Which people are being referred to in your first paragraph? The original people writing down the books? Because there are contradictions in what was passed down.
Or are they counting just anyone who believes what they believe? Because then we have to get into independent evidence vs. non-independent evidence.
The arguments I'm dealing with are fundamentally flawed in more ways that I feel like recounting. There was just one particular area where I wasn't actually sure what the data said and I wanted to find out for my own purposes.
The debate was about Mass Revelation. The story is that approximately 1.5 million Jews saw God, and told their children that they saw it, who told their children that their grandparents saw it, etc. 800 years of oral tradition pass before the story is written down.
I'm really tired right now and don't feel like spelling out the argume...
Something I've been hearing a lot lately (specifically from Orthodox Jews, although it comes up a lot in debates about religion) is that having a large number of people telling a story makes it more likely the story is true, because multiple witnesses can call each other out for deviating from the truth.
My gut reaction is that this is extremely false. But it's a point that should be scientifically testable, and I figure that someone should have done a study on it by now. Does anyone know of such a thing?
A related issue is the argument that oral tradition meant something very different thousands of years ago, when it was the ONLY form of historical record. Oral historians were duty-bound to preserve the story. This sounds plausible. It probably ISN'T as easily testable since we can't compare oral history from pre-writing times against... well, much of anything. (Well, I guess archaeological evidence, if the events being described would have left enough archaeological evidence). Is there an official, accepted scholarly opinion on this?