Sound Matters

New Testament Studies in Sound Mapping

Margaret E. Lee

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781532649974
• eBook ISBN: 9781532649981
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Sound matters. The New Testament's first audiences were listeners, not readers. They heard its compositions read aloud and understood their messages as linear streams of sound. To understand the New Testament's meaning in the way its earliest audiences did, we must hear its audible features and understand its words as spoken sounds. Sound Matters presents essays by ten scholars from five countries and three continents, who explore the New Testament through sound mapping, a technique invented by Margaret Lee and Bernard Scott for analyzing Greek texts as speech. Sound Matters demonstrates the value and uses of this technique as a prelude and aid to interpretation. The essays that make up this volume illustrate the wide range of interpretive possibilities that emerge when sound mapping restores the spoken sounds of the New Testament and revives its living voice.

1

Sound Mapping Reassessed

Margaret E. Lee

Mapping sounds—the very concept seems strange and its usefulness elusive. Why plot sound on a map? The attempt to capture fleeting sound in a graphic image reflects the need to stabilize and then analyze ephemeral experience. Sound mapping commits to the proposition that sound matters. It places priority on the dynamics of listening and asks how these dynamics influence meaning. This essay traces the history of sound mapping, assesses recent studies that employ sound mapping, and suggests directions for the future.1

The Journey toward Listening

The idea of mapping a composition’s sounds began as Bernard Brandon Scott’s insight. Scott coined the term, “sound mapping” and was the first to perceive important possibilities for analyzing New Testament compositions as speech. Our collaboration began with a paper for the Matthew Seminar of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) in 1993 in which we conducted an experiment with sound mapping using the Sermon on the Mount as a test case.2 We chose this passage because it is memorable, framed as a speech, and contains significant material for detailed analysis. Our preliminary investigation convinced us that sound mapping could change how we understand the New Testament.

Encouraged by the initial reception of this experiment, I began to explore ancient discussions of literary composition in Greek to better appreciate their understanding of Greek literature as speech. My early investigations explored Greek grammar as a τέχνη or science of sound. My article, The Grammar of Sound, identified the colon and the period as basic sound units and suggested new interpretative horizons for mapping sounds in a Greek composition.3

I then undertook my doctoral dissertation project to develop a theoretics of sound, create a method and vocabulary for sound analysis, and test its power as an analytical tool. In that project I reexamined the Sermon on the Mount using the theoretics I had developed. I expanded, revised, and corrected our original sound map of Matt 5–7 and began to observe similarities between the Sermon’s auditory features and other sound signals in Matthew’s gospel.4 Armed with a more comprehensive foundation for sound analysis, Scott and I then resumed our collaboration in Sound Mapping the New Testament to present the process of sound mapping and analysis to a wider audience and apply it to a broader range of New Testament material.5

A Sound Approach

Sound mapping is an analytical technique with an empirical basis that draws from two tributaries of the same river: the characteristics of the Greek language and the precise configuration of sounds in a particular Greek composition. Put another way, a sound map plots distinctive features of both langue and parole. Aspects of the Greek language conducive to sound mapping include its flexible word order, rhyming inflections, and its aspectual system. Flexible word order creates a wide range of syntactic possibilities that allow an author to select where emphasis should fall and to specify precisely how syntactic elements are related. Rhyming inflections ensure that nominal elements can be perceived as clusters and not atomistically. The Greek aspectual system creates powerful verbal structures that open dimensions of meaning beyond a verb’s temporal implications.

Such linguistic features generate a vast expressive repertoire that extends beyond the semantic domain. Authors can imply subtleties of meaning using tone and timbre, melody and rhythm, speech and silence. Without even knowing what the words mean, we can feel the urgency of Mark’s gospel narrative with its repeated καί and its clipped cola. We sense the complexity of Paul’s ruminations through his nested, elliptical cola linked by undeclined particles and prepositions. The fourth gospel’s dramatic impact imposes imperatives on a listening audience through its distinctive exploitation of verbal aspect as an auditory cue, even before listeners come to terms with the meanings of its words. New Testament exegesis remains at best incomplete and at worst misguided when we neglect its soundscape.

A composition communicates its λόγος in the creative tension between its fixed, written form and its fluid, voiced quality. Like an opera’s libretto, a manuscript remains incomplete until animated by the human voice.6 Hellenistic Greek authors explicitly appreciate this range of expressive potential as they conceptualize literary compositions as woven fabric. They compare the written marks in a manuscript to the taut warp threads on a loom through which the varied and more colorful weft yarn that symbolizes the human voice is interlaced. In the Greek notion of literary composition as weaving or συμπλοκή, a composition consists of more than the manuscript that preserves it. Like empty warp threads hanging loose on a loom’s frame, a written composition lacks integrity until a human voice articulates its written marks. For these ancient audiences, a composition’s unity and meaning remained inaccessible until spoken; in fact, in the absence of speech, the composition did not actually exist.7 This ancient, governing image of composition as a woven fabric integrated by the human voice should guide our analytical approach to ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Sound Mapping Reassessed
• Chapter 2: New Adventures in Sound Mapping
• Chapter 3: Luke’s Strategy for Interpreting Parables
• Chapter 4: Caves, Cattle, and Koinonia
• Chapter 5: Investigations into the Sound’s Message of Philippians 1:27—2:18
• Chapter 6: Underexplored Benefits of Sound Mapping in New Testament Exegesis
• Chapter 7: Discourse Segmentation, Discourse Structure, and Sound Mapping
• Chapter 8: A Sound Map of Revelation 8:7–12 and the Implications for Ancient Hearers
• Chapter 9: Rhythm, Sound, and Persuasion
• Chapter 10: The New Testament Soundscape and the Puzzle of Mark 16:8