As we noted in a previous article, two of the few critics of the school of liberal theology to take any notice of the matter of oral tradition is Werner Kelber, in his book The Oral and the Written Gospel, and Barry Henaut, in Oral Tradition and the Gospels: The Problem of Mark 4. We will have a look at these works in turn. These writers make a number of points that may be appreciated, even if they do not make the proper connections with them. However, in these books we may see how critics of the liberal theology school attempt to mold opinion in their direction via subtle influence, and how unscientific their methods often become when dealing with the matter of oral tradition. (I am pleased now to report, some years after the first composition of this essay, that several of the same criticisms of Kelber and Henaut I make here are now repeated in Samuel Byrskog's Story as History [128ff].)

Kelber advances his argument against an early, written form of the Gospels in stages. He begins with this comment, on page 17:

The oral matrix of the material (in the Gospels) corresponds with the sociological identity of the early Jesus movement. In antiquity, writing was essentially a product of urbanization and compact settlements; in rural areas language was almost entirely confined to face-to-face communication. The movement of the historical Jesus was largely a rural phenomenon.

Note the generalization here: writing = urban areas, oral communication = rural areas. Of course Kelber DOES qualify by adding "essentially" and "almost entirely" - members of this school are quite apt at covering themselves with these sly qualifiers! In any event, this is naught but a generality, and thus provides a shaky foundation for further building. Does a person who has lived in the city suddenly become illiterate when they travel in the country? And what of the rigorous system of education for Jewish boys that reached even into tiny rural burbs like Nazareth? Note that the movement of Jesus was largely rural would be a surprise to people living in Jerusalem, and in Capernaum, where Jesus had his headquarters! Plus, the early years of Acts take place in Jerusalem, and NOT in the villages around.

Continuing on page 17:

Rural location and an ambivalence toward a largely Hellenistic city culture is what the Jesus movement had in common with the contemporary renewal and resistance movements. Under those conditions, speaking was the norm of communication rather than trafficing in texts, and word of mouth was the principal method of transmission.

Here again, it seems, a critic has forgotten something very important! "Rural location" and "ambivalence toward a largely Hellenistic city culture" perfectly describes the Qumran community - which had quite an affinity for writing things down! The rural/oral, urban/written connection thus fails here. (It should also be noted that even rural communities "read" -- they just did not often "write"! All public festivals and cultic celebrations all over the world use official texts which the priest or king or dignitary read or performed. The orientation toward texts as a primary storage of official info can be seen in the bookkeeping and icongraphic data of 3000 BC!)

Now, on to Kelber's specific evidence for an "oral matrix" - data which, to some extent, we do not dispute, though we have some disagreement with the applications offered (that the "matrix" here indicates fiction at work; see comments here for more). We will look at one section in particular: His analysis of healing stories [Kelb.OWG, 46-50]. Kelber begins by asserting that there is a "predictable progression" in healing stories that establishes their oral background - which is to say, if it can be shown that the stories follow a pattern that a storyteller would use to encourage his own recall, then it is proven that there is a significant oral background to the story. (Kelber does not explore the capabilities of Oriental memory, as we have done.) Here is the "predictable progression" that Kelber envisions:

1 - Exposition of Healing

a - Arrival of Healer and Sick Person

b - Staging of Public Forum

c - Explication of Sickness

d - Request for Help

e - Public Scorn/Contempt

2 - Performance of Healing

a - Utterance of Formula

b - Healing Gestures

c - Statement of Cure

3 - Confirmation

a - Admiration/Confirmation Formula

b - Dismissal

c - Injunction of Secrecy

d - Propagation of Healers' Fame

So how "predictable" is this progression? Kelber uses several stories from the Gospel of Mark and analyzes each to determine their adherence to the outline. Presumably we would find that the stories all follow the outline to a T. But is this what happens? Take a guess - it's not even close! In actuality, NOT ONE of the stories selected follows this outline on all 12 points! In fact, the MOST points that are followed are 9, and that in only one story (healing of the deaf/mute). After that, 1 story follows 8 of the 12; 2 follow 7 of 12 points, and the remainder follow 6, 5, 4, 3, and even 2 (!) points of the outline! This is a "predictable" progression? (Even more interesting is that in at least one case, the points are followed out of order, with 3b coming before 2c!)

So Kelber's case for an "oral matrix" is hardly impressive; yet he has the nerve to say, after this, that:

An obvious point to emerge from this survey of healing stories is their indebtedness to a recognizable commonplace structure...

A point here first: Much of this "commonplace structure" has a lot to do with the fact that if someone is healed miraculously, then certain things will have to happen, no matter what! Items 1a, 1c, 1d, 2a or b, and 3d especially are likely to happen; indeed, it is impossible that one or more of them will NOT happen! Wisely does Taylor note, in a different context, but in a way just as applicable [Tayl.FGT, 128]:

Do they not prove merely this, which is not at all new, that healing stories are everywhere narrated in the same manner, because they everywhere take pretty much the same course?

But what of the incredible variability in the stories, and their nearly total lack of adherence to Kelber's "predictable progression"? Amazingly, here is how Kelber explains it:

Although no single story exhausts all narrative possibilities, one can justly conceive of the telling of healing stories as the actualization of a given narrative repertoire.

! - So now we must CONCEIVE of this being part of an oral matrix - because the evidence quite frankly does not fit! But Kelber's excuses get even more amazing:

In sum, our study concurs with Vladimir Propp's observsation about the twofold quality of a folktale: it is amazingly multiform, picturesque and colorful, and, to no less a degree, remarkably uniform and concurrent.

!!!! - So here, we are being told:

1. That BOTH the multiform nature, AND the uniform nature, of the stories indicates that they found their source in an oral matrix! How peculiar that two completely OPPOSITE indications prove the same point!
2. That the "picturesque and colorful" nature of the stories indicates an oral matrix - well, is not life ITSELF picturesque and colorful? The healing stories would therefore be doing no more than painting a realistic portrait! (And, I might add, this is just what we'd expect if Mark's Gospel was based on Peter's preaching!)

In sum: Kelber's case for an "oral matrix" utterly fails, and is based on unscientific principles. While we do not necessarily disagree that these stories had some foundation in oral transmission (per the link above), I must say that this kind of thinking, I have found, is regretfully common in the circles of biblical criticism!

Another of Kelber's postulates suggests that the committing of oral tradition to writing somehow destroys the "living" tradition. Similarly, Henaut, sounding a bit like a liberal textual critic, dons his "The World is Coming to an End" cap on the matter [Hena.OTr, 14-5]:

The oral phase is now lost, hidden behind a series of Gospel texts and pre-Gospel sources that are full-fledged textuality - a textuality that does not intend to preserve an accurate account of the oral tradition but rather to convey a theological response to a new sociological situation...

...we are left with a tradition that still bears the stamp of the post-resurrectional church.

We will look at Henaut's arguments more closely in our next section, but for now, what of this idea that textuality "kills" the oral tradition? Two major factors destroy this contention, now also rebutted by Byrskog and by Achtemeier, both of whom respond directly to Kelber, and the former to Henaut. First, as we have noted in our previous article, the oral tradition continued even AFTER textuality was established. Second, textuality and orality actually interact with one another so that each reinforces the strengths of the other. [Lent.OLHG, 2] An example of this documented is Papias' comment that he preferred the spoken word to the written; Achtemeier [Ach.10n] notes similar sentiments by Seneca, who said for example, "The living voice...will help you more than the written word." Achtemeier specifically addresses Kelber's claim that the transition from oral to written was a "crucial shift": in light of the interaction of orality and text in this period, and the residual orality that came through even in written documents (which were designed for aural performamces!) no such "shift" occurred at all. Of course, perhaps both Kelber and Henaut would argue for some sort of post-resurrectional conspiracy to alter the words of Jesus, nevertheless; but the point is that the oral/written interactive process was not in the least destructive, but rather constructive and interactive, and that even in the process of writing, orality never actually came to an end. Any changes made to the written record would have had to have been acceptable in light of the oral tradition. Byrskog's criticism is most poignant: "Kelber copes indeed with a significant -- in my view even exaggerated -- existence of an oral legacy at the pre-gospel stage of tradition and transmission; and once we recognize a diachronic, oral dimnsion of the gospel tradition, we encounter immediatelya context of interaction between living people and between oral accounts and written text. To select one isolated textual account from that multifaceted matrix and regard it as entirely estranged from the oral legacy which nourished it, challenges everything we know from antiquity -- as well as from modern anthropological studies -- of how written texts interact with other forms of human, cultural discourse."

We now consider in brief the case of Henaut. Henaut is primarily concerned with Mark 4, the parable of the seeds and its explanation. His basic case is that, although the parable itself might have markers of oral tradition and contains Semitisms, the explanation does not, and therefore, it was probably invented by the church rather than given by Jesus. I daresay the logic here is rather strained: All we can really say is that the explanation was not taught for memory, so that later renditions of it were more freely adapted to Greek. There's no reason to say that the explanation did not have its roots in the words of Jesus.

More generally, Henaut subscribes to all the usual presuppositions, and offers a number of startlingly irrelevant parallels: Sayings and words of Jesus are unhesitatingly ascribed to the post-resurrection church when it is deemed suitable; the usual litany on "created speeches" appears; there is little in the way of research into oral tradition processes, and indeed, the expert opinions of oral tradition specialists like Lord and Vansina are either ignored, misunderstood, or thrown overboard in favor of form and redaction criticism; it is pointed out that supposed "mnemomic devices" are also found in works that are, at first, written - but a modern newspaper article and a paragraph by fantasy writer David Eddings are given as examples! Henaut may be right that such devices CAN be found in (modern!) works that are written from the start; but he considers the devices only individually. The Gospel records contain MANY such devices in combination, and the most plausible explanation for this is that the words go back to an oral teaching tradition begun by Jesus.

As a final criticism, Byrskog drops heavily on Henaut for making a "patently false" statement [167] about ancient historians emphasizing that eyewitnesses should not be involved in an action to the extent that their role affects what they saw and remembered, and then transferring this issue to the Gospels, arguing that this attitude would lead to inserting material to fill in gaps in the oral history that were unknown. Byrskog retorts that while historians were aware of the biases of some eyewitnesses, they "preferred the eyewitness who was socially involved or, even better, had been activiely participating in the events." Thus he concluses that Henaut "misses the point of his criticism and exaggerates his own position, because it is quite unlikely that the early Christians would have felt the active involvement of the eyewitnesses to be as problematic to historical reliability as he claims. There was therefore no acute need to fill in the gaps of history."

In closing, it may be observed that Henaut seems to personify the typical scholar of Jesus Seminar persuasion who gives preference to the "assured results" of redaction criticism, even when other explanations are more plausible. Why? Because those results offer an emasculated Jesus that "don't bother nobody."