Oral and Manuscript Culture in the Bible: Studies on the Media Texture of the New Testament--Explorative Hermeneutics (Biblical Performance Criticism)

Werner H. Kelber

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''Oral and Manuscript Culture in the Bible'' is the fruit of Professor Loubser’s confrontation with how Scripture is read, understood, and used in the Third World situation, which is closer than modern European societies to the social dynamics of the original milieu in which the texts were produced.

“Drawing on a wide range of scholarship dealing with the properties and function of the materialities of oral and scribal arts, as well as oral-scribal interfaces, Loubser unfolds before our eyes and makes manifest to our ears a world of communications in which there are no original texts, let alone original speech, where manuscripts are written to be remembered and read aloud, where scribal products exhibit both a metonymic and a polyvalent quality, where many handwritten documents are oral transcripts—i.e., written records of multiple oral performances—where tradition supersedes individual creativity, where correspondences between Matthew and Luke are not readily taken for signs of literary dependence, where great variability exists in scribal-oral interfaces, and much more. Notably, Loubser’s media criticism, while strenuously focused on the dynamics and processes of ancient world communications, develops vital implications for the theology of the New Testament. New and often surprising insights are gained when matters of Christology, eschatology, soteriology, and ethics, as well as concepts of time, personality, community, and authorship, are examined in light of the media culture of the ancient world. Loubser’s book consistently exposes our frequent media blindness, revealing a historical paradigm that is patently culture bound.”
—Werner H. Kelber, from the Foreword

Professor J. A. Loubser was born in the university town of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He was the great-great-grandson of one of the founders of the University. He completed both his MA in Hellenistic Greek and his doctorate in Theology in New Testament Studies at Stellenbosch University, the latter having spent a year as a DAAD bursary holder in Tübingen, Germany, where he studied under the renowned Peter Stuhlmacher. On his return to South Africa he served in two congregations of the Dutch Reformed Church and became well known for his Reformed criticism of the use of Scripture to support apartheid policies. Seminal in this regard was the publication in 1983 of his book The Apartheid Bible.