The Root Supports You

In his debate with Fr. Stephen De Young, “Protestant vs. Orthodox: Scripture and Tradition,” Dr. Gavin Ortlund said why he distrusts any teaching that is said to have come from the apostles by word of mouth: “it’s very easy for the telephone game to happen when you’ve got oral communication. It can get garbled over time extremely easily. In fact, we see that as early as the second century” (21:55). He comes back to it later: “the concern here is with the telephone game, with the garbling of the transmission of apostolic teaching” (45:24).

Part of this is fair. A claim that something comes from the apostles ought to be tested, and Dr. Ortlund says so in the same breath: “just like the people in the first century needed to measure the Pharisees’ claim of oral tradition, so the people of God and the church need to measure other claims of oral tradition” (21:38). Nobody should object to that.

The trouble is the reason he gives. The telephone game says nothing about any one tradition, only that whatever is passed on by mouth gets garbled, and “extremely easily.” The Gospel was passed on by mouth before it was anything else, so the charge lands there first.

A Branch and Its Root

St. Paul met the same kind of mistake in Rome. Some Gentile Christians had begun to think themselves above Israel, and he told them they were a wild olive branch, grafted into an old tree and living off a root far older than they were. So, he says, “do not be arrogant toward the branches. If you are, remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you” (Romans 11:18). A branch that turns proud against the tree, he adds, can be cut off like the ones before it (Romans 11:21–22).

Paul is talking there about Israel and the patriarchs, not about Scripture and tradition, and his figure should not be pressed further than he takes it. Still, the mistake is the same one: the branch forgets the root it lives on. This article argues that the written Gospel is a branch of the spoken Gospel, and that the telephone game sets the branch against its root.

The Gospel Was Spoken Before It Was Written

For decades the Gospel was preached and not read. The New Testament says so itself. St. Luke sets down the things of Christ “just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us” (Luke 1:2). St. Paul reminds the Corinthians, “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received” (1 Corinthians 15:3), and tells the Thessalonians to “stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter” (2 Thessalonians 2:15).

That spoken Gospel is the root. If speech garbles as easily as Dr. Ortlund says, then what the evangelists wrote down had already been garbled for twenty years or more,¹ and a Christian who rests everything on Scripture is building on reports nobody can trust. A rotten root does not bear a sound branch.

Protestant scholars who have studied the question do not think it was rotten. John Walton and Brent Sandy, evangelicals who both taught at Wheaton College, write in The Lost World of Scripture that “the Gospels were first oral, and the written Gospels were a further development of the oral Gospels,” and that “the treasured teachings of Jesus, which defined the community of believers and which they sought to adhere to, would have been stable and faithfully transmitted.”² The wording varied from one telling to the next, and they say so. But a sentence told in different words has not been garbled.³

The Word of God Was Preached

The apostles call what they preached the word of God.⁴ St. Paul thanks God that when the Thessalonians “received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God” (1 Thessalonians 2:13). St. Peter, having quoted Isaiah that the word of the Lord remains forever, adds: “this word is the good news that was preached to you” (1 Peter 1:25). Neither of them is describing hearsay that would become the word of God once somebody wrote it down.

Where, then, was the word of God kept in those first decades? In the people who had heard it, and who repeated it and lived by it. Paul tells the Corinthians that they are themselves “a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (2 Corinthians 3:3). St. James calls it “the implanted word” (James 1:21). That is the root of the tree: the word planted in a people before any of it was a book. The books, when they came, were written within that people and for it.

An objector will grant that the apostles’ own preaching was indeed the word of God, and say that only what was written has come down to us with any certainty. But that second claim is the telephone game again, and the rest of this article is about whether it is true.

Whisperers and Teachers

In the telephone game a sentence is whispered once, in private, between people who have no stake in it, and nobody may ask for it again or check it against anyone else. Each player has only the one before him. The mistakes are the point of the game.

The first century handed on what mattered to it less like a line of whisperers than like a tree, where every branch draws on the same root.⁵ Josephus, writing in that century, says of the Pharisees that they “delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses,” and that it was the Sadducees who would keep only what is “in the written word” (Antiquities 13.10.6). The quarrel between the written word alone and what was handed down is older than the Church. It was already under way when Jesus taught, and of the two parties he stood nearer the Pharisees.⁶

The tractate Avot of the Mishnah opens with a chain of names: “Moses received Torah from Sinai and delivered it to Joshua, and Joshua to the Elders, and the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets delivered it to the men of the Great Synagogue” (Avot 1:1), and it goes on, teacher by teacher, to Hillel and Shammai at the time of Christ.⁷ The word “Mishnah” itself means repetition. Emil Schurer describes the method: “the teacher dictating the matter again and again to the pupils, or even by the pupils themselves being made to repeat it over and over again.”⁸

Each teacher in that line is named and answerable for what he received, and he drilled it into pupils who would answer for it in their turn. This was Israel’s way of handing things on, so it belongs to the old tree Paul says the Gentiles were grafted into. Paul was schooled in it, and “I delivered to you ... what I also received” is its vocabulary. The apostles handed on the Gospel in the way their fathers had handed on the Law.

The aim of the method was to keep what was handed on from changing. The Mishnah has Yohanan ben Zakkai, who received from Hillel and Shammai, praise his pupil Rabbi Eliezer as “a plastered cistern which loses not a drop” (Avot 2:8). Reporting a ruling of Hillel, it stops to give the rule: “man must speak in the language of his teacher” (Eduyot 1:3). Schurer says that in the traditional law “strict adherence to literal accuracy in the transmission was insisted upon,” while the legends were allowed more freedom.⁹ A sentence whispered once has nothing to keep it fixed. Here the same words were said over and over, and a pupil was praised for losing nothing.

Dr. Ortlund is right to remember that Christ rebuked the tradition of the elders. But his charge was that they set the commandments of men above the commandment of God (Mark 7:7–13). That is a fault in what was taught, not in how it was carried. He never says the tradition had been “garbled” along the way, which is the one thing the telephone game is about.

They Trusted the Teacher before the Book

The early Christians did not share our preference for the written over the spoken. They were readier to trust a teacher they knew than a book, and with reason.

Papias, early in the second century, wrote: “I do not believe that things out of books are as beneficial to me as things from a living and enduring voice.”¹⁰ The evangelical scholar Craig Blomberg grants the same of the Church at large: “oral traditions continued to circulate alongside the written texts until at least the mid-second century and were sometimes even preferred by early Christians as more trustworthy.”¹¹ That is the very century in which Dr. Ortlund says the garbling can already be seen.

Dr. Jeannie Constantinou, an Orthodox biblical scholar, gives the reason for the preference. Every book was copied by hand, and “people were aware of the fact that a book could easily be altered, so they were less likely to trust it. They were more likely to trust what their teacher told them. They knew their teacher, and their teacher, they knew the teacher of their teacher” (“Why Did Christians Sometimes AVOID Writing?,” 3:31).¹²

So it was the book that needed vouching for, and the teacher who vouched for it.¹³ People trusted a writing because it was still joined to those who had received the same teaching by mouth and could say, this is what we were given.

Nobody Was Worse Off for Not Writing

Behind the telephone game is a picture of the ancient world as our own world with the books taken away: a place where people made do with hearsay because they had nothing better. Walton and Sandy correct it: “The ancient world was consistently hearing dominant rather than text dominant. Information was disseminated orally. Traditions were passed on by word of mouth generation to generation. The ability to read or write was not essential to be a fully functioning member of society ... so no one was disadvantaged if they could not read or write.”¹⁴

People were not ignorant. Producing documents was simply a trade,¹⁵ and the nearest comparison today is the computer programmer. Nearly everyone now lives by what programmers build, and almost no one needs to write a line of code to do it. You need to know how to use a computer, not how to program one, and nobody thinks himself cut off from the modern world because he cannot write code. So it was with the pen. A man heard the Scriptures read, learned them by heart, and was taught by someone he knew. That was the ordinary way of knowing anything, above all anything that came from a teacher, for “important traditions found their authority in the people who generated them and transmitted them orally.”¹⁶ In that world the written Gospel grew from the spoken one as a matter of course, not because nothing better was to be had.

What He Points to in the Second Century

Dr. Ortlund does name his evidence. Later in the debate he gives three cases (45:37): the second-century dispute over the date of Easter, where “both sides are appealing to apostolic tradition for their view”; the third-century dispute over rebaptizing those baptized by heretics, “same thing”; and St. Irenaeus, who “appeals to apostolic tradition for some eccentric views that very few of us would accept today, like Jesus dying as a middle aged man.”

On Easter, both sides did claim the apostles, but the chain is too short to garble anything. Polycarp kept the day as “he had always observed with John the disciple of our Lord, and the other apostles with whom he had associated.” Those are the words of Irenaeus, who as a boy had heard Polycarp speak of John. He wrote them in a letter to Victor, the bishop of Rome, describing Polycarp’s visit to Rome when Anicetus was bishop there. They report what Polycarp himself did in an apostle’s company. Each church was keeping the custom it had been given. In the telephone game one message goes in and another comes out. Here two customs stood side by side, and Polycarp and Anicetus, who differed over them, “communed together” and “parted from each other in peace.”¹⁷

On rebaptism, the question was whether a man baptized by heretics had to be baptized again when he came into the Church. Stephen, the bishop of Rome, and Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, argued it by letter. Stephen said no. The custom at Rome was to admit such a man with the laying on of hands, and Stephen’s rule was “let nothing be innovated ... which has not been handed down.” Cyprian said yes, and asked where Rome’s custom came from: “Whence is that tradition? Whether does it descend from the authority of the Lord and of the Gospel, or does it come from the commands and the epistles of the apostles?” Stephen argued from custom. Cyprian asked for Scripture. This was a question of practice, and practice differed from region to region. Cyprian did not break communion over it: at a council of the African bishops in Carthage he asked each bishop to give his view, “judging no man, nor rejecting any one from the right of communion, if he should think differently from us.” The Church as a whole did not adopt Cyprian’s rule: St. Augustine, who admired him, writes that the custom Cyprian opposed “afterwards was confirmed by a plenary Council,” and in the East St. Basil, who honours Cyprian, says the milder practice should be accepted where it is the custom.¹⁸ So the case shows an existing custom surviving a challenge that appealed to Scripture. It does not show that custom being “garbled” as it was passed on.

Irenaeus is the strongest of the three. He does cite the elders who knew John in support of the view that Christ was still teaching past the age of forty, a view nobody holds now.¹⁹ But one Father’s report was never the test of apostolic tradition. The test was what the churches held in common, and no church holds this view.

So the three cases show that claims of apostolic tradition sometimes conflicted and were sometimes wrong, and that the Church knew it and sorted them, checking one branch against the others and all of them against the root. Two of the three are disputes about practice, when to keep Easter and how to receive a convert, and the third is a claim of Irenaeus that no church holds. None of them is a teaching that all the churches held.

An objector will answer that he never said the Gospel was garbled, only the traditions. But that answer needs the two to have travelled by different roads, and they did not. The Gospel was a tradition. Paul “delivered” it as he had “received” it (1 Corinthians 15:3). He uses the same two words of the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:23), and he praises the Corinthians because they “maintain the traditions even as I delivered them to you” (1 Corinthians 11:2). In his Greek, “tradition” is simply the noun of “deliver.” The same mouths carried the Gospel and the traditions to the same ears in the same years, and a game of telephone would not garble the traditions and spare the Gospel. If oral transmission garbled the traditions “extremely easily,” it garbled the Gospel with them. If it carried the Gospel faithfully, as the Protestant scholars above say it did, then garbling cannot be presumed of anything merely because it was spoken. It has to be shown, one case at a time.

Walton and Sandy do not confine what they say to the Gospels. Of oral tradition as such they write that “our ears can be very demanding about the precise transmission of treasured traditions, and that would have been even more the case in a society in which oral transmission of tradition was the norm.”²⁰

One Last Objection

Dr. Ortlund has one more objection, and it is a better argument than the telephone game. His examples are the assumption of Mary and the veneration of icons (46:40), and his argument is that there is “a difference between what the apostles themselves taught and that which is bequeathed to us two thousand years later” (46:22). He is right that what reaches us two thousand years later can differ from what the apostles taught, and Paul’s figure of the olive tree provides for that: branches can be broken off, so something can claim to belong to the tree and not belong to it. But this is a different argument from the telephone game. The telephone game says that whatever is passed on by mouth gets garbled, and the Gospel itself was first passed on by mouth. This argument asks whether a particular teaching goes back to the apostles. That is a question of history, and it has to be argued one teaching at a time.

The assumption of Mary is a belief of the Orthodox Church and not one of its dogmas. Fr. De Young said in the debate that after her death “her body was taken up into heaven,” and he added: “We haven’t dogmatized this the way the Roman Catholics have, but this is something that we believe” (33:57). The veneration of icons is a subject for another article. This article does not settle whether either one goes back to the apostles, or whether any other teaching does.

Dr. Ortlund offers his own explanation for how these teachings entered the Church. Of teachings like the intercession of the saints and the veneration of icons he says: “I’m just firmly persuaded these things are later errors. They’re innovations and accretions and things that you can pretty clearly see are coming in slowly over time after the apostolic age is long gone” (21:24). He explains the word: “I use the word accretions a lot to get at the slow growth nature of these things” (18:57). His concern, he says, is “that things get smuggled in under the label of tradition” (47:38).

For a teaching to be “smuggled in under the label of tradition,” something new has to be taken for old. The two disputes Dr. Ortlund names show how such questions were actually handled: calling a practice a tradition did not protect it from being questioned. The churches saw that they differed over the day of Easter and over how to receive a convert, and they argued both questions openly, by letter and in council. Stephen of Rome’s rule was itself a rule against anything new, “let nothing be innovated ... which has not been handed down.” Even so, Cyprian asked where Rome’s custom came from: “Whence is that tradition?”

So it cannot be assumed that any teaching was smuggled in. Dr. Ortlund says the slow growth is something “you can pretty clearly see.” That is a claim about the historical record, and it has to be shown there: when a teaching is first heard of, and what the churches said about it then. The record itself is thin for the centuries when the Church was outlawed, and as Fr. De Young told him, “the first thing we have is not necessarily the first appearance. ... It’s the first thing that survived to today” (40:14). Dr. Ortlund says that claims of oral tradition have to be measured, and these two disputes show the Church doing exactly that. Another part of this series takes this up.

The Root Supports You

The evidence does settle one thing: the telephone game is the wrong picture. The apostles handed on the faith as their world handed on whatever it could not afford to lose, by repeating it aloud, teacher to pupil, among people who knew one another. Evangelical scholars call that transmission stable and faithful. The Gospels reached the churches by word of mouth before a line of them was written, and after they were written Christians continued to trust the spoken tradition alongside them: Blomberg writes that “until at least the mid-second century” the spoken traditions “were sometimes even preferred by early Christians as more trustworthy.”¹¹

So the written Gospel is a branch of the spoken one. The root is the word of God as the apostles preached it, planted in a people before any of it was put in a book. A Christian who trusts the Gospels has already trusted that people’s way of handing it on. Each branch that claims to grow on the tree can still be tested, as Dr. Ortlund asks. The telephone game is not that test. It is a charge against the root, and of the root Paul told the Romans, “it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you.”