Chapter 119 of 404

Orality

By Jesus’ day, much of the Mediterranean world was literate as well as oral,⁵ but even at this time only a minority could read, especially on a formal level, and orality remained an important part of the larger culture. Memory cultivation is particularly emphasized in oral cultures,⁶ and there remained a bias toward orality and oral memory in the first-century world.⁷

Many cultures orally pass on information for centuries, maintaining accuracy in the points transmitted.⁸ (Even in the transmission of Balkan ballads, where this pattern has been disputed, the basic story is fixed at the oral stage long before the words are fixed at the written stage.)⁹ Many oral societies are now in transition due to westernization and the social dislocation caused by urbanization. My wife, who is Congolese and spent much of her childhood in villages, knows many stories about earlier generations (especially within her family). She also observes, however, that such stories are being lost as younger generations fail to repeat them and most stories fail to be written down.

In oral cultures the point of recall tends to be thematic rather than verbatim, but can include epics considered hopelessly long to modern western audiences. ¹⁰ Variation is to be expected in oral performances, perhaps explaining a number of variants in our gospel tradition as well.¹¹ Not all societies are equally careful with the details of their traditions, but oral history can supplement written records both in orally skilled and unskilled societies.¹² Oral historiography has therefore come into its own as a discipline,¹³ although it is more useful (for historical information) when applied to figures in the recent memory of the informants¹⁴ than when investigating the legendary past.¹⁵

Like some other societies, the ancient Mediterranean world highly prized oral memory. Bards recited Homeric epics and other poets from memory, though intellectuals generally regarded these bards as low-class, engaging in an elementary exercise.¹⁶ Centuries before the Gospels, the best professional reciters could recite all of Homer by heart;¹⁷ in the general era of the Gospels, Dio Chrysostom even claims a people who no longer were able to speak Greek well but most of whom knew “the Iliad by heart.”¹⁸ Many poems remained fluid, but the Iliad remained textually constant, because it became canonical for Greek culture.¹⁹ Such feats of memory appear in some other oral societies.²⁰

↑ Back to top