Literary Canons for an Oral Audience?

The worlds in which the ancient Hebrew and, later, the Greek New Testament canons emerged were predominantly oral. In the Roman Era probably less than 5 percent of the population were able to read complex books like the ones now found in Jewish and Christian bibles. How would it be possible, even desirable, to stage a collection of literature as a symbol for cultural identity and, ultimately, as a vehicle for the production of social authority? Any answer will necessarily be complex. My presentation will focus on one segment in the attempt to address this nexus. I propose the production of scriptural authority needs to be explored as a social rather than a scribal phenomenon. It is the result of complex interaction in what I have elsewhere called canonical ecologies. In the case of the early Hebrew canons, it appears that authority was produced through symbiotic interactions between written (elite) and oral (popular) canonical ecologies. To the scribal community texts had semantic value, but for the oral audience text artefacts were invested with the sense ascribed to them as social memory and through ritual handling of the text artefacts.