Do Oral Cultures Operate the Same as the Telephone Game?
By: Sherene Khouri, M.A., Ph.D. | September 29, 2024
Secular scholars, especially those who attack the historicity of the New Testament, claim it is difficult to establish historical knowledge that is valid and reliable because of the infallibility of the human memory. People do not recall information accurately, especially if the account is written years after the event. However, historians and archaeologists have been able to make strong cases for their accounts considering several factors, such as the closeness of the written document to the event, multiple attestations to the incident, and so on.
In this article, I will discuss the factor of oral tradition communities, how literate people recorded their history, and whether their methodology is reliable or not. Western and advanced societies might not realize that there is a pattern that oral communities usually follow to preserve their history and pass it on to the next generation. The first-century Middle Eastern people were no exception, and we can today trust their recordings despite the minor variations we have in the written accounts of the New Testament.
The Secular Theory of Oral Tradition
Secular philosopher Paul Ricoeur describes the reference modes of history and fiction as interweaving. He believes that when historians try to make sense of an artifact to understand the historical event, their imagination imposes itself making them come up with their own fiction about history.[1] Schröter explains that “the narration of history represents a fictionalizing of the past, whereas the fictional narrative imitates the historical narrative.”[2] Therefore, the final product is never accurate. It is a mixture of the history and imagination of the writer.
Bart Ehrman generally agrees with this view accusing the writers of the NT of not being reliable and the Gospel accounts being recorded as people were playing a telephone game. He states,
Nearly all of these storytellers had no independent knowledge of what really happened [to Jesus]. It takes little imagination to realize what happened to the stories. You are probably familiar with the old birthday party game ‘telephone.’ A group of kids sits in a circle, the first tells a brief story to the one sitting next to her, who tells it to the next, and to the next, and so on, until it comes back full circle to the one who started it. Invariably, the story has changed so much in the process of retelling that everyone gets a good laugh. Imagine this same activity taking place, not in a solitary living room with ten kids on one afternoon, but over the expanse of the Roman Empire (some 2,500 miles across), with thousands of participants.[3]
Ehrman’s analogy might seem appealing to some people; however, the question that we should investigate is whether preserving history in an oral culture is like a telephone game, as Ehrman claims.
What Is Oral Culture?
Oral culture is a term that refers to preliterate cultures to characterize the thought and expression that carry over into manuscript and print culture. People talk to one another about certain events until these events are written. Robert Cochran makes a distinction between oral culture and oral history. He states, “Oral culture is culture based on the spoken rather than the written word; oral history is a record of the past based on spoken accounts.”[4] In our times, an estimated one billion people do not know how to read or write any language, and so they live in what we call oral culture.[5]
It is important to explain also what oral tradition is not. According to Lynne Kelly, oral tradition is “not teaching how to hunt or how to gather during daily excursions. It is not about stories casually told around the campfire at night – these are more folk tale than myth and are usually for children. Oral tradition is about formal knowledge, about the way oral cultures store, maintain and transmit knowledge which is central to their physical and social worlds.”[6] In other words, oral cultures are not a bunch of savages uneducated societies. They are people whose lack of written language and advanced education forced them to find alternative ways to remember and record their history accurately and reliably.
How Do Oral Cultures Save Their Knowledge?
Literate cultures record their knowledge on paper, books, or electronically. If they cannot write, then the knowledge must be committed to memory—practiced, repeated, and saved for future use in human memory. According to Kelly, the way formal knowledge is stored in literate culture is similar to oral culture,
We can assume that the individuals within oral cultures have the same range of intellectual potential, physiology and memory ability that has been typical of all humans for at least the last few millennia. We need to look beyond superficial differences and accept our similarities. It is only when the complexity of oral tradition is acknowledged that the control of knowledge can be seen as a tool for power.[7]
People who lived under oral culture were also human beings with the same abilities to find accurate ways to record and pass on their knowledge.
Different elements were used to save knowledge in oral cultures, such as repetitions, rhythm, poetry, narratives, and stories that were transmitted in social gatherings. De Costa adds that “in oral cultures many constructions are aggregative rather than analytic, that is to say, remembered information is not systematized individually but in groups or series of related groups by means of parallelisms, antitheses, and epithets.”[8]
So, oral cultures created and used different methods to repeat information and learn it. Basic knowledge is acquired in daily interaction to learn what is appropriate and how someone should act in a certain circumstance, and Specialized knowledge is acquired by participating in ceremonies and discussions with elders.[9] This is why early Christians formed liturgy and creeds. The whole purpose was to keep repeating the basics of their faith over and over so it is not forgotten.
Is All Oral History Mixed with Myths?
The ancient Near Eastern civilization left one of the oldest writings (Cuneiform), which included different information, such as migrations of people, chronology of political states, foreign relations, internal governance, legal institutions, and official acts.[10] Moreover, a variety of inscriptions from different places in the world distinguish between mythical, folklore, historical, political, and religious. Wiessner notes that the Enga of Papua New Guinea distinguishes clearly between myth and historical traditions.[11] Historical information includes news about “wars, migrations, agriculture, the development of cults and ceremonial exchange networks, leadership, trade, environmental disasters, and fashions in song and dress.”[12] In other words, because of inscriptions, historians are able to differentiate between myths and other genres, which is a piece of evidence that not all oral tradition is mixed with myths.
Were The Gospels Written According to the Telephone Game?
The majority of first-century Middle Easterners were literate people who lived in oral cultures. The New Testament was written within the first century after the death of Christ. The first written book of the NT was the First Letter to the Corinthians, which Paul wrote AD 53-55. The Gospels were written between AD 70-95, about 40-65 years after the death of Jesus. According to Bart Ehrman, this period of time is enough for people to forget what Jesus had said and done, and consequently, corrupt the Gospels.
The Purpose of the Telephone Game vs. Written Oral History
As per the previous information about oral tradition, it seems that Bart Ehrman has not done a good job investigating the culture of the first-century Middle East; otherwise, he would not have depicted the process of writing the NT books to the telephone game. The purpose of the telephone game is totally different from the purpose of written oral history. The purpose of telephone game is to have fun, so people purposely disrupt the process of communication to laugh at the end results. Writing the Gospels tradition was precisely the opposite. The men of God wrote purposely to preserve the words and deeds of Jesus from disruption (Luke 1:1-4).
One-Way Chain of Communication
I am not sure if first-century people played the telephone game; however, this game represents a single one-way chain of communication, whereas, oral tradition is like a web or network. It does not pass information from one person to another person, but it passes information from many people to many people. When Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians, there were many people alive who witnessed and testified Jesus resurrected and ascended to heaven, and there were multiple opportunities for skeptics to investigate: “Did this really happen?” (1 Cor 15:6).
Liberal scholars who support Ehrman’s theory believe that “oral history reveal that cultures do not tend to remember events over much more than two generations and that memories ‘become increasingly inaccurate until they are so corrupt that they can hardly be distinguished from myth.”[13] If a generation lives for 20-30 years, and information is corrupted after the second generation, then it is reasonable to conclude that the NT books are reliable by secular standards because they were written within the first two generations after the death of Jesus.
Conclusion
It is simply impossible for any culture to retain all their knowledge without some formal information system. Therefore, literate cultures came up with ways to retain information, such as repetition in special ceremonies, conversations with elders, and social gatherings to pass on their knowledge. If Western culture found different ways to store information, that does not mean Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures have never done so. Further study of oral culture tradition shows that depicting the process of writing the NT books with telephone games is emphatically wrong.
About the Author
Sherene Khouri, M.A., Ph.D.
Sherene Khouri was born into a religiously diverse family in Damascus, Syria. She became a believer when she was 11 years old. Sherene and her husband were missionaries in Saudi Arabia. Their house was open for meetings, and they were involved with the locals until the government knew about their ministry and gave them three days’ notice to leave the country. In 2006, they went back to Syria and started serving the Lord with RZIM International ministry. They traveled around the Middle Eastern region—Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and United Arab Emirates.
Sherene was also involved in her local church among the young youth, young adults, and women’s ministry. In 2013, the civil war broke out in Syria. Sherene and her husband’s car was vandalized 3 times and they had to immigrate to the United States of America. In 2019, Sherene became an American citizen.
Sherene is an Assistant Professor at Liberty University. She teaches Arabic, Religion, and Research classes. Additionally, she holds a Ph.D. in Theology and Apologetics, M.A. in Christian Apologetics from Liberty University, and B.S. in Biblical Studies from Moody Bible Institute. Currently, Sherene is also working on a Master of Theology in Global Studies at Liberty University and M.A. in Arabic and linguistics from PennWest University.
Notes
[1] Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, vol. 3, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984– 1988), 190-192.
[2] Jens Schröter, From Jesus to the New Testament: Early Christian Theology and the Origin of the New Testament Canon, (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013), 34.
[3] Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 72-74.
[4] Robert Cochran, “Oral History and Oral Culture,” In The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Michael Ryan, 2011. https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6MTAyODY0Mw==?aid=96753.
[5] Thomas Farrell, J. “Oral Culture,” in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, ed. Patrick Colm Hogan, (Cambridge University Press, 2011). https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6MTM0NTc2MQ==?aid=96753.
[6] Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 15.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Elena De Costa, “Orality,” in Concise Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, ei. Verity Smith, ed. Routledge, 2000. https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6MjA4OTE2Mw==?aid=96753.
[9] J. Goody, The Interface Between The Written And The Oral (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,1987), 156-7.
[10] J. Puhvel, “epigraphy,” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed, July 28, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/topic/epigraphy.
[11] P. Wiessner, “The vines of complexity: egalitarian structures and the institutionalization of inequality among the Enga,” Current Anthropology, vol. 43, no. 2, (2002): 233–69
[12] Ibid, 237.
[13] Richard Bradley, “The Translations of Time,” in RM, Van Dyke & SE Alcock, eds., Archaeologies of memory, Blackwell, (2003): 221–7.
(c) 2024. Bellator Christi.
I don’t deny that Matthew wrote it. All you can possibly extract from the oral tradition angle is that Matthew wrote it. What you cannot show to be greater than 50% probability is that Matthew truly was quoting the real historical Jesus, in this extra bits now missing from Mark’s parallel account.
I’m sorry, but as long as you hold to the patristic tradition that Mark was Peter’s interpreter and that Mark wrote at the behest of the Roman Church over which Peter presided, the notion that Mark would have knowingly sacrificed Christ-sayings indicating Peter’s earthly supernatural authority (Matthew 16:17-9) to make room in his limited paper to tell the story of blind Bartimaeus (Mk. 10:46 ff) doesn’t seem reasonable. Mark has several stories of miraculous healings, they were more expendable than the unique Christ-sayings now confined to Matthew’s particular account.
But Peter was necessarily present to hear Jesus say those things in Matthew 16:17. So you cannot escape the criticism by saying not everybody heard Jesus say the same things. And since gospel author Mark was allegedly Peter’s interpreter or closest follower, the absence of this accolade for Peter in Mark’s account is more glaring.
I disagree for three reasons: first, the Jews thought the Genesis 6 story of the angels cohabitating with human females was historically true, and yet the Jews of the intertestamental period (the time from which the gospels arise) give us 1st Enoch, which you would insist was an elaboration upon Genesis with lots of extra details that were not historically true. Second, it is well known that Josephus’ summary of Jewish history is filled with embellishments. Third, it is also intertestamental Jews who gave us those “additions to Daniel”, and yet you as a conservative would likely insist those additions were not historically true, for otherwise, you’d be committing the same sin of ignoring historically valid witness to god that you accuse unbelievers of. Fourth, it is also well known that the Lxx often departs from the Hebrew in ways that show willingness to sacrifice textual accuracy for the sake of somebody’s later interpretation. See Hebrews 10:5 getting a pre-incarnate Christ-saying out of a Psalm 40 that never gave anybody any reason in the Hebrew to think this was a pre-incarnate messiah saying something to God the Father during the incarnation.
Fifth, and perhaps more directly, false oral traditions cropped up within the original church. They first misconstrued exactly what Jesus said to Peter (John 21:23). The church presided over by James thought it true that Paul relaxed the law for Jews living outside Jerusalem (Acts 21:18-23), but since James intimates that the rumor was false (v. 24) you’ll have to agree it was false. The disciples routinely misunderstood Jesus before he died (Mark 6:52), and despite Peter becoming filled with the Holy Spirit on two separate occasions (John 20:22, Acts 2), he eventually became a Judaizer (Galatians 2:14). And despite the apostles becoming allegedly “amazingly transformed” by seeing the risen Christ, they show, even that late in the game, that they still expected Jesus to be a military messiah (Acts 1:6)…as if they had learned precisely nothing the prior 4 years. Apparently, the apostles becoming “filled with the Holy Spirit” does not render me unreasonable to theorize that they likely conveyed their misunderstandings as “truth” to later followers. Further, an avalanche of what Metzger calls scribal “assimilation” must have occurred in the synoptic gospel manuscripts during the first 100 years for which we have no manuscripts, to explain why the 3 different Synoptics tell a generally consistent story.
John 21:23. If your extolling the accuracy of ancient Jewish oral tradition were true, those checks and balances would have been sufficiently efficient to timely correct the “brethren” who misunderstood what Jesus said. And my theory on why the Judaizer controversy ever arose is that Jesus taught the Judaizer theology, Acts 15 is lying when representing resolution between Paul and the Jerusalem churches, with the upshot being that the reason the Judaizer’s became an issue in the first place was because the authors painted Jesus to be more Gentile-friendly than he really was, i.e., the gospel authors sanitized much of what Jesus said, even though they did an imperfect job.
I do not believe that Jesus thought of himself as a messiah who must die. He saw himself as a martyr, and the “messiah-must-die” nonsense was, like most everything else in Judaism, conjured up as a desperate way to deal with the grief of Jesus’ death. The fact that Jews didn’t believe the messiah needed to die for anybody is precisely what gives the skeptic reasonable pause to consider that early Christians likely made up such a farcical interpretation. That Christians played fast and loose with the OT is clear from the way NT authors misquote and misinterpret the OT. Surely you are aware that this subject has caused Christian scholars to produce tons of books, articles and commentaries that try to “explain” this, and yet those scholars can’t even agree on what criteria should be used to evaluate such phenomena.
Not seeing your point. Your context was leading to “the very idea of the Messiah needing to die for the sins of others was anathema to ancient Jews…” Jews hating the idea of a messiah being hung on a tree might be true, but carries no apologetics force. But regardless, we skeptics have an answer for why a later offshoot of Judaism started doing what offshoots typically do, and re-interpreted the OT conveniently to mesh with the harsh historical reality.
Then you are seeing things that don’t exist. I didn’t “charge”. I repeatedly said I was “reasonable” to hold a theory about these things. My reasonableness in disagreeing with your theories does not argue that you are thus unreaosnable. Two people can possibly be equally reasonable even while their disagreement over the interpretation of a single fact is still in progress.
You haven’t shown that my viewpoint is unreasonable. You’ve only shown, at best, that your view is not so totally out in left field as to be unreasonable. But reasonableness for you doesn’t dictate the limits of reasonableness for somebody else, probably because reasonableness can arrive long before definitive interpretations of the evidence do.
I don’t respond to apologetics websites to convince Christians that the bible has errors. I respond to apologetics websites to convince Christians that they err in telling themselves that all disagreement with their views about the bible are unreasonable.
And if you are a supernaturalist who believes in miracles and the spiritual world, then it stands to reason that you would think Jesus would have risen from the dead and that he would have made divine connections with himself. If your comment was supposed to contain sobering force, then so does mine.
I see nothing unfair in my charge of being reasonable to accuse Matthew of inventing fictitious Christ-sayings. The same charges are made in the Jerome Bible Commentary, and we would never expect to see Christian corroboration of my interpretation if indeed my interpretation was so baseless as to be unfair:
“114 [Matthew 16] Verses 17-20 have no parallel in Mk and Lk; and there can be no explanation of this omission except that Mk and Lk did not have the words. Some writers have suggested that the verses have been removed from their original context, which was postresurrectional, and that they can be compared to Jn 21:15-19, in which Peter is given a peculiar position in a postresurrectional narrative (see R. E. Brown, CBQ 23 [1961] 159). The arguments for this hypothesis are not convincing…”
—-Brown, R. E., Fitzmyer, J. A., & Murphy, R. E. (1968];
—-Published in electronic form by Logos Research Systems, 1996).
—-The Jerome Biblical commentary (electronic ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Thank you for your comments. Regardless of whether you are a supernaturalist or not, the methods used by ancient societies to remember truths passed along orally is fairly settled. What I have argued is that the traditions undergirding the Gospels stemmed from traditions that developed from historical persons and events. I do not see any reason to deny that Matthew and Luke knew about the truths you speak of. Thus, while I appreciate your sentiments, the evidence you offer is lacking. You said that falsehoods were developed by the church. What evidence do you have for that outside of conjecture? One thing you’re forgetting is that oral traditions are not just passed along by individuals, they involve communities. If Matthew invented the statements as you said, then the Gospel would have been rejected as were many other Gnostic texts for doing the very thing you accuse Matthew of doing–inventing Jesus sayings. I appreciate the time you spent writing your response. But as I previously noted, the argument is found wanting and is, thereby, unconvincing.
Blessings,
Brian
———It is equally settled in Greco-Roman biography that the biographers were allowed freedom to state things in a way that gives the reader an impression of events different than “what really happened”.
———First, the dictionary definition of “conjecture” is “inference formed without proof or sufficient evidence” (https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/ conjecture. So I’m not sure why you are insinuating that my hypothesis about Matthew’s invention of Christ-sayings cannot be reasonable unless it has something more solid than conjecture. Trinitarian Christian scholarship on nearly every biblical subject is filled to its eyeballs with exactly “inferences formed without proof or sufficient evidence”. The fact that Trinitarians disagree with each other even on essential doctrine (Lordship Salvation advocates accuse the Cheap Gracers of a “fundamental denial of the gospel”, which is the absolute worst position any professing Christian could possibly take) indicate that at the end of the day, very little about the New Testament rises beyond conjecture and enters “non-speculative fact”.
Second, there is nothing about the Christian faith that justifies classifying “conjecture” as “forbidden” or “unreasonable”,
Third, conjecture is all over the place in Christian scholarship’s attempts to explain things that do not have a direct biblical explanation, like the Synoptic problem, or the degree to which the Christ-sayings in the gospels reflect what the original author wrote and the degree to which they reflect later modification by copyists, or the date of a gospel, or the originally intended audience of a gospel, or how far a Christian’s confession of the deity of Christ can depart from the Trinitarian version, before it has crossed the line into heresy signaling that Christian’s lack of salvation. One major area of conjecture arises from Dr. Mike Licona’s displacement theories allowing gospel authors to report history in a way different than what “really happened”, yet without disturbing biblical inerrancy, with Dr. Lydia McGrew quick to point out that this is just a fancy way of saying the gospels unreliably report history. Most Christin scholars have happy to conjecture about the relation of Acts 15 to Galatians 2 despite knowing that their preferred conjecture is the opposite of another Christian scholars conjecture.
So apparently, the fact that my theory about Matthew’s invention of Christ-sayings sits at the level of “conjecture” by no means justifies even an initial suspicion that maybe the theory is wrong. You must examine the conjecture on the merits to see to what degree if reasonably arises out of what can be safely known about apostle Matthew, apostle Peter and Mark. My conjecture doesn’t deny any ancient Christian statement about these men, and is consistent with the goals that today’s fundamentalist Christian would attribute to those three men.
———-The Jewish church under James held to a rumor that said Paul relaxed Mosaic law for Jews living outside Jerusalem. Acts 21:18-24. Was there any degree of falsity in that rumor, yes or no? That part of the church called “brethren” interpreted a Christ-saying to mean would never die. John 21:23. Were the brethren wrong? Peter required Gentiles to live like Jews. Galatians 2:14. Did Jesus give Peter any reason to think Jesus would require Gentiles to live like Jews? If Matthew thought the risen Christ required the apostles to convey to future generations all that Jesus originally preached to the original apostles (Matthew 28:20) did Matthew errantly make things more complex by adding to his gospel things Jesus never taught, like the Virgin birth?
——First, you don’t know the extent to which the nascent Church was willing to let an apostle have the final say in whether a Christ-saying did or didn’t represent what Jesus really said. but most Christian scholars today, represented by Licona, Keener and others, think John placed in Jesus’ mouth sayings Jesus never actually spoke…and yet there’s no doubt that the gospel of John was always accepted within orthodox circles. Apparently, the early church was slightly less extremist about “what really happened”, than your criticism allows.
Second, I don’t automatically assume that whatever church rejected the non-canonical gospels was the “correct” church. That would merely blindly assume that whatever church created a non-canonical gospel was “wrong” to do so, and we’d have to debate for about a year before you could disabuse me of my belief that all the way back in traceable history, Christianity has been a collection of competing denominations…likely arising to some degree or other from the fact that Jesus himself did not always teach consistently. So if our presuppositions about biblical inerrancy are opposite to each other, then perhaps we need to discuss that presupposition.
——-I could use the same words to confidently assert the failure of your own hypothesis, but since you would not find such posturing the least bit persuasive, fairness dictates that you not expect me to find such posturing the least bit persuasive. But if talking that way helps you feel even more confirmed in your Christian viewpoint, more power to you.
And it almost seems like you are just kidding with that kind of talk. You pretend to draw a fairly ultimate negative conclusion from my argumentation despite likely knowing there’s far more that I could argue for my hypothesis. Unfortunately, reply boxes on the internet are not really geared toward facilitating truly “scholarly” debate.
If Jesus had asserted the critically significant things ascribed in him in Matthew 16:17-19, any other gospel author who recorded the same scene would not likely have “chosen to exclude” such significant teaching. And yet although Mark 8:29 is depicting the exact same scene, Mark has none of Jesus’ theologically significant commentary that appears now exclusively in Matthew 16:17-19.
Since Mark would not likely have “chosen to exclude” such theologically significant commentary from Jesus, we are reasonable to discount that possible excuse and prefer instead the explanation that says the reason such Christ-sayings are missing from Mark is because neither Mark nor Peter knew that Jesus ever said any such thing.
We thus further deduce that the reason they didn’t know Jesus ever said any such thing is because he actually didn’t, for if he had, the content of the missing Christ-sayings, being so supportive of Peter’s apostolic authority, would never have been knowingly excised by either Peter or his devoted follower Mark.
Therefore, we are going to remain reasonable to accept the hypothesis that says the only reason that extra stuff is now limited to Matthew is because Matthew is knowingly putting in Jesus’ mouth statements Jesus never actually made.
That hypothesis receives added strength in light of the Christian scholarly majority view that says Mark was the earliest gospel and Matthew came along later, perfectly consistent with the common-sense notion that embellishment is more likely to appear in the later version of a story rather than in the earlier version of the story.
Infidels like me don’t waste a lot of time worrying about how strongly Christian apologists can defend the reliability of oral tradition. We worry instead about apostolic eyewitnesses who intentionally misrepresent what Jesus really said.
We then further infer that because we now have a solid reason to think Matthew was not above inventing fictional Christ-sayings, we are going to be reasonable if we view other Christ-sayings in his gospel with suspicion, especially if they are not corroborated by the other canonical gospels.
If you think the inferences I draw in this post are unreasonable, I would love to hear why you think that way, they sure seem reasonable to me. Otherwise, Paul’s fallacious generalization that all unbelievers are without excuse (Romans 1:20) doesn’t seem to qualify as much more than the verbal bigotry that we know occurs in hundreds of thousands of churches every Sunday.
Barry, thank you for your response. As one whose dissertation topic was on oral traditions, I can respond to your post. You are right in that Matthew 16:17-19 is a very important text. In my dissertation, I explored this passage to see if it bore any traits of early oral tradition and passed with flying colors. That is, we have strong reasons to believe that Matthew 16:17-19 is early and arose from early eyewitness testimony. Various factors led me to deduce, quite strongly, that the Bultmannian approach to oral tradition is flawed and does not match what is found in the New Testament Gospels. But that does not necessarily answer your charge. You asked why other Gospels did not include such important truths. I think there are various reasons for this. For one, paper was limited, so each Gospel writer had to include the traditions that he and his community deemed most important. Second, many traditions formed from eyewitness testimony existed in the early church. Some of them were included, and others weren’t. These testimonies came from various communities who witnessed the teachings and deeds of Jesus. Not everyone witnessed the same things. Therefore, not all the testimonies can be expected to be the same with 100% certainty. While some degree of flexibility is permitted with the transmission of oral traditions, it was never acceptable to introduce falsehoods into traditions that were held to be historically true. One of the biggest problems with your charge is that you claim that the early disciples misrepresented what Jesus said. However, how could you know that unless you were there? We weren’t, but the early witnesses were. Additionally, there were no known groups in Judaism that ever expected their Messiah to rise from the dead after being hung from a tree. The very idea of a Messiah being hung from a tree was reprehensible in ancient Jewish ears. Thus, with all due respect, your charge fails much in the same fashion that the Jesus Seminar’s did. Both charges are based on presuppositions about what one believes Jesus must have said. If you are a materialist or a naturalist who does not believe in miracles or the spiritual world, then it stands to reason that you would think that Jesus would not have risen from the dead or that he wouldn’t have made divine connections with himself.
While I realize that my post will not likely convince you, I hope, at least, you’ll see why such charges are unfair and how reliable the transmission of oral traditions can be.
Wishing you the best,
Brian