Between Reading and Performance:
The Presence and Absence of Physical Texts
Nicholas A. Elder
Religions 14:979 (2023)
In New Testament scholarship, there is a division between practitioners of performance criticism and those who engage the sociology of reading and reading cultures in the ancient Mediterranean context. The former, as the name of their methodology implies, tend to emphasize the performative nature of engaging textual traditions and downplay the importance of the physical document in a performance event. The latter stress the importance of the physical text in a reading event. This article reaches across the division between performance and reading, suggesting that written manuscripts play different roles in different kinds of performance and reading events. It surveys primary source evidence of two types: one in which the physical text is absent from or de-emphasized in the performance event and another in which the document is explicitly present and figures prominently in the reading event. The article concludes by suggesting that performance critics ought to be more explicit about what role they imagine physical documents to have in hypothetical performance events and that those engaging the sociology of reading ought to be more attuned to the performative potential of communal reading events.