Are We "Misreading" Paul?: Oral Phenomena and Their Implication for the Exegesis of Paul's Letters

Introduction

A critical approach toward oral rhetorical qualities and styles can be traced as far back as Quintilian,¹ if not before. Inquiry into the orality of Homer dates as far back as Josephus, but the work of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord stands out in particular. Parry and Lord studied South Slavic poetry in an attempt to answer the Homeric question that addresses the authorship of the major Greek epics.² Their research has alerted modern readers that the ancients did not receive a written message in the same way the modern readers do.³ These theories are absolutely essential foundations for any Pauline letter.⁴ Like the Greek epics, letters were verbally mediated, as the discussion below will indicate. A brief survey of both non-biblical and biblical scholarship on this matter will reveal varying insights, as well as implications for an improvement of rhetorical studies and general exegesis of Pauline letters. At the very least, the exegetical assumption of the interpreter must accommodate orality in Paul's society.

Theories

As early as 1930, Martin Buber, along with his colleague Franz Rosenzweig, began to think about the "spoken" instead of the "written" Bible in their biblical translation.⁵ In a desire to improve Luther's translation, they argued that neither theology nor politics should be the guiding principle in biblical translation. Rather, the aesthetic sense, or the "rhyme" and "rhythm" of the words themselves, should inform the final translation. Such a proper aural sense in translation should "speak" to the human heart, as it did thousands of years ago in the biblical world (Buber and Rosenzweig 1994:215-18, 76). As part of their translation strategy, they sought to excavate the "sensory and concrete" rather than the lexical meaning in the Hebrew Bible (179-81). Buber recorded Rosenzweig's stark (perhaps too stark for some) comment before their joint translation effort: "Only when it is translated back into orality does it suit my stomach" (211). In spite of Buber and Rosenzweig's strong declaration, biblical scholars paid little attention to orality theories in their interpretive process until the latter part of the twentieth century.

Among non-biblical scholars, Walter J. Ong's observation on the psychodynamics of orality has continued to shape the older model. Regarding the importance of sound and silence, he gives a helpful description of the audible nature of speech. As Ong puts it, "in a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for oral recurrence. Your thought must come into being in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns in repetitions or antitheses, in assonance and alliterations" (1982:34).⁶ Ong makes a final observation that oral cultures are "practical" rather than "theoretical" (idem).⁷

Among biblical scholars, those of the Uppsala School were pioneers in this field by noting the diachronic development of culture through folklore studies and by maintaining that diachronic gap between ancient and modern cultures.⁸ This school of thought formulated a different set of queries within the biblical text. One particularly useful and interesting work on the Hebrew Bible is Susan Niditch's Oral World and Written Word, in which she combines the aforementioned theories from scholars studying folklore and literacy in order to interpret the Bible (1996:117-30). She has special interest in how folklore is compared with the Bible, not in terms of religious or moral authority but in terms of the characteristics of orality. Although her work does not equate the Bible with folklore, she focuses first on the various oral patterns in the Hebrew Bible, which in turn reveals different types of compositional styles. From different texts, she finds different models of composition.⁹ Niditch's work is beneficial primarily because she takes orality scholar Ruth Finnegan's (1988) pluralistic model seriously and formulates her own work accordingly.

One significant contribution to the recent scholarship on the letters of Paul is C. W. Davis' Oral Biblical Criticism (1999), which applies a long-overdue oral theoretical application to Pauline literature...