Abstract
Werner Kelber is probably best known for his ground-breaking book The Oral and the Written Gospel, originally published in 1983, but this is far from his last word on how understanding ancient media is vital to biblical interpretation, and the present volume collects a number of essays that Kelber has since produced in this area. Although these have all been published elsewhere, their collection into a single volume will be welcome both to anyone wishing to follow the development of Kelber’s thought and to anyone with an interest in biblical media studies.
These essays all, in one way or another, concern the effects of different communications media (such as speech, writing and print), which gives this book rather more of a thematic unity than is often the case with essay collections. Kelber’s central thesis is that the modern historical-critical study of the New Testament has been too much in thrall to a print-centric mentality, that is a set of (often unconscious) assumptions about the way texts work that have been formed by the modern use of printed texts, which are quite inappropriate to the very different use of manuscripts in antiquity. The Oral and the Written Gospel was criticized for positing too sharp a contrast between oral and written media. This set of essays shows how, in part in response to such criticism, Kelber’s thought has evolved into a more rounded and complex oral-scribal-memorial-performative paradigm, that is, a media model that recognizes the interaction of different media, while still insisting on their difference, and which finds an increasingly important role for memory in any account of tradition and of both oral and written composition.
This collection of essays is not always an easy read, although this is due in part to the subject matter, for, as Kelber frequently acknowledges, he is often wrestling with issues for which our modern culture has no appropriate vocabulary. Readers will not find easy answers to the questions Kelber raises, but they will be shown a promising direction of travel, and the book will have performed a valuable service if it does no more than raise awareness of the issues it addresses. If Kelber is right, the consequences for Biblical Studies should be far-reaching.