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

The latest volume in the Biblical Performance Criticism Series! 

Cascade, 2018

By Marcel Jousse

Edited by Edgard Sienaert

Forward by Werner H. Kelber

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.

Werner Kelbar writes:

This English publication of Marcel Jousse’s comprehensive phenomenology of memory, oral-style communication, and anthropology is cause for celebration.  After these lectures and essays were lying dormant for decades, they have here been retrieved from oblivion and returned to the academic consciousness.   This is entirely the achievement of Edgard Sienaert, who for the past thirty years has been editing and translating the legacy of the French ethnologist, Semitist, and Jesuit priest.  By Jousse’s own admission, his writings are likely to deliver a culture shock to readers, introducing them to a strange and alien land.   This book raises the uncomfortable question whether it was a typographically mediated, text-centered biblical scholarship that has kept us from understanding the first century Palestinian, specifically Galilean, ethnic environment, its Aramaic-Targumic milieu, and its oral, memorial, recitational communications orbit.   

In addition to familiarizing readers with the ethnic, linguistic, and communicative culture of ancient Palestine/Galilee, Jouse’s publication helps us getting a feel for what it was like living in an ancient society that was operating within strict social parameters, embedded in, surrounded by, and saturated with tradition.  Notwithstanding Jousse’s use of a novel technical terminology and an unconventional conceptualization, the time for its publication may well be a propitious one:  the Gutenberg galaxy is collapsing all around us as we are crossing the threshold to the digital era and entering a world that is in some ways closer to the ancient oral-memorial world than the past five hundred years of printed book culture.  The practitioners of performance criticism in particular, who for some time have been re-oralizing the printed texts, will benefit greatly from immersing themselves in the ancient, oral-style society.   Over and above biblical studies, however, the book represents an intellectual accomplishment of such profundity that its significance should resonate across the human and social sciences.