Let’s say you are trying to understand what Aristotle would think about artificial intelligence. Should you spend time reading and trying to understand Aristotle’s works, or can you talk to modern Aristotelian scholars and defer to their opinion?
How much can a tradition tell you about the opinions of its founders?
To what extent do the various traditions of Christianity fit your definition of a living tradition? How much of the content of the most ‘living’ Christian traditions comes from Jesus, and to what extent does this content reflect Jesus’ actual opinions or those of the early Christians, insofar as this can be known?
You can ask the same questions of any other tradition or genus of traditions. Confucianism, for example, or some school or other of Buddhism.
(Presumably, any difference between living traditions reflects some sort of change in at least one of them—unless ‘free variation’ existed at an early stage, and different descendants converged on different resolutions of the variation.)
It’s possible for traditions to be heavily modified upon contact with other traditions without syncretism taking place, and even with deliberate esoterogeny. I’ve read that Indonesian pagans, upon contact with Christianity and Islam, set about trying to reform their paganism along Abrahamic lines—not with the aim of becoming more like Christianity and Islam, but with the aim of preserving their tradition and its distinctiveness from the Abrahamic religions, by reforming paganism into an equal of Christianity and Islam, a “serious religion”. Of course, it just so happens that the models for “serious religion” are the Abrahamic religions.
Are there traditions that are unusually good at preserving their contents? How did these traditions preserve them? Of course, this requires having a definition of ‘contents’. The Rig Veda had been around for a thousand years before writing came to India, and the earliest known manuscripts of it date to about fifteen hundred years after that (although there were almost certainly earlier manuscripts that decayed or were lost) -- but it was mostly unintelligible until modern historical linguistics, and the proposed interpretations were mostly off the mark. Even now, a lot of it is obscure. But the text is very well preserved.
How much can a tradition tell you about the opinions of its founders?
To what extent do the various traditions of Christianity fit your definition of a living tradition? How much of the content of the most ‘living’ Christian traditions comes from Jesus, and to what extent does this content reflect Jesus’ actual opinions or those of the early Christians, insofar as this can be known?
You can ask the same questions of any other tradition or genus of traditions. Confucianism, for example, or some school or other of Buddhism.
(Presumably, any difference between living traditions reflects some sort of change in at least one of them—unless ‘free variation’ existed at an early stage, and different descendants converged on different resolutions of the variation.)
It’s possible for traditions to be heavily modified upon contact with other traditions without syncretism taking place, and even with deliberate esoterogeny. I’ve read that Indonesian pagans, upon contact with Christianity and Islam, set about trying to reform their paganism along Abrahamic lines—not with the aim of becoming more like Christianity and Islam, but with the aim of preserving their tradition and its distinctiveness from the Abrahamic religions, by reforming paganism into an equal of Christianity and Islam, a “serious religion”. Of course, it just so happens that the models for “serious religion” are the Abrahamic religions.
Are there traditions that are unusually good at preserving their contents? How did these traditions preserve them? Of course, this requires having a definition of ‘contents’. The Rig Veda had been around for a thousand years before writing came to India, and the earliest known manuscripts of it date to about fifteen hundred years after that (although there were almost certainly earlier manuscripts that decayed or were lost) -- but it was mostly unintelligible until modern historical linguistics, and the proposed interpretations were mostly off the mark. Even now, a lot of it is obscure. But the text is very well preserved.