The short story in Matthew\u2019s Gospel about two sons, one of whom obeys (after saying he wouldn\u2019t) and the other of whom disobeys (after saying he would) may be an earlier version (a \u2018draft\u2019, if you will) of the story in Luke\u2019s Gospel that we know as \u2018The Prodigal Son\u2019. But who is responsible for elaborating it into the fuller form we have in Luke? Kenneth Bailey, responsible for some important work on oral tradition and on the cultural setting of the parables, suggests that the poetic genius behind the Lukan parables he studied was perhaps none other than Jesus himself. However, the extended chiasms or inverted parallelisms Bailey identified seem more characteristic of written composition than orality, where the earlier lines are not visible, are not there to be set side-by-side with later parallels. Short chiasms are typical of orality; longer structures are not (one may think of the alphabetic acrostics found in some psalms, which by virtue of the fact that they use the alphabet imply literacy).<\/p>\n
I had a conversation about memory and orality with a friend of mine, also a New Testament scholar. He found much encouragement for the possibility of precise preservation of information through an experiment with student memorization. But such experiments fail to ask the question of how one memorizes a \u2018text\u2019 when there is no static written version to go back to. What are needed are experiments involving composition of oral pieces with similar length and structure to the longer Lukan and Matthean parables. For the study to provide genuine light on the subject, however, we would ideally need to have test subjects whose primary mode of communication and thought was not literature. It is not appropriate to assume that Jesus and his followers were not literate \u2013 neither Galilee nor its neighbors were purely oral cultures at this stage. Neither is it appropriate to assume, however, that those whose literacy may have been rudimentary, of the form most common in this time and place, would have composed lengthy works with elaborate structures and parallelisms, utilizing the method that would perhaps be most natural to us: imagining it written.<\/p>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The title may sound like a joke, but the truth is that most recent discussions of oral tradition in the Gospels have made use of the Lord-Parry school\u2019s work on folk songs and epics. I have some significant problems with this, given the role of meter and rhyme and the assistance to memory provided by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n