Download or read book The Oral Ethos of the Early Church written by Joanna Dewey and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To experience the gospel message as first-century people heard it is to move into an oral world, one with very little reliance on manuscripts. The essays in this book explore this oral world and the Gospel of Mark within it. They demonstrate the oral style of Mark's gospel, which suggests that it was composed orally, transmitted orally in its entirety by literate and nonliterate storytellers, and survived to become part of the canon only because it was widely known orally. Women's storytelling also thrived during the first centuries of Christianity. With the transition to manuscript authority beginning in the middle of the second century, women's voices were often minimized, trivialized, or completely omitted in written versions. Further, when the Gospel of Mark was one of four written Gospels these voices were quickly ignored. An ancient audience hearing Mark performed, however, enjoyed a vibrant experience of the gospel message and its urgent call to follow.
Download or read book The Dictionary of the Bible and Ancient Media written by Tom Thatcher and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-10-19 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dictionary of the Bible and Ancient Media is a convenient and authoritative reference tool, introducing specific terms and concepts helpful to the study of the Bible and related literature in ancient communications culture. Since the early 1980s, biblical scholars have begun to explore the potentials of interdisciplinary theories of oral tradition, oral performance, personal and collective memory, ancient literacy and scribality, visual culture and ritual. Over time these theories have been combined with considerations of critical and exegetical problems in the study of the Bible, the history of Israel, Christian origins, and rabbinics. The Dictionary of the Bible and Ancient Media responds to the rapid growth of the field by providing a source of reference that offers clear definitions, and in-depth discussions of relevant terms and concepts, and the relationships between them. The volume begins with an overview of 'ancient media studies' and a brief history of research to orient the reader to the field and the broader research context of the book, with individual entries on terms and topics commonly encountered in studies of the Bible in ancient media culture. Each entry defines the term/ concept under consideration, then offers more sustained discussion of the topic, paying particular attention to its relevance for the study of the Bible and related literature
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Synoptic Gospels written by Stephen P. Ahearne-Kroll and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The field of Synoptic studies traditionally has had two basic foci. The question of how Matthew, Mark, and Luke are related to each other, what their sources are, and how the Gospels use their sources constitutes the first focus. Collectively, scholarship on the Synoptic Problem has tried to address these issues, and recent years have seen renewed interest and rigorous debate about some of the traditional approaches to the Synoptic Problem and how these approaches might inform the understanding of the origins of the early Jesus movement. The second focus involves thematic studies across the three Gospels. These are usually, but not exclusively, performed for theological purposes to tease out the early Jesus movement's thinking about the nature of Jesus, the motivations for his actions, the meaning of his death and resurrection, and his relationship to God. These studies pay less attention to the particular voices of the three individual Synoptic Gospels because they are trying to get to the overall theological character of Jesus"--
Download or read book Worship Women and War written by John J. Collins and published by SBL Press. This book was released on 2015-10-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrate the career of an inspirational scholar and teacher concerned with revealing voices from the margins This volume of essays honors Susan Niditch, author of War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (1993), “My Brother Esau Is a Hairy Man”: Hair and Identity in Ancient Israel (2008), and most recently, The Responsive Self: Personal Religion in Biblical Literature of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian Periods (forthcoming), among other influential publications. Essays touch on topics such as folklore, mythology, and oral history, Israelite religion, ancient Judaism, warfare, violence, and gender. Features: Essays from nineteen scholars, all experts in their fields Exploration of texts from Mesopotamia, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament Bibliography of Niditch's scholarly contributions
Download or read book Biblical Humor and Performance written by Peter S. Perry and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-08-21 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What’s so humorous about the Bible? Quite a bit, especially if experienced with others! Nine biblical scholars explore their experiences of reading and hearing passages from the Bible and discovering humor that becomes clearer in performance. Each writer found clues in their chosen biblical text that suggested biblical authors expected an audience to respond with laughter. Performers have a powerful role in either bringing out or tamping down humor in the Bible. One audience may be more disposed to respond to humor than another. And each contributor found that experiencing humor changed the interpretation of the biblical passage. From Genesis to Revelation, this study uncovers the Bible’s potential for humor.
Download or read book The Forgotten Compass written by Werner H. Kelber and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-09-21 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As form criticism arose, the French anthropologist Marcel Jousse developed a hermeneutical paradigm, global in scope and prescient in its vision but opposed to the philological paradigm of biblical studies. While the philological methodology came to define modernity’s biblical hermeneutics, Jousse’s rhythmically energized paradigm was marginalized and largely forgotten. Although Jousse has left relatively few traces in writing, many of his more than one thousand lectures, delivered at four different academic institutions in Paris between 1931 and 1957, have been edited and translated into English by Edgard Sienaert. The Forgotten Compass surveys Jousse’s views on biblical tradition and scholarship, documenting the relevance of his paradigm for current biblical studies. What distinguishes Jousse’s paradigm is that it is firmly established within the orbit of ancient communications and deeply rooted in Jewish tradition. The Forgotten Compass challenges readers to come to appreciate the print Bible’s lack of fluency in the very sensibilities privileged by Jousse’s paradigm and to raise consciousness about the multivocal, multisensory culture in which the biblical traditions emerged and from which they drew their initial nourishment.
Download or read book Empowering the People written by Richard A. Horsley and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-03-25 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative study, Horsley builds on his earlier works concerning the problematic and misleading categories of "magic" and "miracle" to examine in-depth the meaning and importance of the narratives of healing and exorcism in the Gospels. Incorporating his work on oral performance and turning to important works in medical anthropology, a new image emerges of how these narratives help us re-evaluate Jesus's place in first-century Galilee and Judea. In his exorcisms and healings, Jesus-in-interaction was empowering the villagers in their struggles for renewal of personal and communal dignity in resistance to invasive Roman rule.
Download or read book Sound Mapping the New Testament Second Edition written by Margaret E. Lee and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-08-22 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the ancient world, writings were read aloud, heard, and remembered. But modern exegesis assumes a silent text. According to Margaret Lee & Brandon Scott, the disjuncture between ancient and modern approaches to literature obscures the beauty and meaning in writings such as the New Testament. Further, the structure of an ancient Greek composition derives first from its sounds and not from the meaning of its words. They argue that sound analysis, analysis of the signifier and its audible dimension, is crucial to interpretation. Sound Mapping the New Testament explores writing technology in the Greco-Roman world, then turns to ancient Greek literary criticism for descriptions of grammar as a science of sound and literary composition as a woven fabric of speech. Based on these perspectives and a close analysis of writings from the four gospels, Paul, and Q, Sound Mapping the New Testament advances a theory of sound analysis that will enable modern readers to hear the New Testament afresh. The second edition reprints the first edition with a new introduction that reviews a decade of sound mapping scholarship and argues for the continued necessity of sound mapping for New Testament interpretation.
Download or read book Memory Memorization and Memorizers written by Marcel Jousse and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-07-18 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the spoken word. It is about words spoken in the first century of our era and later put down in writing as confirmation of what had been said and done. Here, Marcel Jousse answers his own fundamental question: "How did the human being, placed at the heart of the countless actions of the universe, set about to conserve within him the memory of these actions and to transmit this memory faithfully to his descendants, from generation to generation?" To all oral societies, tradition is memory, and of all oral societies, ancient Galilee, perhaps more so than any other, developed ways and means of capacitating memory to levels we no longer fathom. This book is about how Ieshua's deeds and sayings were first faithfully recorded in the memory as and when they happened, how they were then faithfully transmitted orally within and without Palestine, and how they were finally faithfully--literally--recorded anew, as oral tradition put in writing.
Download or read book First Century Gospel Storytellers and Audiences written by Thomas E. Boomershine and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-07-29 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays explore the reconception of the Gospels as first-century compositions of sound performed for audiences by storytellers rather than the anachronistic picture of a series of texts read by individual readers. The new paradigm implicit in these initial experiments is based on the recent realization that the majority of persons—85 to 95 percent—were illiterate and experienced the Jesus stories as members of audiences. Either from memory or from memorized manuscripts, the evangelists performed the Gospels as an evening’s entertainment of two to four hours. The audiences were predominantly addressed as Hellenistic Judeans who lived in the aftermath of the Roman-Jewish war. When heard whole, the Gospels were vivid experiences of the central character of Jesus. These studies of audience address and the interactions between first-century storytellers and audiences reveal a dynamic performance literature that functioned as scripts for an ever-expanding network of storytelling proclamations whose envisioned horizon was the whole world. When the Gospels were told at one time from beginning to end, they invited the listeners to move from being peripherally interested or initially opposed to Jesus to identifying themselves as disciples of Jesus and believers in him as the Messiah.
Download or read book Sound Matters written by Margaret E. Lee and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sound matters. The New Testament’s first audiences were listeners, not readers. They heard its compositions read aloud and understood their messages as linear streams of sound. To understand the New Testament’s meaning in the way its earliest audiences did, we must hear its audible features and understand its words as spoken sounds. Sound Matters presents essays by ten scholars from five countries and three continents, who explore the New Testament through sound mapping, a technique invented by Margaret Lee and Bernard Scott for analyzing Greek texts as speech. Sound Matters demonstrates the value and uses of this technique as a prelude and aid to interpretation. The essays that make up this volume illustrate the wide range of interpretive possibilities that emerge when sound mapping restores the spoken sounds of the New Testament and revives its living voice. Contributors Thomas E. Boomershine Pieter J. J. Botha Jeffrey E. Brickle Nina E. Livesey Dan Nasselqvist Bernhard Oestreich Frank Scheppers Bernard Brandon Adam G. White
Download or read book Orality and Literacy in Early Christianity written by Pieter Botha and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of the Jesus movement and earliest Christianity requires careful attention to the characteristics and peculiarities of oral and literate traditions. Understanding the distinctive elements of Greco-Roman literacy potentially has profound implications for the historical understanding of the documents and events involved. Concepts such as media criticism, orality, manuscript culture, scribal writing, and performative reading are explored in these chapters. The scene of Greco-Roman literacy is analyzed by investigating writing and reading practices. These aspects are then related to early Christian texts such as the Gospel of Mark and sections from Paul's letters.
Download or read book The Interface of Orality and Writing written by Annette Weissenrieder and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the visual, the oral, and the written interrelate in antiquity? The essays in this collection address the competing and complementary roles of visual media, forms of memory, oral performance, and literacy and popular culture in the ancient Mediterranean world. Incorporating both customary and innovative perspectives, the essays advance the frontiers of our understanding of the nature of ancient texts as regards audibility and performance, the vital importance of the visual in the comprehension of texts, and basic concepts of communication, particularly the need to account for disjunctive and non-reciprocal social relations in communication. Thus the contributions show how the investigation of the interface of the oral and written, across the spectrum of seeing, hearing, and writing, generates new concepts of media and mediation.
Download or read book The Messiah of Peace written by Thomas E. Boomershine and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The telling of Mark's story of Jesus as the Messiah of peace in the decades following the Roman-Judean war announced a third way forward for Diaspora Judeans other than warfare against or separation from "the nations." Mark's Gospel was the story of the victory of a nonviolent Messiah who taught and practiced the ways of a new age of peace and reconciliation in contrast to the ancient and modern myth of redemptive violence. The Messiah of Peace is a performance-criticism commentary exploring a new paradigm of biblical scholarship that takes seriously the original experience of the Gospel of Mark as a lively story told to audiences rather than as a text read by readers. The commentary is correlated with the Messiah of Peace website, which features video recordings of the story in both English and Greek. Critical investigation of the sounds of the Markan passion-resurrection narrative reveals the identity of its original audiences as predominantly Judean with a minority of Gentile nonbelievers. Hearing the passion-resurrection story was an experience of involvement in the forces that led to the rejection and death of Jesus--an experience that brought on the challenges inherent in becoming a disciple of the Messiah of peace.
Download or read book From Text to Performance written by Kelly R Iverson and published by Lutterworth Press. This book was released on 2015-04-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the last two centuries biblical interpretation has been guided by perspectives that have largely ignored the oral context in which the gospels took shape. Only recently have scholars begun to explore how ancient media inform the interpretive process and an understanding of the Bible. This collection of essays, by authors who recognize that the Jesus tradition was a story heard and performed, seeks to reevaluate the constituent elements of narrative, including characters, structure, narrator, time, and intertextuality. In dialogue with traditional literary approaches, these essays demonstrate that an appreciation of performance yields fresh insights distinguishable in many respects from results of literary or narrative readings of the gospels.
Download or read book Text and Tradition in Performance and Writing written by Richard A. Horsley and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Embedded in modern print culture, biblical scholars have been projecting the assumptions and concepts of print culture onto the texts they interpret. In the ancient world from which those texts originate, however, literacy was confined to only a small number of educated scribes. And, as recent research has shown, even the literate scribes learned texts by repeated recitation, while the nonliterate ordinary people had little if any direct contact with written scrolls. The texts that had taken distinctive form, moreover, were embedded in a broader and deeper cultural repertoire cultivated orally in village communities as well as in scribal circles. Only recently have some scholars struggled to appreciate texts that later became ""biblical"" in their own historical context of oral communication. Exploration of texts in oral performance--whether as scribal teachers' instruction to their protŽgŽs or as prophetic speeches of Jesus of Nazareth or as the performance of a whole Gospel story in a community of Jesus-loyalists--requires interpreters to relinquish their print-cultural assumptions. Widening exploration of texts in oral performance in other fields offers exciting new possibilities for allowing those texts to come alive again in their community contexts as they resonated with the cultural tradition in which they were embedded."
Download or read book The Story of Naomi The Book of Ruth written by Terry Giles and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-01-29 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book of Ruth is probably best known as a romantic love story that, through the expression of loving devotion, overcomes tragedy and ends with the founding of the most famous family in all of biblical Israel. But the book wasn't always this way. In fact, it wasn't a book at all but rather a story told with a very different purpose in mind. Before Ruth, there was the Story of Naomi, a subversive story designed to challenge a male-dominated status quo. Through comedy, sarcastic irony, and unparalleled rhetorical skill the Naomi storyteller holds up for inspection social gender roles and the power of sexuality in a manner that resonates yet today. The Story of Naomi--The Book of Ruth goes behind the literary rendition of the story and recaptures the original oral tale, with script and performance directions that brings to life the humor, tragedy, and transparent honesty shared between the Naomi storyteller and her audience.
