The Oral Style in the Gospels

Six Unpublished Conferences 

Second Conference -- The Oral Style

By Father Leonardo Castellani

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

The Holy Books are written in an oral style — that is, they were first quoted from memory and later transcribed in writing. This is a quite important discovery for the study of Scripture made by Jesuit Father Marcel Jousse (my teacher in Paris) in 1932, that has been slowly penetrating in Germany and England, very little in France, and almost not in Spain.

In this lesson, I will present what I omitted saying in the Introduction to my Comments on the Gospel; that is, the scientific foundation of the oral style. As support, I will take a question once made to me by a young sales clerk in a bookstore.

How did Jesus Christ write?

Jesus Christ did not write,

How is it, then, that we now have a written Gospel?

Transcribed, rather than written.

And I informed him that the Gospels were recited first.

Then, Christianity in its entirety is up in the air — said he.

We will leave it in the air for the time being and settle it again later, explaining how the Gospels came about, with which their authenticity, rather than being ruined as the young man said, gets strengthened.

Christ did not write the Gospel, neither did he dictate it to Matthew, Mark and Luke; He did not dictate it, except in a very special sense. The first Gospel, that of Matthew, was transcribed some seven years after Christ having died; perhaps a bit more, but not more than 18 years; the last Gospel, that of John, took some 40 or 50 years. And in the meanwhile? In the meanwhile it was transmitted by 'oral tradition'.

Does that mean they were being learned by memory by some persons from others?

In a certain sense, yes.

But that is quite unverifiable; really, if the Christian faith about Christ being God is based on those four pamphlets...

Indeed, this faith is based on those four pamphlets; we have no other documents on the sayings and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth. But they are not the least unverifiable: quite the contrary.

How have those unique pamphlets which so much noise have caused and so great effect have had in the world? What has the form of their composition been? And how do you prove all that? Marcel Jousse proved his discovery, in a strictly scientific manner, in a quite hard to read paper titled "Le Style oral rythmique et mnémotechnique chez les Verbo-Moteurs" (The rhythmic and mnemonic oral style among the verbomotor people).

Let's stretch out the objection of the young bookstore sales clerk with an example: let´s suppose that a biography of Hipólito Irigoyen were written today by an author who does not even put his last name on the work, he just signs it Gabriel or Robustiano; there is no reference in it to any document, all of it is conversations of Irigoyen with the author; in it, utterly extraordinary acts by Irigoyen are narrated, let's say that he once stopped the rain with a single word, or paralized General Uriburu's soldiers with just one cry.

Let's suppose, moreover, that all documents dealing with Irigoyen had been annihilated, his certificate of baptism, his law degree, the collection of "La Época" daily, and any and all journals which make any single mention of Irigoyen.

Even more, let's suppose that the biography is not written seven, but fifty years after his death; and everyone who reads that book is obligated to believe it, to pay a 60% tax on all his belongings to the People´s Radical Party, and to die for that party should it become necessary.

This is what appears to the eyes of the bookstore sales clerk in considering the Gospel. Evidently, such a book on Irigoyen would not be believed, it would have no authority. And what would he think if half the world believed it? That half the world or more had become crazy. This is how Catholics appear in the eyes of the sales clerk.

He lives, just as all of us, in the world of the written style; but ... a different world has existed, the world of the oral style, of which traces and examples remain, even in the language of children, of drunkards, and of madmen; and also of the great orators and the great poets. By means of science — by means of very profuse and accomplished scientific investigations, we can exit this world to which we are accustomed, and move for a moment to the Palestine world of 2,000 years ago, the world of Rabbi Jeshuª ben Nazareth, who pretended the title represented by his name, Savior, "Jeshuª" . 

Let's imagine ourselves standing on the hill called "the horns of Hattin", at a break in the mountains surrounding the lake of Genezareth, in the year 31 or 32 of our age. There is a man dressed in white on one of the small rocky "Horns" or hillocks, who can be seen by the crowd located at the foot, in the "Valley of the Dove". The man has at his back, the lake and the smooth hills that surround it; at his front is the snow-capped crest of Mount Hermon; at his left, Nazareth and Mount Tabor, at his right, the town of Bethsaida Julia

Those who followed him were standing or sitting, as they could, on the roughness of the rocks; they could have been 5,000 men, maybe more, maybe less, but not less than 1,000: 'turba multa', that is, a large crowd, coming from everywhere in Judea or from outside Judea. Having seen the photographs we have of the area, it is impossible for a man, even if he were a stentor yelling, to make himself heard by the people at the foot of the hill as believed by José María Bover; and there is no place in all of Judea more suited for one to make himself heard, other than this kind of natural pulpit. The question: "How did Christ preach to those large crowds that the Gospel describes?" Up to now, that had been an unanswered question, it was simply incomprehensible. How did he preach? Yelling? Using a megaphone?

The man dressed in white with a red headband on his temples over his turban, stood up and gave a signal to indicate that the 'Sermon of the Mount', that we now quote, would begin; in actuality, his Oral-Improvised-Recitation. "He opened his mouth (άνοιξαν τα στόμα) says the Gospel, and if he spoke, he naturally opened his mouth; but that expression represents the conventional signal with which the reciter would indicate his starting to talk, or demanded attention, and slowly moving himself rhythmically, uttered this balad:

Blessed are the poor in spirit:

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn:

for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek:

for they shall possess the land.

Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice:

for they shall have their fill.

Blessed are the merciful:

for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the clean of heart:

for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers:

for they shall be called children of God.

Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake: 

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye when they persecute you

and revile you

and speak all that is evil against you untruly, 

for my sake

Be glad and rejoice then

for your reward is very great in heaven

For so they persecuted the prophets

that were before you.

These are the eight beatitudes, the opening or overture of the Sermon of the Mount. Those who heard them for the first time — since we are tired of hearing it — did not need interpreters, because they were the ones referred to, the poor, the sweet, the persecuted: they heard a kind of simple little poem that opens and closes with the same word, the “Malkûtha”, magic word to the Hebrews : the kingdom of the Messiah; small poem inside of which is a kind of play of words — "sons of peace / sons of God" — of repetitions, of antithesis, a delicate rhythm and a delicate artifice which makes it quite easy to keep in memory.

Jesus sat again, and the Twelve stood up and repeated the Recitation word by word before the master, and then. climbing down from the summit, dispersed themselves among the groups, and then one or two from each group — the chiefs of the groups — repeated the recitation before the apostles and in turn dispersed themselves among the other groups. After a while the recitation had been memorized by hundreds and hundreds of hearers. This was the "printing press" of the ancient peoples of oral style.

The Apostles having come back, Jesus stood up again and pronounced another recitation.

"You have heard what was told to your parents:

Thou shalt not kill

And whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment.

But I say unto you

Whosoever shall say thou fool ...

And so forth: the recitation of the "Amplification of the law° or "Magnification of the law", seeped from top to bottom with the word 'say': 'it was said', 'I say', 'he who says',,,

The Sermon of the Mount was delivered that way, in an entire day or over several days — which was summarized in Matthew's Gospel, and put in writing some 8 or 9 years later. The Apostles had memorized in their heads — in their laryngeal and mouth muscles — the Recitations of the Master, and they would quote them to the groups of people that would ask them to; such was the task of the 'Apostolate' — quite different from that of the 'apostolates' of today. Apostle means 'envoy'; that is, depository of an inviolable message and authorized by the author of the message,

How can it be proven that this was so?

As I said, this system still exists nowadays, even though it exists in an imperfect form. Putting together the various imperfect forms, the entire system became clear. This system was a full blown institution in all peoples before the introduction of writing, of the document and the book. The experimental tests had been made by ethnologists, explorers, missionaries, linguists; with many languages and in many places, whose testimonies were compiled by Father Jousse in his 'Account'; but science does not want to know only the facts, but mainly the wherefore; and then arose a brilliant theory regarding human language, which Jousse called 'the psychology of the gesture'.

Human languages are the product of an evolution of human natural expression (which is not animal only, but animal-intellectual); evolution which has three stages: the manual style, the oral style and the written style. And the principle of such evolution is the 'gesture'.

What gesture?

The gesture taken in its most general sense.

If you study philosophy at the Instituto Nacional del Profesorado, in the first year you will be taught the origin of language in the following manner:

"The Traditionalists such as the Count De Maistre, pretend that language was taught by God to men.

The Positivists teach that language comes from a convention or agreement.

Max Müller says the language comes from an onomatopoeia or imitation,

Darwinists say that language is a transformation of the bestial screams and chatter of our symian ancestors..."

 And so forth.

The language comes from Gesture. In the beginning it was the Gesture. the gestures of the face are called 'grimaces', the gestures of the hand are called 'gesticulations', the gestures of the entire body 'attitudes', and additionally there are phonetic gestures of the bucal chords, larynx, tongue, palate, teeth, the 'voice'. All this we designate with the general name of 'gesture'; etymologically, the word has that meaning; from the verbs gésere and gestare: in Latin, gesture is the entire human comportment, including the features of the face; in old Spanish the face was called 'gesto' — a man could be 'agestado', 'malgestado', 'biengestado'...

"Virginibus tiriis mos est gestare pharetram”

says Queen Dido in Virgil: "The Tyrian maidens are used to get the quiver" — to carry the bow and the quiver on the back.

In summary, gesture means the face, the gesticulations, the attitude, the movement and the comportment — and by extension also the accomplishments of men: gesta Dei per francos, God´s accomplishments achieved through the Francs; 'chansons de geste´, songs of noble and heroic deeds; the geste of the independence; gestation, gesticulation, gestic, gerund — the word has been ramifying; in Spanish to "gestor" or "gerente", the manager of the English, one who handles, directs, controls.

But there is much more. There are internal gestures that express our emotions and are at the same time their material cause or support: he was fuming — he had a stiff face — I tremble just of thinking of it — my blood curdled — I got goosebumps — I went weak at the knees — my mind went blank — made my mouth water — my hair stood on end — he gnashed his teeth in anger — seeing him makes me sick — I can't stand that woman — I just can't stomach that kind of books — I was left speechless — it was shocking to me .... all these are internal gestures.

"My entire body was in shock". If I hear an unexpected door slam, or a fire gun shot, my entire body is shaken. Are you sure of that? You are wrong. The entire body vibrates the same, but so faintly that it does not reach the level of consciousness. This was proven by psychologist Feré through Mosso's balance, and it had been discovered earlier by Maine de Biran. Any sensation, no matter how faint it is, is a vibration; that is, a gesture. It was thought that eyesight was an exception to this, vision appears to be static, something like a mirage or a photograph. No. Dr. Nuel has proven that vision is supported by very delicate muscular and nervous movements, a “bundle of brain reflexes”, as they say today; but not only of the brain — also muscular ones. Do we think with the brain? No: we think with the entire body, and we say that some people think only with their heart — or with their stomach. “There is not a single drachma in man´s body that does not think the same way that he lives”. Uncultured people have a 'somatic' religion; that means, it has no religious sentiment other than by means of movements; for example, walking on their knees from the door of the Cathedral in Cajamarca to the image of the Virgin of the Valley, practice that some priests forbid. Religious sentiment has also three stages, somatic, psychic, and pneumatic.

Experimental psychology has come to confirm what the ancient people said, that "life is movement": vita in motu Aristotle had said; That is, it is gesture. Pleasure, for example, is the conscience of a harmonious dynamogenesis — pain is the conscience of an inharmonic dynamogenesis; and the language is a directed and significant dynamogenesis: some women cannot think without talking, and some men too. A kind of continuous and marvelous dance is what we call life; and the drum is the heart. This is why dance is the first of the fine arts and the origin from which all the rest came; and the origin of language is a manual rhythmic and imitative state. 

The vital human gesture is comprised of energetic explosion, imitation and rhythm. If we inquire how the body comes about to produce movements, the method is always the same. It consists of using certain substances that could be called explosives, and like gunpowder do not await but a spark to explode. I speak of food. especially of the carbohydrates (mainly sugar) and fats- We have a sum of energy stored, ready to produce movement. This energy has been gradually, imperceptibly obtained from the sun by plants; and an animal that feeds on a plant or of another animal that has fed from a plant (as when we eat chicken) simply makes pass through his body an explosive that life manufactured by storing solar energy. When it makes a movement, it releases stored energy ... This is what biological chemistry tells us. This is the body of the gesture, what we call "energetic explosion". The soul is its sense or signification; and man from his intellect is capable of perceiving that sense: and so, instead of saying 'I was scared' he says 'my hair stood on end'

Man is capable of more: he is capable of intentionally giving a sense to his movements in order to say things; that is, he is capable of representing, of mimicking. Man is the most imitating animal in existence, says Aristotle; and from that — he says obscurely — poetry was born. All his gestures are subject to an absolutely universal law, which rules everything from the movement of the stars to the beats of the heart, which we call rhythm; which we cannot define unless with the word 'measure', a certain measure, and man is capable of becoming aware of the rhythm and seek it on purpose, and again from it is born poetry, music, song, and dance, which is a combination of the first three (like the South American 'pericón con relaciones' folk dance) and afterwards the oral style, which is also a combination of the three. Thus, scientifically, the expressive movements of man (and all are so in some way), that is 'his gestures' comprise four elements, two of them essential. body and soul, energetic explosion and sense; and two properties, rhythm, property of the body, and mimesis, property of the soul.

Theoretically, the manual and corporal style was first; I say theoretically because phonation, the phonic gesture existed always at the same time, and the purely manual style never existed, except in the deaf-mute. It belongs to language prehistory, it no longer exists, even though its traces exist everywhere. In fact, there are redskin tribes (Father Jousse traveled to North America to study them) that cannot speak at night if they don't light a fire: their language is a mixture of gesticulations and sounds, and I am about to believe that the same happens with the Napolitans and the Jews. But why go so far? Have you not seen an orator such as Mussolini, Father Golia, German Dominican Gozzano? The extraordinary force of their word, that sort of magic or magnetism, comes from the fact that their body accompany it in everything, as if it were a single thing, as full expression is, or should be, knowledge and emotion at the same time. The great orator dances his discourse. Mussolini used to move himself little, but he moved as a lion. In contrast, Hitler literally danced, he seemed to be Italian. The bad orator, the orator of written style, moves his arms or his head haphazardly, his gestures are nothing more than discharges of excessive nervousness and his words do not incarnate those movements, stiff, conceited, sometimes ridicule. I saw a great preacher in Mendoza who, to note that his sermon was well done, it was necessary to close your eyes,

Children are a bundle of natural gestures, which have to be directed and not repress too much; bad teachers repress too much.

"What's that, you crying? Boys do not cry."

"Aren't you going to sit still at the table?

"Oh, Monica behaves quite well, she behaves as a young lady."

"Please, Johnny, do not point the finger at people"

"Charlie, don't laugh so noisily"

"Fred, it is not necessary for you to jump to say you are glad you got a bicycle"

"Susan, don't run like that, you are not a small child anymore"

"Lucy, don't hug just anyone in the street, you're seven already"

Repressing the gestures is good, since the way to repress emotions, which form one thing with them, are the internal gestures that produce the external ones, and that leads to self-control; but caution, not too much nor too early. Our education takes the child and submerges him into the written style: read and write; what things, dear God! The book: I am not going to talk against the book; it would mean ruining my business, I write books, but books aren't everything and before the book there are other things. Sports: they are very good, but it is too little; much better to direct the gestures of children are games, song and dance, manual work and pure mimesis or theatrical representation, which the goold schools of old used to have: At Stonyhurst College (which I visited in 1933) boys study latin and greek, but they frequently present Shakespeare plays (and there is a teacher in charge of theater exclusively) and every boy has to learn a manual trade.

Leaving aside the paedagogical applications of the psychology of gesture (which I expounded in another conference) let's go back to our topic, exegesis. The Apostles, in possession of their Teacher's talks, composed in the same style other recitations, with His acts, His miracles, His Passion and Death. Where? Perhaps in the Cenacle, where they remained shut in with the Virgin for 40 days. It is revealing that the primitive Holy Fathers call the Gospel "The Apostolic Catechesis." Saint Peter would stand up during the supper (which is our 'mass' of today) before Communion and recite a piece of the life of the Teacher, the one he was asked. His interpreter or "meturgeman", Mark, would translate it into Latin or Greek. The faithful in Rome, people of written style, would have asked Mark to put Peter's preaching in writing. Saint Peter may have not been very happy with that, but did not forbid it — says historian Eusebius. That way our Gospel according to Mark came about in year 55 (that is, 22 years after Christ's death), which is in reality the preaching of Saint Peter

Let's put the Gospel of next Sunday as an example.

-A-

Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake

a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake

a man approached

he was a leader of the synagogue

-B-

he saw Jesus 

he fell at his feet

He shouted

and pleaded

Rabbi, my daughter is dying

Please come to my house

put your hands on her

and she will be healed and live

-A-

And Jesus stood up

And a large crowd followed him

And a woman was there 

who had been subject to bleeding 

-B-

she heard Jesus

she came up behind him

and touched his cloak

and she thought

If I just touch his clothes,

I will be healed.

Immediately her bleeding stopped

and she was healed.

Our Gospels in Greek keep traces of the oral style everywhere; It suffices to translate a pericope to the Aramean, as Father Jousse has done, for the original lttle poem of the verbomotor peoples to appear in all its purity and with all its ingenious laws: the propositional gesture, the parallelism or repetition of the first gesture in the form of an echo, the word

This discovery of the "oral style" has brought much light to exegesis; it has resolved many difficulties. Allow me to give you some examples: 

1) Maldonado's “superfluous features”. In the Parable of the Great Banquet the king who made the invitation says: “The fat calf has been killed, the chickens have been seasoned". The ancient fathers thought that parables were ‘allegories’ (they are nothing but symbols), they tried to interpret all the features of the narrative and would leap into a sea of the imagination to the point of the outlandish; for example, "the fat calf means the hierarchy, the seasoned chicken means the faithful". Juan de Maldonado in the sixteenth century saw that such interpretations lead to nowhere, saying: "They are ornamental features, superfluous features that signify nothing" — that is, paddings, as if Christ were a bad poet. No. They are simply a cliché of the oral style, as the tail of Tobiah's dog; and within the symbol of the invitation "means my banquet cannot be postponed (on these matters of allegory and symbol we will see more in the next conference).

2) in His 'Eschatological Sermon', Christ said: "Amen I say to you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done." The modern impious raised a serious difficulty against Christ, so much so, that a rationalist school called the 'eschathological school', founded by Julius Wellhausen in 1860 and the present head of that school is that Alsacian Swiss, Sweitzer, to whom so much flattery is given by the newspapers: this school claims that Christ erred by believing that the end of the world would come within 40 years, and that therefore Christ was as son of God and as prophet as you or I — or even less. No. Christ was asked two things at once, the end of times and the destruction of Jerusalem; and Christ answered both together, as all the nabis and reciters — doctors — prophets of an oral style; that is, he described the type and the antitype at the same time, a proximate event and a remote one.

3) The Holy Virgin, on being greeted as Mother of the Messiah by her cousin Isabel, prorupted in a hymn we now call the Magnificat

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord

and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior

From this hymn which has nine double propositional gestures, the Germans drew an objection against the authenticity of the Gospel of Luke — that is, against Saint Paul: it is an invention, a literary creation: because it is impossible that a fourteen or fifteen year old girl could have improvised at once such an admirable little poem, which includes 11 or 14 allusions to the Old Testament. But it turns out that that feat is not impossible for a young girl of the oral style who has been educated in the temple of Jerusalem. The holy martyr de Foucauld, who lived as a hermit among the Bedouins and was martyred by them, he found out that a poor arab woman, of the tribe of Imrad, who received charity from a French official, thanked him by improvising a hymn full of cliches of the arab poets from among those she had learned and recited since she was a child:

I go out of my tent before the prayer

A march full of worries

I have left Tekadeit and Lilli there

Starving, extenuated, crying

Locusts are death to the poor

I met the captain that had pity on me

He is a man that strives for the good

he is valiant in war, he is generous

He is blessed with the cries of joy of women

he has merits before God

His defiance no one picks up

He can to all the pagans

And so, many other difficulties. But the main service rendered by Father Jousse's discovery is to have liquidated the famous "synoptic question" once and for all, which had become an unending mess (but still is being taught at the seminaries) and to have corroborated the authenticity of the Four Gospels and the apostolic writings (or recitations) for good.

In summary, Christ "preached", that is, recited in the old rhythmic and mnemonic oral style then common in Palestine: He deposited his message in a number of "living printers" zealously controlled ones by the others. This oral style has the following characteristics:

First: It is not poetry, though at times is very beautiful, more than the poetry of the present time (at least that published in La Nación's Supplement), its primordial end is not aesthetic but mnemonic, to produce compositions that can be easily held in memory by the people, and to conserve that way (without printers or parchments) the great religious, historical, legislative, monuments of a people.

Second: Those compositions are not made with separate words but with set phrases, or with oral clichés, which are the primordial unity of all languages; the which are made up not of the separate words appearing in our dictionaries but by phrases; and this is why such thing called 'syntaxis' exists in them; the law for constructing the phrase.

Third: In those peoples, the institution called 'nabi' (or prophets in Israel) exists, of which a pale reflection are our South American 'payadores', who have as a purpose to conserve and transmit those recitations; and also create them, improvise them; then they are called 'rabbis' or teachers — as Rabbi Jeshoua ben Nazareth, who was not a beggar but had that honorable and important office: although he would recite for free and live on charity.

Fourth: Nabis do not change a word in the recitations of their Teacher; that was strictly prohibited.

Fifth: That way, the recitations have been kept intact, even over entire centuries, as has been proven experimentally; and when they are put in writing it is simply to control the reciters; thus, the tyrant Pisistratos had Homer's rhapsodies put in writing, when it was noted that the rhapsodists or reciters began to diverge slightly from one another.

So here is the answer to my bookseller: "How did Christ write?" To transmit His doctrine (His Revelation) Christ made use of an instrument even safer than if he had written a book, sent it to the printer and proofread the copy. If you open the anthology of my books that has been made by the National Commission of Culture you will meet with the enormous errors which make me say what I never said or thought. Books die or at least become old; many books of the time of Christ have disappeared. The oral, rhythmical, mnemonic transmission lives, and gives sequel to numberless books. The priests who know dead languages have as a mission that of reviving the words of Christ before the faithful in the current language.

So were produced "the Vedas" of the Hindus; the "Alkoran" of the muslims, and even the "Chanson de Roland" and the "Cantar del Mio Cid" in the Middle Ages; and eminently, the Four Gospels of Christ.

Go to first conference On Inspiration in the Bible