ABSTRACT
For the unsuspecting reader of the Bible, there is often a tendency to think that the world of Bible is much like our own world. But to think this way is to ignore the distinction between oral and literary culture. The world that produced the biblical documents was largely an oral culture, unlike modern Western culture, which, until the advent of the audio-visual revolution, has been in many ways a literary culture. For vast numbers of people who lived in ancient Israel and who lived in the orbit of Jesus' ministry, communication was oral. When Israelite and early Christian sacred tradition entered into the written medium, a whole host of issues came to the fore that heretofore had not been relevant. In fact, as the various biblical manuscripts were passed down, a complex textual tradition developed, with many variant readings for both Old and New Testament texts.
