Broken Wing

Oral transmission: It's not just a way to get VD!

When you hear the words "oral transmission" you might think it's a way your health teacher warned that one could contract herpes. You might alternatively think it's a system which allows your car to shift gears based on speech commands. You are right on both counts. But it is also a way of communicating history, and a not very good one at that.

You see, before the Old Testament was written down, it was passed down through generations of nomadic illiterate clans by storytelling. The problem with this approach is the same problem that plagues the game "Telephone," in which a message is passed, via whispering, through a throng of a group of children, inevitably incoherent by the time it reaches the last snot producer. Except the problem is even worse, because the children are trying expressly to maintain the fidelity of the message, while storytellers have the temptation to make the story interesting by exaggerating. If you think the bible is boring now, you can't even imagine what a snoozer it was before the storytellers got to it.

The following is a list of outlandish events from the modern Bible, followed by the actual events from which storytellers derived them:

Story	Actual event
The burning bush	Moses interprets literally the description of the symptoms of a nasty illness passing through the clanswomen.
Ten commandments	Moses' wife made a list of things that made her mad.
Noah's Ark	Noah took his family to the zoo and it rained.
The parting of the Red Sea	A really fat guy did a cannonball into the Red Sea.
Cain kills Abel	Cain stops talking to Abel over a $6.76 debt.
Eve is deceived by a serpent	A woman did something stupid and made up an elaborate and ridiculous cover story involving talking animals and magical fruit rather than risk losing an argument.

For people who take a literal interpretation of the bible (read: retarded people), the defense is that since the bible is divinely inspired, god guided the transmission of the bible from its beginning. Of course, the end result of several different versions, each of which considers all the others inferior, makes this argument laughable. I've even heard some people say that the bible is the truth because it says so in the bible. Oh, that's nice! Anytime I want to make a claim, just write out that claim, and underneath write "The above claim is true." Let me start right now:

• The Bible is a ridiculous book full of myth and contradiction.
• Every statement in this list is true.

Posted by mill1991 at June 21, 2005 01:03 PM | TrackBack