I was watching Jacob Berman interview Jodi Magness about the dead sea scrolls on youtube, when this occurred to me: Writing has been developing over centuries; today, paper is being replaced by digits! Tablets were replaced by vellum and papyrus, which were replaced by paper; first hand-written, then printed.
Oral culture has been impacted by writing. The more wealthy a society, the more they are prone to take up technological change, so empires, more so than their colonies would tend to do so. Being able to read and write in a colony would probably mark you out as either OF the empire, or on the SIDE of the empire, so ruling class or middle class. The plebs would tend to remain in their oral culture. (I don’t say ‘plebs’ because I’m only talking about the Roman empire, though — it’s just a word; the people; the underclass.)
A significant component of oral culture is the itinerant player: musician, singer, poet, balladeer, actor, story-teller, juggler, peddler, entertainer. (The US had them too, 100 years ago.) Many illiterate and literate people in the first century CE would have got news from them, particularly away from towns and ‘cities’, as well as getting cultural tropes, in the absence of newspapers and electronic media! Writing was used for business, government and religion.
My question is: can you guess, from looking at contemporary cultures with low rates of literacy and minimal opportunity to do any reading or writing anyway (scarce material; scarce time), how much of the synoptic gospels were gleaned from the gradual product of itinerant players, whose metier is to conflate, embellish, and then broadcast the stories of heroes and villains of their last 100 years or 200 years history, some of whom would have had the name Jesus, some of whom may have wanted to repel the Roman occupation, but some, not, some of whom would have done “good deeds”, some of whom would have been rooted in religion, maybe Essenes, some not, some of whom would have been executed, some not, etc.,etc. (cf. Robin Hood, Pretty Boy Floyd, Billy the Kid . . . )
In other words, could Q have been the general, orally transmitted, and quite heterogeneous, mythopoesy of a country unwillingly occupied by foreigners, with irrational hopes of liberation, and triumph? I ask, in the light of scholars now dating the synoptics to very late C1, if not C2, so a good couple of generations after the apparent dates of the activity of one of them, Jesus of Nazareth, around 30CE.
I put this to Jodi Magness, but she pleaded “not my field” — fair enough. Is it yours? What do you think?
1 Comment
I was watching Jacob Berman interview Jodi Magness about the dead sea scrolls on youtube, when this occurred to me:
Writing has been developing over centuries; today, paper is being replaced by digits! Tablets were replaced by vellum and papyrus, which were replaced by paper; first hand-written, then printed.
Oral culture has been impacted by writing. The more wealthy a society, the more they are prone to take up technological change, so empires, more so than their colonies would tend to do so. Being able to read and write in a colony would probably mark you out as either OF the empire, or on the SIDE of the empire, so ruling class or middle class. The plebs would tend to remain in their oral culture. (I don’t say ‘plebs’ because I’m only talking about the Roman empire, though — it’s just a word; the people; the underclass.)
A significant component of oral culture is the itinerant player: musician, singer, poet, balladeer, actor, story-teller, juggler, peddler, entertainer. (The US had them too, 100 years ago.) Many illiterate and literate people in the first century CE would have got news from them, particularly away from towns and ‘cities’, as well as getting cultural tropes, in the absence of newspapers and electronic media! Writing was used for business, government and religion.
My question is: can you guess, from looking at contemporary cultures with low rates of literacy and minimal opportunity to do any reading or writing anyway (scarce material; scarce time), how much of the synoptic gospels were gleaned from the gradual product of itinerant players, whose metier is to conflate, embellish, and then broadcast the stories of heroes and villains of their last 100 years or 200 years history, some of whom would have had the name Jesus, some of whom may have wanted to repel the Roman occupation, but some, not, some of whom would have done “good deeds”, some of whom would have been rooted in religion, maybe Essenes, some not, some of whom would have been executed, some not, etc.,etc. (cf. Robin Hood, Pretty Boy Floyd, Billy the Kid . . . )
In other words, could Q have been the general, orally transmitted, and quite heterogeneous, mythopoesy of a country unwillingly occupied by foreigners, with irrational hopes of liberation, and triumph? I ask, in the light of scholars now dating the synoptics to very late C1, if not C2, so a good couple of generations after the apparent dates of the activity of one of them, Jesus of Nazareth, around 30CE.
I put this to Jodi Magness, but she pleaded “not my field” — fair enough. Is it yours? What do you think?