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and the dialogue within the flow of the story could at any point reflect the individual teller’s
style and interests.” Also, arbitrary news, jokes, or things that are not directly affecting the
community are deemed of little importance so the accuracy of the telling is also deemed
unimportant. In these instances there is no rigid structure of control.
Bailey concludes that much of the material
preserved in the haflat samar are present in
the Synoptics, “such as proverbs, parables,
poems, dialogues, conflict stories and historical
narratives.” Because Jesus was the central
figure of early Christianity and the person with
whom its beliefs and identity were defined by,
Bailey rightly asserts that the tradition would have been carefully and accurately preserved. The
eyewitnesses would have been the only “authentic reciters of the tradition” in the early Church.
Bailey asserts that Paul’s transmission more clearly resembles “formal controlled oral tradition”
because of the fact that he was not a direct eyewitness. This means that because “Paul cannot
become a reciter of the informal controlled oral tradition…he does not try…[and] presumes
only to make passing references to the specific Jesus in sayings in the Synoptic tradition.”114 The
evangelists, therefore, gather information from the tradition provided by the eyewitnesses,
passed on through “informal controlled oral tradition,” and write their gospels.
114
All ideas and quotations from this section taken from: Kenneth Bailey, “Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and
the Synoptic Gospels” Themelios 20, no. 2 (January 1995): 4-8; 10, http://s3.amazonaws.com/tgcdocuments/journal-issues/20.2_Bailey.pdf..