The argument as used by Orthodox Jews is an interesting case study of what I think of as “unique apologetics.” There’s a large body of apologetics that is structurally very similar across a wide swatch of religions. However, many religions have small bits that give their apologetics a unique flavor, a way of at least superficially distinguishing their religion from others. For example, among Islamic apologetics, one sees the argument that a founder of a religion that was false would likely claim to be divine, and that Muhammad’s not doing so is evidence of his sincerity/the truth of the religion.
Among Orthodox Jews, the argument of a large scale, simultaneous oral tradition dates back to the Kuzari, an apologetic series of dialogues by Yehuda Halevi from the 1100s. The argument in its most general form does sound valid: if one did have a few million lines of separate transmission this would be quite strong evidence. The problem isn’t really in the lines of the argument but in the factual premises of the details. There are some aspects where the ancient Israelite oral tradition seems remarkably accurate (see for example, the genetic research about kohanim). However, there are not a million separate lines of transmission but rather a large number of people interacting and talking to each other. Now, arguably that should reduce the total amount of memetic drift (I’m possibly stretching the meme-gene analogy too far here but the idea should be clear). But the oral tradition itself is shown to be severely mutable in many respects. One amusing example of this failing is a line in the Talmud that discusses the importance of properly attributing ideas and sayings to their actual authors. An identical line shows up in multiple locations, each time attributed to a different Rabbi. This also helps answer your question and suggests that oral history can be frequently extremely unreliable, even in cases where the people in question feel a major moral/ethical duty to pass it on reliably.
Moreover, the combination of both written and oral tradition itself testifies strongly to the tradition having been repeatedly reduced to a bottleneck where at most a few people were aware of the tradition. For example, see 2 Chronicles Chapter 34 and 2 Kings Chapter 22 where under the time of King Josiah it is implied that almost everyone has completely forgotten much of the tradition until a copy of something (possibly a Torah, possibly the text of Deuteronomy) is discovered in a wall. This is not the only example of this sort of event recorded in the Bible. The Bible describes a similar set of activity at the time of Ezra.
So, the upshot is that in general it seems that oral history is not very reliable although there are a handful of striking examples of apparently accurate oral history. It isn’t clear how one would tell how frequent such incidents are. I wouldn’t rely on the Missionaria Protectiva.
The argument in its most general form does sound valid: if one did have a few million lines of separate transmission this would be quite strong evidence.
And this is why I spent 20 years being Orthodox, having being trapped in High School...
For example, see 2 Chronicles Chapter 34 and 2 Kings Chapter 22
And this is why I cut my losses..
All that due to a poor knowldege of the Scriptures :).
The argument as used by Orthodox Jews is an interesting case study of what I think of as “unique apologetics.” There’s a large body of apologetics that is structurally very similar across a wide swatch of religions. However, many religions have small bits that give their apologetics a unique flavor, a way of at least superficially distinguishing their religion from others. For example, among Islamic apologetics, one sees the argument that a founder of a religion that was false would likely claim to be divine, and that Muhammad’s not doing so is evidence of his sincerity/the truth of the religion.
Among Orthodox Jews, the argument of a large scale, simultaneous oral tradition dates back to the Kuzari, an apologetic series of dialogues by Yehuda Halevi from the 1100s. The argument in its most general form does sound valid: if one did have a few million lines of separate transmission this would be quite strong evidence. The problem isn’t really in the lines of the argument but in the factual premises of the details. There are some aspects where the ancient Israelite oral tradition seems remarkably accurate (see for example, the genetic research about kohanim). However, there are not a million separate lines of transmission but rather a large number of people interacting and talking to each other. Now, arguably that should reduce the total amount of memetic drift (I’m possibly stretching the meme-gene analogy too far here but the idea should be clear). But the oral tradition itself is shown to be severely mutable in many respects. One amusing example of this failing is a line in the Talmud that discusses the importance of properly attributing ideas and sayings to their actual authors. An identical line shows up in multiple locations, each time attributed to a different Rabbi. This also helps answer your question and suggests that oral history can be frequently extremely unreliable, even in cases where the people in question feel a major moral/ethical duty to pass it on reliably.
Moreover, the combination of both written and oral tradition itself testifies strongly to the tradition having been repeatedly reduced to a bottleneck where at most a few people were aware of the tradition. For example, see 2 Chronicles Chapter 34 and 2 Kings Chapter 22 where under the time of King Josiah it is implied that almost everyone has completely forgotten much of the tradition until a copy of something (possibly a Torah, possibly the text of Deuteronomy) is discovered in a wall. This is not the only example of this sort of event recorded in the Bible. The Bible describes a similar set of activity at the time of Ezra.
So, the upshot is that in general it seems that oral history is not very reliable although there are a handful of striking examples of apparently accurate oral history. It isn’t clear how one would tell how frequent such incidents are. I wouldn’t rely on the Missionaria Protectiva.
And this is why I spent 20 years being Orthodox, having being trapped in High School...
And this is why I cut my losses..
All that due to a poor knowldege of the Scriptures :).