The present issue of Oral Tradition stands as a tribute to a conference initiated and convened by professors Werner Kelber and Paula Sanders on the topic of Oral-Scribal Dimensions of Scripture, Piety, and Practice in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, April 12-14, 2008. Sixteen active participants (a keynote speaker, four specialists in each of three world religions, and three respondents) met to examine the aesthetic, compositional, memorial, and performative aspects of three faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) in their appropriate media contexts. In many ways, this approach differs from, and indeed challenges, historical scholarship. Beginning with the pre-modern period and reaching into our postmodern world, the strictly philological, textual paradigm has served as the intellectual premise for classical and biblical scholarship, for medieval studies, and for the study of world religions as well. The Rice conference and the papers that emanated from it are designed to provide the philological, textual study of the monotheistic faiths with fresh insights and to suggest significant modifications. The largely Western paradigm of the three monotheistic faiths as quintessential religions of the book is, thereby, called into question in the present issue of Oral Tradition. If the flourishing discipline of orality-scribality-memory studies has shown anything conclusively, it is that prior to the invention of print technology the verbal arts were an intricate interplay of oral and scribal verbalization, with manuscripts often serving as mere reference points for recitation and memorization. The papers that follow show that this scenario applies with special relevance to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Coming from a background of comparative work on orality and literacy but a non-specialist on the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, I was struck by how the conference themes paralleled developments in oral literary studies in Africa. These included the move away from generalized assertion to more focused insights into multiple historical and culturally specific diversities; a more nuanced, culturally aware, and critical approach to the concept of “the oral”; the fading influence of speculative teleological models; the historically specific epistemologies of oral and written as part of the subject matter; and the concepts of multi-literacies and multi-oralities.

This essay examines evidence for the interplay of memory recall and written technology in ancient Israel and surrounding cultures. The essay begins with a summary of the comparative evidence for writing-supported textual transmission in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Israel (based on the author’s Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature [2005]). This is followed by a survey of studies in the humanities and social sciences on how memory shifts affect textual transmission. The article concludes with a preliminary summary of the author’s research on memory shifts and other trends in documented cases of transmission history.

A 1997 claim that “Muslim hostility to the writing of tradition” was of “Jewish origin” stimulated this article’s attempt to de-essentialize the notion of “Jewish oralism.” It reconstructs the vastly disparate concerns and historical circumstances that prompted Jews of third-century Palestine on the one hand, and of eighth- and ninth-century Baghdad on the other, to champion and guard the oral transmission of certain corpora of rabbinic tradition. The article concludes by considering a Babylonian-Palestinian Jewish dispute of the geonic era against the backdrop of Abbasid-Umayyad tensions.

Although comprised of self-consciously written texts, the New Testament reflects an intersection between oral and written words and worlds. In this paper, I undertake a survey of the New Testament with respect to the language of written and spoken word in an effort to identify where they overlap, ways in which they shape one another, places where they describe distinct worlds, and the social dynamics associated with each kind of word. In the conclusion I suggest ways in which the interplay between written and spoken word led to the emergence of the Gospels.

This paper examines the contexts of oral communication and the use of written messages in Josephus’ writings, the New Testament, and rabbinic literature, and discusses the possible reasons for using orality or writing in the respective Jewish and Christian contexts in antiquity. It is argued that an individual’s social power depended on his position within the communication network and his ability to control and manipulate the dissemination of knowledge among his co-religionists. Mobility was an important means of creating these networks and the most mobile rabbis would have been the most well-connected.

How the Gospel of Mark, which would not have qualified as a “respectable” text in the Hellenistic-Roman world, became included in the Scripture of established Christianity is explored in the following steps: an examination of Mark’s relation to the Judean Scriptures in comparison with scribal cultivation of those scriptures; an exploration of the importance of oral communication in the origin of the Gospel; a review of the predominance of oral communication, oral performance, and oral-written texts in the context in which Mark was cultivated; an examination of the ways in which the Gospel of Mark was memorable and performable; and an analysis of Mark’s resonance with hearers in its historical performance context.

This paper examines the history of the biblical texts from their oral and papyrological beginnings to their triumphant apotheosis in print culture. Focusing on the oral-scribal-memorial-typographic dynamics, it demonstrates ways in which the biblical texts were communicated, transformed, interiorized, and lived by. The central thesis states that the media transformations of the Bible can be viewed by and large as reductive processes commencing with multiformity and polyvalency and moving away from oral, memorial sensibilities in the direction toward the autosemantic print authority.

The Qur’ān is usually read as a canonical text, constituting the foundational document of the Islamic religion. This paper proposes a new approach: reading the Qur’ān as the communication process between the Prophet and his community, which allows for the recovery of its dramatic character. It also enables us to reclaim its cultural context by tracing out the processes of negotiations, appropriations, or rejections of earlier Jewish and Christian traditions. The Qur’ān thus emerges as the testimony of a revolutionary late-antique religious paradigm.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the New Testament as performance literature. Recent scholarship has brought to the fore the importance of interpreting the New Testament in the context of the oral cultures of the first century. This leads us to ask about the oral/performance dynamics of the “writings” now in the New Testament canon. The paper is comprised of three parts. Part 1 offers some reasons why the New Testament writings, if they are to be appropriately interpreted in their original oral context, must be treated as performance literature. Part 2 outlines performance criticism as a methodology for this task—constructing first-century scenarios of performance as a context for interpretation, reorienting and expanding methodological approaches to the New Testament as oral literature, and employing contemporary performance as a research tool. Part 3 represents the bulk of the paper, laying out in detail the idea of performance as research, arguing that what we can learn from contemporary performances may help us interpret the New Testament writings in the context of the oral cultures of the first century.

It was on practical grounds that the initial inscription of both Koran and hadîth (as well as most of the other genuine Islamic sciences) was undertaken: in both cases the use of script served to bolster the memory. There were no ideological reasons opposing this undertaking. There were also very practical grounds for the deliberate collections of Koran and hadîth: individual persons, above all rulers and court figures, wanted to have copies of the Koran and collections of hadîth at their disposal for private use. While there were no reasons to oppose a (non-official) codification of copies of the Koran for private use, strong ideological reservations arose against the codification of the hadîth. It was precisely the existence of the now-codified Koran that for a long time hindered the development of a second prospectively codified body of religious texts. In the case of the Koran it was the professional interests of the Koran readers who appeared to lose their monopoly as the sole custodians of the Holy Book; in the case of the hadîth there were continued misgivings about placing similar text corpora alongside the Koran. While the codification of the Koran can be regarded as paradigmatic for the codification of hadîth only with considerable restrictions, the hadîth codification, on the other hand, was paradigmatic for the codification process of a great number of other Arabic-Islamic sciences.

Starting with the mnemonic imperative governing the use of rhetoric in pre- and early Islamic Arabic oral poetry, this essay proposes that in the later literary periods, rhetorical devices, now free of their mnemonic obligation, took on further communicative or expressive functions. In the High CAbbāsid age, rhetorical devices are “retooled” to serve as the “linguistic correlative” of Islamic hegemony as witnessed in caliphal court panegyrics of the rhetorically complex badīc style. Finally, the “rhetorical excess” of the post-classical badīciyyah (a poem to the Prophet Muḥammad in which each line must exhibit a particular rhetorical device) is interpreted as a memorial structure typical of the medieval manuscript (as opposed to modern print) tradition.

My response to the conference focuses on five issues: (1) the importance of the reciprocity and interdependence of orality and writtenness; (2) the importance of socio-political-economic facets of textual uses; (3) the recitative, performative dimensions of the texts treated; (4) the largely Mediterranean provenance of the texts treated; and (5) the authority of texts, both written and oral. Finally, I make a tentative suggestion about the importance of the perceived authority rather than writtenness of major religious texts as the locus of sacrality, since the papers demonstrate how much both orality and writtenness are involved in the life of these texts.