The Oral and the Written Gospel:

...However, not discussed is Mark 16:7 which for many of us disproves such pessimism...

...It is surely true that writing narrows the more fluid options of speech...

...Thus, as part of introducing textuality, Mark is discrediting the most plausible oral tradents of the gospel, i. e., the disciples and the family...

...indeed, in Jerusalem, if one attributes any history to John, a gospel that Kelber ignores...

...For Kelber, the pre-written Jesus tradition was in opposition to the written gospel...

...The real "bad news," however, is the employment of orality and textuality observations to back Kelber's long-disputed approach to Mark...

...Kelber also insists that textuality runs against many of the innate tendencies of orality, so that the written gospel had a direction different from and even corrective of the oral transmission...

...The movement of the historical Jesus was largely a rural phenomenon...

...We are told that Mark polemicized against the disciples of Jesus, but there is no acknowledgement of the painstaking refutation of that thesis by Ernest Best...

...A really incredible suggestion is that in Mark 15:40 the mother of Jesus is deliberately referred to as mother of James and Joses to help discredit her...

...He underestimates the accountability of the written gospel read to its first, intended audience...

...It is quite debatable that prophets created sayings of Jesus (as posited by Kasemann, Thiessen, and Boring) and that no differentiation was made between Jesus speaking in the ministry with his own voice and the risen Jesus speaking through such prophets...

...Even in the part of the book for which I am enthusiastic, I find serious faults...

...Unfortunately, throughout Kelber fails to alert readers of the dubious character of major hypotheses...

...but I believe Kelber presses this too dialectically...

...Because of oral fluidity and prophetic creation it is irrelevant to ask whether even the pre-written tradition is faithful to Jesus in his ministry...

...and so Kelber assumes that a sayings collection "precluded reflection on his death...

...Almost all these points are open to serious challenge...

...Marcan textuality in its concentration on the cross constitutes for Kelber a corrective of the more free-swinging christologies of the oral stage, many of which survive in apocryphal literature...

...David Hill has strongly challenged the prophet hypothesis, but his work is not cited...

...The Epistle attributed to James the brother of the Lord puts no emphasis on quoting Jesus...

...I would agree that there is a distance between Jesus and the written gospel, but I do not find Kelber's interpretation of the distance a great improvement over Bultmann's chasm...

...This critique may not seem novel to informed Roman Catholic readers since many of us never accepted Bultmann's skepticism nor Gerhardsson's rigid approach to the preservation of the Jesus tradition...

...The good news is the massive stress on the "orality" of the early Christian movement, with a close study of how features associated with oral communication shaped the message before it underwent "textuality'' (jargon for being written down...

...Again some of this may not be a surprise to those who have read the Roman Pontifical Biblical Commission on the second stage of Gospel formation (between Jesus and the evangelist) which consists of preaching adapted to the needs of the listeners...

...Helpfully digesting some important studies on the dynamism of "orality" (including those of Walter Ong who wrote the Foreword), Kelber wisely emphasizes the social context inherent in oral communication where speakers addressed audiences a context that may help us to reconstruct early Christian history...

...But what if he spoke it only once (Kelber tends to forget the other side of some "if" sentences), why does the search for the original words that he spoke become meaningless...

...Under this name she is associated with Mary Magdalen and Salome as failing to transmit the oral resurrection message...

...Kelber argues that if Jesus spoke a saying more than once, the concept of the original form of the saying (the ipsissima vox) has no validity...

...for in some ways it is very helpful...

...For instance, in describing oral gospel transmission Kelber posits a rural context, wandering prophets, free creation of Jesus sayings, and a lack of stress or the death of Jesus: in short, elements that would contrast with the written, canonical gospels known to us...

...This stress involves a strong critique of Rudolph Bultmann's neglect of Jesus's ministry, and of Birger Gerhardsson's opposing attempt to posit a Christian oral tradition similar to a rabbinic, school process or memorization...

...Kelber, however, would increase the number of transmitters from official preachers to a whole range of Christians...

...Kelber argues that an important motif in the Marcan Passion Narrative is the "death" of the disciples there is no future for them after their infidelity in the crucifixion of Jesus...

...Yet in the first century we have little evidence of many Christian converts in non-urban settings...

...Kelber stresses that Q ( a collection of sayings common to Matthew and Luke but absent from Mark) does not speak of Jesus's death...

...Again, Helmut Koester's very controversial assumptions about the antiquity of apocryphal gospels is given facile consent without serious debate...

...Where in the New Testament is the family presented as tradents of the Jesus tradition...

...Assumptions about negative Q theology are often dubious because we do not know whether Q represented a complete theology or was meant only as a supplement to an existing tradition...

...in others it is disastrously wrongheaded...

...Bultmann posited a chasm between the preserved gospel and the largely unknown Jesus of the ministry...

...True enough if he means Jesus moved about in the countryside of Galilee (but also in major towns...