Behind the Gospels

Understanding The Oral Tradition

Eric Eve

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780281062553
• eBook ISBN: 9780281070497
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

For a hundred years, the million dollar question has been, What was the nature and state of the tradition between Jesus and the gospels? Eve surveys the major proposals, offers critical and constructive commentary, and makes appropriately nuanced suggestions of his own. On this topic, his work is now the place to start' Dale C. Allison, Jr. Professor of New Testament, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary 'Eric Eve has written a magnificent guide to one of the most exciting areas in Gospels studies today - oral tradition and memory theory. With clear writing and judicious assessment, he covers the important personalities and ideas in the search to get behind the Gospels, from form criticism to the present. I highly recommend this book to scholars and students alike' Chris Keith, Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, St Mary's University College, London 'Eric Eve gives a balanced and lucid account of all attempts to reconstruct the oral tradition behind the written Gospels . . . Eve's judgments on these questions are fair, his arguments convincing. This is a foundational book both for Jesus research and for our understanding of the literary history of the New Testament' Gerd Theissen, Professor Emeritus of New Testament, University of Heidelberg.

1

The ancient media situation

What is oral tradition?

Oral tradition is always something spoken, but not everything spoken is oral tradition. To call something oral tradition is to imply that it has been handed on over a period of time. It thus implies at least some degree of stability in what is handed on so that one can meaningfully talk of the same tradition at different points in time. The great majority of what is spoken is too ephemeral ever to become oral tradition. Everyday conversation is not oral tradition. Neither is casual rumour or gossip of the sort that is either quickly forgotten or rapidly distorted beyond recognition. Even if occasionally these things may become the starting point of an oral tradition, they are not themselves oral tradition.

Oral tradition is also to be distinguished from oral history. According to Jan Vansina, oral tradition is that which is passed down from one generation to another, or persists over a number of generations, while oral history (or reminiscence) is what you get if you ask eyewitnesses (or those whom they have informed within living memory) for their recollections.¹ This sharp dichotomy has been questioned,² and Vansina’s requirement that something only counts as oral tradition if it has been passed down between generations is probably too restrictive, but the distinction is nevertheless not without point. To survive, an oral tradition has to be both memorable and significant to the society or group that transmits it, which means among other things that it must be shaped in such a way as to allow it to endure. Personal reminiscences do not operate under the same constraints, and may be relatively shapeless, especially if they are being produced spontaneously from episodic memory (someone’s personal recollection of what took place). The distinction is not absolute, however. For one thing, oral history may be in the process of becoming oral tradition. For another, the psychological and social factors that shape oral tradition can also act on individual memories. People tend to relate their memories according to the narrative forms current in their culture. If an eyewitness habitually narrates his or her account of a salient event, it may undergo the same kind of shaping that an oral tradition would. In some cases an eyewitness may deliberately shape an account with the intention of initiating an oral tradition. A teacher might do so to help ensure the survival of his or her words (as, for example, Birger Gerhardsson argues; see Chapter 3).

Oral tradition is closely related to memory. In order to survive as oral tradition it must be memorable, and particular individuals must remember it. It also forms one part of the social or collective memory of the group to which the tradents (people who hand on the tradition) belong. But it is only one aspect of social memory, which can also include monuments, commemorative ceremonies, rituals, beliefs, ways of behaving and, not least, written texts.³ In the context of the first-century Mediterranean, oral tradition is thus far from a purely oral phenomenon uncontaminated by any other medium of communication; it is rather but one factor (albeit often the dominant one) of a complex interplay of memory, orality and scribality (the use of texts in a pre-print culture). In the remainder of the chapter we shall examine the second and third of these factors a little further, returning to the first in Chapter 6.

Some characteristics of orality and oral tradition

Speech and writing may become intertwined in a number of ways (for example someone may write down what was originally spoken or recite what was originally written), but the two media are nevertheless distinct, and at a first approximation one may list the following ways in which speech differs from writing.

First, unlike a written or printed text, speech is an event, not a thing. The speaker speaks, and while he or she speaks, the speech event unfolds in time; when the speaker stops speaking, the sound of his or her voice falls silent, the speech event fades into the past, and there is nothing left to examine (today we could record the speech electronically, but that possibility did not exist in antiquity).

Second, speech is heard, not seen. Even while it is going on, it cannot be examined. Attending to it fully while it is being spoken allows little time for critical reflection on what is being said. Once it is over, it is no longer directly available for reflection. To the extent that it lives on at all, it lives on only in memory (where, to be sure, it can be critically assessed after the event if it has been sufficiently well remembered).

Third, what is remembered of speech will vary depending on a whole host of factors, but one is most unlikely to remember every word spoken in a lengthy conversation or performance. What may stick in memory is the gist of what was said, or the impression made by the speaker, or particularly striking turns of phrase. In recalling what was said on a future occasion, one will most likely reconstruct it from remembered fragments filled in by one’s own imagination and grasp of the speech conventions employed. That said, some kinds of speech are rather easier to remember with reasonable accuracy (for example short poems, witty aphorisms and the like), and oral traditions are typically shaped to be memorable.

Fourth, speech (in a situation devoid of electronic media) always involves immediate face-to-face interaction with an audience of one or more other people. What is said will be influenced to a greater or lesser extent by verbal and visual feedback from that audience (including gestures and facial expressions), and by the manner in which the speaker tailors his or her message to the audience; moreover, what is heard will be filtered through the audience’s expectations.

Fifth, a speech act always takes place in a particular social situation, which may be more or less formal (for example, a casual conversation is very different from a lecture), but which will always tend to constrain what can be said and how it can be said. It is obvious, for example, that bawdy limericks or lewd jokes would be quite out of place in a board meeting or Bible study group, just as a lengthy lecture would be out of place in an informal private conversation. Some speech acts, not least those involving the deliberate handing on of oral tradition, take place as performances marked off from everyday speech by a number of factors (such as the social setting and the style of language employed).⁴

Sixth, face-to-face oral communication consists of more than just words; it includes a whole range of more or less subtle cues including gesture, facial expression, bodily deportment, and, of course, the rhythm, pacing, intonation and stress with which the words are spoken. By such means a speaker may make it very clear, for example, when irony is intended, or which point is being emphasized. When the words are reduced to writing, such visual cues are lost, and the message may appear much more ambiguous. Indeed, the message of a speaker can be completely falsified by repeating the same words in subsequent oral performance while totally altering the intonation and facial expression. One only has to think of the different ways in which the single word ‘yes’ can be uttered in response to a question, and the total misrepresentation that could result from representing a cautious, sceptical, drawn-out ‘yes’ as a brisk, bold affirmative ‘yes’.⁵

The six points just noted apply more or less to our own experience of oral communication, but we should be wary of assuming that the distinctions they imply between orality and writing apply equally well to every kind of oral utterance and every kind of writing. In this book we are particularly concerned with speech acts that form part of an oral tradition. This is an area that has been researched and written about extensively (in the context of folklore studies and cultural anthropology, for example), but we need to be a little cautious about drawing too many sweeping generalizations, first because conclusions drawn from completely non-literate cultures may not be directly applicable to the more complex media situation of the first-century Mediterranean, and second because some of the earlier conclusions (such as those suggesting a ‘Great Divide’ between orality and literacy) have been challenged by subsequent work. With these caveats we may nevertheless sketch a brief outline of how oral tradition has sometimes been characterized.

Much twentieth-century thinking about oral tradition grew from the seminal work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord on Homeric literature as oral poetry in connection with a study of contemporary Balkan bards. In brief and at the risk of gross oversimplification, Parry’s work began from the observation that Homeric verse makes heavy use of a number of set formulas, so that, for example, in the Iliad and the Odyssey the dawn is frequently rosy-fingered, the sea wine-dark, and Achilles swift-footed, even in situations when he is not actually going anywhere. One advantage of such set formulas is that they neatly fill out one half of a Greek hexameter, and so form a useful stock of phrases for composition in performance, effectively forming the basic units of the poet’s vocabulary. For according to Parry and Lord the Homeric poems were composed in performance long before they were written down. They would have been re-performed many times, but no two performances would have been exactly alike; instead the poems would have been created afresh in each new performance, calling on the same stock of phrases, the same overall story outline, and the same stock of intermediate elements such as scenes following the same general outline. So, for example, more or less the same order of events is followed in the Iliad and Odyssey every time a banquet occurs or every time a hero dons his armour.⁶

It is knowing the stock of phrases and these intermediate and larger structures that is meant to have enabled the Homeric poets to recreate their epics in multiple performances without the aid of writing; no verbatim memorization was involved. In support of this thesis Parry and Lord carried out extensive fieldwork in Yugoslavia observing illiterate bards compose in performance in much the manner just described, the best of them well able to rival Homer at least in terms of the length of the epics produced.⁷

The oral formulaic theory of Parry and Lord has met with a number of criticisms. Not least, critics have challenged the sharp divide it postulates between orality and literacy. In relation to the study of the New Testament the relevance of the Parry–Lord theory has been questioned on the grounds that the synoptic tradition is plainly not epic poetry. In Chapter 6 we shall briefly describe an attempt to generalize the Parry–Lord theory to other types of oral tradition on the basis of cognitive psychology.

Stemming in part from the work of Parry and Lord, and in part from the conviction that the use of different media (speech, writing, print, electronic devices) could have profound effects both on society and on the way individuals think, the exploration of such media differences was developed by scholars such as Jack Goody, Walter J. Ong and Eric Havelock, and taken up in New Testament studies by Werner Kelber (on whom see Chapter 4).⁸ It is certainly not the case either that all these scholars are in agreement with one another or that their work has gone unchallenged, but as a useful first approximation it may be helpful to sketch the characterization of oral tradition that emerges from this kind of approach.

First, it is said, oral tradition (or oral transmission) is generally a series of creative performances, in which oral composition may play as much of a role as faithful recall. Such performances are rarely, if ever, attempts to repeat fixed oral ‘texts’. Of course the oral performance of memorized fixed texts can and does occur, but generally only in connection with writing. The notion of a fixed text whose words are to be repeated verbatim scarcely exists except where such texts have first been written down. Indeed, it is hard to see how the notion could exist apart from a written text against which to compare successive oral performances.⁹ It is probably going too far to say that oral tradition never allows for verbatim repetition, since there are some kinds of material (songs, short poems, liturgical and magical formulas, particularly striking pithy sayings and the like) that lend themselves to verbatim or near-verbatim repetition, especially where, for example, the efficacy of a magical formula or liturgical ceremony is assumed to depend on getting the wording exactly right, but such cases are the exception rather than the rule, and variability is possible and reasonably common even for relatively memorable metrical material.

Second, oral tradition rarely preserves the past for its own sake, that is, in the sense of retaining information about the past for purely academic, historical or antiquarian purposes. This does not mean that oral tradition never preserves anything from the past, or that it shows no interest in the past, but rather that its interest in the past is nearly always for its practical application in the present. There is a tendency in oral tradition towards what has been termed homeostasis, that is for orally transmitted material either to be conformed to the present interests of the social group that is using and transmitting it or to die out altogether when it ceases to be relevant. It should be stressed, however, that this is only a tendency; complete homeostasis is rarely achieved, since oral traditions often preserve archaisms whose meaning is no longer understood (certain nursery rhymes and folk songs provide modern examples of this phenomenon) as well as information about the past that is deemed interesting for its own sake (perhaps due to its very oddity).¹⁰

Third, oral tradition prefers the vivid and the concrete to the abstract and the general. Fourth, along with the preference for the vivid goes a preference for the striking, the unusual, the sharply drawn, for black-and-white contrasts and situations of conflict, for the dramatic rather than the humdrum, presumably because these are more memorable than the everyday and the commonplace. Along with this is a tendency to simplify the characters oral tradition describes, making them one-dimensional heroes and villains, larger-than-life ‘heavy’ characters, or even caricatures. Any subtleties, complexities and ambiguities tend to get lost.

These generalizations can be helpful if used with caution. They can provide an initial orientation to the characterization of oral tradition, but it should not be assumed that all oral traditions work in the same way and display identical characteristics. Different societies value different kinds of material in different ways and may employ different techniques in han...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the author
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note to the reader
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The ancient media situation
• 2. Form criticism
• 3. The rabbinic model
• 4. The media contrast model
• 5. Informal controlled oral tradition
• 6. Memory and tradition
• 7. Memory and orality in the Jesus tradition
• 8. The role of eyewitnesses
• 9. Probing the tradition
• 10. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Search items for ancient and biblical texts
• Search items for modern authors
• Search items for subjects
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