{"id":57,"date":"2011-01-21T14:00:10","date_gmt":"2011-01-21T14:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?p=57"},"modified":"2015-03-13T23:16:35","modified_gmt":"2015-03-14T03:16:35","slug":"a-lecture-on-lectors-not-readers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/2011\/01\/21\/a-lecture-on-lectors-not-readers\/","title":{"rendered":"A Lecture on Lectors— Not Readers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a> The word of the Bible was in many many ways a very different world than our world, and one of the major differences was the way ancient texts worked and how exactly they were read.\u00a0\u00a0 A few basic facts first: 1) the literacy rate in the Greco-Roman world of the NT was anywhere from 10%-20% depending on where one was and what sub-culture we are talking about.\u00a0 When I say literacy, I am not referring to the ability to read the odd word or phrase, say of graffiti or a business sign.\u00a0 I can do that when I am in Turkey or Russia, but I am certainly not literate in those languages\u2014 I could not read whole paragraphs much less a whole manuscript. \u00a0 I am referring the sort of literacy that makes one a regular reader, and perhaps also a producer of ancient texts.\u00a0 And in regard to this,\u00a0 literacy was something mostly only elite persons had, persons with considerable education.\u00a0\u00a0 When I say \u2018elite\u2019 persons, I do not necessarily mean wealthy persons, though most elite persons were wealthy.\u00a0 And unfortunately, when I say elite literate persons, the majority of these persons, and in some contexts the vast majority, were men, men like the chap you see to the left in this post, who could afford a marble sarcophagus with his face carved on it.\u00a0 2) the second factor involved in this discussion is the nature of ancient texts, which were almost universally written in \u2018scriptum continuum\u2019,\u00a0 a continuous flow of letters.\u00a0 Even if one had some rudimentary Greek education and language ability, the very nature of ancient texts would be a real impediment to just anyone picking them up and reading them, if they had not been educated in them in the first place.\u00a0\u00a0 Take a good look at the next picture in this post, a picture of\u00a0 a Biblical manuscript.<\/p>\n

This one is different from some in that there are not two columns on each leaf of the papyrus but only one, one continuous flow of Greek letter.\u00a0 When you have a document like this,\u00a0 most ancients could not simply pick it up and read it. \u00a0 More elite persons could do so,\u00a0 but they didn\u2019t have to, because\u00a0 most of them could afford \u2018readers\u2019\u2014 or as they are better called, \u2018lectors\u2019, people trained in the skill required to read such a document, and read it fluidly, fluently, without long pauses and stumbling and trying to figure out where<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Reading in antiquity involved a different skill set than it does now in various ways, because these document had little or no punctuation, no chapters and verses,\u00a0 no separation of words\u2014- you get the picture.\u00a0 Most ancient reading was done out loud, whether it was done by a lector, or you were reading to yourself.\u00a0\u00a0 And it wasn\u2019t just because of scriptum continuum that you did this.\u00a0 The other reason was, these texts were oral texts in the sense that they were meant to be heard, not silently read\u2014 they had oral and rhetorical devices in them which were best appreciated when read out loud,\u00a0 devices like assonance and alliteration, dramatic hyperobole, onomatopoeia and so on.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Texts, even in the most literate parts of Roman society were read out lod and were composed aloud as well, by dictation.\u00a0 Indeed, as Raymond Starr has shown the verb \u2018dictare\u2019 which technically means to dictate, had come to also have the sense of \u2018to compose a document\u2019.\u00a0 (What follows in this post is indebted to\u00a0 Raymond Starr, \u201cLectores and Book Reading\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Classical Journal\u00a0 Vol. 86 1990, pp. 337-43).\u00a0\u00a0 Even\u00a0 business reading would normally be done out loud.\u00a0 Libraries and homes were noisy places when reading or composing was going on.\u00a0 And when we are talking about the reading of something even loosely poetic, it needed to be heard for sure\u2014- take for example the Psalms.\u00a0 \u201cThe experience of the poem was also the experience of the reader\u2019s voice\u201d (p. 338).\u00a0\u00a0 Starr goes on to stress \u201cA reading that brought out the metrical effects of a poem or the rhythmical play of an oration or history would require a talented reader whose skills were kept sharp by regular, frequent practice\u201d (p. 338).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In other words, Theophilus would have needed a proper lector to really appreciate Luke-Acts.\u00a0 Don\u2019t picture him poring over a manuscript by lamplight using a magnifying glass and silently reading while going to sleep at night.\u00a0\u00a0 For that matter, don\u2019t picture Paul\u2019s letters being silently read either\u2014 they were basically orations sent within the framework of letters since they could not be orally delivered on the spot, and they were most definitely meant to be heard\u2014 full as they are of rhetorical and oral effects.\u00a0 And while we are at it\u2014- Hebrews is a sermon,\u00a0 so is 1 John as well.\u00a0 They were definitely meant to be read aloud.\u00a0 Only strictly private correspondence like 2-3 John might be read by the recipient to himself, and yet those documents as well got into the canon.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Who were these \u2018lectors\u2019?<\/p>\n

In Roman society at least they tended to be literate slaves, by which I mean, persons taken captive in the Roman conquests, who may well have been high status persons elsewhere or at least teachers or philosophers, who now, through enslavement, had become a Roman\u2019s pet reader, educator, after dinner speaker etc. \u00a0 Not only did \u2018lectores\u2019 tend to be slaves or freedmen, so were most of the support staff as well\u2013 note-takers, clerks, copyists.\u00a0 These could all be different persons in a Roman household.\u00a0 But for the person who could only afford one literate slave or freedman he might well do all of these jobs. \u00a0\u00a0 While most professional \u2018readers\u2019 were males there is a surprising number of inscriptions in the CIL\u00a0 mentioning female readers, three women \u2018paidoagogoi\u2019 are also mentioned and a number of women note takers and librariae (see n. 13 in Starr\u2019s article). \u00a0 What we know is that buying a slave trained as a \u2018lectores\u2019 was expensive.\u00a0 They did not come cheap, and he would normally be expected to read both Latin and Greek texts at the drop of a hat.<\/p>\n

But we must distinguish between \u2018business reading\u2019\u00a0 and what we might call \u2018pleasure reading\u2019. A clerk would read back to his owner or employer a document.\u00a0 A secretary would read back normal secretarial correspondence.\u00a0 A notarius would take notes, but this seems to have been beneath the dignity and pay grade of a lectores.\u00a0 A lectores was expected only to read out loud (p. 340).\u00a0 Sometimes a lectores would read aloud his master\u2019s works at a private recitation in a home or at a dinner party.\u00a0 The great man, say a lawyer, would of course give his own speeches in court, but home was the domain of the \u2018lectores\u2019 most of the time. \u00a0 And besides recitations for dinner guests, the lectores would do entertainment and pleasure reading for the family he served. \u00a0 Believe it or not, an oration or a reading was the main entertainment at dinner parties,\u00a0 with lyre playing, perhaps a short comedy skit, or dancing girls being on down the list. \u00a0 The elite wanted to appear to be literate, knowledgable, and they used their meals as occasions to \u2018improve\u2019 themselves, to become cultured. \u00a0 As\u00a0 Starr adds \u201clectores,,made it possible for their masters to listen to a work read at many times when that would have been awkward or impossible otherwise\u2026Since one read a roll by rolling it from the right to the left hand, reading required two hands, but that inconvenience was completely circumvented by the use of a lector.\u201d (p. 343).\u00a0 And of course the lector served as the eyes for a person whose eyesight had gone dim, but who wished to continue to learn.<\/p>\n

It needs to be stressed that reading in antiquity was a considerable task.\u00a0 This is why Dio Chrysostom says \u201cHave someone read to you, because you will get more out of it if you are spared the trouble of reading yourself\u201d (18.6).\u00a0 If you had a lector, you could focus on the \u201cliterary work and not the work of reading\u201d\u00a0 as Starr puts it at the end of his article. \u00a0 My blog readers may by now wonder, how exactly is this of relevance to our study of the New Testament? \u00a0\u00a0 I am glad you asked. \u00a0 Let\u2019s take a text like Rev. 1.1-4.\u00a0 The alert reader will notice that John distinguishes between the \u2018reader\u2019 of this text,\u00a0 and the hearers. \u00a0 The \u2018reader\u2019 in question is surely the person John sent to orally perform the Apocalypse, and indeed he would have had a huge task on his hands. \u00a0 Indeed, he was sent to seven churches to read this whopper of a document to each audience. \u00a0 And a good thing too, as they would hardly have been very able to decipher his rather Semitized and often inadequately grammatical Greek. \u00a0 It seems clear to me that such a reader would have had to be trained in the content of the document as well, to make explanations. \u00a0 It is probably that Paul used his co-workers,\u00a0 a Timothy or a Phoebe to orally deliver his discourses verbatim. \u00a0 And this brings us to why it was written down at all\u2014 when there were lots of things that the audience needed instruction on, and Paul did not want to just send a co-worker a long distance with vague instructions like\u2014 talk to them about the Lord\u2019s Supper,\u00a0 he dictated these documents so his \u2018lectores\u2019\u00a0 would only have to read it out, and then perhaps do some explaining. \u00a0 The verbatim was necessary as well to convey apostolic authority in what was said.<\/p>\n

Take one other example\u2014 namely Mark 13.14 and its reference to a \u2018reader\u2019.\u00a0 This is a parenthetical note to the person reading out the document to Mark\u2019s audience to be sure to explain about the sacrilege that is an abomination (an allusion to Daniel of course). \u00a0 It is not a note to us, who simply read the document for ourselves these days.\u00a0 It required a knowledgeable reader, a trained reader, who knew OT allusions and their references in such cases.\u00a0 And happily in Rome and other cities, early Christians had converted a few of these folks who served the Gospel simply by oral reading.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The word of the Bible was in many many ways a very different world than our world, and one of the major differences was the way ancient texts worked and how exactly they were read.\u00a0\u00a0 A few basic facts first: 1) the literacy rate in the Greco-Roman world of the NT was anywhere from 10%-20% […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nA Lecture on Lectors--- Not Readers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The word of the Bible was in many many ways a very different world than our world, and one of the major differences was the way ancient texts worked and\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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