudepigrapha.”³¹ The careful preservation of details in such oral tradition is difficult to guarantee;³² but within the first generation or two, one would expect more of the widely circulated oral sources to remain accurate than would be the case in a later period. It is clear, in any case, that many traditions and documents flourished for some time in antiquity besides those that have survived to this day.

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