Rethinking Ancient Reading

Pieter J. J. Botha wrote a fascinating article exploring the vast difference between contemporary and ancient reading practices. The article, “New Testament Texts in the Context of Reading Practices of the Roman Period: The Role of Memory and Performance,” published in Scriptura vol. 90 (2005) pgs 621-40, is well worth a read. I just wanted to note some highlights here.

Botha begins by painting the picture of a contemporary reading scene:

“One pulls the chair up to the desk and arranges some of the books and other papers already lying there. Then, glasses are picked up form a preferred place, cleaned [. . .], perched on the nose and steadied behind the ears to gaze at the now lucid pages. Adjustment of the study-lamp and little shifts of the chair and arms to reduce the shadows on the book follow. On reaches for a pencil or highlighter, and the soft sounds of scratching in the margins of book or notebook become audible.” (621)

This is the posture of many a contemporary reader – seated alone at a desk, wrapped in silence, bathed in incandescent light and aided by glasses. Botha observes how this picture is completely anachronistic in the first century. There was no electricity for light, no eye-glasses, no desks, and rarely was reading a silent solitary activity.

In regard to the texts themselves, Botha observes how unfriendly they are to modern reading practices. The dominant textual format—the scroll—was unwieldy and cumbersome. The visual landscape of the ancient text looks overwhelmingly cluttered to the modern eye with no paragraph divisions, punctuation or even spacing between words! “The Greco-Roman text was constructed with almost no aids to the reader, whose task it was to divide the lines correctly into words and sentences” (627).

It is not surprising, then, that ancient readers were expected to know the text before they read. Consider the orator Quintilian’s recommendation for reading,

“There is much that can only be taught by practice, as for instance when the boy should take breath, at what point he should introduce a pause into a line, where the sense ends or begins, when the voice should be raised or lowered, what modulation should be given to each phrase [. . .] I will give but one golden rule: To do all these things, he must understand what he reads.” (Inst. Orat. 1.8.1-2; Botha, 628).

Quintilian suggests practicing a text to the point that the reader knows his “reading” beforehand. Botha (drawing from J. Svenbro) suggests a fascinating illustration. He compares ancient reading practices to moderns “reading” sheet music. It is not impossible to “read” music in silence, but the most common way of doing so is by playing it on a piano to know what it sounds like (629).

Even the act of writing was drastically different in the ancient world. There were no editors, and often lengthy compositions were dictated in one sitting from memory. Pliny even mentions his preference for working out his texts in his head before dictating them to his scribe (Epist. 9.36). Or consider Cicero’s description of how the “speaking mind will forsee what is to follow” when delivering a speech (De Oratore 44.150; Botha, 633). These writing practices describe a very different literary concept that is far more oral than visual.

These ancient reading and writing practices ought to invite us to rethink ancient texts. This is especially so of NT texts which point to oral delivery as the primary means of distribution (1 Thess 5.27; Col 4.16; Rev 1.3). With these oral texts we must not fall into contemporary habits of “seeing” texts, but must have ears to hear.

Paul and Ancient Letter Writing

Letters have had a huge impact on my life. At the beginning of the summer of 2004 I met a girl in Texas. Though I had recently sworn off relationships, I was enchanted. Unfortunately for our blooming romance, my summer was committed to traveling around the country. For the next eight weeks I moved every Saturday shuffling from one summer camp to another. These camps lacked the technologies of modern communication. I had no cell service or wireless internet. In fact, I didn’t own a cell phone and high speed internet was still a novelty, certainly not available in the rural areas where I worked. Landlines charged exorbitant rates for long distance calls and I was a poor college student. Still, I could not risk having no contact for two months. So, I wrote letters . . . lots of letters. She wrote me letters too. It turned into quite a collection. It also built the foundation for a relationship that would eventually become a marriage.

That summer was probably the only time in my life I worried about the aesthetics of my handwriting. As I reflect on that process, it seems like ancient technology. Since then, I have not penned a single letter. Anymore, I never write anything by hand except the occasional illegible signature.  Contemporary literate communication is now conducted through almost entirely electronic means. It is fascinating to think about how drastically different communication is today than it was just seven years ago. To consider the literary communication of the early Christians is to step back almost 2,000 years. As one would expect, the technologies and conventions involved were even more unlike today.

Unfortunately, we often pay no attention to letter writing practices in the ancient world. How did people communicate across vast distances without phones or telegraphs? Letters of course! But how did most people communicate with letters when the vast majority of the population was illiterate? Interpreters usually give no thought to the technology and conventions involved in ancient letter writing. As a result, we mistakenly import our cultural and technological assumptions into Paul’s letters. We picture the Apostle sitting at a desk scratching on paper in silence, deep in theological thought. Then, Paul rushes the letter to the nearby post-office and the process is complete. E. Randolph Richards in Paul and First-Century Letter Writing: Secretaries, Composition and Collection provides a fascinating analysis of the historical processes involved in ancient letter writing. Throughout his analysis Richard illuminates Paul’s letter writing practices. The result is a uniquely insightful picture of Paul’s letters were written and thus ought to be interpreted.

After a brief introduction to the topic of ancient letter writing, Richards spends his first chapter showing how modern portraits of Paul, both popular and academic, are rife with anachronistic assumptions. Paul’s letters were not lone productions scratched out in silence as Paul conjured them in his head, only to be mailed the next day. The rest of the book is spent analyzing ancient letter production from the evidence of Cicero, papyrus letter collections and occasionally Seneca. Richards’ book is thoroughly documented and provides explanations that are based on historical precedent rather than modern assumptions.

Summary of Chapters:

• Chapter 2: Richards places Paul in the larger context of the first century letter writing. Most uniquely, he suggests that Paul’s “coauthors” must be taken into account as active participants in producing the letters. 
• Chapter 3: How does one write without pens? Here Richards provides an overview of the nuts and bolts of letter composition describing the writing materials, rough drafts and final products. 
• Chapter 4: Richards describes the involvement of secretaries (paid letter writers) who were an almost universal part of ancient letter writing process. Here Richards shows that there was a spectrum of influence the secretary would wield ranging from little more than transcriber to full blown composer. “The role played by the secretary depended on how much control the author exercised at that particular moment in that particular letter, even shifting roles with the same letter” (80).
• Chapter 5: Here Richards explores Paul’s use of secretaries. The letters explicitly mention secretaries six times (Rom 16.22; 1 Cor 16.21; Gal 6.11; Col 4.18; 2 Thess 3.17; Phlm 19). For the most part, Richards considers Paul’s use secretaries to be in the middle of the spectrum of influence as more than a transcribers but ultimately submissive to Paul’s literary will. 
• Chapter 6: Richards outlines criteria for identifying “interpolations” or preformed material in Paul’s letters.  He concludes, “Even though this material was non-Pauline, it was not un-Pauline or post-Pauline. The material was inserted during the letter’s composition and thus had Paul’s ultimate authorization” (108). 
• Chapter 7: Having identified interpolations, Richards provides explanations for how various preformed material was woven into Paul’s letters to produce a complete letter. “The arguments went were [Paul] intended them to go; the conclusions were what Paul intended to reach. Nevertheless, the smaller, quieter voices of others can still be heard in his letters” (120). 
• Chapter 8: Richards suggests that Paul’s letters reflect neither the top nor bottom of the literary scale of ancient letters. Rather, “Paul’s fall closer to the middle of the spectrum and reflect a Jewish subculture” (140). 
• Chapter 9: Any description of Paul’s epistolary style must recognize the length of time involved in letter composition, the use of secretaries and the presence of coauthors. Richards even suggests that stylistic statistical analysis indicates the kind of diversity one would expect in thirteen letters written in these circumstances. 
• Chapter 10: Describes the process (in terms of time and cost) by which letters were prepared to be dispatched. Richards argues that at least two final copies of each letter were made. One was sent to the recipients and the other kept for Paul’s personal records. There is an interesting chart calculating the comparative cost of producing these letters (169). As a conservative estimate, Richards thinks Paul’s longest letter (Romans) would have costs upwards of $ 2,200 and his shortest (Philemon) around $ 100. “Weeks, if not months, of work likely went into a letter” in addition to “considerable expense” (169). 
• Chapter 11: Once completed, ancient letters had to be sent. Unfortunately, there was no publicly accessible postal system in the Roman Empire. As a result, letters were sent through happenstance travelers who were already going to the intended destination or were sent privately at the expense of the sender. 
• Chapter 12: Travel in the ancient world was far from convenient by modern standards. Still, letters were carried. Depending on the time of year and difficulties of the journey a letter could take just a few days or multiple weeks to be delivered. 
• Chapter 13: Turning to Paul’s specific practices with letter carriers, Richards thinks, “Paul most likely used happenstance carriers to deliver his early letters, Galatians and 1-2 Thessalonians” (200), but then smartened up and began using members of his team as private letter carriers to ensure safe delivery as well as serve as interpretive guides (cf. 209). 
• Chapter 14: The question of how Paul’s letters came together into a collection is something of a mystery. Richards suggests, based on the common practice of authors keeping records of their letters, that Paul himself was responsible for collecting all his letters in a notebook format. These notebooks were posthumously circulated as a collection and eventually canonized. 
• Chapter 15: After explaining the complexity of the ancient letter writing process, and the multiple stages of human activity, Richards probes the question of inspiration. He wonders, at what stage(s) of the process was Paul “inspired” by the Spirit?

This is a book that deserves much attention, but I fear it will not gain the notoriety it deserves. Paul and First-Century Letter Writing is notable for at least three reasons. First and foremost, Richards’ arguments are historically grounded at every turn. With the disciplined imagination of a historian Richards allows the historical context to fill in the picture of Paul’s letter writing rather than pontificate based on modern assumptions.  Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, Richards provides a well-researched argument. 


Second, and this is all too rare in much of contemporary Pauline studies, Richards appreciates Paul’s role as a missionary-pastor working with a team. Richards brings years of personal missionary experience in a culture more similar to Paul’s world than the contemporary West. He provides numerous illustrations that help make sense of cultural differences and missionary dynamics. 


Third, this book is actually readable to people who are not consumed with NT studies. Often when I talk about my reading with my wife she can’t wait to change the subject. With this book, however, she was keenly interested to hear about Richards’ insights. Why might such a triumph of scholarship wallow in obscurity? It lacks a widely published name or a weighty endorsement. Also, the title seems boring. Please don’t let this fine book be ignored. Take and read.

Learning to "Read" in an Oral World

Most of my reading, aside from novels, is focused on biblical studies. Right in line with my interests, this summer I’m doing an independent study focused on the Apostle Paul’s education. I am chiefly interested in discovering how educated Paul was and the significance of his education for reading his letters and understanding his mission.

In the contemporary world, literacy (both the ability to read and write) is a key component of education. In fact, without this basic skill advanced education is impossible. In the ancient world, however, the ability to read was limited (perhaps 10 %) and the ability to write was scarcer still. Paul lived and wrote in a world that was dominated by the oral rather than the written word. In the modern world, the written word is such a basic part of everyday life that we have no idea how much the technology of writing influences the way we think. Imagine, for example, “a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything” (31) or an educational system with no written homework or required reading. Whatever education Paul may have had, it must have been drastically different than modern education simply by nature of the transition from an orality to literacy.

So, I picked up Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word in order to understand the significance of the orality-literacy shift. I’ll admit that at first glance, I was not excited about the book. It seemed a necessary evil, but much to my surprise I found the book to be a delightful read. Ong’s introduction to the field of orality studies is fascinating and in many ways paradigm shifting. In lively prose Ong shows how much writing is a technology that has reshaped how humans think.

The first chapter shows that human language is essentially oral. “Indeed, language is so overwhelmingly oral that of all the many thousands of languages [. . .] spoken in the course of human history only around 106 have ever been committed to writing to a degree sufficient to have produced literature, and most have never been written at all” (7). Further still, written texts are based on oral languages. So, while “Oral expression can exist and mostly has existed without any writing at all, writing never without orality” (8).

So, language is thoroughly oral, but as literates we have a difficult time comprehending the significance of orality and so we tend to describe oral performances using our literate category of “oral literature.” Ong has a helpful illustration of the inadequacy of this approach:

Thinking of oral tradition or a heritage of oral performance, genres and styles as ‘oral literature’ is rather like thinking of horses as automobiles without wheels. [. . .] Imagine writing a treatise on horses [. . .] which starts with the concept not of horse but of ‘automobile’ built on the readers’ direct experience of automobiles. [. . .] In the end, horses are only what they are not. (12)

Unfortunately, it is precisely in literary terms that oral traditions have been analyzed. This is problematic especially because we “read” Paul’s letters as literates when they were written to serve an oral function. The shift from orality to literacy has changed how we “read” but we are often unaware of the changes.

The second chapter of the book outlines how scholars stumbled upon the significance of orality as they analyzed Homer’s literature. This history of the subject chapter is interesting but the book gets really good in chapter three which focuses on how orality alters the mental state of humans. Consider how the orality-literacy shift changes complex problem solving. How does a person “work out” a complex problem without the assistance of writing? Further still, how would a person retain the learned information without writing to preserve it? “The only answer is: Think memorable thoughts. [. . .] you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence” (34). As a result, oral traditions have patterned formulaic sayings and type-characters because without the aid of writing complex syllogisms and plot-lines cannot be retained.

One of the many results of this phenomenon is the traditional orientation of oral cultures. “Oral societies must invest great energy in saying over and over again what has been learned arduously over the ages” (41). This is directly contrasted to contemporary measures of education that reward novelty. Another example is how oral cultures tend to think in terms of situations rather than abstractions. When confronted with geometric shapes, oral cultures don’t see circles and squares but rather situated objects like plates and doors (50). Clearly, the way of thinking in an oral culture is different than that of a literate one.

Even the idea of memorization is different in oral cultures. Literate societies think of memorization as being measured “word for word,” constantly checked against a text as the point of reference. Oral cultures have no way to check a verbatim rendition. So, an oral poet will remember formulaic sayings and type characters in his retellings. Though oral cultures claim verbatim retellings, analysis of contemporary oral cultures suggests an average of 60 percent accuracy when the same story is recorded twice and the two checked against one another (61). It has been noted, however, that the accuracy of oral retellings is significantly higher in some ritual texts (62-64). Here Ong points to the textual fluidity of the Last Supper (Mt 26.26-28 || Mk 14.22-24 || Lk 22.19-20; cf. 1 Cor 11.23-25) as an indicator of the oral way of remembering in the early church (64). Orality changes the way we think about memory and this ought to significantly influence, among other things gospel studies and approaches to the so called “synoptic problem.” Memory was measured differently in the oral world.

In chapter four Ong turns his attention to the way in which “writing reconstructs consciousness.” He argues, “More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness” (77). Most significantly, writing is a technology that transforms communication from the oral-aural sensory perception to visional perception. Communication in oral situations is fundamentally different than written communication. Spoken words are always highly contextual between multiple people. Written communication, however, is a single person’s word crystallized forever in a text (100). There is no interchange or exchange. Because of this, “written words sharpen analysis, for the individual words are called on to do more. To make yourself clear without gesture, without facial expression, without intonation, without a real hearer, you have to foresee circumspectly all possible meanings a statement may have for any possible reader in any possible situation, you have to make your language work so as to come clear all by itself, with no existential context” (102-3). To illustrate his point further Ong traces the use of Latin as the premier “learned language” and rhetoric as the prime subject for much of western history (107-13). He shows that writing reshapes how humans communicate with one another.

Chapter five is concerned with the development of print culture. When the technology of writing shifts communication from an oral/aural sphere to a visual one, it creates “a shift from sound to visual space” (115). This oral to visual shift is, as chapter five argues, observable in the development of print culture. Whereas early manuscripts were focused on producing a written document usable in a primarily oral culture, today print is intended to serve a literate culture. There are two very helpful illustrations of this point. First, the concept of plagiarism is a preoccupation of a literate society and was of little concern in an oral world. “Typography had made the word into a commodity. The old communal world had split up into privately claimed freeholdings” (129; cf. 131). Stories no longer belong to groups or tribes but to individuals. The second illustration of print culture that I found quite illuminating was the development of plot-lines. This illustration is only introduced in chapter five and transitions to chapter six.

The shift from orality to literacy was first observed in literary analysis of Homer. Not surprisingly then, most studies of orality-literacy shift dynamics have focused on literature and narrative in particular. The shift is keenly observable in the development of the concept of a plot line as seen in chapter six. Today, elementary school students learn the development of a plot in terms of a story arc (139).  In the world of literature the climax of plot is the detective story (141). “In the ideal detective story, ascending action builds relentlessly to all but unbearable tension, the climactic recognition and reversal releases the tension with explosive suddenness, and the dénouement disentangles everything totally – every single detail in the story turns out to have been crucial – and, until the climax and dénouement, effectively misleading” (146). Thus, a very tight plot line allows for great complexity in character development and “plot twists” that turn out to be quite important (148-52). In the context of an oral world, however, the primary genre of oral tradition is the epic, which does not have a linear plot. Epic poetry is episodic. The story begins “in the middle of things” and can contain lengthy digressions that do not serve a specific plot development. Literate stories have intricately woven plots but oral cultures have creative ways of immersing their readers in an episodic experience.

The last chapter of Ong’s book is devoted to some theorems about how the orality-literacy shift can be applied in other fields of study. He points to implications for literary theory (157-162), deconstructionist theory (162-66), speech-act theory and reader response criticism (166-68) and, most interesting to me, the fields of social sciences, philosophy, and biblical studies (168-70). He is particularly emphatic about biblical studies,

Orality-literacy theorems challenge biblical study perhaps more than any other field of learning, for over the centuries, biblical study has generated what is doubtlessly the most massive body of textual commentary in the world. [. . .] But [. . .] biblical studies, like other textual studies, are inclined unwittingly to model the noetic and verbal economy of oral cultures on literacy, projecting oral memory as a variant of verbatim literate memory and thinking of what is preserved in oral tradition as a kind of text that is only waiting to be set down in writing (170).

Ong’s argument burns away much of the scholarly dross that has accumulated around the biblical text over centuries of studying it as a text apart from a developing oral tradition. I think this has significant implications for how we read Paul in light of developing hermeneutical traditions after his death. But alas, I digress.

There is much to commend in Ong’s book. First, it was unexpectedly readable. Filled with interesting illustrations of his points, Ong held my attention throughout. Second, the book forced me to rethink a lot of my assumptions about how I read a text and especially the biblical text. But this rethinking helps in deconstructing false assumptions and reconstructing accurate assumptions about what to expect in oral cultures. Third, Ong’s thesis is bold without being all-encompassing. He rigorously argues that the shift from orality to literacy provided a context for the development of the western world, but he does not want to relegate every development simply to the invention of writing. Orality and Literacy is a fine example of an introductory book to a paradigm-shifting subject. Students of the Bible need to learn to think in an oral world as they “read” in a historically responsible way.

Early Christian Readers

How was early Christian literature made? Who read it? In what circumstances were Christian books read? How did they compare to other ancient books in physical form, literary quality and reading function? The significance of these questions is often overlooked. In fact, in the many NT classes I have taken both at the undergraduate and graduate level, rarely have these questions been addressed.

It is precisely to these questions that Harry Gamble attends in his masterful, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts. The goal of the book is to provide “a history of early Christian texts” (x). It is a difficult history to write. Early Christian writers give few details regarding the production, circulation and use of their literature because they assumed the process to be common knowledge. Rather than seek to answer these questions by focusing on a specific geographic region or time frame, Gamble attempts to provide a portrait of the entire landscape of the literary culture of the burgeoning Christian movement in the first five centuries.

Gamble’s study includes five chapters:

1.      Literacy and Culture in Early Christianity

2.      The Early Christian Book

3.      The Publication and Circulation of Early Christian Literature

4.      Early Christian Libraries

5.      The Uses of Early Christian Books

In each chapter Gamble seeks to answer his questions by first placing them in the larger context of Jewish and Greco-Roman literary culture. He then, as far as possible, compares what we know about literacy and books with what is evidenced among the early Christians. The result is a fantastically insightful book. In light of this book’s significance I will provide a review of each chapter in a series of upcoming posts. Stay tuned. Larry Hurtado thinks Gamble’s book “ought to be required for any PhD student in the field.” You will want to know why.