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¢ 135 april d. decOnicK1 HUMAN MEMORY AND THE SAYINGS OF JESUS cOnTempOrary experimenTal exercises in The TransmissiOn Of Jesus TradiTiOns 7 For years, as a pedagogical exercise in parables as metaphor, I have asked my students to listen to my own parable, the “Parable of the Lottery Ticket.” I use this exemplar in class because its internal references are contemporary , allowing the meaning of the parable to easily emerge as metaphor rather than allegory. I recite the parable exactly the same each time I perform it, as follows: The kingdom is like a young woman who found a lottery ticket in the street. The next day, when the numbers were posted, she won twenty-four million dollars. What the students do not know is that I have another pedagogical objective when I ask them to listen carefully to this parable: I want to make concrete for them the role of real-life memory and its effect on the transmission of Jesus’ sayings. So, at the beginning of the subsequent class period, I ask my students to take out a blank piece of paper and reproduce in writing the parable of The Lottery Ticket as accurately as they can. Of course, students offer the normal objections, several typically pointing out that I did not tell them that they needed to “memorize” the parable, before they settle down to the task. In only a few minutes, they are finished. Without another word, I collect their papers. The next class period, I show them a chart that reproduces their versions of the parable side-by-side with the original. The entire class period is filled with howls of laughter at the twenty-five versions that are displayed. Not a single student in any of my courses has ever replicated the parable 136 April D. DeConick exactly, although most students have faithfully reproduced the “gist” of it. This has never been a big surprise to me, since all the classic studies in orality have demonstrated again and again that the reproduction (equals R throughout this essay) of a story will maintain the overall meaning of the narration while sacrificing the verbiage and details (see Parry 1971; Lord 2000; Havelock 1963; 1976; Ong 1967; 1971; 1982; Foley 1991; 1995). What I have experienced in my classroom is summarized well by Kenneth Bailey, who writes about his own experience within the oral culture of the Middle East (Bailey 1991). Bailey describes three types of transmitted materials, the most inflexible being proverbs and poems, which are often remembered verbatim, and the most flexible being jokes and casual news, which “float” and “die” in a state of “total instability” (Bailey 1991, 44). He says that the transmission of the remaining materials—including parables and historical narratives—was accomplished with “continuity and flexibility,” not “continuity and change.” This continuity with flexibility works to “control” the transmission of the material. Bailey could be writing about my classroom exercise when he writes about his own experience in the Middle East as follows. Continuity and change could mean that the storyteller could change 15% of the story—any 15%. Thus after seven transmissions of the story, theoretically all of the story could be changed. But continuity and flexibility mean that the main lines of the story cannot be changed at all. The story can endure one different transmission through a chain of a hundred and one different people and the inner core of the story remains intact. Within the structure, the storyteller has flexibility within limits to “tell his own way.” But the basic story line remains the same. By telling and retelling, the story does not evolve from A to B to C. Rather the original structure of the story remains the same but it can be colored green or red or blue. (Bailey 1991, 45) The Role of Memory in Orality and Scribality This relatively simple classroom exercise has gradually eroded my confidence in traditional approaches to and explanations of the similarities and variations among the early sources for Jesus. The fact that traditional methods and models are highly problematic is not a new insight. Werner Kelber’s The Oral and the Written Gospel (1983) was bold and pioneering for many reasons, among them his criticism of the traditional model of literary dependence and the traditional methods of biblical studies that created it. Kelber’s book pushed scholars to start remapping the oral/scribal culture and consciousness that dominated the ancient world and to work [3.15.219.217] Project...

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