Word-Processing in the Ancient World: the Social Production and Performance of Q

Abstract

Discussions of the Gospels tend to ignore the pragmatics of contemporary composition. Oral performance is sometimes acknowledged, even though too clear a distinction is often drawn between oral and written communication. Here evidence for oral social composition in and for oral social performance will be adduced. If, then, as our main example, the Q community was as important in the oral formation of the collection as this oral social composition model suggests, the arbitrarily imposed 'strata' of much recent discussion seem very implausible. Then if there were 'wisdom' and 'apocalyptic' and/or 'deuteronomic' strands, they could anyway have lain happily intertwined from the start (as indicated, incidentally, by Paul in Romans), demanding no complex explanation in terms of successive radical revisions.

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