The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q

[From the Author's Preface] I have written this book out of a concern for what seemed to me a disproportionately print-oriented hermeneutic in our study of the Bible. Walter J. Ong, who has amply documented the problem outside the field of biblical studies, has termed it the "chirographic bias" of Western intellectuals, and Lou H. Silberman has, in the words of Marshall McLuhan, drawn critical attention to the "Gutenberg galaxy" in which much of biblical scholarship is conducted. In New Testament studies the problem manifests itself in the inability of form criticism to produce an oral hermeneutic, our misconceived search for "the original" form of oral materials, the collaboration of form with redaction criticism in reconstructing tradition according to the paradigm of linearity, and a prevalent tendency to perceive the written gospel in continuity with oral tradition. The current revival of the Griesbach hypothesis, which seeks to explain the Markan text as a conflation of Matthean and Lukan texts, is further testimony to the triumph of visualism and our growing inability to come to terms with spoken words in the synoptic tradition.