Interpretation, Text and Oral
Culture: Some brief Notes
Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee
bifalle
Boece
or Troylus for to wryten newe,
Under
thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle,
But
after my makyng thow wryte more trewe;
So
ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe,
It
to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape,
And
al is thorough thy negligence and rape.
-- Chaucer
This text from Chaucer if you can read through the “Old English” is a
comment upon the difficulties of dealing with a bad copyist, whose work
is so poor it must be continually corrected. By Chaucer’s time
copyist’s had some technical devices such as word and line separation
and some punctuation to assist their work. Already by the time of
Chaucer the idea of “original” and “copy” had begun to shape the
thinking of writers and readers. But the idea of mechanical
duplication waited upon the universal application of the printing press.
As I prepare to preach every Sunday I find myself often drawn into
questions about the meaning and the relationship between the text we
read in translation on a Sunday morning and the biblical tradition
itself. The text is itself a many layered thing, often composed
of various sources and created out of many manuscripts and pieces of
manuscripts. I am conscious as I preach of being part of a living
tradition that takes the form of “texts” and communities of
interpretation. I think less of a “book” when I think of Hebrew
and Greek scriptures than I do of a living tapestry that has been woven
into texts and lives, words and acts. It is still a fabric being
woven even as we meet and worship in these early years of the
twenty-first century here in our small church community in the Squamish
Valley.
In the following all too short and inadequate essay, I am attempting to
make my hearers aware of this Biblical and living tapestry as a living
form of many threads and of the ongoing act of weaving such a
tapestry. Sadly most ways of reading the texts we call “biblical”
presuppose a dead text rather than recognizing the organic nature, and
long and intricate work of the loom weaving the Biblical
tapestry. Further, there is an assumption, that is uniquely
modern and that assumes literacy, that a text as read by the eye is
simply equivalent to what earlier communities experienced as
“biblical.” The ongoing life of biblical speaking, hearing, enacting
and living interpretation gives a very different understanding of what
we might mean by the term biblical. First and foremost, the
biblical tapestry was and is a continual creation of weaving and
joining with the various threads of interpretation found in earlier
weavings on the loom of interpretation. The tapestry itself calls
forth yet more acts of weaving together threads into a pattern that is
never closed, while having a continuity of colour and design.
I have not footnoted this text, and that is a shame. So before
moving on let me at least suggest a few sources that have helped me
understand the biblical journey. The First is Paul D. Hanson,
Dynamic Transcendence (Phil: Fortress Press, 1978). This is an
important book because Hanson sees the Biblical Tradition as one that
is always on the move, always taking new shape and form in the
community. The Second is Walter Ong, The Technologizing of the
Word (New York: Methuen, 1988). This is the most important
book written about the change in consciousness that occurred with the
various techniques and technologies that created a literate
culture. In a similar vein but more poignant and sharper in
critique is Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, ABC: The Alphabetization of
the Popular Mind (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). Illich and
Sanders show what is gained and lost in the creation of the culture of
the printed page and what is nearly being lost in the triumph of the
electronic age. What is most helpful in their work is their
insight into the subtle and yet transformative power of the various
media. Of course Marshall Mcluhan and his teacher Harold Innis
have produced important works that can help us see more clearly the
various traps particular technical devices can set for the human spirit
and mind. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographic Man. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962) is
particularly important for understanding the fracturing of mind and
community that is represented in the uncritical technologizing of human
culture. Harold Innis, Empire and Communication (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1972), makes the link between technologies
of communication and the control of human culture.
I have only listed above some of the sources for the thinking offered
below. I would be remiss if I did not point to the obvious
source, those written texts we call the “Bible.” I say texts
because we are aware that there are many “translations” of what many of
us assume to be stable and certain originals. Translations that
are not paraphrases or based on other translation in English are, if
thorough and honest, equipped with footnoting that will make any
attentive reader aware of the difficulties in rendering the biblical
tradition on the page. You will read, for example, in the New
Oxford Holy Bible in small italics and in many places in the text such
remarks as: “Other ancient authorities read …,” or “The Hebrew is
obscure…,” or “The Greek texts appear to be missing . . .,” Paying
attention to such comments might awaken even the dullest of readers to
the fact that what we are dealing with is a weaving of texts and
interpretative work that is anything but closed to further
interpretation, new discovery and deeper understanding. Our
Bibles if read in one way can close off the mind and spirit or in
another can open both mind and spirit to an ongoing biblical
journey. The analogy of weaving is a good one as long as we
realize that the tapestry is still being woven, and will never be
finished. The questions raised are not ones of completing the
tapestry, but of finding a way of weaving our interpretive threads so
as to integrate and enhance the beauty of the tapestry.
Reading
Scripture is a challenge because we approach it through the many layers
of history, doctrine and cultural presupposition. Most of us also
read it in translation, and translation is itself an interpretive
art. This is not to mention the texts, parts of texts and new
findings of texts that go into making up the text of the Hebrew or
Greek Testament. What most of us do not see or hear about is the
detailed stitchery of reconstructing a text for translation. As an
example of this detailed work, there are approximately 10,000 textual
variants for the Gospel of Mark alone. To prepare a text
for translation means deciding which of the variant threads to weave
into and which to leave out of the design. While some variants
are easy to dismiss or decide between, others make it difficult to
discern, not just which variant reflects accurately the original
writer’s intention, but what sense can be made of the text at
all.
The first task of arriving at a reliable text in the original languages
requires a great deal of work by linguists, archaeologists, and
biblical scholars. The painstaking work of piecing together
fragments, of discerning a reliable script from pages that may have
missing words, obliterated text and partial erasure of texts are tasks
that require a great deal of skill and patience. The bibles we
have in front of us are all the consequence of many human hands and
minds over thousands of years working to copy, excavate, preserve,
recover and make decisions between the many variants in the texts.
The question of how the decisions are made to guide choices between
variant texts is still problematic. There actually is no agreed
upon method, and there is still debate even about the reliability of
various passages rendered in the original language and the
variants. The idea of arriving at a reliable text in the original
language is all premised upon the assumption that there existed one
singular text from early on in the tradition. In the absence of
any “originals” or texts that come from periods close to the writing of
the texts, the work of rendering a reliable text, and even defining
what we might mean by reliable, is difficult. While the Masoretic
Text of the Hebrew Bible was created in the Middle Ages and is the
central source for constructing an original Hebrew text, there are
earlier manuscripts that do play an important role in constructing the
text. One of the central problems in arriving at a Hebrew Text of
the Old Testament is the differences between the Masoretic text and the
earlier Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic translations. While Hebrew
manuscripts pre-dating the Middle Ages exist, these are few when
compared to Latin, Aramaic and Greek translations. There are some
significant differences in these texts.
In the case of the New Testament, while the time frame is shorter, the
variants and number of canonical manuscripts and fragments are numerous
and carry significant variants. The extra-canonical manuscripts
have themselves important implications for understanding the canonical
texts by demonstrating that the communities of interpretation were
plural and diverse. The making of a reliable text of the canon in the
original language involves a growing number of variants. It is
true that some variants are easily dismissed as errors by
copyist. But a great number represent interpretive work on the
part of a particular community or scribe. Again, there are no
originals of Paul or the Gospel writers’ manuscripts. We are
always dealing with copies of copies of copies.
In all cases we must imagine a very different world from our own.
Before the creation of the many techniques and devices used to
reproduce written texts there was a culture that was not just without
those techniques, but without the idea of an “original” and a
“copy”. This is difficult for us to grasp. Oral culture has
none of the notions of a “past” event that can be “captured” as a bare
fact separate from the “subjective experience” of a particular
community. While there was an attempt to recall acts of the past
and to keep these acts alive in the experience of the people, there was
no absolute division between “fact” and “interpretation.” Fact
and interpretation were bound together through the experience of a
people performing the significant memories in the hearing (and viewing,
for often the past was performed in ritual dance) of a people.
This re-enacting was embodied, that is it involved the sounds produced
by a human body, the hand, feet and whole body moving with the physical
sounds of the spoken or sung memory.
History of the
oral sort involves without exception the physical shaping and
interpretation of memory. Even the first writing schemes were not
abstracted from the sheer physicality of the telling. The jots
and tittles on the page were meant as guides for the vocal chords. They
were meant to be acted out in the hearing of the people.
For most of the history of what we now call the “bible”—meaning a
book—the scroll, tablet or manuscript was not meant for the individual
eyes to collect and process in the mind. Rather it was a script
meant for playing out in and for the community, and always required the
interpretative sounds and movements of those particular persons in
their communities. It is only when the mechanisms of the text and
reproductive technologies gives a “page” that can be seen as
independently carrying information, that we move into a time of
considering “fact,” “text,” “community” and interpretation as
separable. The idea of “facts” as things that have no necessarily
inter-subjective experience is a modern idea. The Christian and
Hebraic traditions have for most of their lives been rooted in the
lived experience of communities as they preformed both the memory and
living experience of their faith. The idea that a technical
device or artifact like a book or its duplication could become the sole
location of Divine meaning is a peculiar idea of an age that has the
techniques to create exact copies of an original. The idea of
making and duplicating copies from originals and the technology of
invariant copying changes human understanding.
The text in the world of the “technologized word”—as Walter Ong has
called our time—is not understood as an interpretive doorway to
the experience of the Sacred, but an object that passes on information
irrespective of the particular voice, ear, or community of speakers and
listeners. The idea that there is “information” or a particular
“word” that can be passed, without reference to any particular human
community or collective experience, to the mind of a reader and that
this text can be closed to further experience is uniquely a product of
a technologized word. The oral culture was one where communal
experience and community was always implicated in the reading of
texts. It is difficult for us to grasp, but before the modern
period the “Bible” was not a book but an enacted experience in the life
of communities in differing places and times. The Bible was a
living word experienced in the flesh of many communities. It was
not primarily a book or text but a ‘way’ of enacting a story in many
communities, that may have used a script but was never confined by or
trapped on a page. The biblical text of the modern world, to use
another metaphor, is but the photograph of a bird in flight. The
flight of the bird is always more than any photograph.