Chapter 126 of 404

Note-Taking

Emphasis on orality coexisted with literacy in Mediterranean school settings.¹¹⁹ Orators often used written speeches or notes,¹²⁰ or wrote out, polished and published their speeches after delivery.¹²¹ Hearers of speeches sometimes took notes to capture the gist of the speeches,¹²² although some speakers wanted their hearers to be too spellbound to be able to take notes.¹²³ (Such notes were not, of course, verbatim transcripts, which were not available in this period.)¹²⁴ One could also takes notes¹²⁵ from which one would later arrange one’s material for a composition, for the purpose of guarding memory.¹²⁶

It is especially in academic settings, however, that note-taking prevailed. Disciples of advanced Greek teachers, both in philosophy and rhetoric, often took notes during their teachers’ lectures.¹²⁷ Thus, for example, Quintilian mentions such taking of notes, even while emphasizing the use of memory.¹²⁸ Likewise, our collection of discourses from Musonius Rufus appears to depend on the writings of one of his students.¹²⁹ Many teachers left the matter of publication to their followers.¹³⁰

From an early period those who took such notes sometimes published them.¹³¹ The practice is attested close to the era of the Gospels by Arrian, a disciple of Epictetus. His accounts of Epictetus’ teaching in Koine are so different from Arrian’s own Atticizing diction in his other writings¹³² that he feels it necessary to apologize for the rough style of these discourses: “whatever I heard him say I used to write down, word for word, as best I could, endeavouring to preserve it as a memorial, for my own future use, of his way of thinking and the frankness of his speech.”¹³³ Records of teachings thus could preserve even the teacher’s distinctive style (fitting distinctive style and language for Jesus often evident in our Gospels).

Quintilian, the famous Roman teacher of rhetoric, inadvertently attests the potential accuracy of such a practice. Some of the boys who were his students had published in his name their notes on his lectures. He attests that their notes were fairly accurate, though he clearly wished that he had had the opportunity to polish them for publication. His own published work overlapped with what they had written.¹³⁴

While Jewish disciples may have taken fewer notes and emphasized orality much more highly than most Gentiles, they also were able to take notes and use them as initial mnemonic devices to recall larger blocs of material.¹³⁵ Certainly the supposition that few Palestinian Jews could write has been challenged and shown inaccurate.¹³⁶ Some suggest that at least one of Jesus’ followers, a tax-collector (Mk 2:14),¹³⁷ would have had the skills to take such notes, and later Christian tradition in fact opined that the other disciples later made use of his notes.¹³⁸ Whatever the particulars, the possibility that some disciples took some notes during Jesus’ ministry or soon afterward is a factor worth taking into account. Confronted with a classicist’s evidence of note-taking in antiquity, one traditional form critic conceded that such evidence would require revision in the skepticism of radical form critics.¹³⁹

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