The ancient societies of the Bible were overwhelmingly oral. People originally experienced the traditions now in the Bible as oral performances. Focusing on the ancient performance of biblical traditions enables us to shift academic work on the Bible from the mentality of a modern print culture to that of an oral/scribal culture. Conceived broadly, biblical performance criticism embraces many methods as means to reframe the biblical materials in the context of traditional oral cultures, construct scenarios of ancient performances, learn from contemporary performances of these materials, and reinterpret biblical writings accordingly. The result is a foundational paradigm shift that reconfigures traditional disciplines and employs fresh biblical methodologies such as theater studies, speech-act theory, and performance studies. The emerging research of many scholars in this field of study, the development of working groups in scholarly societies, and the appearance of conferences on orality and literacy make it timely to inaugurate this series. For further information on biblical performance criticism, go to www.biblicalperformancecriticism.org.
Sound matters. The New Testament's first audiences were listeners, not readers. They heard its compositions read aloud and understood their messages as linear streams of sound. To understand the New...
The Galilean Oral-Style Tradition and Its Traditionists
by Marcel Jousse
Edited by Edgard Sienaert
Foreword by Werner H. Kelber
$50.00
£37.00
AU$74.00
ISBN: 9781532633928
Pub Date: July 2018
Format: Paperback
Imprint: Cascade Books
This book is about the spoken word. It is about words spoken in the first century of our era and later put down in writing as confirmation of what had been said and done. Here, Marcel Jousse answers...
Receiving a letter from Paul was a major event in the early churches. Given the orally oriented culture of the time, a letter was designed to be read out loud in front of an audience. The document was...
The book of Ruth is probably best known as a romantic love story that, through the expression of loving devotion, overcomes tragedy and ends with the founding of the most famous family in all of biblical...
A Performance-Criticism Commentary on Mark’s Passion-Resurrection Narrative
by Thomas E. Boomershine
$57.00
£42.00
AU$85.00
ISBN: 9781625645456
Pub Date: June 2015
Format: Paperback
Imprint: Cascade Books
The telling of Mark's story of Jesus as the Messiah of peace in the decades following the Roman-Judean war announced a third way forward for Diaspora Judeans other than warfare against or separation...
Narrative and Performance Criticisms in Dialogue and Debate
Edited by Kelly Iverson
$30.00
£22.00
AU$44.00
ISBN: 9781625649874
Pub Date: October 2014
Format: Paperback
Imprint: Cascade Books
For the last two centuries biblical interpretation has been guided by perspectives that have largely ignored the oral context in which the gospels took shape. Only recently have scholars begun to explore...
Speaking, Seeing, Writing in the Shaping of New Genres
Edited by Annette Weissenrieder and Robert B. Coote
$52.00
£38.00
AU$77.00
ISBN: 9781498237420
Pub Date: October 2015
Format: Paperback
Imprint: Cascade Books
How did the visual, the oral, and the written interrelate in antiquity? The essays in this collection address the competing and complementary roles of visual media, forms of memory, oral performance,...
The various studies presented in this anthology underscore the foundational matter of translation in biblical studies as understood from the specific perspective of Biblical Performance Criticism. If...
Embedded in modern print culture, biblical scholars have been projecting the assumptions and concepts of print culture onto the texts they interpret. In the ancient world from which those texts originate,...
To experience the gospel message as first-century people heard it is to move into an oral world, one with very little reliance on manuscripts. The essays in this book explore this oral world and the...
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