Behind the Gospels: Understanding The Oral Tradition by Eric Eve

Author:Eric Eve [Eve, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: SPCK
Published: 2013-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

Eenie, meenie, miney, mo,

Catch a something by the toe.

If he hollers, let him go,

Eenie, meenie, miney, mo.

Here, the nonsense first line cues both the last line, which repeats it, and the metre for the entire piece, four lines of seven syllables with the stress on the odd-numbered syllables in each line. The sound of ‘eenie’ cues the second word ‘meenie’ via assonance. The alliteration of ‘meenie’, ‘miney’ and ‘mo’ constrains the rest of the line together with the use of three vowel sounds in alphabetical order: e, i, o, an order also found, for example, in ‘fee, fie, foe, fum’ or ‘Old MacDonald had a farm, ee-i, ee-i, oh!’ The last word, ‘mo’, then provides the end rhyme used by every other line. The middle two lines offer the concrete image of something being caught by the toe hollering to be let go. In combination these multiple constraints make the rhyme quite hard to get wrong, but it is the sound at least as much as the sense that provides the multiple cueing that makes it so.

This short verse also illustrates the way in which a stable oral tradition can change. For there is still that placeholder ‘something’ that is caught by the toe. In older versions of the rhyme, the word that used to appear there is one that is no longer considered acceptable. More recent versions have therefore replaced it with something less objectionable, ‘tiger’ being one of the more popular variants, having the advantage of alliterating with ‘toe’. The rhyme ‘Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Mo’ thus illustrates, not only how multiple constraints can lend stability to a piece of oral tradition, but also the kind of change that can be accommodated within such constraints when circumstances change. Of course not all oral tradition is as neatly and tightly constrained as the short rhyme ‘Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Mo’, but the occurrence of so many constraints in such a short piece neatly illustrates the general principle.

The application of these insights to the oral Jesus tradition may not be immediately obvious, not least because we lack access to the original Aramaic tradition in which early poetic forms of Jesus sayings (for instance) can be directly discerned, even though, as Allison remarks, ‘a few items in the tradition . . . look as though they were composed precisely in order to lodge themselves in memories’.56 Rubin’s insights do suggest a couple of tentative approaches, however. In more general terms they may help us to sharpen our questions about what might make some putative piece of oral tradition memorable: is it the poetic language, the concrete imagery, the familiar structure, or some combination of these? Are there enough such constraints in any given pericope for it to have survived as a relatively stable piece of tradition in the course of oral transmission? More specifically, for any given piece of supposed tradition that exists in more than one form (the Lord’s Prayer, for example, which appears in slightly different forms at Matthew 6.9b–13 and Luke 11.

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