Oral Traditions and the Bible

We in the advanced world have created an attitude that tends to shape up as, “if you cannot read there must be something with you”. It is a rather superiority enhancing position, especially given that most people in the 3rd World do not have a school like we have had.
Bible translators inform us that there are in excess 2000 People Groups around the world do not have a verse of the Bible in their own language. This is not to suggest that they do not have a written language system but the odds are that a majority of these groups may be pre-literate. Three young men are currently on a hike from Cairns in Far North Queensland to a town called Stanthorpe on the border of Queensland and New South Wales, a journey of 2000 Kilometres, simply to raise the profile of Bible Translation; it isn’t a bad effort I reckon.
However that is not the major thrust of this writing, For decades now academics, at least some of them, have been very keen to ascribe to the Bible distortions, inaccuracies and even downright fairy tale status based upon the fact that the text has been around for a minimum of almost two thousand years, there is that number again, and some date back to at the latest the Exodus from Egypt. Moses was educated, so the tradition goes, in the court of Pharaoh, so he could have been taught about the use of papyrus as a recording medium and had the capacity to write the first five books as tradition claims.
I am not so much interested in the verbatim accuracy of copied manuscript today, I do hold the Bible true as God’s word to us but whether it is literal is today’s red herring. This blog is about the oral tradition that most scholars can agree upon. That, prior to the invention of printing mechanisms, people were taught by word of mouth. In fact until the invention of printing press even written material was duplicated by the process of one person reading aloud and others transcribing the words.
This same thing still happens in pre-literate societies and even some which have advanced world education who are revisiting their roots. Anthropologists have spent much time and energy documenting the lives of pre-literate societies during the last hundred or so years. They have noticed some commonalities between diverse tribal groups in the way that people are educated. Some of them have a striking similarity to our year, most significant being that many groups have places that are associated with specific events in their history and when they are at that location. This equates closely to the “Christian” year which is divided up into Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, Advent, and then we start all over again. Some cultures even have a harvest and thanksgiving festival in as well.
It would seem that we have not come all that far from our pre-literate ancestors, even in the literate 1st World. There are even trends today that suggest we may be entering into a post literate society. twenty years ago universities were accepting students from HSC exams and immediately sending them to remedial English classes prior to entering into formal study. The people who are supposed to know about good blog writing claim that you are going for too long if your blog cannot be read in 90 seconds, their claimed concentration span for readers of blogs. I guess that makes me a bad blogger because I doubt even a speed reader would finish this. But my time is up tomorrow I will expand upon this subject by exploring Orality and Evangelism. Until then as the Hebrews say Shalom.