Oral-Scribal Dimensions of Scripture, Piety, and Practice

Judaism, Christianity, Islam

Werner H. Kelber, Paula A. Sanders, Kelber, Sanders

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498236706
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Ecumenism & Interfaith

In April 2008 a conference was convened at Rice University that brought together experts in the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The papers discussed at the conference are presented here, revised and updated. The thirteen contributions comprise the keynote address by John Miles Foley; three essays on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible; three on the New Testament; three on the Qur'an; and two summarizing pieces, by the Africanist Ruth Finnegan and the Islamicist William Graham respectively.The central thesis of the book states that sacred Scripture was experienced by the three faiths less as a text contained between two covers and a literary genre, and far more as an oral phenomenon. In developing the performative, recitative aspects of the three religions, the authors directly or by implication challenge their distinctly textual identities. Instead of viewing the three faiths as quintessential religions of the book, these writers argue that the religions have been and continue to be appropriated not only as written but also very much as oral authorities, with the two media interpenetrating and mutually influencing each other in myriad ways.

1

Ancient and Modern Democracies

Orality, Texts, and Electronic Media

John Miles Foley

This lecture is dedicated to Werner and to my son Isaac.

Introduction

I should like to begin by expressing my gratitude to Rice University for creating this opportunity, and this moment in time, for all of us to come together in order to discuss issues I believe are both crucial and critical for a broad consortium of academic disciplines—especially during this new chapter in intellectual history in which we find ourselves struggling to correlate old and new paradigms, to make sense of the intersecting worlds of oral tradition, texts, and electronic media. For it is not merely languages, literatures, and the study of world religions that are heavily implicated by orality–literacy interactions, but also anthropology, history, philosophy, psychology, music, and many other areas of learning and inquiry.

Hearty thanks are due in particular the Boniuk Center for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance, the Humanities Research Center, the Office of the Dean of Humanities, the Department of History, the Kennedy Institute for Information Technology, and the Department of Religious Studies. Let me also mention, as prominently as possible, our trusted guides for this shared enterprise: Werner Kelber and Paula Sanders; as well as each of those members of the conference comitatus from whom we will be hearing over the next few days, including our respondents Ruth Finnegan, and William Graham. Many thanks to one and all for your commitments and contributions.

Caveat and Outline

In view of the unprecedented nature of what awaits us during this seventh incarnation of the Orality–Literacy conference series, and in line with a policy of full disclosure that may appear unique during this political season, I feel it is only proper to provide a caveat and an outline before setting out on this evening’s expedition.

First, the caveat. In much of what I have to say, I will be asking you to weigh some counterintuitive proposals—ideas that will at first blush seem quite unlikely and perhaps even heretical. But I emphasize that they will seem counterintuitive only because our intuition is based fundamentally on what I call textual ideology, the opposite to what Talya Fishman terms the “essentialist preference for the oral over the written,” a phemomenon which she challenges. These ideas will appear unlikely only because we are in the hard-to-break habit of studying, analyzing, and representing oral traditions (and now the Internet) through our default medium of texts.

Without fully realizing the consequences, we have insisted on thinking about radically different, non-textual media not on their own terms, that is, but on textual terms. It is as if we were to adamantly cling to representing the history of the French language only in terms of supposedly analogical developments in Apache, Estonian, or Urdu. In such a scenario French itself becomes a secondhand subject, excused from primary examination. As part of my revisionist agenda, I will suggest nothing more outlandish than studying, analyzing, and representing media on their own terms—that is, directly, instead of through mandatory semiotic translation. Or at least as close as we can get. And we can get a lot closer than we customarily have.

Now for the outline. Since the principal theme of my remarks is democracy in media, our first step will be to examine the use and abuse of that word, especially with regard to some disabling cultural presumptions that prosper by remaining “under the radar,” hidden from conscious scrutiny. From that juncture we will proceed to some large-scale, coarse-grained discriminations among three kinds of word-marketplaces or verbal “agoras”: oral, textual, and electronic—or, for short, the oAgora, tAgora, and eAgora. We will conclude with a short discussion of the Pathways Project and, perhaps not unexpectedly, a story.

I hasten to add a footnote here, and what would a textually driven scholar do without his footnotes? Namely, please understand that these three arenas for communication—again, the oAgora, tAgora, and eAgora—are most certainly not meant as absolute, mutually exclusive, or (perish the thought!) evolutionary. Like any imposed concept, they are heuristics, models to think with rather than divinely conceived, pre-existing categories. Human nature is of course more complex and interesting than any model, and I offer the three agoras merely as a pathway into our deliberations on democracy in media.

Exiting my footnote and returning to our outline, then, we will move on to thinking through—as promised—a counterintuitive thesis and a couple of taken-for-granted concepts.

Here is the superficially unlikely thesis: Oral Tradition (OT) and Internet Technology (IT) resemble one another more than either medium resembles Textual Communication. And why? Because OT and IT—unlike texts—mime the very way we think, namely, by navigating through networks of potentials. This homology, hopefully intriguing in itself, also offers us new ways to construe and represent OT realities via IT vehicles. But more of that later on.

The two concepts, which many right-thinking, well-trained scholars would consider matters settled long ago, are authorship and referentiality. But there is more to both of them than “meets the eye,” to resort to an inexcusable pun. Oral traditions, like so many phenomena in the burgeoning Internet and digital world, are not singly but rather multiply authored. To use a term developed for wikis, group blogs, open data-bases, and other collective projects in the eAgora, the authorship of oral traditions is distributed. Performances are most immediately the product of a single person or group, of course, but even the most “original” of them (and the word “original” is itself problematic) have deep roots in how others have performed and re-performed beforehand. Assigning an oral traditional performance—or even an oral-derived text—exclusively to a single individual borders on a vicarious act of plagiarism.

And then there is the riddle of referentiality. To what do oral traditions refer? What is “contained” in the given performance and what is implied? If not contained, how necessarily is it implied? Is the distinction between any expectable feature being “there” and “not there” more phenomenological than discursive? How does the entextualization of oral traditions affect their ability to mean, or even their intelligibility? Toward the end of my reflections on referentiality (Part III) I will offer an example or two of how both OT and IT depend on what is, from a textual perspective, not physically present at all. Of course, that putative absence is a false and misleading diagnosis, fostered by an endemically oblique and therefore faulty perspective. Truth within the medium is more to the point.

Part I: Democracy

Let’s start with a recalibration. “Democracy” in today’s popular speech is a Humpty-Dumpty word. It means whatever the speaker wants it to mean, for whatever purpose he or she wishes to use it, and it is often deployed more as word-magic to gain political or corporate advantage than as the fixed and certain concept we romantically imagine it to be.

It was not always so. The ancient Greeks, perhaps initially the historian Herodotus, coined the word δημοκρατεία from two roots as old as Homer—δημος, community; and κράτος strength, might, or power. Most fundamentally, then, “democracy” carries with it the noble, pluralistic sense of power residing in the hands of the entire community, the people at large. Its core meaning is thus not merely anti-monarchic but also anti-exclusive, anti-xenophobic, and anti-privileged—or, more to the point, inclusive, inter-ethnic, and pro bono publico: for the sake of the public good.

The page, in contrast, is oligarchic; it is now and always has been the domain of the oligarchy, etymologically those “few first ones” who control communication and invisibly censor the expressive channels we use to exchange knowledge, ideas, and art. The question is who those chosen few are in any given time and place.

In ancient and medieval times, with literacy not only highly restricted but also highly specialized, what was consigned to texts was available to and usable by very, very few. Homer’s stories—and I take the name Homêros as a code-term for the oral epic tradition as a whole, an anthropomorphization of that tradition as a legend—were performed for centuries before the invention of alphabetic writing about 775 BCE. (There was, as Angelika Neuwirth might put it, a long pre-canonical tradition.) During that time, and arguably for centuries afterward, these stories’ exclusive or principal medium was in fact oral tradition. The new technology of writing and reading did not, as we have too often presumed, conquer archaic Greece overnight, anymore than Internet and digital media have entirely dispensed with the book and page in our time. What was written down was in many cases taken out of the loop for the people at large. Just the opposite of our situation—or rather our ideological view of our situation.

Indeed, as moderns who have trouble thinking outside the default medium of the page, we have grossly overestimated the text-making and text-consuming technology of pre-Gutenberg, not to mention pre-paperback societies—the same syndrome that Richard Horsley has in mind when he points out that the “concept of Scripture assumed in standard Jewish and Christian biblical studies is . . . deeply embedded in the assumptions of modern print culture.” To imagine, as so many scholars implicitly have, an Amazon.com-like literacy consisting of easily reproducible copies and a mass readership in ancient and medieval times is to subscribe to an anachronism of major proportions. A single book of Homeric epic—take any one of the 48 in the Iliad and Odyssey—required 20–24 feet of papyrus to inscribe its several hundred hexameters. Not exactly the sort of thing one could stuff into a satchel, or manipulate with acceptable ease on a well-lit library table. So it was not just a question of who possessed the literacy skills needed to use a text (again, very, very few), but even more basically how these 48 books (at minimum 960 feet of papyrus) might possibly be “read.”

In the medieval period we have more (but hardly enough) information about the establishment, copying, and transmission of the works we cherish. But in some ways that only complicates matters. Brian Stock has explained the dynamics of what he calls “textual communities,”1 which were formed around texts but were at the same time dependent for their function not on the virtually universal literacy we take for granted but on the literacy skills of a single person, who then interpreted and communicated the wisdom out of the text to the broader community. How? By shifting into oral mode, of course. We might want to compare this with what Gregor Schoeler has explained about the continuing oral mediation of Islamic texts. Whatever the case, it is hard to imagine a more determinative oligarchy than the medieval textual community. The privileged few become the privileged one, in effect.

Early medieval England also presents us with other unexpected complications. There are no literate English kings until the twelfth century, for example; and why should there be? That craft, like other crafts that supported the society and its administration, was the province of specialists whose trade it was to build, amass, and manage documents. And then there is the (for us) counterintuitive phenomenon of scribes who read formulaically and thus re-made or re-composed Old English poetry rather than copied it verbatim. This mixed mode of “singing on the page” has been confirmed in modern scenarios as well, in Finland and the Former Yugoslavia to name just two prominent sites.

These few examples bespeak a simple truth. Our naïve assumptions notwithstanding, texts are the furthest thing from a genuinely democratic medium in the ancient and medieval worlds. Their making and their use are controlled by oligarchies—variously constituted, to be sure, and dependent on the particular society or intra-societal group, but oligarchies nonetheless.

And what about today’s world? Who constitutes the contemporary oligarchy? We can make a few observations. University presses act as ready gatekeepers for the academic community, but the levels of privilege and determinism hardly end there. Commercial presses have their own non-democratic agenda, as do learned journals and popular magazines—all of them with their own designs on how the marketplace of ideas must function. Anyone who sets pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, works within an idiosyncratic textual scenario that foreshortens reality by predetermining the outer limits of creativity and communication. Once the precious artifact is created, it is made available only to a select few—those who can afford the price of the book, the subscription to the journal, the annual fee for the learned organization. Nor does the disenfranchisi...