Oral and Written Gospel: A Critique of Werner Kelber

1994 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Halverson

In The Oral and Written Gospel, Werner Kelber argues that the first written gospel was an attempt to supersede oral tradition by the creation of a literary ‘counterform’. It aimed to discredit ‘oral authorities’ (identified as the disciples and family of Jesus and Christian prophets). Similarly, the paucity of sayings in Mark indicates a suspicion of the sayings genre, which is taken to be the oral genre par excellence. The sayings represent the living voice of the living Lord. The substitution of a written gospel would silence that voice as an ongoing phenomenon by relegating it to the dead past. The passion narrative is essentially the creation of Mark, and with its emphasis on the death and post-resurrectional silence of Jesus, creates a new Christology in opposition to the ‘oral Christology’ of the sayings, which never refer to the death of Jesus. The net effect of the written gospel was to inaugurate a theology (or ‘hermeneutic’) of death and absence in contradiction to the principle of presence that informed the oral tradition.

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-109
Author(s):  
Marina A. Kozlova

The paper is devoted to the peculiarities of the creation of the personified image of the city in the novel “The Dead [City of] Bruges” by Georges Raymond Constantin Rodenbach, which, according to the author himself, represents not only the protagonist, but also its organising force. The Belgian author draws on an earlier literary tradition, according to which the city appears to the poet's mind in the form of a woman. The image of the city is built on the combination and interaction of different elements, among which those that are considered in the article: the theme of duality, the motif of reflection, which becomes the main constructional principle of the image system of the novel, as well as references to mythological and literary archetypes. The theme of duplicity is directly connected with the category of correspondence or analogy, which is central to Rodenbach's oeuvre and forms a peculiar poetics of reflection and determines the choice of expressive means. Dualism is associated with a hostile, dark and demonic force, contrasted with the "holy" and infallible feminine ideal, embodied in the image of the perished beloved, who is also a prototype of the city. The poeticised image of the city is related to archetypical figures that are typical of European symbolism – first of all, Ophelia, but also Orpheus and Narcissus, all this through an appeal to the symbolism of water and the otherworld, then through the main character's attempt to overcome the border between worlds and create a new myth about love that defeats death.


2021 ◽  
pp. 79-92
Author(s):  
David Lloyd Dusenbury

Anti-Semitic interpretations of the gospels and Christian hostility towards Jews are both rooted, in terribly complex ways, in the first centuries of the Christian era. The death of Jesus is certainly the “most resentment-laden” theme in Christian history. But this chapter argues that it is not a sign of primitive Christian resentment that the gospels depict a Judaean moment in Jesus’ legal ordeal in Jerusalem—an ordeal which culminates in a Roman verdict, and a Roman punishment. In fact, the Judaeans’ condemnation of Jesus is less decisive in the gospels than in many revered Judaic texts. This chapter thus seeks to reconstruct a Judaic ‘passion’ narrative in which Jesus dies, and Pilate is innocent, from the ‘Judaean’ testimonies of a pagan philosopher (Celsus), from the pages of an illustrious rabbinic collection (Babylonian Talmud), and from a tradition of parodic ‘gospels’ (Toledot Yeshu).


Joseph Conrad ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 51-70
Author(s):  
Yael Levin

The chapter focuses on Conrad’s scenes of suspension as sites for an investigation of language and its role in the creation of the modernist subject. Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Victory are read as the serial restaging of an unsolicited encounter with the language of the other. These unwarranted interruptions contribute to an exploration of a particularly passive and fragmented subjectivity that relinquishes the agency and cohesion afforded the Cartesian cogito. The insistence on the oral tradition is thus read not as an attempt to resurrect speech within an essentially silent medium but as a dramatization of the role of language in the evolution of the modernist subject and the narrative that houses him. Those same experimental narrative techniques that are often associated with Conrad’s commitment to an inherently epistemological philosophical inquiry are attributed here to the author’s effort to chart the ontological coordinates of character and narration.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-411
Author(s):  
Ariel Fox

Abstract This article explores the changing depiction of the merchant and the mercantile in the early Qing. A figure of much anxiety and mistrust in the late imperial imagination, the traveling merchant moves things out of their proper place—through both his movement of goods across space and his own mobility across social strata. In the early Qing play Shiwu guan 十五貫 (Fifteen Strings of Cash), however, the merchant's facilitation of the circulation of money and man does not trouble the social whole as much as constitute it. The merchant-hero breaks through narrative and economic impasses, directing capital away from the dead ends of hoarding and incest and toward the creation of productive marriages. In recuperating the merchant as a moral subject and his circulation of money as a moral act, Shiwu guan offers new possibilities for the construction of selfhood both onstage and off.


1988 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Van Tilborg

The passion narrative of Jesus as told by Matthew is a verbal enunciation which finds its place next to other passion narratives in which the narrator lets the protagonist use the words of the '1' person of Psalm 22 and in which the narrator describes internal and external conflicts with the words of the Psalm. Against the background of the Greek Septuagint and the Aramaic text in the Targum, parallel to what the hymnist of Qumran tries to do and the narrator of the story about Aseneth, based on the narrative as we find it in Mark, Matthew took Psalm 22 as anchor for his story. What is described in the Psalm, happens in the life and death of Jesus. To approach Jesus' passion more closely, Matthew used poetic language: words on words on words. The passion and death of Jesus has thus become literature, an ambiguous attempt to express the impossible. The question, 'how can one maintain today compassion against the forces of violence?', is the concern of the article.


2021 ◽  
pp. 129-147
Author(s):  
T. A. Mirvoda ◽  
M. V. Stroganov ◽  
◽  

(Discussion based on the materials of the defense of T. A. Mirvoda’s PhD thesis “Poetics of a modern children’s “scary” narrative in oral tradition and the Internet”)Within the framework of the conversation, the article discusses psychological background of the emergence and existence of scary stories in the modern online space which are being accompanied with audio-visual objects and ritual practices, which on a par with the oral folk art of similar themes form the network mythology of horrors (the creepypasta). The principles of genre stratification of children’s «scary» narrative folklore and the creation of a corresponding index of characters and plots, as well as the differentiation of scary stories and evocations, proposed in the dissertation research by T. A. Mirvoda, are highlighted.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (S-2) ◽  
pp. 218-221
Author(s):  
Jeyabharathi T

The creation of God is the belief that we will be safe by creating rituals and temples that are sacrificed by men who are afraid of the fury of nature. They also gave their hunting tools to the gods who created it and also established idolatry. Among the gods that were so, there is a dual ity of the small god. At first, the small deities were worshipped on the border of the village as a place where the dead ancestors lived as people. This is called the Guardian Goddess. The great deities are considered to be the deity of every deity shown in Thelly. The difference between the minor gods and the great gods does not appear to have been in the Sangam literature. However, it is a discretion to match the definition of today. In the society where the dead were usually the middle stones, the stones became worship. The study is the only small-sighted cult of the four temples that were built for the king, the deceased, the dead from the north, the life of the goddess, the king and the living.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Ben-Dov

This chapter surveys the reception and development of the Enochic 364-day calendar in later Jewish and Christian traditions, focusing on sources from Ethiopia. It traces the creation of Enochic astronomy and of the 364-day calendar in their Mesopotamian and ancient Jewish setting, and then continues to assess this legacy in the Book of Jubilees, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and, in a rather different way, in 2 Enoch and other Jewish apocalypses. This is done with an eye toward the transmission of other branches of ancient sciences, such as astrology and physiognomy. The chapter then continues to assess the path of the Enochic teaching in Christian Ethiopia, dwelling on the tension between the preservation of the ancient tradition and its acculturation to other, later, branches of Ethiopic astronomy.


Neophilology ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 65-72
Author(s):  
Vladimir Viktorovich Kolchanov

The historical and political prototypes are the material for the creation of bright and memorable images in the novel by M.A. Bulgakov “Fatal eggs” are described: A.S. Rokk (chief commander of the Workers' And Peasants' Red Army S.S. Kamenev), Polaitis (Marshal M.N. Tukhachevsky), Shchukin (A.I. Egorov), “red-moustached driver” (a talented scientist-inventor, engineer of III rank P.K. Oshchepkov). We determine theatrical and genre sources that influenced the creation of images: mystery, farce, buffo, pantomime. The text satirical and grotesque nature the is investigated. In the framework of the farce and buffo the First Moscow process where the prototypes are is considered. The composition and genre issues are touched upon, the problem of attribution of the story is raised. To the source base of the work are added: occult novel by A. Crowley “Moonchild”, stories by A. Schnitzler “Rock”, U. Allen “Fatal Experience”, R. Market “Invention of Professor Carter”, R. Presber “Last Feast of the Last of Birkovich”, B. Lavrenev “The Child Gregory”. References to the iconic systems of the Egyptian “Book of the Dead” and the collection of Arab fairy tales “One Thousand and One Nights” are used.


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