Biblical Views: Sacred Texts in an Oral Culture: How Did They Function?

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Ours is a text-based culture, a culture of the written word. You need look no further than your computer screen to verify this. An Internet age is conceivable only if there is widespread literacy, which in turn leads to widespread production of texts.

It may be difficult for us, in a text-based culture, to conceive of and understand an oral culture, much less how sacred texts function in such a culture. However difficult it may be, it is nevertheless important that we try to understand oral culture, since all the cultures of the Bible were essentially oral cultures.

The literacy rate in Biblical cultures ranged from about 5 percent to 20 percent depending on the culture and which subgroup within the culture we are discussing. Not surprisingly then, all ancient peoples, whether literate or not, preferred the living word—which is to say the spoken word. No wonder Jesus said to his audiences, “Let those who have ears, listen.” He never said, “Let those who have eyes, read.”

So far as we can tell, no documents in antiquity were intended for “silent” reading, and only a few were intended for private individuals to read. Ancient documents were always meant to be read out loud, and usually read out loud to a group of people. For the most part, documents were simply the necessary surrogates for oral communication. This was particularly true of ancient letters.

Most ancient documents, including letters, were not really texts in the modern sense at all. They were composed with their aural and oral potential in mind, and they were meant to be orally delivered when they arrived at their destination. Thus, for example, when one reads the opening verses of Ephesians, loaded as it is with aural devices (assonance, alliteration, rhythm, rhyme and various rhetorical devices), it becomes perfectly clear that no one was ever meant to hear this in any language but Greek, and furthermore, no one was ever meant to read this silently. It needed to be heard.

There was a third reason it needed to be orally delivered. Texts were expensive to produce: Papyrus was expensive, ink was expensive, and scribes were ultra-expensive. (Being a secretary in Jesus’ time could be a lucrative job.) Because of the cost of making documents, a letter in Greek often had no separation of words, sentences, paragraphs or the like, little or no punctuation, and all capital letters. Imagine having to sort out a document that began as follows:

PAULASERVANTOFCHRISTJESUSCALLEDTOBEANAPOSTLEANDSETAPARTFORTHEGOSPELOFGOD.

The only way to decipher such a collection of letters was to sound them out—out loud. In St. Augustine’s fourth-century Confessions, he says that St. Ambrose was the most remarkable man he had ever met because he could read without moving his lips or making a sound. In this oral culture, texts were often simply surrogates for oral speech, and this is true of many Biblical texts as well.

It is hard for us to wrap our minds around it, but texts were scarce in the Biblical world and were often thus treated with great respect. Since literacy was an accomplishment only of the educated, and the educated tended to be from the social elite, texts in the Biblical world served the purposes of the elite—conveying their authority, passing down their judgments, establishing their property claims, indicating their heredity and the like. But since all ancient people were profoundly religious, the most important documents, even among the elite, were religious texts.

What do texts in an oral culture tell us about their authors? It is too seldom taken into account that the 27 books of the New Testament reflect a remarkable level of literacy, and indeed of rhetorical skill, among the inner circle of leaders of the early Christian movement. Early Christianity was not, by and large, a movement led by illiterate peasants or the socially deprived. New Testament texts reflect a considerable knowledge of Greek, rhetoric and general Greco-Roman culture.

The New Testament letters are not really letters, though they sometimes have epistolary openings and closings. They are discourses, homilies, rhetorical speeches of various sorts that their authors could not be present to deliver to a particular audience, and so instead they sent a surrogate to proclaim them. These documents would not be handed 082to just anyone. From what we can tell, Paul expected one of his coworkers, such as Timothy or Titus or Phoebe, to go and orally deliver the contents of the document in a rhetorically effective manner. Only someone skilled in reading seamless prose, and indeed who already knew the contents of the document, could place the emphases in the right places so as to effectively communicate the message.

In an oral culture, words, especially religious words, were regarded not as mere ciphers or symbols. Words were believed to have power and an effect on people, but only if they were properly communicated and pronounced. It was not just the sacred names of God that were considered to have inherent power, but sacred words in general. Consider, for example, what Isaiah 55:11 says: “So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” The Word or words of a living and powerful God were viewed as living and powerful in themselves.¹ You can therefore imagine how a precious and expensive document that contained God’s own words would be viewed. It would be something that needed to be kept in a sacred place like a temple or a synagogue, and only certain persons with clean hands and pure hearts would be allowed to unroll the sacred scroll and read it, much less interpret it.

From what we can tell, texts that ultimately became part of the New Testament were treasured during the first century and were lovingly and carefully copied for centuries thereafter. There is even evidence beginning in the second century of the use of female Christian scribes, who had “fairer” hands, to copy and begin to decorate these sacred texts.

Ours is a text-based culture, a culture of the written word. You need look no further than your computer screen to verify this. An Internet age is conceivable only if there is widespread literacy, which in turn leads to widespread production of texts.