Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §8.3
nence from the marginalisation imposed upon them by the almost exclusive focus
of scholarly interest on the sayings of Jesus. 155 Not least of importance,
given Kelber's developed thesis, is his recognition that Mark (his main focus in
the Gospels) retains many of the indices of orality — for example, its 'activist
syntax' and colloquial Greek, its use of the storyteller's 'three', and its many redundancies
and repetitions; 'Mark may be treating an oral story in order for it to
remain functional for the ear more than for the eye'. 156 Mark's Gospel may be
frozen orality, 157 but it is frozen orality. 158
Unfortunately, Kelber pushes his thesis about Mark marking a major transition
from oral to written far too hard and seriously diminishes its overall value.
The first step in his thesis development is that the written Gospel disrupts the 'oral
synthesis'; it 'arises not from orality per se, but out of the debris of deconstructed
orality'; it indicates 'alienation from the oral apparatus'; it 'accomplishes the
death of living words for the purpose of inaugurating the life of textuality'. 159 The
transition is overdramatized: it is widely recognized that in a predominantly oral
culture, oral versions of a tradition would continue after it had been transcribed
and that knowledge of the written version would usually be in an oral medium. 160
155. Kelber, Oral ch. 2.
156. Kelber, Oral 65-68. See also Theissen, Miracle Stories 189-95.
157. Kelber, Oral 91, 94.
158. The oral character of Mark's narrative has since been strongly emphasized by T. P.
Haverly, Oral Traditional Literature and the Composition of Mark's Gospel (Edinburgh PhD,
1983); and especially by J. Dewey, 'Oral Methods of Structuring Narrative in Mark', Interpretation
43 (1989) 32-44; also 'The Gospel of Mark as an Oral-Aural Event; Implications for Interpretation',
in E. S. Malbon and E. V. McKnight, eds., The New Literary Criticism and the
New Testament (JNSTS 109; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1994) 145-63. Note also Lord's
earlier evaluation of 'The Gospels as Oral Traditional Literature' (Walker, Relationships 58-84
[particularly 79-80, 82], 90-91). The conclusion of the Symposium on Jesus and the Oral Gospel
Tradition (ed. H. Wansbrough) can cut both ways: 'We have been unable to deduce or derive
any marks which distinguish clearly between an oral and a written transmission process.
Each can show a similar degree of fixity and variability' (12). Strecker rightly emphasises the
continuity in transmission of the tradition from oral to written ('Schriftlichkeit' 164-65). Cf.
Schröter, Erinnerung 55, 60.
159. Kelber, Oral 91-96, 130-31, 184-85 (quotations from 95, 98, 131). Compare and
contrast the more balanced judgment of G. N. Stanton, 'Form Criticism Revisited', in
M. Hooker and C. Hickling, eds., What about the New Testament?, C. Evans FS (London:
SCM, 1975) 13-27: There is no reason to doubt that it was not the writing of Mark's gospel,
but the later slow acceptance of Mark as a fixed and authoritative text which led to the death of
oral traditions about Jesus' (20). Kelber subsequently shows himself more dubious regarding
what he calls 'the great divide thesis, which pits oral tradition vis-ä-vis gospel text' ('Modalities
of Communication, Cognition and Physiology of Perception: Orality, Rhetoric,
Scribality', Semeia 65 [1995] 194-215 [here 195]).
160. See, e.g., 0. Andersen, 'Oral Tradition', in Wansbrough, ed., Jesus 17-58 (here 43-53).
202