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

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Actio According to Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria XI,3) and the Performance of the Gospel of Mark 1 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.
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