A related issue is the argument that oral tradition meant something very different thousands of years ago, when it was the ONLY form of historical record. Oral historians were duty-bound to preserve the story. This sounds plausible. It probably ISN’T as easily testable since we can’t compare oral history from pre-writing times against… well, much of anything. (Well, I guess archaeological evidence, if the events being described would have left enough archaeological evidence). Is there an official, accepted scholarly opinion on this?
Sociologists have tested the degree to which myths and folktales in present day oral cultures vary with retellings and transmission. I’m not finding the study with a cursory search, but I recall that they found that although the tellers thought they were telling the same story each time, the stories actually changed, not just with transmission from one teller to another, but with retellings by the same trained storytellers, and sometimes in significant details. The sociologists had to pretty much dispense with the notion that highly trained individuals in an oral culture were able to effectively preserve the content of the stories passed down by word of mouth much better than individuals from cultures used to using the written word would be able to.
Sociologists have tested the degree to which myths and folktales in present day oral cultures vary with retellings and transmission. I’m not finding the study with a cursory search, but I recall that they found that although the tellers thought they were telling the same story each time, the stories actually changed, not just with transmission from one teller to another, but with retellings by the same trained storytellers, and sometimes in significant details. The sociologists had to pretty much dispense with the notion that highly trained individuals in an oral culture were able to effectively preserve the content of the stories passed down by word of mouth much better than individuals from cultures used to using the written word would be able to.
I’d really like to find that study. That seems pretty directly relevant.
It seems to be a bit more complicated than that. Still, even a Jesuit isn’t willing to trust it as history for more than 150 years.