getting ready for SECSOR 2011

The SECSOR 2011 meeting is this weekend (4–6 March) at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, KY. The pictures look gorgeous, and I'm excited to get on the road. I'll be presenting my paper, "Speaking of Jesus: 'Oral Tradition' beyond the Form Critics," in the SBL New Testament section on Saturday evening. I've been working on this paper for over a month, and I think it's pretty good. But I would think that, wouldn't I?

In the spirit of open and public academic discussion and debate, I've uploaded my paper to both Scribd and Google Docs. I'll embed the Scribd version below. If, for some reason, you prefer Google Docs, you can use the link I've included. Both documents are completely public.

The highlighted numbers in the paper refer to the accompanying PowerPoint presentation. I've tried to upload the .pptx file to Scribd and Google Docs, but it didn't display properly in either place. If you're interested in seeing the PowerPoint, leave a comment here and I'll happily e-mail it to you.

UPDATE: I've finished the handout that I will distribute to anyone determined to listen to my paper. Like the paper itself, you can find the handout on Google Docs, or you can see the embedded Scribd version, below.

Speaking of Jesus: "Oral Tradition" beyond the Form Critics
Speaking of Jesus: "Oral Tradition" beyond the Form Critics (handout)

on songs, tales, and paroles

In the summer of 2005 I settled upon the metaphor of langue and parole to express my view of the relationship between any particular expression of a living tradition and that tradition per se. These terms—langue and parole—are technical terms in structural linguistics. Langue refers to the "system of language," the patterns and rules and conventions that precede and enable any specific utterance. Parole refers to a specific, particular utterance, an actualization of the language-system, a concrete mobilization of the potential provided by langue. The important point for my purposes is that you can never speak langue; that is, you can never say everything that a language-system enables you to say. I can read the finite number of sentences in a book or on a blog, but I can never read all the sentences in the English language. As a language-system, "English" enables an infinite number of sentences. "English" is the potentiality—the langue—that enables the sentences—the paroles—you're reading now.

The problem I was addressing via this metaphor isn't new in oral tradition studies. Albert Lord, in his seminal 1960 work, The Singer of Tales, entitled his fifth chapter, "Songs and the Song" (99–123). According to this distinction, the plural "songs" refers to any specific performance of the tradition (or parole), and the definite singular "the song" refers to the tradition itself, the langue that precedes and envelops "songs" but is itself unsingable, unutterable, only ever potential. Lord refers to "the song" as "a flexible plan of themes, some of which are essential and some of which are not" (99). And, consequentially, the transmission and preservation of "the song" in these terms differs dramatically from from the transmission and preservation of any given parole. Lord says of the singer of "the song":

His idea of stability, to which he is deeply devoted, does not include the wording, which to him has never been fixed, nor the unessential parts of the story. He builds his performance, or song in our sense [i.e., parole], on the stable skeleton of narrative, which is the song in his sense [i.e., langue]. (99)

If all of this seems a bit confusing, think about any of the seemingly endless versions of any classic Christmas song we've been listening to for the last five weeks. I heard at least three different versions of "Santa Baby" this month, one each by Eartha Kitt, Madonna, and Taylor Swift. These songs are all very different in terms of their style and their affect, and they each evoke a different response from me (e.g., I viscerally hate Madonna's version). Their words may be exactly the same across all three versions (though I haven't checked whether or not they are), but the variation between them is important. So what makes them the same song? And what enables their variations without any of these versions becoming "a different song"? These are the questions I'd like to see us raise, mutatis mutandis, of the four gospels.

In order to raise a similar issue, John Miles Foley refers to the "tale within a tale" in his 1995 book, The Singer of Tales in Performance, which in its very title evokes Lord's earlier work:

[W]e could observe that any performance/version is fundamentally a "tale within a tale," with the avenues of implication necessarily running both ways. The present tale [parole] both enriches and is enriched by the larger, implied tale [langue]—itself unperformed (and unperformable) but metonymically present to the performer and audience" (48, n. 44)

In fact, I first read Foley's book in the summer of 2005, so my landing on the langue/parole metaphor to express these issues was in direct response to Foley's discussion.

All of this comes back to my mind because I'm reviewing The Interface of Orality and Writing: Speaking, Seeing, Writing in the Shaping of New Genres (A. Weissenrieder and R. Coote, eds.; WUNT 260; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010). Today I started John Miles Foley's essay, "Plentitude and Diversity: Interactions between Orality and Writing" (103–18). In the overview to his article, Foley refers to "rule-governed variation" and the navigation of "webs of potentials" (103), both of which get at precisely the issue of how any "oral-derived text" relates to the living tradition it expresses. These phrases, I think, provide a more helpful way for thinking about how the gospels, for example, relate to each other and to the larger "Jesus tradition" of which they are but individual instances or expresses (paroles). Indeed, the phrase "rule-govered variation" nearly depends on the langue/parole metaphor for its explanatory power: the set of rules that governs variation in the expression of any tradition is the system of potentials (langue) that enables the expression (parole) in the first place.

a fortuitous find

I have assigned a selection of readings from Plutarch's Moralia (the Quaestiones romanae et graecae) and from Seneca's Epistles (the Epistulae morales) in my graduate course, World of the New Testament. I'm interested in both Plutarch and Seneca as presentations of features of the Greco-Roman world from elite, pagan perspectives. Plutarch explicitly is trying to explain features of Latin culture to his Greek readers; Seneca, on the other hand, is exploring and commending certain behaviors or ways of thinking to his friend, Lucilius.

I'm certainly no Latin scholar; still less do I know anything about Seneca. So I was pleasantly surprised when I came across the following:

I shall therefore send to you the actual books; and in order that you may not waste time in searching here and there for profitable topics, I shall mark certain passages, so that you can turn at once to those which I approve and admire. Of course, however, the living voice and the intimacy of a common life will help you more than the written word. You must go to the scene of the action, first, because men put more faith in their eyes than in their ears, and second, because the way is long if one follows precepts, but short and helpful, if one follows patterns. Cleanthes could not have been the express image of Zeno, if he had merely heard his lectures; he shared in his life, saw into his hidden purposes, and watched him to see whether he lived according to his own rules. Plato, Aristotle, and the whole throng of sages who were destined to go each his different way, derived more benefit from the character than from the words of Socrates. It was not the class-room of Epicurus, but living together under the same roof, that made great men of Metrodorus, Hermarchus, and Polyaenus. Therefore I summon you, not merely that you may derive benefit, but that you may confer benefit; for we can assist each other greatly. (Seneca, Ep. 6.5–6)

Seneca's view of texts—what they are, what they're good for, and how to use them properly—is particularly interesting to me, given my own interests in media criticism and Christian origins. Seneca is a member of the Roman elite social class (he was Nero's tutor!), highly educated, familiar with the range of philosophical texts produced by and for the Greek and Roman upperclasses, able to live a life of relative leisure even in comparatively difficult times (see Ep. 1.4), and sufficiently resourced to send a barrage of letters to a friend who is physically distant from him. Even so, Seneca is no raw bibliophile; he isn't interested in amassing and reading texts for their own sake (see Ep. 2). Instead, although he exhibits familiarity with texts from outside his favored Stoic tradition (Epicurean, Platonic, etc.), he exhorts Lucilius to confine himself to familiar and more profitable texts. Reading too many texts is akin to knowing too many people, and being a friend to none (Ep. 2.2).

So how does Seneca suppose texts function (or ought to function) in order to maximize their benefit? Texts only work properly, according to the excerpt quoted above, within the context of social relationship. The value to Lucilius of Seneca's Moral Epistles isn't in the reading but in the relationship between the two men established prior to the epistles and evoked, strengthened, and furthered by means of the texts. Similarly, Cleanthes embodied and furthered Stoic philosophy via his relationship with Zeno rather than by reading his texts. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, of Socrates' followers; indeed, famously Socrates didn't even leave behind any textual remains!

And so Seneca says (and this really is quite amazing), "Of course, however, the living voice and the intimacy of a common life will help you more than the written word. You must go to the scene of the action, first, because men put more faith in their eyes than in their ears, and second, because the way is long if one follows precepts, but short and helpful, if one follows patterns." The written text enables Seneca to face and overcome the problem of geographical distance (he is physically removed from his friend, Lucilius). But the text is no substitute for the interpersonal relationship and interaction that is given concrete expression in face-to-face conversation; indeed, the text—when it behaves properly—mimics social interaction. Seneca becomes present to Lucilius via the written text. For this reason, Lucilius read a different text than the one before me; when I read Seneca, there is no extratextual relationship invoked (and evoked) in my act of reading.

Notice that this is a far cry from the standard opposition between "orality" and written texts we find in much biblical scholarship. We're not juxtaposing oral tradition over and against written text. Rather, we're on the lookout for how written texts functioned in a world conditioned by and geared toward the actual social engagement of human beings with one another. Thus the significance of Seneca's allusion to social script of autopsy (eyewitness testimony) when he says men prefer their eyes to their ears. On the surface this may seem to elevate written texts—accessed with the eyes—over spoken words—perceived with the hear. But in fact this is exactly the opposite of Seneca's point! Seneca privileges the concrete experience of knowledge shared through interpersonal relationships (including words spoken between people) over that gained second hand, through the reports of someone else or mediated by means of written reports.

see you in Louisville

I just found out today that my paper, "Speaking of Jesus: 'Oral Tradition' beyond the Form Critics," was accepted by the (SBL) New Testament section for the 2011 SECSOR meeting. That meeting will be held the weekend of 4–6 March, 2011, in Louisville, KY, at the Galt House. Here's my paper's abstract:

Oral tradition has been a live analytical concept in gospels research at least since the form critics but especially since Werner Kelber’s The Oral and the Written Gospel (1983). Recently, numerous high-profile publications in Jesus and gospels research attest the ascendency of memory as an equally live subject in the exploration and explanation of Christian origins. One by-product of this confluence of issues—oral tradition and memory—has been a renewed discussion of form criticism and its legacy. The apparent connection with the form critics’ aims risks misdirecting contemporary exploration of the early Christians’ use of oral and written traditions down potentially blind alleys. This paper offers three specific areas that distinguish—or ought to distinguish—contemporary oral-traditional research from form-critical inquiry. First, contemporary scholarship conceptualizes orality in terms broader than merely the transmission of tradition. Second, contemporary scholarship problematizes the construction of trajectories as explanatory models of Christian origins. Third, contemporary scholarship highlights both the similarities and the differences between oral and written expressions of tradition and explores the interface between the two. As a result, contemporary scholarship would be well-served by fostering an abrupt rupture between the current interest in the oral Jesus tradition (and the constitutive role of memory therein) and the procedures and products of Formgeschichte.

My thanks to the SBL NT section committee for approving my proposal. You can find more information about SECSOR at their website.

letter-collections and written tradition in antiquity

Now that I've finished reading Jesus in Memory, I've been able to return to Harry Gamble's very important monograph, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). Earlier in the book Gamble proposed the collection of (ten of) Paul's letters to seven churches as the motivating factor behind the Christians' early adoption of the codex format (rather than the scroll; see pp. 58–66). Now I'm reading Gamble's discussion of another collection of early Christian epistles: the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (109–12). Gamble's analyses of these letter collections are always interesting, even if I find parts of them still open to question.

Even so, what caught my interest is an almost off-handed comment about the early interest in written texts early in the second century among the church in Smyrna (western Asia Minor). Gamble has carefully teased out a surprising level of literary activity among the Smyrnaean Christians, and then he says:

This intense activity shows that the church at Smyrna in particular had both the interest and capacity to reproduce and distribute texts, and this, moreover, during the first two decades of the second century, a period often regarded as still heavily committed to oral tradition and little interested in the written word. (112)

Indeed. If Gamble has accurately reconstructed the letter-gathering, -transcribing, and -transmitting activities of the Smyrnaean church, then the interest in written texts at this Christian center is surprising. And Smyrna isn't the first major center of Christianity in the ancient world that comes to mind; if this state of affairs obtained in Smyrna, what must the text-production situation have been like in Alexandria, Rome, Jerusalem, or Antioch?

But what catches my attention, at least at this point in Gamble's analysis, is the way this textual interest breaks down generically. That is, the texts in which the church at this historical juncture (late-first to early-second century) exhibits such striking interest are all letters, and in fact the collections are of a single author's epistolary works. Collections weren't made on the basis of letters to specific churches or regions of churches (e.g., letters to Asian churches, or Syrian-Palestinian churches, or European churches, etc.). They also weren't all collected together in a single mass (important Christian epistolary texts). What we see are specific anthological interests in Paul's letters, Ignatius's letters, and so on.

Here's my point: What we don't see—and what makes Gamble's barb against the predilection for oral tradition that many of us assume among the general culture of Late Antiquity (and the early Christians in particularly) somewhat specious—are interests in written texts across multiple genre. We don't see at this stage in the Church's history a collection of gospels. Justin Martyr will demonstrate awareness of at least two and possibly all four canonical gospels in just a few decades, but this isn't the same as collecting and binding together multiple narrative texts. Tatian, a few decades after Justin, will bring together the four gospels in his Diatessaron, but this, too, is a far cry from collecting and anthologizing narrative texts. Irenaeus, just a few years after Tatian but on the other side of the Empire, may be the first instance we have of a four-gospel collection, but even here his interest in collecting narrative texts results more from Marcion's exclusive preference for [a corrupted version of] Luke's gospel rather than from the same sorts of impulses we see behind the collection of Paul's and Ignatius's letters.

So when Papias, the late-first- and/or early-second-century bishop of Hieropolis, says, "For I did not think that things found in books would benefit me as much as things from a living and abiding voice," he clearly demonstrates a preference for oral tradition over written texts.¹ In context Papias's preference for the "living and abiding voice" applies especially to evangelical and, perhaps, paraenetic tradition. Presumably, if Papias had been writing on the apostle Paul, his estimation of the value of written texts would have differed. And equally clearly Papias doesn't reject tout court the value of written texts; after all, Papias is writing his own text, the now-lost Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord.

Harry Gamble, then, hasn't actually demonstrated any parity between oral and written expressions of the tradition in the early church, though he has very helpfully encouraged us to consider how generic dynamics intersect with media dynamics.

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¹ οὐ γὰρ τὰ ἐκ τῶν βιβλίων τοσοῦτόν με ὠφελεῖν ὑπελάμβανον, ὅσον τὰ παρὰ ζώσης φωνῆς καὶ μενούσης (Papias, Frag. 3.4; Greek text from Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations [third edition; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007], 734).

moral mediocrity and the influence of media dynamics

In Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era (which I originally mentioned here), American sociologist Barry Schwartz discusses "Moral Mediocrity" (113–4) as a factor in the ebb of Abraham Lincoln's aura in the second half of the twentieth century. Moral mediocrity doesn't refer to the decline of America's social fabric (as it might in some conservative circles) but rather to the shift from more to less socially conscious cultural patterns, from less to more individually centered ways of being.

In Schwartz's words,

Every society moves alternately from one phase to another, from moral passion to moral mediocrity, from eras of "collective effervescence" wherein the nation's sacredness is felt and its myths and symbols reaffirmed, to eras in which the presence of sacred myths and symbols recedes. During the 1950s, the United States found itself somewhere between these two states: morally passionate, but less so than it had been; morally mediocre, but less so than it would become. (Schwartz 2008: 113)

At any rate, it wasn't Schwartz's comments on moral mediocrity that sent me back to my blog. Rather, it was an observation about heroes and celebrities.

That television has brought into prominence entertainers and athletes whose celebrity has overwhelmed the public's interest in the great figures of history is certain. These celebrities, in many ways inferior to their audience, do the opposite of what great men did. "The celebrity cult," Orrin Klapp observed in 1962, "celebrates the triumph of ordinariness—charm without character, showmanship without ability, bodies without minds, information without wisdom. Hero-worship looks horizontally, even downward, to a 'man like myself.'" Heroes, as Klapp defines them, are no longer great men [sic]. (Schwartz 2008: 114)

Klapp's description of celebrity cult as "showmanship without ability, bodies without minds," and so on is at least as relevant in 2009 as it would have been in 1962. I'm not interested in arguing that society is going downhill, to hell in a handbasket, or anything like that. American culture has always had its strengths; it has also always had its weaknesses, and we have been swapping these for those since the eighteenth century. But our gains in historical knowledge and awareness (with respect to our heroes and their life-sized [rather than larger-than-life] personae) come at the expense of some losses with respect to our moral and societal ideals. Epic heroes may not be historically authentic or socially sophisticated, but they inspire and challenge in ways that real-life people never can. We gain one; we lose the other.

But one of the things I appreciate about Schwartz's analyses (see the bibliography in Structuring Early Christian Memory for more of Schwartz's works) is his ability to move beyond simplistic conclusions to appreciate and comment upon the complex dynamics behind social commemorative patterns. Besides memory, I am also very interested in media criticism (start here for a helpful précis). But one of the perennial problems among media critics is an overly deterministic view of media. Too often scholars assume that changes in media (from oral to written, from written to print, from print to electronic, etc.) result in specific, even inevitable changes in social as well as psychological patterns. So Walter J. Ong speaks of "oral noetics," and Werner H. Kelber of an "oral synthesis." And these scholars stand squarely in a venerable academic tradition (see the works of McLuhan, Havelock, Goody, and many others), but they have overestimated the consequences of shifts in media.

With respect to the passage cited above, Schwartz does not assume that the rise of television caused or resulted in the moral mediocrity mentioned earlier. Television may have enabled Americans to more readily replace traditional heroes with popular celebrities, and it may even have enabled them to do so in larger numbers. But television did not cause people to ditch their heroes in favor of Brangelina. Media dynamics are vehicles as much as they are causes of social changes.

Turning to media criticism and New Testament studies, scholars have been prolific over the last two plus decades identifying and explaining the results of the shift from oral traditions to written gospels. In Kelber's case, the shift from (a written!) Q to Mark is presumed to disrupt the pre-Markan Jesus tradition (Traditionsbruch) and create something entirely new. Arguments such as these strike me as overstated. Yes, media dynamics are important. But perhaps we need to think about how media dynamics facilitated social and cultural transformations that were already underway among Jesus' first-century followers (and their social and cultural milieux) rather than taking deterministic views of oral and scribal media.