Memory, Memorization, and Memorizers: The Galilean Oral-Style Tradition and Its Traditionists

by Marcel Jousse, Edgard Sienaert (Editor), Werner H. Kelber (Foreword by)

Overview

This book is about the spoken word. It is about words spoken in the first century of our era and later put down in writing as confirmation of what had been said and done. Here, Marcel Jousse answers his own fundamental question: "How did the human being, placed at the heart of the countless actions of the universe, set about to conserve within him the memory of these actions and to transmit this memory faithfully to his descendants, from generation to generation?" To all oral societies, tradition is memory, and of all oral societies, ancient Galilee, perhaps more so than any other, developed ways and means of capacitating memory to levels we no longer fathom. This book is about how Ieshua's deeds and sayings were first faithfully recorded in the memory as and when they happened, how they were then faithfully transmitted orally within and without Palestine, and how they were finally faithfully--literally--recorded anew, as oral tradition put in writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781532633935
Publisher:	Cascade Books
Publication date:	07/18/2018
Series:	Biblical Performance Criticism , #15
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Edgard Sienaert is Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Africa Studies of the University of the Free State, South Africa. He is the author of two books on Marcel Jousse’s anthropology, based on the unpublished 1931–1957 lectures: In the Beginning Was Mimism: A Holistic Reading of Marcel Jousse’s Oral Lectures (in French), and In Search of Coherence: Introducing Marcel Jousse’s Anthropology of Mimism (Pickwick, 2016).
Edgard Sienaert is Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Africa Studies of the University of the Free State, South Africa. He is the author of two books on Marcel Jousse's anthropology, based on the unpublished 1931-1957 lectures: In the Beginning Was Mimism: A Holistic Reading of Marcel Jousse's Oral Lectures (in French), and In Search of Coherence: Introducing Marcel Jousse's Anthropology of Mimism (Pickwick, 2016).

Werner H. Kelber is the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at Rice University. His publications include Imprints, Voiceprints, and Footprints of Memory (2013) and The Oral and Written Gospel (1983).

Table of Contents

Abbreviations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Foreword Werner Kelber xiii

Introduction Edgard Sienaert 1

Part 1 Last Dictations: On the Elaboration and Emigration of the Palestinian Oral Style

Introduction: A Methodology for the Study of Memory 17

Section 1 The Intra-Ethnic Elaboration of the Palestinian Oral Style 23

1 Memory in Palestine-Institutions 25

2 Memory in Palestine-Techniques 40

3 The Counter-Necklace of Kepha 69

Section 2 The Extra-Ethnic Emigration of the Palestinian Oral Tradition 85

1 The Engenderment of a Hellenistic Oral-Style Tradition 87

2 Kepha and His Apprehenders 106

3 The Counter-Necklace from Jerusalem to Rome 120

Conclusion: Kepha 143

Part 2 Four Lectures on the Early Transmission of the Gospels

Lecture 1 The Psychology of the Palestinian Ethnic Milieu 151

Lecture 2 The Targumist Meturgemans-Sunergoi, Accompanists of Shaul 167

Lecture 3 The Cathechisms of Paul "Sent in Writing" 179

Lecture 4 The Palestinian Mashal of the Wild Olive Tree 191

Part 3 Four Essays on the Palestinian Oral Style

1 Terminology in Context: Judahite, Judean, Judaist in the Palestinian Ethnic Milieu 207

2 Father, Son, and Paraclete in the Palestinian Ethnic Milieu 225

3 The Manducation of the Lesson in the Palestinian Ethnic Milieu 274

4 The Targumic Formulas of the Our Father in the Palestinian Ethnic Milieu 346

Appendix 1 The Galilean Oral Style in Eighty Propositions 391

Appendix 2 The Aramaic Targumic Formulas of the Our Father 394

Appendix 3 Aramaic Rhythmo-catechism on the Memra 397

Bibliography of Marcel Jousse's Works 401

Index 403

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Sienaert’s excellent translation of Marcel Jousse could not be more timely. It comes just as interpreters of Jesus are recognizing that form criticism was a misunderstanding of oral tradition modeled on written texts. Lecturing at the Sorbonne, etc. from 1931 to 1957, Jousse rebelled against the dominant “algebraicized,” hyper-disciplinized academic print-culture. This selection of his lectures opens up his groundbreaking (re-)discovery of concrete interactive oral culture and communication sustained by memory and mimesis. He finds this exemplified by Ieshua, who was deeply imbued with the popular Aramaic Palestinian-Galilean culture behind the oral-derived Targums.


—Richard Horsley, author of Text and Tradition in Performance and Writing





Although largely shrouded in silence by the academy, the French anthropologist Marcel Jousse is a giant in the study of oral cultures. This collection of essays and lectures introduces readers into the Galilean oral-style tradition of the first century CE. Relying on the Aramaic Targums, the author places before us a culture that is generated by the intricate operations of memory and formulaic diction. Jousse’s work remains an immense intellectual achievement that presents a viable alternative to the form critical model of the Jesus tradition and the gospels.


—Werner H. Kelber, Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies, Rice University





The course Marcel Jousse sets in his writings and lectures is devious, but the voyage promises great benefits: it leads us to the milieu of Rabbi Yeshua/Jesus and shows us not only the culture where the original human, the anthropos mimans, is to be found, but explores the reasons why it decayed. With a careful selection and translation of Jousse’s essays and lectures, and with an astute introduction, Edgard Sienaert helps us to follow Jousse’s way to this fascinating land.


—György Kustár, Assistant Professor of New Testament Studies, Theological Academy of Sárospatak, Hungary

Editorial Reviews

Sienaert’s excellent translation of Marcel Jousse could not be more timely. It comes just as interpreters of Jesus are recognizing that form criticism was a misunderstanding of oral tradition modeled on written texts. Lecturing at the Sorbonne, etc. from 1931 to 1957, Jousse rebelled against the dominant “algebraicized,” hyper-disciplinized academic print-culture. This selection of his lectures opens up his groundbreaking (re-)discovery of concrete interactive oral culture and communication sustained by memory and mimesis. He finds this exemplified by Ieshua, who was deeply imbued with the popular Aramaic Palestinian-Galilean culture behind the oral-derived Targums.


—Richard Horsley, author of Text and Tradition in Performance and Writing





Although largely shrouded in silence by the academy, the French anthropologist Marcel Jousse is a giant in the study of oral cultures. This collection of essays and lectures introduces readers into the Galilean oral-style tradition of the first century CE. Relying on the Aramaic Targums, the author places before us a culture that is generated by the intricate operations of memory and formulaic diction. Jousse’s work remains an immense intellectual achievement that presents a viable alternative to the form critical model of the Jesus tradition and the gospels.


—Werner H. Kelber, Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies, Rice University





The course Marcel Jousse sets in his writings and lectures is devious, but the voyage promises great benefits: it leads us to the milieu of Rabbi Yeshua/Jesus and shows us not only the culture where the original human, the anthropos mimans, is to be found, but explores the reasons why it decayed. With a careful selection and translation of Jousse’s essays and lectures, and with an astute introduction, Edgard Sienaert helps us to follow Jousse’s way to this fascinating land.


—György Kustár, Assistant Professor of New Testament Studies, Theological Academy of Sárospatak, Hungary

From the Publisher