Delivering from Memory: The Effect of Performance on the Early Christian Audience

by William D. Shiell

When the New Testament was read publicly, what effect did the performances have on the audience? In Delivering from Memory, William Shiell argues that these performances shaped early Christian paideia among communities of active, engaged listeners. Using Greco-Roman rhetorical conventions, Shiell's groundbreaking study suggests that lectors delivered from memory without memorizing the text verbatim and audiences listened with their memories in a collaborative process with the performer. The text functioned as a starting place for emotion, paraphrase, correction, and instruction. In the process, the performances trained and shaped the character of the reader and the formation of the audience. The lector's performance functioned as a mirror for the audience to examine themselves as children of God. These conventions shaped the ways lectors performed Jesus. Just as the New Testament reflects many titles for Jesus, so the canonical form of the Gospels offers many ways Jesus was performed in the ancient world. By interpreting through the eyes of performance, we join a conversation that has existed since the formative stages of the Christian movement. By performing with the ancient audience, we shape the character of reader and audience through the emotions, rhetorical figures, and memories in the text. We raise new questions about audiences in the ancient world and interpret stories through the ears of performance.

152 pages, Paperback

First published September 16, 2011

Reviews

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

All I knew about the book was that one of the top performance criticism scholars wrote it and I was delighted to read it. It’s a great book and I highly recommend it.
It’s amazing to see what all goes into a performance. Things like the performers emotions, audience interactions, the process of memory and then the audience plays a key role. They interrupt and add to the emotion, virtue formation, being communal, discussing and meditating on the words. Performance was complex and it was cool to see the range of literature you drew from like Quintilian, Aristotle, Cicero as well as extra biblical literature like Enoch and Esdras.
But with the performance pieces in the New Testament it was cool to see details that I usually gloss over but have such importance, especially in the role of performance. Like Jesus’ use of delivering a message, or hand gestures or body postures throughout Acts, or the role of Timothy doing the art of public reading.
And then it was cool to see how the role of performance shapes the audiences memory and interpretation, which was nicely illustrated through Stephen who enraged people during his presentation of Israelite history, but stirred up boldness in the retelling of the story. It was nice to expand beyond a silent reading of the text in privacy and see how oral transmission of it brings the community together and emphasizes how these texts were meant to be read aloud.