#12 How do we know the Tradition is authentic?
We have a problem: The first millennium and a half of Jewish history from the giving of the Written Torah at Sinai (3300 years ago) till the writing of the Mishna (1800 years ago) there are no written explanations/interpretations of the Written Torah on record. Yet Jewish Tradition asserts that whatever the rabbis in the Talmud claim to be the definitive interpretation of the written Torah was in fact received orally by Moshe from G-d and transmitted from master to disciple until the Talmudic era 1500 years later. Do we just accept this assertion simply as a matter of blind faith? Or is there any good reasons to believe that the Oral Tradition is authentic and not just an invention of “Rabbinic Judaism” and falsely attributed to the Biblical era preceding it?
This question can be approached on two levels:
1) For the outsider/skeptic who has no prior experience with Torah learning and wants to have enough reason to take it seriously:
Most skeptics start with the assumption of some kind of “broken telephone” hypothesis: If all that detailed information remained oral for so long a period of time, it must have undergone drastic—if perhaps unconscious—changes.
We can refute this hypothesis with the following lines of argumentation/evidence:
a) The point of departure from the strictly oral transmission to writing down the oral law (by Rabbi Yehudah Hanasi—the redactor of the Mishna) is clearly known and documented including the reasons for this departure and its legal justifications. It is not shrouded in mystery or emerged imperceptibly. It was a conscious decision to start committing the Oral Law into a formal authoritative text which was accepted by all the Jewish sages of that era. The reason given was that the persecutions of the Romans at the time were so severe that the real danger of national loss of memory started to loom large. This implies that the sages were consciously keeping track of how well the oral tradition was being preserved through human memory all along. It was a priority which necessitated a radical change in Jewish learning when the need arose.
If the existence of the oral law until that point in time was gradually unconsciously changing all along, what changed now to suddenly decide to write it down? Why would preservation in writing suddenly become necessary if no serious care was made beforehand to retain the accuracy of the oral information?
b) The points of dispute and the origins of dispute regarding the oral law are very carefully documented in the Talmud. Some disputes are dated back to the Biblical era between kings and their officers and among the prophets. This indicates that great care was taken to preserve not only oral interpretations which everyone agreed to, but even oral disputes which divided earlier generations of scholars. Ex: The mishna records the many disputes between Hillel and Shammai who argued centuries before the Mishna was written.
c) The most basic refutation of the “broken telephone hypothesis” is by challenging the intuitive assumption that masters and their disciples were very informal and casual about transmitting this oral information. There were seven defense mechanisms set up to prevent any mistakes in transmission.
1) constant repetition and thorough review
2) experiential grasp of the information
3) practical implementation of the information in different circumstances
4) multiple chains of transmission which all had to corroborate with each other at the ends of the chains.
5) multiple levels of cross-checking
6) motivation by reward for success and punishment for failure
7) grave and solemn responsibility for all future Jewish history
2) For insiders who are intimately familiar with the Talmud and the character of the sages, we see their integrity and honesty in searching for truth on every page. No faults are hidden, no uncomfortable questions are ignored or avoided. The trust in the sages that their tradition is genuine and accurate is well earned by our own experience of them.
3) The issue of the accuracy of the written Torah can be appreciated by contrast with Christianity’s sacred book- the New Testament.
There are thousands of places where there are alternative readings with differences in meaning. Dozens of those places involve subjects of fundamental theology. And there is even a dispute over which language the original text was written in! And all this ambiguity took place only in 2,000 years since it existed with a central religious authority for most of that time. The origins of Christianity is not well preserved at all.
Contrast this picture with the Chumash—written 3300 years ago and only a dozen variant spellings—which do NOT alter the basic meaning of any word!
In accuracy of written texts, Judaism has an outstanding record.
