I often wonder what the 1/2 life of information might be if passed word of mouth from generation to generation. I also often wonder if information from the Bible used any of the ideas passed word of mouth over thousands of years or do they claim divine revelations? My gut feeling tells me that information of the kind often seen in the bible might very well be the product of some 1/2 life phenomina. I went to a 45th high school reunion recently. After only 45 years most of the stories I heard that I was familiar with had changed drasticaly. Some of us have turned into legends over the years. Most of us have now since fallen off the radar but some of these legends have continued to grow since the 1930’s. Stories that I heard that were allready 30 years old continue to morph until I heard them again another 45 years later and they somehow magicaly grew, I can only imagine how a story could change in 4,000 years.
Well, the reason the Bible is “The Bible” is because all the Christian faiths claim divine inspiration for the common books. There’s some debate over what all books should be included, and the obvious debate over Biblical inerrancy (i.e. is the printed Bible the literal Word of God as written, or is it something with a message that transcends the actual words on the page?)
I think most of them were written down a long time ago; with the exception of a few of the Old Testament books, they were all written between one and two hundred years after the events, or something like that, so there weren’t really that many generations of oral tradition to count on.
I think in stories and matters that are important, societies have methods for ensuring that the information doesn’t mutate too badly- memorizing the stories, etc… This is how the pre-literate world operated- that’s how the Homeric stories were transmitted up to the point when someone could write them down.
Non-important stuff… I’m not sure. The half-life is probably pretty short in terms of exact information, but probably pretty long in terms of abstract concept transmission.
I’ve read- will look for a cite- that the survival of family oral traditions is less dependant on time than the degrees from the person hearing them. You’re likely to remember your grandmother’s stories of her childhood, for example, but the stories she passes on about her grandmother’s past- assuming you never knew her grandmother- are less likely to survive, especially the more mundane ones. When it becomes stories about people you personally did not know only the most interesting ones tend to survive and they often become confused in details, with more familiar points of reference taking the place of the truth. (Example: in his '08 campaign Obama referred to a tale of his great-uncle being in the U.S. military party that liberate Auschwitz; the truth value of this was mixed: his great uncle was in a U.S. military outfit that liberated a concentration camp, but it was a much smaller and less famous/less infamous subcamp of Buchenwald {?} as opposed to Auschwitz, which in fact was liberated by Soviet troops.)
When I started genealogy work I found out that some of the family stories were flat out made up (e.g. my great-great-grandmother who was constently reported to be a fiery Irish lass with a thick brogue who came over during the potato famine, was born in South Carolina to parents whose ancestors came from England and Ulster at least a century before the potato famine), some were pretty much completely accurate, and most were in between. Sometimes I would find a story that HAD to have been really interesting at one point but it had not been passed down (e.g. some of the campaigns I know for absolute fact my Civil War ancestors were involved in, or the ancestor who took in the orphaned Andrew Jackson for a while [and whose life Jackson emulated- he was a saddle maker’s apprentice when he moved into the house and when he left became what the old man was- a country lawyer/magistrate/planter). Most of my ancestors are just names and dates and locations- I know nothing about them as individuals, whether they were mean or nice or smart or stupid or funny or serious, and in my experience that’s most families: people can tell you about the older relatives they knew, they can tell you a little bit about the ancestors they’re older relatives knew, but when you get more than two degrees removed they could rarely fill half a sheet of paper with the stories that are passed down.
I’m sure they exist, but I’ve yet to meet a family that has stories of their immigrant ancestors if said ancestors came here before the early 19th century, or stories that have been passed down from the Revolution. We lose interest after we no longer feel a personal connection.