The Bible is a written document, but much of it must rest on oral tradition.
Jesus, like Socrates or the prophets of the Old Testament in Bible , probably did not write down any of his own teaching. We possess it only in Greek translation from the hands of later writers, who must ultimately have relied on traditions passed down by his disciples. Even the stories about him probably depend on originally oral transmission within the early churches, and were not written down till some time later than their occurrence. We could say the same about many Old Testament texts. The books of the prophets presumably rest on the work of the prophets’ disciples, who collected oral material and ordered it (in ways that still baffle its readers); and the Psalms were probably meant for recitation or singing, and may well have existed for many years before anyone wrote them down.
First Approach to the material
In the mid-twentieth century, influential biblical scholars thought a lot could be The Bible known about the original contexts in which such material was used orally, and the discipline of form criticism developed in an attempt to systematize approaches to originally oral material – partly under the influence of similar studies in the field of Norse and Middle Eastern studies. In the case of the Gospels, the leading form critic was Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), who tried to establish the various types into which the Gospel stories fell: pronouncement stories designed to end in an aphorism, miracle stories whose climax was the crowd’s acclamation of Jesus, and so on.
In Old Testament studies, Sigmund Mowinckel (1884–1996) paid particular attention to the Psalms, arguing in a series of studies that they could best be understood as texts intended for recitation at various Israelite festivals.
He reconstructed these on the basis of his classification of psalm-types, and with the help of comparative material from other ancient
Near Eastern cultures.
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