UNIVERSITY OF DENVER & ILIFF SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY

THE ORAL-DERIVED TEXT OF MARK IN

45




SUBMITTED TO DR. PAMELA EISENBAUM
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE COMPLETION OF THEO 6143,
NEW TESTAMENT SEMINAR: LANGUAGE & TEXT


BY
DANIEL M. YENCICH


DENVER, COLORADO
18 NOVEMBER 2013

1

The present study of the Markan text of
45
is an attempt, however small, at filling the gap that
currently exists between orality studies/performance criticism and textual criticism of the New
Testament. I suggest that the free text of Mark in
45
is a manuscript tradition that reflects the
rich interplay between orality and textuality within the developing media culture of early
Christianity. After situating
45
in this media context, I argue that its singular and distinctive
readings evince certain telltale signs that its Markan text is an oral-derived text which stems from
a continuing performance tradition of the Gospel of Mark in the third century.
Minding the Gap: Media Culture in the Study of Christian Antiquity
In the final pages of Robert Hulls recent The Story of the New Testament Text, the
veteran text critic suggests ten as-yet unexplored avenues for future New Testament textual
research.
1
The list of open-ended questions is varied but largely devoid of surprises. For the most
part, one finds calls for a reinvigorated treading of ground already at least partially surveyed.
Among other things, Hull calls for renewed effort in the study of patristic quotations, the Greek
lectionary text, and the text and early canonical status of Revelation.
2
Worthy projects, to be
sure, but ones which largely require well-worn and familiar tools of the text critical trade. Hulls
penultimate suggestion, however, is striking in its deviance from this pattern:
The interface between orality (or orality/scribality) studies and textual criticism is only
beginning to be explored. The old idea from form criticism that there was a long period
of exclusively oral tradition in early Christianity has been abandoned, but the
phenomenon that ancient literature was mostly consumed (and even produced)
orally/aurally has not been sufficiently explored in biblical studies.
3


Here Hull calls not just for reinvigorated study of an already-established issue in New Testament
textual criticism, but for a paradigm shift in the discipline. By suggesting that textual scholars

1
Robert F. Hull, The Story of the New Testament Text: Movers, Materials, Motives, Methods, and Models
(Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010), 189191.
2
Ibid., 189.
3
Ibid., 190.
2

engage in critical inquiry of oral issues, Hull has done some rather constructive damage to the
definitional boundaries governing New Testament textual criticism. Historically (and
unsurprisingly, given the disciplines name), text critics have dealt almost entirely in matters of
text, not intangibles like orality and oral performance. As the discipline moves forward, however,
Hull calls for a new survey of its boundaries at precisely this juncture.
Thus Hull notices a gap in the discipline: to move forward, textual scholars must grapple
with the realia of orality in Christian antiquity. Yet the gap is really a double lacuna: just as
textual scholarship has not adequately accounted for orality, scholars of early Christian orality
and performance have not moved adequately towards a fuller appreciation of text. As something
of a transition piece, the present study attempts to bridge this gap by keeping a foot in both the
disciplines of textual and performance criticism. Since textual criticism has been a mainstay in
biblical research for well over a century, it needs no introduction. Performance criticism, on the
other hand, is something of a novum in the field and thus bears a short excursus on definition and
method.
Performance Criticism as Critical Methodology
Performance criticism, as defined by one of its strongest proponents, is an emerging
discipline which seeks to reorient the methods by which we study [the biblical texts] in light of
the oral dimensions of the writings.
4
Performance criticism does not supplant the classic critical
methods of the biblical studies canon; it augments them.
5
It is a reorientation of how we
approach the texta paradigm shift from print medium to oral medium that has implications for

4
David M. Rhoads, What Is Performance Criticism?, in The Bible in Ancient and Modern Media: Story
and Performance, ed. Holly E. Hearon and Philip Ruge-Jones, Biblical Performance Criticism 1 (Eugene: Cascade,
2009), 88.
5
As David Rhoads makes clear, performance criticism augments the classical tools of the biblical critics
trade, including historical, textual, source, and form criticisms, as well as the more recently developed
methodologies like rhetorical, narrative, discourse analysis, orality, and ideological criticisms. David M. Rhoads,
Biblical Performance Criticism: Performance as Research, Oral Tradition 25, no. 1 (2010): 166167.
3

the entire enterprise of New Testament studies.
6
Because the question of mediathe conduit by
which a tradition travelsis so foundational, performance criticism and its attendant attention to
the orality of the first and second centuries is a paradigm shift for biblical studies. It is a call to
alter our default setting for approaching and appreciating the New Testament texts.
7

For the most part, however, biblical performance criticism has focused its attention on the
oral origins of biblical texts, and has spilled the most ink over the Gospel of Mark.
8
What is
currently lackingespecially with regard to Markis any sort of sustained inquiry into the
possibility of oral performance of the text beyond its origins. While historical reconstruction of
Marks reception among its earliest audiences has its place, it is a limited inquiry that does not
extend beyond Mark in its textualized form. At some point, the tradition became a text. While
Mark did not become fully fixed once it was written down,
9
there is no denying that it became a
textual tradition nonetheless within a generation or two of its birth. Yet the question remains:
after becoming a textual tradition, did it also continue to exist in oral form as well?


6
Rhoads, What Is Performance Criticism?, 88. Cf. James D.G. Dunn, Altering the Default Setting, in
The Oral Gospel Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 4179.
7
Dunn, Altering the Default Setting.
8
See, e.g., Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and
Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1997); Antoinette Clark
Wire, The Case for Mark Composed in Performance, Biblical Performance Criticism 3 (Eugene: Cascade, 2011);
Whitney Shiner, Proclaiming the Gospel: First-Century Performance of Mark (Harrisburg: Trinity, 2003);
Christopher Bryan, A Preface to Mark: Notes on the Gospel in Its Literary and Cultural Settings (Oxford: Oxford
University, 1997); Richard A. Horsley, Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Marks Gospel (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, 2001); Richard A. Horsley, Jonathan A. Draper, and John Miles Foley, eds., Performing
the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark (Fortress, 2011); Richard A. Horsley, Oral Performance and Mark: Some
Implications of The Oral and Written Gospel, Twenty-Five Years Later, in Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Beyond
the Oral and Written Gospel, ed. Tom Thatcher (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008), 4570; Adela Yarbro
Collins, Composition and Performance in Mark 13, in A Wandering Galilean: Essays in Honour of Sen Freyne
(Leiden: Brill, 2009), 539560; Pieter J.J. Botha, Marks Story as Oral Traditional Literature, in Orality and
Literacy in Early Christianity, Biblical Performance Criticism 5 (Eugene: Cascade, 2012), 163190.
9
D. C Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 124147.
4

Mark & Early Christian Media Culture
Clearly Mark did not cease to exist as some kind of oral tradition once textualized, because the
Markan tradition lived in its transmitting communities as an oral/aural text. As Harry Gamble
makes clear,
While many theorists have proposed that there is a great divide between literacy and
orality, and that the social, cognitive, linguistic, and hermeneutical dynamic of oral and
literate cultures are so distinct as to make them fundamentally incompatible or mutually
exclusive, what we know about the societies of the ancient Mediterranean points in a
different direction. There the oral and the written modes were certainly not incompatible
or mutually exclusive, but co-existed in a complex synergy. This synergy was at work
both in the production and in the use of texts.
10


Indeed, written texts were created to support, rather than supplant, oral delivery.
11
All reading,
including private reading, was oral. Scriptio continua, as found in
45
and all other majuscule
manuscripts, required a special effort and was most easily read phonetically, with the aid of
the ear, such that the sense of the text [arose] only as the syllables [were] pronounced and
heard.
12
Ostensibly, the sense of the text was appreciated by gathered audiences in their
communal reception of it as an oral/aural text.
I suggest that Mark also continued as an oral performance traditionand not just a
publicly read textinto the third century as well. Gamble notes that oral performance of
dramatic texts did not die out in the second and third centuries, but continued in theaters and at
public festivals.
13
The media culture did not immediately change in some Copernican turn from
oral-based to text-based overnight. Writings of this era attest to the persistence of oral
performance traditions as well. Clement of Alexandria indicates a strong preference among

10
Harry Y. Gamble, Literacy, Liturgy, and the Shaping of the New Testament Canon, in The Earliest
Gospels: The Origins and Transmission of the Earliest Christian Gospels - The Contribution of the Chester Beatty
Gospel Codex 45, JSNTSup 258 (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 30.
11
Shiner, Proclaiming the Gospel, 18. Cf. Pieter J.J. Botha, Orality and Literacy in Early Christianity,
Biblical Performance Criticism 5 (Eugene: Cascade, 2012), 15.
12
Gamble, Literacy, Liturgy, and the Shaping of the New Testament Canon, 31. Emphasis mine.
13
Ibid., 32.
5

second-century Christians for oral rather than written traditions about Jesus.
14
Indeed, the
preference for oral delivery is evident in another oft-quoted section of Eusebius in which Papias
(c. 130 CE) makes clear his preference for the utterance of a voice that is living and abiding
over less helpful textual forms (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 3.39.4).
15
In ca. 200,
16
Tertullian castigates
the compiler of The Acts of Paul and Thecla who apparently drew from a continuing oral
tradition in the heaping up of his colorful tale.
17
Finally, Galen, a prominent Roman physician
and philosopher of the latter second and early third century, seems to agree with Papias that
reading out of a book is not the same as, or even comparable to, learning from the living
voice.
18

It thus seems clear that oral traditions retained a valued place in the media culture of early
Christianity. In light of this, Richard Horsley proposes the possibility that through the second
and third centuries Mark, like the other Gospels, continued to be performed orally from
memory.
19
As we shall see, the free text of
45
suggests evidence to support this claim, at least
inasmuch as it pertains to Mark. In turning now to the Markan text of
45
, let us bear in mind
what Parker makes clear: it is not as if the oral Gospel traditions ended at some point in the

14
Shiner, Proclaiming the Gospel, 18. See Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 1.1.9, 14.
15
Yet Papias clearly sees writing as a useful medium of instruction; after all, he is writing a five-volume
book on the teachings of Jesus! Even so, Papias clearly prefers to learn what he can straight from the horses
mouth rather than by reading it from a written source. [] The traditional written word sufficed; the traditional
spoken word more than sufficed. Rafael Rodrguez, Oral Tradition and the New Testament: A Guide for the
Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2014), 12. Emphasis mine.
16
Wilhelm Schneemelcher and Robert McLachlan Wilson, Writings Relating to the Apostles: Apocalypses
and Related Subjects (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 214.
17
Tertullian, De Baptismo, 17. See Dennis Ronald MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for
Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983), 21.
18
Galen, De Compositione Medicamentorum Secundum Locum 6.1, quoted in Botha, Orality and Literacy,
32.
19
Richard A. Horsley, Oral and Written Aspects of the Emergence of the Gospel of Mark as Scripture,
Oral Tradition 25, no. 1 (2010): 104. Egbert J. Bakker makes a similar point with regard to the Iliad: Whoever
wrote the Iliad, or gave orders for it to happen, did not merely write down a poem that was meant to be heard rather
than read, still engaging in what we would call literary communication. Nor did the writing of the Iliadput an end
to the public performance tradition of the Homeric epics. On the contrary, the writing of the Iliad was a masterful
attemptto secure this tradition by regulating the ongoing flow of performances and supplying it with a firm basis,
a model for the rhapsodes act. Egbert J. Bakker, Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1997), 31.
6

second or third or fourth centurythey continued alongside and in support of those written
traditions which grew out of the oral.
20

The Oral-Derived Text of Mark in
45

In this section I will argue that the Markan text of
45
is not only a textual tradition meant for
public reading, but an oral-derived text
21
which shows signs of having been shaped by, and even
created for, a continuing oral performance tradition. In what follows, we explore the texts
structural clues, its free text, and its tendency to signal its oral derivation with the special
language often dedicated to oral performance and storytelling. As we shall see, certain
similarities with another oral-derived text, Homers Iliad, will emerge. These parallels help to
more concretely situate the earliest manuscript of Mark as an oral-derived text meant to support a
continuing performance tradition.
Structure and Memorization: Punctuation as Performers Aid
As a third century Greek manuscript created for public use,
45
is a textual tradition that serves
the needs of an oral audience. Its appearance as an artifact suggests as much.
22
The text is clearly
written on pages well-suited for public readings and everyday use. Further, as Frederic Kenyon
notes, the Markan text of
45
contains an occasional high point punctuation mark added by the
scribe (e.g., , 7:3).
23
Another hand has added more, in heavy dots or strokes above

20
Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels, 102.
21
Following John Miles Foley, I define oral-derived text as texts which may survive only as texts, [but]
have roots planted firmly in oral tradition. John Miles Foley, The Singer of Tales in Performance (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995), xi. Such oral-derived texts may be categorized by a fourfold typology: Oral
Performance, Voiced Texts, Voices from the Past, or Written Oral Poems. See Rodrguez, Oral Tradition and the
NT, 24, 8385.
22
45 is a one-column papyrus manuscript whose contents variously include thirty-two or thirty-three lines
of Greek text per page. Twenty-eight of its extant leaves are housed in Dublin while the other two reside in Vienna.
Its original dimensions measure 25.0 x 20.0 cm. Its shelf number is Dublin, CBL BP I; Vienna, sterreichische
Nationalbibliothek, Pap. G. 31974. See Daniel B. Wallace, Manuscript Description: Gregory-Aland 45 (Dublin).
(Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, 2013), http://images.csntm.org/Manuscripts/GA_P45/P45
(Dublin CBL BP I).pdf. Accessed November 16, 2013.
23
This mark is visible in the plates supplied by Kenyon in Frederic G. Kenyon, The Chester Beatty Biblical
Papyri: Descriptions and Texts of Twelve Manuscripts on Papyrus of the Greek Bible: Fasciculus II: The Gospels
and Acts: Plates (London: Emery Walker, 1934), f.5.v. Readers may wish to compare Kenyons valuable (but
7

the line at the end of a clause.
24
For Larry Hurtado, these marks seem to denote the ends of
clauses and sentences and serve as aids to help facilitate in the public reading of the Markan
text.
25

If, following Hurtado, these marks are assumed to be helps for public lectors, one
wonders at their lopsided use throughout the codex. The marks are present on every extant page
of Mark in
45
and appear a

total of 81 times across ten leaves.
26
Yet they are utterly absent in
the text of Matthew (which is admittedly highly fragmentary) and in the much more extensive
texts of Luke and John. I suggest that these marks are aids for memorization rather than simply
helps for public reading, and are present only in Mark among the Gospels because it lends itself
more comfortably to performance, on account of its relative brevity, fast-paced and episodic
structure, and its lack of extensive didactic material.
27
Whitney Shiner notes that [e]ase of
memorization is greatly facilitated by clear division and artistic structure, which explains many
of the organizing devices used by Mark, such as chiasmus and the use of threefold repetitions to
structure sections of the Gospel.
28
These punctuating marks may function similarly as visual

limited) photographs to the recently-released high-resolution images of 45

and other Chester Beatty manuscripts at
the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts website. Images of 45 may be freely accessed at
http://www.csntm.org/Manuscript/View/GA_P45.
24
Frederic G. Kenyon, The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri: Descriptions and Texts of Twelve Manuscripts
on Papyrus of the Greek Bible: Fasciculus II: The Gospels and Acts: Text (London: Emery Walker, 1933), ix.
25
Larry Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2006), 182n91.
26
Kenyon, The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri: Descriptions and Texts of Twelve Manuscripts on Papyrus
of the Greek Bible: Fasciculus II: The Gospels and Acts: Text, 313.
27
The marks appear frequently once more in the text of Acts and may suggest a similar performance
tradition. Although critical inquiry into Acts as an oral-derived text falls beyond the scope of this study, a few words
can be said about its plausibility. Mitigating against an Acts performance tradition, as with Matthew, Luke, and
John, is the relative length of the text. It is a long document and would require much memorization. But length of
tradition alone does not make or break performance: both the Iliad and Odyssey are considered by classicists to be
oral-derived, and both of these dwarf all of our Gospels. Also, similar to these Homeric texts, Acts of the Apostles
features a dramatic, even epic, storyline of long travels, great peril, and difficult odds stacked against the stories
heroes. Acts seems very much the sort of story that would be performed among early Christian groups and may very
well have had a place similar to Mark in the media culture of early Christianity. All of this invites further inquiry
but, unfortunately, must be left for other studies.
28
Shiner, Proclaiming the Gospel, 109.
8

aids for memory which concretely (rather than artistically or literarily) structure the Markan text
and aid in its memorization for public oral performance.
Tradition & Variance: Oral Performance, Spontaneity, and Audience Expectation
As Philip Comfort notes, the text of
45
is highly varied and does not comport fully with any
established textual family.
29

45
is something of a free textual tradition and thus, for Antoinette
C. Wire, represents an extreme form of what is a general characteristic of early Gospel
manuscripts.
30
Ernest Colwell suggests that the scribe of
45
made no attempt to reproduce
exactly the source from which he worked.
31
The scribe re-creates the Markan narrative with
significant freedomharmonizing, smoothing out, [and] substituting almost whimsically.
32

While Comfort suggests that this tendency may be the scribes attempt at reproducing what he
imagined to be the thought of each phrase of his exemplar,
33
given the persistence of oral
traditions alongside the text, it may be that the free text of
45
reflects the relative freedom of
oral performance in the scribes media cultural milieu. In the section that follows we will explore
various distinctive readings which suggest the limited freedom of oral performance behind the
text.
The freedom of a given performer to alter the tradition in performance is always held in
tension with the boundaries of the inherited tradition. One cannot thoroughly change and so
transgress the tradition in performance, otherwise the performance ceases to be a part of the
tradition. Yet each performance varies slightly: each is unique and authentic, but still part of the

29
Philip Wesley Comfort, Encountering the Manuscripts: An Introduction to New Testament Paleography
& Textual Criticism (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2005), 66.
30
Wire, The Case for Mark Composed in Performance, 35.
31
See Ernest Cadman Colwell, Methods in Evaluating Scribal Habits: A Study of
45
,
66
,
75
, in
Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1969), 106124.
32
Ibid., 106.
33
Comfort, Encountering the Manuscripts, 66.
9

tradition.
34
Michael N. Nagler further clarifies the tension of spontaneity and tradition by
suggesting that the performance tradition was not regarded by ancient performers as a finished
product, a repertoire of unalterable conventions already completed, separate from the minds of
its bearers, but was considered a still-living stream governed by the inherited habits,
tendencies, and techniques already associated with the tradition.
35
Slight variations
spontaneous changes on the part of the performerare tolerated (even welcomed) as long as
they are in keeping with, and do not utterly disrupt, the established tradition.
Such slight, spontaneous variations can be found throughout the Markan text of
45
and
are indicative of its oral derivation. Indeed, in Mark alone there are over 60 points where NA
28

reads against the often expansive and paraphrastic text of
45
. Guided by the knowledge that tere
are dozens more, an examination of a few examples will suffice. At 7:6 the scribe of
45
stacks
up speaking verbs which would otherwise be implied: (And he
answered [and] said to them.; cf. NA
28
, ).
36
Text is a minimalists medium;
it runs on a tight economy of words and resists the stacking of synonyms. The text of
45
simply
does not demand such addition: it makes for quicker reading and retains the same sense to write
And he answered them. Yet the scribes preference tends towards a repetitive style of oral
performance comparable to that of Homer in the Iliad.
37
It is a style which is typical also of Mark
in general.
38

A similar refraction which only minimally affects the narrative is found in a singular
reading at 7:8. Where readers of NA
28
expect to find the traditions () of humans, the

34
Rodrguez, Oral Tradition and the NT, 28. Cf. Shiner, Proclaiming the Gospel, 40.
35
Michael N. Nagler, Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1974), xxiii.
36
As an attempt at a close reading, breathing marks and other accents which are absent in
45
are not
supplied when quoting the manuscript text.
37
E.g., Homer, Iliad 1.43, Thus he spoke, praying ( ...); 1.57, they assembled and
were gathered together ( ).
38
Joanna Dewey, Oral Methods of Structuring Narrative in Mark, Interpretation 43, no. 1 (1989): 36.
10

scribe has supplied the similar commandments () of humans. Once again, the sense of
the story has not been corrupted. Tradition and commandment are semantically-related as
things which govern practice. Furthermore, this replacement of words is clearly not an example
of any sort of scribal error involving the eye, such as misspelling or parablepsis. The scribe has
simply replaced a referent with a perfectly passable synonym. There are, of course, other
examples of this phenomenon throughout the Markan text of
45
, two of which are singular
readings.
39

Such slight variations or refractionsverbal stacking, synonymous replacement, or other
small and spontaneous changesare typical of the Markan text of
45
, as well as

oral
performance and storytelling more generally. Small changes are often made in oral performance,
whether intentionally or unintentionally, based on a performer and his (or her) audience. As
Bruce Rosenburg notes, verbatim memory (remembering and recreating a tradition word-for-
word) is the least frequently used inoral traditions, though it is not unheard of. For the most
part, passages are remembered by piecing together retrievable data, and then by giving them
coherence by lling them out with supplementary information. In other words, performers tend
to create, and audiences tend to listen, for the gist of the tradition unless otherwise motivated,
and not for verbatim wording.
40
Thus the performer is bound by the audience to recreate the
well-known tradition, but is allowed some room for spontaneity in his performance. The Markan

39
Singular readings: At 8:12 in
45
, the generation asks for () rather than seeks ( or ) a
sign. In 9:6,
45
reads rather than (), (Byz.), or (B C* L f
1
28. 33. 565. 579.
700. 892. M lat sy
p.h
). See J. Keith Elliott, Singular Readings in the Gospel Text of P45, in The Earliest Gospels:
The Origins and Transmission of the Earliest Christian GospelsThe Contribution of the Chester Beatty Gospel
Codex P45, Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 258 (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 128.
Other, non-singular (but still instructive) examples include: 7:25 ( ; cf. ,
NA
28
); 7:30 ( ; cf. , NA
28
). At 7:5, the scribe does not replace a word with its synonym so
much as clarify it: unclean, defiled hands ( ) are unwashed [hands] ([],
45
). This addition is
absent in the critical text of NA
28
. These few examples of the free text are joined by dozens more.
40
Bruce A. Rosenberg, The Complexity of Oral Tradition, Oral Tradition 2, no. 1 (1987): 81. Emphasis
added.
11

text of
45
exhibits very clearly this kind of variance while staying true to and ultimately
recreating a faithful rendition of the Markan traditionand is thus suggestive of oral derivation.
Signaling the Performance Arena: Prosody and Epithet
One of the most telling evidences of the oral cultivation of
45
s Markan text is its propensity for
performance-like flourish. In other words, the scribelike a performeris simply trying to tell a
good story. The scribe does so by making use of special language which signals its derivation
from the performance arena.
41
We will examine two instances of this special language: first, a
prosodic interjection into a dramatic Markan scene and, second, an addition of a metonymic
epithet.
A most illustrative example of this tendency, in 5:22 the scribe adds (behold!), and
gives Jairus the synagogue leader a rather dramatic entry into an already powerful Markan
sandwich story.
42
The addition is an interjectional, prosodic particle which is quite at home in
the register of performance or storytelling.
43
Such prosody can have dramaticeven
determinativeconsequences for the reception and interpretation of verbal messages.
44
The
particle heightens the tension and enhances the narrative. is the kind of special language
typically reserved for oral performance or storytelling. As an insertion into the text of
45
, it
assists in rhetorically recreating the oral performance arena from which it derives.
45


41
Performance arena is a technical term used in oral tradition studies to refer either to the actual, physical
site where performances take place, or the place in which readers and/or audiences imagine themselves as they
read and/or experience an oral-derived text. 45, as a text created within a largely oral-aural context, shows signs
of possible derivation from both. Rodrguez, Oral Tradition and the NT, 2728.
42
Other manuscripts also reflect this distinctive addition: A C K N W 0107 f
13
28. 33. 565. 579. 700.1424.
2542. l 2211 M lat bo.
43
Rodrguez, Oral Tradition and the NT, 29.
44
Ibid., 28.
45
Ibid.
12

We turn now to another example of language which signals its performance arena. In
6:22, we find a rare instance when our scribe has provided a correction or maybe an addition
above the line of the text.
46
Where other MSS read , ours reads:
[.
47

is itself already a singular reading, and is corrected or clarified by the addition
of above the line.
48
Without the correction, captures the same sense
that would attain. Thus the correctionif that is what it isis unnecessary:
readers and hearers would know precisely who occupied the royal office simply from narrative
context. To replace with is but the slightest refraction of memory, that
most vital human process in transmission,
49
and does not disrupt the storytelling text in any
way. The variant reading, sans superscript addition, captures the gist of the story and needs no
refining to reflect referential specificity.
Elliott notes, however, that the superscript addition may not be a correction.
50
Since
does not appear to be written in a different hand, and there is no indication that
is to be replaced by it, the reading may be intended by the
scribe and may plausibly be argued to be another instance of performance-derived speech.
is a specific title or epithet which carries metonymic weight and situates Herod in a

46
Elliott, Singular Readings in the Gospel Text of P45, 128.
47
Although Kenyon does not note the presence of the definite article in the superscript addition, an
incomplete omicron does appear to accompany the royal title above the line. Cf. Kenyon, The Chester Beatty
Biblical Papyri: Descriptions and Texts of Twelve Manuscripts on Papyrus of the Greek Bible: Fasciculus II: The
Gospels and Acts: Text, 5. For images, see Kenyon, The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri: Descriptions and Texts of
Twelve Manuscripts on Papyrus of the Greek Bible: Fasciculus II: The Gospels and Acts: Plates, f. 4. r. Compare to
the recently digitized (and much clearer) image of this leaf at Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts,
Manuscript: P45, 2013,
http://www.csntm.org/manuscript/zoomify/GA_P45?image=P45_004b_w2.jpg&page=2#viewer. Accessed
November 16, 2013. Here the probability of the reading is suggested by the clarity of the image.
48
Here Elliott misreads the scribal addition, oddly mistaking a very clear upsilon for an omega and
supplying the reading . Elliott, Singular Readings in the Gospel Text of 45, 130.
49
Rosenberg, The Complexity of Oral Tradition, 81.
50
Elliott, Singular Readings in the Gospel Text of 45, 128.

13

contextually-specific place within the narrative. Similar epithets are applied to important
characters in the oral-derived epic the Iliad, and function as metonymic still points in the action
that swirls about them.
51
Among others, Achilles the swift-footed ( ),
Hektor the divine ( ), and Priam the king ( ) are all key epithets in
the Iliad which, when uttered in performance, summon the entire mythic history associated
with these characters that is implied by the referential phrase.
52
The same may be said of our
scribes King Herod. The naming of Herod with a memorable and metonymically-pregnant
epithet is an established trope of performed and oral-derived texts of antiquity. In this slightest of
spontaneous changes, the scribe includes a performance-derived signal for his listening audience
which summons the history and tradition associated with Herod and his legacy as king.
Conclusion
It is hoped that the present study has achieved what it set out to do, namely to act as a kind of
bridge between the disciplines of textual and performance criticisms. Focusing on one tradition
within a single manuscript, we have attempted to re-describe the Markan text of
45
as an oral-
derived text which draws from and supports a continuing oral performance tradition of Mark. As
we have seen,
45
s Markan text evinces certain signs of such oral derivation: its rudimentary
punctuation may serve as aid to memory; its free text may signal the variance and constraint of
oral performance; and, finally, its occasional tendency towards the special language of
performance signals (and rhetorically recreates) its performance arena. Taken alone, each
characteristic does not suggest much. But taken together, and understood in terms of the media
cultural estuary of the third century, they suggest a plausible new bridge between the great
divide of orality and textuality in early Christianity.

51
John Miles Foley, Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991), 139.
52
Ibid., 149.
14

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