Orality and Literacy VI: Literate authors of ancient texts

N. T. Wrong has posted on the Relative Unimportance of Oral Culture for Interpreting Biblical Books, reminding us of the fact that "Of those who wrote biblical books, the literacy rate was 100%". With the antibishop (thanks to Andrew Criddle for the term), there is always an enjoyable element of facetiousness, but his reminder about this blindingly obvious fact is actually a useful one because it forces us to think again about the role of the literate in a culture where there was widespread illiteracy, to come to terms with the role played by this elite. As Harry Gamble says,

In a community in which texts had a constitutive importance and only a few people were literate, it was inevitable that those who were able to explicate texts would acquire authority for that reason alone (Books and Readers, 9-10).

Moreover, as I have argued here (Orality and Literacy V: Illiterate Tradents), it is not just a question of taking literate authors of literary texts seriously. It is also a question of focusing on literate tradents. The idea of illiterate early Christian tradents remains problematic. Most of the tradents we know about were literate, and one of the earliest pieces of known tradition (1 Cor. 15.3-5) presupposes literate tradents and the importance of tradition interacting with what is written.

Now in that post, I did promise a note on Acts 4.13, where Peter and John are described as ἀγράμματοι, sometimes translated as "illiterate". Many commentators suggest that the word is more appropriately translated "uneducated" than "illiterate", not least because the same text, Acts, depicts Peter as quoting extensively, verbatim, from the Hebrew Bible (or perhaps more accurately here in Acts, the Septuagint). I make no presumption of historicity since it seems likely that Luke has composed those speeches; the point is that the author who depicts Peter and John as ἀγράμματοι in the same text also has them quoting their Scriptures verbatim. Therefore the likely meaning of the word, as Luke uses it, is "uneducated" and not "illiterate", and this verse does not provide a one-stop response to arguments in favour of the likelihood of literate tradents.

Orality and Literacy V: Illiiterate Tradents?

I hope that it is already apparent that I regard James D. G. Dunn's article, “Altering the Default Setting: Re-envisaging the Early Transmission of the Jesus Tradition,” New Testament Studies 49/2 (2003), 139-75, as a very important and challenging contribution to the discipline. His approach in this article is summarized effectively in the following paragraph:

In a word, we naturally, habitually and instinctively work within a literary paradigm. We are, therefore, in no fit state to appreciate how a non-literary culture, an oral culture, functions. And if we are to enter empathetically into such a culture it is essential that we become conscious of our literary paradigm and make deliberate efforts to step outside it and to free ourselves from its inherited predispositions. It becomes necessary to alter the default settings given by the literary shaped
software of our mental computers. (142; emphasis original).

In previous posts in this series, I have attempted to argue that Dunn is overstating the case for the extent of our immersion in a literary culture. He is offering a valuable corrective but it is a perspective that may need a little nuancing. What Dunn describes is not our broader culture but the rarefied atmosphere of the academic sub-culture. His characterization of "our print-determined default setting" (150) and the"blinkers of a mindset formed by our print-dominated heritage" suggests that he is not engaging with the secondary orality of our culture and is inclined to over-emphasize elements in the academic's experience of the world. In this post, however, I would like to begin to think a little more about the other element in Dunn's contrast, the "oral culture", the "non-literary culture" that he says informed Christian origins.

The description of the world in which early Christians moved as an "oral culture" may be unhelpful. It is a world more accurately characterized as one in which there was interaction between orality and literacy, a "rhetorical culture" to use the term coined by Vernon Robbins. It is my working hypothesis that Dunn underestimates the importance of literacy in emerging Christianity and I will attempt to explain why by focusing on one element in Dunn's article that is shared with other studies of early Christianity, the issue of literacy rates and their relevance to the development of the synoptic tradition.

Now, Dunn is surely right to remind us of the extent of illiteracy in in this period. Citing Harris and others, he says that "literacy in Palestine at the time of Jesus would probably have been less than 10 per cent" (148). But what is the relevance of this frequently made observation to the discussion of the Synoptic Problem and the transmission of Jesus tradition, the elements at the heart of Dunn's study? The Gospel authors were of course literate, so the issue of literacy rates appears to be focused on (a) the pre-gospel period and (b) the mindsets of and the communities in which the evangelists moved. But how important is that fact of widespread illiteracy in these areas? Dunn writes:

In my judgement, discussion of possible allusions to and use of the Jesus tradition, both within the NT epistles (Paul, James, 1 Peter), within the Apostolic Fathers, and now also within the Nag Hammadi texts, has been seriously flawed by overdependence on the literary paradigm. For if we are indeed talking about largely illiterate communities, dependent on oral tradition and aural knowledge of written documents, then we have to expect as the rule that knowledge of the Jesus tradition will have shared the characteristics of oral tradition. That is to say, the historical imagination, liberated from the literary default setting and tutored in regard to oral culture, can readily envisage communities familiar with their oral tradition, able to recognize allusions to Jesus tradition in performances of an apostolic letter written to them, and to fill in ‘the gaps of indeterminacy’ in other performances of that tradition. (169-70)

I am particularly interested in the words underlined in the passage. The assumption appears to be that the tradents were illiterate or that the illiterate community members were themselves acting as tradents. Perhaps this was the case but I am not sure that this is self evident. After all, "aural knowledge of written documents" presumes literate community members reading out these documents, something that will itself have invested those who were literate with a particular authority that could not be shared by those who were illiterate. Might the same have been true also of tradents more broadly, of those who were sharing oral traditions about Jesus? How many of the early Christian tradents were literate?

Let us take a moment to think about the early Christian tradents we actually know about. The most well known, Paul, was of course literate. His sharing of Jesus tradition in places like 1 Cor. 9, 1 Cor. 11 and 1 Cor. 15 is a case of a literate tradent sharing Jesus tradition with another literate tradent (the reader of the letter) who will then share that tradition with his or her hearers. Here we have a clear example of the kind of interaction between orality and literacy that characterizes the development of Christian origins, or, more specifically, between literate tradents and (presumably) illiterate hearers of the tradition. Presumably Apollos too was literate (e.g. Acts 18.24) and so were Silas, Timothy and, we would have thought, Phoebe, Barnabas, Prisca and Aquilla and many others. If we can trust Luke, it is broadly implied that James too is literate (Acts 15.20), and his importance in the emerging Christian movement (cf. Josephus, Ant. 20) may also suggest literacy.

It is reasonable to assume that such people were participating as literate tradents in a culture in which there was interaction between orality and literacy. But we can go a little further than this. The tradition itself presupposes literate tradents. In 1 Cor. 15.3-5, he presents what he has received as of first importance (i.e. major, early tradition) and which he also passed on to the Corinthians (παρέδωκα γὰρ ὑμῖν ἐν πρώτοις ὃ καὶ παρέλαβον), "that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures". The content of the tradition invokes what is written. It is difficult to imagine illiterate tradents having success with the sharing of material that itself presupposes literacy in this way.

Additional note 1: I have deliberately used the term "literate" in a generalized way of those who would be able to dictate a letter, or to read and understand writing. The meaning of "literacy" of course changes, and there are different kinds of literacy even today, and different degrees of competence. We too readily think of (the physical act of) writing when we talk about literacy, and one of the difficulties for us is to imagine our way into a culture where the educated did not need to be and usually were not good scribes. More too on this in due course.

Additional note 2: Before anyone else says it, what about Acts 4.13, where Peter and John are described as ἀγράμματοί? Does this mean "illiterate"? This post is long enough already, so I will add a comment on this verse in my next post in the series.

Orality and Literacy IV: Secondary Orality in Christian Origins Scholarship

In my previous post, Orality and Literacy III: Secondary Orality and Ong, I talked a little about the concept of "secondary orality" in its dominant usage in the guild. However, there has recently emerged another, different usage of the same term in scholarship on early Christian literature. April DeConick recently mentioned this in her post What is Secondary Orality? Having discussed "secondary orality" in its dominant usage, coined by Ong, she goes on:

Now what, if anything, does secondary orality have to do with oral-rhetorical cultures like the one we study? Here things get even more confusing. Scholars, including myself, have used this word to refer to possible moments when we think we see preserved in a piece of literature orality that is dependent on another piece of literature. An example? A saying in one of the gospels that is not literarily dependent on another piece of literature (that is, it hasn't been copied from one text into the other). Rather the author may have heard the saying read and is writing that down, or some such scenario.

April goes on to suggest that the new usage of the term is unhelpful -- "I wish we had never started using this term in this new way". But where did it begin? The earliest use of it in this sense that I can find is Werner Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: the Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), in the following places:

Obviously, orality derived from texts is not the same as primary orality, which operates without the aid of texts. The passion narrative is largely built on texts and texts recycled into the oral medium, that is, secondary orality. (197).

The gospel as parable exemplifies its delicate status in the ancient world of communication. As text, we observed, it absorbed and transformed oral speech into a new linguistic construct. But we also had occasion to suspect that the gospel—like most texts in antiquity—was meant to be read aloud and heard. The text appears to be torn between competing tendencies. How can it be both removed from and committed to orality? The categories of primary and secondary orality [italics original] will help clarify the matter. Those oral units that we previously discussed (chap. 2) constitute primary orality. They owe their very existence to oral verbalization. Insofar as they contributed to the building of the gospel, they underwent decontextualization and recontextualization (chap. 3). The resultant text, as all texts, is fixed and in a sense dead, permanently open [218] to visual inspection and the object of unceasing efforts at interpretation. If this text enters the world of hearers by being read aloud, it functions as secondary orality. But now the story narrated is one that was never heard in primary orality, for it comprises textually filtered and contrived language. (217-8).

Kelber's departure from Ong's use of the term "secondary orality" is self-conscious. In a footnote to the second of those two passages, he writes:

In communications theory secondary orality usually refers to electronically mediated sound. We would suggest a differentiation of three types of orality: primary orality, textually mediated or secondary orality, and electronically mediated or tertiary orality. (226, n.118)

As far as I can tell, the term "secondary orality" is first applied to the Gospel of Thomas's mediation of Synoptic tradition by Klyne Snodgrass, "The Gospel of Thomas: A Secondary Gospel", Second Century 7 (1989-90), 19-38, where he attempts to make clear that he is not talking about a kind of direct literary "copying" by Thomas of the Synoptics; instead, he suggests, Thomas is "witness of a 'secondary orality'" (28), footnoting Kelber for "the expression".

Snodgrass, however, only uses the term in passing. The scholar who develops the term most fully in relation to Thomas is Risto Uro, who also cites Haenchen for the concept, "Literatur zum Thomasevangelium", Theologische Rundschau 27 (1961), 147-78 (178), which of course predates Kelber. Uro's key article on the topic is "'Secondary Orality' in the Gospel of Thomas? Logion 14 as a Test Case", Forum 9:3-4 (305-29), reprinted as "Thomas and the Oral Gospel Tradition" in Risto Uro (ed.), (SNTW, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), 8-32. Like Kelber, Uro uses it in self-conscious differentiation from the standard usage in orality / literacy studies (see 10, n. 11 of the reprint), and it means the indirect dependence on the Synoptic Gospels mediated orally. For a further comment, see also Risto Uro, Thomas: Seeking the Historical Context of the Gospel of Thomas (London & New York: Continuum, 2003), Chapter 5, especially 109.

Most recently, April DeConick has used the term in the same sense. As far as I can tell, it does not appear in the first of her two major new volumes, Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas (Early Christianity in Context; LNTS 286; London & New York: T & T Clark, 2005), but it occurs fairly frequently in the second, The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation (Early Christianity in Context; LNTS 287; London & New York: T & T Clark, 2006). It occurs on 18, 21, 22, 24, 53, 89, 94, 111, 134, 140, 167, 169, 188, 194, 200, 201, 208, 215, 235, 261, 269, but on each occasion it is used as a convenient shorthand for oral mediation of Synoptic texts to Thomas. As I read it, there is not a lot invested in this term in the book, and April's recent comment on her blog, in which she expresses some scepticism about the term, may confirm this impression.

Given the more established use of the term in in oral and literacy studies, it may be that it is wise to drop the term in Christian origins (and especially Thomas) scholarship, where it may cause confusion. The question that then arises is whether there are other ways of conceptualizing the kind of indirect, oral mediation of a tradition from one text to another. I would like to make some suggestions on this topic in due course.

Orality and Literacy III: Secondary Orality and Ong

In an interesting post on Forbidden Gospels Blog, April DeConick responds to an element in my post Orality and Literacy II: Clarifying the Critique of Dunn by asking the question What is Secondary Orality?. One of the encouraging things about this discussion is that it continues to anticipate things I was hoping to discuss in my current series on Orality and Literacy. See also Loren Rosson's Busybody post Back to Oral Culture II and Judy Redman's useful contribution Orality and Literacy. April helpfully discusses two quite different meanings of "secondary orality" in the scholarship, the one established by Walter Ong, for whom "The electronic age is also an age of 'secondary orality', the orality of telephones, radio, and television, which depends on writing and print for its existence" (Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London; New York: Methuen, 1982), 3), and the other one that has become common in Christian origins scholarship in reference to an author's indirect, oral familiarity with a prior text. The latter is particularly associated with Gospel of Thomas scholarship where scholars occasionally appeal to the author's familiarity with the Synoptic Gospels through a process of secondary orality, as opposed to direct literary dependence. In this post, I would like to talk a little about secondary orality in the first of those two senses, the sense established by Ong, and I will go on to discuss the other use of secondary orality in my next post.

Walter Ong was prescient in his realization of the emerging importance of secondary orality, something he was already discussing in 1971 (Rhetoric, Romance and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), Chapter 12, especially 299), but the generation that separates us from Ong's important studies has demonstrated an explosion in secondary orality of the kind that he could hardly have imagined. When Ong conceptualizes secondary orality, his list of electronic devices now naturally looks dated. The following statement is typical:

. . . the 'secondary orality' of present-day high-technology culture, in which a new orality is sustained by telephone, radio, television and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print (Orality and Literacy, 11)

"Telephone, radio, television and other electronic devices" -- the computer revolution has hardly dawned. When, twelve years later, Robert Fowler (in the essay mentioned by Loren Rosson) is exploring "How the secondary orality of the electronic age can awaken us to the primary orality of antiquity", his list of what is involved in the discussion of secondary orality includes the following:

However, by means of our computers, telephones, televisions, VCRs, CD players, and tape recorders, hypertext breaks into our cozy study, grabs us by the scruff of the next [sic?], and plunges us full-bore into the advent(ure) of secondary orality.

It is interesting to see in this snapshot of a moment in the development of the culture of secondary orality (and Fowler himself is prescient in this fascinating article) that there are items in this list that were absent from Ong's list. And to us, in 2008, Fowler's 1994 list already looks dated. VCRs and tape recorders are already going the way of vinyl before them. One cannot buy cassettes or videos on the High Street any more. Tape is no more. We would now talk about DVDs, DVRs, downloads, blackberries, podcasts, P2P, streaming, etc. It is easy to see that one is living in a revolution when the items in the list are changing so rapidly.

This brings us back to where we began in this series (Orality and Literacy I: Exaggerated contrasts with our culture?) and my claim about Dunn, that he was inclined to underestimate the extent of orality in our culture; he conceptualizes our culture solely in the terms of academic sub-culture of the library, the scholarly monograph and the article. There is nothing surprising here; we speak of what we know. Indeed Ong himself is a case in point. When he discusses television and radio, he begins to think in terms of political figures and their oratory (Orality and Literacy, 136-7). On the only occasion that he specifies a particular radio programme, it is "a recently published series of radio lectures" by Lévi Strauss (Orality and Literacy, 174). Perhaps it is unsurprising, therefore, that Ong thinks in terms of television, radio and electronic devices "that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print" (above, but often repeated). While there is obviously a lot of truth in that, it is worth adding that a huge amount of the content of television, radio, the internet, podcasts is spontaneous and not formally dependent on writing or print. One example among many is the coverage of sport.

It is worth asking ourselves whether, as academics, we are inclined to play down orality in our culture and whether this may lead to exaggerated, even romanticized notions of the primary orality of the past. Once again I would like to repeat that I regard it as essential that the ancient historian attempts to understand the utter difference of the ancient world from ours, and to realize just how difficult it is for us to conceptualize the primary orality of antiquity. But it does not need to be a part of that project to mis-conceptualize contemporary world.

Orality and Literacy II: Clarifying the Critique of Dunn

One of the benefits of writing a blog is that one is able to clarify earlier posts in the light of listening to the way that they have been read. Before beginning my series on Orality and Literacy, I was aware of the dangers of being misread, and in my first post I attempted to lay down a few markers, in particular aiming to make clear that I was not issuing any kind of challenge to the essential contrast between our literate culture and the oral culture of antiquity. It is, of course, in the nature of such posts that readers are tempted to skip over the position markers and infer a perspective more radical than the one the author actually holds. It is also important to bear in mind the sketch-like nature of blog posts, what I called "snapshots" of my thinking at a given moment.

There is actually little I disagree with in April DeConick's post on The Forbidden Gospels Blog, What is Orality? and, as always, I am grateful to April for taking the time to write with her characteristic fervour. As I wrote in comments over on her blog, though, the point of my post was to talk about the way in which we are inclined to caricature our own literate culture, to exaggerate the contrasts for rhetorical effect. I am in part being playful here, looking at how Dunn's conceptualization of our culture is in fact falling short -- I have not in this initial post even begun to deal with the ancient world. (April does not mention Dunn in her response but instead implies that my comments were targeted more broadly as an attempt to challenge contemporary work on orality in the ancient world.) It may take a few more posts in my series before my thinking on this is as clearly articulated as I would like, but let me mention here one element that I hope to return to, that we need to take seriously "secondary orality" in our culture (the term is, of course, Walter Ong's; cf. Loren Rosson's anticipation of the topic on The Busybody).

Where Dunn uses the interesting analogy of the computer's "default setting", he gives examples from word-processing, an important part of that heavily literate academic sub-culture that many of us live and breathe. But the computer could also provide a means of illustrating elements of secondary orality. The computer is now a telephone, a radio, a television and more. One of the most exciting challenges to us as early twenty-first scholars of antiquity is the exploration of comparisons and contrasts with the primary orality of the period we are studying.

Orality and Literacy I: Exaggerated contrasts with our culture?

In a lot of recent New Testament scholarship, there has been a welcome corrective to our natural tendency to make the world of the evangelists into a very textual, a very literary world, to conceptualize it in anachronistic fashion as being similar to our own. There has been a renewed stress on orality and the importance of understanding oral communication and how processes of spreading oral tradition might have impacted on the formation of the Gospels. In a series of posts, I would like to offer some of my own reflections on this scholarly trend. This will be done as an experiment in "thinking out loud" as I think through the literature and reflect on certain elements that have been insufficiently discussed in the past. As always with blog posts, these are at best snapshots of my thinking at a given point, and not the result of detailed, mature reflection ready for print publication.

I would like to comment here on one of the elements in the way that the case is argued in the scholarship. When contemporary scholars are attempting to contrast our culture with that of the ancient world, they sometimes greatly exaggerate the literary nature of our culture. (By "our culture" here I mean early twenty-first century life in the west, particularly the English speaking west). James D. G. Dunn is a case in point. In his important article, “Altering the Default Setting: Re-envisaging the Early Transmission of the Jesus Tradition,” New Testament Studies 49/2 (2003), 139-75, he writes:

We here are all children of Gutenberg and Caxton. We belong to cultures shaped by the book. Our everyday currency is the learned article and monograph. Libraries are our natural habitat. (142).

There is, of course, a lot of truth in this; no one would deny the importance of the book in our culture. But what Dunn is talking about here is not so much our culture, which is full of orality at every turn, but the academic sub-culture of research and writing. Even within that sub-culture, our literary research interacts with oral and aural elements. Our primary means of communicating our scholarship is the classroom, which is all about speaking and hearing and only minimally about text. For many of us, the oral interaction in the classroom is a major contributor to the development of our thoughts. In the preparation of our scholarship, the oral plays a key role. Dunn's own article began life as an SNTS Presidential address in 2002. A lot of my work has begun life as conference papers, presented orally (and yes, I know that a lot of scholars simply read papers out loud, but even there, the primary means by which their scholarship is being appropriated is aurally). The interaction between written draft, oral presentation, revised drafts in the light of live questioning -- these are the staples of the development of academic work. Thus where Dunn conceptualizes the scholar as living in the library, I prefer to think of the enterprise as one of interaction in which solitary library time is only one feature, and not necessarily the most important feature.

Outside of that academic sub-culture, the world we live in is a world still dominated by orality. Many more people receive their news through television and radio, oral media, than through newspapers. And many who do use newspapers are now no longer simply reading them but they are combining the reading experience with watching online videos, listening to podcasts and so on. I describe myself as an avid Guardian "reader" because of the familiarity of that expression, but my "reading" in fact incorporates Guardian podcasts and sometimes also video material.

Dunn is inclined to underestimate the extent of orality in our own culture. Later in the article, he writes:

In an overwhelmingly literary culture our experience of orality is usually restricted to casual gossip and the serendipitous reminiscences of college reunions. (149).

This is a surprising statement in the light of the pervasive orality of our culture. The spoken word is everywhere. For many, the written word is secondary. It is worth reminding ourselves that being literate does not necessarily mean that the written word is primary, or that we always think along literary lines. Consider the specific case of knowledge of the Bible. As any of us who have taught the New Testament know, our students' knowledge of the texts is often received through oral tradition and not through direct familiarity with the text. How many people who think they know the Christmas story get their knowledge directly from reading Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 (or the Protevangelium of James)? Very few. Their knowledge is conveyed through our culture's oral tradition and its harmonized and legendary version of the story so frequently retold.

My point here is not to attempt to narrow the gap between the ancient world and our world. The key task of the ancient historian is to convey some sense of the utter difference of the worlds we study from our own, and to avoid anachronistic reading in of our own way of looking at things. My point rather is that in our attempts to conceptualize the ancient world, we should be careful not to lapse into caricature of the modern world. Imagine the person who in a millennium is reading Dunn's article, looking for information about how we communicate with one another in the early twenty-first century -- that researcher would have precious little idea of how we actually live our lives. We live in libraries ("our natural habitat"), we trade in monographs and learned articles ("our everyday currency"). Where Dunn is exploring the analogy of a computer's "default setting", he conceives of the computer solely in word-processing terms, not as a communications device that combines the functions of television, radio, telephone and more.

It may be that the attempt to reimagine the orality of antiquity proceeds in part from the contemporary academic's anxiety about the heavily literary nature of his or her experience of the contemporary world. Dunn is one of the most prolific New Testament scholars ever -- his latest book running, apparently, to 1300 pages. Is it a coincidence that the scholars who stress the attempt to regain access to an ancient oral culture are those who are the most prolific writers in the contemporary culture?