Actio According to Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria XI,3) and the Performance of the Gospel of Mark

Actio according to Quintilian (Institutio oratoria XI,3) and the Performance of the Gospel of Mark

Geert VAN OYEN (Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium)

Introduction It is generally accepted that the individual writings of the New Testament have to be understood in their oral culture. This insight originated at the end of the 20th century and it differs from precedent 19th century theories on orality that were looking for oral sources as the basic explanation for the written gospels (e.g. to solve the Synoptic Problem). The focus switched to the role the media (spoken and written language) played as specific means of communication1. The attention for the communicative aspect of the Biblical stories originated together with the growing idea that there exists no great divide between orality and literacy2. Istvan Czachesz, a representative for many other authors, states: “Orality and literacy could have existed side by side and perhaps interacted from the very beginning”3. This observation leads to many uncertainties about the exact way the gospels were composed and written down4. Scholars are operating in a grey zone. Indeed, it is not difficult to imagine in general the existence of a society in which oral and written culture were completely mixed. However, it is almost impossible to reconstruct how this mixture concretely worked out in the case of the origin and composition of the gospels 2000 years ago. It is against this background of a mixed oral-aural-written ancient culture that I would like to present this paper on the performance of the gospel of Mark in light of contemporary ideas of performing in Roman rhetoric and more specifically of delivery. I am aware that the topic of performance of the gospels in the first century is a very questionable one and that it is not sure when, where, and

1 K.R. IVERSON, Orality and the Gospels: A Survey of Recent Research, in CBR 8 (2009) 71-106; N.A. ELDER, New Testament Media Criticism, in CBR 15 (2017) 315-337. 2 Biblical scholars mostly have in mind the discussions related to Biblical texts, but the mixture of literacy and orality is a much wider cultural phenomenon that, e.g., is also true with regard to the classical rhetorical situations. See M. FOX, Rhetoric and Literature at Rome, in W. DOMINIK - J. HALL, A Companion to Roman Rhetoric, Malden, MA: Wiley – Blackwell, 2007, 369-381, p. 370: “Rhetoric in the ancient world was experienced primarily in the context of a live performance, a form of communication that presupposes an interaction between speaker and audience. Literature, on the other hand, often revolved around a private act of reading. The contrast, however, should be thought of as a fluid spectrum rather than a polarity. Much ‘literature’ was also read out loud […], and it is clear that speeches delivered in the courts or senate house were written down in order to be read”. For more literature on the interrelatedness of orality and writing in other cultures, see J.M. FOLEY, The Singer of Tales in Performance, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995, 66-78, R. FINNEGAN, Literacy and Orality. Studies in the Technology of Communication, Oxford – New York: Blackwell, 1988; D.M. CARR, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; H. HEARON, The Interplay Between Written and Spoken Word in the Second Testament as Background to the Emergence of Written Gospels, in Oral Tradition 25 (2010) 57-74. 3 I. CZACHESZ, The Transmission of Early Christian Thought: Toward a Cognitive Psychological Model, in Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses 36 (2007) 65-83, p. 67; with reference to P.J.J. BOTHA, Cognition, orality- literacy, and approaches to first century writings, in J.A. DRAPER (ed.), Orality, Literacy, and Colonialism in Antiquity, Atlanta: SBL, 2004, 37-63. 4 See my paper at the ISBL-EABS session on “Orality and the Gospel of Mark” in Helsinki, August 2018: Orality, Memory, Performance: Doing Exegesis with more Questions than Answers. 2 how there have been performances and if they concerned the gospel as a whole. Still, I think that it makes sense to learn as much as possible about oral communication in the first century C.E., in order to understand what could have happened when parts of the gospel were orally transmitted5. My paper is thus partly a purely hypothetical mind game, but I hope, a useful and meaningful one. Actually, interest in Antiquity is only half of the background of this paper. Research on orality and performance have also to do with the “praktisches Interesse” and the “Verwendungsmöglichkeiten der Exegese”, as Sönke Finnern and Jan Rüggemeier call it in their newest book on Methodology of the New Testament6. Their following short remark on the communication of the gospel in modern situations is of major importance: “Die actio als eigener ‘Methodenschritt’ ist nicht zu unterschätzen”7. This remark is motivated by the observation that the gospel is orally transmitted in liturgy, homily and performance, of which – I add – performance of a whole gospel book is a special form (cf. below). There is indeed nowadays an undeniably increasing interest in how to perform a gospel for modern audiences, because the awareness is growing that – compared to silent reading and study – oral-aural (and visual!) communication offers different and additional value to the communicative aspects of the gospel. It is not amazing that Finnern and Rüggemeier refer to Roman rhetoric as a guideline for modern performance: “Auβerdem ist der Körper des Redners ein wichtiges Medium bei der Aufführung. Zwischen dem Inhalt bzw. der Intention der Rede und der Stimme, Mimik, Gestik und Proxemik (räumliche Distanz) muss eine Kohärenz bestehen”8. These are more or less exactly the categories Quintilian exposes in the chapter on actio in the Institutio oratoria. It certainly is a step forward to find “Performanzkritik” in a German handbook of methodology, but I am afraid performance critics will not be completely satisfied to see their method as part of a chapter with the subtitle: “Wofür kann ich die Analysen verwenden?”. They consider performance criticism as a complete interdisciplinary research method9. In sum, against this double background of orality and performance both in Antiquity and in the 21st century, the questions of this paper are: Is there any interesting information in Quintilian’s work on actio that is useful when performing the gospel or parts of the gospel of

5 The aim of this paper differs from attempts to find traces of orality in the gospel of Mark. Of course we can! See e.g. the paper by C. BREYTENBACH, Das Evangelium nach Markus: Verschlüsselte Performanz? at the CBL in Leuven (July 2017; publication date 2019). I am rather looking at the synchronic level what happens when oral communication takes place. For the importance of media study, see H.E. HEARON – P. RUGE-JONES (eds), The Bible in Ancient and Modern Media (Biblical Performance Criticism), Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009; T. THATCHER – C. KEITH – R.F. PERSON – E.R. STERN (eds), The Dictionary of the Bible and Ancient Media, London – Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2017. 6 S. FINNERN – J. RÜGGEMEIER, Methoden der neutestamentlichen Exegese. Ein Lehr- und Arbeitsbuch (UTB, 4212), Tübingen: Francke, 2016, 294-313 (the title of Chapter 14). 7 FINNERN – RÜGGEMEIER, Methoden der neutestamentlichen Exegese, 299. 8 Ibid. 9 D. RHOADS, Biblical Performance Criticism: Performance as Research, in Oral Tradition 25 (2010) 157- 198. – It is a little bit disappointing to see that chapter 17 (“Der Text in seiner B eziehung zum alltäglichen Leben”) in the “6, völlig neubearbeitete Auflage” of W. EGGER – P. WICK, Methodenlehre zum Neuen Testament, Freiburg – Basel – Wien: Herder, 2011, is limited to 1,5 pages (!) with the explanation that “Aufgrund der Ausrichtung dieser Neubearbeitung auf Proseminare musste hier gekürzt warden” (276, n. 2). 3

Mark? In what way is the growing number of performances of a gospel today of interest for exegetical methodology as a whole? There is much to do about the hermeneutical question of the compatibility between, on the one hand, methods that are concerned with the past – the historical critical methods (but in their wake also social and many other readings) –, and, on the other hand, newer methods that are focusing on the present (some reader-oriented approaches, narrative criticism or many forms of ‘applied’ exegesis). It seems to me that the exegetical “method” of studying orality and performance of the gospel can build a bridge between the past-oriented methods and the present-oriented ones for more than one reason10. The most evident one is that because of the direct way of communication the experience of an oral performance of a story does not change very much, regardless of the time the audience is living in11.

The aim of this paper is not to devaluate the classical exegetical approaches of historical criticism or even narrative criticism which are working on the written text of the Gospel of Mark and which publish the result of their research in written form. I just want to call attention to the possibility and the value of an oral performance of the gospel as a serious form of interpretation of the text that is reflecting exegetical insights not by talking or writing about the gospel but by telling and retelling the gospel itself. I do not do this for reasons of melancholy or romantic desire to copy what was done in Ancient times. As I already mentioned, I am not even sure the gospel as a whole was performed in Antiquity. We do not have to imitate what one did in Antiquity. I am doing this because I firmly believe that oral communication of the gospel opens the exegete-performer as well as the audience towards other dimensions of the story. Oral communication of the gospel has contributed as much (if not more) to the transmission of the gospel of Mark through the ages as did written communication – although here as well the opposition between written and oral transmission is probably a false one.

Orality, Rhetoric, and Performance of Mark There is no need here to repeat the development of orality studies on the gospel of Mark since the work of Werner Kelber or Joanna Dewey12. For our purpose, I want to highlight one aspect of the evolution within orality studies. After initial interest in the oral style of the gospel(s) – sometimes wrongly used as a criterion of authentic eyewitness in the search for the historical Jesus – and in the processes of collective and social memory, the logical next

10 C. BRYAN, A Preface to Mark: Notes on the Gospel in Its Literary and Cultural Settings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 170: “We have therefore examined Mark's text using the tools of literary and historical criticism. If nothing else becomes clear from such an examination, it is surely that Mark's literary and social milieu is very remote from ours, and that there is much about it we shall probably never understand. The abyss that separates Mark from us can, however, be bridged by one means: performance”. 11 From a psychological point of view, compare a similar remark in P. LAMPE, Psychologische Einsichten Quintilians in der Institutio Oratoria, in NTS 52 (2006) 533-554, p. 533, n. 2: “Das folgende quintiliansche Material legt jedoch die Vermutung nahe, dass wenigstens innerhalb des westlich-abendländischen Kulturraums einige Basisuniversalien existieren, die Kontinuität auch über zwei Jahrtausende signalisieren”. 12 W.H. KELBER, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983; J. DEWEY, Oral Methods of Structuring Narrative in Mark, in Interpretation 43 (1989) 32-44. For a survey, see G. VAN OYEN, No Performance Criticism without Narrative Criticism, in E. SHIVELY – G. VAN OYEN (eds), Communication, Pedagogy and the Gospel of Mark, Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2016, 107-128; R.A. HORSLEY, Oral Performance and Mark: Some Implications of The Oral and the Written Gospel. Twenty-Five Years Later, in T. THATCHER (ed.), Jesus, the Voice, and the Text. Beyond the Oral and the Written Gospel, Waco, TX: Baylor Univ. Press, 45-70. 4 step was to do research on the actual performance of Mark’s gospel. Performance, indeed, is the final stage of the orality process. It deals with the direct oral-aural communication between performer and audience and in the ars retorica it comes after all the ‘preparatory’ work has been done. Let me illustrate the difference between a historical and a rhetorical- performance approach by quoting only one author. In the introduction of his monograph on Mark in the series Interpreting Biblical Texts (1999), Donald Juel summarizes very well the impact of this change from historical criticism towards orality and towards the rhetoric of ‘performance’ (a word that he frequently uses in the book, 23 times)13.

“Traditional biblical scholarship has usually attended to such matters [gvo: author, readers, …] by asking historical questions. […] One might propose, on the contrary, that the task of biblical scholars is to help a contemporary audience understand the Bible, and the task of contemporary audience is to experience the force of the narrative’s argument in the present.” (31-32)

“How should the narrator be embodied in a reader/performer? Should the reader be a baritone or a tenor, a mezzo or a coloratura? There are no stage directions. Anyone can read. How they embody the narrative, how they give it voice, will differ. Significant differences may require some adjudication. Who is correct? The legitimacy of a performance must take into account the effect of a particular reading as well as the ‘meaning’. What does hearing the passage do to readers? What should it do? Does it instill confidence in the narrator among readers? Does it raise anxieties or challenge long-held convictions? While such questions are more difficult than simple historical or literary queries, they will make for a far more lively and interesting engagement with Mark’s Gospel” (34-35). Orality studies have prepared the way for performance criticism. Just as narrative criticism in the 80’s had to struggle to conquer its place in NT criticism, performance criticism is on its way to be integrated in the wider spectrum of approaches14. I can be wrong, but I see at least three explanations for the relative success of the new approach in the academic world. First, after a long period of exaggerated focus on historical and “detached” exegesis, a return to a more engaged reading and explanation of the Bible could be expected. One rediscovers some values and dimensions of Biblical research that were lost of sight. Performing and experiencing a performance is like a fresh start. It feels like going back to the roots. Moreover, performer and audience have a direct sensation that the text of the gospel connects with real life. Second, one of the challenges and opportunities of performing is that it reaches a large and diversified audience. Anyone without any distinction can hear the gospel: the evangelical Christian who carries a long tradition of interpretation, the agnostic who based his insights on faith upon rationalist positivism, and the Biblical scholar who will be looking in a mirror. This opens the doors for dialogue between the participants about the meaning of what they hear and see15.

13 D.H. JUEL, The Gospel of Mark (Interpreting Biblical Texts), Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1999. The content of the book itself is an application of this insight on several themes and sections of the Gospel. 14 I intentionally add narrative criticism here because it has influenced performance criticism in two ways, as a (1) synchronic method that (2) considers the gospel as a story. See K. IVERSON (ed.), From Text to Performance. Narrative and Performance Criticisms in Dialogue and Debate (Biblical Performance Criticism Series, 10), Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2014 (with contributions by David Rhoads, Joanna Dewey, Philip Ruge- Jones, Holly Hearon, Thomas Boomershine, Margaret Lee, Kelly Iverson, Kathy Maxwell, and Richard Swanson). – See D. RHOADS, Performance Criticism: An Emerging Methodology in Second Testament Studies—Part I, in BTB 36,3 (2006) 118-133; Part II, in BTB 36,4 (2006) 164-184. 15 See E. STRUTHERS MALBON, Hearing Mark. A Listener’s Guide, London: Bloomsbury, 2002. The book about “hearing Mark” is written for those who see themselves “in some relationship to the Christian tradition— although it may be somewhat complex relationship involving questions as well as affirmations” (p. 7). 5

Third, the success is not only due to theoretical studies but also to the performances themselves. Some academics do not only write about performance but are performers themselves. Markan scholars (in the English speaking world) who deserve to be mentioned here are Thomas Boomershine16, the late Whitney Shiner17, David Rhoads18, and Philip Ruge- Jones19. Their studies on oral performances20 are combined with real performances and they make use of the internet to inform and communicate21. Not only do they perform in real time, but they have videos on YouTube which, of course, contribute to the success (but which make the experience different from a real time experience)22. One should also know that there exist many less “academic-scholarly” projects – this does not necessarily contain a judgment on the quality of the performance23. There are also ‘schools’ where people learn to study the gospel of Mark by heart according to specific principles and methods. They are often combined with an explicit spiritual perspective on the text, like in the case of the Fraternité Saint-Marc24 or of the brothers Peter and Ian Birkinshaw25. It is difficult and probably impossible to measure, but it would be interesting to have an estimation of the number of people who read the Bible on their own in silence and those who experience it through oral communication (inclusive the liturgical celebrations!). It would confront us, “scholars of the written text”, with the limitations of the impact of our work. The basis of the performances I have in mind here is rhetorical and more specifically Hellenistic and Roman rhetoric. References to these works to interpret Mark’s gospel are not new. One may think for instance of Benoît Standaert’s thesis (1978; dir. Bas van Iersel) on the composition of Mark26 or of Vernon Robbins’ Jesus the Teacher (1984) on the use of repetitive progressive forms, but there are many more. A recent survey on ‘Mark and ancient rhetoric’ (2017) gives a clear overview of the topics that were studied through the lenses of ancient rhetoric27. Typically, since research focused upon the written text of Mark, it were only the first parts of the rhetorical canon that were taken in consideration and especially the structure

16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GheAa2AQ2nk 17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBxwqKozFpk 18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5G8MokhyfY&list=PLMCNGsPs7YgbpsCe3tI42oqOyOKsg-yzk (not a performance but two suggestions for opening up familiar texts). 19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhqMmDhc0UU 20 Here add the many publications by Boomershine, Rhoads, Shiner, Ruge-Jones. 21 See for instance www.gotell.org (Tom Boomershine), www.biblicalperformancecriticism.org (David Rhoads), www.nbsint.org (Network of Biblical Storytellers, founded by Tom Boomershine; with an annual Festival). 22 Although dating from June 2013, see some more names and links to videos on Mark Goodacre’s blog: http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/performances-of-marks-gospel.html 23 McLean 24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVCF7_WWwCY 25 https://gospelofmarklive.wordpress.com/ . See also Bert Marshall: https://reflections.yale.edu/article/gospel-mark-out-loud . Just do a search on google on Performances on the Gospel of Mark and you will find out many different genres of performing Mark. 26 B. STANDAERT, L’évangile selon Marc. Composition et genre littéraire, Nijmegen: Stichting Studentenpers, 1978. 27 D. YOUNG – M. STRICKLAND, The Rhetoric of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, Minneapolis, MN, Fortress, 2017, 49-55 (‘Rhetoric and the Gospel of Mark’). Not all of the authors mentioned there (and in further footnotes of the book) refer to the ancient orators, but they all pay attention to rhetorical elements in the gospel. 6 or arrangement (dispositio) and the style (elocutio) of the gospel. Not only biblical scholars28, but also literary critics in general have noticed the lack of interest in what Quintilian and other orators said about delivery (actio)29. In 2001, Chris Holcomb concludes an article on Quintilian with the following remark: “Strange that historians of rhetoric have not paid more attention to issues of performance. For it is performance, after all, that is the ultimate goal and destination of oratorical training”30. I am aware that it remains a little bit awkward to talk in our scholarly guild about oral performance. A lot of resistance against the phenomenon has to do with the fact that this kind of research is about the practical performative aspect of the text, which – according to many critics – does not really belong to real “science”31. It is true that performance is on the border of exegesis and other fields of theology (and other disciplines as well). Since it involves a visible effort of the whole person – more than any other critical approach –, it can easily be considered (and rejected) as a (too) personal subjective interpretation of the gospel32. Performing demands a willingness and openness to become vulnerable from the side of the performer. Both performer and audience have to leave their comfort zone.

What does Quintilian say about actio? The actio (ὑπόκρισις, also pronuntiatio) or delivery is the fifth part of the classical canons of rhetoric: inventio (invention), dispositio (arrangement, composition), elocutio (style), memoria (memory), actio (delivery). The description of actio as part of ancient rhetoric receives systematic attention in the works of the Roman writers33: Rhetorica ad Herennium,

28 A. GIGNAC, “On en fit la lecture” (Ac 15,30-32). L’interprétation des lettres du Nouveau Testament en contexte d’oralité, in ID. (ed.), Narrativité, oralité et performance. 7e Colloque international du Réseau de Recherche en Narratologie et Bible (RRENAB), 5 au 7 juin 2014, Université de Montréal (Terra Nova, 4), Leuven: Peeters, 2018, 71-106. 29 The same could be said about the memoria. 30 C. HOLCOMB, “The Crown of All Study”: Improvisation in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, in Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31 (2001) 53-72, p. 70. Cf. TONGER-ERK, Actio, p. 45: “Obwohl die Rhetoriken der actio so einstimmig einen hohen Stellenwert beimessen, bleibt das Ausmaβ der Beschäftigung met der actio doch merkwürdig gering”. 31 Symptomatic is the fact that Bryan – in his underestimated monograph A Preface to Mark (1993) – adds as the very last part of the book four pages on Gospel and Performance (p. 167-170) under the heading: “Unscientific Postscripts”. 32 On the relation of narratology and re-telling (Nacherzählung) of stories, with special attention to the fact that retelling a story always implies a certain critical position, see FINNERN, Narratologie, 258-261. T. BOOMERSHINE, All Scholarship is Personal: David Rhoads and Performance Criticism, in Currents in Theology and Mission 37 (2010) 279-287; M.E. LEE, How Performance Changed My (Scholarly) Life, in ibid., 304-311. 33 On actio in Antiquity, see L. TONGER-ERK, Actio. Körper und Geschlecht in der Rhetoriklehre (Studien zur deutschen Literatur), Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012, 40-49 (and the bibliography on p. 41, n. 3). See also E. FANTHAM, Quintilian on Performance: Traditional and Personal Elements in “Institutio” 11.3, in Phoenix 36 (1982) 243-263; U. MAIER-EICHHORN, Die Gestikulation in Quintilians Rhetorik (Europäische Hochschulschriften, XV, 41), Frankfurt am M.: Peter Lang, 1989; G. WÖHRLE, Actio. Das fünfte officium des antiken Redners, in Gymnasium 97 (1990) 31- 46; F. GRAF, Gestures and Conventions: The Gestures of Roman Actors and Orators, in J.N. BREMMER – H. ROODENBURG (eds), A Cultural History of Gesture, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992, 36-58; J. HALL, Cicero and Quintilian on the Oratorical Use of Hand Gestures, in Classical Quarterly 54 (2004) 143–160; Jorge FERNÁNDEZ LÓPEZ, Quintilian as Rhetorician and Teacher, in W. DOMINIK - J. HALL, A Companion to Roman Rhetoric, Wiley – 7 the three works of Cicero (De oratore, Orator, Brutus) and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria34. All modern scholars agree upon the fact that Quintilian is the most complete writer on rhetoric because “his work deals with the entire spectrum of rhetoric’s technical aspects in a thorough and systematic way”35. This is also true for his exposé on delivery36.

Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (publication ca. 95 C.E.; Book 1-12) is a manual of practice and theory for teachers and students of rhetoric. The commentary on actio is found in Book 11, section 337. It consists of 184 paragraphs. The two aspects that play a role in performance are the voice (vox) and the gestures (gestus, including the face), “which is both posture (the static way of presenting oneself) and gesticulation (the dynamic way)”38. They correspond to the ears (voice) and the eyes (gesture) of the audience who receives the performance.39 It is impossible to give an exhaustive survey of the entire content of Inst. 11.3 (see U. Maier- Eichhorn). The summary of my reading is done in function of what I will say further on about performances of Mark. I make a distinction between two categories. One category concerns the practical suggestions and concrete advices Quintilian gives to his readers-teachers- students. The other one concerns the general characteristics of a good delivery40. Before that, let us just take one moment to listen to a fragment of the introduction which contains, with reference to Cicero, a very strong plea for a good delivery of the speech:

“[T]he thing itself [gvo: delivery] has an extraordinarily powerful effect in oratory. For the nature of the speech that we have composed within our minds is not so important as the manner in which we produce it, since the emotion of each member of our audience will depend on the impression made upon his hearing. Consequently, no proof, at least if it be one devised by the orator himself, will ever be so secure as not to lose its force if the speaker fails to produce it in tones that drive it home. All emotional appeals will inevitably fall flat, unless they are given the fire that voice, look, and the whole carriage of the body can give them.” (11.3.2)

From this quotation, we can learn already two relevant things: (1) a written text is not complete if it is not delivered in an oral form41 and it is not successful if it does not touch the emotions of the audience, and (2) an oral performance should be of excellent quality.

Blackwell, 2007, ch. 23, p. 307-322; J. HALL, Oral Delivery and the Emotions: Theory and Practice, in W. DOMINIK - J. HALL, A Companion to Roman Rhetoric, ch. 17, p. 218-234. 34 See the Appendix “A Brief History of Greco-Roman Rhetoric” in D. YOUNG – M. STRICKLAND, The Rhetoric of Jesus, 299-317. 35 Jorge FERNÁNDEZ LÓPEZ, Quintilian as Rhetorician and Teacher, 307. 36 Cicero only in De Or 3.213–227 and Orat 55–60. 37 General outline of XI, 3: introduction (1-14a), voice (14b-65a), the gestures and formal things (64b- 149a), the difference of speech adapted to each part of it (149b-176), epilogue (177-184). For the English translation online, see http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Quintilian/Institutio_Oratoria/11C*.html#3 . For the Latin text, see http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/quintilian/quintilian.institutio11.shtml#3 38 GRAF, Gestures and Conventions, 37. 39 TONGER-ERK, Actio, 45: “Die Art des Vortrags ist für die Überzeugung und Gewinning des Publikums das letztlich entscheidende Instrument”. That is true for all Roman orators. 40 This should be seen in the broader framework of Quintilian’s Institutio which is also a book on how to be or to become a good man, vir bonus dicendi peritus (Inst. 12.1.1, quoting Marcus Cato). See B. STEINBRINK, Actio, in G. UEDING (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Bd. 1, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992, col. 43–52, 50- 51; LAMPE, Psychologische Einsichten, passim; and many other authors. 41 Later on, in book 12, Quintilian explains that both oral and written communication are necessary and have their value: “[49] For a number of learned authorities have held that the written and the spoken speech 8

Some Practical Suggestions A long list of tips and tricks, of dos and don’ts to receive and to train a good voice (11.3.14 qualitas) precedes instructions on how to use it conform the language of the speech itself: correct, clear, ornate and appropriate (30: emendata dilucida ornata apta). Quintilian mentions the use of pauses (34-39), the compatibility of evenness and variety (aequalitas, varietas; 43-44), “the necessity of adapting the voice to suit the nature of the various subjects on which we are speaking and the moods that they demand” (45-51), the breath (51-56: “Our speech must be ready, but not precipitate, under control, but not slow”), the avoidance of singing (57-60), and the importance of a correct use of the voice adapted to the emotions (62- 65). This last aspect is explained in detail at the end of the chapter on actio (149-176). There, Quintilian mentions four general aspects with regard to emotions. [1] One should find the right tone for the whole of the text. [2] Different parts of the discourse demand different emotions. [3] Every sentence is different and the delivery should be in correspondence with every single emotion in the sentence. [4] In fact, even at the level of a single word one should know which interpretation one wants to deliver. He concludes: “To cut a long matter short, if my reader will take this or any other word he chooses and run it through the whole gamut of emotional expression, he will realise the truth of what I say” (176)42.

Between the two sections on the voice, Quintilian inserts the advices about gestures (66-148). The head, as chief member of the body, plays the most important role. The glance expresses feelings like supplication, threats, flattery, sorrow, joy, pride or submission (72). When the eyes move, they become intent, indifferent, proud, fierce, mild, or angry (75). Every detail of the head (except maybe the nose and the nostrils) has a function in the expression of emotions: the eyebrows, the cheeks, the eyelids, and the neck (77-84). The longest part on gesture is dedicated to the hands. The reason is simple: “As for the hands, without which all action would be crippled and enfeebled, it is scarcely possible to describe the variety of their motions, since they are almost as expressive as words” (85). The emotions expressed by the hands – “the universal language” (87) – are countless43. Further instructions are given about stand on different footings, and that consequently some of the most eloquent of speakers have left nothing for posterity to read in durable literary form, as, for example, is the case with Pericles and Demades. […] [51] My own view is that there is absolutely no difference between writing well and speaking well, and that a written speech is merely a record of one that has actually been delivered. Consequently it must in my opinion possess every kind of merit, and note that I say merit, not fault. […] [52] What, then, will be the difference between what is written and what is spoken? […] [54] Did Demosthenes and Cicero speak better, then, or worse than they wrote? If they spoke worse, all that can be said is that they should have spoken as they wrote, while, if they spoke better, they should have written as they spoke.” 42 “et ne morer, intra se quisque vel hoc vel aliud quod volet per omnis adfectus verset: verum esse quod dicimus sciet”. 43 I found the following ones in Inst. 11.3.85-116 (not all of them are emotions): to demand, promise, summon, dismiss, threaten, supplicate, express aversion or fear, question or deny (86); to express joy, sorrow, hesitation, confession, penitence, measure, quantity, number and time (87). Quintilian gives very specific description of the positions of the hand when it comes to express “statements of facts”, reproach, refuting (92), denunciation, indication (94), argumentation (95), modesty (96), markers of different points (99), restraint or timidity (100), interrogation, approval, distinction of different points (101), promise, assent, exhortation, praise (102), surprise, fear, indignation (103), regret, anger (104). HALL, Oratorical Delivery, 2007, p. 226 notes “some twenty different gestures involving the hands”. For twenty-four pictures about the positions of the hand, see MAIER-EICHHORN, Die Gestikulation, Anhang 1, 137-143. GIGNAC, “On en fit la lecture”, p. xx, n. xx, mentions S. ALDRETE, Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome (Ancient Society and History), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, and a video (www.uwgb.edu/aldreteg/Greg.Ostia.mov). Concerning the gesticulation there is a 9 other parts of the body: the general position, the feet, the shoulders (122-136). The last paragraphs on gesture are about grooming: toga, shoes, rings, tunica (137-149).

The whole section 11.3 can sound a little bit strange to modern ears, and

“[t]here has been some debate about how artificial the rhetorical system of gestures outlined by Quintilian actually was and to what extent it was based on the gestures commonly used in daily life. Some scholars, perhaps misled by the minute detail of Quintilian’s account and prescriptions, have claimed that such a system was quite separate from everyday gestural communication and that it could only be learned and mastered through arduous training in rhetorical schools. This view has been rightly contested (for full discussion see Hall 2004, where wide bibliographical reference is provided), and Quintilian’s precepts are best regarded as a conscious selection and stylization of everyday Roman nonverbal communication. Such a selection must be based, once again, on the orator’s sense of dignity, which implies the rejection of improper bodily movements and gestures, especially those that are conceived of as ‘effeminate’ (11.3.32, 11.3.91)”44.

Some general ideas Apart from a detailed description of how to speak and move, we can distill some general ideas. First, Quintilian is a proponent of a rather simple style of delivery. He is against exaggerations in the use of movements and against mimicry (88-91, 103, 107, 182). A courtyard or public speech is not a theatre; an orator is not a comic actor (181). It is also necessary to keep in mind the circumstances of the delivery (150: quis, apud quos, quibus praesentibus sit acturus)45. Second, the general purpose of actio is triple: conciliatory, persuasive and moving (“tria autem praestare debet pronuntiatio, ut conciliet persuadeat moveat”), and the “possession of these three qualities involves charm [“ut etiam delectet”] as a further requisite” (154). It is therefore important “never to be so preoccupied over particular portions of a case as to forget to consider the case as a whole” (151). Third, when reading the Institutio, one is struck by the focus on emotions. Voice and gestures have to work together harmoniously in order to “exhibit an emotion that cannot be distinguished from the truth” (62, see 61-65). “If the orator is then able to convey these images effectively to the audience, he will succeed in rousing the same powerful emotions in them too”46. Fourth, there is a kind debate about the illuminations in the early medieval manuscripts of the work of Terence (Publius Terentius Afer); see SHINER, Proclaiming the Gospel, 129-135; MAIER-EICHHORN, Die Gestikulation, Anhang 1, 150-153. 44 FERNÁNDEZ LÓPEZ, Quintilian as Rhetorician, 2007, 319. There is no time to develop the gender issue linked to the performer; according to TONGER-ERK, Actio, 46, “corporeality” (Körperlichkeit) is one of the paradoxes of rhetoric in Antiquity that explains why there was no “Verwissenschaftlichung” of the actio: “Zunächst bedarf die Wissenschaft von der actio einer naturgegebenen körperlichen Grundlage – eines männlichen, gut gewachsenen, nicht verkrüppelten Körpers. Doch selbst der ausgebildete, trainierte und beherrschte Körper scheint nie ganz in den oratorischen Verkörperungen aufzugehen. Immer wieder verrutscht das Bild, offenbart sich der Körper in seiner geschlechtlichen Materialität, was die rhetorische Lehre gerade zu vermeiden angetreten ist. Zuletzt scheint die Verschiedenartigkeit, die Individualität der Körper dem Systematisierungswillen der Rhetorik einen Regel vorzuschieben, so dass das decorum, die Regeln des Passenden und Schicklichen, gerade in Bezug auf die actio am Ende für jeden etwas anderes bedeuten kann – eine Feststellung, die Quintilans vorherige ausführliche wissenschaftliche Ausarbeitung der actio geradezu paradox erscheinen lässt” (with reference to Inst. 11.3.178ss.). 45 GRAF, Gestures and Conventions, 39-40: “But most insistent is the opposition between rhetorical and theatrical gesticulation” (p. 39). The main reason is that the “outward appearance of a person is an image of the inward personality and character—dress, gestures, walking, any motion, are significant of interior man” (p. 40). 46 HALL, Oratorical Delivery, 2007, 234. See also the beginning of Institutio where Quintilian says that voice and gesture appeal to the ear and the eye “the two senses by which all emotion reaches the soul” (11.3.14). GRAF, Gestures and Conventions, 40: “TO understand the system of Roman rhetorical gestus and its peculiarities, it is important to have a clear idea of its aim. Quintilian is outspoken about what it is all about; the gestural 10 of paradox in the description of delivery: on the one hand it is a very technical question, on the other it is also a matter of talent and “despite the fact that such success cannot be attained without art, it is impossible entirely to communicate the secret by the rules of art” (177). That is true for all forms of arts, is not it47?

What about actio of Mark today?

Relevance of Quintilian’s actio for Markan performance Without entering the discussion about the plausibility of performances of Mark in the first century and the circumstances in which these could have taken place48, there are many reasons why we should not refer to Quintilian when performing the Gospel of Mark today. He wrote his Institutio for orators and not for storytellers; there are many gestures that are determined by time and region (Mediterranean context) and are therefore strange to other cultures49. On the other hand, one cannot deny that some basic principles of oral communication transcend the literary genre and are common to the delivery of both rhetorical discourses and stories like a gospel50. One can think of the art of convincing an audience, the permanent attention for the role of emotions, the idea of performing as the ultimate way of communication, the search for a convenient delivery adapted to the kind of text that is performed.

We can retain at least three essential things from Quintilian’s lesson on actio for Markan exegesis. First, it is a wakeup call for all exegetes who explain the gospel. They should become aware that writing about the text is only half of the job as long as it is not touching the “emotions” of the readers. Delivery is the most efficient way to touch the recipients of the story. And the best way to move our audience is to be moved ourselves51. In other words, what is the relationship of the exegete with the text s/he is studying? Second, it is by saying the text loud in front of an audience and in interaction with the audience that we can experience new dimensions of the text. This implies also a preliminary challenge to performers. They should first make a choice about the general goal they want to reach. Only thereafter, they can see how they consider every lower level of the text, as Quintilian

language together with the rest of the performance is directed towards the emotions, not the reason, of the audience”. 47 HALL, Oratorical Delivery, 2007, 234: “For the Romans, oratory was closer to what we would call today a performing art than a literary genre”. 48 See, e.g., A.C. WIRE, The Case for Mark Composed in Performance (Biblical Performance Criticism, 3), Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011. On the different ways of performing with or without a manuscript, see K.M. HARTVIGSEN, The Way of the Lord. Towards a Cognitive Poetic Analysis of Audience Involvement with Characters and Events in the Markan World (BZNW, 180), Berlin – Boston: de Gruyter, 2012, p. 5, n. 15: “In antiquity, the character of performances would vary according to the social settings in which they took place. Some would be formal, others informal, some would be based on manuscripts, others not”; p. 8: “Whether a written manuscript was present or the gospel was performed from memory, may therefore not be of particular importance for my analysis of an oral performance of Mark”. 49 GRAF, Gestures and Conventions, 51-52. 50 See also above n. xx (Lampe). 51 Institutio 6.2.28(.36); see M. LEIGH, Quintilian on the Emotions (Institutio Oratoria 6 Preface and 1-2), in The Journal of Roman Studies 94 (2004) 122-140. Apart from the actio there are many other aspects of the rhetoric that contribute to move the audience. 11 mentioned: first the whole text, then the larger parts, thereafter the sentence, and finally every word. Third, actio is a well-considered aspect of performance. We cannot copy-paste what Quintilian is writing but we can learn from it that in order to obtain a good balance between text, voice and gesture a professional approach of delivery is necessary. Delivery deserves research.

If we take seriously the contribution of delivery to Biblical exegesis, some characteristics of performance should/could be integrated in the broader perspective on exegesis. Performance criticism should not be something that is placed in a footnote as a minor issue. One of these characteristics is that each performance is always unique52. There are no two identical performances, not even by the same person. The circumstances are never identical, the audience changes, etc. And a second one is that the text itself may change with each performance. Some things will be added, others will be omitted or changed, and, maybe more fundamentally, special translations are used53. Both characteristics belong to the oral process of performing and they are sometimes used to disqualify the status of performance for exegesis. In fact, the revival of performances takes us back to the mixed culture of oral and written text, as it was in the first century. It relativizes the importance attached to a fixed text. Every written commentary on the gospel of Mark is nothing else than a snapshot based on one written non-existing but supposed “original”54. Both aspects of performance – the uniqueness of the text and the changeability of the text – cannot be used as an argument against the integration of performance criticism in the canon of methodologies of gospel criticism. The main difference is that written texts and written commentaries can have an influence for centuries (although they may change!) while oral performances are instantaneous. However, the advantage of an oral performance is that it contains text and interpretation in one movement, while a written source text is “void” of meaning as long as there is no additional interpretation55. This observation on the specificity of written text and oral performance is not a judgment on the quality of the medium but on the effect of it. Both have their own value and are not contradictory but complementary. In an earlier article, I considered exegesis in modern times where multiple approaches are accepted, as a dialogue

52 BRYAN, A Preface to Mark, 169-170. BREYTENBACH, Das Evangelium nach Markus: Verschlüsselte Performanz?, p. xx: “eine performance [ist] einmalig. Sie ist in einen bestimmten sozialen Kontext eingebettet. Ein/e bestimmte/r Akteur/in interagiert mit der Zuhörerschaft, die zu dem Zeitpunkt gegenwärtig ist, zuhört und zuschaut, mitfühlt und -riecht. Auch wenn sie sich zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt am selben Ort treffen würden, wäre es eine neue performance mit einer eigenen Dynamik. Wiederholte Aufnahmen, die Kulturanthropologen von denselben Performern, die die gleichen Texte vor demselben Klan aufführen, machten, zeigen, dass das Gesprochene und die begleitenden Handlungen, auch die der Zuhörer und Zuhörerinnen, sich nur mit erheblichen Variationen wiederholen. Auf der Seite des Performers gibt es nicht nur Variationen in Lautstärke, Ton, Betonung, Gestik und Mimik, sondern auch in Wortwahl und Wendungen”. 53 These ‘changes’ can be compared to what happens in the written transmission of the text. 54 On the relationship between written text(s) and oral performance, see (among many other authors) HARTVIGSEN, Prepare the Way of the Lord, 5-9: “The manner in which written texts were composed and read also draws attention to the interface of oral and written media. Interaction between graphic and acoustical signs during the encoding and decoding process tended to reduce considerably the discrepancy between the two media. […] Hence, one might claim that late Western Antiquity was ‘a culture of high residual orality which nevertheless communicated significantly by means of literary creations’” (p. 8; the citation is from P.J. ACHTEMEIER, OMNE VERBUM SONAT. The New Testament and the Oral Environment of Late Western Antiquity, in JBL 109 [1990] 3-27, p. 3). 55 See on this difference K. IVERSON, A Centurion’s “Confession”: A Performance-Critical Analysis of Mark 15:39, in JBL 130 (2011) 329-350, p. 332: “Thus, while writing has distinct advantages, permanence being one of them, a written transcription obscures the full dynamics of a communicative event”. 12 between readers56. I now should correct myself and add: it is a dialogue between writers, readers, performers and audience. We are evolving towards a continuous exchange between oral and written information and interpretation – not to mention the visual! –, and between writers and performers. Writing about the written gospels is always opening new dimensions of a text according to the methods that are used57, and so is every single new performance. Although the media and their effects are different, orality and literacy may have more things in common than we think. A growing collaboration and interaction between written exegesis and other media exists already. Just think of Bible and film, Bible and art, Bible and literature. If a painting by Rembrandt or a novel by Saramago can be considered as a valuable exegesis of a text58, a fortiori a performance of a gospel “text” is exegesis. It is the general insight of Quintilian on the role of delivery that indirectly can make a change in the way we describe the function and the method of doing exegesis. I learned from my teaching experience at undergraduate level in which I combine oral performance and written research that a symbiosis between orality and literacy made it possible for students to reach a much closer contact with the text than when I taught the same class ex cathedra and on the basis of a purely textual approach59.

The practice of performing Mark When it comes to the concrete design of a performance of Mark, one quickly discovers the limitation of a manual like the Institutio. Quintilian describes the delivery in a detailed manner, sometimes with a description of gestures we do not understand anymore today. However, a handbook on oral delivery is like a book of methodology on written texts. They contain descriptions of how one could or should act, but the concrete elaboration depends on the performer himself/herself, the same way as exegetes will use in a different manner source criticism or any other method. He or she has to make constantly decisions. Where are the emotions and which emotion exactly is there in every single word or verse? What is the main idea I want to transmit? Who is exactly my audience tonight? Do I opt for a low style (used for teaching), a middle style (to please), or a high style (to move)?60 The delivery Quintilian is talking about is always in interaction with a written text of a speech. This is also true for the performances of Mark we are talking about here. The performer delivers a concrete exegesis of a text. He is an exegete, just like a commentator of the gospel of Mark. The difference is that (in principle, but this might be questioned) the performer can only present one interpretation at a time to the audience, while the commentator can offer many interpretations to the readers.

56 G. VAN OYEN, "À bon lecteur salut!" La lecture du Nouveau Testament comme dialogue entre lecteurs/rices, in R. BURNET - D. LUCIANI - G. VAN OYEN (eds), Le lecteur de la Bible (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, 273). Leuven: Peeters, 2013, 19-42. 57 There are always new “waves” in Biblical research. See now for instance the perspective of trauma theory. 58 R. BURNET, Quand l’artiste est l’exégète, in E. DI PEDE – O. FLICHY – D. LUCIANI (eds), Le récit : Thèmes bibliques et Variations. Lectures et réécritures littéraires et artistiques (BETL, 293), Leuven : Peeters, 2018, 41-71, p. 71 : “Il faut autant regarder Rembrandt que lire Bultmann, autant passer son temps au Louvre qu’à compulser le dictionnaire de Kittel”. 59 G. VAN OYEN, No Performance Criticism without Narrative Criticism, esp. 120-128. In the same volume T.E. BOOMERSHINE, Teaching Mark as Performance Literature: Early Literate and Postliterate Pedagogies, 73-94. 60 http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Canons/Style/Style-Levels.htm Here should be added a note on the different styles in Roman rhetoric and Quintilian’s preference for a simple style (see already above). 13

“During an oral performance, the performer may even out ambiguities and constrain interpretations that are left open-ended in the specific written manuscript on which a performance is based. By choosing to utter a phrase in a certain manner or to make gestures which emphasize a specific interpretation, the performer reveals his understanding of the narrative. Accordingly, a particular performance of a narrative reflects the cognitive efforts of the performer before or during the performance event. These features of the performance event are impossible to reconstruct. The theories that are presented will therefore call attention to characteristics of the written manuscript which may be realized in various manners by different performers during performance events”.61

So even with the rules well described, freedom, responsibility, personality and talent of the performer are determinative for the delivery during the performance. Each performer will act according his/her temperament and according to the circumstances in which the performance takes place. A great effort has been made by several scholars to describe their own performances or how one could/should perform (passages from) Mark. This is the inverse movement from oral performance to written explanation about the performance. It is worth the effort to compare some of these comments. On the one hand, this comparison reveals different aspects of delivery and, on the other hand, it helps to see how delivery is a form of exegesis that connects with the tradition of written exegesis62. Therefore, in the last part of this paper, I would like to compare some comments by three authors on the text and the performance of Jesus’ death in Mark 15,34-37. W. Shiner and T. Boomershine are also performers, K.M. Hartvigsen has a monograph on the psychological aspects of audience involvement with characters and events.

Three authors on Mark 15,34-37 Whitney Shiner is certainly the author who has the most detailed description closest to the theories of delivery in the first century63. He focuses on emotions in the delivery and concludes his comments on “Delivery and Emotion” in ancient rhetorical literature as follows: “A speaker was not believable if he was not emotional. For the Gospels to be credible, then, the performer would have to present them in an emotional manner. Otherwise, they could be dismissed as quant stories”64. Shiner incorporates Quintilian’s idea that the performer himself has to feel the emotions he wants to stimulate within the audience, but he distances himself from Quintilian’s critique on the popular style because it would be too close to what actors do on stage65. This becomes clear in the comments on his own performance that, necessarily, contain a very personal exegesis because they are a kind of self-reflection. One of the scenes where “audience inclusion” functions very well is the crucifixion scene. As a performer, one can express the emotions at best when it is done in character. Look how Shiner describes the performance66:

“The cry of dereliction, I enjoy. I have one line to express the suffering of Jesus. I muster up every ounce of pain I have felt in my life and cry in a loud voice, “Eloi! Eloi! Lema sabachthani?” Then I get to repeat

61 HARTVIGSEN, Prepare the Way of the Lord, 6-7. 62 It is not my intention here to make a (critical) review of the performances of colleagues, although in another context this could be done to learn from it. 63 W. SHINER, Proclaiming the Gospel. First-Century Performance of Mark, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003. 64 SHINER, Proclaiming the Gospel, 81-83, p. 83. 65 SHINER, Proclaiming the Gospel, 81-88, p. 87: “It is doubtful that the rhetorical taste of Mark and his audience was as refined as that of Quintilian, let alone as conservative. We are much more likely to find indications of their taste in Quintilian’s assumptions against common failings that he tells his students to avoid”. 66 SHINER, Proclaiming the Gospel, 182-183 (bold as in the original). 14

in English: “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” (15:34)? It is very cathartic for me, though it may be disconcerting for the audience. The mockery is transformed by doing it in character. My understanding of mockery in character is extremely nasty. I overdo it a little and make the mocking sound like third-graders on the playground, with lots of “Naaah naah na naaah naah!” in my tone of voice. “Hey Messiah! King of Israel! Come on down from the cross so that we might see and believe!” The childish tone is appropriate since we are supposed to despise those who mock Jesus in his pain. When I read the mockery silently, I usually thin of the cleverness of Mark’s irony. When I perform it, I think about how nasty the mockery is. Much of the crucifixion scene consists of mockery. About halfway through, it begins to feel a little strange to perform. This is the foundational narrative of Christianity. It is the climactic scene around which the whole narrative is built. I am standing there, insulting Jesus. The audience is sitting there, listening to me abuse Jesus. What a strange way to celebrate the Son of God! If I wanted to hear someone ridicule Jesus, I could go out on the street and find a Pharisee or some Roman soldiers. It is this mockery that involves the audience so deeply in the crucifixion. Mark has focused on the one part of the suffering of Jesus that I can experience. If the performer describes the physical agony of crucifixion, it remains something external to me. I sympathize with pain of that sort. If the performance describes the mental anguish of Jesus, it is still external to me. My reaction is still sympathy. If the performer yells insults at Jesus, I experience that directly. That “dinglewort” is insulting Jesus. That “dinglewort” is insulting me! Mark puts me in the place of Jesus in the one way I can feel directly”.

More than any silent reading of a written text, participating at such a performance of the crucifixion scene makes understandable to the audience what is at stake here. The idea behind Shiner’s interpretation is that through his authentic performance in which he expresses both the emotions of Jesus’ pain of the abandonment and of the cruelty of the mockery, he will be able to move the audience. The performance of Mark in the “grand style” of Antiquity should make it possible to modern participants to be touched by the story. Why such an ‘emotional performance’? Performing according to Shiner is a testimony of faith and “the performance of the Gospel makes Jesus powerfully present”.67 Shiner wants his audience to believe.

Although Thomas Boomershine has a completely different way of performing, he shares the same initial idea that “in the moment of performance, the meaning is more directly connected with the emotional impact of the events and characters involved” than with ideas or facts68. His book on the Passion and Resurrection story in Mark 14-15 is a critical exegetical commentary and interpretation on the Greek text and focuses specifically on the sound of both the Greek text and the English translation in oral performance. Boomershine’s vision on the message of the gospel is explained in the introduction: “the story of Jesus as the nonviolent Messiah of peace and reconciliation with Israel’s Gentile enemies in the period after the Judean-Roman War”69. He situates the gospel in its original historical context but the fundamental message has not changed over the centuries. His performance-criticism commentary ends as follows70:

67 SHINER, Proclaiming the Gospel, 192. Read the whole conclusion on p. 191-193. 68 T.E. BOOMERSHINE, The Messiah of Peace. A Performance-Criticism Commentary on Mark’s Passion- Resurrection Narrative (Biblical Performance Criticism, 12), Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015, 11. The quotation is found in a section on the difference between “oral-culture” and “literate-culture” audiences (p. 9-13). His commentary on Mark 14-15 maintains “a dialectal relationship between engagement in the experience of the story and critical analysis”, starting with “first engagement with performance and then involvement in critical analysis” (13). 69 BOOMERSHINE, The Messiah of Peace, 1. “Mark’s gospel announced that the kingdom of God and the deliverance of the human community from the powers of evil will happen by prayer and peaceful engagement with our enemies rather than by violence” (33). 70 BOOMERSHINE, The Messiah of Peace, 362. 15

“As it was in the first century, the telling and interpretation of the Gospel of Mark in the twenty-first century will be addressed to persons who are in various stages of non-belief in Jesus as the Messiah of peace. Mark’s passion and resurrection narrative is a story of Jesus’ suffering and death for the redemption of the world from the corporate powers of evil. It ends with the paradigmatic story of his victory over those powers and the commission to tell the story. The story of Jesus’ passion and resurrection continues it be a story about the ways that will lead to peace”.

In contrast to Shiner, Boomershine’s performances are closer to the simple style of delivery. The tool that is used to guide the performance is sound mapping71. Not as much the gestures but the speed, the emphasis, the voice, the tone, the repetitions, the difference between circumstances and essential sentences are helping the performer in putting the emphasis in a specific manner in the speech and the gestures. With regard to Mark 15,33-3772 this leads to the following printed presentation73:

1.1 (Καὶ γενομένης ὥρας ἕκτης σκότος ἐγένετο* ἐφ᾽ ὅλην τὴν γῆν ἕως ὥρας ἐνάτης.) 2.1 (καὶ τῇ* ἐνάτῃ* ὥρᾳ*) ἐβόησεν ὁ* Ἰησοῦς φωνῇ μεγάλῃ, 2.2 Ελωι ελωι λεμα σαβαχθανι; 2.3 ὅ ἐστιν μεθερμηνευόμενον Ὁ θεός μου ὁ θεός μου, εἰς τί ἐγκατέλιπές με;

3.1 καί τινες τῶν παρεστηκότων ἀκούσαντες ἔλεγον, 3.2 Ἴδε Ἠλίαν φωνεῖ. 4.1 δραμὼν δέ τις [καὶ] γεμίσας σπόγγον ὄξους περιθεὶς καλάμῳ* ἐπότιζεν αὐτόν λέγων, 4.2 Ἄφετε* ἴδωμεν εἰ* ἔρχεται* Ἠλίας καθελεῖν αὐτόν. 5.1 >ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς ἀφεὶς φωνὴν μεγάλην ἐξέπνευσεν.< (rounded with φωνεῖ and φωνῇ μεγάλῃ)

The sound map is a very sophisticated system that helps us to see some interesting stylistic, semantic and other aspects of the text that will not be manifest until they are performed orally. It is difficult to summarize Boomershine’s commentary on this passage which concerns the volume, the speed, the tempo, the rhythm, the way of addressing the audience, the tonal quality, the joke and humor, the onomatopoeia. In short, all things that have to do with the sound and the voice. The words in bold print are repetitions. They illustrate some important issues in the passage: the time has become important for Mark (the hour!), the word play with Eloi/Elijah74, the loud cry, Jesus’ last breath, the contrast between Jesus’ characterization at the moment of his death and the mockery of the bystanders. Besides the fact that Boomershine integrates in his analysis remarks on the sound map, his commentary does not differ very much from a “normal” narratological commentary75:

71 It is explained from the beginning in BOOMERSHINE, The Messiah of Peace, 1-8. And there is an Appendix 8 with the Greek text of Mark printed per cola et commata with marks used to indicate the various features of the episodes in the Passion and Resurrection Narrative (p. 368-386). 72 BOOMERSHINE, The Messiah of Peace, 294-326 (passim in the section on Mark 15,33-47: The death and burial of Jesus). For a video of Boomershine’s performance of Mark 15,33-37 in Greek, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dwo3z9T7HY, from 29’12 to 30’52. For his performance in English, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnPtuXiYcBw, from 27’07 to 28’26. While the Greek performance has only one minor change compared to the “printed” (4.1 ἔλεγον for λέγων), one can hear many more changes in the English performance. 73 The sound map is found on The Messiah of Peace, 384. For the explanation of the symbols and the bold print, see p. 375. 74 Boomershine explains how the misunderstanding by the bystanders (intentional or simply poor hearing?) could be translated in English (but in his own performance he does not change the words and keeps “Eloi”, “Elijah”, “God”. 75 BOOMERSHINE, The Messiah of Peace, 306. 16

“Thus, the Aramaic quotation reports Jesus’ cry in the context of its original historical occurrence around 30 CE. The Greek translation, in which the storyteller expresses her or his own anguish, sets the cry in the context of the storyteller’s relationship with the audience in the present moment of the story at any subsequent time. Both Jesus’ sense of abandonment and the storyteller’s anguish are thereby made present. The effect of the episode is to establish identification with Jesus as a righteous man praying to God during the most intense suffering. And, as a result of the connection between the quotation of Jesus’ words in Aramaic and the storyteller’s translation of this most memorable line of the psalm, along with the preceding allusions in 15:24 and 34, the entire crucifixion section is set in the context of Israel’s tradition of righteous suffering”.

The impression I have when watching the video and reading the commentary – this is the order Boomershine asks us to follow when reading his book – is that it is difficult to make the bridge from the performance to the interpretation in the commentary. I am not talking here about the sound aspects and the other narrative aspects. I am rather thinking of the idea of the Christological and theological themes: the righteous suffering in this passage and the general interpretation of the Messiah of peace in the whole of the gospel. If I would propose another dominant theme in the gospel of Mark (e.g. the Messianic secret, the appeal of taking up one’s cross, the anti-empire counter-story), would I perform in a different way? In what sense is the performance a mirror of the interpretation? This is not a critique of the performance. I just note that performance and exegetical interpretation need each other. A performance needs to be enriched by interpretation. Through his comments on the performance of Mark, Boomershine opens the dialogue with commentators of the written text of Mark.

The above examples of Shiner and Boomershine have made clear that the ultimate aim of performance is touching the modern audience by an oral transmission of the text as it was done – according to them – in the first century. If one takes seriously the role of emotions in performance – as both authors do –, it is not at all surprising that the psychological dimension of the reception by the audience needs more clarification76. What are the conditions that have to be fulfilled from the side of the audience to be touched by the story? How do the markers in the text have an effect on the audience? This is exactly what Kirsten Marie Hartvigsen does in Prepare the Way of the Lord. She offers a theoretical basis and framework for a detailed analysis of audience involvement with events and characters, and the emotional effects of such involvement77. This is not an easy task, since the “effects of the rhetoric cannot be employed to reconstruct communities. It can only tell us which values, beliefs, and customs were communicated. The effects of the rhetoric would not depend on characteristics of the narrative alone, but on factors determined by each audience member”78. The large theoretical framework of Hartvigsen’s study on cognitive poetics and psychonarratology is a necessary addition to the work of the performance critics we mentioned in our paper. It would demand

76 BOOMERSHINE, The Messiah of Peace, 8-19, has some pages on how he sees the audience in the section on ‘Meaning in Texts Read by Silent Readers and in Stories Heard by Audiences’ and ‘The Audiences of Mark’. “Thus, the alternative to ‘meaning as reference’ can be called ‘meaning as experience.’ And ‘meaning as experience’ is dependent on the willingness of audiences to enter fully into the story and to identify with the characters of the story” (12). 77 HARTVIGSEN, The Way of the Lord, 4: “I hope to shed more light on processes taking place in the mind of audience members, where processes of involvement, emotions, and identity formation actually occur”. 78 HARTVIGSEN, The Way of the Lord, 14. 17 a more serious treatment than is possible in this paper79. We limit ourselves to some of her comments on Mark 15:33-3780. The effect of the performance on the audience of Jesus’ death will depend on the preceding story line and on their previous cultural knowledge. Hartvigsen will therefore offer different possibilities of perceiving what is heard81. Depending on the traditions they belong to, audience members will draw on the Jewish and/or the Greco-Roman background when they hear the time indications in 15:33. If an audience member knows the LXX (Amos 5:18.20; Joel 2:1-2; 3,4) and he combines it with Mark 13:24 (σκοτίζομαι), he will interpret it as an eschatological temporal marker. If he knows the Greco-Roman tradition, he will consider darkness as a miraculous portent at the moment of the death of important human beings like Romulus, Cleomenes, Julius Caesar. Anyway, the temporal indication accentuates the symbolic meaning of Jesus’ death. In Mark 15:34 the audience is transported to the Markan world through the use of Aramaic. Those who recognize Ps 21,1 LXX will hear that Jesus is using existing scripts to express his feeling of abandonment and to pray to God in order to be saved82. For audience members who heard Jesus speaking in Aramaic and who heard the narrator’s translation (even if they do not understand Aramaic), it becomes immediately clear that the bystanders misunderstood Jesus’ utterance. I am not giving enough credit to Hartvigsen’s study, which reveals the complex processes that are at work in audience involvement. But she herself mentions three limitations of the approach and I would like to repeat the first one83. Hartvigsen’s reconstructed hypothetical audience is a “general group of audience members located in a house church in antiquity”. She leaves for others to explore how a performance “on the basis of a specific, text-external audience located in a precise situation” would occur84. I think that is the main challenge for performance criticism during the next years. It is not enough – and it is extremely difficult – to try to unravel the cognitive processes at work in a first century audience. But even if performance critics try to reconstruct the original settings, performances are done today for very concrete audiences today. We live in a completely different cultural situation and the encyclopedia of knowledge is completely different. The interdisciplinary research field where biblical scholars would work together with sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists is a huge unexplored territory.

79 HARTVIGSEN, The Way of the Lord, 33-99 (Part II). 80 HARTVIGSEN, The Way of the Lord, 507-509. 81 The commentary by Hartvigsen is characterized by the following conditional sentence structure: “If audience members are familiar with…, then they will understand what is heard as…”. In the conclusion we read: “In this study, the main variables were constituted by knowledge of different types of cultural memory” (HARTVIGSEN, The Way of the Lord, 526). 82 Hartvigsen interprets the cry as a prayer. But see on the different interpretations G. VAN OYEN – P. VAN CAPPELLEN, Mark 15,34 and the Sitz im Leben of the Real Reader, in Ephemerides theologicae Lovanienses 91 (2015) 569-599. 83 The second shortcoming she mentions is the fact that she did not pay enough attention to the gestures and the voice! That was exactly what Boomershine, Shiner and others wanted to do. It seems that the importance of psychonarratology has pushed gesture and voice to the background. The third limitation is the focus on the LXX as cultural heritage while the HARTVIGSEN, The Way of the Lord, 535-536. 84 HARTVIGSEN, The Way of the Lord, 535. 18

Conclusion

In the introduction of this paper I asked two questions. I repeat them here and I add a short answer.

(1) Can performance criticism learn something from Quintilan’s book chapter on delivery? Yes, when it comes to the general ideas that performing is an essential aspect in the communication of a text. No, when it comes to the concrete elaboration of gestures and the use of voice. (2) In what way is the growing practice of performances of Mark and the related performance-critical exegesis of interest for exegetical methodology as a whole? I am pleading for a larger exegetical approach than a purely written one. A cross- fertilization between exegesis on the written text and exegesis through performance could widen the exegetical work towards new dimensions that are not yet totally developed today: the role of emotions is one of them and the psychological (individual and group) factors that are present when the audience actively participates in a performance is another one. There is no need to make a schism between the written text of Mark and the oral performance of it today. A written commentary can only become better when someone performs it. An oral performance can only become better when the performer comments on it.