If you read Ehrman's book you'll see that the myth of infallible oral transmission has also been disproven by modern research. There are still bards today who travel and tell stories and they tailor their versions to their audience. No one knows because they had never been written down or recorded.
Even more interesting is this experiment.
The moral of the story is quite clear. Human memory is not to be trusted.
Even more interesting is this experiment.
Quote:On October 4, 1992, an El-Al Boeing 707 cargo plane that had just taken off from Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam lost power in two engines. The pilot tried to return to the airport but couldn’t make it. The plane crashed into an eleven-story apartment building in the Amsterdam suburb of Bijlmermeer. The four crew members and thirty-nine people in the building were killed. The crash was, understandably, the leading news story in the Netherlands for days.
Ten months later, in August 1993, Dutch psychology professor Hans Crombag and two colleagues gave a survey to 193 university professors, staff, and students in the country. Among the questions was the following: “Did you see the television film of the moment the plane hit the apartment building?” In their responses 107 of those surveyed (55 percent) said yes, they had seen the film. Sometime later the researchers gave a similar survey with the same question to 93 law school students. In this instance, 62 (66 percent) of the respondents indicated that they had seen the film. There was just one problem. There was no film.
These striking results obviously puzzled the researchers, in part because basic common sense should have told anyone that there could not have been a film. Remember, this is 1992, before cell phone cameras. The only way to have a film of the event would have been for a television camera crew to have trained a camera on this particular apartment building in a suburb of Amsterdam at this exact time, in expectation of an imminent crash. And yet, between half and two thirds of the people surveyed—most of them graduate students and professors—indicated they had seen the nonexistent film. Why would they think they had seen something that didn’t exist?
The moral of the story is quite clear. Human memory is not to be trusted.
Robert G. Ingersoll : “No man with a sense of humor ever founded a religion.”
