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

O UTLINE :
1. INTRODUCTION: THE REVOLUTION AROUND US
Kelber’s conceptualization of “orality” asserted itself in his reading of written texts, a move
which I find revolutionary among biblical scholars.
2. WERNER KELBER AND THE FORM CRITICS
Despite the sophistication of his media-critical perspective, Kelber betrays certain influences
inherited from the form critics. These abiding influences aren’t an indictment against Kel-
ber’s scholarship but rather an indication of the tenacity of form criticism’s legacy.
3. THREE NEW-ISH IDEAS IN BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP
a. Conceiving “Oral Tradition”
Contemporary media criticism exhibits considerable interest in “oral tradition,” as did
their form-critical forebears. However, they conceptualize the referent of that
phrase—oral tradition—in fundamentally different terms.
b. Plotting Christian Tradition
The form-critical conception of oral tradition as discrete, source-critical entities en-
abled scholars to postulate evolutionary trajectories and triangulate forms of the tradi-
tion predating our written sources. Contemporary media critics, in contrast, need to
eschew evolutionary models in light of the reconfiguration of oral tradition men-
tioned in the previous section.
c. Writing Voices, Speaking Signs
Taking the role of oral tradition seriously means approaching the gospels as “oral-
derived texts,” and specifically as the kind of oral-derived text that John Miles Foley
calls “Voices from the Past.”
4. CONCLUDING REMARKS
If contemporary media criticism is to have any lasting effect on the academic study of the
Bible, it will need to disassociate itself from its form-critical legacy and posture itself as a
paradigmatically new form of critical inquiry.

A T YPOLOGY OF T RADITIONAL V ERBAL A RT :

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: See John Miles Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 38–53.

KEY WORDS: oral tradition; media criticism; form criticism; Jesus tradition; orality
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

A BSTRACT :
Oral tradition has been a live analytical concept in gospels research at least since the form critics
but especially since Werner Kelber’s The Oral and the Written Gospel (1983). Recently, numer-
ous high-profile publications in Jesus and gospels research attest the ascendency of memory as an
equally live subject in the exploration and explanation of Christian origins. One by-product of
this confluence of issues—oral tradition and memory—has been a renewed discussion of form
criticism and its legacy. The apparent connection with the form critics’ aims risks misdirecting
contemporary exploration of the early Christians’ use of oral and written traditions down poten-
tially blind alleys. This paper offers three specific areas that distinguish—or ought to distin-
guish—contemporary oral-traditional research from form-critical inquiry. First, contemporary
scholarship conceptualizes orality in terms broader than merely the transmission of tradition.
Second, contemporary scholarship problematizes the construction of trajectories as explanatory
models of Christian origins tradition. Third, contemporary scholarship highlights both the simi-
larities and the differences between oral and written expressions of tradition and explores the in-
terface between the two. As a result, contemporary scholarship would be well-served by foster-
ing an abrupt rupture between the current interest in the oral Jesus tradition (and the constitutive
role of memory therein) and the procedures and products of Formgeschichte.

R ECOMMENDED R EADING :
John Miles Foley. 2002. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press.

A comparatively accessible presentation of Foley’s theory of “traditional verbal art,”

which seeks to respect the “bewildering diversity” of traditions from around the world
and throughout history. HROP builds on Foley’s earlier, more technical works, Immanent
Art (1991) and The Singer of Tales in Performance (1995).

Tom Thatcher, ed. 2008. Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Beyond The Oral and the Written Gos-
pel. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press.

An excellent status quaestionis of NT media criticism. This collection of essays celebrates

the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Oral and the Written Gospel, and
includes a brief survey of Kelber’s media-critical theory of Christian origins and an inter-
view between Thatcher and Kelber. The remaining essays extend beyond Kelber’s origi-
nal analysis and position media criticism for the twenty-first century.

Rafael Rodríguez. 2010. Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance,
and Text. European Studies on Christian Origins. LNTS 407. London: T&T Clark Inter-
national. [With apologies for including my own work here.]

An application of social memory scholarship and oral traditional scholarship to the prob-
lems of historical Jesus and gospels research. SECM proposes a historiographical pro-
gram that critically accepts the gospels as memorial artifacts and avoids the categories of
“authentic” and (or versus) “inauthentic” tradition. This program is then applied to the
healings and exorcisms in the sayings tradition.

This paper is available online at http://thinkinginpublic.blogspot.com/2011/03/getting-ready-for-secsor-2011.html