I was playing around this morning, and made this book cover for Bultmann’s book “Jesus and the Word.” It uses the Chunk type from The League of Moveable Type, available here. It needs to be trimmed, but if I get it printed up, I’ll post a photo of it on the book (which is a paperback that doesn’t need a dust jacket).
My copy of This World and Beyond needs a dust-jacket, so perhaps I’ll make one for that collection of Bultmann’s sermons.
Here is an interview with Daniel Wallace, where he discusses the recent discovery of a fragment of the Gospel of Mark, dated to the 1st century CE, along with some other manuscripts.
Pretty exciting, if you ask me.
H/T: Larry Hurtado’s Blog.
In Paul Rhodes Eddy & Gregory A. Boyd’s The Jesus Legend, they spend a fair amount of time discussing the fact that the culture in which Jesus lived was an orally-dominated culture. One aspect I found particularly interesting, partially because of what I wrote about regarding Luther and his view of the gospel a while back, that the gospel is something to be proclaimed and heard, was the following note on the ideal of “gospel”:
It is important to remember that for the earliest Christians, the term “gospel” was used to refer to the “oral proclamation of the significance of the [life], death and resurrection of Jesus, not to a written account of the story of Jesus.” While the term “gospel” was eventually also applied to written texts that contained the story of Jesus, the term never ceased being used to refer to the oral proclamation. It has retained this dual-purpose semantic range to this day, but we must always remember that in the beginning was the “gospel” as Good News proclaimed orally.
p. 354
They go on to discuss how scholars believe the gospels to be composed with the intent of being read aloud:
Christopher Bryan effectively demonstrates that both in terms of its narrative structure and its compositional style Mark shows all the evidences of being written for oral recitation. Bryan concludes his study by asking, “Was Mark written to be real aloud?” He answers this question with a resounding yes. “Mark, ” he adds, “was designed for oral transmission – and for transmission as a continuous whole – rather than for private study or silent reading.”
p. 359
Noting that some scholars doubt that such a lengthy text would be read in a single service, the authors remark in a footnote, amusingly, that:
This hesitation, however, is fueled by anachronism. In the ancient Mediterranean world – where neither a roast beef in the oven nor the kickoff of an NFL football game made the congregation nervous if the service lasted more than an hour – a narrative the length of Mark’s easily would have been performed during a single gathering of the community. As we noted in chap. 6, oral narratives much longer than Mark’s are routinely performed to this day in certain cultures.
p. 359
All of the above prompted several personal responses.
First, the majority of the non-denominational/baptist churches I have attended have not typically read scripture aloud in service, at least not more than a few verses. This seems a questionable (non)practice; at the very least, the entire text which is being preached on should be read at some point during the service. (I’d take a few psalms and Old Testament readings as well, but let’s go for at least the text of the day).
Second, I wonder what it would be like to hear the Gospel of Mark read in its entirety in the context of the church community. If a church put on a “performance” of the Gospel of Mark, it being read by church members who had practiced reading sections of text, would any attend? In all honesty, I don’t know if I am up to listening to a reading of the entire Gospel of Mark in a single sitting. It seems that one would need not only practice at reading that much text aloud, but practice listening to that length of text aloud. Perhaps a church group could practice with shorter works of texts, and work their way up to a gospel?
It would seem that audio bibles are perhaps one way to practice listening to the gospels aloud. BibleGateway.com has several audio bibles available, so perhaps I will try to spend some listening to the gospels and epistles. I wonder, if such a discipline was sustained over time, would I understand the scriptures differently?
Finally, as a counter-argument to the classical clerical complaint about congregations getting “nervous” when service goes to long, I invite you to watch a video of Lyle Lovett’s classic song, “Church.”
The Kingdom of God, then, is something miraculous, in fact the absolute miracle, opposed to all the here and now; it is “wholly other,” heavenly ( cf. R. Otto). Whoever seeks it must realize that he cuts himself off from the world, otherwise he belongs to those who are not fit, who put their hand to the plow and look back. The stories of the calling of the first disciples are legends (Mark 1:16-20, 2:14); he who seeks for a historical kernel in them by attempting to explain psychologically the behavior of the disciples misunderstands them. But these legends are the historical witness for the meaning of Jesus’ message concerning the Kingdom, which tears men up by the roots from their business life and from their social relationships and commands the dead to bury their dead.
Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, p.37
I’ve had discussions with folks about why the disciples just dropped everything and followed Jesus. ‘Isn’t that crazy?’ I’ve said. I’ve been told that at least some of the disciples would have known Jesus, Galilee not being all that large, and so it is not as if they just followed a total stranger. That may be true, but I think Bultmann may have a point as well. In the Gospels, the stories of the calling of the disciples may be told in the manner which they are to emphasize what Jesus’ call means, what the Kingdom means – they mean, as Bonhoeffer said, that ‘when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.’
Here is my (very) brief review of Elie Wiesel’s Souls on Fire, which I shared at Goodreads:
Elie Wiesel’s telling of the lives and tales of the Hasidic masters is at turns beautiful and unsettling, humorous and poignant. The lives and tales themselves call to mind the sayings and stories of the Christian Desert fathers. Wiesel’s own voice, and his largely implicit foregrounding of the tales against the backdrop of a post-Auschwitz world, add a modern literary layer to these essentially spiritual tales.
Another word from Mendl of Kotzk:
When he cursed the serpent, God condemned him to slither on the ground and feed on dust. What a strange malediction! The serpent will never be hungry, is that a malediction? Yes, it is, and a dreadful one at that!
Souls on Fire, p. 245.
A paragraph that struck me while reading; one of many, actually, from Wiesel’s book.
A disciple tells [Mendl of Kotzk] his woes: “I come from Rizhin. There, everything is simple, everything is clear. I prayed and I knew I was praying; I studied and I knew I was studying. Here in Kotzk everything is mixed up, confused. I suffer from it, Rebbe. Terribly. I am lost. Please help me so I can pray and study as before. Please help me to stop suffering.” The Rebbe peers at his disciple in tears and asks: “And who ever told you that God is interested in your studies and your prayers? And what if He preferred your tears and sufferings?”
From Wiesel’s Souls on Fire, p.235.
