Rafael Rodríguez, PhD Speaking of Jesus: “Oral Tradition” beyond the Form Critics

rrodriguez@jbc.edu SECSOR (March 2011)

Johnson Bible College (Knoxville, TN) Louisville, KY

[1] SPEAKING OF JESUS: “ORAL TRADITION” BEYOND THE FORM CRITICS

1. INTRODUCTION: THE REVOLUTION AROUND US

In 1983 Werner Kelber published his seminal volume, [2] The Oral and the Written Gospel,

which sought—perhaps for the first time among NT critics—to think about the adjective oral as

rather larger than simply a medium of communication. He recognized that [2a] oral tradition

encompassed much more than simply another source lurking behind our extant written texts and

had the potential to call into question the processes by which we read and understand the written

texts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.1

This idea might not have been new in 1983, but it was revolutionary. We can find recog-

nitions of orally expressed tradition before, behind, or between written gospels from the very be-

ginning of critical gospels scholarship. Though there are historical antecedents that predate NT

form criticism, the form critics first highlighted the earliest Jesus tradition prior to its expression

in written gospels. [3] Martin Dibelius sought to show “with what objective the first churches

recounted stories about Jesus, passed them from mouth to mouth as independent narratives, or

copied them from papyrus to papyrus” (1935:v; my emphasis). Rudolf Bultmann also admitted

oral tradition in the history of the synoptic tradition, though the admission did him no good.2

[4] Therefore, when Kelber launched his quest for “the oral gospel,” he was heir to an

impressive scholarly legacy. But whereas previous scholarship envisioned the pre-gospel oral

tradition as an extension (or perhaps a pre-tension) of the written tradition, Kelber began with a

fundamental disjunction between oral and written traditions. As the earliest written gospel, Mark,

1
This, I think, represents the greatest strength of Kelber’s work, despite serious weaknesses at other places.
2
In his discussion of “the materials and the task” of form criticism (1963:1–7), Bultmann explains his in-
difference to the question of media: “[I]t is at this point a matter of indifference whether the tradition were oral or
written, because on account of the unliterary character of the material one of the chief differences between oral and
written traditions is lacking” (6). He does not, however, explain in this context which “chief differences” he has in
mind, and especially which is lacking “on account of the unliterary character” of the written gospels.
 Rodríguez 2

in Kelber’s view, stands over and against the oral gospel; that is, he “force[d] the polarity of oral-

ity versus textuality” (1997:xxi). Unlike his predecessors, [4a] Kelber’s conceptualization of “or-

ality” asserted itself in his reading of written texts, and this was his major innovation. In light of

the explosion of the influence of media-critical scholarship since 1983, we may be justified in

speaking of a “Kelber Revolution” in biblical studies.3

[5] This paper proposes that contemporary media-critical biblical scholarship foster an

abrupt rupture with its form-critical heritage.4 [6] My plan is a simple one. [6a] After a brief ex-

amination of form-critical influence even over Kelber’s work, I will propose [6b] three areas of

distinction where, despite apparent and superficial similarities, the old form critics and the new

media critics actually engage very different research agenda: [6c] (i) the conception of oral tradi-

tion in form- and media-critical perspective; [6d] (ii) the use of evolutionary trajectories to re-

cover oral tradition; and [6e] (iii) the interface of oral and written expressions of tradition.

[7] 2. FORM-CRITICAL INFLUENCES ON CONTEMPORARY INQUIRY

By the close of the twentieth century gospels scholarship had largely moved beyond form-critical

methods and concerns. Even so, form criticism continues to exert influence over contemporary

NT scholarship. Due to the nature of this paper I provide only one example here. [8] Chris Keith

and Tom Thatcher frame Kelber’s thesis that Mark created the genre, “passion narrative,” as “a

3
To name only a few examples, see (i) the output of the SBL section, Bible in Ancient and Modern Media,
including two Semeia volumes (Silberman 1987; Dewey 1995), and (ii) the re-evaluation of memory and oral tradi-
tion among Jesus historians (e.g., Dunn 2003; Bauckham 2006; Allison 2010). In addition, two unrelated volumes
celebrate Kelber’s work (Horsley, Draper, et al. 2006; Thatcher 2008), and he has been an important voice in cele-
brating the work of other media critics (e.g., Birger Gerhardsson [see Kelber 2009] and Antoinette Clark Wire [see
Kelber 2010]). Similar work rages among Hebrew Biblical and Judaic scholarship.
4
Ironically, one of the few voices calling for NT scholarship to forsake its form-critical heritage is Walter
Schmithals (1997), though he rejects full-stop the notion of an oral Jesus tradition. I certainly do not share
Schmithals’s motivation for abandoning form criticism’s methods and results.
 Rodríguez 3

rebellion against earlier form-critical models” (2008:198).5 [8a] Keith and Thatcher note two

objections to the form critics: [8b] (i) the equiprimordiality of every utterance of the Jesus

tradition, and [8c] (ii) the lack of evidence for the performance of connected narratives among

the earliest Christians (2008:200). [8d] This first objection opposes head-on the form-critical

model of early Christian traditioning.6

[8e] Kelber’s second objection, however, actually depends upon and extends a form-

critical perspective. In a move reminiscent of Bultmann himself (1963:2), Kelber suggests that

[9] “Mark imposed his writing authority upon an unorganized oral lore” (1983:79; my empha-

sis). He assumes the Jesus tradition existed as independent, disconnected units prior to the writ-

ing of Mark’s gospel; [10] “they are anything but fragmented pieces in need of integration. . . .

All are autonomous stories, and none are designed to build up a project of Markan proportions.”

To be sure, Kelber argues from his media-critical perspective of the “natural state of oral affairs”

rather than from NT scholarship’s form-critical heritage. Even so, when he describes Mark’s writ-

ten gospel as a [11] “lining up of single stories and sayings” (1983:79), the reader could be for-

given for thinking of Mark as a string of pearls.7

5
For this reason, Keith and Thatcher provide a brief summary of the origins of the passion narrative in
form-critical perspective (see 2008:198–200).
6
E. P. Sanders effectively demolished any confidence we might put in developmental laws of the tradition:
“There are no hard and fast laws of the development of the Synoptic tradition. On all counts the tradition developed
in opposition directions. It became both longer and shorter, both more and less detailed, and both more and less Se-
mitic. Even the tendency to use direct discourse for indirect, which was uniform in the post-canonical material
which we studied, was not uniform in the Synoptics themselves. For this reason, dogmatic statements that a certain
characteristic proves a certain passage to be earlier than another are never justified” (1969:272; original italics).
7
The difference between Kelber’s and Schmidt’s strings of pearls, of course, is that Kelber attributes trans-
formative significance to the act of stringing together (cf. Schmidt 1919:281). There is some irony here; Richard
Horsley lauds Kelber as “a pioneer . . . one of the first to explore the Gospel of Mark as a plotted narrative, not a
mere ‘string of beads’” (2006:viii). Kelber may in fact endorse a narrative reading of Mark, but this endorsement
masks agreement with the form critics that the pre-gospel Jesus tradition consisted of discrete, autonomous units
(pericopae) lacking interconnectivity.
 Rodríguez 4

[12] 3. THREE NEW-ISH IDEAS IN CONTEMPORARY BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP

The abiding influence of form-critical conceptions of the Jesus tradition and Christian origins

even in Kelber’s iconoclastic application of media criticism to Mark, Q, and Paul attests the

gravity of such figures as Bultmann and Dibelius over subsequent scholarship. For the remainder

of this paper I want to focus on three specific points of contrast between twentieth-century form-

critical gospels scholarship and twenty-first-century media-critical research into Christian ori-

gins.

[13] 3.1. Conceiving “Oral Tradition”

Gospels scholars of the early- and mid-twentieth century conceptualized oral tradition primarily

as a source behind various sayings or narratives in our written texts. For example, B. H. Streeter

accepted that the appeal to oral tradition best accounted for “those cases where the degree of ver-

bal resemblance between the parallel passages is small” (1924:184). Streeter also allowed that

scholars could account for certain traditional forms, for example proverbs, as oral tradition even

if they “occur[red] in almost identically the same form in two Gospels” (1924:185). Though the

transmission of these two types of oral tradition—fluid, malleable tradition, on the one hand, and

stable, proverbial tradition, on the other—differed greatly, scholars conceived them similarly: as

singular points of origin that, eventually, led to our written texts.

[14] The form critics also understood oral tradition and its transmission to the evangelists

in rather singular terms (see Taylor 1933:29). In fact, such a singular conception of oral tradition

is a sine qua non of form-critical inquiry. At its heart, form criticism conceives oral tradition as

“square one,” as the originating point that eventually leads to the form of the traditions recorded

in our gospels. [14a] The form critics supposed that the gospel stories slowly and steadily pro-

gressed through “different stages on the stream of Gospel tradition” (Taylor 1933:125).
 Rodríguez 5

Form criticism still occupied a strong position within NT scholarship when this way of

conceiving oral tradition passed into obsolescence. [15] In 1960 Albert Lord published his semi-

nal work, The Singer of Tales, which engaged a comparative analysis of the oral composition of

Yugoslavian oral epic and the written remains of Homeric epic tradition.8 Lord saw more clearly

than the form critics that the question of oral tradition required opening up the possibility that

oral verbal art operated in strikingly different terms than its written counterpart.

[15a] Whereas the singer thinks of his song in terms of a flexible plan of themes, some of
which are essential and some of which are not, we think of it as a given text which un-
dergoes change from one singing to another. . . . [16] His idea of stability, to which he is
deeply devoted, does not include the wording, which to him has never been fixed, nor the
unessential parts of the story. He builds his performance, or song in our sense, on the sta-
ble skeleton of narrative, which is the song in his sense. (1960:99; my emphasis)

This kind of tradition presents us with problems, largely because, [17] “unlike the oral poet, we

are not accustomed to thinking in terms of fluidity. We find it difficult to grasp something that is

multiform” (Lord 1960:100). The form critics thought of oral tradition in disconnected, episodic,

autonomous terms. Differences between stories represented “different stages on the stream of

Gospel tradition” (Taylor 1933:125; cited above). Oral tradition, then, exhibited a certain insta-

bility because it changed in the process of transmission until, eventually, it took on the stability

afforded by the written medium. Lord, however, conceived of oral tradition not as unstable but

as fluid, as multiform. [18] The tradition is neither precarious nor tenuous by virtue of varying

8
Lord focused almost myopically on the phenomenon of spontaneous composition (“composition-in-
performance”) of lengthy epic tradition, and especially on the morphological utility of formulaic phrases for the
composition of metrical epic poetry by illiterate traditional singers. The Singer of Tales opened up a new field for
analyzing traditions spanning centuries and encircling the globe. (See Finnegan 1990, as well as the extensive anno-
tated bibliography in Foley 1985, which is available and updated at http://www.oraltradition.org/hrop/bibliography.)
Unfortunately, his emphasis on (i) composition, and (ii) formulaic language has been misapplied to the gospel tradi-
tion (see, e.g., Lord 1978; Hurtado 1997 is especially critical of Kelber 1983 in this regard).
 Rodríguez 6

across multiple performances; rather than an aberration, the tradition’s variability is itself a hall-

mark of oral tradition!9

[19] The form critics thought of oral tradition as a source lying behind the written synop-

tic gospels, akin to Q or Ur-Markus.10 In contemporary scholarship, however, “oral tradition” no

longer refers to content but rather to the social conventions, rhetorical structures, and traditional

patterns that enabled and constrained people as they spoke about the world, God/the gods, the

past, or whatever. [19a] “Oral poetry is not a ‘thing’ but a process, not a set of discrete items but

an interactive way of speaking” (Foley 2002:127). Consequently, we should study oral tradition

grammatically, by pursuing the patterns and rules according to which people construct meaning-

ful statements, rather than (or in addition to) lexically, by examining the contents of such mean-

ingful statements. [19b] This is the import of Kelber’s insight that tradition in oral expression is

equiprimordial.11 [19c] Because the tradition has not yet crystallized into canonical form, each

performance results in an original form, related to previous as well as subsequent performances

by virtue of embodying the tradition itself rather than by linear, evolutionary development. As a

consequence—and here’s the point to be pressed—[20] contemporary media critics pursue fun-

damentally different phenomena than did the form critics. Both refer to oral tradition, but the

similarities end there.

[21] 3.2. Plotting Christian Tradition

Already in 1983 Werner Kelber objected vociferously to the linear, evolutionary concept of the

tradition’s development from an original form into the synoptic tradition, especially as that

9
Gregory Nagy (1996:107) updates Lord’s insight: “Multiformity, as conveyed by poludeukḗs ‘patterning
in many different ways’, the variant epithet describing the sound of the nightingale in Odyssey 19.521, is a key con-
cept in understanding poetry as performance in ancient Greece.” John Miles Foley identifies oral tradition’s multi-
formity as “the root perception underlying” late-twentieth-century oral-traditional research (1995a:2) and “the life-
blood of oral tradition” (1995a:75).
10
For a similar conception of oral tradition in a recent media-critical analysis, see Zimmermann 2010.
11
See Kelber 1995:151; 2005:237; 2010:75–82.
 Rodríguez 7

model informed Bultmann’s form-critical analysis and Gerhardsson’s reaction against it

(1983:1–43). Nevertheless, the evolutionary model of the development of the tradition along tra-

jectories continues to exert influence over NT scholarship. As recently as 2009, [21a] Anthony Le

Donne proposed a revision to historiographical approaches to Jesus research that takes nuanced

and sophisticated account of social memory research. [21b] At the heart of Le Donne’s proposal

lies the insight that “memory is distortion” (2009:51), though Le Donne prefers the term “mem-

ory refraction” to refer to the ways that memory takes up and expresses the past. In my view, the

most helpful and insightful aspects of Le Donne’s work are his synchronic analyses of any given

moment of early Christian tradition.12

[22] However, Le Donne moves from his synchronic analyses of specific moments of

tradition to develop a diachronic model of historiography. [22a] Le Donne “allows a charting of

memory trajectories that can be measured and triangulated. In this way my ultimate purpose is to

postulate the plausible perception that gave rise to a particular memory (or memories)”

(2009:70).13 In this regard Le Donne highlights memory’s continuity: “In order for successive

memory refractions to be thought of as a ‘trajectory,’ there is little room for dramatic refractions”

(2009:72). While I agree that memory exhibits, under normal circumstances, striking continuity

through time,14 Le Donne’s model does not make provision for the unpredictability of the ways

in which memory adapts and refracts previous memories.

[23] I propose a different model, one consonant with the grammatical analysis of oral tra-

dition mentioned above, for which I turn to Tom Thatcher’s brief discussion of [23a] temporal

12
Similarly helpful is Zimmermann’s discussion of “the tradition-giving function” (2010:133–34).
13
To be fair, Le Donne is not claiming (or attempting) to recover wie es eigentlich gewesen; “the aim is not
to postulate what an unrefracted memory probably looked like, but to postulate what an early refracted memory
probably looked like” (2009:70).
14
See Schwartz 1991 for a discussion of the recognizability of images of George Washington across peri-
ods of significant social change.
 Rodríguez 8

versus spatial understandings of plot (1997). The former “involves the linear organization of

events in narrative time,” while the latter, which “also involves organization, [is] not linear. In

this vein one might speak of a ‘plot’ of ground, where ‘plot’ represents the space inside a two-

dimensional matrix of points on a grid” (1997:401). The former model enabled historians of

Christian origins to simply continue their straight lines connecting extant written texts further

back behind our earliest written source and to imagine that, by so doing, they have arrived at “an

earlier stage of the tradition than appears in our sources” (Bultmann 1963:6; cited above). [23b]

Oral traditional multiforms (or, for NT scholars, oral-derived texts; see the next section), how-

ever, refuse the sequential ordering and diachronic analysis at the heart of linear, evolutionary

models of development.15

A grammatical analysis of the extant written texts, however, does not aim to recover how

an idea evolved from earlier to later texts (and so to reconstruct how that same idea developed

before its earlier textual expression). Instead, a grammatical analysis of oral traditional multi-

forms sets those multiforms alongside one another in order to throw into sharper relief how a

performance of the tradition actualized specific potentials and possibilities enabled by the social

conventions, rhetorical structures, and traditional patterns that made speaking about the past pos-

sible in the first place. [24] In Structuring Early Christian Memory, I appealed to Ferdinand de

Saussure’s differentiation between la langue (an abstract system of linguistic features constrain-

15
See Kelber 1995:148: “When Jesus pronounced a saying at one place, and subsequently chose to deliver
it elsewhere, neither he nor his hearers could have perceived this other rendition as a secondhand version of the first
one. Each saying was an autonomous speech act. And when the second rendition, delivered before a different audi-
ence, was at variance with the first one, neither the speaker nor his hearers would have construed a difference be-
tween the literal, original wording and its derivative (Lord 1960:101, 152). No one saying was elevated to the privi-
leged position of ipsissima verba at the expense of any other saying. Without a trajectory to invite comparative
thought, each saying constituted an original act and an authentic intention.”
 Rodríguez 9

ing and enabling individual utterances) and les paroles (individual utterances).16 [24a] “A lin-

guistic system does not exist apart from its actualizations in concrete, individual utterances, but

that system transcends and contextualizes individual utterances. So it is with the Jesus tradition

and its actualization in performance” (Rodríguez 2010:86).

Over fifteen years ago Kelber encouraged precisely this kind of thinking about “tradi-

tion,” though without the Sassurean metaphor: “[W]e must learn to think of a large part of tradi-

tion as an extratextual phenomenon” (1995:159; my emphasis). [25] Instead of a source inform-

ing the contents of first-century Christian textual remains, [25a] “tradition” in media-critical per-

spective refers to the context informing the texts’ composition as well as their performance and

reception. Here the term context refers to the diachronic experience of the tradition itself. [26] In

a brilliant if awkward metaphor, Kelber describes tradition as [26a] “a circumambient contextu-

ality or biosphere in which speaker and hearers live. It includes texts and experiences transmitted

through or derived from texts. But it is anything but reducible to intertextuality” (1995:159).

Foley approves of and expands Kelber’s metaphor, warning of the consequences when we ne-

glect the omnipresence of tradition and proceed instead along reconstructed trajectories:

[27] Within this biosphere, in other words, no event—no matter how singular it may ap-
pear at the time—ever really occurs out of context; each work of verbal art is nourished
by an ever-impinging set of unspoken but implicitly articulated assumptions shared
among the discourse community. To remove the event from the biosphere of tradition is
therefore [28] to sap its cognitive lifeblood, to deprive it of very obvious potential for
conveying meaning, to silence the echoes that reverberate through it (and its fellow
performances or works) under the aegis of its immanent context. (Foley 1995b:171)

[29] Both metaphors—tradition-as-biosphere and tradition-as-langue—obviate any attempt to set

side-by-side two or more individual instances of the tradition in an attempt to reconstruct histori-

cal trajectories that both explain the extant data and enable us to reconstruct forms of the tradi-

16
To be clear, I am importing the ideas of la langue and les paroles analogically; neither Saussurean lin-
guistics nor structuralist theory in general inform my analytical perspective.
 Rodríguez 10

tion predating our data. Whereas the form critics brought multiple expressions of a particular tra-

dition together to reconstruct developmental trajectories, [30] contemporary media critics see in

the tradition’s multiforms an indication of the flexibility and variability of a vibrant and living

tradition, whether that tradition finds expression in oral or written media. This leads us directly

into our third and final point.

[31] 3.3. Writing Voices, Speaking Signs

Contemporary media critics have broadened their focus beyond source-critical issues to

consider how the ongoing oral Jesus tradition throughout the first century CE (and beyond) inter-

acted with the written gospel tradition. [32] John Miles Foley addresses “the rhetorical persis-

tence of traditional forms” in “oral-derived texts, that is, the text with roots in oral tradition”

(1995a:60).17 For our purposes, Foley’s most significant insight pertains to a “continuity of re-

ception” that bridges “the supposed gulf between oral traditional performance and manuscript

record” (1995a:75). Inasmuch as the written texts functioned within communities with robust

experience of and appreciation for the oral performance of Jesus tradition,18 those communities

do not appear to have apprehended the tradition entextualized in manuscript form as fossiliza-

tions or fixations of the tradition.

17
See Foley 1995a:60–98. Foley acknowledges two fundamental kinds of oral-derived texts, “texts that are
known to be direct transcriptions of oral performances and texts composed in writing but employing a traditional
oral register” (1995a:60, n. 1). While the precise relation between our written gospels and first-century oral Jesus
tradition will probably always elude us, I approach them as somewhere between these two categories, significantly
closer to texts-composed-in-writing than to transcriptions. See Rodríguez 2010:102–4.
18
See Luke 1.1–4, which speaks of many who have “compiled accounts” [ἀνατάξασθαι διήγησιν], which
activity seems to contextualize the Luke’s program of “writing” [γράψαι]. We cannot press the image of “setting
one’s hand” [ἐπιχειρέω] to restrict the evangelist’s meaning to “compiled written accounts”; see Acts 19.13, where
some Jews “set their hand to name the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits” [ἐπεχείρησαν . . .
ὀναµάζειν ἐπὶ τοὺς ἔχοντας τὰ πνεύµατα τὰ πονηρὰ τὸ ὄνοµα τοῦ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ]. Of course, the most famous refer-
ence to the early Christians’ appreciation for the tradition in oral performance comes from a fragment of Papias pre-
served by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. 3.39.1; see Alexander 1990; Holmes 2007:723; 734).
 Rodríguez 11

[33] Foley proposes a fourfold typology of oral-derived texts that reminds us to expand

our focus beyond the composition of written texts to consider also how those texts were accessed

(“performance”) and received by actual people (see Table 1).

composition: performance: reception:

Oral Performance: oral oral aural

Voiced Texts: written oral aural
Voices from the Past: oral/written oral/written aural/written
Written Oral Poems: written written written
Table 1: Foley's Typology of Oral and Written Traditional Verbal Art19

For various reasons I would identify the written gospels as [34] “Voices from the Past,”20 which

has a number of consequences. First, the evangelists’ written texts record traditions that they and

other oral tradents embodied in numerous and probably regular performances of the tradition.

Again, we shouldn’t expect to find records (or transcripts) of the oral Jesus tradition in our writ-

ten texts, but it seems comparatively less likely that any of the gospels or their sources radically

subverted the tradition they expressed (pace Kelber 1983). Second, the written texts continued to

facilitate the oral expression of the tradition. At the very least, the gospels were usually if not

always read aloud.21 In addition, without denying that the actual written texts were read aloud

before communal gatherings, I do find it likely that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and/or John were also

performed orally, without being read (at least, without being read as we understand “reading”).22

As a consequence, oral tradition is not simply that part of our reconstructed evolutionary

trajectories that precede our written evidence or their hypothetical textual sources. Still less is

oral tradition, as the form critics imagined, the individual, disconnected units (pericopae) of the

19
See Foley 2002:38–53; 2006:137.
20
See Rodríguez 2010:104–5; see also Foley 2006:137–38.
21
See Shiner 2003; the classic study is Achtemeier 1990.
22
See my discussion of Luke’s presentation of the image of Jesus reading an Isaiah scroll in Luke 4.16–21
(Rodríguez 2010:152–65).
 Rodríguez 12

Jesus tradition. Instead, [35] contemporary media-critical biblical scholarship begins with the

premise that oral tradition fundamentally transforms the way we apprehend the written remains

of early Christianity.

[36] 4. CONCLUDING REMARKS

Contemporary NT scholarship is recently enamored with issues of memory and oral tradition.

Time will tell whether this infatuation will fade like other scholarly fads or yield substantive and

lasting insights into Christian origins. But one thing is clear: [36a] If the current interest in media

criticism is to bear any significant and lasting fruit, it must unshackle itself from its form-critical

legacy, and this for at least three reasons:

[36b] First, the form critics meant something fundamentally different in their references
to oral tradition than do contemporary media critics. Formerly a source-critical concept,
oral tradition now refers to the discursive context framing our texts—their composition,
performance, and reception—in a word, their biosphere.

[36c] Second, the form critics approached oral tradition via a fundamentally different
analytical route than do contemporary media critics. Whereas form critics assumed evolu-
tionary dynamics, media critics bring multiforms of the tradition in line with one another
in order to get a sense of the plot-as-space bounded by the social conventions, rhetorical
structures, and traditional patterns that constrained and enabled meaningful expressions
of the stories about Jesus.

[36d] Third, the form critics accorded very little, if any, significance to the act of writing
the gospels. In contrast, contemporary media critics pay particularly close attention to
“the interface of orality and writing,”23 being especially sensitive to the ways that oral-
traditional dynamics framed the written texts as well as to the ways that writing affected
orally expressed tradition.24

The apparent similarities between form-critical research and media-critical scholarship are only

apparent; they rest on such divergent and disparate conceptual frameworks that any weight ex-

erted by the former on the latter can only dull the sharp edge of inquiry. [37]

23
See the studies in Weissenrieder and Coote 2010.
24
See, e.g., Thatcher 2006; Zimmermann 2010; this aspect of contemporary media-criticism is perhaps the
most difficult to sustain, primarily because of the ever-present danger of lapsing into conceiving oral and written
expressions of the tradition as fundamentally different things (the so-called Great Divide theory of media dynamics).
 Rodríguez 13

WORKS CITED

Achtemeier, Paul J.
1990 “Omne Verbum Sonat: The New Testament and the Oral Environment of Late
Western Antiquity.” JBL 109/1: 3–27.

Alexander, Loveday
1990 “The Living Voice: Scepticism towards the Written Word in Early Christian and
in Graeco-Roman Texts.” In The Bible in Three Dimensions: Essays in Celebra-
tion of Forty Years of Biblical Studies in the University of Sheffield. JSOTSup 87.
Edited by D. Clines, S. Fowl, and S. Porter. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
221–47.

Allison, Dale C., Jr.

2010 Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History. Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic.

Bauckham, Richard
2006 Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. Grand Rapids
and Cambridge: Eerdmans.

Bultmann, Rudolf
1963 History of the Synoptic Tradition. Trans. by John Marsh. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
2000 Story as History—History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of An-
cient Oral History. WUNT 123. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Dewey, Joanna (ed.)

1995 Orality and Textuality in Early Christian Literature. Semeia, 65. Atlanta: Schol-
ars Press.

Dibelius, Martin
1935 From Tradition to Gospel. Trans. by Bertram Lee Woolf. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons.

Dunn, James D. G.
2003 Jesus Remembered. Christianity in the Making, 1. Grand Rapids and Cambridge:
Eerdmans.

Finnegan, Ruth
1990 “What is Orality—if Anything?” BMGS 14: 130–49.

Foley, John Miles

1985 Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research: An Introduction and Annotated Bibliogra-
phy. New York: Garland.
1995a The Singer of Tales in Performance. Voices in Performance and Text. Blooming-
ton and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
 Rodríguez 14

1995b “Words in Tradition, Words in Text: A Response.” In Orality and Textuality in

Early Christian Literature. Semeia 65. Edited by J. Dewey. Atlanta: Scholars
Press, 169–80.
2002 How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
2006 “The Riddle of Q: Oral Ancestor, Textual Precedent, or Ideological Creation?” In
Oral Performance, Popular Tradition, and Hidden Transcript in Q. Edited by R.
A. Horsley. Atlanta: SBL, 123–40.

Holmes, Michael W.
2007 The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. Third edition.
Grand Rapids: Baker Academic.

Horsley, Richard A.
2006 “Introduction.” In Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark. Edited by
R. Horsley, J. Draper, and J. M. Foley. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, vii–xvi.

Horsley, Richard A., Jonathan A. Draper, and John Miles Foley (eds.)
2006 Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark. Essays Dedicated to Werner
Kelber. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Hurtado, Larry W
1997 “Greco-Roman Textuality and the Gospel of Mark: A Critical Assessment of
Werner Kelber’s The Oral and the Written Gospel.” IBR 7: 91–106.

Keith, Chris and Tom Thatcher

2008 “The Scar of the Cross: The Violence Ratio and the Earliest Christian Memories
of Jesus.” In Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Beyond The Oral and the Written
Gospel. Edited by T. Thatcher. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 197–214.

Kelber, Werner H.
1983 The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in
the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Repub-
lished with a new introduction in the series, Voices in Performance and Text.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press [1997].
1995 “Jesus and Tradition: Words in Time, Words in Space.” In Orality and Textuality
in Early Christian Literature. Semeia 65. Edited by J. Dewey. Atlanta: Scholars
Press, 139–67.
1997 “Introduction.” In The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speak-
ing and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, xix–xxxi.
2005 “The Works of Memory: Christian Origins as MnemoHistory—A Response.” In
Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity. Semeia
Studies 52. Edited by A. Kirk and T. Thatcher. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Litera-
ture, 221–48.
2009 “Conclusion: The Work of Birger Gerhardsson in Perspective.” In Jesus in Mem-
ory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives. Edited by W. Kelber and S.
Byrskog. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 173–206.
 Rodríguez 15

2010 “The History of the Closure of Biblical Texts.” In The Interface of Orality and
Writing: Speaking, Seeing, Writing in the Shaping of New Genres. WUNT 260.
Edited by A. Weissenrieder and R. Coote. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010, 71–99.

Le Donne, Anthony
2009 The Historiographical Jesus: Memory, Typology, and the Son of David. Waco,
Tex.: Baylor University Press.

Lord, Albert B.
1960 The Singer of Tales. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24. Cambridge,
Mass., and London: Harvard University Press.
1978 “The Gospels as Oral Traditional Literature.” In The Relationships among the
Gospels: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. Edited by W. O. Walker. San Antonio,
Tex.: Trinity University Press, 33–91.

Nagy, Gregory
1996 Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond. Cambridge and New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.

Rodríguez, Rafael
2010 Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance and Text.
European Studies on Christian Origins. LNTS 407. London and New York: T&T
Clark.

Sanders, E. P.
1969 The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition. SNTSMS 9. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Schmidt, Karl Ludwig

1919 Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu. Berlin: Trowitzsch.

Schmithals, Walter
1997 “Vom Ursprung der synoptischen Tradition.” ZTK 94: 288–316.

Schwartz, Barry
1991 “Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Wash-
ington.” ASR 56/2: 221–36.

Shiner, Whitney
2003 Proclaiming the Gospel: First Century Performance of Mark. Harrisburg, Penn.:
Trinity Press International.

Silberman, Lou H. (ed.)

1987 Orality, Aurality, and Biblical Narrative. Semeia, 39. Decatur, GA: Scholars
Press.

Streeter, Burnett H.
1924 The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins. London: Macmillan and Co.
 Rodríguez 16

Taylor, Vincent
1933 The Formation of the Gospel Tradition. London: Macmillan and Co.

Thatcher, Tom
1997 “The Plot of Gal 3:1–18.” JETS 40/3: 401–10.
2006 Why John WROTE a Gospel: Jesus, Memory, History. Louisville, Ky.: Westmin-
ster John Knox.
2008 Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Beyond The Oral and the Written Gospel. Waco,
Tex.: Baylor University Press.

Weissenrieder, Annette and Robert B. Coote (eds.)

2010 The Interface of Orality and Writing: Speaking, Seeing, Writing in the Shaping of
New Genres. WUNT 260. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Zimmermann, Ruben
2010 “Memory and Form Criticism: The Typicality of Memory as a Bridge between
Orality and Literality in the Early Christian Remembering Process.” In The Inter-
face of Orality and Writing: Speaking, Seeing, Writing in the Shaping of New
Genres. WUNT 260. Edited by A. Weissenrieder and R. Coote. Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2010, 130–43.