The Performance of the Fourth Gospel
an Exploration Into the Performative Elements of the Gospel of John in Light of Performance Criticism
Mémoire
Marc-André Argentino
Maîtrise en théologie
Maître ès Arts (M.A.)
Québec, Canada
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Résumé
Marc-André Argentino examine comment l’Évangile de Jean aurait pu être composé dans le cadre d’une tradition orale déjà bien établie à l’époque et ce, sous l’angle de la critique de la performance. Dans cet exposé, l’Évangile de Jean sera étudiée telle une œuvre de performance, bâtie pour être interprétée dans le contexte de la culture orale du monde gréco-romain du 1e siècle. Offrant une perspective nouvelle sur l’étude biblique, M. Argentino étudiera le texte et la question de l’oralité d’une part du point de vue des sciences humaines et, d’autre part, du point de vue des sciences appliquées. Dans cette optique, le rôle de la mémoire sera analysé selon les principes de la neurobiologie et la neuropsychologie. L’objectif de cette analyse est de déceler des éléments de preuve qui pourraient militer en faveur de l’argument que l’Évangile de Jean aurait été transcrite de mémoire et ce, par l’existence d’outils de mémorisation et d’apprentissage insérés à même le texte.
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Abstract
Partant de la critique de la performance, Marc-André Argentino analyse l’Évangile de Jean dans le cadre d’une tradition orale déjà bien établie à l’époque. Dans son exposé, l’Évangile de Jean est étudié comme une œuvre de performance, construite pour être interprétée dans le contexte de la culture orale du monde gréco-romain du premier siècle. Présentant une perspective nouvelle dans les études bibliques, M. Argentino étudie le texte et la question de l’oralité d’une part du point de vue des sciences humaines et, d’autre part, du point de vue des sciences appliquées. Dans cette optique, le rôle de la mémoire est analysé selon les principes de la neurobiologie et la neuropsychologie. L’objectif de cette analyse est de déceler des éléments de preuve qui
pourraient militer en faveur de l’argument que l’Évangile de Jean aurait été transcrit de mémoire et ce, par l’existence d’outils de mémorisation et d’apprentissage insérés à même le texte
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Table of Content
Résumé ... iii
Abstract ...v
Table of Content ... vii
Abbreviations ... ix
Dedication ... xi
Acknowledgement ... xiii
Introduction...1
Chapter 1 Orality in the First Century ...7
Oral Performance ...8
Oral Expression in First Century Culture and Literacy ...9
Who was literate? ... 12
Storytelling ... 15
Built around a tradition ... 18
Chapter 2 Biblical Performance Criticism ... 21
Examining the Nature of the Johannine Plot as Dramatic Rise and Fall ... 22
Examining the language of the Fourth Gospel as performance tradition: ... 26
Speech as Gesture ... 26
The continuous use of οὖν by the Johannine author. ... 41
Breakdown of the Johannine text into scenes and then examined in a performance tradition. . 46
Performing Semeia: an Examination of a Scene of Action in the Fourth Gospel ... 53
The "I am" Statements ... 61
I am the Bread of Life... 64
I am the Light of the World... 65
Chapter 3 Composed for memory: a Neuropsychological explanation... 69
Ancient Memory Theory ... 71
Brain, Science and Memory ... 75
Performance and Memory... 82
Conclusion ... 87
Section 1 Concluding Remarks and Elements Needed for Further Analysis ... 87
Section 2 Concluding Remarks on Performing John and Future Analysis... 93
Bibliography: ... 99
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Abbreviations
BPC Biblical Performance Criticism
fMRI Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
LXX Septuagint
NRSV New Revised Standard Version SBL Society of Biblical Literature SBLGNT SBL Greek New Testament
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Dedication
To my wife Fiona, my parents Line and Marco, and my sister Alexandra, thank you for always being my solid foundation.
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Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Guy Bonneau for his help and guidance in this tedious and sometimes frustrating adventure. I could not have accomplished this without your mentoring and guidance.
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Introduction
The causality of the invention of the printing press has left a scar upon the history of humanity. The print culture that has ensued since the invention of the printing press has marred our capability to understand ancient media and texts. Since the 15th century, society has slowly become imbued with print media. This has consequentially shaped our means of communication and our standard understanding and definition of communication. This has created a bias in our approach to understanding, interpreting and interacting with ancient texts and media. Our silent print culture overshadows and has blotted out the true means of interaction and interpretations with ancient media in its oral and aural state. In biblical studies, this bias of a print society is represented by the belief that the gospels were composed by a singular individual or a community with an individual end. Nevertheless in the first century, societies and cultures were imbued with an entirely different means of communication and relation to media. Oral and aural means of communication dominated the first century Greco-Roman world due to the high level of illiteracy, the cost of writing materials, the limited means of producing written material, the difficulty of reading texts that are all bunched up together, etc. Moreover, Whitney Shiner states that “In the first century, writing was largely understood as a representation of speech. Oral communication was understood as true communication. A book was a list of words waiting to become communication. Even when a person reads to himself, he usually reads aloud to re-create the sound of the words.”1 All in all, the written word was not something that was necessary or at the technological forefront of first century communication. There was a dominance and preference for oral means of communication and oral performances of texts.
Consequentially, many of us have been approaching Scripture as “writings” from a print culture. Many do not see the differences between a printed text and a performed text, but it is something that must be made clear from the beginning, and it is made clear by Robert Fowler:
To put it sharply in an oral culture typically no two performances of a story are ever identical. It is taken for granted that the oral storyteller will vary his or her language in response to the needs of the moment, responding to the
1 Whitney Shiner, “Oral Performance in the New Testament World,” in The Bible in Ancient and Modern
Media: Sotry and Performance, ed. Holly E. Hearon and Philip Ruge-Jones. (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2009),
2
particular time place, and audience. Exact precise repetition of words is what a person from a print culture might hope for or expect, but that is because the printing press (or its electronic descendants, such as the photocopying machine) allows us to reproduce printed marks on paper endlessly, with exactitude and precision. People in an oral/aural culture, by contrast, expect and invariably receive from the oral storyteller a slightly (or greatly!) different story every time a story is told. Whereas a deeply literate person might compose a story, memorize it, and perform it as faithfully as possible to the original text, in an oral/aural culture there is no such thing as an “original” composition that is memorized then repeated verbatim. Rather, each performance of a story is itself a unique new composition.2
We need to dispel our modern understanding of communication. We need to make the shift from print culture to that of oral culture. For the first century person, communication was understood as taking place in a relational construct between two persons involved in some kind of relationship. The physical presence of the speaker and listener are significant parts of communication in the first century, for oral communication adapts like a living organism. Therefore, “to facilitate the social memory, it is important to create powerful speech that is memorable—resulting commonly in such forms of speech as proverbs, stories, repetitions, alliterations, contrasts, epithets, and formulas.”3 As David Rhoads explicates, it is these elements provided by a first century oral culture that will provide a new context in which to interpret and examine the texts of the New Testament as performances. The New Testament texts we currently study are composed transcripts of oral presentations/exchanges, possible written accounts of a specific oral performance or multiple performances over time. “As transpositions to writing, they were employed not to replace orality with literacy but to enhance orality. The writing of gospels and letters stimulated oral composition, served social memory, and enabled oral compositions to spread more easily from one geographical location to another.”4 Therefore the texts we study were not originally meant to be read, they were meant to be performed in full in front of an audience of believers.
2Robert Fowler, “Why Everything we Know About the Bible is Wrong,” in The Bible in Ancient and Modern
Media. Biblical Performance Criticism, ed. David Rhoads et al. Vol. 1 (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2009), 6-7.
3 David Rhoads, “Performance Criticism: An Emerging Methodology in Second Testament Studies—Part
I,” Biblical Theology Bulleting 36 (2006): 121.
3 Therefore, by attending to the oral aspects of Scripture, there is a paradigm shift in the exegetical process and interpretation. The Bible was not a printed story inked upon papyrus for the private reading of the rich elite. The biblical texts all began as oral stories which circulated through the Christian community, these oral stories were performed for an audience. Hence, our exegetical means must shift from the written to the performed. As Michael A.K. Halliday states: “Writing and speaking are not just alternative ways of doing the same things; rather, they are ways of doing different things. Oral communication differs dramatically from written by the sheer use of the voice, and the variations of prosodic features: ‘rhythm, intonation, degree of loudness, variation in voice quality (tamber), pausing and phrasing.’”5 We must therefore, further examine the role of orality and aurality in the first century.
It is these concepts which lead me to examine the Johannine text as a performance piece, which was intended for the oral culture of the first century Greco-Roman world, where the oral entity had primacy and the composed body was secondary. Consequentially, I am specifically posing the question: In light of performance criticism and the foray of
media studies into the field of biblical studies, I will argue that the Fourth Gospel was composed in performance, from an already circulating oral tradition. I will be paying
close attention to the performative elements and constructs of the Fourth Gospel composed from an oral tradition. From the point of view of a print culture, it is difficult to grasp the concept of memorising entire texts as a means of distribution and sharing. Therefore, this question in turn raises a few questions of its own: (1) what is the nature of an oral culture in the Greco-Roman world, and what is the role of a performance in such a culture? (2) What historical groundings are there for performances in Greco-Roman culture? (3) What is the role and significance of performance in the history of early Christianity? (4) What would a performance of the Fourth Gospel look like? (5) What is the impact of an oral analysis and interpretation of the Fourth Gospel over a literary one?
To answer some of these questions I will turn to the methods of performance criticism. The first part of this work will be dedicated to clarifying the nature of the first century oral culture, as well as the role of performance and the dynamics of morality as it is
5James A. Maxey, From Orality to Orality A New Paradigm for Contextual Translation of the Bible, Vol. 2
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used in a performance. Albert Lord, Walter J. Ong and Jack Goody have done extensive research and work on the dichotomy between orality and literacy. Their differing approaches elucidate the stark difference between the oral and the written, as well as the impact and consequences of these differences on our perception and reception of a same story. However, for the sake of brevity my focus will be on the work completed by Albert Lord and Milman Parry. It will be therefore necessary to clarify the role played by manuscripts and scribes in the oral culture of the first century, especially as they are related to performances. When looking at the oral and manuscript culture in relation to the Bible we come to understand that communication is a systemic process. To comprehend this systemic process, an analysis of Greco-Roman literacy and writing in the first century will be necessary. We will look at the cost of writing, the time needed, the role of memory, performance and reading practices. In doing so, the information we gather will aid us in better understanding the Gospel tradition in the early church. Specifically, it will aid in elucidating: the transmission of the Jesus tradition, how stories were told in the first century similar to the Gospels, oral performances in the New Testament World, as well as the relation between the New Testament and literacy and orality.
In the second part of this work, we will look for external evidence, as well as internal evidence that John was composed in performance. This will be accomplished through the lens of biblical performance criticism. I will first examine the nature of the plot of the Gospel of John, what is it structure? What type of plot are we faced with in the Fourth Gospel? Following this, we will examine the language of the Fourth Gospel as performance tradition. Due to limited space we will only examine: speech as gesture and the continuous use of οὖν in the Gospel of John. Other elements such as literary device: alliteration, assonance, metaphors, etc., speech pattern, and others will have to be examined in a later work. It will be important to develop a model of the Fourth Gospel “performance event” with all of its components. Though there are many, and in light of the type of text we are faced with, we will focus on the division of the Gospel text. We will suggest a new breakdown of the Fourth Gospel into scenes and acts that differ from the medieval division as it will be accomplished by the performative technique of entrances and exits. Having accomplished this we will then use these new divisions to examine a scene of action in the Gospel of John, specifically that of the blind man. Following this, we will examine how the
5 character of Jesus is subjectively constructed through the “I am” statements. We will examine two of the seven statements: the bread of life in chapter 6 and the light of the
world in chapter 8.
Having demonstrated all of these elements, the third part of this work will examine the role played by memory. Specifically, we will examine how the Fourth Gospel is composed for memory. We will be examining this from a perspective that has not yet been considered in biblical studies, that of neurobiology and neuropsychology. We desire to provide empirical perspectives and evidence that the Gospel of John could have been composed for memory as the elements contained in its composition aid in the process of memorization and learning. This joint humanities and natural sciences examination will hopefully bring to light new elements to be used in future examination of orally composed texts.
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Chapter 1 Orality in the First Century
As modern educated and literate Westerners, we do not fully grasp and understand the impact and significance reading has in our lives. Especially with the advent of smartphones, tablets, laptops, the internet, cellular technology, etc., we are in constant contact with written material. When we wake up in the morning the first thing most of us do is turn around, pick up our smartphone and read our text messages, emails, Facebook messages and timeline and our Twitter feed. While we have breakfast, how many either read the newspaper, or read the news on our smartphone or tablets? While commuting, do we not read books or news on our tablets or e-book devices? At work, we read our emails, our reports, our files; we read documents sent to us by colleagues or our bosses. On our commute home we read again books, e-books, tablets; at home before bed or in our leisure time do we not we read. When we browse the internet for information, we again read. Reading is one of the most constantly used means of communication by modern man and I would not be surprised if its use surpassed that of speaking. However, this was not always the case. The supremacy of reading is something new in the evolution of man’s communicative means. But, since it is such a huge aspect of our lives and being literate has had such a huge impact on human evolution, we assume that it has always been this way and we imprint its supremacy, significance and widespread use, in a reverse fashion throughout history. Consequentially, when analyzing ancient texts, this was not the case. The written medium did not reign supreme, rather it was cast aside seen as a secondary means of communication. For according to paleoanthropologists, for the greater part of our existence, 50 000 to a million years6, humans have communicated, in general, through oral means. This is a vastly significant time frame compared to the five centuries since the invention of the printing press, and the mass dissemination of printed and written media. Prior to the printing press, reading and writing was limited to the elite. This is something we tend to forget due to our full immersion into the written and read culture and world we live in, as the modern man tends to favor the written word over the spoken word.
6 Donald Johanson, Blake Edgar, and David L. Brill. From Lucy to Language, rev. ed., (New York: Simon &
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Oral Performance
In the twentieth century, sociologists and anthropologists have been able to learn a great deal about oral communication in predominant oral/aural cultures. We need not look further than the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord on Yugoslavian folk tales and the Homeric Epic to achieve a better understanding of the formulas and mechanics of oral performances of texts. In these types of cultures, an oral text is not composed “for” a performance but “in” performance.7 This distinction is significant as it implies that no two performances of a same story or poem will ever be the same. In an oral culture it is taken for granted that the performer or “author” will vary the story, the language used, the themes in accordance to the setting in which he is performing, the audience and his general need at the moment to grasp the attention of the crowd. Oral performers respond to the time and place in which the story is being told. The same story will also vary from teller to teller depending of the performers, experience, skill and training.
In a print culture, we expect a precise and exact repetition and reproduction of the text. This mentality is visible in the class room or the theaters, as we all have this one friend who will complain that the film was not exactly as the book, or that the performed Shakespearean play was not faithful to the original manuscript. We are trained in grade school to memorize our orals presentations word for word, while our teachers read our written texts to evaluate the quality of our memorization. In the work place, Johnson needs to make 15 photocopies so that everyone has the exact same document at the meeting. Precise reproduction is the name of the game in a print culture. There is no room for error, deviation, or creative modification.
However, this is not the case for oral cultures, whether they are modern or existing prior to the printing press. The audience in an aural culture expects a different rendition of a same story each time, there are no original versions of a story; whereas we in the print culture expect there to be, rather each performance of a story is in itself a new and unique composition. J.A. Loubser states that “the synoptic narratives, and perhaps even the Johannine gospel, are the results of extended performances of the Jesus story. These Stories, we can assume, had already reached a high degree of standardization at the time
9 that they were recorded in writing. The so-called synoptic “problem” is a testimony to this, demonstrating astonishing correspondences between the different synoptic gospels.”8 This has a significant impact when one works with biblical texts, for the oldest texts that we have are not “originals” texts or close to the original texts. Rather the oldest texts that we have are a snap shot in space and time as they represent a single performance, in a specific location, at a specific time, performed by a specific teller of tales, in front of a specific audience. The captured performance would never be similarly reproduced. This is the paradigm shift scholars need to begin to consider when performing biblical exegesis: we must break from the stigma of the printing press and turn to orality as the backbone of our exegetical mindset. And this is what is key; the exegetical methods that have been used are not incorrect, nor do they need to be modified. Our mindset and conceptualization of the first century media culture need to be changed so that when we perform exegesis, we have in mind a manuscript that wasn’t written down, but one that was spoken. We must also keep in mind that the manuscripts we have do not represent a fixed tradition, but one that was ever changing and evolving with every representation of the story. Therefore, our exegetical methods must now consider devices which stem from oral communication and not from literary and print communication.
Oral Expression in First Century Culture and Literacy
When discussing first century literacy, we must make clear that literacy is not to be understood in the modern sense of the term. Literacy can be the most basic signatory literacy, to the ability to read short segments or sentences, noting inventory on clay or wax tablets, or having the skills required to read and write manuscripts. Our modern understanding of literacy tends to sway towards the last category. However, as it can be seen in the first century Greco-Roman culture, there are varying degrees and extents of literacy. Raffaella Cribiore clarifies this multiplicity by dividing it into 4 distinct categories: “1) writing as handwriting, the physical act of tracing characters or words; 2) writing as copying or taking dictation, the recording of others’ words; 3) writing as crafting lexical, syntactical, and rhetorical units of discourse into meaningful patterns; 4) writing as
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authoring, or producing an independent and original text for a specific audience and purpose.”9
Though there are varying degrees of literacy, how many people were in each of these categories? This is where this get difficult, for there is no flawless numerical evidence or means to express this evidence numerically. Simply put, no one at that time thought it necessary to collect such data for anthropological means or for future scholars. Nevertheless, we are presented with two models of estimates. From the first perspective, Richard Rohrbaugh points out that:
“There is general agreement among social historians that two to four percent of the population in agrarian societies could read, or read and write, and that the vast majority of these lived in the cities. Among both classicists and Second Testament scholars, however, there has been a long-standing tendency to imagine widespread literacy during the Roman period. It has been claimed that schools were common and that at least elementary education was broadly available. Many have seen in this a plausible social base from which to argue the much beleaguered question of the literary level and character of the Gospels. Yet recent studies suggest that the spread of literacy in the Roman world has been sharply overestimated and that the scope of the Hellenistic school system has been exaggerated as well. In fact, claims of near-universal access to at least elementary education simply do not stand up to scrutiny: there is simply no evidence that schools included the “mass of the population” in their clienteles”10
Meir Bar-Ilan uses a cross-cultural approach to build a model, which demonstrates the connection between illiteracy and agriculture to estimate percentage of literacy in the land of Israel: “it is no exaggeration to say that the total literacy rate in the Land of Israel at that time (of Jews only, of course), was probably less than 3%.”11 Using the information presented by Rohrbaugh and Bar-Ilan, by using a cross-cultural model of agricultural societies; we can estimate a rate of literacy between 1% and 4%. William Harris, however uses the evidence available to him from Antiquity to construct his model and estimate. He
9 Rafaella Cribiore “Writing, Teachers, and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt” American Studies in
Papyrology 36 (1994): 10.
10 Richard Rohrbaugh “The Social Location of the Marcan Audience” Biblical Theology Bulletin: A Journal
of Bible and Theology 23 (1993): 115.
11 Meir Bar-Ilan, “Illiteracy in the Land of Israel in the First Centuries C.E.”, Essays in the Social Scientific
11 explains that literacy in Attica would not have risen above 10-15% by the end of the 4th century12. Literacy was generally limited to the ruling classes; therefore, Harris, Rohrbaugh and Bar-Ilan all come to a similar conclusion: that the majority of the Roman Empire was illiterate. Harris estimates that the combined literacy level in Rome in the period before 100 BC is unlikely to have much exceeded 10%13. As Joanna Dewey explains “A very small educated elite, plus a few literate slaves and freed people, could handle the writing needed to maintain an empire and to conduct long distance trade, about the only activities in Antiquity that absolutely depended on writing. Most people had little or no use for reading and writing skills.”14 We can determine from these authors that literacy in the cities would be higher than in the rural areas, it would be higher among men than among women, and it would be higher in the upper class than in the lower classes.
Nevertheless, though the majority of the population was illiterate, this does not signify that they could not have knowledge of specific texts. Tom Thatcher in Why John
Wrote a Gospel expresses that since most people in John’s culture could not read, it would
be impossible to have knowledge of the texts explicit content and thus could not discuss about the text or challenge its claims.15 He however failed to consider in his work the fact that in a first century culture the majority of people would not have access to a text in a similar way to that of a modern reader. Due to the nature of oral cultures, the Gospel of John was most likely read to the illiterate Christian or performed by a skilled lector, actor, reciter, rhetorician, or literate slave of a wealthy Christian. The “illiterate” Christians were probably exposed multiple times to the Gospel tale in different settings, locations and by differing readers. Due to the importance of oral memory in the first century these “illiterate” people probably had memorized parts of or all of the Gospel text. Memorizing an oral performance of the gospel would have been accomplished in similar fashion to how the Yugoslavian poet would have memorized the formulas and epic tales of his people :
“When we speak a language, our native language, we do not repeat words and phrases that we have memorized consciously, but the words and sentences emerge from habitual usage.. This is true of the singer of tales
12 William Harris “Ancient Literacy”, (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 328. 13 Idem. 329.
14 Joanna Dewey, “Textuality in an Oral Culture: A Survey of the Pauline Traditions” Semeia 65 (1994): 40. 15 Tom Thatcher, “Why Did John Write a Gospel: Jesus-Memory-History”, (Louisville: Westminster John
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working in his specialized grammar. He learns them by hearing them in other singers’ songs, and by habitual usage the become part of his signing as well. Memorization is a conscious act of making one’s own, and repeating, something that one regards as fixed and not one’s own. The learning of an oral poetic language follows the same principles as the learning of language itself, not by the conscious schematization of elementary grammars but by the natural oral method.”16
Performances are mnemonic devices, for they aid the performer in remembering what to perform. Those who observe the performers at work are helped with respect to their own memorization of a tale. This metonymic nature of performances (memorization through the performative act) aids the audience to engage and memorize the text. This is true for the Gospel of John as will be demonstrated further on. The illiterate Christian or believer would go through a similar process when hearing the Gospel of John performed over and over again. Therefore, due to his continuous oral interaction with the text, he would organically memorize the texts over a period of time. Consequentially, clear cut knowledge of the Gospel text was not limited only to the literate few; rather the illiterate audience was probably intimate and familiar enough with the Johannine text to be able to discuss and challenge the content of the text, contrary to the position defended by Thatcher.
Who was literate?
Being literate in the first century depended upon many factors: one’s education, availability of materials, society in which one lived, social status one had in society, wealth and necessity of writing to your daily life and tasks. Socially speaking, there was very little incentive for the general populace to desire to learn to read. On a day to day basis they are not visually bombarded with signs and advertisement, as we are today. There are no road signs indicating what exit to take, or publicity for the new Dodge camel or Ford goat. They did not have emails, text messages, memos, daily delivery of newspapers, magazines. Reading materials were not part of everyday societal life.
Being able to read and write also depended on the availability (or lack of), materials, which was limited not only to your geographical location, materials being more
13 readily available in major cities and towns thanin rural areas, but also to one’s buying power. Pieter Botha in Orality and Literacy in Early Christianity expounds a hypothetical cost table for the price of copying early Christian documents and the estimated costs of Papyrus scrolls.17
The Gospel of Matthew would have cost 5½ to 7½ Drachmai for the copying, another 6½ for the papyrus and would have required 9 days of labour.
The Gospel of Luke would have cost 6 to 8 Drachmai for the copying, another 7 for the papyrus and would have required 9½ days of labour.
Acts would have cost 5½ to 7½ Drachmai for the copying, another 6½ for the papyrus and would have required 9 days of labour.
John would have cost 4 to 6 Drachmai for the copying, another 5 for the papyrus and would have required 7 days of labour.
Mark would have cost 3½ to 4½ Drachmai for the copying, another 4 for the papyrus and would have required 5½ days of labour.18
To continue this comparison, for the cost of Matthew one could buy 72 loaves of bread or 18 liters of wine; a cheap tunic made by an apprentice would cost anywhere between 16 and 24 drachmai, a white shirt for special occasions cost about 40 drachmai.19 The average wage for a day laborer was 1 drachmai 1 obol (there are 6 obol to a drachmai) therefore the yearly wage would be about 365 drachmai20. Therefore a copy of the Gospel of Matthew would be 4% of their yearly salary or 2 weeks’ worth of work. Now, 4% does not seem like an exuberant amount; however, an average household of 6 needed a thousand drachmai a year for food, clothes, and housing, to simply survive.21 This is the equivalent of 3 workers full daily wages; therefore, the average household might not be able to afford the cost of a
17 Botha uses evidence from Papyrus London which is a fragment that dates from the first half of the third
century. This fragment is an account of the receipts for a professional scriptorium. It is from this information that he extrapolates his estimated costs. His time estimates for copying are calculated at five hours a day, with a writing speed of two lines per minute.
18 Pieter Botha, “Orality and Literacy in Early Christianity”, Vol. 5 (Oregon: Cascade Books), 2012, 72-73. 19 Idem. 73.
20 Estimated for 6 day work weeks over 52 weeks, does not included days not worked for high holidays or
other events.
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gospel, depending on the worker to non-worker ratio. Furthermore, even if they could afford to have a written copy of the Gospel, the average household could not read.
The use of written material depended on one’s wealth not only to be able to purchase it, but also on one’s ability to read. Even if you could afford to purchase a Bible or any other book during the first century, it was a symbol of status. Consequentially, there are few options available to one who would desire to be read to or to read a book themselves. An option that is limited to the wealthy: if one cannot get an education, or does not desire to read himself, a trained slave or freedman could be used to read to his master. Pliny demonstrates this in his letters (2.20.1) as well as Suetonius in Augustus (78.2). The use of trained slaves or freedmen is something that was, in general, limited to the bureaucrats, aristocrats and the Roman army. Outside of this sphere, literacy, as we all know, depended on one’s ability and means to get an education. Obtaining an education was, however, limited to, once again, the wealthy aristocracy, there was no such thing as a public education system. However, being literate was not an important factor in the first century, as there was no day to day use of it. The average worker would never come in contact with literature; there were no manuals to explain the trade of blacksmithing, woodworking, masonry, carpet weaving, etc. Knowledge of the trades was passed down by word of mouth and hands-on training, as well as years of experience. If you worked in the fields for your daily wage there was also no need for being able to read or write. The only type of work that would have required writing would be running the empire, managing the military, keeping stock of one’s inventory of goods, or merchants that would deal in long distance trading. Unless communication was needed and you could not be present, written communication was not needed. Joanna Dewey corroborates this as she states: “Reading and/or writing were not necessary for daily life. Wills could be oral, though they often were written if enough wealth was involved. Only very large financial transaction would be put in writing.”22
Literacy served a political, military and economical function in the first century. Richard Horsley sums it up nicely:
15 “The largely localized ancient economy did not require wide spread
literacy. A Tiny minority of urban artisans used brief written forms. By the first century BCE, Roman aristocratic families had written contracts drawn up for large-scale loans and other major transactions. Administration and control of the empire required considerable use of writing, such as the imperial correspondence carried out by slaves in the “family of Caesar.” The calculation of how much tribute could be taken form a given territory and its population were kept in writing.[…] The operations of the Roman military also required extensive, if less public, writing. Writing in various forms was thus used mainly to maintain or expand military, economic and/or social power.”23
Literacy was used by the wealthy and powerful as a means of controlling and dominating the poor and powerless masses.
Storytelling
Storytelling was part of the culture of Antiquity, as is demonstrated by the existence of professional story tellers. Suetonius in his Life of Augustus writes about Augustus calling upon a storyteller to read to him “He would then go to bed, but never slept above seven hours at most, and that not without interruption; for he would wake three or four times during that time. If he could not again fall asleep, as sometimes happened, he called for someone to read or tell stories to him, until he became drowsy, and then his sleep was usually protracted till after day-break. He never liked to lie awake in the dark, without somebody to sit by him.” 24 In the open markets or open places story tellers would hawk their wares on the street corners for anyone to hear as Dio Chrysostom remarks: “And I remember once seeing, while walking through the Hippodrome,many people on one spot and each one doing something different: one playing the flute, another dancing, another doing a juggler's trick, another reading a poem aloud, another singing, and another telling
23 Richard Horsley, “Text and Tradition in Performance and Writing”, Vol. 9 (Oregon: Cascade Books),
2013, 2-3.
24“Ancient History Sourcebook: Suetonius (c.69-after 122 CE): The Divine Augustus, #78” last modified
October 1998, http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy.html.
16
some story or myth; and yet not a single one of them prevented anyone else from attending to his own business and doing the work that he had in hand.25”
The question remains, why were stories told? The obvious reason would be to entertain people and pass the time. Since the first century culture was not burdened with the modern technological means to entertain themselves. Apuleius describes this in his work,
The Golden Ass as he states “when I heard, I desired to heare some newes, and said, I pray
you masters make me partaker of your talk, that am not so curious as desirous to know all your communication: so shall we shorten our journey, and easily passe this high hill before us, by merry and pleasant talke.”26 However we also learn from Theon’s Progymnasmata that storytelling also served educational purposes: “Some of the ancient poets call fables
ainoi some mythoi. Prose writers most often call them logoi rather than mythoi and thus
refer to Aesop as a logopoios, and Plato, in a dialogue on the soul, sometimes uses the word
mythos, elsewhere logos. A mythos is said to be a certain kind of logos since the ancients
said that “to speak” was mytheisthai. It is called ainos because it also provides some
parainesis (“advice”). The whole point is useful instruction.”27
Similarly, Plato in his Republic also echoes this stating that storytelling made learning more palatable to the people “Perhaps it’s for this reason that we must do everything to insure that what they hear first, with respect to virtue, be the finest told tales for them to hear.”28 For Plato, storytelling is a great means to teach about morals or instill values or demonstrate his teachings. Pliny demonstrates what Plato is saying quite well in his letter to Avitus29, we also see this in the Jewish practices at temple where Scripture would be read aloud as a means of instruction, or with Jesus using parables to teach invaluable lessons to his disciples and followers. A concrete example of this is expressed by Strabo in his Geography:
25“Dio Chrysostom, The Twentieth Discourse: On Retirement, 20:10” last modified June 2012,
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Dio_Chrysostom/Discourses/20*.html
26 “The Golden Ass: by Lucius Apuleius “Africanus”, Chapter 1 Line 20” last modified January 2013,
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1666/1666-h/1666-h.htm
27 Alexander Kennedy, “Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric”, (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 24.
28 Plato, “The Republic”, trans. Allan Bloom (Harper Collins, 1968), 378 29 Pliny Letters 2.6.6
17 In the first place, I remark that the poets were not alone in
sanctioning myths, for long before the poets the states and the lawgivers had sanctioned them as a useful expedient, since they had an insight into the natural affections of the reasoning animal; for man is eager to learn, and his fondness for tales is a prelude to this quality. It is fondness for tales, then, that induces children to give their attention to narratives and more and more to take part in them. The reason for this is that myth is a new language to them — a language that tells them, not of things as they are, but of a different set of things. And what is new is pleasing, and so is what one did not know before; and it is just this that makes men eager to learn. But if you add thereto the marvelous and the portentous, you thereby increase the pleasure, and pleasure acts as a charm to incite to learning. At the beginning we must needs make use of such bait for children, but as the child advances in years we must guide him to the knowledge of facts, when once his intelligence has become strong and no longer needs to be coaxed. Now every illiterate and uneducated man is, in a sense, a child, and, like a child, he is fond of stories; and for that matter, so is the half-educated man, for his reasoning faculty has not been fully developed, and, besides, the mental habits of his childhood persist in him. Now since the portentous is not only pleasing, but fear-inspiring as well, we can employ both kinds of myth for children and for grown-up people too.30
All of these examples are pointing us towards a single conclusion about the function of stories: stories bring the listeners into their world; the audience associates itself with the environment, the characters and the situations. Where knowledge and reasoning fail, stories will prevail upon those being taught (women, children, the un-educated, as Strabo explains further in his texts). The audience responds to the actions and dialogues taking place; they are systematically enveloped in the tale and transformed, as well as instructed by the tales being told.
In the cultural situation of the first century, stories are the most effective means of teaching and educating the masses. Once again, it comes down to the concept of a paradigm shift. We must remember that the dominance of our modern print culture is not to be imposed. Thus, storytelling is the oldest means of information transmission. Joanna Dewey comes up with three general groups of storytellers: “street performers, who traveled about
30“Strabo Geography, 1.2.8” last modified September 2012,
18
eking out a very marginal existence; a somewhat higher-status group, who told religious and secular stories outside temples and synagogues, entertaining and teaching people; and, finally those who did not make their living at it, but who were know in their village, town or region as good tellers of tales.”31
Built around a tradition
Tradition plays an important part in the conceptualization of an oral performance, especially in its so called composition. We learn from Parry Lord that tradition is a compositional technique in oral formulaic theory. This is important when considering a text from the perspective of performance criticism. Performance criticism, applied in a literary setting, differs greatly in its application from its biblical counterpart. To expound upon this, when using performance criticism on a Shakespearean text, one takes into account the existence of a first manuscript and a first performance; to these can be applied the very vague and controversial title of "original". To say the least, if one is working with the works of Shakespeare, the existence of the folio and the performance of the play for the first time can be understood to be point "A" from a spatial temporal point of view of the performative and creative act. In Shakespearean literature, scholars can work from point "A" and move forward knowing that there is truly “an initial” moment of textual and performative spatial temporal existence to work from. However, when one works with the Gospels, biblical scholars are not guaranteed the existence of an original text. Rather, a spatial temporal point "A" does not exist in biblical scholarship; there is no traditional "original" text. What does exist is a "Jesus" tradition that was circulating in the first century.
Similarly to what Albert Lord presents on Yugoslavian folktales, this "Jesus" tradition circulated around and was known by many. It is from this oral tradition that the Gospel authors formed the individual Gospel traditions which began circulating in certain communities, groups and traditions. Therefore, every performance of a text was in itself an "original" version; for it was taken for granted that the speaker or performer would adapt, modify or change the performance of a story depending on his own desires, the crowd
19 around him, the location and a multiplicity of other factors. Consequentially, the written version of the texts that we have in hand are a snapshot in time and space of a specific performance, performed by a specific performer, at a specific time, place and for a specific crowd. The moment any of these variables change we are again presented with a different version and a new original piece. This could account for some of the variations we are presented with in the differing manuscripts we have uncovered from the past. Another explanation is that the author might have put down in text, or have been commissioned to do so, not a performance but the tradition that was circulating around orally as he had understood said tradition. This situation would take into account the key elements of the tradition, commonly found circulating within the Christian community at the time.
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Chapter 2 Biblical Performance Criticism
The social, historical, and cultural environment of the first century seems to clearly permit nothing more than an oral culture of transmission, education and sharing when it would come to the documents of its time. Much of the work in biblical performance criticism in recent years and evidence born from this work is tied to the Gospel of Mark and the Pauline corpus. The means and methods of analyzing how the linguistics and compositional methods of these texts were used to demonstrate that Mark and the Pauline corpus were composed in performance, by the members of Biblical Performance Criticism (BPC)32 branch of the SBL, will be echoed over the next sections. The next six parts will summarily examine various facets of the linguistic devices, compositional methods, tools and formulas of the Gospel of John that point to its composition in performance.
The process of analysis, for the Fourth Gospel, will be broken down as such: first we will analyze the story pattern in John as a dramatic rise and fall. This will therefore lead into the second element of demonstrating the story pattern in John as performance tradition by examining the use of deixis, indices of movement and indices of setting (specifically mimetic and diegetic space) in the Johannine text as evidence of its composition in performance, as well as the continuous use of οὖν by the Johannine author as a means of creating temporality, spatiality and performative flow to the Fourth Gospel. These two elements will provide us with the structure of the Fourth Gospel, as it will demonstrate the framework of the dramatic structure of the Johannine plot and how this framework is indicative of an oral performance, rather than that of a written narrative meant to be read. Thirdly, we will break the Gospel of John down into acts and scenes, following performative techniques rather than the traditional medieval division of the text. We will fourthly examine a scene of action in the Gospel of John. Fifthly, we will analyze the “I am” statements as subjective construct of Jesus’ identity. Sixthly, we will examine how the Gospel of John is composed for memory from the perspective of neuroscience, neurobiology, and neuropsychology.
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Examining the Nature of the Johannine Plot as Dramatic Rise and Fall
The performative nature of the Fourth Gospel is interesting in opposition to that of the synoptic tradition. Though performative in nature, the Synoptic Gospels have a simple plot structure. What this signifies is that the plot for the Gospel of Mark, Matthew and Luke move uniformly downwards towards the crucifixion of Christ. The Gospel of John on the other hand, has a plot that is complex in nature. Unlike the Synoptic texts, in the Fourth Gospel there is a change of fortune, a reversal of the plot, a peripetia, and there is a moment of recognition, an anagnorisis. What this implies is that the Gospel of John is dramatic and tragic in nature. Thus the performative means of the Johannine Gospel would be different in nature than that of the Synoptic texts. This diagram below represents visually what I mean. The vertical line of the diagram represents the changes that occur, while the horizontal line represents the performative time of the plot. In light of this, the red line would represent the plot line of the Synoptic Gospels. It moves uniformly downwards from the beginning of the Gospels to their end. There are no changes that occur throughout the temporality of the performance. Jesus moves towards his death in a continuous line in each of these Gospels.
Simple Plot
Chapter 2 Wedding at Cana
End
Chapter 19 to 21 crucifixion, death and resurrection Chapter 12 the end of Jesus’s public ministry
A B C D Performative time Beginning
Change that occurs
Chapter 5 violation of the Sabbath
Peripetia
E Complex Plot
23 However, this is not the case in the Fourth Gospel. Rather, the Gospel’s plot follows the pattern of tragedies and dramas. In the first four chapters of the Johannine narrative, Jesus is praised and acclaimed as he is given divine titles: Messiah, Son of God, King of Israel, and Saviour of the world (to name a few). He is praised for his miracle as the wedding of Cana and is sought after by Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. This is presented by the incline of the graph. However, in chapter 5, the tone of the narrative changes; rather than being praised for the miracles he is doing, the Jews are seeking to kill him now in 5:18 “the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him”. This is similar to Oedipus in Oedipus
Tyrannus for Oedipus is first proclaimed king; he is then rejected and ostracized. Othello is
another example one can use, in Act III scene 3 Othello is deceived by Iago, as Iago attempts to corrupt Othello; the peripetia (which occurs at line 260) is indicated by the language used by Othello as it is transformed from weak and meek to a language that uses diabolical and physical imagery (as demonstrated by line 302). Hamlet has a similar reversal in act III scene 3 when Hamlet King Claudius is praying and it is an opportune moment for him to kill him.
Now might I do it pat, now he is praying; And now I'll do't. And so he goes to heaven, And so am I reveng'd. That would be scann'd. A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send To heaven.
Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge! He took my father grossly, full of bread,
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May; And how his audit stands, who knows save heaven? But in our circumstance and course of thought, 'Tis heavy with him; and am I then reveng'd, To take him in the purging of his soul, When he is fit and seasoned for his passage? Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent. When he is drunk asleep; or in his rage; Or in th' incestuous pleasure of his bed; At gaming, swearing, or about some act That has no relish of salvation in't- 2375
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven, And that his soul may be as damn'd and black
24
As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays.
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days. Exit. (2358-2379)
Where Othello’s peripetia develops over a multiplicity of lines, Hamlet’s is rather quick. Nevertheless, the result is the same; Hamlet goes from wanting to Kill Claudius to realizing that doing so at that moment he would not be avenging his father, as Claudius would be going to heaven. In not killing Claudius in this scene, Hamlet is the cause of the death of his mother, Laertes, Ophelia and himself. The tragedy hinges on this aspect in a similar way the Fourth Gospel hinges on the reversal of the acclamations and praise received by Jesus, to the questioning and doubting of who he is “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” (John 6:42) Peripetia is the break we see in our diagram, from the upward motion begun by the plot of the Fourth Gospel to the downward motion towards the death of Jesus.
Anagnorisis is used throughout the Johannine plot; as Culpepper states, the story of
the Fourth Gospel is “a death struggle over the recognition of Jesus as the revealer.”33
Anagnorisis permeates the Johannine plot, which is significant to the tragic aspect of the
text as well as the performative axis. Recognition in the Fourth Gospel is very interesting in the context of an oral culture, for it is a mental action that has to be acted out upon a stage when it is used in a performance, as Jo-Ann Brant states in her work:
“Recognition is a cognitive act and therefore something private. In a narrative, an omniscient narrator can reveal what occurs in a character’s head. In a performance piece, recognition must be played out on the dramatic and theatrical axis so that the audience can see or hear the event happen. Two of the principle means of making it visible are the action that follows and the way that a character speaks when the moment of recognition occurs.”34
33 Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel, 84 34 Brant, Dialogue and Drama, 51
25 Thus, in a performative narrative there is a relation between the plot and anagnorisis; in John recognition demonstrates a division in the social construct of the text between those who accept Jesus and those who do not. For when a character recognises Jesus they must rearrange their relationship with others in similar fashion to Othello and Hamlet (peripetia and anagnorisis occur together in those scenes). Consequentially for the Johannine characters, John the Baptist must decrease, Nicodemus must be from Galilee, and the blind man is chased out by his own people and shunned by his parents. The social conflict of the Gospel of John makes visible anagnorisis when it can be determined if a character is a renegade to the social status quo. In a performance this is made visible and audible through the performing of emotions or their description by the storyteller.
This is what we get in the Gospel of John, it is a performance of the act of recognition, as is demonstrated in Chapter 20 when Mary recognizes Jesus:
They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” (20:13-15)
The repetition of the question “Woman why are you weeping” is a performative device which provides Jesus with a disguise, aligning him with people who would have no relationship with her and therefore no knowledge of what has occurred. It is to be noted that there is another performative device: Jesus does not present himself as someone she would be able to recognize in the first place. There is therefore no link that can be made between Jesus and the source of Mary’s sorrow. This is another theatrical device as it permits the character of Mary to express her sorrow on stage in the form of a dialogue rather than be provided by a narrator. This expression of grief begins the shift to recognition in the following verse “Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).” (20:16). Echoing the tradition in Greek performances upon such occasions, Jesus and Mary embrace. This is key to demonstrating the performative and dramatic nature of the Fourth Gospel for “in classical tragedies the
26
embrace makes visible on the theatrical axis the fact that the character who has come to a new understanding feels great joy and affection for the one whom she now holds.”35 Not only does the anagnorisis demonstrate that the plot and nature of the Johannine text differs greatly from the Johannine tradition; it also indicates that the text is performative in its nature. For, if the Johannine text was a written work on inked pages, the representation of this scene would have differed greatly.
Examining the language of the Fourth Gospel as performance tradition:
Performing a story from the New Testament tradition in the first century differs greatly from what we, as modern literate readers and audiences, are used to. A key component of a performance lacked in first century oral performances: New Testament texts were performed without stage direction and with minimal or no scenery at all, this would follow the Greco-Roman cultural norm. The words spoken by the performer are the predominant devices by which the time and place of the story is represented and by which actions and movement are accomplished. The world of Jesus and the events which took place in it exists within the words that are articulated in a performance. Thus, as an audience we must ask ourselves what is being brought before our eyes by the characters of the tale. In the case of the Fourth Gospel, it is through the speech of Nicodemus, Disciples, Jesus, Samaritan woman, Mary, etc. that the performer(s) can orient their audience to the space of the stage and the world of the Fourth Gospel that exists beyond its construct. Through the speech of the performer, objects appear before the eyes of the audience, gestures are anticipated and performed, the dramatic construct of the Fourth Gospel unfolds through speech-acts. It is clear that dialogue and direct speech are significant elements of the Fourth Gospel; it is their predominant presence that requires an analysis of the role that language partakes in completing a multiplicity of tasks in a single literary context.
Speech as Gesture
A key component of speech as gesture is called deixis, which signifies indicating or pointing out. Deixis is used in a multiplicity of ways in a performance; as it pertains to the
27 Fourth Gospel, these ways can be broken down into four distinct categories. The first category is personal deixis; it is subjective in nature as it translates the speaker’s role in a speech act into a visual event through personal, possessive or demonstrative pronouns. The meaning and effect of a personal deixis will vary depending on the person (first, second, or third) and the context. The second category is temporal deixis, which is expressed in time adverbials such as: “now, then, soon, today, tomorrow, etc.” The third category is spatial deixis; it indicates the speaker’s location during a speech act, as well as reference to objects in light of his position on the stage. The last category is modal deixis, which refers to the ambiance or attitude. There is also social deixis (which refers to one’s social status) and discourse deixis, however these are not necessary to the examination of the Fourth Gospel. The Johannine author uses deictic language and gestures in the Fourth Gospel in ways that are particular to drama and ancient Greek performances, rather than use the descriptive words of a narrator to provide the same information. As it pertains to the particular case of the Fourth Gospel, personal and demonstrative pronouns “I, you, this, that, here, and now” serve the deictic function of capturing the audience’s attention, and of identifying the circumstantial features of the performance taking place. This is the concept of a deictic center; this concept refers to the location and time of the speaker when the deictic term is uttered on stage. To explain this, let’s take a look at the Merchant of Venice Act 4, Scene 1 in the 2004 film adaptation36 when the Duke states:
“[…] and then 'tis thought
Thou'lt show thy mercy and remorse more strange Than is thy strange apparent cruelty […]”
From this clip we can determine the deictic center (the speaker) is the Judge, the addressee is Shylock, the location during the utterance is in a court of justice, the time this occurs is during a court hearing and the utterance refers to the redemption of debt. The deictic center can be visually represented by this image37:
36 The video clip can be found at this address http://tinyurl.com/MerchantOfVenicAct4-1e 37 The image is adapted and based on the image found in Brant, “Dialogue and Drama,” 80.
28
The utterances of the performer can only be understood if the audience knows of the deictic center of the speaker during a performance. As the image demonstrates deixis makes real the dramatic subject in space and time. What this signifies, if for example—in the
Merchant of Venice—the roles of the speaker and one being addressed are reversed, than
the deictic center would be transferred to Shylock. As a consequence of this, the reality of the dramatic subject in space and time will be affected in relation to the distal and proximal terms he will use to refer to his environment. Therefore, the deictic terms will change depending on the speaker’s perception of the distance of objects, and his location in space and time. He can express these perceptions by stating this, here, now or that, there, then depending on the perception of the deictic center.
The Johannine text uses deixis to enhance the reception of a text in a performance and bring the audience into the world of the Fourth Gospel. As Jo-Ann Brant expresses “Some aspects of the Johannine narrator’s speech make sense only if decoded on the performance axis, and some represent the space that the narrator occupies as if it were the dramatic space of the characters he describes.”38 A great example of this is the use of the word οὕτως in the Fourth Gospel. When we read the text in English, the word οὕτως is omitted since it is clumsily translated into the English language but also it makes no sense to a silent and private reader. However, in a performative context οὕτως makes plenty of sense as it is deictic in nature and serves a performative function. We have two examples of the omission of this deictic term in our English translations: John 4:6 and 13:25. John 4:6 is
29 written thus in Greek: ἦν δὲ ἐκεῖ πηγὴ τοῦ Ἰακώβ. ὁ οὖν Ἰησοῦς κεκοπιακὼς ἐκ τῆς ὁδοιπορίας ἐκαθέζετο οὕτως ἐπὶ τῇ πηγῇ· ὥρα ἦν ὡς ἕκτη. In English (NRSV) the text reads like this: “Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.” The οὕτως in this sentence would be translated as either “in this way” or “thus”; from the perspective of a silent reader this makes no sense to what we are reading. However, from the perspective of an actor and an audience this is significant. The οὕτως plays a two part role, it informs the actor that he must proceed by acting out a sitting motion, this in turn brings to life the action to the audience and brings them into the fold of the story. This is similarly the case for John 13:25 ἀναπεσὼν ἐκεῖνος οὕτως ἐπὶ τὸ στῆθος τοῦ Ἰησοῦ λέγει αὐτῷ. The NRSV translates it as “So while reclining next to Jesus, he asked him”. Once again the οὕτως can either be translated as “in this way” or “thus”, what is important is that οὕτως indicates motion, it is also a theatrical key that informs the performer that he must act out the movement. The NRSV translation is heavily depended and affected by our print culture and by the way we interact with texts in a silent and private manner. However, the Greek texts indicate motion and thus we should delve deeper into what other sources of speech as gesture may be present in the Johannine text.
Brant explicates an interesting feature of demonstrative pronouns: “The Fourth Evangelist’s penchant for using the demonstrative pronouns ἐκεῖνος and οὕτως as personal pronouns sets him apart from the authors of the synoptic Gospels.”39 When demonstrative pronouns are used as personal pronouns, they take on a deictic role that accomplishes a motion on the performative axis. This is translated on stage by a motion, gesture or action that is completed by the performer, which in turn the verbal gesture permits the audience to visually follow it to the object/person/place that is being indicated. The Fourth Gospel is abounding with examples of this fact: e.g. 6:9 ἀλλὰ ταῦτα τί ἐστιν εἰς τοσούτους. The ταῦτα in this example would be followed by a gesture pointing to the bread and the fish turning the audience’s attention to them. John 2:16 αρατε ταῦτα ἐντεῦθεν, μὴ ποιεῖτε τὸν οἶκον τοῦ πατρός μου οἶκον ἐμπορίου, in this sentence once again ταῦτα would be used to indicate and bring the audience’s attention to the items: cattle, sheep, doves, money changers, which are turning the temple into a market place. 4:13 Πᾶς ὁ πίνων ἐκ τοῦ
