Orality And The Scriptures

What does "orality" (oral forms of discourse) have to do with the "Scriptures," a corpus of sacred written documents? The aim of these essays is to reveal how the field of "orality studies" concerns the manifold process of composing, translating, and transmitting the diverse texts of Scriptures. This oft-neglected oral/aural dimension of communication provides us with a sharper perception of and greater appreciation for the various literary features of the biblical writings and their associated semantic and spiritual implications. Part One, ORIENTATION, overviews the principal aspects of orality studies: key terms, methodologies, as well as controversies about the transmission of Scripture. Part Two, DOCUMENTATION, presents three illustrative "case studies" involving composition, featuring full-text analyses that expound an oral-oriented, literary-rhetorical "hearing" of Isaiah 66, John 17, and Philippians. Part Three, APPLICATION, invites readers to engage more actively with translating the biblical text by critically considering four additional passages from an oral-aural "soundpoint"-Song of Songs 8, Revelation 5, Philemon, and 1 Corinthians 13. The final chapter encourages the application of an orality-based methodology, to achieve an exegetically accurate, yet artistically dynamic transmission of the Bible in today's media-rich world. The book thus seeks to motivate its readers-whether teachers, students, translators, or mass-media communicators-to always lend a sensitive ear to the text whenever they engage the Scriptures. "Throughout this book, Wendland progressively, and with increasing intensity, draws our attention to an enormous amount of detailed examples of the manifold poetic and rhetorical phenomena encoded in biblical orature. The cumulative effect of these detailed examples builds a powerful case for the necessity of recognizing and exploiting the expressive nature and potential of biblical oral arts. Clearly, oral verbal arts communicate much more than "mere words." As Wendland puts it, they also 'animate hearts'" (from the Foreword). Ernst R. Wendland (Ph.D., African Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin) is an instructor at Lusaka Lutheran Seminary and a dissertation examiner in Zambian languages at the University of Zambia. A former UBS Translation Consultant, he still serves as Professor Extraordinary in the Centre for Bible Interpretation and Translation in Africa, Department of Ancient Studies, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

In this groundbreaking work, Bible translation is presented as an expression of contextualization that explores the neglected riches of the verbal arts in the New Testament. Going beyond a historical study of media in antiquity, this book explores a renewed interest in oral performance that informs methods and goals of Bible translation today. Such exploration is concretized in the New Testament translation work in central Africa among the Vute people of Cameroon. This study of contextualization appreciates the agency of local communities--particularly in Africa--who seek to express their Christian faith in response to anthropological pauperization. An extended analysis of African theologians demonstrates the ultimate goals of contextualization: liberation and identity. Oral performance exploits all the senses in experiencing communication while performer, text, and audience negotiate meaning. Performance not only expresses but also shapes identity as communities express their faith in varied contexts. This book contends that the New Testament compositions were initially performed and not restricted to individualized, silent reading. This understanding encourages a reexamination of how Bible translation can be done. Performance is not a product but a process that infuses biblical studies with new insights, methods, and expressions.

In this groundbreaking work, Bible translation is presented as an expression of contextualization that explores the neglected riches of the verbal arts in the New Testament. Going beyond a historical study of media in antiquity, this book explores a renewed interest in oral performance that informs methods and goals of Bible translation today. Such exploration is concretized in the New Testament translation work in central Africa among the Vute people of Cameroon. This study of contextualization appreciates the agency of local communities--particularly in Africa--who seek to express their Christian faith in response to anthropological pauperization. An extended analysis of African theologians demonstrates the ultimate goals of contextualization: liberation and identity. Oral performance exploits all the senses in experiencing communication while performer, text, and audience negotiate meaning. Performance not only expresses but also shapes identity as communities express their faith in varied contexts. This book contends that the New Testament compositions were initially performed and not restricted to individualized, silent reading. This understanding encourages a reexamination of how Bible translation can be done. Performance is not a product but a process that infuses biblical studies with new insights, methods, and expressions.

In the current context of globalization, relocation of cultures, and rampant technologizing of communication, orality has gained renewed interest across disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. Orality has shed its once negative image as primitive, non-literate, and exotic, and has grown into a major area of scientific interest and the focus of interdisciplinary research, including translation studies. As an important feature of human speech and communication, orality has featured prominently in studies related to pre-modernist traditions, modernist representations of human history, and postmodernist expressions of artistry such as in music, film, and other audiovisual media. Its wide appeal can be seen in the variety of this volume, in which contributors draw from a range of disciplines with orality as the point of intersection with translation studies. This book is unique in its exploration of orality and translation from an interdisciplinary perspective, and sets the groundwork for collaborative research among scholars across disciplines with an interest in the aesthetics and materiality of orality. This book was originally published as a special issue of Translation Studies.

Drawing on a wide range of scholarship dealing with the properties and function of the materialities of the oral and scribal arts, as well as oral-scribal interfaces, the author unfolds before our eyes and makes manifest to our ears a world of communications in which there are no original texts, let alone original speech, where manuscripts are written to be remembered and read out aloud, where scribal products exhibit both a metonymic and a polyvalent quality.

Religious scholars take up various questions relating to the relationship between orality and literacy in the context of colonized people in antiquity, and explore the role of orality in relation to this hegemony. Among the topics are theoretical and methodological foundations, Mithra's cult as an example of religious colonialism in Roman times, th

The concept of 'scripture' as written religious text is re-examined, considering orally distributed sacred writings.