Biblical performance criticism : Performance as research

Traditionally, scholars have studied the writings of the New Testament by reading them silently and in private. For centuries, we scholars have been treating these scriptures as "writings"--written to be studied and interpreted as manuscripts, written to be broken up into episodes and verses for scholarly analysis. We have been dealing with them as if they originated as part of a print culture. But this is not at all how the early Christians of the first century experienced the writings in the context of the oral cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world. It is the thesis of this paper that the contents of the writings that comprise the New Testament were originally composed and experienced orally. As such, the New Testament writings ought to be treated as remnants of oral events. That is, we need to study the writings of the New Testament as (trans)scripts of performances in an oral culture.Issue title: Oral Tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam