Why are there many gospels -which often do not agree?"You might think that in an oral culture, where so much depended on hearinbg things by word of mouth., there would be special care to make sure that traditions told about important persons or events would be passed along accuractely-that every telling and retelling of a story would be exactely the same and that the people telling the stories would be particularly scruplous not to alter the accounts in any way. As it turns out, that's not true at all. Cultural anthropologists who have studied modern oral societies have shown that just the opposite is the case. In oral culture there is not a concern for what we in written culture call verbatim accuracy. In oral cocieties it is recognized that the telling of a story to a different version of the story. Stories are molded to the time and circumstance in which they are told." (p. 35-6).
"My thesis has just been the opposite: that the ways these various storytellers have framed their accounts of Judas, and the details of the stories they told about him, are directly related to other views they had about God, Christ, the significence of death, the way of salvation, how to live in the world, the Jews and Jewish rejection of Jesus, and so on. As these storytellers told their tales about Judas, they did so in light of their other concerns, perspectives, and theological views, their loves, hates, likes, dislikes, inclinations, and disinclinations" (p.51-2).
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