Of special significance is the oral tradition of doctrinal transmission and its written record. Judaism over the centuries had developed its own unique tradition of the oral transmission of teachings. According to rabbinic doctrine, orally transmitted tradition coexisted on an equal basis with the recorded Law. Both text and tradition were believed to have been entrusted to Moses on Mount Sinai. Within the unbroken chain of scribes the tradition was passed on from generation to generation and substantiated through scripture and exegesis. The doctrinal contents of the tradition were initially passed on orally and memorized by the students through repetition. Because of the possibilities of error in a purely oral transmission, however, the extensive and growing body of tradition was, by necessity, fixed in written form. The rabbinic tradition of the Pharisees (a Jewish sect that sanctioned the reinterpretation of the Mosaic Law) was established in the Mishna (commentaries) and later in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmud (compendiums of Jewish Law, lore, and commentary). Because the essence of oral tradition is never concluded—i.e., by its very nature is never completely fixed in writing—the learned discussion of tradition by necessity continued in constant exegetical debate about the Holy Scriptures. The written record of tradition, however, never claimed to be equal to the Holy Scriptures in Judaism. A similar process of written fixation also occurred among the sectarians of the community at Qumran, which in its Manual of Discipline and in the Damascus Document recorded its interpretation of the Law, developed first, orally, in the tradition.

In the Christian Church a tradition also was formed proceeding from Jesus himself. The oral doctrinal transmission of the tradition was written down between the end of the 1st and the first half of the 2nd century in the form of a number of different gospels, histories of the Apostles, letters, sermonic literature, and apocalypses. Among Christian Gnostics the tradition also included secret communications of the risen Christ to his disciples.

According to the self-understanding of the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches, the church, as the institution of Jesus Christ, is the self-chosen bearer of the oral and the written tradition. It is the church that created the New Testament canon. The selection of canonical writings undertaken by it already presupposes a dogmatic distinction between “ecclesiastical” teachings—which, in the opinion of its responsible leaders, are “apostolic”—and “heretical” teachings. It thereby already presupposes a far-reaching intellectualization of the tradition and its identification with “doctrine.” The oral tradition within Roman Catholicism thus became formalized in fixed creedal formulas.

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