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Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Beyond "The Oral and the Written Gospels"
Werner Kelber's The Oral and the Written Gospel (1983) introduced biblical scholars to interdisciplinary trends in the study of ancient media culture. The book is now widely recognized as a milestone and it has spurred wide-ranging scholarship. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication, new developments in orality theory, literacy theory, and social approaches to memory call for a programmatic reappraisal of past research and future directions. This volume address these concerns. Kelber himself is interviewed at the beginning of the book and, in a closing essay, he reflects on the significance of the project and charts a course for the future.
325 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2008
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March 2, 2024
2024 reads: 08
Rating: 3.5 stars
Tom Thatcher’s edited volume, Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Beyond the Oral and Written Gospel, brings together several voices at the 25th anniversary of Werner Kelber’s pivotal work, The Oral and Written Gospel (OWG). It chiefly aims to assess the state of research and point to future avenues of exploration. (2). OWG investigated the NT from the perspective of first-century media culture. (2) Kelber argued that the medium of any given media (text, speech, etc.) communicates in different ways. (2) Contemporary modern audiences approach texts from a print-oriented hermeneutic of media and transmission. Jesus, the Voice, and the Text engages Kelber’s thesis. Horsley looks at oral performance and Mark’s Gospel (ch. 3); Dewey looks at the oral hermeneutics in Mark’s Gospel as well as Trajan’s ‘Gospel’ (ch. 4, 8); Hearon examines storytelling in the ancient Mediterranean world (ch. 5); Draper compares vice catalogues (ch. 6); DeConick examines memory and Jesus Sayings (ch. 7); Keith and Thatcher look at the ‘violence ratio’ and the cross in early Christian memory (ch. 9); Kirk proposes manuscript tradition as a ‘Tertium Quid’ (‘third what’) (ch. 10); and finally Kelber himself brings together oral, scribal, and memorial communication in early Christianity (ch. 11).
The strength of Thatcher’s edited volume is in drawing attention to the oral nature of the ancient world. I will not be able to engage the NT again without throwing off this idea. Typical NT issues such as the ‘synoptic problem’ appear less of a problem and more a reality embedded in the ancient world of orality. With no stabilized or industrial text-type (print-oriented hermeneutic) as we know today, the chirographs (i.e. ‘scribality’) themselves exist in a different milieu. (9, 19) Modern textual criticism might not be able to withstand this critique as it fundamentally operates on modern, fixed-type ideas of transmission which simply did not exist at the time. At its core, chirographic texts more closely parallel orality than fixed-type texts of the modern period (e.g. variation, lack of “originals,” relevancy, and recomposition). (10) Fundamental to Kelber’s thesis (and those taken up in Jesus, the Voice, and the Text) is that scribality (written media) depicts a necessary break and critique with orality (oral media). (13) In this understanding, Mark wrote a gospel not to preserve living memories of Jesus but to construct a new Christian identity that served as a “corrective gesture vis-à-vis tradition.” (13, 17) This task of “appropriation” is a function of “hot-memory” (10-11). As such, it reveals both the situated tradition and the identity of the early Christian movement.
While oral media requires different postures and understandings as Kelber, et. al. have argued, the NT does in fact come to us as a written source. Part of the OWG project seems to get behind the source as we have it and reconstruct the historical context. How is this different from source/form criticism? The investigation merely shifts from text to event. I also sense an overstatement/pushing the logic of oral theory too far when Kelber states that “…every telling of a story is a discrete speech act operating within the dynamics of its own unique situation.” (4) In principle, yes (as a definition), but this is not to say that zero continuity of communication takes place? In other words, not everything is lost. It would be better to speak of degrees of change. The more appropriate question might then be asked: to what degree has the message changed with the change of medium? Related to this is the question regarding the degree to which making a message “relevant” for new audiences (10) necessarily critiques the prior message? Can authors and speakers not imbibe the sense or wider semantic or connotative range of a message and remain faithful to it? Finally, a glaring hole in Thatcher’s edited volume is the need to specify the genre of the Gospels. In my mind, supplementing this project with Greco-Roman bioi would be of a huge assistance to the ongoing conversation.
[Read for the Synoptics Literature seminar with Dr. Pennington at SBTS]
Rating: 3.5 stars
Tom Thatcher’s edited volume, Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Beyond the Oral and Written Gospel, brings together several voices at the 25th anniversary of Werner Kelber’s pivotal work, The Oral and Written Gospel (OWG). It chiefly aims to assess the state of research and point to future avenues of exploration. (2). OWG investigated the NT from the perspective of first-century media culture. (2) Kelber argued that the medium of any given media (text, speech, etc.) communicates in different ways. (2) Contemporary modern audiences approach texts from a print-oriented hermeneutic of media and transmission. Jesus, the Voice, and the Text engages Kelber’s thesis. Horsley looks at oral performance and Mark’s Gospel (ch. 3); Dewey looks at the oral hermeneutics in Mark’s Gospel as well as Trajan’s ‘Gospel’ (ch. 4, 8); Hearon examines storytelling in the ancient Mediterranean world (ch. 5); Draper compares vice catalogues (ch. 6); DeConick examines memory and Jesus Sayings (ch. 7); Keith and Thatcher look at the ‘violence ratio’ and the cross in early Christian memory (ch. 9); Kirk proposes manuscript tradition as a ‘Tertium Quid’ (‘third what’) (ch. 10); and finally Kelber himself brings together oral, scribal, and memorial communication in early Christianity (ch. 11).
The strength of Thatcher’s edited volume is in drawing attention to the oral nature of the ancient world. I will not be able to engage the NT again without throwing off this idea. Typical NT issues such as the ‘synoptic problem’ appear less of a problem and more a reality embedded in the ancient world of orality. With no stabilized or industrial text-type (print-oriented hermeneutic) as we know today, the chirographs (i.e. ‘scribality’) themselves exist in a different milieu. (9, 19) Modern textual criticism might not be able to withstand this critique as it fundamentally operates on modern, fixed-type ideas of transmission which simply did not exist at the time. At its core, chirographic texts more closely parallel orality than fixed-type texts of the modern period (e.g. variation, lack of “originals,” relevancy, and recomposition). (10) Fundamental to Kelber’s thesis (and those taken up in Jesus, the Voice, and the Text) is that scribality (written media) depicts a necessary break and critique with orality (oral media). (13) In this understanding, Mark wrote a gospel not to preserve living memories of Jesus but to construct a new Christian identity that served as a “corrective gesture vis-à-vis tradition.” (13, 17) This task of “appropriation” is a function of “hot-memory” (10-11). As such, it reveals both the situated tradition and the identity of the early Christian movement.
While oral media requires different postures and understandings as Kelber, et. al. have argued, the NT does in fact come to us as a written source. Part of the OWG project seems to get behind the source as we have it and reconstruct the historical context. How is this different from source/form criticism? The investigation merely shifts from text to event. I also sense an overstatement/pushing the logic of oral theory too far when Kelber states that “…every telling of a story is a discrete speech act operating within the dynamics of its own unique situation.” (4) In principle, yes (as a definition), but this is not to say that zero continuity of communication takes place? In other words, not everything is lost. It would be better to speak of degrees of change. The more appropriate question might then be asked: to what degree has the message changed with the change of medium? Related to this is the question regarding the degree to which making a message “relevant” for new audiences (10) necessarily critiques the prior message? Can authors and speakers not imbibe the sense or wider semantic or connotative range of a message and remain faithful to it? Finally, a glaring hole in Thatcher’s edited volume is the need to specify the genre of the Gospels. In my mind, supplementing this project with Greco-Roman bioi would be of a huge assistance to the ongoing conversation.
[Read for the Synoptics Literature seminar with Dr. Pennington at SBTS]
Displaying 1 of 1 review