SACRED TEXTS IN AN ORAL CULTURE—How Did They Function?

Dr. Ben Witherington, professor at Asbury Theological Seminar, has made a recent lecture he gave available in print form. While the lecture does not deal with the text of the letter to the Hebrews specifically, its principles apply to all New Testament scripture including Hebrews.

What follows on this blog entry is the first of the four Parchman lectures I gave at Truett Seminary at Baylor University this week.

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Ours is a text based culture, a culture of written documents. You need look no further than your computer screens to verify this assertion. There could only be an internet age if there was widespread literacy, which in turn leads to widespread production and reading of texts. It is thus difficult for us in a text-based culture to conceive of and understand the character of an oral culture, much less understand how sacred texts function in such an oral culture. Yet however difficult, it is important that we try to understand such a thing, since all of the cultures of the Bible were essentially oral cultures, not text-based cultures, and their texts were in fact oral texts, which some might think is an oxymoron on a part with Microsoft Works, but in fact it is not so.

The literacy rate in those Biblical cultures seems to have ranged from about 5% to 20% depending on the culture and which sub group within the culture we are discussing. Not surprisingly then, all ancient peoples, whether literate or not, preferred the living word, which is to say the spoken word. Texts were enormously expensive to produce—papyrus was expensive, ink was expensive, and scribes were ultra expensive. Being a secretary in Jesus’ age could be a lucrative job indeed. No wonder Jesus said to his audiences—‘let those who have ears, listen’. You notice he did not ever say—‘let those who have eyes, read’. Most eyes could not read in the Biblical period.

So far as we can tell, no documents in antiquity were intended for ‘silent’ reading, and only a few were intended for private individuals to read. They were always meant to be read out loud and usually read out loud to a group of people. For the most part they were simply necessary surrogates for oral communication. This was particularly true of ancient letters.

In fact, most ancient documents including letters were not really texts in the modern sense at all. They were composed with their aural and oral potential in mind, and they were meant to be orally delivered when they arrive at their destination. Thus for example, when one reads the opening verses of Ephesians, loaded as it is with aural devices (assonance, alliteration, rhythm, rhyme, various rhetorical devices) it becomes perfectly clear that no one was ever meant to hear this in any language but Greek and furthermore, no one was ever meant to read this silently. It needed to be heard.

And indeed there was a third reason it needed to be orally delivered—because of the cost of making documents a standard letter in Greek would have no separation of words, sentences, paragraphs or the like, little or no punctuation, and all capital letters. Thus for example imagine having to sort out a document that began as follows: PAULASERVANTOFCHRISTJESUSCALLEDTOBEANAPOSTLEANDSETAPARTFORTHEGOSPELOFGOD. The only way to decipher such a collection of letters was to sound them out– out loud. There is of course the famous anecdote about St. Anselm and St. Ambrose. Anselm said that Ambrose was the most remarkable man he had ever met, because he could read without moving his lips or making a sound. Clearly, an oral culture is a different world than a largely literate text based culture, and texts function differently in such a world. All sorts of texts were simply surrogates for oral speech, and this statement applies to many of the Biblical texts themselves.  Click here to read the rest of the article.