The One That Got Away

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a youth pastor who bragged on video about recommending the Bible to a middle-school girl and then scampering away.  ("And I was like, I just teed off on that one, you know," mic drop.)  An atheist podcaster / blogger was upset about it; I wondered how much of the glorious tale was true.

Then the Internet forced this story down my throat: a MAGA-adjacent TikTok pastor / therapist named Stuart Knechtle bragged to another "faith-based podcaster" that he had brought 19-year-old Barron Trump to the very brink of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  Or maybe not: "And he’s very close to putting his faith in Christ. Very close." (I almost had that 100-pound marlin in the boat, that 12-point buck was in my sights!)

The whole story was dodgy.  Why was this guy on the phone to a teenager, let alone a president's son, at 12:30 a.m.?  Who called whom?  Numerous commenters on the Daily Beast story were upset about Knechtle's talking publicly about his missionary activity, but bragging about hooking high-profile converts is as old as Christianity: the New Testament contains numerous such stories.  One can question the ethics of publicizing a phone conversation, but without knowing the circumstances of the call I can't say.  Besides, this guy is a MAGA Christian: what has he to do with ethics?  I expect both of Barron's parents have staff whose job it is to monitor media about him, and if I were Stuart Knechtle I'd watch my back.

Anyone who's been exposed to missionary propaganda will recognize the form of these stories, though usually they end with the target joyously giving himself or herself to Jesus; the conversio interruptus these guys recount is, I admit, less familiar to me.  But this all reminded me of a book I read a couple of years ago, Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition by Eric Eve (Fortress Press, 2014).  As I've written before, biblical scholars have long been interested in the ways the early Christians preserved teaching by and about Jesus in the period before the gospels were written.  "Oral tradition" is a catch-all term for the practices supposedly used, but not much was known about how they worked, and Eve's book is a good introduction to the present state of scholarship.

I was particularly interested in chapter 5, where Eve discusses some recent work, which draws on accounts of a 19th-century Christian missionary, John Hogg, as reported by his daughter.  Hogg worked in Egypt, building Christian communities there.  (Although Egypt is primarily Muslim, it was a hotbed of early Christianity and still has a significant Christian minority that long predates John Hogg.)  The discussion is too long to detail here, but briefly, as a late 20th century scholar named Kenneth Bailey tells one of the stories:

Before the first World War John Hogg’s daughter dipped into this same oral tradition and in her biography of him told of how he was waylaid at night by a band of robbers who demanded valuables. He quickly surrendered a gold watch and his money but indicated that he had a treasure worth far more. They were curious. He pulled a small book from his pocket and spent the entire night telling them of the treasures it contained. By morning the band, convicted of the evil of their ways, sought to return his watch and money and pledged themselves to give up highway robbery. Hogg took the watch but insisted that they keep his money, and indeed then financed the gang personally until they could establish themselves in legal employment. [quoted in Eve, p. 69]

This is the familiar come-to-Jesus story.  But Eric Eve looked at the daughter's biography of her father and found that she had another version of the encounter.  She dismisses the version Bailey used as a "romantic tale," and gives a much longer and "rather more mundane" one without the edifying conversion (pp. 70ff.).  Rena Hogg, the daughter, "regarded the discrepant versions of this tale as evidence of how 'fact and fancy mingled in lore'.  A more accurate way of putting it might be to say that the discrepant versions show how fact is transmuted into legend" (p. 72).  Eve points out that the polished, edifying version was preserved more or less intact for several decades, and it's easy to see why.  Kenneth Bailey hoped to establish that such preservation was involved in the early churches and supports the reliability of the gospels and Acts.  What it seems to show is that considerable editing may have been applied to the material the churches passed along, to make it suitable for preaching and proselytizing, and it sounds to me like the processes assumed a century ago by form-criticism, as passé as it's commonly said to be.

In the case of the stories told by Friendly Atheist's youth pastor and Stuart Knechtle, we aren't even looking at supposedly inerrant Bible stories, just self-aggrandizing tall tales told by would-be fishers of men.  It's not only appropriate but necessary to be skeptical of them, especially when they fit such a recognizable pattern.  If you're at all interested in this subject, I urge you to read Behind the Gospels.  If it seems too scholarly, another recent book, Elijah Wald's Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories (Da Capo Press, 2024), shows oral tradition at work in the development of the blues in the late  1800s to early 1900s.  Be aware that, as its title suggests, it's often pretty raunchy, but if you're reading this blog that shouldn't be a barrier; and remember that, according to Friendly Atheist, the Bible itself is full of filth and nastiness.  In reading Jelly Roll Blues I saw a lot of parallels to the development of early Christian tradition, but it's fascinating in its own right.

Apologetics for a New Millennium, Same as the Old Millennium

It's fun to peek from time to time at the present state of fundamentalist Christian apologetics.  I've begun reading Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ by Darrell L. Bock and Daniel B. Wallace (Thomas Nelson, 2010), and it doesn't seem that much has changed in the past fifty years -- longer, really.

Bock and Wallace are both academics, professional scholars, but they begin Dethroning Jesus with some rather lazy arguments.  Bock recounts how he debated John Dominic Crossan "in front of a packed house at Southern Methodist University" (page 2).  Crossan, a member of the notorious Jesus Seminar, told the audience of a study of college students who were asked where they were when the Challenger Space Shuttle blew up, and were asked again three years later.  Not only did their memories change, but:

Afterward, the students were asked to compare their testimonies and choose the one they liked best. The study noted that most students preferred the description they gave three years after the event rather than the initial account they gave immediately after the event. [Crossan's] point in citing the study was to say that memory becomes distorted over time [page 2].

I notice that we're already getting some distance between the original study and the account I've quoted here: we have Bock's memory of Crossan's description of the study.  No reference is given for the study itself, and though I've heard of similar research that led to similar results, I'd like to be able to have a look at the actual report.  Because memory can indeed become distorted over time, and as we'll see, Bock doesn't actually dispute this, it would be nice to have some backup.  (A cursory search on Youtube didn't bring up anything, but I'll look again.)

Here's how Bock remembers his rebuttal of Crossan:

I noted that two very important points were missing from his discussion of the experiment at Emory. First, it took place in a culture that has developed distance from the use of memory. We have video footage and computers now. Second, those who were asked at Emory had no stake in what was being recalled. I raised the question of what might have happened had the NASA astronaut corps been asked to go through the same exercise, since their lives would be at stake in the shuttle’s fate. The analogy was that those who followed Jesus paid a great price for their belief. Their families probably disowned them. Many even lost their lives for their faith. They likely would have been marked by such an event, and thus their memory was likely to be better. Quite a gap existed between college students and NASA astronauts when it came to the shuttle. The astronauts were more like the martyrs of the first generation of faith.

This is a standard fundamentalist move, brought up-to-date for the space age: because the early Christians suffered, "even lost their lives for their faith", their account of Jesus is trustworthy.  If you accept this argument, however, one must ask about non-Christians who lost their lives for their faith, often at Christian hands.  Many Jews chose martyrdom rather than convert to Christianity, so by Bock's logic, this counts against the truth of Christianity and for Judaism.  Further, most Christian martyrs had no personal memory of Jesus' ministry, so their tenaciousness can not be explained by fidelity to what they had seen and heard and touched.  And what of those Christians who chose life over martyrdom, probably outnumbering those who chose to die?  Notwithstanding its enduring popularity as an apologetic touchstone, Christian martyrdom is not an argument for the truth of the New Testament.

More could be said about Bock's attempt to recast the focus to the "astronaut corps" instead of the students.  The astronauts who died in the Challenger disaster could hardly repeat the experiment, since they were dead.  (The same is true of the Christians who died for their beliefs.)  In the absence of evidence about the other astronauts' memories of the disaster, this move can only be seen as an attempt at distraction.  (I'll try to find a study I read about, of children who'd survived school shootings; as I remember it, if they were near the shooter, they remembered that they were far away from him; if they were not near, they remembered being closer and in greater danger.  There are obvious parallels to some of the gospel material here.)

Bock returns to his second point:

Add on top of this the fact that Judaism was a “culture of memory,” for that is how the Jews passed on stories, and the appeal to a modern analogy at Emory looks less plausible. This difference over memory parallels the way Jesus is remembered and discussed today. Some are skeptical about memory and Jesus, arguing that Jesus has been formed largely in the image favorable to those doing the remembering. Others argue that Jesus’ presence and teaching were so powerful that they were well remembered by people who were used to passing on teaching orally. In many ways, this book is about that debate. It is a debate that rages in our culture as people speak about who Jesus was and what he taught.

I'm a bit surprised that a professional New Testament scholar could get so much wrong, but then Bock isn't the first I've encountered.  Judaism in Jesus' time relied on written sources to pass on stories: it was unique among pre-Christian religions in its reliance on Scripture, which means "writing."  Literacy wasn't as widespread in those days as it is now, but reading the Torah in synagogue was a regular part of Jewish worship.  True, the written text was used as a springboard for oral commentary, but that is true today among Christians too, and that commentary could range widely beyond the letter of the text.  There's a genre of Jewish biblical interpretation, haggadah, which retells the written biblical stories with a great deal of variation and invention, but those retellings have also been written down.  And the earliest Christian evidence we have are written documents, the letters of Paul, written a decade or more before anyone bothered to write the gospels.

If you accept the traditional authorship of the gospels, you have to cope with the fact that the evangelists provide as many as four discordant versions of Jesus' life and teaching -- five, if you include Paul's accounts of the first Eucharist and the resurrection.  That "culture of memory" was not all that reliable, even for preserving material that we know was of first importance to believers.  There's been a resurgence of attention to "oral tradition" in New Testament scholarship in the past couple of decades, but it seems to be as much about variation in the church's use of the Jesus tradition as about preserving historical data, and it doesn't give much support to apologists like Bock.

Still, reading these arguments gave me a warm feeling of familiarity: Bock's arguments are invalid, but they bring back memories of other invalid defenses of Christianity that I've encountered over the past forty years.

Higgledy Piggledy, Oral Tradition

Last week I read a new book by Rafael Rodríguez, Oral Tradition and the New Testament (Bloomsbury, 2014), which I'd found when it was recommended and discussed recently by a blogger I found when I was writing about Morton Smith a few years ago.  From time to time I look in to see what she's writing about, and this new book sounded worth following up.  The university library had just gotten it in, and it turned out to be interesting and useful.  It brought me up to date on a topic I hadn't looked at much lately, and pointed me to some other books I'll want to read.  (Just what I need.)  It's concise, under 150 pages including references, and readable.  I can recommend it to anyone who's interested in this subject, especially if they've read about it or heard about it before.  But, of course, I have a quibble.

Here's the context.  It's virtually a cliche in New Testament scholarship that before the gospels were written, information about Jesus and his teachings was preserved by "oral tradition."  How this oral tradition worked, what forms it took, has always been disputed, though.  Before the historical study of the Bible began at the end of the eighteenth century, though, the (more or less) official position of the church was that the gospels were written either by Jesus' original followers (Matthew and John) or by people who'd worked with them (Mark, supposedly written by an associate of Simon Peter) or by an associate of Paul (Luke and Acts), though Paul didn't become a Christian until a few years after Jesus' death.  Since the authors of the gospels were either eyewitnesses or had accesses to eyewitnesses, they didn't really need "oral tradition": they worked from memory or from the reported memories of the apostles.  I hope to write more about this before long, so I won't go into too much detail here.

In the twentieth century, scholars came to agree that the gospels were not written by eyewitnesses, indeed not by the men who traditionally had been claimed as their authors.  For a while in the 1800s, very late dates for the gospels became fashionable in some circles, though the fashion reversed itself in the 1900s.  So how was the gospel material preserved and transmitted from those who'd known Jesus until it was eventually written down?  "Oral tradition" was the answer.  After the 1920s, the dominant approach in European and American scholarship was form criticism, developed by German scholars and widely adopted by their colleagues.  Form criticism attempted to understand how stories and sayings were affected by transmission -- how they changed, how they stayed the same -- and how they were used by the early churches.  Naturally there were many scholars who rejected this approach, because they saw no reason to abandon longstanding church tradition, but others were skeptical of the method itself.  When I was reading a lot of New Testament scholarship in the 1980s, I read some of the classics of form criticism and some of the later attacks on and defenses of it.  Some of the opponents seemed to believe that if they could demolish form criticism, the field could return to traditional approaches, but that's like believing that if you can demolish Darwinism, the creation myths of Genesis will be vindicated. One reason form criticism was invented was that traditional understandings of the gospels had failed: few scholars believed, for reasons having nothing to do with form criticism, that the gospels were direct eyewitness accounts of Jesus' career by his followers and their converts.  Yet "form criticism" remains a bugbear of biblical reactionaries to this day, a sort of symbol of everything they reject in modern approaches to the study of the Bible.

When I read Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Eerdmans, 2008) a few years ago, it was the first serious scholarly book I'd read on this subject in quite a while.  Reading Bauckham's critique, it occurred to me that form criticism would have been based on outdated and largely discredited anthropological theories of pre-literate cultures anyway, and that it could surely be criticized because of that.  But although Bauckham made some valid points, he still accepted most of the historical-critical approach to the Bible, including many of its conclusions.  I wondered if some of the people who'd welcomed his book noticed, for example, that he didn't think the gospel of Matthew was written by an eyewitness. Whatever the failings of form criticism, abandoning it would not be much help to a conservative-fundamentalist case for the validity or reliability of the gospels.

So Rodríguez' book looked like a good way to begin bringing myself up to speed on whatever advances had been made in the study of oral tradition since the 1980s, and it is that.  I plan to read some of the writings he cites.  But the main advance seems to have been the development of what Rodríguez calls "media criticism" of the New Testament writings, which appears to have more to do with the use of those writings for worship and devotion rather than a better understanding of their history and composition.  As Rodríguez says, we have no access to the oral tradition that predated the writing of the gospels: attempts to reconstruct it as a source have not worked.  Scholars can do a bit more with written sources, but not very much since those written sources are mostly lost; the only exception is the gospel of Mark, which most New Testament scholars believe was used as a source by the authors of Matthew and Luke, who rewrote it, cut, and added to it to produce their gospels.  Mark still exists as a separate work; other hypothetical sources like Q do not.

All this goes, I hope, to set the stage for the following passage from Oral Tradition and the New Testament, which baffles me for reasons I'll explain shortly.

A logical place to begin the history of contemporary media criticism is with Swedish scholar Birger Gerhardsson.  His dissertation, Memory and Manuscript (1961), was published at the zenith of form criticism’s influence, when the academic community was not ready to take seriously Gerhardsson’s critical challenges to form criticism.  Gerhardsson’s work would not be granted adequate consideration for at least two decades, and perhaps closer to four.  Perhaps most (in)famously, Morton Smith wrote an influential and dismissive review essay that described Gerhardsson’s thesis as a whole as “impossible to conceive” (1963: 176). Two decades later, Werner Kelber (1983) would take Gerhardsson seriously, and 15 years after that, in 1998, Gerhardsson’s book would be republished, along with his follow-up essay, Tradition and Transmission in Early Christianity (1964), and a penitent foreword by no less than esteemed Rabbinics scholar (and Morton Smith’s former student) Jacob Neusner.  Finally, in 2009, an edited volume of interdisciplinary essays would reassess the original significance of Gerhardsson’s work (Kelber and Byrskog 2009).  Today, Gerhardsson is widely recognized as a seminal figure in the history of research in early Christian oral tradition, a man literally decades ahead of his time [34].

I never got around to reading Memory and Manuscript, though I think I remember looking at Tradition and Transmission in Early Christianity to see Gerhardsson's reply to Smith's criticism.  If I remember right, it was not an effective rebuttal, so I didn't feel it important to follow up by reading the books in their entirety.  I did hear about Neusner's recantation in the wake of the controversy over Smith and the longer gospel of Mark, and the blogger who alerted me to Rodríguez mentioned the republication of Gerhardsson's book and Neusner's "penitent foreword."  I did some digging and learned about the messy, bitter break between Neusner and Smith, which led to Neusner's repudiating most of his own earlier scholarship along with his teacher's.

What I didn't find was any refutation of Smith's critical review of Memory and Manuscript.  It originally appeared in the Journal of Biblical Literature, volume 82 (1963), 169-176, and was reprinted in a posthumous collection of Smith's articles.  It doesn't seem to be readily available online unless you have access to an academic library's resources.  Maybe there's something in the edited volume of interdisciplinary essays on Gerhardsson that Rodríguez mentions; it's in the university library here, but it's checked out so it may be a while before I can look at it.

I also recall seeing Gerhardsson's work cited favorably by numerous conservative academics and apologists I read, so I'm not sure how seriously to take Rodríguez' suggestion that Smith's "(in)famous" and "influential" review shut down consideration of Gerhardsson's thesis.  Maybe the review was influential because it made valid criticisms?  I'm especially inclined to think so because of what Rodríguez himself has to say about Gerhardsson's work.

Briefly, Smith argued that Gerhardsson based his argument on dubious assumptions: that Jesus made his disciples memorize his teachings as any rabbi of his day would have done according to the Talmud, and that the early church functioned like a rabbinical school.  Smith countered that the New Testament writings do not look anything like the rabbinical material, and that there is no evidence in the New Testament or early Christian history of such methods of preservation and transmission among the early Christians.

Even if we were to suppose the apostles witnesses to Jesus' legal teaching, there is no evidence of a class of memorizers to preserve their witness as the professional "repeaters" of rabbinic Judaism preserved the oral Torah.  And there is no appeal to chains of tradition.  Paul never says "Peter says that Jesus said," nor "I heard from James who heard from John who heard from Jesus."  Indeed, Paul is notorious for the rarity with which he even refers to Jesus' teaching [175].

Remember Rodríguez' claim that Smith "described Gerhardsson’s thesis as a whole as 'impossible to conceive'"?   It's in the final sentence of the review.  Here's the context:

In one of the few places where Paul does appeal to tradition, he lists, as the evidence on which his gospel was based, six stories of resurrection appearances (1 Cor 15.3ff).  One of these was Christ's appearance to him, the other five he seems to say he had "received."  Presumably they constituted the evidence for the primitive Christian kerygma as he knew it -- one might say, the most important part of the earliest known preaching of Christianity.  Yet of these five appearances, two or three have disappeared from the canonical tradition, except for passing references.  A second example, and even less explicable by Gerhardsson's postulates, is the loss of any reliable record of Jesus' attitude toward the Law.  How a careful, rabbinic tradition should have produced, about this central rabbinical concern, the mess of contradictory scraps of evidence which the gospels preserve, it is impossible to conceive [176].

It seems to me that Rodríguez misrepresented Smith's statement.  It was not Gerhardsson's "thesis as a whole," that he called "impossible to conceive," but the failure of early Christian tradition to preserve a "reliable record of Jesus' attitude toward the Law."

Even more significant, Rodríguez himself is quite critical of Gerhardsson's thesis.  For example:

However, Gerhardsson goes too far when he argues, on the basis of both the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letters, that the disciples -- specifically, The Twelve – formed a collegium, or authoritative school, that was responsible for forming, preserving, and transmitting the Jesus tradition (1961:244, 245-61)...

All of this rests on a highly speculative reading of a handful of texts, especially Acts 15 (see 249-61).  For example, he calls Acts 15.5ff “a description of a regular early Christian general session” (251, emphasis added), though nothing in Acts 15 (or elsewhere) suggests that it describes a regular or recurring kind of meeting.  Instead, Acts 15 seems to describe a special, ad hoc gathering of the Jerusalem church to settle a significant, persistent problem that was not typical for the early Christians.  Moreover, Paul’s letters provide authoritative doctrinal and pragmatic pronouncements to their audiences from Paul himself and not from Jerusalem.  This fact alone suggests that authority among the earliest Christians was not concentrated in a small group located in Jerusalem...

Gerhardsson’s conception of the oral Jesus tradition, then, is too rigid and inflexible, especially in that he assumes a fixed oral tradition that was more stable and unchanging than even the written Jesus tradition!  To be sure, Gerhardsson leaves room for the adaptation and creative application of the fixed Jesus tradition in earliest Christianity.  But the Jesus tradition as Gerhardsson has imagined it is nevertheless unreasonably and impractically stable, fixed, and memorized [35-6].

This is pretty close to Smith's critique, in my opinion, though it's framed differently.  It's easy to imagine a Gerhardsson partisan (Neusner, say) attacking Rodríguez for an infamous dismissal of the great scholar's work.  That wouldn't be entirely inaccurate, since Rodriguez does reject his "thesis as a whole," which assumes Jesus' early followers as a rabbinical academy.  Given Rodríguez' careless reading -- to put it as charitably as I can -- of Smith's conclusion, and the lack of any real refutation of Smith's criticisms, I'd say that Smith's review still has to be answered, or even seriously confronted.  (Smith's remarks about the resurrection tradition in 1 Corinthians were especially "influential" for me, and deserve more attention than they have received; if any serious scholar is in danger of being undervalued in New Testament studies, it's Morton Smith.)

This is not to dismiss the whole of Oral Tradition and the New Testament: there's a lot in it that seems good to me.  But the part I've discussed here is seriously weak, and casts a shadow over the rest.

A Harvest of History

I spent a couple of days over the weekend reading Dorothy Canfield's A Harvest of Stories (Harcourt, 1958), which I bought many years ago so as to have a copy of her story "Sex Education."  That story made a big impression on me when I stumbled on it in a public library while I was in junior high.  It's about how age altered the perspective of a rural woman as she told the same story three times over several decades.  Canfield, who often published under her married name as Dorothy Canfield Fisher, lived a life that spanned the late 19th through the mid-20th century.  That fascinated me as a kid, and still does: I lived at the same time as someone who was an adult in 1900, who knew people who'd fought in or lived through the Civil War, and who saw the world change tremendously in her lifetime.  I say "the world" because she spent time in Europe, and brought the Montessori method of schooling to the United States.  She saw a good many changes in the opportunities open to women, and it would be interesting to know what she would think of the changes that came after.

Anyway, I thought of the book when I told an acquaintance about "Sex Education," and decided it was time to read the rest of it.  Canfield was from Vermont, where her family had lived for generations, and several stories are about those earlier generations, based on recollections of elderly people she knew when she was growing up.  For all that her sensibility looks pretty old-fashioned now, she was a vigorous writer, and a pleasure to read; her style hasn't dated much.

The third section of the book consists of stories about war, and I couldn't help thinking, as I read about the effect of the German invasion on French families in World War I, of some latter-day parallels.  I kept transposing them in my mind to, say, Iraqi families have had to endure since 2003.  Canfield went to France to follow her husband as he served in WWI, where she worked with the American wounded, and these tales probably draw on people's real experiences.  They're about the survivors without ignoring the dead, and they're heartbreaking.  Few Americans have the kind of connection to the Middle East (except perhaps through Israel) that many of us have to Europe, so it's unlikely that we'll get such stories out of the Iraq War; besides, we're the invaders, and there's probably not a market in the US for stories about American soldiers ransacking Iraqi houses and executing the Mayor of a village for failure to cooperate with them in every detail.  But I'm sure the stories are there to be told.

I was especially intrigued by a story that could have been put in the war section, but instead was with the other "Vermont Memories."  It's called "Ann Story," about a real woman who assisted the rebels during the American Revolution.  She married at 14 (child marriage!), and when her husband was killed by a falling tree while setting up a homestead, she took over the claim herself with her five children.  She lived to be about seventy-six.

Canfield begins the story by assuring the reader that

We know most of the homely-heroic details of her life, for the people who settled Vermont, from 1764 to the 1790s, were younger sons and daughters of decently educated Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island people, hence quite literate.  They left behind many kinds of written records of those first years -- letters, diaries, account books, memoirs, amateur local histories.

In addition, Vermont oral tradition is vivid and unbroken.  The grandparents of my youth had heard from their grandparents all about the life of the early settlers.  It is from talk as well as from yellowed letters, deeds, and daily journals that we know accurately how the primeval Vermont forests were turned into the mellow home-farms now all around us [36-7].

That reminded me of Craig Womack's remarks on oral tradition, which I've discussed before:

I would argue that oral traditions – legends and myths, if you will – performed in their cultural contexts have always been nationalistic and are told for the purpose of cultivating a political consciousness. If one considers the comments of elders telling stories in The World and Way of the Creek People, virtually all of them indicate the purpose of the stories is to inculcate a sense of Creekness in Creek listeners – what it means to form a clan, a town, a nation; their storytelling constitutes an act of Creek survival. Creek nationalism is created through a Creek narrative; the two from an interdependency, not an oppositional discourse. Although Adams is surely justified in critiquing the way “myths and legends” are often used as a diversion from political discussion, this is not an inherent characteristic of the discourse itself. “Legends and myths” might provide strategies for nationalism instead of functioning as a distraction, and this may be more closely linked to their original purpose [61-2].

Oral tradition is certainly linked to nationalism in Canfield's writing!  She goes on to tell how the early Vermonters were

simple-hearted enough to be on fire with the love for liberty, which they spelled, pronounced, and lived for with a capital L. When, before long, they drew up a constitution for the new state, those buckskin-clad farmer-hunters laid down their rifles and their axes to write into it (the first state which did this on the North American continent as far as we can find out) a clause forbidding human slavery in any form.  The rising wind of the passion for human freedom, for the recognition of individual human dignity sang loudly in the years of all these young family men, then British Colonials, soon to become Americans, who pushed into Vermont along Indian trails [39].

The Indians, alas, were British allies during the Revolution, so that passion for human freedom didn't extend to them, nor to the land "these young family men" took from them.  Indians appear only as villains in Ann Story's tale, hired by the British "to fight for them against the colonial rebels" (42), just as some American slaves fought for the British in hopes of securing their freedom; as "an Indian war-party, about half a mile away, was pillaging and setting fire to the cabin of a neighbor" (43) who wasn't at home, having fled with most other colonists to escape the Indian danger.  Ann Story was a patriot ("we still keep such words ... in our everyday vocabulary" [42]).  "She wanted the same thing for other people's children -- her country.  In a time when political opinions meant something, showed the stuff men and women were made of, she was passionately on the side of self-government by the people" (42).  Well, American people -- you know.  Not Indians.

So, as you can see, as Craig Womack says, "oral traditions – legends and myths, if you will – performed in their cultural contexts have always been nationalistic and are told for the purpose of cultivating a political consciousness."  But that truism cuts both ways, or in many.