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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 Testament's meaning in the way its earliest audiences did, we must hear its audible features and understand its words as spoken sounds. Sound Matters presents essays by ten scholars from five countries and three continents, who explore the New Testament through sound mapping, a technique invented by Margaret Lee and Bernard Scott for analyzing Greek texts as speech. Sound Matters demonstrates the value and uses of this technique as a prelude and aid to interpretation. The essays that make up this volume illustrate the wide range of interpretive possibilities that emerge when sound mapping restores the spoken sounds of the New Testament and revives its living voice.
The concepts of social memory and social identity have been increasingly used in the study of ancient Jewish and Christian sources. In this collection of articles, international specialists apply interdisciplinary methodology related to these concepts to early Jewish and Christian sources. The volume offers an up-to-date presentation of how social memory studies and socio-psychological identity approach have been used in the study of Biblical and related literature. The articles examine how Jewish and Christian sources participate in the processes of collective recollection and in this way contribute to the construction of distinctive social identities. The writers demonstrate the benefits o...
Throughout history, the study of sacred texts has focused almost exclusively on the content and meaning of these writings. Such a focus obscures the fact that sacred texts are always embodied in particular material forms—from ancient scrolls to contemporary electronic devices. Using the digital turn as a starting point, this volume highlights material dimensions of the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The essays in this collection investigate how material aspects have shaped the production and use of these texts within and between the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, from antiquity to the present day. Contributors also reflect on the implications of transiti...
The Fourth Gospel and the Manufacture of Minds in Ancient Historiography, Biography, Romance, and Drama is the first book-length study of genre and character cognition in the Gospel of John. Informed by traditions of ancient literary criticism and the emerging discipline of cognitive narratology, Tyler Smith argues that narrative genres have generalizable patterns for representing cognitive material and that this has profound implications for how readers make sense of cognitive content woven into the narratives they encounter. After investigating conventions for representing cognition in ancient historiography, biography, romance, and drama, Smith offers an original account of how these conventions illuminate the Johannine narrative’s enigmatic cognitive dimension, a rich tapestry of love and hate, belief and disbelief, recognition and misrecognition, understanding and misunderstanding, knowledge, ignorance, desire, and motivation.
In Public Reading in Early Christianity: Lectors, Manuscripts, and Sound in the Oral Delivery of John 1-4 Dan Nässelqvist investigates the oral delivery of New Testament writings in early Christian communities of the first two centuries C.E. He examines the role of lectors and public reading in the Greek and Roman world as well as in early Christianity. Nässelqvist introduces a method of sound analysis, which utilizes the correspondence between composition and delivery in ancient literary writings to retrieve information about oral delivery from the sound structures of the text being read aloud. Finally he applies the method of sound analysis to John 1–4 and presents the implications for our understanding of public reading and the Gospel of John.
Open Access for this publication was made possible by a generous donation from Segelbergska stiftelsen för liturgivetenskaplig forskning (The Segelbergska Foundation for Research in Liturgical Studies). In a seminal study, Cur cantatur?, Anders Ekenberg examined Carolingian sources for explanations of why the liturgy was sung, rather than spoken. This multidisciplinary volume takes up Ekenberg’s question anew, investigating the interplay of New Testament writings, sacred spaces, biblical interpretation, and reception history of liturgical practices and traditions. Analyses of Greek, Latin, Coptic, Arabic, and Gǝʿǝz sources, as well as of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, illuminate an array of topics, including recent trends in liturgical studies; manuscript variants and liturgical praxis; Ignatius of Antioch’s choral metaphor; baptism in ancient Christian apocrypha; and the significance of late ancient altar veils.
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 the assumption for the biblical messages being received is not individual silent reading, then the question becomes, how does this public performative mode of communication affect the translation of this biblical material? Rather than respond to this in general theoretical terms, most in this collection of articles offer specific applications to particular Hebrew and Greek passages of Scripture. Almost all the authors have firsthand experience with the translation of biblical materials into non-...
This volume reimagines the first-century reception of the Gospel of Mark within a reconstructed (yet hypothetical) performance event. In particular, it considers the disciples' character and characterization through the lens of performance criticism. Questions concerning the characterization of the disciples have been relatively one-sided in New Testament scholarship, in favor of their negative characterization. This project demonstrates why such assumptions need not be necessary when we (re-)consider the oral/aural milieu in which the Gospel of Mark was first composed and received by its earliest audiences.
In the ancient world, writings were read aloud, heard, and remembered. In contrast, modern exegesis assumes a silent text. For Margaret Lee and Brandon Scott, the disjuncture between ancient and modern approaches to literature obscures the beauty and meaning in writings such as the New Testament. As the structure of an ancient Greek composition derives first from its sounds, and not from the meaning of its words, sound analysis, analysis of the signifier and its audible dimension, are crucial to interpretation. Sound Mapping the New Testament explores writing technology in the Greco-Roman world, and uses ancient Greek literary criticism for descriptions of grammar as a science of sound and literary composition as a woven fabric of speech. Based on these perspectives and a close analysis of writings from the four Gospels, Paul, and Q, Lee and Scott advance a theory of sound analysis that enables modern readers to hear the New Testament afresh. This second edition includes a new introduction which reviews a decade of sound mapping scholarship.