{"id":1219,"date":"2013-09-05T17:15:00","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T17:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/09\/our-literarcy-bias-what-it-is-and-how-it-affects-our-perception-of-scripture.html"},"modified":"2013-09-05T17:15:00","modified_gmt":"2013-09-05T17:15:00","slug":"our-literarcy-bias-what-it-is-and-how-it-affects-our-perception-of-scripture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/09\/our-literarcy-bias-what-it-is-and-how-it-affects-our-perception-of-scripture.html","title":{"rendered":"Our Literarcy Bias: What it is and How It Affects Our Perception of #Scripture"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

by Crystal St. Marie Lewis<\/span>
R3 Contributor\u00a0<\/span>

<\/span>*This first appeared on the Crystal St. Marie Lewis Blog<\/a><\/span>

<\/span><\/p>\n

I just finished reading an interesting essay titled \u201cWhy Everything We Know About the Bible is Wrong\u201d by Robert M. Fowler. I found one of the arguments in the essay so important that I felt I should share it with all of you. According to Fowler, one of the fundamental problems for 21st century Bible readers is the literacy divide between the Bible\u2019s readers and the Bible\u2019s writers.\u00a0Because we\u2019re a highly literate culture with deeply embedded expectations of written materials, we often misunderstand the purpose of the texts recorded by the Bible\u2019s\u00a0newly-literate<\/i>\u00a0oral cultures<\/b>.<\/span><\/div>\n
For example, you probably learned to read when you were young, from people who also learned to read when they were young. You were raised at a time in history when a high percentage of people knew how to read and write. You are deeply embedded in a literate culture. This means that you share some experiences of the written word, and have some fairly consistent expectations of written texts. These experiences and expectations likely include two things:<\/span><\/div>\n
    \n
  1. You have used a textbook in your lifetime, or have read a book in a book club, or you\u2019ve bought a book from a bookstore where there were five or more copies on the bookshelf. You know the experience of reading a \u201cviral\u201d article on a website, and take for granted that the content of that article will be the same for everyone accessing the website. Therefore, you expect certain written works to be uniform in content because you understand and automatically appropriate the outcome of mass production or mass distribution.<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. You have written a report which required you to quote a source, often with very detailed citations. Therefore, you expect that where there\u2019s a \u201ccopy\u201d of a document, there must also be an \u201coriginal\u201d or source to confirm the accuracy of what you\u2019ve copied. And by the way, because you wrote book reports as a child (and for a growing percentage of people in American society, research papers in college) you place a high value on details and accuracy.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    But when it comes to the Bible, have you considered the following?<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
    \n
    \u201cIn an oral culture, typically no two performances of a story are ever identical. It is taken for granted that the oral storyteller will vary his or language in response to the needs of the moment, responding to the particular time, place and audience.\u201d Fowler, pgs. 6-7<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
    In other words, as a cookie-cutter textbook generation, we expect the Bible\u2019s stories to remain static in overall content. However, the original hearers had no such expectation. In fact, they expected their stories to change with each storytelling event.<\/span><\/div>\n
    \n
    \u201cThe idea that oral communication was fluid and changeable bewilders and frightens many printed-book-literate people. (\u2018If it changes, how can we trust it?\u2019) Even when we discover multiple versions of certain stories, we may still insist that there surely must have been an \u2018original\u2019 version of these stories. However, that is an attitude that comes from print culture, not an oral culture.\u201d Fowler, pg. 8<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
    Simply put, the desire for an original source document is one that we\u2019ll likely never overcome because we\u2019ve been taught that a \u201csource\u201d must always exist. We assume that in order for the written word to be valid, it must be verifiable, because we were raised in the era of book reports and footnotes.\u00a0The Bible, however, is a not a term paper written to appease a persnickety professor. Rather, the Bible is a written collection of \u00a0generations-old, evolving oral stories\u00a0as they existed at the time they were written down<\/b>. Someone chose to record a tiny piece of the evolving oral tales in writing, capturing one solitary moment in the life of the story. Even in cases where the works were copied from other documents, it is probably not proper to wonder where the \u201csource\u201d\u00a0document<\/b>\u00a0is,
    \nbecause the source was the\u00a0spoken<\/b>\u00a0word.<\/span><\/div>\n
    From what I\u2019ve gleaned in the essay written by Fowler and other writers, we erroneously believe that the\u00a0preservation of God\u2019s Word<\/b>\u00a0is the same as\u00a0preserving each string of words<\/b>.<\/b>\u00a0<\/i>We also erroneously equate\u00a0preserving God\u2019s Word<\/b>\u00a0withpreserving an interpretation of the Word.<\/i><\/b>\u00a0We spend a lot of time chopping scripture into sound bytes and mining tiny details of our stories, but this is not how ancient storytellers and hearers engaged these stories\u2026\u00a0We differ in approach because our high level of literacy has made us letter-focused, rather than spirit-focused, when a more faithful use of the text would be to focus on the power of story to bring people together.<\/span><\/div>\n
    Follow Crystal on Twitter @crystallewis<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    by Crystal St. Marie LewisR3 Contributor\u00a0*This first appeared on the Crystal St. Marie Lewis Blog I just finished reading an interesting essay titled \u201cWhy Everything We Know About the Bible is Wrong\u201d by Robert M. Fowler. I found one of the arguments in the essay so important that I felt I should share it with […]<\/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-1219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nOur Literarcy Bias: What it is and How It Affects Our Perception of #Scripture<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"by Crystal St. Marie LewisR3 Contributor *This first appeared on the Crystal St. Marie Lewis BlogI just finished reading an interesting essay titled\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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