The Interplay Between Written and Spoken Word in the Second Testament as Background to the Emergence of Written Gospels (original) (raw)
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The theological controversies that arose within the Christian Church of Late Antiquity resulted in the convocation of several Ecumenical Councils, where bishops gathered from the whole Christian world to discuss matters of faith and Church politics. The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (451) include letters, documents relevant to the debates, and most interestingly, the allegedly verbatim transcripts of the discussions: these provide unparalleled evidence for the history and language of the time. The role of notaries and scribes in the production of the Acts is crucial. In this paper I consider the work of the scribes and its output on the historical and linguistic reliability of the Acts. These are by and large reliable as far as the events of the Council are concerned, although there is evidence of omissions and alterations. The Acts prove also precious in assessing features of spoken Greek: by looking at syntactic complexity and lexicon of spoken statements as opposed to originally written passages, one finds the same characteristics that modern research attributes to spontaneous spoken language.
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The New Testament Ἡ Καινὴ Διαθήκη records numerous aspects important to faith such as inter alia, the virgin birth, miracles, teachings, death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and each of these had to be maintained and propagated. The death of Christ brought great disappointment to the lives of His disciples. Disillusioned by what had taken place they went back into their previous vocations. However, when they discovered that Christ was indeed alive, they were excited. After the resurrection of Christ, He spent forty days with His disciples before He ascended into heaven. The disciples spent many days in the upper room anticipating the arrival of the Holy Spirit which gave the much needed power so that they could maintain and propagate the values and beliefs of their teaching of Christ. This study sought to identify the forms of communication used by the early Christians to maintain and propagate the gospel of Christ. This study used a desktop methodology. The theoretical fram...
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This article clarifies a perennial problem relating to the concept of 'orality' in Gospels studies and attempts to provide some resolution to that problem. Specifically, Gospels criticism has struggled to conceptualize the relation between the Jesus tradition as it was orally performed and early textual (written) expressions ofthat tradition. The binary opposition 'literacy/orality' has failed to provide any help in this conceptualization, and this failure is rooted especially in the rather nebulous (yet widespread) concept of 'orality'. New Testament scholarship requires a set of culturally specific models of textuality, including the non-communicative functions of written texts and the non-literate use of written traditions. Before we can develop the necessary models, however, we need to deal with the problems we have created by appealing to 'orality'. We must suspend the processes of composition familiar to our own literate minds and try to enter into a process that makes sense within the ancient world where orality was not only the dominant form of transmission and preservation, but also the dominant form of consciousness.
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2018 National Meeting of the SBL | Gospel of Mark Section
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Work in the ethnography of communication has barely begun to look at writing, despite the fact that the status of writing has recently preoccupied much of literary theory. The search to locate how writing functions among a culture's communicative practices can involve identifying domains that are unique to it, for example, where some kinds of writing attain a standing such that they are not meant to be understood as the transcription of a testimony or other oral act. Such a possibility is part of our culture but not part of many others, and is, among other things, a significant cognitive development. This article takes a diachronic perspective, back to a moment in our own past when a certain class of writings began to demand a kind of understanding different from that demanded by writing in that culture up to that time. 1 look at the Middle Ages to examine, inter alia, the written document putting into question prevailing temporal indices; the move of the act of writing away from an identification with other constatable acts and toward a more oblique and less committed relation to those acts; biblical exegesis as elaborating a new stance of writing through its practice of written gloss; the teaching of writing skills and the professionalization of the writer; and the significance of a renewed use of the cursive hand. The changing status of writing both encouraged and is implicated in the appearance and legitimizing of a set of utterances (and the acts behind them) seen as beneficially unmoored rather than moored, in a space and time of their own. (Ethnography of communication, grammatology, medieval studies, writing) On parle dans sa propre langue, on ecrit en langue etrangere. Jean-Paul Sartre Franz Kafka said that he discovered the possibility of writing literature when he realized that he could substitute the pronoun he for /.' Though obviously inspired by his own experiences, his discourses could be drawn from without them, or,
17. The Mediterranean Community of Practices between Speaking and Writing in Early Modern Documents
In Molinelli, Piera (ed). 2017. Language and Identity in Multilingual Mediterranean Settings Challenges for Historical Sociolinguistics, Series:Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 310, DE GRUYTER MOUTON, pp. Pages 309-324, 2017
The present study deals with the evidence of the linguistic behaviour of writers having multiple competence in different languages and graphic norms in Early Modern Mediterranean documents. The aim is to investigate the linguistic variation in Early Modern Mediterranean documents written in a multi-faceted Italian and transcribed according to flexible writing criteria, especially when oral expressions were involved. [co-authors: Di Salvo, M.; Mori, L.; Muru, C.]