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¢ 27 2 Werner h. Kelber and TOm ThaTcher “IT’S NOT EASY TO TAKE A FRESH APPROACH” reflecTiOns On THE ORAL AND THE WRITTEN GOSPEL (an inTervieW WiTh Werner Kelber) In the conceptual phase of the present volume, I (Tom Thatcher) met with Werner Kelber to discuss Kelber’s current views on key issues in the media culture of early Christianity and also his reactions to various criticisms of his work. A transcript of this conversation follows. The abbreviation OWG throughout refers to Kelber’s The Oral and the Written Gospel (1983).¢ ¢ ¢ Thatcher: Professor Kelber, let’s begin with a general overview of your current thinking about the differences between oral words and written texts. I’ll throw out a few questions and/or statements, and you can respond to them however you like. First, in the most general sense, how does oral speech work? And how do written words work differently from oral words? What’s the essential, critical difference between the two? In the same vein, in your earlier work you focused on the divide between orality and literacy, but more recently you’ve added a third element to the discussion, what you call “scribality/chirography.” It seems that there are three issues here or three modes of communication that we need to account for: oral speech, chirographs, and mechanical type. What are the essential differences between these different modes of communication? Kelber: In the oral medium of communication, the verbalization takes place face to face, person to person. Spoken words are not visible or permanent in any material sense of the word. Walter Ong stressed this point many times: words transpire at the moment of speaking, and their continued existence is retained only in the mind, the heart, and the memory. 28 Werner H. Kelber and Tom Thatcher There is therefore a sense of union, an essential union, between speaker, audience, and words transacted in each performance. But the act of performance changes when scribality is introduced: it is changed by the scribal medium. For now the writer is distant from the audience, and the audience is no longer a direct participant in the performance. The writer does not feel the pressure of the audience, who are always there with the oral performer. Also, we must stress that written words take on a new visual authority that it is impossible to conceive of in orality. Impossible. This is a basic and totally elementary statement about these two media [orality and writing]. Going further ahead now to the question of scribality, and of mechanically –produced type. It is interesting to see that print media was a contributing factor, a factor that cannot be overrated, in the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, the Reformation. Here we see very essentially different processes of duplication coming into consideration. To copy a manuscript, scribes had to write laboriously, an exceptionally grueling task—note here that “manuscript” and “chirograph” both come from the words for “hand,” manus from the Latin and cheir from the Greek. The early texts were produced by hand by individuals. But mechanical type more easily produces an infinite number of copies, even more and more so as the technological processes were refined over time. The issue here is now the reproduction of identical copies, identical. Both the mechanism of production and the resultant identity of the copies are new with mechanical type: identical texts now existed in multiplicity for rapid dissemination across Europe and the Western world. The typographical medium, as a result of mechanization processes, makes each letter exactly the same in every document, thus creating an objectification of speech that words did not have—and never could have had—in manuscript culture. Hence, the sense of the authority of the biblical text increases, and at the same time we see the division of the text into paragraphs and chapters. This is, of course, aesthetically pleasing, but much more significant is the sense of power that is conveyed. Now the sacrality of the text, its religious authority, is further enhanced. Of course, many of the chirographs were also aesthetically pleasing, and Gutenberg himself used manuscripts as models when he produced his typographic characters. So I am not saying that the chirographs could not have a certain appeal in their appearance. But at the same time, the mechanically produced text gives the words a sense of perfection that is divine—that seems to be divine—so that the text itself more than ever before takes on divine authority...

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