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Oral gospel traditions (German: mündliche Überlieferung) reportedly transmitted the sayings and acts of Jesus before they were written down as logia and as the canonical gospels.

The oral tradition consisted of various types of stories, including parables, miracle stories, historical stories and legends, and a passion narrative. They were passed on as self-contained units without chronological order. Soon they were written down as collections of similar stories.

In the early 20th century, the oral traditions became the subject of study using the methods of form criticism, partly by German scholar Rudolf Bultmann. Though Bultmann considered that there was no real border between oral and textual transmission.

Form critics no longer agree with the precise formulations of Schmidt, Dibelius, and Bultmann, the pioneers in this field, but the most basic ideas behind their approach are still widely shared. Modern form critics do agree that before the Gospels came to be written, and before the sources that lie behind the Gospels were themselves produced, oral traditions about Jesus were circulated. Indeed, all the sources for the Gospels were based on oral traditions, and this has significant implications for Biblical scholars. They now agree that the oral material regarding Jesus had been in circulation for a long time, not just before our surviving Gospels but even before their sources had been produced.

Although the Gospels were written in Greek, as were most of their sources, (some) of the surviving oral traditions date to the earliest years of the Christian movement, before it expanded into the Greek and Latin speaking lands elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Many of these traditions originated in Aramaic-speaking communities of Palestine, within several years at least of the traditional date of the death of Jesus. Thus Aramaic has become an important condition of reliability. It permeated all levels of Jewish life in Palestine. It was the spoken medium of communication in Jewish Palestinian life. Today, scholars agree that Jesus spoke Aramaic, but the use of Aramaic as a condition of reliability has only become important since the discovery of the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls. These scrolls have allowed this present generation of scholars to make massive progress. Scholars further agree that the portions of the gospels that show an Aramaic root have a greater degree of historical plausibility.

References

1. Burkett, Delbert, ed. (2011). The Blackwell Companion to Jesus. John Wiley & Sons.
2. Burkett, Delbert Royce (2002). An introduction to the New Testament and the origins of Christianity. Cambridge University Press. p. 124.
3. Kelber, Werner H. (1983). The oral and the written Gospel: the hermeneutics of speaking and writing in the synoptic tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q. Indiana University Press. p. 1.
4. Konrad Hammann Rudolf Bultmann - Eine Biographie 2012 - Page 107 ">>Eine prinzipielle Grenze zwischen der mündlichen und der schriftlichen Überlieferung gibt es nicht<< — so hält Bultmann diese Konsequenz seiner traditionsgeschichtlichen Perspektive fest"
5. Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, HarperCollins, 2012. p 83 - 85
6. Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian's Account of His Life and Teaching, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010. pp 9-12
7. Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian's Account of His Life and Teaching, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010. pp 87-88
8. Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, HarperCollins, 2012. p 87 - 93 & pp 92-93 and p 171
9. Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian's Account of His Life and Teaching, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010. pp 101-107 & pp 108-110 and pp 9-12

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