Is the memory of storytellers better than we think?

A viewer, Peter Shearer, counters my suggestion that Oral Tradition is prone to corruption by saying, “Hi Jay, as usual, you have decided to comment on an interesting topic. More so for me because your discussion relates to something I studied intensively at university back in the late 1960s: Homer and the Bardic Tradition. Although I seldom hear you say anything with which I disagree, in this case I do, a bit. Homer, was thought to have 'invented' most of what he said about the Trojan War. For instance, 'scholars' of Greek history said the armour described by Homer was an invention. It looked like a beehive and protected everything (except the foot region). The scholarly rationalization was this was Homer's explanation of why Achilles would eventually fall (i.e. his heel was vulnerable). Well it turned out that somewhere in the late 19th or early 20th century examples of the 'beehive' armour were found. Homer was right. Similarly, the hive shaped boar's tusk helmets were supposed to be an invention . . . until one of them was found. Another aspect of Bardic poetry that is important to understand is the use of 'metrical formulae' allow a bard to paste together a new poem, say the size of the Iliad, extempore, before a live audience AND to be able to repeat it, verbatim, months later. Milman Perry, a classicist came to the attention of the academic world with his publication on this topic titled "The Singer of Tales" which he published in 1960. Perry based his explanations on Serbo-Croation bards who were following the same practice today as Homer did in Iron Age Greece! The memory capacity of these bards is prodigious. [All that to say that] Bards might be able to preserve history better than you think. That is not to say that I find your arguments in this episode wrong. There is too much evidence from other aspects of Islamic History, all of which you have addressed over the years, that make your objections not just persuasive but extremely strong. They just fall a little short of being definitive. That part, I'm sure, will come in the not too distant future”. In response I would like to thank Peter for his very thorough explanation concerning the ability of Bards and other storytellers to memorize large portions of stories accurately. And how do we know they are accurate? Because we find items within those stories which match the time and place they are purported to take place. The problem with the stories concerning what Muhammad said and did is not so much that they are specific, or even comprehensive, but that they are NOT accurate, in that they don't fit the environment, the culture, the topography or the setting for a man living in the central area of Arabia in the mid-7th century, but they do fit someone living further north, almost 600 miles further north, both topographically, culturally and linguistically, so that the man Muhammad whom we read about in the later traditions represents a prophet living within a very controlled and regulated economic and political system, with rules and regulations which could not have existed that early or in that place. How then can we explain such cultural, political and legal sophistication symptomatic of a very progressive urban environment from among a people who were mere desert nomads? From what the scholars are suggesting (with whom I would concur), this can best be explained by an accumulation of centuries of story tellers, who took what they have been told, and then retold it adding bits and pieces of their own story, their own culture, and their own traditions, so that when it was finally compiled by men like Al-Bukhari 240 years later, it went through yet another entirely new disseminating process, more thorough than anything before. Al Bukhari was given 600,000 of these accumulated stories, and and asked to decide which were authentic, and which were not, whittling them down to 7,397; thus throwing out 98% of them and only retaining 2%, leaving us with a Muhammad which fit his 9th century theology and paradigm of a prophet. Yet, how could the compilers of these 9th century traditions like Al Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmidhi and others have known the environment, or the nomadic cultural grid, to say nothing of the unsophisticated Arabic language of the 7th century Hijaz (i.e. central Arabia)? They didn't have to. All they had to do was decide which of these hundreds of thousands of stories fit their 9th century cultural grid, as well as their 9th century theological precepts. And so they threw away everything else which did not, without evening considering that much of that which they retained would not fit the place, nor the time, nor the persons living in a 7th century central Arabian environment; but then that was not a question which would have been foremost on their minds, would it? But it is on ours. © Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, 2020 (27,760) Music: "small adventure", by Rafael Krux (from filmmusic-io - License CC BY)