something's amiss here

I'm working through some thoughts on the identity of Paul's interlocutor in Romans (chapters 2–11, though my focus is on Romans 1–4). I've been reading Runar Thorsteinsson's Paul's Interlocutor in Romans 2: Function and Identity in the Context of Ancient Epistolography (Almqvist & Wiksell International: Stockholm, 2003), which is just a fantastic book. With very few exceptions, Thorsteinsson's arguments are both clear and compelling; when I examine his reading of Romans, he sees the text the way I see the text. Though I'm neither a Romans nor even a Pauline specialist, it seems to me that this is a book of which NT scholarship must take much greater account. You Pauline scholars out there, Am I wrong?

On the other hand, I'm also working my way through [parts of] Douglas Campbell's The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009). Campbell's book was the subject of the December 2011 issue of JSNT, with very critical review articles by Barry Matlock and Grant Macaskill. Of the very many distinctive reading positions and arguments in this very lengthy book, Campbell argues that we should read Rom. 1.18–32 as "speech-in-character," as Paul taking up the voice of and speaking as a character other than himself. Stanley Stowers has argued convincingly that Paul employs the rhetorical device, speech-in-character, in Rom. 7.7–25, so such things are not impossible. However, as Stowers emphasizes and Campbell acknowledges, anyone who proposes this as a reading strategy has to explain how Paul might have expected his readers to recognize his rhetorical maneuver. In Romans 7 there are several clear signals (which I discuss in my notes on Romans; if there's interest I can post those comments on this site). But Romans 1 lacks such clear signals. So Campbell argues instead,

It is my contention that the initial auditors of Romans could have detected such a strategy relatively easily through a plethora of nonverbal signals—the types of signals with which performed texts abound. And it must be emphasized that at this stage of our discussion it is necessary only to establish this identification as a possibility. Ultimately, my suggested rereading of Romans 1:18–32 will rely on evidence that emerges "downstream," so we will affirm this identification strongly only in retrospect. But it should be noted that this retrospective judgment is an accident of the text's canonical preservation, of the resulting loss of its original performed context, and also of some of our modern hermeneutical assumptions. We will realize belatedly what the Roman auditors could recognize relatively quickly, through the text's appropriate performance. For this reason, my auditors need for the moment only to be open to this reading of 1:18–32 as a possibility. Could the Roman Christians have detected a satirical textual operation here if it was indeed present? (Deliverance of God, 530; my emphasis [see pp. 530–41])

As I have already admitted, I am not a Pauline specialist, so I'm a bit outside my field. But I am a bit more experienced with oral traditional scholarship, and I have spent eight years reflecting on and exploring how to apply the theories, methods, and results of oral traditional scholarship to written textual questions. In fact, oral traditional scholars themselves have spent decades exploring this issue, so there's a vast body of literature on the subject. And oral traditional scholars have long emphasized that nonverbal and/or extratextual factors such as intonation, gesture, voice inflection, pace/tempo, musical accompaniment, social and/or physical environment, facial expression and other body language, eye contact, directionality, etc. etc. etc. affect how a written text communicates its meaning to an audience. In fact, it's safe to say that the written text itself didn't communicate its meaning to its original audience; rather, a reader/lector/oral performer communicated the text's meaning, and s/he did so via a number of techniques that (i) cannot be found within the tradition's textual stratum (i.e., the written text itself) and so (ii) is no longer available to us. This is unfortunate, because these methods, as Campbell rightly recognizes, are often if not always determinative for how and what a written text means.

Anyone reading Campbell's book, however, needs to know, this is NOT the way to apply issues of oral performance and/or presentation to (written) textual analysis. The problem with Campbell's argument here in Romans 1 is that there's no way to falsify it. There's no way to prove that Campbell's rereading runs exactly counter to Paul's intentions for Rom. 1.18–32 precisely because there's no evidence in support of his rereading. Unlike Romans 7, no textual clues suggest that Paul is speaking "in character" in Romans 1, and so all Campbell can do is grin and ask us to bear it.

But, given that, first, Rom. 1.18–32 makes perfectly good sense within Paul's own authorial voice (i.e., in his undisputed letters, in the disputed [or deutero-Pauline] letters, and in Acts, Paul speaks of God's judgment against the gentiles) and that, second, nothing that follows 1.18–32 requires us to hear Paul's comments about gentile depravity as "speech-in-character," we need to read this text straightforwardly, as the author presents it to us. Indeed, Thorsteinsson, in the much more helpful reading of Romans that I mentioned above, argues persuasively against exactly the kind of retrospective reading strategies Campbell employs here. So while we might grant that we could read Rom. 1.18–32 as a "satirical textual operation," we—and Campbell, too—need to admit that Paul has utterly failed to encode that operation with the text itself. And that failure, I would argue, is the best evidence against the proposal that we should read this passage satirically (pace Campbell, 541: "[s]uch texts therefore deliver their ironic and subversive potential entirely performatively" [emphasis his]).

contrasts (or, not ridiculicity)

In contrast to that other article I was reading, Samuel Byrskog's 2003 review of Rudolf Bultmann's classic, Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition [1921; ET: History of the Synoptic Tradition (1963)] strikes me as both fair and appropriate. I have my own disagreements with Byrskog's approach to memory and oral tradition, but his evaluation of Bultmann's work and its legacy seems pretty cogent to me. So I appreciate the force with which Byrskog gives the following blunt assessment:

The fundamental problem with Bultmann's method is not its inherent skepticism toward the historicity of the tradition. Occasionally he grants a good deal of continuity to the tradition; and skepticism is indeed part of all critical investigations. Rather, what is essentially problematic is precisely that his method does not work as a tool of historical inquiry. (Byrskog, "review of The History of the Synoptic Tradition" [JBL 122/3 (2003)], 554; emphasis added)

Byrskog goes on to demonstrate the unworkability of Bultmann's method; this is not simply dismissive invective. And so the blunt assessment is not only warranted but also welcome.

ridiculicity

I'm reading a fairly ridiculous article by Helmut Koester. His short piece, "Written Gospels or Oral Tradition?" (JBL 113/2 [1994]: 293–97) responds to Edouard Massaux's argument that the written Gospel of Matthew bore significant influence on other Christian texts of the first two centuries CE. Koester, of course, argues that apparent Matthean tradition in 1 Clement, Ignatius' letters, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and others actually stem from oral tradition. And it seems to me that Koester says a number of silly things. For example:

When pieces of tradition are quoted and used in early Christian authors, their function in the life of the community is usually maintained. Indeed, it may not even be necessary to refer to them as traditions related to Jesus. This is most clearly the case in Paul's allusions to sayings of Jesus in Romans 12–14, in 1 Peter, and in the Epistle of James. As far as writings such as 1 Clement, Barnabas, and the letters of Ignatius are concerned, use of sayings of Jesus and allusions to them would seem to be natural continuations of this practice, whether or not Jesus is explicitly mentioned as an authority. Sayings of Jesus were known because they had been established as parts of a Christian catechism; the passion narrative was known because it was embedded into the Christian liturgy. (Koester 1994:297; emphasis added)

The entire perspective informing this paragraph seems absurd to me. Notice how Koester privileges a tradition's "function in the life of the community" over its significance as a "tradition[] related to Jesus." When, for example, a Christian text says something like, "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse" (Rom. 12.14), that text is clearly performing certain functions among the Christian community. However, when another text narrates Jesus saying something to this effect (e.g., Matt. 5.43–48), the latter text is less authentic because its communal function has been muted. (That is, in Romans 12 Paul is overtly trying to persuade the Roman Christians to think and behave a certain way; in Matthew, the Evangelist may be endorsing certain patterns of thought and behavior, but his endorsement is covert, masked by the overt aim of narrating the life and teaching of Jesus.) I can't help but wonder where Koester thinks Jesus' followers procured the traditions that were at work in their communities if not from the teachings of the historical Jesus. I'm not even claiming that such traditions had to actually stem from the historical Jesus; only that the tradition's significance as a "tradition[] related to Jesus" must be more salient than any purported "function in the life of the community."

But even more to the point, I don't understand how Koester can claim that Jesus' teachings "were known because they had been established as parts of a Christian catechism," or that "the passion narrative was known because it was embedded into the Christian liturgy." Koester is clearly a fan of putting carts before horses. Where does Koester think Christian catechisms and liturgy came from if not from the sayings and passion of Jesus, among other things? Instead, the teachings of Jesus and the passion narrative were known because they were foundational to the beliefs and practices of Jesus' followers. As a result, their catechisms and liturgy reflected his teachings and passion. While the catechisms and liturgy might have been vehicles of the traditions of Jesus' teachings and passion, they were not the motivation or reason for knowing these traditions. Otherwise, Koester needs to explain what motivated the church's catechisms and liturgy.

Ridiculous.

"collective" and/or "social" memory

I'm reading Samuel Byrskog's article, "A New Quest for the Sitz im Leben: Social Memory, the Jesus Tradition and the Gospel of Matthew" (New Testament Studies 52 [2006]: 319–36). Byrskog has recently fired off a series of essays looking to reframe the form-critical concept of Sitz im Leben within the contemporary theoretical framework sustaining NT scholarship. Of course, as I've mentioned previously, I'm not as interested in salvaging NT criticism's form-critical heritage. But inasmuch as Sitz im Leben has degenerated into a fairly generic term that means not much more than "context," it remains flexible enough to serve contemporary needs while maintaining an apparent continuity with the research of previous generations.

At any rate, Byrskog is rightfully drawing attention to the surprising terminological disarray in the secondary literature regarding the communal dimension of memory. "There is a confusing variety of terminology. The literature uses 'family memory', local memory', 'popular memory', 'public memory', 'relational memory', 'cultural memory', etc. These expressions sometimes carry different connotations, but are also often employed synonymously" (321–22). Byrskog's right; the loose use of language here is unfortunate and, I think, masks a worrying imprecision with respect to what we're after when we use these terms.

So I'm sympathetic with what Byrskog's trying to do when he defines more precisely what he means by "social" and "collective" memory. But I'm not sure he's successful. He clarifies:

With James Fentress and Chris Wickham, I will use "social memory" as a label distinct from "collective memory". While the latter is social in that it includes those recollections of a group that are shared by all of its members, being something else than the sum total of all the individual recollections, the former is social in that it deals with the social aspects of the mental act of remembering. Social memory is thus interested in the memory of individuals in social contexts which are larger than the individual and yet related to the individual. (322)

Byrskog describes beautifully the most important insight of social memory theorists: that every act of memory is social. But I'm not sure what his use of "collective memory"actually refers to. Byrskog equates collective memory with "recollections of a group," but I'm not sure what a group's recollection actually is, how it's manifested, for whom it's manifested, or whatever. Funnily enough, Byrskog himself has balked at this very idea of "collective memory": "Groups and cultures might have what we call ‘memory’, which affects the members of those contexts, but groups and cultures do not remember and recall; individuals do” (2000:255; original emphasis). Granted that in this current context (Byrskog's NTS article) he still focuses on the individual rememberer (notice the reference to "all of its [viz., a group's] members"). But I don't understand at what point a sufficient number of individuals within a group exhibit a particular recollection, and I don't understand what makes the memories of individuals "collective" other than, apparently, the mere fact that multiple individuals share them in common.

In a rough draft of another paper, I've questioned Byrskog's concept of "collective memory" this way:

Byrskog affirms that “groups and cultures do nurture a memory of their past” and that “memory is to some extent a social construct” (2000:255), though he does not explain what processes, social or psychological, are involved in this nurturing. This problem plagues Byrskog’s work at multiple points; another example, taken at random: “[O]ral historians of today often attempt to control the uniqueness of each eyewitness account with a sense of its representativeness and a careful method of strategic sampling. In order to do this, one needs to single out persons who are representative of a larger group, and compare their versions with each other. Groups are important, but one needs to focus on the individuals within each group, because the collective version [of the past] might be entirely different from the version of the individual” (2000:69; original emphasis). But what, precisely, is “the collective version” that an oral historian could compare and contrast with an account given by any given individual? And which individual, for that matter, is able to give an account of the past that isn’t already reflective of the history, interests, and culture of the groups to which s/he belongs?

I should clarify that I wrote these comments solely in reference to his very important monograph, Story as History, History as Story (Mohr Siebeck, 2000). However, the same problems are operative in his 2006 article. I'm very, very sympathetic to the interest in the social dynamics of even the most individual of processes (here, memory). And I do think that "remembering together" affects the way individuals express and employ memory. But I just can't convince myself that "collective memory" refers to "group memory" or even the aggregate of individuals' memories. Individuals and groups aren't separate (or separable) entities; my memories all by themselves are already social creations. The act of remembering with other people doesn't transform my memories into social facts; still less does it produce social facts in the melding of multiple individuals' memories. Remembering together augments and extends the social-ness of my/our memories; it does not cause that social-ness.

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)

more from Pieter Botha

I haven't read Pieter Botha before. I've done quite a bit of reading in oral traditional research and the gospels (including the gospel of Mark), so I've run into Botha's work on numerous occasions. But I've never read him before. So his essay, "'Publishing' a Gospel: Notes on Historical Constraints to Gospel Criticism" (see this post), has come as a very nice surprise. Here's yet another quote worth working through:

Incidentally, these practices remind us forcibly of the fluidity of all manuscript traditions in antiquity. What we would call an edition simply did not exist in antiquity; ἔκδοσις (usually translated with "publish") merely indicated the stage at which the author let a version out of his own hands. Copying was basically ad hoc, determined by innumerable factors and completely outside any formal control. It is impossible to speak of fixed traditions. . . . When we think about books in Greco-Roman antiquity, we should accept that single, final autographs probably never existed. In reality many participated and contributed to textual traditions endlessly in flux. (347; original emphases)

The phrase, "endlessly in flux," seems a bit exaggerated to me. But the point that writing a text did not fix the tradition is well taken. Too often, NT scholars talk about writing as the point at which a variable oral tradition becomes fixed; oral traditional scholars (both inside and outside biblical scholarship) have known for quite some time that written texts are only as stable as the cultural practices that facilitate their use.

gospels as messengers

I'm reading an essay by Kristina Dronsch and Annette Weissenrieder, entitled, "A Theory for the Message for New Testament Writings or Communicating the Words of Jesus: From Angelos to Euangelion" (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], 205–35). The argument is highly technical and dense, and the authors' specific proposal is not very clearly communicated. But they do engage the media dynamics of early Christian traditioning processes in a sophisticated and nuanced way.

Their argument, in a nutshell, is that the written texts comprising the New Testament—and specifically the gospels of Mark, Luke, and John—bridge the distance between the absent Jesus and the present audiences of the texts. The evangelists, or actually the gospel texts themselves, serve as messengers (Boten) mediating the message and making present the message's sender to the message's recipients. You can find one particularly useful statement of their thesis on p. 222: "[M]essengers are not only a link in an information chain, they also have to be understood as a medium of communication. Messengers do not just bear messages; they are also media of transmission."

All that simply to introduce the following quotation, found in the authors' introductory comments to their discussion of Luke's gospel as postal communication:

The messenger plays an important role behind the transference of information. That is, the reliability of the messenger has a prominent role in successful communication. . . . The qualities demanded here like dependability and credibility were transferred to the messenger to fulfill the purposes of the absent transmitter; nevertheless, this is to be understood not in a sense of fidelity to the letter of the message, but the fidelity to the sense intended by the sender. It is not about preserving, but about passing on directly. Therefore, the protection of the message aims as Horst Wenzel has explained, not at the authentic preservation of the message, but at the dependability of the messenger. (228, citing H. Wenzel, Hören und Sehen. Shrift und Bild. Kultur und Gedächtnis im Mittelalter [Munich: Beck, 1995], 262; my emphases)

source criticism and text production in antiquity

I'm still working through David Rhoads's essay, "Performance Events in Early Christianity," and Rhoads has just made an excellent point. He says, "The early Chrisitian communities had no un-embodied experience of the stories [in the gospels] and the [New Testament] letters" (178). In light of the massive amount of research in the last twenty-plus years on reading in antiquity, I think this point is fairly safe, even perhaps axiomatic. That is, in the early church no one (or nearly no one, so nearly that the difference is negligible) engaged a NT text alone, in a "quiet time" sort of atmosphere without others around. Reading, it seems, was a communal activity.

If so, then I have a simple question, and I hope someone out there can honestly engage it. Has anyone ever attempted to explain, on the strength of any particular source-critical theory, an evangelist's act of writing in culturally informed ways? In other words, if (say) Luke sat down with Mark and Matthew before him (à la the Farrer hypothesis), what cultural scripts informed his act of composing the gospel as he read from his two (and others?) sources? Was Luke, on this model, engaging a disembodied tradition? And if not, then how did the mechanics of his text-production actually work?

is this nonsense?

I'm still reading 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). Now I'm working through David Rhoads's essay, "Performance Events in Early Christianity: New Testament Writings in an Oral Context" (166–93). Rhoads frames the NT texts as "performance literature," written texts that are incomplete in themselves.

Simply put, the writings we have in the New Testament are examples of "performance literature," that is, literature that was meant for performance—like music or theater or ancient poetry. It is difficult to imagine musicologists studying scores of music without ever hearing a performance. Nor can we imagine theater scholars studying scripts of ancient drama without having seen performances of the plays or without trying to determine how they may have been performed and experienced in ancient times. Yet we biblical scholars have studied the literature of the New Testament for centuries without ever hearing them performed as stories or speeches or epistolary orations, without trying to determine how they may have been performed in the early church, and without constructing ancient performance scenarios as a basis for interpretation. (169)

I agree completely. Rhoads has put his money where his mouth is. He regularly performs large sections of the New Testament (e.g., the Gospel of Mark, or Revelation) from memory; so deep is his conviction that people need to hear the text at least as much as they should read the text. And so I have a real appreciation for Rhoads's work.

But. When Rhoads turns to the question of memory, he makes the following statement: "The first century was a memory culture more than it was a manuscript culture." My question: Is this gibberish? What does Rhoads mean by "the first century," and how is that any kind of culture, memory or otherwise? Are "memory culture" and "manuscript culture" "things," separatable, isolatable, able to be set in contrast with each other like lemons and protractors?

I appreciate the question Rhoads is trying to raise, and I even agree that we need to raise it. That is, How did "memory" (whatever that is) and "manuscripts" function in antiquity in specific cultural locations? That is a very important question (or better, a very important set of questions). But notice that Rhoads's language is way too blunt to get at the question, let alone to propose helpful starts at useful answers. Rhoads's identification of "the first century" as any kind of "culture," as if it were a culture at all, swings a sledgehammer at a question that requires considerable finesse.

on imagining new worlds

I'm currently reading Richard Horsley's essay, "The Gospel of Mark in the Interface of Orality and Writing," in 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). If you're familiar with Horsley's other works then you'll already know what to expect from this essay: a critique of certain culturally inappropriate models sustaining biblical scholarship and a striking reliance on certain key binary oppositions (Judean vs. Galilean, élite vs. ordinary people, etc.).

Despite the need to improve on and further Horsley's work, he nevertheless does provide a helpful opportunity to think more largely about biblical studies and the concrete social functioning of the texts we analyze. This has always been one of the key strengths of Horsley's scholarship. So I thought I'd reproduce this helpful quote on the need for us to get past ourselves and appreciate Mark's gospel as, perhaps, a single performance of the Jesus tradition rather than a collection of previously independent short stories (novella, according to Dibelius).

What remains difficult even for those who recognize Mark as a sustained story, I think, and perhaps also for those of us who also recognize the interface of orality and writing, is to imagine the formation, the composition, of the whole (Gospel) story. Perhaps because we are so habituated to composition in/as writing we have particular difficulty imagining how a text of the length and complexity of Mark could have been composed other than in writing—even though many epics that are orally performed (and composed) are much longer and more complex in plotting than Mark and the other Gospels. (157)

Of course, worlds of difference separate Mark and the other gospels from the epics I think Horsley has in mind (Homer, Moslem Yugoslavian epics, etc.). But that's not the point Horsley's making. He's reminding us that Mark's story—impressive and complicated as it is—isn't really so impressive and complicated that it had to be composed by an author in possession of himself, deliberate and laboriously working at a table or desk, free of the distractions of the wide world around him.

Instead, Mark certainly could have been (I think probably would have been) the kind of story Jesus' followers told as they gathered together to learn, to worship, to fellowship, and to pray. Certainly at some point someone (let's call him Mark) wrote the story down—though strangely Horsley would disagree. But that doesn't mean that Mark's written gospel was the first time the story ("the whole [Gospel] story") was apprehended in a single social engagement by women and men devoted to Jesus. In fact, given that the first mention of Mark's gospel doesn't occur until early in the second century CE (Papias), I suspect no one thought what Mark had done to Jesus' story was particularly groundbreaking or innovative (pace Kelber). Mark's gospel provided another in a very large number of possible performances of the Jesus story, and before long Matthew and Luke (and even John) would show that Mark's story, indeed, wasn't even that long!

Taylor-made Bultmann

One of my perennial interests concerns the way we have distinguished Judaism from Christianity and the various ways this distinction has affected our historical, exegetical, and theological work. A lot of work in the post-World War II era has gone to expose and/or correct the anti-Judaic tenor of a lot of Christian scholarship, but even here the fundamental disjunction between Judaism and Christianity as separate things is frequently detectable.

Rudolf Bultmann, famously, attributed the creation and transmission of many of the miracle-stories in the gospels to "Hellenistic circles," by which I understand him to mean Greek (= gentile) Christian communities. The transposition of the Jesus tradition from Palestinian (= Jewish?) to Hellenistic circles is, for Bultmann, a major source of the distortion evident between Jesus and the gospels. Here, then, is an excerpt from British NT scholar Vincent Taylor explaining how Bultmann would have considered a parable to have escaped relatively unscathed the distorting effects of Hellenization:

For the parables he [viz., Bultmann] lays down the principle that the best criterion of genuineness is the presence of an opposition to Jewish morality and piety or of the eschatological attitude which characterized the preaching of Jesus, always providing that no specifically Christian details are present (G.S.T. 222). (The Formation of the Gospel Tradition [London: Macmillan and Co., 1933], 28)

the gospels and "gospel tradition"

In my gospel narratives class I regularly refer to "tradition"—whether "gospel tradition" or "Jesus tradition"—though I don't necessarily explain what I mean. This is a problem, I think, because tradition is one of those words, like myth or criticism, whose connotations overshadow their denotations. Tradition connotes negatively; after all, didn't Jesus condemn the Pharisees for their privileging tradition vis-à-vis the word of God? Aren't tradition-al things bad, like hymnals, bee-hives, and racism?

Of course, this isn't the technical sense of tradition, and the term itself is ubiquitous in biblical scholarship. In fact, tradition as an analytical concept is in need of some precision; in the current environment it's only too easy to write whole books on some aspect or other of tradition without ever really spelling out precisely what we mean by it.

Vincent Taylor, in his famous book, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition (London: MacMillan and Co., 1933), reflects on the term explicitly on the very first page. There's much to disagree with here, especially eighty years after the book was published. But it is helpful for thinking about how far thinking about tradition has come.

It is important that we should appreciate the distinction between the 'Gospel tradition' and the Gospels. Before the Gospels were written the 'tradition' was organic; it was a thing of life, and as such was always changing and growing. Just because of this it was subject to the accidents and experiences of life; it could be corrupted, but it was also capable, through growth and change, of becoming more truly itself, as the sapling grows into the tree and as the child becomes the man. In the Gospels the 'tradition' has attained a relatively fixed formation; it is no longer subject to change, except as it is altered by copyists or by the writers of the later Apocryphal Gospels. Whenever we return to our Gospels we find the tradition as we left it, and the only changes which can happen are those which take place within our own minds through fuller knowledge and understanding. Before these books were written the position must have been very different. At that time the tradition was more plastic; it was a story of life and a product of life; its formation was determined by its contents and by the mental and spiritual environment in which it lived; it grew, and developed, and had a history. (1–2)

Many people recognize that tradition (as distinct from texts, as Taylor is using the term) is hardly made static or fixed by virtue of being written down. Certainly Matthew and Luke, if they knew of and used Mark as a source for their own gospel texts (the standard position among NT scholars) did not think of the tradition in Mark's gospel as "fixed" or "static." And the early Christians who recognized these texts as the word of God did not, apparently, experience angst at the variation and fluidity of the tradition as evident across the three synoptic gospels, to say nothing of John's gospel (!). However counterintuitive it may seem to us that tradition remains "organic," vibrant and adaptable, even in written form, this seems to be the clear perception of the texts among the early Christians. It may seem weird to us, but I suspect that, if they could analyze us, our own preoccupations with the verbal fixation of written/printed texts would seem equally alien.

is Bultmann's idea of Mark schizophrenic?

In my last post I presented, in his own words, Martin Dibelius's conception of those responsible for the Jesus tradition as the anonymous, unskilled community that passed on the tradition until the evangelists (especially Mark and Matthew, but also Luke) got their hands on it.

In his own landmark form-critical study, Rudolf Bultmann exhibits a different conception of the evangelists (or at least of Mark). Bultmann begins Die Geschichte der Synoptischen Tradition (1921) with a recapitulation of the previous generation's estimation of Mark as "the actual course of historical events" in the life of the historical Jesus, and he then revisits William Wrede's devastating critique of that view. In his revisitation Bultmann writes,

Mark is the work of an author who is steeped in the theology of the early Church, and who ordered and arranged the traditional material that he received in the light of the faith of the early Church—that was the result; and the task which follows for historical research is this: to separate the various strata in Mark and to determine which belonged to the original historical tradition and which derived from the work of the author. (History of the Synoptic Tradition [trans. by John Marsh; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963], 1)

Dibelius, if I read him rightly, considers Mark and Matthew, especially, to be collectors of tradition, hardly authors at all and certainly not in any meaningful sense of the word. So he can dissolve the gospel narratives into their individual pericopae, because the evangelists strung them together, leaving the traditional units they collected more-or-less intact. Bultmann, following Wrede, sees Mark as a much more revolutionary presentation of Jesus. Mark—in this way of reading him—casts Jesus as Israel's messiah, but he well knows that no one during Jesus' lifetime thought of him in messianic terms. So he weaves a narrative in which the messianic secret develops organically from the very beginning, in which Jesus himself at first silences and then gradually affirms his messianic status.

So Bultmann's Mark—again, if I'm reading rightly—is a strange hybrid between two competing conceptions. Bultmann affirms Wrede's innovative Mark, who tells the story of man who never was and so is responsible for both the story and the man. But Bultmann also affirms Dibelius's traditional Mark, who collects the traditions told by others and so is responsible only for anthologizing stories already in circulation. Hence Bultmann's program: "to separate the various strata [viz., the innovative (Wredian) and traditional (Dibelian) strata] in Mark and to determine which belonged to the original historical tradition and which derived from the work of the author."

Those of you more familiar with the history of form-critical scholarship: Is this a helpful way to understand what I'm reading?

the anonymity of gospel tradition

The opening words of the English translation of Martin Dibelius's landmark work, Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums (1919):

There is a theory that the history of literature is the history of its various forms. This may be true of literature properly so-called, but it cannot be applied indiscriminately to every kind of writing. It has, however, special significance when applied to materials where the author's personality is of little importance. Many anonymous persons take part in handing down popular tradition. They act, however, not merely as vehicles, but also as creative forces by introducing changes or additions without any single person having a "literary" intent. In such cases the personal peculiarities of the composer or narrator have little significance; much greater importance attaches to the form in which the tradition is cast by practical necessities, by usage, or by origin. The development goes on steadily and independently, subject all the time to certain definite rules, for no creative mind has worked upon the material and impressed it with his own personality. (From Tradition to Gospel [trans. by Bertram L. Woolf; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935], 1)

It would be difficult to explain how strongly and how thoroughly I disagree with just about every word with which Dibelius characterizes the early Christian tradition. That this is our received heritage should give all of us currently involved in exploring and reconstructing Christian origins pause to consider just how far astray our forebears drifted. We should also expect that breaking free of this heritage can only happen with tremendous and focused and sustained effort.

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.

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).

biblical studies and comparative thinking

Werner Kelber's essay, "The Work of Birger Gerhardsson in Perspective," concludes the book, Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (Werner Kelber and Samuel Byrskog, eds.; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009; 173–206). I'm not the biggest fan of Kelber's work, though I have to admit that I am a beneficiary of his groundbreaking work. My first introduction to Kelber was through his seminal monograph, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1983), which in my initial opinion posited too-strong a disruption between oral and written communicative media. Since then Kelber himself has acknowledged this shortcoming, though he still (again, in my opinion) slides too-easily into an oral vs. reading dichotomy.

Those criticisms aside, I find myself enjoying the current essay very much, perhaps more than I've enjoyed any other thing Kelber has written. With that, I'd like to quote Kelber's analysis of biblical scholarship and why objections to cross-cultural and/or transhistorical analytical models are red-herrings.

As an academic discipline, biblical scholarship is laden with centuries of received manners and mannerisms. Not infrequently it has operated in a state of culturally conditioned and/or institutionally enforced isolation. More to the point, many of its historical methods and assumptions about the functioning of biblical texts originated in perennial working relations with print versions—typographic constructs of modernity. Plainly, New Testament (and biblical) studies stand in need of a rethinking of the communications environment in which the early Jesus tradition participated. (181)

Kelber is exactly right. The danger—for Kelber as well as for any of us who search for sociological and anthropological models to help illumine ancient texts—is thinking that we have avoided misapprehending the biblical texts while everyone else sees them through culturally inappropriate lenses. Kelber may too easily critique other scholars for assuming an inapplicable communications model, but his work also constantly reminds that our own ways of perceiving, processing, transmitting, and working with words differ in nearly every respect from Jesus, Paul, and every other figure from antiquity. Cross-cultural models help us become better aware, at the very least, of our own ways of verbalization and so to question how ancient communicative techniques and technologies may have functioned in ways different from our own.

the stability of [hand]written texts

One of my perennial interests centers on the ways different cultural and historical perspectives influence the way we perceive written texts. This difference in perception affects every level of our understanding of texts, from what they are to what they're for to what kind[s] of information they contain. This is part of the reason I expressed an interest in reviewing Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (Werner Kelber and Samuel Byrskog, eds.; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009). One of the consistently interesting scholars in these issues is Alan Kirk, who wrote Chapter 6, entitled simply, "Memory" (155–72).

I'm indebted to Alan for a number of reasons, so my comments here are not meant to be disparaging in any way. In fact, what I've read of his essay so far helpfully and honestly takes up Birger Gerhardsson's work on memory and tradition and sets it on a firmer footing. As one example, Kirk has an enviable grasp of the dynamics of fluidity and fixity at work among the evidence for the early Jesus tradition:

The formal features of such genres ensure stability and thus continuity across many oral enactments. However, through their equally core property of variability, or better, multiformity, the tradition is brought to expression in ways responsive to the different social and historical contexts in which it is enacted. (160; my emphasis)

I love that formulation: "their equally core property [relative to their stability] of . . . multiformity." Too often we think of the tradition as some "thing" that exists on its own and that suffers corruption if/as it changes. Research on memory, oral tradition, and oral performance, however, have encouraged us to reconfigure our understanding of the Jesus tradition to account for the ways the tradition could be multiply expressed in different forms, for different purposes, on different occasions, etc. The tradition contains within itself the capability of multiform expression and variation, so that change ≠ corruption.

Even so, Kirk shares an assumption (if I may call it an assumption) with the vast majority of biblical and related scholarship that the codification of tradition in written texts—even handwritten texts—stabilizes that tradition. Immediately following the excerpt quoted above, Kirk adds,

Oral genres, in other words, though stable are not fixed in the sense that the written medium fixes a text. To fix them would be to impair their capacity for oral (as opposed to written) transmission, for loss of adaptability to different social and historical settings entails erosion of relevance and hence survivability. (160–61)

I understand the basic logic undergirding this assumption. If I give a speech this afternoon, I can't "re-hear" that speech a week or even ten minutes later without the aid of some recording technology (which obviously did not exist in antiquity). But if I write a text this afternoon, I can return to that text ten minutes, a week, even ten years later and the wording will be the same then as it is today. Once inscribed, a text can be corrected, erased, commented upon, whatever. But unless I'm stuck in some J. K. Rowling story, the words set in ink won't change and, within limits, aren't even subject to change.

But Kirk's essay isn't focused on written texts; it's focused, instead, on the conjunction of memory and tradition. And I cannot see how an inscribed text fixes tradition and places limits on its variability (or, to use Kirk's preferred term, multiformity). I'm not suggesting that written traditions can't be fixed, relatively or absolutely. But the fixing (= stabilizing) of tradition requires certain social forces that transcend the presence or the absence of written texts. One need look no further than the synoptic gospels to see that, if Matthew and Luke are dependent on Mark and Q (a proposition Kirk accepts), nothing about the entextualization of the Markan or Q tradition rendered that tradition fixed. Bart Ehrman's work on "the orthodox corruption of scripture" [my comments are available here] highlights the way [hand]written traditions were still responsive to (even subject to) the social contexts in which they were employed.

Within the Hellenistic milieux of early Christianity, second Temple Judaism, Roman Egypt, etc., tradition in both written and oral expressions experienced the "core properties" of stability and multiformity. That may strike us as odd, given the ease with which we naturally expect multiple copies of [printed] texts to be identical, whether we bought them in east Tennessee or South Yorkshire. But we simply cannot even recognize the data of the ancient world—let alone account for it—as long as we think that "the written medium fixes a text."

re-oralizing written manuscripts

Martin Jaffee is probably one of my favorite scholars of oral tradition and the relation between orally transmitted and actualized material and the written texts in which such material exists today. Jaffee, in my opinion, has not only read John Miles Foley (something more people who cite him ought to do) but also understood him. Jaffee's most substantial work that I've read is his 2001 monograph, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE–400 CE (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), but I've run across a number of his essays in edited volumes throughout the course of my own research.

Most recently, his essay, "Honi the Circler in Manuscript and Memory: An Experiment in 'Re-Oralizing' the Talmudic Text"—the fourth chapter in Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (Werner Kelber and Samuel Byrskog; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009; 87–111)—presents an excellent example of the kind of analysis Foley advocated in his 1995 monograph, The Singer of Tales in Performance (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). That is, Jaffee balances the primary target of his analysis (viz., an orally mediated tradition) with a respect for the inevitable field of that analysis (viz., handwritten texts). This balance eludes much of media-critical scholarship; we seem to either forget the text-based nature of all our work or to underestimate the significance of the oral milieux contextualizing our written texts.

Jaffee's essay in the Gerhardsson Festschrift offers two presentations of the Honi tradition from the Munich manuscript of the Babylonian Talmud. The first represents in English the visual appearance of that tradition in the MS Munich, "attempting to represent in English what a reader of the manuscript finds in the published facsimile edition: line after undifferentiated line of text without any of the normal cues of punctuation that would signal to a reader how to vocalize the text" (91). The second presentation employs different typefaces (italics, plain text, BOLD ALL CAPS, etc.) in an attempt

to represent visually the various oral-performative sources of textual tradition that are manifest in the editorial shaping of the material but concealed by the scribal format of the manuscript. My goal is to permit the reader to grasp the fundamental ways in which the linear, scribal version of the Talmud neutralizes the oral-performative traces of the transmitted text even as it becomes the very condition of the recovery of the text's oral life. (91)

At this point many of us textually-trained practitioners of biblical scholarship will object that Jaffee does not—indeed cannot—provide any methodologically rigorous criteria to ensure that the "oral-performative" interpretation of the Honi pericope actually obtained, either in the original composition of the MS Munich that provides the text with which he works or in that manuscript's subsequent reception. And Jaffee recognizes this problem (see pp. 96–97). But Jaffee refuses to abandon the attempt to recover oral-performative dynamics that we know with near-certainty contextualized the written textual artifacts with which we work simply because we cannot know if, or how well, we have recovered those dynamics. As Foley would say, we already de-nature oral-derived texts when our interpretations take account of their strictly textual dynamics and neglect the performative and traditional cues embedded in and yet obscured by those textual dynamics.

As a result, we cannot know with any certainty the degree to which Jaffee's "re-oralization" of the Honi pericope accurately revivifies how that pericope would have been heard by its audiences in any given cultural or historical milieu. And yet we can appreciate the way his presentation of the text in discrete "breath-units" and highlighting the multiple "voices" comprising the talmudic text adds depth and texture to the flattened words on the page. Work still remains to be done, of course. But Jaffee advances our reading of oral-derived texts. Now to turn to the gospels . . .