J.H. Heidegger's Corpus of Christian Theology: Sacred Scripture: The Necessity of Scripture, Part 1

1.  Divine Revelation up until Moses was propagated by tradition alone, without Scripture.

Divine Revelation, already begun after the Fall in Paradise, and contained in the Promise of the Seed, who would crush the Head of the Serpent, that is, Christ, who would strip the Devil of the power with which the violated Law had armed him against he sinner, was successively handed down by oral tradition or narration all the way to Moses.  For, that up to that point the whole, or any part of it, had been committed to writing, is not certain.  For the famous books attributed to Adam by the Sabæans[1] and to Seth by the Sethians,[2] the fragment of Enoch,[3] the Jezirah of Abraham,[4] the Prayer of Joseph,[5] the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs,[6] and other Pseudepigraphical Writings of the same kind, have been rashly introduced by heretics and almost thrust into the very nest of the Patriarchs.  Therefore, it is placed beyond doubt, that Moses was the first to write, at the command of God, Revelation, at least that which would then be the norm of faith.

2.  The manner of the preservation of the tradition until Moses.

In that whole time, which runs from Adam to Moses, God instructed His Church by His own immediate voice, received by the believing Patriarchs, and by the same, living to great age, delivered to their families.  For Methuselah lived together with Adam for two hundred and forty-two years, and prolonged his life to the year preceding the flood.[7]  Shem, the son of Noah, lived together with Methuselah for ninety-eight years, and after the flood he lived about another five hundred years.[8]  Isaac passed fifty years together with Shem,[9] and ceased to live only in the tenth year before the descent of Israel into Egypt.[10]  Therefore, it was easy for four men, and those sacred heads, as it were, Adam, Methuselah, Shem, and Isaac, each of whom always passed no small amount of life with his predecessor, and cherished sacred fellowship, to preserve the Divine Revelation, through the grace of God, by oral tradition; and God would make provision, lest it perish altogether from the earth, especially inasmuch as He repeatedly revealed Himself to them, and explained His will ever more familiarly and abundantly.

[1] The Book of Adam, also known as the Ginza Rabba, was a first-century composition (with later redactions) of the Mandæan Gnostics of southern Iraq and Iran.  The Mandæans looked to Adam as their founding prophet, and to John the Baptist as the greatest and final prophet.  They were dualistic (the God of Light is opposed by a World of darkness), and placed a strong emphasis on ritual purity (and baptism).  Their designation as Sabæans is traced back to the Koran.

[2] The Sethians (flourishing from the second to fourth century) were a Gnostic movement, regarding themselves as the spiritual descendants of Seth (and thus distinct from ordinary humanity), esteeming him to be a divine revealer and prototypical savior.  The Sethians were dualistic:  the Supreme God of Light stands above the demiurge’s lower world of darkness and ignorance.  Salvation comes through gnosis.  The Sethians produced multiple works attributed to Seth, including The Three Steles of Seth, The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, The Apocalypse of Adam, and The Second Treatise of the Great Seth.

[3] 1 Enoch, falsely ascribed to the patriarch Enoch, is a work of Jewish Apocalypticism, written between the third century BC and the first century AD.  Only fragments of it survived and circulated among Christians of the West, until James Bruce, a Scottish explorer, brought three intact Ethiopic manuscripts from Ethiopia to Europe in 1773.

[4] The Jezirah of Abraham or Sefer Yetzirah (also known as the Book of Formation or Creation), a work of Jewish mysticism and cosmogony (and a foundational text for the Kabbalistic tradition), was probably composed in the Early Middle Ages.  It is ascribed to Abraham (although some versions and later traditions link it to Adam or Rabbi Akiva [second century AD]).

[5] The Prayer of Joseph, a first-century AD Jewish composition, survives only in fragments, the majority of which are preserved by Origen.  The title ascribes the work to Joseph, but the fragments focus on Jacob as an earthly incarnation of the angel Israel.

[6] The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, traditionally ascribed to the twelve sons of Jacob, was composed much later, reaching its final form in the second century AD.

[7] See Genesis 5; 7:6.

[8] See Genesis 11:10, 11.

[9] See Genesis 11; 21:5.

[10] See Genesis 25:26; 35:28; 47:9.