Blogging is a great place to think out loud and present things in ways and with illustrations that one might not consider appropriate in a scholarly paper. As it happens, I\u2019m getting ready to read a paper about oral tradition and the Synoptic Gospels at the Midwest Society of Biblical Literature Conference. I\u2019m also reading Jesus, The Voice and the Text<\/em> and will be blogging about it more systematically in the near future.<\/p>\n One striking notion that has come into New Testament studies via Werner Kelber, reaching him from the Parry-Lord school\u2019s work on oral folksongs and epics, is \u201cequiprimordiality\u201d. Every instance of a story or saying being told or retold is a unique performance and is therefore even asserted at times to be \u201cultimately discontinuous\u201d with respect to any other performance.<\/p>\n I am starting to fear that some scholars working in orality are mistaking their field for that of quantum mechanics. Even in the case of the latter there is still some debate about the subject among physicists, particularly about whether the impossibility of knowing both the position and movement of a \u201cparticle\u201d simultaneously is a problem of measurement or indicates that \u201cparticles\u201d do not have such properties until we take a measurement. But it certainly seems to be the case that virtual particles can pop into and out of existence. Some refer to this as \u201cquantum weirdness\u201d, and there are other interesting examples of it as well.<\/p>\n Oral tradition is not quantum physics. It may be impossible to define what could be meant by the \u201coriginal form\u201d of a saying. We may also find it impossible to plot the trajectory of a saying. But anyone who has had any contact with communication via oral or largely oral modes of transmission are unlikely to be persuaded that one person\u2019s retelling of a story, or even one\u2019s own retelling of a story on some particular occasion, cannot influence later renditions.<\/p>\n With respect to the \u201coriginal version\u201d, the problem may be illustrated by referring to Anton Bruckner\u2019s symphonies. It would be easy for someone to make a case that any symphony by Bruckner<\/a> \u201cdoes not exist\u201d in the same sense that the Gospel of Mark \u201cdoes not exist\u201d. We have multiple versions and manuscripts, and in the case of the symphonies we have evidence for the composer himself having continued to edit and change them<\/a> even after their first performance. There is debate about which version of the symphonies ought to be performed, and most recordings in fact are of eclectic versions<\/a> akin to the critical editions of the New Testament \u2013 not the same as any actual copy Bruckner produced, but an estimation of which version of various passages reflects the \u201cfinal\u201d accomplishment of Bruckner. Behind this is the awareness that authors can continue tinkering with \u201cfinished\u201d works and make them seem worse rather than better to those who encounter them.<\/p>\n We might also turn to remakes of songs to illustrate the possibility of tracing relationships between performances. Of course, we are dealing with songs that have been recorded and written down, and so the cases are not precisely parallel. Nevertheless, if we take a song such as \u201cBig Yellow Taxi<\/a>\u201c, might we not legitimately detect in the version by the Counting Crows influence not only of the \u201coriginal\u201d (a concept itself problematic given the different renderings by Joni Mitchell herself) but also of subsequent remakes?<\/p>\n