ABSTRACT
Modern Western scholars have had an implicit, if not explicit, preference for the written over the oral. As just one example, Bovon says that ‘the merit of Luke [is] that he raised what was oral and popular tradition to the literary level’ (1994: 166; italics mine). On the other hand, in recent years a number of scholars think New Testament scholarship has been too text-bound, and so rightly stress that, despite the growth in written literature, orality did not die. Some postmoderns want to dismantle what they perceive to be the arrogant authority claims made of the written text. And so frequent reference is made to some ancient writers’ skepticism about the written text, especially vis-à-vis the viva vox, the living voice. Already Socrates, according to Plato, had his misgivings about writing, or at least about making writing public, because it was open to the danger of drifting ‘all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it’, and once misused or even abused, it cannot defend itself (Phaedr. 275d-e). Plato also claims that ‘written words go on telling you just the same thing forever’; in a sense, they become a dead voice.
