ORALITY AS THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING APOSTOLIC PROCLAMATION IN THE EPISTLES A ...

352 Pages·2003·3.51 MB·English

by  Thomas M Winger

ORALITY AS THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING APOSTOLIC PROCLAMATION IN
THE EPISTLES
___________________
A dissertation presented to the faculty of
Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Department of
Exegetical Theology, in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of
Theology.
___________________
by
Thomas M. Winger
May 1997
Approved by _______________________
Adviser
_______________________
Reader
_______________________
Reader
To Sara, Anne, and Benjamin
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The impetus for this study came from Rev. Dr. James Voelz’s seminar, “Problems in
Hermeneutics,” at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. Thanks are due to him for encouragement in
rethinking the fundamentals of how we interpret texts, without losing track of the goal: that
hermeneutics must lead to exegesis. Fellow students involved in this seminar—especially Revs.
William Cwirla, Joel Elowsky, Alan Ludwig, and Vilson Scholz—provided unparalleled critical
discussion. The financial support of Lutheran Church–Canada, Concordia Seminary’s Walther
Fellowship, and Harold and Joan Fischer (who supported my study in honor of my sainted
grandfather, Rev. Walter Lebien), made the full-time pursuit of this work possible. Likewise,
thanks are due to the faithful people of my charge under God, Grace Evangelical Lutheran
Church, St. Catharines, Ontario, for granting me a writing leave to complete this work. Rev.
Duane Peters assisted greatly with accurate translations of the Fathers. The library staffs of
Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, and Concordia Lutheran Theological Seminary, St. Catharines,
provided exceptional service. Rev. Dr. Norman Nagel has been a constant encouragement to
critical thinking in an evangelical and confessional way, especially towards understanding the
Office of the Holy Ministry. Inexpressible thanks are due to my parents, Rev. Dr. Roger and Mrs
Della Winger, for all they have given me. Finally, and most importantly, my wife Sara has
supported me in innumerable ways throughout these difficult years.
* * *
Readers from the modern academy may be surprised that the present author has abided
by traditional conventions of language usage, retaining masculine pronouns for non-specific,
impersonal references. There is meaning in this too—but the meaning must be made explicit lest
it be misunderstood. Chapter one argues that all language is shorthand. The “inclusive language”
movement fails to grasp this fundamental linguistic truth. Her ladyship Margaret Thatcher once
referred to the rule in which one is schooled, that “‘He’ embraces ‘she.’” It is with this
understanding that this study proceeds, that linguistic shorthand is by nature already “inclusive.”
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...........................................................................................................iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS............................................................................................................iv
PREFACE.................................................................................................................................vii
CHAPTER 1 BEYOND THE SEMANTICS OF WRITTEN COMMUNICATION........................1
Introduction: Pragmatics.................................................................................................1
Receptor-Oriented Communication Theory....................................................................5
Speech-Act Theory.......................................................................................................21
Rhetorical Criticism......................................................................................................24
Narrative Criticism........................................................................................................30
CHAPTER 2 THEORIES OF ORALITY AND LITERACY.......................................................34
Introduction..................................................................................................................34
The Special Theory of Greek Orality: The Homeric Question.......................................36
“Oral Mentality”............................................................................................................55
“Media Criticism”.........................................................................................................73
Critics of the Oral Theory.............................................................................................94
Linguistic Investigations.............................................................................................125
Conclusions................................................................................................................143
CHAPTER 3 ORALITY AND THE INTERPRETATION OF WRITTEN DOCUMENTS:
THE CASE OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES.......................................................................147
Reading in the Ancient World and Orality..................................................................147
Modern Exegetical Recognition of the Oral Character of the Written Word.................171
Biblical Evidence for Orality.......................................................................................200
Biblical depictions of the reading experience.....................................................200
Oral performance: Liturgical pieces and references...........................................212
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Evidence of oral traditionalism..........................................................................217
An oral theme: Christ the lÒgoj........................................................................221
Auditory Analogies...........................................................................................224
The Oral Function of the Prophetic and Apostolic Writings as Holy Scripture
.............................................................................................................................227
Addendum 1: “Letter” and “Spirit” in 2 Corinthians 3.................................................241
Addendum 2: Hearing and Understanding in the Parable of the Sower.......................246
CHAPTER 4 EPISTLES, APOSTLES, AND ORALITY..........................................................249
Introduction................................................................................................................249
Traditional Theories of Epistolary Genre....................................................................250
The Epistle as an Oral Genre.......................................................................................255
Addendum 3: Oral Formulary Characteristics in the Epistles.......................................268
Commonplaces, koinoˆ tÒpoi...........................................................................268
Chiasm and inclusio..........................................................................................271
Lists..................................................................................................................274
Repetition..........................................................................................................277
The Messenger in the OT and ANE.............................................................................279
¢pÒstoloj / +xylIwf ...................................................................................................285
Apostolic Presence.....................................................................................................292
Conclusion.................................................................................................................305
CONCLUSION.......................................................................................................................307
The Value of Oral Theory for Exegesis.......................................................................307
Placing the Scriptures on the Oral-Literate Continuum......................................309
“Oral Exegesis”?................................................................................................315
Addendum 4: “Protestants,” “Catholics,” and the Word of God..................................319
Addendum 5: The Scripture Reading, the Ministry of the Word, the Office
of the Holy Ministry.............................................................................................321
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BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................................324
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PREFACE
How then shall they call upon the One in whom they have not believed?
And how shall they believe in the One whom they have not heard?
And how shall they hear apart from a preacher?
And how shall they preach if they are not sent?
Just as it stands written: “How beautiful are the feet of those preaching a Gospel of good things.”
However, not all heeded the Gospel.
For Isaiah says: “Lord, who believed what we put forth to be heard?”
For faith is from hearing, and hearing through the message of Christ.
(Rom. 10:14-17)
St. Paul, it is generally acknowledged, was schooled in the finest rhetorical tradition of
the Graeco-Roman world. As a student of Gamaliel, he also inherited a rich rabbinic legacy of
immersion in the Word of God. His writing unfolds according to the ways which were put into
him. In the same way, the modern reader escapes his own schooling only with great difficulty.
St. Paul’s manner is utterly foreign to us. How often is this grand sequence from Romans
chapter ten scanned silently in the privy confines of the parlor or study, the eye alone with the
ink, the rustle of onionskin the only whisper to intrude upon the moment?
Yet how gracefully St. Paul mates sound with script. What Isaiah writes [gšgraptai]
is also what he says [lšgei]. What Isaiah writes of is preaching [khrÚssw], a proclamation of
Gospel [eÙaggel…zomai], a message of good things meant to be heard [¢ko»]. The Gospel
which Isaiah proclaimed is put forth and received in the same way as the message [·»ma] of
Christ: through ears, from hearing [™x ¢koÁj], which hearing may only occur where there is
speaking. The ear is the organ of the faith of which he speaks. His vocabulary carries his
message: ™pikalšw, ¢koÚw, khrÚssw, eÚaggel…zomai, ØpakoÚw, ¢ko», ·»ma. It is all too
easy to remove the ear and the mouth from these verbs: ¢ko» becomes “report”; ™pikalšw is
interiorized as “pray” or “believe”; eÚaggel…zomai simply “brings good tidings” or
“evangelizes”; ØpakoÚw becomes an activity of the will, “obey”; and ·»ma takes on the
ambiguity of “word.”
And so the word has fallen silent. Is it not ironic that in the church of the
Reformation—that moment when the Word proclaimed renewal, that church devoted to clear
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preaching and vernacular proclamation—the Word could seem confined to pulp and paper? In a
valuable comparative study of “sacred writ” in world religions, William Graham notes this as a
peculiar emphasis of the modern Christian, especially the Protestant:
“the word of God” no longer reflects so much an aural sense of hearing God speak as it
does a fixing or reification of “word” into a synonym for “Bible” in the sense of holy writ.
… Such reification masks in many instances the degree to which for Christians the “word”
is theologically and functionally not a written text, but the living, spoken message of the
Gospel. The identity of this vocal message of the Gospel preaching with the vocal word of
God that spoke from the pages of scripture was still vivid for Christians of earlier, more
aurally oriented ages.1
Graham’s functional definition of “word of God” exposes a distinct shift in meaning. Although
one would hesitate to assert that the Word is “not a written text,” Graham’s investigation
highlights how it is more than written. The contrast is not between Word as Bible and Word as
not-Bible, but rather between a silent, textbook Word, and a written Word which has a living
voice; it is between a Word received primarily by the eye with all its modern training, and the
Word received through the ear, from preacher to hearer, in the way of Romans ten.
If what is said in introductory hermeneutics is true—that the first cross-cultural move
is the move from our world into the world of the text2—then this cultural chasm must be
bridged. Father Walter Ong, a key figure in bringing orality research to illumine biblical studies,
pictures precisely the dilemma facing modern, Western man:
Although its founding fathers were steeped in a still strong oral and oratorical tradition,
the United States was founded in literacy . . . . Most Americans, even those who write
miserably, are so stubbornly literate in principle as to believe that what makes a word a
real word is not its meaningful use in vocal exchange but rather its presence on the pages
of a dictionary. We are so literate in ideology that we think writing comes naturally. We

1William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the
History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 63.
2See Dean O. Wenthe, “Entrance into the Biblical World: The First and Crucial Cross-
Cultural Move,” Logia 4.2 (Easter/April 1995): 19-24. Both traditional and modern hermeneutics
texts deal with this problem. Milton S. Terry, Biblical Hermeneutics, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, repr. 1974), 232: “It is not an easy task for one to disengage himself from the living
present, and thus transport himself into a past age.” The same task today is spoken of as fusing
“two horizons.” See Anthony C. Thiselton, The Two Horizons (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980).
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have to remind ourselves from time to time that writing is completely and irremediably
artificial and that what you find in a dictionary are not real words but coded marks for
voicing real words, exteriorly or in imagination.3
Ong certainly presents a strong bias against writing which remains to be proved. But it prompts
the questions of the day: Can we cross this chasm and learn to hear the Scriptures as God’s
living message? Does the modern image of the critical scholar laboring at his desk in the privacy
of a study carrel, scrutinizing each vocable, fanning pages forwards and backwards, dissecting
the text with Gospel synopsis and concordance—does this image in any way correspond to what
the scriptural writers expected of their “readers”? Or, on a more popular level, is placing Bibles
into hotel rooms tÕn lÒgon khrÚssein as the scriptural world understood it?
To focus upon the academic context, does not the modern historical-critical (or even
the traditional historical-grammatical) method render the text silent, dulling its character as
proclaimed Word of God, with Christ the lÒgoj at its heart? Ong challenges this academic
establishment by asking: “If the ecclesial dialogue through the living Word of God in Jesus
Christ is the essential element in Christian hermeneutic, how is the exegesis furnished out of
biblical scholarship to be appropriated into this hermeneutic?”4 That is, has the silence of
academia rendered it irrelevant to the church?
Though today the Word may have fallen silent, at the beginning it was not so. What is
the oral milieu from which the Scriptures arose? For this is also a question of scriptural origins,
as Ong phrases it: “How far is the Bible to be regarded as actually composed in writing and how
far as a record of speech insofar as it is considered God’s revelation to mankind?”5 Within this
basic question, however, lurk hidden dangers. Can one accent the lively, vocal character of

3Walter J. Ong, “Literacy and Orality in Our Times,” in Winfred Bryan, ed.,
Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983),
129.
4Ong, “Maranatha: Death and Life in the Text of a Book,” Journal of the American
Academy of Religion 45.4 (1977): 445.
5Ibid., 444.
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Scripture, as proclamation recorded that it might continue to proclaim, without reducing
Scripture to a simple record of proclamation—a typically Barthian perspective on Scripture and
revelation? Ong often missteps in this direction.
There is another danger, albeit less serious, of romanticizing the past. Thus warns
Werner Kelber:
… insofar as interest in speech and discourse gives the appearance of being inspired by a
longing for former times, orality-literacy studies could likewise arouse the suspicion of
reinventing a romanticized past. Is not the urge to recover the spoken word but one more
example in the unending history of human cravings for original simplicity and pristine
originality?6
We are not practicing reverse ethnocentrism, substituting an ancient culture for our own, as if
orality were superior to textuality.7 One strives to honor and recognize the culture in which the
text arose in order to understand it better. But the Gospel is also at stake. For if “faith is from
hearing” as St. Paul says, then we dare not silence the Word.
There is, of course, a certain irony in addressing the lively, oral character of Scripture
in the antiseptic environment of the academic dissertation. The paradoxical inadequacy of this
pursuit, however, is paralleled by our inability to study the original oral production of a

6Werner Kelber, “In the Beginning Were the Words: The Apotheosis and Narrative
Displacement of the Logos,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58.1 (Spring 1990):
70. It is Jacques Derrida who criticizes “logocentrism”—the privileging of voice over writing, the
philosophy of “presence.” Of course, in “deconstructing” this position, he simply elevates text in
place of logos.
7A feature of post-modern deconstructionism is the assertion that it is all about power.
Joanna Dewey, “Textuality in an Oral Culture: A Survey of the Pauline Traditions,” Semeia 65
(1994): 37-65, argues that the earliest age of the church was egalitarian and oral. Textuality was
thus imposed by the literate male segment of the church in order to subjugate the largely illiterate
female component. Vernon K. Robbins, “Oral, Rhetorical, and Literary Cultures.” Semeia 65
(1994): 75-91, correctly counters that, “This is a form of romanticism that inverts the common
tradition that nonliterate people are unintelligent” (77). That is, she glorifies the oral age as
superior to the literate. “Dewey’s statement presupposes that oral leaders are kinder and better
people than literate people. In actual practics, ‘oral leaders’ can be exceptionally hierarchical and
some ‘literate’ leaders are exceptionally egalitarian” (77).
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