Don’t Take Notes

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’  But I tell you, . . .”  Matthew 5:38-39a  NIV

Heard/ Tell – Lately we’ve remarked on the curious fact that Yeshua wrote nothing.  Westerners are uncomfortable with that.  Perhaps that’s why we rely so heavily on the writings of the apostles.  We like our religion in black and white, on the page where we can check everything for accuracy and theological relevance.  Certainly Yeshua was intimately familiar with the written word.  His “Bible” was the scrolls of the Tanakh, carefully copied from one generation to the next.  But if we think that’s all he relied upon, we would be mistaken.  The vast corpus of rabbinic material to which it constantly refers was oral.  It wasn’t categorized and produced as the redacted Mishnah until Judah ha-Nasi’s work, a man who lived between 135 and 217 CE.  One of the reasons we so often find Yeshua’s contemporary rabbis citing a long list of prior authorities is simply because no one could open a “book” to check their sources.  Everything had to be delivered per vocem.  And when you realize this, Yeshua’s vocal instructions make perfect sense.  His teaching method was exactly the same as the method used by all the other rabbis.  We can see this quite clearly in the above verse.  “You have heard—akoúō  (to hear) . . . but I say—légō (to say, to speak) . . .”  Everything depends on listening—and memorizing.  Not note-taking.  “Did you hear me?” not “Did you get that down?”  The shift in Western civilization toward written, printed Scripture does not match the teaching method of the Messiah.

And it doesn’t match the teaching methods of other ancient faiths as well.

“The ancient Vedic tradition represents the paradigmatic instance of scripture as spoken, recited word.”[1]

What this means in the Hindu culture has direct bearing on our understanding of the first-century Jewish culture.  Consider this: “Written texts have been used, certainly, but a text without a teacher to teach it directly and orally to a pupil is only so many useless leaves or pages.  This is in many ways the dimension of textuality in the Indian context that the modern Westerner finds hardest to grasp: the indissoluble link between the authoritative, oral transmission from a qualified teacher and the authoritativeness of one’s own ‘possession’, or appropriation and understanding, of a sacred text.”[2]

“This has established the guru-sisya relationship as the only model for true learning in India.”[3]

We might also find some parallels in the Hindu idea that ““Knowledge or truth, especially salvific knowledge or truth, is tied to the living words of authentic persons, not authentic documents.”[4]

It makes you wonder what we really mean by “the living word”?  Maybe the teacher-pupil, dare I say, rabbi-disciple, should be the only model for true learning of the Bible.

Topical Index: oral, written, heard, say, teaching, guru, pupil, Matthew 5:38-39a

[1] William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 68.

[2] Ibid., p. 75.

[3] Ibid., p. 74.

[4] Ibid., p. 75.