Oral Tradition in New Testament Studies

New Testament studies, and Biblical studies more generally, is a conservative field when it comes to oral tradition. The field developed as part of Christian theology in order to interpret the Scripture, the sacred text that contains or mediates the holy word of God. Within this field of study, the term "oral tradition" has a very distinctive and confined reference to the transmission of the sayings of and stories about Jesus prior to the composition (simply presumed to be in writing) of the Gospels. Because the written text is deemed sacred, however, it may be understandable that oral tradition in the broader sense assumed in other fields poses a considerable threat to New Testament (Biblical) scholars. That in turn may explain why the limited work that has been done is heavily derivative from work in other fields. Despite considerable resistance, recent research and explorations in several connections are conspiring to challenge standard assumptions and procedures in the field, bringing comparative work on oral tradition in the broader sense to bear on the "oral tradition" of Jesus in the distinctively New Testament studies sense. First, careful and extensive recent examinations of the evidence indicate clearly that literacy was extremely limited in Mediterranean antiquity. The exhaustive survey by Catherine Hezser (2001) makes it unavoidable that the Jews were not an exception. Obviously the field must come to grips with the dominant importance of oral communication in the formative period of what became New Testament literature. Second, increasing awareness of work in other fields indicating that literacy and orality should not be understood in terms of a Great Divide, but rather were engaged in close interaction, is opening up recognition that even after a text was written, it was still "read" or "recited" orally to a whole community of people, not read silently by a solitary individual. It is much easier, moreover, to imagine the possible oral composition and regular performance of a "text" such the Gospel of Mark. Martin Jaffee's recent analysis of the close interrelationship of oral recitation and interpretation and