What if there was no Holy Bible at all?

[Mister Emu]

Your wish is my command. ;0)

Would you mind expanding on how you believe the piece relates to our disagreement about whether or not oral preservation of knowledge has the capacity to be reliable?

 

[Glaurung]

Guess people somehow lost all oratory skills and techniques today. Shame really.

Socrates believed so.

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To them came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them. He enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

 

[Twilight Hue]

Would you mind expanding on how you believe the piece relates to our disagreement about whether or not oral preservation of knowledge has the capacity to be reliable?

It has everything to do with it. Information gets modified each subsequent retelling. Omissions, substitution, exaggeration, embellishments. The original information gets distorted, aspects dropped, added on.
That's how oral culture relates and retells its stories generation to generation as well as the reasons why no one can even remember how the original story began much less it's author or how a person can become a super being of legend down the line.

If MIT.edu isn't sufficient enough for explaining oratory culture . .

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

Pfft. Yep, listening to a Harvard professor <blah>-<blah>-<blah>

You keep IGNORING the FACT that without writing? You cannot possibly KNOW if the oral tradition preserves ANYTHING accurately.

You gave ONE supposed "example", which I pointed out was flawed-- and you simply ignored that.

You cannot explain how you "know" that oral tradition is accurate. Magic, I suppose-- the same magic that gives people faith that gods are real?

100% of your "argument" is Argument From Authority Logical Fallacy. And you fail to address how you "know".

 

[Bob the Unbeliever]

Would you mind expanding on how you believe the piece relates to our disagreement about whether or not oral preservation of knowledge has the capacity to be reliable?

Here's the thing: YOU are making a BOLD CLAIM-- that oral tradition somehow preserves the original narrative.

All we need to do? Is say: PROVE IT.

You refer to an Authority (logical fallacy), but you ignore the fundamental problem: how does anyone KNOW that the original and the latest stories are the same?

LANGUAGE does not even remain that perfectly static!

Your unsupported claim remains false, for a failure to explain how anyone can tell if it works or not.

 

[Mister Emu]

BTW, thank you. I appreciate the effort to provide an academic light to our discussion.

If MIT.edu isn't sufficient enough for explaining oratory culture . .

I certainly accept MIT's academic quality(I'll admit to being curious as to the unattributed author, do you have any further information as to the source of the piece?). Harvard is similarly sufficient, yes?

It has everything to do with it. Information gets modified each subsequent retelling. Omissions, substitution, exaggeration, embellishments. The original information gets distorted, aspects dropped, added on.
That's how oral culture relates and retells its stories generation to generation as well as the reasons why no one can even remember how the original story began much less it's author or how a person can become a super being of legend down the line

Now this is interesting, as I saw references made to techniques to enhance recall and provision the amount of information in accordance with the capacity of the one recalling(I am assuming you are referring to the line about oral stories being episodic in nature so that individual episodes could be culled or restored when you say omissions and substitution); all of which are designed at improving the accuracy of the information transfer process.

As far as embellishments and exaggerations, those are added to physical writings as well, making them no less prone to failure to depict events as they occurred, which I thought was beside the point of whether oral information transfer was capable of maintaining information constancy.

I think it is interesting that in the cited Orality and Literacy by Ong (http://dss-edit.com/prof-anon/sound/library/Ong_orality_and_literacy.pdf) Ong writes p.56:

How such repetition could be verified before sound recordings were known was unclear, since in the absence of writing the only way to test for verbatim repetition of lengthy passages would be the simultaneous recitation of the passages by two or more persons together.

And then in the Handbook of Oriental Studies by Scharfe (Handbook of Oriental Studies) p. 26 we get:

Vedic Brahmins prefer to recite in pairs

I'll restate my opinion after an inspection of the question:
What if there was no Holy Bible? Can be understood two ways: what if the members of a literature primary culture had not written down the circumstances surrounding the life of Jesus and the immediate aftermath, and, what if the Christian religion had been founded in a culture of oral tradition that did not have a literate tradition at all.

The first understanding I would disregard, and I don't think you'd want to waste your time with it; the second is an interesting look at how information is processed and transmitted on a cultural level. The answer to the second is that it depends on the kind of culture it appeared in and how devoted they were to accurately relaying every word as spoken vs relaying only the purpose and meaning. There is no guarantee that it would be textually pure, but there is no guarantee that the keepers of the tradition would fail at that task(if they attempted it).

The handling of information ranges from some relatively loose(I find it fascinating that the Yugolsavic poets mentioned by Ong p.59 seemed to consider very similar wording to be 'word for word, line for line') to the feats of the Vedic reciters who studied/study multiple ways of recitation in order to ensure full accuracy.

Your argument that it would be impossible to maintain purity is untenable, we have a major world culture that went to great lengths over millennia to develop surety that is equal to literate societies for the preservation of their culture, religion, and history. Their methods of passing on via the spoken word is only surpassed by modern electronics.