Today’s Luann comic strip gives us a nice (fictional) illustration about story mutation, a real-world phenomenon with which we’re all too familiar — and one to which few if any traditionalist New Testament pay sufficient attention.
In successive panels of the comic strip, Luann and her teenaged friends pass along a story to each other. In the retelling, crucial details get left out. Moreover, each reteller adds a significant embellishment — one that probably made perfect sense to the reteller, but which had zero basis in fact.
By the end of the strip, all the cumulative mutations have given birth to a completely new, and utterly false, account.
First panel: Luann’s rookie firefighter brother Brad says to her: “I scrubbed the fire station floor today — and I got to pull the fire truck out!”
Next panel: “Brad got to drive the fire truck!”
Next panel: “Brad drove a fire truck to a fire.”
Two panels later: “Luann’s brother fought that huge warehouse fire.“
At the sixth retelling, one of the friends tells Luann’s and Brad’s mother: “I heard Brad was in a dangerous firestorm.”
The mom, predictably, freaks out: “BRAD! Why didn’t you tell me about your close call!?”
(All emphasis above is mine.)
Most people readily recognize that this kind of story mutation happens fairly regularly. It comes into play every time we’re asked to make an important, consequential decision on grounds that a particular event supposedly occurred in a certain way. It’s the reason why, in such circumstances, we normally insist on first-hand testimony from eyewitnesses who were actually there — see, e.g., Deut. 17.6, 19.15 and Num. 35.30; students of the Prologue of the Gospel of John, take note.
Some New Testament scholars claim that we don’t need to worry about story mutation in our scriptural studies, because the NT’s stories are supposedly based on “controlled oral tradition.” Let’s leave aside that this seems like so much wishful thinking, and the triumph of hope over experience: The adequacy of the scholarship supporting this claim has been severely challenged; see this comment of mine from last year for more details.
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