Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Beyond The Oral and the Written Gospels

1. Beyond Texts and Traditions: Werner Kelber’s Media History of Christian Origins

¢ 1 1 TOm ThaTcher BEYOND TEXTS AND TRADITIONS Werner Kelber’s media hisTOry Of chrisTian OriGins [T]he nature of the medium helps determine the form and kind of knowledge preserved. —Kelber 1983, 90 Our premise is furthest removed from the notion that language and different linguistic embodiments are comprehensible as neutral carriers of ideational freight. . . . [M]odes of communication were themselves potential embodiments of cognition and shapers of consciousness. —Kelber 1995a, 443 I am persuaded that the integration of issues such as speech and the oral matrix of chirographic life, media interfaces, and the human sensorium—issues that have clearly not been given their due—matters considerably for a more adequate, indeed different, understanding of our religious tradition. —Kelber 1995b, 163 In February of 1983, Werner Kelber released a short book with a long title andtheambitiousaimofexposingthemediadynamicsofearlyChristianity: The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q. Essentially, Oral and Written Gospel (OWG) sought to demonstrate that biblical scholars had overlooked a key element in their conceptions of early Christianity: the impact of communications media on the structure of life and thought. Of course, all scholars recognize that the extant written sources for Jesus were based on early Christian preaching, and that Paul’s letters were normally read aloud in community gatherings. Kelber, however, sought to show that the dynamics 2 Tom Thatcher of orality are so different from those of textuality—that speech is so different from writing—that the gospels cannot be viewed as the inevitable product of Jesus traditions and that Paul’s theology cannot be comprehended apart from his media milieu. Rather, when viewed from the perspective of first-century media culture, the books of the New Testament are best understood as attempts to harness and control the forces of orality. Obviously, any thesis so sweeping cannot be met with indifference, and Kelber’s claims immediately drew criticism as well as praise.1 But while many of the specific points of OWG have been disputed, time has shown that the book was a milestone in biblical studies, significant less for the answers it gave than for the questions it raised. Most substantially, OWG dared to ask what would happen if scholars began to wrestle with the fact that the early Christian documents (canonical and noncanonical) were written in a media milieu very different from our own, a world where orality was the dominant mode of cognition and communication, and no more than ten percent of the population could read (see Bar-Ilan 1992, 54–55; Harris 1989, 1–24; Hezser 2001, 496). The present volume seeks to assess the state of research into this question at the twenty-fifth anniversary of OWG’s publication and to point the way to future avenues of exploration. This introduction will contextualize the programmatic essays to follow by surveying several major themes of Werner Kelber’s research. In both OWG and subsequent essays, Kelber has focused on three sets of interrelated issues, each of which represents a distinct theme in the recent study of the media dynamics of early Christianity. First, Kelber has discussed in detail the hermeneutics of speaking and writing, and the interfaces between them, on a theoretical level. Oral and written words generate and communicate meaning in different ways, and the implications of these differences are significant for our understandings of speech and texts. Second, Kelber has applied his theoretical model to a variety of issues in Christian origins and to developmental trajectories in the history of Western thought. These first two facets of Kelber’s work intersect in his sophisticated readings of the gospels, Paul, and noncanonical Christian texts (most notably Q and the Gospel of Thomas). Taken as a whole, Kelber’s exegetical studies, beginning with OWG and continuing to the present time, have gradually taken the form of a media history of Christian origins.2 Third, building on his media model, Kelber frequently critiques conventional conclusions of biblical scholarship. In these moments, Kelber calls for sweeping changes in both the methods and anticipated results of form criticism, source criticism , and the study of the historical Jesus. Beyond Texts and Traditions 3 The remainder of this essay will review Kelber’s conclusions in each of these three areas: the hermeneutics of orality and writing, the media history of Christian origins, and the inevitable clash between a media-sensitive approach and traditional text-based...