Orality and Literacy in Early Christianity

Botha, Rhoads

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621899037
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The history of the Jesus movement and earliest Christianity requires careful attention to the characteristics and peculiarities of oral and literate traditions. Understanding the distinctive elements of Greco-Roman literacy potentially has profound implications for the historical understanding of the documents and events involved. Concepts such as media criticism, orality, manuscript culture, scribal writing, and performative reading are explored in these chapters. The scene of Greco-Roman literacy is analyzed by investigating writing and reading practices. These aspects are then related to early Christian texts such as the Gospel of Mark and sections from Paul's letters.

Part 1

Setting

1

Mute Manuscripts

It is a truism to note that the world in which early Christianity came into being was a pre-technological world. What this observation implies, however, is not always fully transparent. It is especially the issue of communication technology that can easily be misunderstood. With this chapter, my aim is to promote the relevance of research done on orality and literacy for the interpretation and historical use of ancient texts, such as some early Christian documents. Even more importantly, I want to draw attention to an all-pervading bias in many scholarly studies, a bias towards literate, visually oriented thinking which is projected unto ancient texts.

To do this it is argued that from the realization that “the worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached,”1 it follows that various ways of communicating reflect historically determined, relative facets of human existence. Communication media not only reflect culture but also influence it fundamentally. Writing is a socially determined phenomenon, like all human activities. The immense complexities of these issues should be stressed. My approach is somewhat generalizing; the idea is primarily to argue for the importance of multidisciplinary investigations involving contemporary media research for the understanding of certain texts from the Greco-Roman world, and not to provide any final answers.

Communication Media and Consciousness

Some Introductory Remarks

Every society can be seen as a “precariously put together fabric of meanings by which human beings seek to find guidance for their lives, to be consoled and inspired, in the face of finitude and death.”2 This “psychic unity of mankind” can, however, only be described substantially in terms of historical and cultural particularities.

Anthropology has taught us that there is a very broad range of differences among cultural groups in attitudes to, values about, and perceptions of the world and of themselves, as well as in ways of dealing with and experiencing associations and emotions. Cultural patterning extends to personality and interpersonal relationships. The diversity so obvious in human thought and the consequent differences between traditional and modern cultures have been mostly interpreted with an approach set within a binary framework. Terms used are “primitive” and “advanced,” or the emergence of rationality from irrationality, or the contrast between logico-empirical versus mythopoeic thinking. A binary framework tends, however, to reduce human interaction and development to an unacceptably simple design.

We also find “the opposing tendency, adopted by many social scientists heavily committed to cultural relativism, which leads them to treat all societies as if their intellectual processes were essentially the same. Similar yes, the same no.”3 Goody notes that the specification of difference is not enough in itself; one needs to point to mechanisms, to causal factors.4

Awareness of the problems posed by cultural changes is a continuing feature of discussions in biblical scholarship.5 Amongst biblical scholars cultural change is usually considered a relatively unimportant issue, and the adoption of cultural relativism is regarded with suspicion; as an interpretive approach cultural relativism is seen as opening up an unacceptable gap between interpreters and ancient texts. The point, however, is that to account for (at least some of) our difficulties in interpreting texts from a different culture (to the extent that one can meaningfully refer to something such as “culture”) we need to take cognizance of studies specifically attempting to grapple with these issues.

Scholars like Malina and Hollenbach have pointed out that terms such as wealth and poverty derive their meaning from the normative cultural values within which they occur.6 Similarly, interpretation of New Testament texts that fails to take cultural differences seriously when it comes to concepts like texts, tradition, and even writing can only misrepresent those texts. This proposition can also be approached from a more sociological perspective, in that to understand the uniquely human manner of living, “great stress should be placed on the observation that culture is learned. Perhaps even more important is the fact that what is learned has first to be discovered or invented by someone and then transmitted to and shared by others. Every item in our cultural repertory is built on an initial act of innovation and then on a series of modifications in the course of time.”7 The alphabet, writing, and various communication technologies are innovative modifications, components of learned culture. Written texts and the phenomenon of writing are part of social worlds. Similar to institutions such as marriage, deeds such as lying, or customs like greeting-by-hand, writing exists as a society presumes it to be. Without cultural construction writing is nothing; it is created by “the social agreement that something counts as that condition.”8

It follows that writing as such reflects and is interwoven with specific cultural phenomena, radically determined by and determining attitudes and experiences related to writing. Different communication media will have various far-reaching effects on human behavior, on the “fabrics of meaning” constituting human motivation and activities. “For some, at least, of the differences in intellectual processes that are indicated in a very general way by means of terms like ‘open’ and ‘closed’ can be related not so much to differences ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowlegments
• Introduction
• Part One: Setting
• Chapter 1: Mute Manuscripts
• Chapter 2: Living Voice and Lifeless Letters
• Chapter 3: Greco-Roman Literacy and the New Testament Writings
• Chapter 4: Writing in the First Century
• Chapter 5: Memory, Performance, and Reading Practices
• Chapter 6: Authorship in Historical Perspective
• Part Two: Gospel Traditions
• Chapter 7: Transmitting the Jesus Traditions
• Chapter 8: Mark’s Story as Oral Traditional Literature
• Part Three: Paul’s Letters
• Chapter 9: Letter Writing and Oral Communication: Galatians
• Chapter 10: Paul and Gossip
• Chapter 11: Aspects of the Verbal Art of the Pauline Letters
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography