The Case For Christ

actually, scrolls of papyrus-were relatively rare. Therefore
education, learning, worship, teaching in religious communitiesall
this was done by word of mouth.
Rabbis became famous for having the entire Old Testament
committed to memory. So it would have been well within the
capability of Jesus' disciples to have committed much more to
memory
than appears in all four gospels put together-and to have passed
it along accurately."
"Wait a second," I interjected. "Frankly, that kind of
memorization seems incredible. How is that possible?"
"Yes, it is difficult for us to imagine today," he conceded, "but
this was an oral culture, in which there was great emphasis
placed on memorization. And remember that eighty to ninety
percent of Jesus' words were originally in poetic form. This
doesn't mean stuff that rhymes, but it has a meter, balanced
lines, parallelism, and so forth-and this would have created a
great memory help.
The other thing that needs to be said is that the definition of
memorization was more flexible back then. In studies of cultures
with oral traditions, there was freedom to vary how much of the
story was told on any given occasion-what was included, what was
left out, what was paraphrased, what was explained, and so forth.
One study suggested that in the ancient Middle East, anywhere
from ten to forty percent of any given retelling of sacred
tradition could vary from one occasion to the next. However,
there were always fixed points that were unalterable, and the
community had the right to intervene and correct the storyteller
if he erred on those important aspects of the story.
It's an interesting" -he paused, searching his mind for the right
word- "coincidence that ten to forty percent is pretty
consistently the amount of variation among the synoptics on any
given passage." Blomberg was hinting at something; I wanted him
to be more
explicit. "Spell it out for me," I said. "What precisely are you
saying?" "I'm saying that it's likely that a lot of the
similarities and differences among the synoptics can be
explained by assuming that the
disciples and other early Christians had committed to memory a
lot of what Jesus said and did, but they felt free to recount
this information in various forms, always preserving the