Written?

“Now He said to them, “These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all the things that are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”  Luke 24:44 NASB

Spoke – Yeshua followed the teaching technique of the rabbis.  He never wrote anything.  You might think that this fact has little to do with what we know about his teaching today.  After all we have the apostolic documents.  His teachings have been enshrined in the sacred texts for two thousand years.  But what we have isn’t what his disciples had—and there is a difference.  In fact, what we have in the Bible, any Bible, isn’t what was delivered to the original audiences, even in the letters of the later apostles because virtually all of God’s instructions were originally given orally.  Even Paul’s letters were usually read aloud to larger audiences especially in illiterate cultures.  Something fundamental happened when those messages were converted to written texts.

“Where memory collapses time spans, writing tends to fix events temporally and heighten the sense of their distinctiveness as well as their ‘pastness’, or separation from the present and the individual person.  The sense of participation in the events narrated becomes more difficult.  Something of this kind of perceptual shift is what we often try to get at by distinguishing (oral) ‘myth’ from (written) ‘history’ as narrative modes.  The crux of the difference between the two is not their relative ‘truth’, but their presentation of temporality . . .”[1]

The authors of the gospels understood this problem.  That’s why they used special Greek linguistic constructions in an attempt to make the story a present reality.  They often used present tense verbs instead of past tense as demanded by context.  They did this so that the reader who was not present when the event happened would feel as if he were.  But, of course, we barely recognize this technique in our translations because the translators alter the tense to fit proper English grammar.

“Oral telling of the past, even by specialized guardians of a society’s traditions, is not subject to the same repeated scrutiny over time (whether within a single transmitter’s lifetime or over several generations) that a written record receives.  Where the former is personal (which is to say, communal, in the most immediate sense) and directed to present concerns and situations, the latter has existence apart from its author, his or her ‘present’ concerns, and those of the community, which will rarely be the same as those of a later time.”[2]

Once again we must realize that our written texts are often viewed as if they were written for us I our contemporary circumstances.  But they weren’t.  They were neither written nor intended for us.  They were delivered orally to the original audience about contemporary issues.  Unfortunately, our written texts push us toward an eschatological view of all Scripture.  We simply read the texts as if they were yesterday’s newspaper.

“In other words, literacy changes the relationship between a society and its traditions, as well as that between individuals and their past, because it fixes those traditions and that past in a way that distances both from the present. . . The private reader will demand of and find in a text very different things from the listening audience.”[3]

Written sacred material alters religious practice.  Perhaps this is why the Talmud resisted being written for centuries because once it was committed to writing, the character of the believing community changed, even though the Talmud attempts to recount all the conversation around any particular topic.  We face the same problem with all of our commentaries, translations, and religious material.  A “statement of faith” isn’t the kind of faith found in the communities that followed the God of Israel, not because it is doctrinaire but because it converts lived experience into propositions.  Perhaps we need to step back from the text and ask ourselves how we came to believe in the first place.  Perhaps that gnawing feeling that something is missing arises from a preoccupation with the written words instead of the power of oral communication.  When God said, He spoke and we listened.  Maybe God doesn’t speak because we are reading rather than listening.

Topical Index: written, oral, Luke 24:44

[1] William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 16.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.