No problem.
1. Those passing on the oral tradition and "preaching" have an agenda, first and foremost, to spread the word and get followers.
Maybe I am just missing it, but I don't see how this affects the reliability of oral tradition.
2. Those passing on the oral tradition will tend to omit or change aspects of the story as it keeps getting told, especially when passed from person to person.
Kind of like me going to church tomorrow and telling a friend a certain sentence, and having them immediately tell their neighbor, and they tell their neighbor, and theirs, and theirs, and as it gets around and back to me it will be different from what I originally said as aspects of the sentence will be changed or omitted, right?
3. People even retelling events that they've seen themselves recollect events differently, or have a bias, or due to faulty observation tend to tell events differently from how they occured.
People of what century
4. 40 years of this happening before it is even put into writing has a huge effect on the veracity of the telling of an event.
Yes, but I get the impression that you think that all of the things mentioned in the gospels and the book of Acts are fictional or made up.
christiancourier.com wrote:
A Religious Explosion
For some reason – that scarcely can be explained on ordinary bases – the religion of Christ exploded on the landscape of first-century society. Jesus had only a handful of men (the apostles) who functioned as the leaders of his cause. From this tiny seed came the mighty Christian movement.
On the day of its birth the community of believers consisted of a minimum of 3,000 persons (Acts 2:41). If the numeral 3,000 constituted only those immersed that day, and not those disciples previously baptized by John the Baptist (Mt. 3:5-6) and the Lord’s disciples (Jn. 4:1-2), the total was significantly larger. Within a relatively short period of time, the number of saints was computed at 5,000 adult men (Acts 4:4), not to mention the thousands of women who likewise were added to the body of believers.
It has been estimated that by the time Stephen was martyred (Acts 7:60), the Jerusalem church consisted of no fewer than 20,000 souls (Kistemaker, p. 148 ). This represented more than one-third of the estimated 55,000 citizens in Jerusalem at that time (Jeremias, p. 83).
Beyond that, the gospel rapidly spread from Palestine into Africa (Acts 8 ), Syria (Acts 9), Asia Minor (Acts 13ff), and finally into Europe (Acts 16ff). Paul, whose tireless travels spanned some 12,000 miles, evangelized from Jerusalem to Rome – and perhaps as far as Spain (Rom. 15:24,28 ).
Clement of Rome (c. A.D. 95) says that Paul reached “the boundary of the west” (1 Clement 5), which could be an allusion to Spain. Both Irenaeus (Against Heresies, 1.10.2) and Tertullian (Against Jews, 7) confirm the presence of Christians in Spain in the 2nd century A.D.
Christianity swept over the Roman empire like a tidal wave. The New Testament pays tribute to this phenomenal growth. The Christians were charged with having “turned the world upside down” (Acts 17:6). Their “sound went out into all the earth” (Rom. 10:18 ); and was “bearing fruit” everywhere (Col. 1:6).
Historian Will Durant (following the lead of Edward Gibbon) argued that by A.D. 300, a quarter of the eastern segment of the empire was Christian, while about one twentieth of the western division was similarly identified (p. 603). Those figures are now considered to be too conservative.
E.M. Blaiklock has noted that studies of the catacombs beneath the city of Rome (about 600 miles of galleries) contain somewhere between 1,750,000 and 4,000,000 “Christian” graves. He estimates that in the middle Empire at least twenty percent of Rome’s citizenry was made up of Christians – and at times the percentage was greater even. [Note: These tombs reflect an association with the Christian cause, though many of those buried doubtless had digressed from the pristine format.] The catacombs represent ten generations of believers (p. 159). This would suggest that the city of Rome itself had somewhere between 175,000 to 400,000 Christians – each generation spanned! This is staggering.
The testimony of Tertullian (c. A.D. 160-220) is most dramatic: “Men proclaim that the state is beset with us. Every age, condition, and rank is coming over to us. We are only of yesterday, but already we fill the world” (Apology, 37.4).
Moreover, as we shall subsequently observe, this wild-fire growth was achieved under the most adverse circumstances. Again, the question cries out for an answer: What was the cause to which this amazing growth may be attributed? What natural circumstances can account for this?
There is another powerful fact that may be mentioned briefly at this point. The initial impact of the gospel was within the Jewish community. The nucleus of the early church was Hebrew. As indicated above, many thousands of Jews converted to Christianity. It is an indisputable historical fact, however, that the Jews were strict monotheists. To them, there was but one deity. And yet, without controversy is the fact that Jesus made the claim of being divine (cf. Jn. 5:18; 8:58; 10:30). Surely only the strongest sort of evidence would persuade a Jewish mind to acknowledge the humble Nazarene as “God” (cf. Jn. 20:28 ).
Source:
http://www.christiancourier.com/feature/july99.htm
This information, coupled with extra-biblical documents are very interesting.
SUETONIUS: (69-140 A.D.)
A Roman historian and annalist of the Imperial House under the Emperor Hadrian. He refers to Christ and Christians and the "disturbances" caused by them, namely not worshipping idols and loving all, including their tormentors.
"Because the Jews at Rome caused constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus [Christ], he [Claudius] expelled them from the city [Rome]." Acts 18:2, which took place in 49 A.D.
Life of Claudius, 25:4.
In another work Suetonius wrote about the the fire which devastated Rome in 64 A.D. under the reign of Nero. Nero blamed the Christians and exacted a heavy punishment upon them, among them covering them with pitch and burning them alive in his gardens.
"Nero inflicted punishment on the Christians, a sect given to a new and mischievous religious belief."
Lives of the Caesars, 26.2
... to be continued...
