Oral Tradition in Bible and New Testament Studies

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Modern biblical scholarship is largely a child of the high tech of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. It developed its basic assumptions about and approaches to biblical texts in working with the print Bible, the first major, mechanically constructed book in early modernity. For this reason, the historical, critical scholarship of the Bible has risked laboring under a cultural anachronism, projecting modernity’s communications culture upon the ancient media world. However, despite its resolutely text-centered habits, historical criticism has by no means been unaware of orality’s role in the formation of biblical texts. The impact of form criticism, the method devised to deal with oral tradition, on biblical scholarship of both the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the New Testament has been immense. Today, form criticism is besieged with multiple problems, the most significant of which is its complicity with post-Gutenberg assumptions about ancient dynamics of communication. Not only are biblical texts by and large located in close affinity to speech, but the form critical project has turned out to be largely misconceived. Orality studies, therefore, challenge biblical scholarship to rethink fundamental concepts of the Western humanistic legacy such as text and intertextuality, reading, writing and composing, memory and imagination, speech and oral/scribal interfaces, author and tradition. And they invite us to be suspicious of imagining tradition exclusively in closedspace, text-to-text relations, and instead to grow accustomed to notions such as compositional dictation, memorial apperception, auditory reception, and the interfacing of memory and manuscript. Contemporary research in orality is, therefore, anything but a mere embellishment of textual studies. John Miles Foley’s observation that “what we are wrestling with is an inadequate theory of verbal art” applies with particular force to biblical studies