Stephen Chrisomalis and Mark Dingemanse both respond to the notion that our society shows evidence of a return to orality. It is certainly far more common now than it was a couple of decades ago for people to listen to a book in the car or on their ipod. But one doesn't have to go back much further than that and weekly radio shows provided a similar sort of aural presentation of narrative. In short, we are certainly witnessing changes in media culture and use, but not in a way that will make it easier to answer questions about orality and the New Testament, of the sort that April DeConick, Mark Goodacre and NT Wrong have been discussing.
Speaking of changing media, Danny Zacharias has a music video on YouTube to help you learn the Greek first declension paradigm.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
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3 comments:
Thanks for giving all the links and posting on orality.
What amazes me is how binary the thinking: as if a culture is either oral or literate and not both. Don't our kids prefer now to use their telephones to text? And you're absolutely right that we still listen to the radio in the visual age of tv and youtube. So back to the New Testament, and the story of Jesus scratching something on the ground with a finger and so forth: is the shortage of writing technology really an excuse for assuming illiteracy? And only a dozen year ago, biblical scholar Louis H. Feldman came to that eureka conclusion that Homer was a literate poet as evidenced, at least, by the fact that in the Iliad story of Bellerophon a deadly letter is written -- and not on a clunky stone but on a folding table ("Homer and the Near East: The Rise of the Greek Genius" Biblical Archaeologist 59.1 (96), p16). That looks and sounds like this: γράψας ἐν πίνακι πτυκτῷ θυμοφθόρα πολλά (ILLIAD.6.169) which also suggests people have been writing just about as long as they speak. I say we study baby sign language more -- moving from the oral to the visual (i.e., graphic) -- for clues of where we've come from.
And to go along with your youtube, there's this written post from Suzanne McCarthy who encourages hearing The Spoken Word.
J.K.: Assuming he wasn't doodling, the story of Jesus writing in the dirt would imply not only that Jesus was literate but that the woman's accusers were assumed to be literate as well. Further, this would suggest that the intended audience of the Gospel, experiencing the story orally or textually, would have some concept of the significance of Jesus' act.
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