Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] When is the same memory tradition story not actually the same, written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Toutch?
[00:00:14] Do we mean the same thing by the same that people in oral cultures do? Here I pick up on my discussion of oral cultures. In the previous post. I talked about how Mill and Perry began to study one such culture, and his discoveries were startling. Professional memorizers, reciters would claim that various performances of the same tradition account story song was in fact the same as earlier performances, but, well, apparently not, at least by our standards. Again, this is excerpted from my book Jesus before the Gospels.
[00:00:53] How different could the same song be in different versions?
[00:00:59] Social anthropologist Jack Goody has noted that when Milman Perry first met a singer named Avdo, he took down by dictation a lengthy song that he performed called the wedding of smilegage. It was 12,323 lines in length. Some years later, Albert Lord met up with Avdo again and took down a performance of the same song. This time it was 8488 lines. Perry himself observed this phenomenon. He at one time had Avdo sing a song performed by another singer named Moomin. Avdo strongly insisted it was the same song. His version was nearly three times as long. There are obviously important differences between what Perry and Lorde found among singers of epic poetry in Yugoslavia and what we find in the gospel accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus. For one thing, the gospels are not poetry to be sung, but prose narratives and collections of sayings. Moreover, as Lord himself notes, the kind of epic tradition that he recorded is quite different from when a tells b what happened and b tells c, and so on, with all natural errors of lapse of memory and exaggeration and distortion. It is obviously the latter sort of tradition that we are interested in when dealing with stories and sayings of Jesus. Thus, my point is not that with the epic poetry of Yugoslavia we have an exact analog with the gospels. It is rather that if we want to know about how oral cultures pass along their traditions, we should not make assumptions about what seems natural from our vantage point. As readers living in literary cultures, surely they would have remembered things better than we do. We instead need to see what experts in oral traditions have told us and see how that might be relevant for understanding the oral traditions of early Christianity.
[00:03:00] Further confirmation the findings of Parry and Lorde have, in broad outline, been confirmed by other studies of other oral cultures. No one had done more in that realm than the previously mentioned Jack Goody, who spent a highly productive 30 years as a professor of social anthropology at Cambridge University in his various publications, Goody stresses that without a written text, it is impossible to know for certain if two versions of a tradition are the same in our sense or not. Outside of writing or tape recorders, vcRs, or more modern forms of electronic recording. There is no way to check one version with the other. Your only choice is to listen to both and see if they seem the same. In his classic study, the domestication of the savage mind, Goodie reports on his anthropological work in northern Ghana, in West Africa, among the people known as the lodaga, a tribal society that was completely oral until schools were introduced in the modern period.
[00:04:07] Goody reports that the lodaga had one major myth known as the Bagre, which came in two forms. The white bagre was connected with a set of rituals, and the black Bagre was more strictly narrative, a cosmological myth that detailed how humans were created and came to be cultured with the development of farming, hunting, iron making, and the brewing of beer. When asked, members of the lo Dagao would sometimes indicate that there was only one correct version of the myth. But as Goody discovered, that was not at all the case. In fact, even the poem itself encourages people to incorporate elements they had learned at other recitals. As a result, when the myth was recited, new passages were constantly being introduced. Other passages were changed or deleted. As Goody summarizes, we have here a process of composition that gives rise to a number, indeed an infinite number, of variants.
[00:05:06] Goody was able to demonstrate this phenomenon by recording different versions of the Bagre. He found that some elements that were absolutely essential to the myth in 1951 were completely absent in 1970. These changes involved portions that one might expect would be transmitted intact. The invocation to the myth is only about a dozen lines in length and is, as Goody indicates, something that everyone knows, more or less, as christians all know, the Lord's prayer. And yet taping shows that the wording of the invocation can vary significantly from one recitation to the other, even in the case of recitations by the same individual, and even in individuals who will correct you when your version does not correspond to their current version. At one point in 1970, Goody took two recordings of the black Bagre by the same speaker a few days apart. One of them was 1646 lines in length. The other was 2781. Another time he recorded two versions of the white Bagre. One was 6133 lines, the other 1204. And yet, as he emphasizes, quote, the local population see it all as the same ritual and recitation. Even though the differences are enormous, unquote Goody's conclusion is that we ourselves, in our context, would not call these recitations the same. The differences are extremely deep, even if, in a very broad sense, the gist of the myth survives in all the retellings close.
