When was the last time you heard the Bible read in Church and people applauded Jesus’ actions of loving kindness or laughed wholeheartedly at the disciples’ stupidity? The absence of these signs of the engagement of the audience is a sign of the changes that have happened in our experience of the Bible since its composition 2,000-3,000 years ago. In the historical context of antiquity when 80-90% of people couldn’t read, the books of the Bible, like the plays of Shakespeare some 1500 or so years after the Gospel of Mark, were composed for performance to audiences. The composers of the books of the Bible assumed that the performances of their compositions would include gestures, variations in tempo and volume, facial expressions, and changes in tone of voice.
In the media culture of our time that Walter Ong has called a “secondary oral culture,” we are rediscovering the vitality of “the book.” In my experience as a biblical storyteller, people are often surprised at how “alive” the stories are when they hear them told and ask, “How did you make the stories so alive?” My favorite explanation is that rather than the stories being like Frankenstein brought back to life, they are alive and well. My job is not to kill them.
The Bible was and is the quintessential book. Indeed, the word “Bible” is an English version of the Greek words biblos/biblion that mean “book.” An associated meaning is “scroll” because the original copies of the “books” of the Bible were scrolls in which the pages of papyrus or vellum were pasted together in a continuous roll. Our current bibles and books are descendants of later codexes in which the pages were folded in half and bound together in the middle. If we want to understand human history, much of which is preserved in books, we have to learn about “the book,” the Bible.
The Bible was not originally a book as we think of a book as a text to sit and read alone in silence. The various books of the Bible were visual recordings of sound that the original authors assumed would be performed for audiences, often from memory. The reasons for this were: 1) most people were illiterate (85-95%) during the more than one thousand years during which the various books of the Bible were composed 2) books had to be copied by hand using costly materials, and were, therefore, expensive to buy. Our bibles now are the product of loving labor and technological developments such as the printing press that have been developed during the last three thousand years of human history.
An appropriate and interesting way of experiencing the Bible is to listen to a good biblical storyteller telling the stories. Over half of the individual books collected in the big book of the Bible are stories that were told and retold by storytellers for anywhere from a few decades to a few centuries before they were written down. These storytelling occasions, sometimes with and sometimes without a manuscript in hand, varied in length from a few minutes to several hours. The Gospel of Mark was a two-hour story and the Gospel of Luke a four-hour story. And those were short stories when compared with the performances of Homer’s Iliad that went on all night long. Furthermore, they reflect the varied memories of the original events that circulated in different storytelling circles. Thus, the four stories of Jesus’ resurrection in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John identify different groups of women who went to the tomb and different angels who spoke to them. But all of the stories are memories of the same transformative event.
Therefore, as we read the books of the Bible in our modern book, we can picture and hear those original storytellers, prophets and singers in our imagination. We can also picture and hear the millions of people in homes, classes, synagogues and churches who have read, recited, heard, and remembered the books of the Bible over the two thousand years since they were formed into the definitive collections. Listening to the Bible is an entry into a grand adventure of exploration and discovery.
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