Structuring Early Christian Memory Jesus In Tradition Performance And Text

Structuring Early Christian Memory

Performing Early Christian Literature

Scholars of early Christian literature acknowledge that oral traditions lie behind the New Testament gospels. While the concept of orality is widely accepted, it has not resulted in a corresponding effort to understand the reception of the gospels within their oral milieu. In this book, Kelly Iverson reconsiders the experiential context in which early Christian literature was received and interpreted. He argues that reading and performance are distinguishable media events, and, significantly, that they produce distinctive interpretive experiences for readers and audiences alike. Iverson marshals an array of methodological perspectives demonstrating how performance generates a unique experiential context that shapes and informs the interpretive process. Iverson's study explores the dynamic oral environment in which ancient audiences experienced the gospel stories. He shows why an understanding of oral performance has important implications for the study of the NT, as well as for several issues that are largely unquestioned by biblical scholars.

Jesus Tradition in the Apostolic Fathers

This dissertation reevaluates the tradition of Jesus' sayings in the Apostolic Fathers in light of the growing recognition of the impact of orality upon early Christianity and its writings. At the beginning of the last century it was common to hold that the Apostolic Fathers made wide use of the canonical Gospels. While a number of studies have since called this view into question, many of them simply replace the theory of dependence upon canonical Gospels with one of dependence upon other written sources. No full-scale study of Jesus tradition in the Apostolic Fathers has been published which takes into account the last four decades of new research into oral tradition in the wake of the pioneering work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Based on this new research, the present dissertation advances the thesis that an oral-traditional source best explains the form and content of the explicit appeals to Jesus tradition in the Apostolic Fathers that predate 2 Clement. In the course of the discussion, attention is drawn to the ways in which the Jesus tradition in the Apostolic Fathers informs our understanding of the use of oral tradition in Christian antiquity.