Lindsay Brash wrote: > >I'm sure that in communities which relied upon oral history, it > was a long > >way from chinese whispers. And that is hard for us to understand > >today. But on the other hand, there would be influences which > moulded the > >stories over time ... I don't think it is reasonable to assume > that there > >was no change over time.
and Andrew Alder responded: > OK. But I don't think I've ever seen the Bible *defended* on the > grounds of > the alleged *accuracy* of oral transmission. I'm sure it has been > *somewhere*, but it's not prevalent among my circles, and it's > not the way > I intend to argue here. But what *is* prevalent is to *attack* > the accuracy > of the Bible on the basis of the supposed parallel between > chinese whispers > and oral traditions. Oral transmission in oral-based cultures is far more accurate than Chinese whispers. I would be deeply offended if anyone were to suggest to me that there is any parallel. In most games of Chinese whispers, what comes out at the end bears no resemblance to what was put in, and to all intents and purposes, this is the aim of the game - most people aren't actually *trying* to get the right version at the end and they certainly aren't able to hear accurately what is going on. There are two very important differences between the transmission of information in cultures without writing. One is that everyone's memories for heard information are much better. In much the same way that the memories of people who have been blind since before the advent of palm pilots have much better memories than those of us who are sighted - because it was so much more difficult for them to look up information like phone numbers and addresses, they remembered them better. The other is that important information was learned off by heart. It was not just that people were told stories around campfires and passed them on - members of each community were identified whose role it was to learn the important stories and teach them to their apprentices. And the teachers made sure that their pupils had them word perfect, because it was important that the information be transmitted accurately. The reason that old manuscripts are written all in uppercase with no gaps between the words and no punctuation (and, in the case of Hebrew, no vowels either) is that they weren't designed to convey information, but to remind people of what they already knew by heart or almost so. There is a third difference between the cultures that transmitted Scripture orally and ours, and that is the reverence in which they held God. We would tend to call their attitudes 'ignorant supersition' in many cases, but the fact remained that they were conscious that they were telling others about a very powerful being of whom they were very much more scared than we tend to be today. So to try to equate the accuracy of early oral transmission of Scripture with Chinese whispers is a total nonesense, but that still doesn't mean that there is no room for error. If you look at collections of old English folk songs, you will see that there are variations of wording for the same song between collections, which reflect the fact that they were handed down orally for many generations before they were written down. The differences aren't all that big. But they do come in several types. Some can be explained by substitution of words that sound very similar but have different meanings. Typically, one version will make far more sense than the other in this case. Others seem to be attempts to fix the poetry (sometimes by more modern singers when a shift in pronunciation over the centuries has made the original words no longer rhyme or fit the rhythm pattern properly). Still others are blatant attempts to change the meaning because a particular singer or group of singers just plain didn't like the words in that bit. A more modern example of the first and last types of variation is the different versions of the grace "be present at our table, Lord" which are in circulation. The last two lines I learned growing up in a very reformed Presbyteryian church were "and grant that we may spend our lives in serving Thee". It wasn't until I started mixing with people from Methodist backgrounds that I hear "and grant that we may feast in Paradise with Thee". When I was studying theology, one of my colleagues made a study of different versions of this (I think it was a time-wasting exercise) and discovered that, while most people sang "these mercies bless, and grant...", old collections of table graces had this line as "these *morsels* bless, and grant..." which makes far more sense both grammatically and theologically. And when you look at different manuscripts of Scripture, you can find examples of both these types of difference (not sure about the shift in pronunciation one, though). The "I don't like the theology" changes can have happened any time, but the similar sounding words one would only have happened either during the course of oral transmission or in the days when, in order to produce copies of the text as quickly as possible, one monk would sit at a desk with the text in front of him and dictate to a roomfull of other monks who wrote down what they heard, and then may not have proofread as carefully as they should. >From my perspective, the versions of Scripture we have available now are very (surprisingly) accurate, but they are not inerrant. Judy -- "Politics is the work we do to keep the world safe for our spirituality" - Judith Plaskow Rev Judy Redman Uniting Church Chaplain University of New England Armidale 2351 ph: +61 2 6773 3739 fax: +61 2 6773 3749 web: http://www.une.edu.au/campus/chaplaincy/uniting/ action for peace: http://www.une.edu.au/campus/chaplaincy/uniting/links/peace.html email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------ - You are subscribed to the mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put in the message body 'unsubscribe insights-l' (ell, not one (1)) See: http://nsw.uca.org.au/insights-l-information.htm ------------------------------------------------------
