Date: Sun, 5 Apr 1998 20:56:52 -0400 (EDT) From: William E. Arnal To: Bob Schacht Cc: "Crosstalk (list)" Subject: Re: Original GThomas On Sun, 5 Apr 1998, Bob Schacht wrote: > Wrong-o. The mere presence of writing in a culture does not make it > literate in any meaningful sense. To say that a culture is an X culture > usually means that X is, in some sense, normative. However, that said, Jews > were and are, as the Moslems say, a "People of the Book", so to say that > they were an illiterate culture would hardly be appropriate! One of the > interesting things about Jewish culture is that it was SIMULTANEOUSLY > literate and oral-- that is, their scriptural traditions were transmitted > and circulated orally as much as in written form, and these different forms > were not always isomorphic. I think that is what Jack was trying to get at. Just my point. And Crossan's, for that matter. There are oral cultures, and then there are oral & written cultures. There are not -- or at least so far there has never been -- a purely written culture. And for a culture to be "oral," it has to be largely untouched by writing technology. This is simply NOT true for Hellenistic and Roman antiquity: writing had been around for millenia, and was used copiously. It is even LESS true of the early Christians, who, within a decade or so of Jesus' death, apparently had nothing better to do than to WRITE piles and piles of stuff about their religion. > >Or, if we only escape orality when > >writing is widespread, then the Christian texts are oral > >products until the early modern period! > > This is probably more true than we usually think! Right. So if one claims that what marks the move from oral to written cultures is the PREDOMINANCE of writing, Christianity NEVER made that shift in the period with which we are concerned. > There are two problems with this: > First, Scribal concern with verbatim accuracy does not mean that their > concern *resulted* in verbatim accuracy. Performance would vary as one > moved farther away from the orbit of such scribes, e.g. to rural areas > where scribes interested in verbatim accuracy would have a harder time > making a living. Of course. The point is not that written texts are accurate, but that scribal interests define accuracy in terms of verbatim reproduction of a fixed exemplar, while oral tradition -- and not just oral performance of wriiten materials -- does not and cannot do so. > Second, verbatim accuracy assumes a canonical standard against which to > measure accuracy. From Josephus, we know that even the Temple had to keep > three sets of the Hebrew scriptures, and when it came time for a reading, > all three would be compared so that the oral performance would reflect a > consensus of the available authoritative texts. Not every rural synagogue > could afford this luxury. Again, this is just the point. There cannot be a FIXED -- as in freely consultable exemplar APART from writing. Without writing, no canon, just authority. "I say so, and I'm a special dude, so this version is THE version." As opposed to, "the texts say THIS, and you don't, so special though you may be, you're wrong." As for rural synagogues not being able to afford texts, that just illustrates the social consequences of scribalism: the lower classes (or rural folk) depend on the upper classes (or urban folk) who can afford written exemplars to establish the authenticity of their traditions, rather than that authenticity being rooted in the consensus (or whatever) of the village. > But how accurate is your knowledge? Let's say we do a survey of Zep heads, > and get them to write down the lyrics to several typical Zep tunes, and > compare what they wrote. How much "verbatim accuracy" would you expect? > Besides, I'll bet you do not have to undergo the scrutiny of other Zep > heads by reciting those words in public Zep gatherings, and you will > probably (let us hope) not instruct any offspring (cats don't count) in Zep > teachings with much care for verbatim accuracy. But I could be wrong. ;-) And this too I THINK supports my point. I don't PERFORM this material at all -- if I did, in fact, I'd expect it to undergo changes according to the vicissitudes of the performances, i.e., I'd expect it to become LESS accurate, and shaped to expectations. But even if that isn't true, the fact that I could, with considerable (not perfect) accuracy recite this stuff is a function of hearing the same exemplar over and over again. If I had heard the same song, but with slightly different lyrics each time, the memorization would be impossible. But precisely because of the scribal medium (vinyl, in this case) every time I heard this material it was the same. And if we wanted to check the accuracy of my recall, we could do it NOT by comparing it to the recall of others, but by comparing it to the vinyl (or now, CD) exemplar. Scribal media GIVE us the notion and fact of an ORIGINAL; with oral transmission, there is no fixed original of which all performances are (more or less accurate) reproductions. Bill ________________________________________ William E. Arnal 19 University Place, #503 Religious Studies/Classics New York, NY 10003 New York University (212) 998-8990 (o) william.arnal@nyu.edu (212) 995-5036 (h)