Orality and Literacy in Early Christianity

Ancient Literacy

Along with other biblical critics, Botha cites and amply draws on William Harris's immensely erudite study, Ancient Literacy. Unlike most classicists, Harris has observed a continuing vitality of oral communication and a heavy reliance on memory among Greeks and Romans—findings which, he suggested, “will be highly unpalatable to some classical scholars” (Harris: 328). Literacy, he reasoned (and Botha agrees), had been the preserve of an infinitely small minority of scribes, amanuenses, and a few members of the educated elite: it “would be astonishing if as much as 10% of the population as a whole was literate” (Harris: 61). The limited literacy that did exist operated in the midst of a vast illiteracy, was saturated with oral features, and remained attached to oral sensibilities to a degree virtually unimaginable for us typographic folks. Botha concurs: “even the literates were literate in an illiterate culture” (Botha: 198; cf. also xiii).

Harris, followed by Botha, moreover, states that the major employer of writing was the imperial government, which had little interest in providing incentives for the development of reading and writing skills. In agreement with Lévi-Strauss' well-known thesis about a nexus between writing and the construction of social classes, the institution of slavery, and the exploitation of the masses, Botha submits that “literacy is important for hegemony” (55). Unlike most classicists and biblical scholars (but in agreement with Harris) Botha (48) downplays the influence of formal education. Roman society was predominantly rural, and “schooling must have been puny.” To a large extent education was administered in the family where memorization more than reading and writing was the focus.

But Harris's study is less satisfactory, I submit, insofar as it defines literacy strictly in terms of reading and writing skills, and measures it in purely quantitative terms. One needs to bear in mind that in a society unaccustomed to the page-bound and page-turning truth, reading and writing were not the defining criteria they came to be for modernity. This is recognized by Botha: “Concepts such as illiterate, or literacy are very much culture specific, historically determined” (Botha: 178). Statistics on literacy versus illiteracy, therefore, will not in themselves help us understand much about ancient communications culture (Botha: xii). “In Greco-Roman societies one could be educated without having the ability to read and write” (Botha: 195, 240). That is to say, people can be, and often are, eminently culturally competent, socially “literate” as it were, in matters such as taxation, health, food, human relations, the physical environment, politics and numerous other items without necessarily being conversant in reading and writing (Botha: 27). In fact, people can be orally and memorially more accomplished than literate people operating in their own scriptographic medium.

Authorship

Authorship, a principal component of (ancient) communications culture, features prominently in the first part of Botha's work. Like reading, writing, memory, censorship and logic, it has a long and varied history, and “it should be studied as a sociological problem” (114). Far from being a subject settled once and for all, it is an adaptable phenomenon that has undergone changes over time. It seems reasonable to me, therefore, to grasp the differential quality of authoring in order to come to an understanding of the distinctly ancient authorial processes, and to guard against retrojecting modern authorial notions into our classical and biblical legacy. Botha is undoubtedly correct in alerting us to the ever-present temptation of anachronistic projections.

Among different authorial options, perhaps the most influential model is that of the author as solitary writer who self-consciously and almost single-handedly composes literature. It is a notion traditionally connected with the romantic movement of the 18^th and 19^th centuries (Botha: 114–16). Ideas of individuality, creativity, spontaneity, imagination, inspiration, and originality all contributed to an aesthetics of authorship which stipulated, or implied, that writers were non-derivative and immune to literary antecedents. At the same time, romanticism was instrumental in fostering the rise of oral, folkloric studies. The romantic tradition, therefore, both inspired the ideal of authorial originality and fostered sensibilities toward oral tradition. Ever since, the concept of the author as creative individual has rarely been entirely absent from modernity's dealings with texts, ancient and modern alike and in various ways has played a role in historical and literary criticism, and in the popular imagination as well.

Literary Theory and Print

Related to, yet different from, the romantic concept is the recent application of literary theory, which has cast authors into the role of architects of the narrative who consciously designed interior causations made up of motivations, characterizations, polemics, relationships, themes, followable sequences, and a progressive buildup of suspension—all features that add up to a recognizable authorial point of view. Admittedly, the new criticism has mediated the (re)discovery of the Gospels as stories of significant literary merit. In the new literary view, the evangelist is perceived to be a circumspectly operating author who is single-mindedly focused on the interior landscape of the narrative, showing little discernible interest in oral tradition. It is fair to ask whether our recent journeyings into literary criticism have not had the effect of turning the ancient writers into “crypto-moderns” (Botha: 110). What deserves additional attention is the fact that that the older romantic and the recent narratological concepts of authorship were significantly reinforced by the typographic medium. From the outset, the two concepts had merged with assumptions derived from print culture. It was then that the idea of the individual, creative persona began to exert its most powerful influence on the pre-modern and modern concept of authorship. Botha is aware of the pervasive prestige of print, “the cultural metamorphosis produced by printing” (Botha: 13), and of our habit to apply print-made concepts where they do not pertain. But more needs to be said on this issue.

Print is the medium which from the middle of the fifteenth century up until the present has invaded our thinking about authorship and compositional processes so thoroughly and has surrounded us on all sides so tightly that we are at pains to distance ourselves and to recognize the extent of our indebtedness. A key feature of print technology was the standardization of texts. Owing to the duplicative powers of the new medium, all printed copies of a given text were henceforth identical in a sense never experienced before. Textual sameness in this totalizing fashion had been unknown, and indeed unworkable, in the ancient and medieval communications culture. Prior to print, no two manuscript copies were entirely alike. This hitherto unattainable textual identity in print was given added support by a systematic formatting of books and a methodical organization of typographic space. The net effect was an unprecedented rationalization of layouts, which created the impression of reliable stability. To such an extent had print attained control over the spatial construction of the page and so effectively had the new technology reified contents that texts appeared to be standing on their own, functioning in hermeneutic self-sufficiency and sealed off from tradition. In other words, the new typographic technology, which “is comfortable only with finality” (Ong: 132), imparted a sense of closure to the printed text, transforming it into an oeuvre, a self-contained arena of mechanically constructed language. Whereas the older romantic concept of texts and authorship, we saw, had exhibited significant sensibilities toward oral dynamics, the recent literary criticism has given the appearance of having been subsumed under the print medium—an issue to which I will return below. Texts were perceived to be primarily, if not exclusively, related to other texts.

In addition to standardizing and rationalizing text production, print also was instrumental in fostering a preoccupation with individuation: “a heightened appreciation of individuality accompanied increased standardization” (Eisenstein: 234). Oddly, classical and biblical scholarship has paid relatively little attention to the title page and its capacity to earmark individual authorship, although Botha is clearly aware of it (116). One may look upon dedicatory references in ancient literature (see Luke's two volumes) as forerunners of the title page, but they form an integral part of the body of the text. Being unlike anything that can be observed in the chirographic culture of antiquity and the Middle Ages, the title page was a genuine innovation. Positioning itself entirely separate from and in front of the text, the title page, in addition to relocating dedicatory references, gradually came to displace two signature features of the ancient and medieval scriptographic communications system: the incipit, which had constituted the opening line of the manuscript, and the colophon, which had followed at the close of the text.

One may view the title page, therefore, at one and the same time as a notable reconfiguration of established scribal conventions and as a significantly innovative gesture in Western communications history. Peter Schöffer (1425–1503), principal assistant of Gutenberg, and the printer Arnold Ther Hoerner of Cologne (ca. 1470) are among those credited with initiating the use of title pages, testifying to its close connection with print. From the middle of the fifteenth century onward the titular invention became a rapidly popular feature in the book production. In fact, it was printers who were the driving force in promoting and disseminating the new practice. Furnishing the name of the printer, and the place and year of publication, in addition to the author and title, the title page was an effective instrument in publicizing printers as much as authors. Both authors and printers were the beneficiaries of title pages, and title pages in turn raised the status of individual authors along with that of printers.

Imitation and Plagiarism

In a recent book on Plagiarism in Latin Literature (2012), Scott McGill has illustrated and analyzed the phenomenon of charges and counter-charges, defenses and denials concerning literary stealing in Roman antiquity. The term employed for what was viewed by some as an objectionable reuse of texts was furtum (klopī). It suggests that claiming undeserved credit was an identifiable incidence which in the view of some at least carried the stigma of a culpable offense. Based on carefully observed examples of furtum literature, McGill (28) concludes that a sense of inviolable textual boundaries, of literary ownership, and authorial integrity already had a place in Latin antiquity. His central thesis, therefore, postulates the existence of plagiarism which entails proprietary claims and “by definition is bound up with authorial value.”

Plagiarism in Latin Literature is thoroughly researched and grounded in a superb command of sources. The execution of the argument, moreover, is impressively nuanced. For example, the author readily concedes that the Romans lacked a distinctly technical term for plagiarism. One therefore wonders whether McGill is not overreaching in referring throughout to plagiarism as a reified concept, something that, we shall see, did not happen until the advent of print. The Romans, moreover, he rightly observes, had next to no experience with acknowledging literary debts via footnotes, nor were they ever duty-bound by copyright laws. He also acknowledges the sparse visibility of the phenomenon: “The category of plagiarism did have a rather limited compass in the Latin world” (29). In other words, references to plagiarism were highly exceptional in Roman literary practice. Last but not least, McGill reflects at some length on what he calls the prevalent “imitative literary culture like that of ancient Rome” (23) in which texts in fact did not have firmly fixed boundaries.

Imitation, I suggest, may not be the most suitable category because mimesis—imitatio—is a loaded philosophical, literary term which carries a wide range of meanings through Western intellectual history ranging from Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Poetics all the way to Erich Auerbach's distinguished work on Mimesis and beyond. What McGill has in mind and describes competently is the conventional practice of reworking texts (59), the freedom to recycle large swaths of material (24), the frequent reproduction of unacknowledged traditions (25–26), the well known fact that citation of sources was virtually non-existent in the chapter-verse format (52), and the persistent challenge ancient word processing poses to memory (79). Rewriting, I submit, was a hallmark of ancient literary practice (see above all David Carr's Writing on the Tablet of the Heart). Without being aware of it, McGill touches here on an aspect of the dominantly oral functioning of ancient literature which by now is extensively documented by a vast and growing scholarship. In sum, McGill succeeds well in focusing on a feature that appears to agree with our own literary experience, but in part at least his success is accomplished by abstracting plagiarism from the larger context of ancient communications culture, which in many ways is unlike our literary experience.

No doubt, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Seneca the Elder, Livy, and countless others were already in antiquity thought of as authorial figures in their own right. But once more I plead for recognition of the high technology of the 15^th and 16^th centuries, which has so deeply impacted our modern sense of authorship. It will immunize us against a false familiarity with the ancients. “The authors at the turn of the 16^th century,” Michael Giesecke observes, “did not find themselves in an enviable situation…. They had to break with centuries-old habits of seeing and thinking” (586; my translation). The challenge they faced was to navigate the change from the age-old scriptographic world—which I will describe more closely below—to the typographic system which was represented by printers and printers' workshops, publishers and a growing readership, rapidly developing reading and writing skills, marketplace economics, and a flourishing print entrepreneurship. Inevitably, authors became enmeshed in this new typographic network, interacting with and receiving support from all its constituent parts, be they institutions, high-tech professionals, or market forces.

It was in this media context that the modern model of authorial identity emerged and took shape. Conditioned by mechanically constructed texts that were systematically formatted and classified by titles, authors metamorphosed into individual creators of oeuvres. Once the idea of one work-one author became the rule, a hermeneutic of authorial self-sufficiency molded new concepts of communication, composition, and cognition. The oeuvre in this new media culture took on the appearance not merely of stability and finality, as pointed out above, but of originality. Throughout the 17^th and 18^th centuries it was again primarily printers who set the terms for the new scheme of things. As Elizabeth Eisenstein has observed (121), printers helped establish and define copyright and plagiarism, and the closely related notion of literary property rights. These were all ideas that decisively shaped what came to be the modern concept of authorship.

Communication and Cognition

On a more subtle but no less influential level, the typographic medium created an intellectual environment that brought changes to sense perception and theories of cognition. The reification of the print text was accompanied by a diminution of the human sensorium and a narrowing of conceptual boundaries. Once more it was printers who took the lead, because their professional experience had taught them that the typographic book was almost entirely the product of mechanical processes in which the primary senses had lost their rationale. These senses had no part, or were perceived to have no longer any part, in the technical construction of texts. In this new media experience, therefore, the traditional faculties, because visually non-representable, were no longer deemed usable. The one exception was the visual sense, which harmonized well with typography (Giesecke: 587). As the focus shifted with ever greater intensity toward the new technology, the printed text as visualized language was totalized as never before. It is, therefore, no accident that the very senses which had played a formative role in ancient communication—oral and memorial sensibilities—suffered a steep decline with the advent of the typographic revolution. The focus on the visual sense was not a novelty in the Western history of communication. At least since Aristotle the cognitive superiority of vision had been reiterated throughout antiquity, the Middle Ages, and into modernity. What was new in print culture was the elevation of the visual sense to the virtual exclusion of the other senses.

“The typical way that ‘author’ is used by NT scholars,” Botha observed, “is probably along the lines of a thoughtful student working at a desk in a well-stocked study with texts and notes about discourses with other intellectuals lying about” (113). An exaggeration? I do not think so. Not explicitly, but implicit in many of our methods and theories lurks the profile of the individual writer, who is situated in a thoroughly textual environment. Texts, in this mode of thinking, are perceived to have come into existence primarily in relation to other texts. Conventional approaches to the so-called Synoptic problem, for example, predominantly operate on a purely literary theory, imagining authors who work selectively, indeed analytically, with texts, and exclusively with texts, and postulating the so-called Q, a text hidden from our view, yet presumed to be retrievable in its archetypal form. Here we see the model of modernity's print authorship in full play. I will return to the issue of the Synoptic problem below.

It is the significant achievement of Botha's book that it gives us a model of the Greco-Roman communications culture that is well grounded in ancient history and uncommonly sensitive to ancient media realities. What has been said about Harris' book applies to Botha's book as well: classicists by and large will not be entirely happy with many of his views. Hence my question: will the two distinguished disciplines of classical and biblical scholarship, represented by McGill and Botha, ever enter into a serious conversation?

Botha's own model of the ancient communications culture projects an oral-textual intermediality encompassed by “the all-pervading presence of orality and oral tradition” (38) and transacted in social contextuality. Authors in this media context “were not authors or writers quite in the sense that would be understood today” (15). Authorship was anything but a simple act, and invariably at odds with modern notions of authoring. What one needs to keep in mind, Botha writes, is that multiple voices and hands were involved in the processing of ancient texts. Quite frequently, a series of intermediary steps contributed to the oral-scribal composition: mental, memorial authoring, reading (out loud) from a given text, making of notes, excerpting from and rewriting or re-oralizing existing scrolls or manuscripts, use of notebooks (made of wood, wax, or papyrus), various interactions between the authorial dictator and a scribe (dictation to a stenographer or scribe for commitment to papyrus, scroll, or codex) (120). Rarely will these steps have been in use all at once, but the plurality of procedures raises the question whether our concept of authorship, loaded with assumptions derived from modern literary criticism as it is, and filtered through typographic sensibilities, as we saw, is an appropriate designation for the compositional processes we observe in antiquity.

If in the ancient media context “an author required a group effort” (Botha: 129), and authoring was a multi-layered activity, would not terms such as “corporate authoring,” or “distributed authorship” (Foley), “collective authoring,” or “co-authorship” (Botha: 200) reflect more accurately the oral-scribal-memorial-performative modes of authorship? Furthermore, when a scribe excerpted or rewrote portions of a manuscript, added comments or deleted parts, do we view the resultant product as a new work in its own right or an edition of the prior text? “Who wrote what?” Botha rightfully asks (82), noting that the lines between what we call editing and authoring are blurred (83; 122–23). Or, to be more precise: editing and authoring, in the way we use and understand these terms, may not be entirely adequate as far as the observed phenomena are concerned. Divisions of labor that seem so clear to us between author and scribe, copyist and editor are not as clear cut.

Finally, if we take the materiality of communication seriously, should we not likewise take the social role and identity of those into consideration who were principally instrumental in the oral-scribal manufacturing of ancient writings? “The hands that made those [chirographic] artifacts, handled them, wrote them, corrected them, took care of them, were the hands of subservient persons” (85). Could our scholarly reconstructions of Greco-Roman-Hellenistic antiquity overcome their “disregard for classes other than the elite” Botha asks (41), and view ancient literature not simply as the extension of noble minds but partially at least as products of slaves or freedmen, educated scribal experts to be sure, but slaves and freedmen nonetheless? Authorial labors, I submit, entailed not merely mental, cerebral activities, but the appropriation of multiple sensory attributes and, last but not least, the tangible engagement of a subservient class in the material aspects of scribal composition.

In this first part of the book Botha has developed foundational principles of ancient communications culture: scriptio continua, which required vocal articulation (“lack of punctuation” is misleading because the point is not that the ancients “lacked” anything, but that their word processing operations were different); dictation, one of the hallmarks of scribal composition; recitation or performance, the principal means by which texts came to be experienced; memory, which was engaged in the composition and the consumption of both speech and chirographs; “reading,” predominantly (although not exclusively) a performative act administered by a person reading out aloud (lector, anagnōsīs) rather than an experience of silent internalization; chirographs operating between dictation and auditory reception; and recycling of chirographs, hence the variability of many classical and biblical textual traditions. Significantly different from modernity's typographic communications system sketched above, the ancient scriptographic network was represented by dictator and lector, scribes (librarii, epistulares) and amanuenses, couriers and tabellarii (letter carriers), and handwritten materials destined for re-oralization. In terms of sense perception, auditus, visus, manus (handwriting) and the memorial faculty were constitutive. Remove the oral-aural sense, touch and memory—as has largely happened with typography—and communication in antiquity is not merely dysfunctional, it is nonfunctional.

Rumor

The second, much shorter part of the book is devoted to the early Jesus tradition and the formation of the Gospel of Mark. The model of tradition developed by Botha focuses on the informal, unofficial channels (without in principle ruling out more controlled transmissional processes). By far his most notable contribution to the early Jesus tradition is a daring exploration of the power of rumors. Considering the negative connotations associated with rumor, the scholarly treatment of what has historically been considered unworthy of serious reflection marks a bold step in our conceptualization of tradition. Botha writes on this topic with rare authority. A phenomenon of “immense sociological importance” (142), rumors, he observes, are passed on primarily by people of liminal status, ranging from the lower echelons of the elite down to the retainer class, including fishermen, merchants, artisans, day-laborers, service workers, and many others. Centers of rumor transmission are often marked by chronic unemployment, economic exploitation, and ubiquitous fears and anxieties associated with crisis situations. Rumor arises when people are confronted with unexpected or unexplained experiences, and it seeks to “fill the gap created by ambiguity” (154) when in the absence of satisfactory information tension and frustration are born.

Clearly, rumor research as developed by Botha is a world removed from a model of the tradition as a systematic forward movement, an accumulation of rationally progressing stepping stones, when each stage commences where the prior one has left off—all procedures that the historical paradigm has often projected on the gospel tradition. He will have none of this. As far as rumor transmission is concerned, it is “news that does not develop in institutional channels” (153), does not circulate unidirectionally, and is not passed on “like a linear relay line” (145), but is rather interactional, perforce uncontrolled, and moving in irregular fashion. In the Gospels Botha finds traces of rumor transmission in Mark 1:45 (spreading word about Jesus), Mark 5:14 (the swineherds reporting about the fate of the swine), Luke 2:1–20 (the socio-economic conditions underlying the birth story), Matthew 2:16–18 (the killing of the infants), 2:1–12 (the visit of the Magi), Mark 26: 59–61 (speculations concerning the destruction of the temple), Mark 13 (messianic ruminations), Matthew 28:11–15 (stories about the theft of Jesus' body), and defamatory, anti-Jewish slander attempting social demarcation and self-definition. In part at least, Botha concludes, rumor research makes a case for “the anonymity of the Gospels” (161), and it alerts us against viewing them in all instances as direct responses to specific communal traditions.

Redaction Criticism and Orality

Not surprisingly, Botha views with skepticism redaction criticism and its implications both for tradition and gospel. The proponents of the discipline, he points out, have paid little attention to how in the face of ancient chirographic conditions one might technically imagine the assumed editorial processes. “Our very concept of the gospel authors as ‘redactors of tradition’ reflects an anachronistic perception” (17). For Botha, the alternative to the tradition-redaction cul-de-sac lies in approaching Mark as “oral traditional literature” (166). We need to explore precisely how he understands this concept. It refers to the oral formulaic theory developed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, which in Botha's view provides the explanatory framework for both tradition and gospel. Although the theory has been met with limited enthusiasm by classicists, its impact on the humanities and social sciences has been immense, and studies related to Parry-Lord “defy bibliographical containment” (172). Botha himself seems slightly ambiguous about the applicability of the theory to gospel materials. He doubts “whether the theory can be used to indicate orality outside epic poetry” (174), and Mark is not, of course, epic poetry (167). But he also claims far more confidently that “the oral formulaic theory can explain most of the prominent characteristics of the Markan gospel” (180).

Two main features distinguish the Parry-Lord theory. One is the principle of composition-in-performance. It suggests that composition and performance, transmission and recitation, were part of the same process in the making of Homeric verse. It is this process of traditional transmission (175) that Botha finds eminently relevant to the gospel tradition. It is a view which for many of us working in orality-scribality studies can no longer be in doubt. I have written extensively about the oral compositional dynamics of the tradition as well as about what I have defined as “scribal activism,” and I hold that the concept of composition-in-performance is superior to a strictly literary one. The theory's second principle is that of the formula, a compositional technique famously defined by Parry as “a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea” (italics mine; Botha: 169, 176). It is noteworthy that the formula, as conceived by Parry-Lord, is inseparable from meter, consisting of fixed verbal combinations that are shaped under metrical conditions.

The Gospels, of course, are not metered language. This raises the question about the theoretical applicability of Parry's formula. Can all the multiple “formulaic” features Botha singles out in Mark—stylized descriptions, stereotypical use of names, type-scenes, stock phrases, techniques of repetition, double expressions, conventional introductions, use of series of threes, thematic compositions, paratactic style—be subsumed under Parry's formula? At issue is not the deeply oral diction of Mark, but the ultimate usefulness of Parry's formula. The Gospels are not oral metered epic.

Oral Composition

Botha's summary assessment of the Gospel states that “Mark does not merely contain oral traditions, but is oral composition” (xv, 188). This is a key sentence cited twice in Botha's book. In following Parry-Lord, the suggestion seems to be that the technology of alphabetic writing was not needed in the Gospel's traditional history except for the final chirographic transition which, again following Parry-Lord, was accomplished by dictation (187). Basically this is also the position advocated initially by Albert Lord (1978), and more recently by Joanna Dewey, Antoinette Clark Wire, and Richard Horsley.

It is here that I am less convinced than Botha and others. I have long argued that in addition to a predominantly memorially empowered, performative history, scribality cannot completely be ruled out from the gospel tradition, that the Gospels are not fully explicable as transcriptions of actual performances, and that dictation of orally composed performances cannot in the end account for the texts in their entirety. Along with others working in orality-literacy studies, Botha has objected to this position: “I still think that [Kelber] tries to incorporate too much of traditional [= textual] thinking about the history of the synoptic tradition” (110, n. 70), and again “Kelber underestimates the role of orality in Greco-Roman society and romanticizes writing” (138). Perhaps this is the case. But I should like to submit two issues for consideration.

Orality, Preliteracy, and Authorship

As far as the ancient media realities of Pauline epistolography are concerned, Botha suggests the strong possibility that Paul was agrammatos (201); he may not have been able to write Greek. But, Botha quickly adds, “illiteracy carried no stigma in itself” (202), and no one, I suppose, will doubt that the apostle was deeply conversant in the traditions of his people. The point is this: an educated person in antiquity was one who had internalized the traditions of his people, and not one who had mastered reading and writing. Paul's compositional and dictational habits, his reliance on “rather sophisticated scribes” (199), and the recitational rationale of his letters will all have been matters entirely in keeping with ancient word processing. Again Botha states that co-authorship was a fact of ancient communicative life, and he explicitly discredits the notion of Paul writing his letters “as an individual, sitting at a desk and dropping a note to some friends” (200). And yet, I ask, is not a large part of Pauline scholarship an accomplice in the logic that postulates Paul the solitary theological genius solely masterminding his epistolary production? Have we truly come to terms with the fact, Botha asks, that we are dealing with Paul's and Sosthenes' letter to the Corinthians, with Paul's and Timothy's follow-up letter to the Corinthians, or that the letters to the Thessalonians are “the Paul-Silvanus-Timothy corpus” (200)? It was in the memorial-oral-scribal-performative network that the epistles took on life, with Paul functioning as mental composer and memorial dictator, scribes versed in manuscript technology writing by hand, emissaries and reciters in charge of oral delivery, and audiences at the aural receiving end.

Traditionally, interpreters have turned to Greco-Roman rhetoric for hermeneutical assistance, but all too often the oral, performative dimension has been too cursorily integrated or neglected altogether, missing the point that “orality was part and parcel of the whole process” (199). My sense is that we have not sufficiently explored and reflected on the apostle's conventional practice of authoring his letters. Botha hints at memorial compositioning: “Composition in memory—even for very long texts—is possible and was done; probably most Greco-Roman authors were quite practiced in doing so” (74, n. 50). But have Pauline studies truly come to terms, I ask, with the mode of mental compositioning, with composition-in-memory-and-dictation?

In our Greek texts of the Pauline letters, for example, statements from the Hebrew scriptural tradition are conventionally printed in bold, forcing the impression upon readers that we are dealing with citations from published sources, and making us forget that we encounter the products of a mind saturated with scriptural language. Amanuenses and emissaries, far from being subsidiary persons, were crucially important figures in making the epistolary project a success. In all probability, scribes could be entrusted with semi-authorial responsibilities, and emissaries/reciters of the letters exercised power in establishing the apostolic parousia, commenting on and expanding the epistolary content, thus not merely transmitting, but interpreting and continuing the work of Paul. In toto, what mattered most in the ancient context was not exclusively the textually produced and demarcated content, but what took place within the communicative web of text, audience, and reciter. And the emissaries' delivery encompassed a whole range of rhetorical skills, including modulation of voice and gestures aimed at persuasion and the arousal of emotions.

Paul as a Subject of Gossip

What in the case of the Jesus tradition Botha has defined as rumor, in the Pauline context he calls gossip. But whether he calls it rumor or gossip, he is describing one and the same phenomenon. In a culture unlike ours, which knows of no mass-media communication and global interconnectivity, where people spent much of their lives “in the streets, shops, arcades, arenas and baths of the city” (216), and not in homes or offices, and where interpersonal relations provided by far the most important source of information, gossip must have been an ubiquitous force in everyday life. “People from all walks of life gossiped” (226). In singling out gossip and rating it as “the most ‘rhetorical’ of activities” (223), Botha has once again put a high premium on the informal aspects of communication. Paul, an ambiguous and controversial figure, and a man “without power, prestige and privilege” (230), would have been a ready source of gossiping himself.

His attitude toward circumcision and the Law, his Cilician background, his independence and work as artisan in a trade that carried a social stigma provided ample grounds for suspicion that could set tongues wagging. Furthermore, in the urban Mediterranean society where face-to-face conversation was the main mode of communication, it may not always have been feasible to distinguish between gossip and factual information (225). When, therefore, the apostle's teachings led to frequent misunderstandings and dissension, one should not, Botha suggests, in all instances credit weighty theological issues to have been the sole source of disruption. To explain the factionalism surrounding Paul's career wholly in terms of doctrine, to ascribe the feuds and quarrelings in his communities solely to major theological events, and to make “the ‘quest’ for Paul's opponents” (213) the hermeneutical key to his letters runs the risk of an unwarranted idealization of his work and message.

In Botha's view, “gossip plays a major part in factionalism, conflict and power struggles” (214). The notion that “opponents” were challenging the apostle's doctrinal convictions with developed doctrinal ideas of their own may owe more to Paul's own inclination to theologize his life and work than to the social and communicative realities on the ground (231). While Paul's thought came to be situated and expounded early on in the history of theological ideas, it was to some extent at least part of the People's History (Horsley), feeding on and growing out of informal, daily discourses.