Could someone please explain where this idea that the Bible is made up of oral traditions came from?

Question

As far as I know it was cannonized a hundred or so years after Jesus resurection and contains apostolic letters and writings. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

No. The Dead Sea scrolls date back to 1000 BC

The original Biblical Scripture (TORAH) were oral and then people started writing them down.

By 1,000 BC they were in writing for the most part

There were Greek translations of the Old Testiment when Jesus walked the Earth

50 years after Jesus died the Aspostiles started publishing the New Testiment or after Jesus Biblical Scripture.

Answer 2

First of all, it was not canonized a hundred years after Jesus' death, but much later. Secondly, how you think people got the material for people to write down a gospel decades after Jesus' death and after the death of many of his earliest disciples? Few people could write back then (estimated only 5% or so of the population). The only means of remembering things back then was by it being passed on orally.

Oral communication to pass on stories at that time in that part of the world is a well documented thing. In fact, most, if not all, ancient cultures passed on info that way.

Answer 3

Well, that's the New Testament, which was the product of a more literate society than the Old.

But even the NT has some of the marks of an oral tradition; for example, the genealogical list that kicks off the book of Matthew. Three groups of fourteen 'begats' is essentially a mnemonic device for remembering genealogy.

Answer 4

Oral tradition - mainly refers to the Old Testament -
prior to paper and Gutenberg press -

books were very expensive - and rare

and so by ORAL - (say memorization) we had those books
and the Bible - because it was memorized

not a bad thing - either

how many verses do you recall?

was it the Council of Nicea AD 330 when the final 66 were decided on?

Answer 5

The old testament is much older than Jesus. They say stories like Noah's Ark were orally passed down which makes since because every culture/religion has some kind of flood story

Answer 6

I think you're missing the fact that anything that is supposedly dated before the first findings of writs and scripts is simply a story passed on from the beginnings of civilized man, and subject to interpretation by the person recording such ideas.

Answer 7

The idea of the bible as oral tradition is largely a product of the European "Higher Criticism" school of philosophy in the 1800's. In order to make the scripture fit their ideas of the evolution of thought, it became necessary to find things in the text that are not actually recorded. Their answer was to postulate that there was an oral tradition that was lost that said what they wanted it to say. The actual textual evidence is that the Tanakh (Old Testament) has been written in document form for at least three thousand years and the New Testament has been in written form since the middle of the first century A.D.

Answer 8

I'm sure some or the Old Testament could have been oral, as Moses had some repeat things. But he wrote it down later.

Answer 9

Before there was writing (and the internet) people spoke to each other...I don't even the funnest of fundamentalists would tell you that the stories in the Bible were "new" when they were written down...but I've been wrong before.

Answer 10

You may have noticed in your Bible that there is an entire section that preceeds the stories about Jesus and his exploits.

If you haven't, yes, you're missing something.