I have my interview with Dr. Allen Christenson set for early next week, so this post is related to another topic related to oral knowledge.
As I've previously mentioned, I've been working as an extra in the church's New Testament movie. The scriptures are coming to life for me as I get to witness the dialogue and and different rhetoric techniques the actors use. I missed class on Tuesday to shoot the scene where apostles Peter and John preach to a multitude of people after Christ's death. They are interrupted mid speech by Roman guards who then arrest them. However, I could feel of their urgency as they finished preaching to the people the message they had prepared. There is power in dialogue, especially in religious speeches/sermons. I got to hear the dialogue 20+ times as I was standing right behind the apostles and it took hours of repeating the same scene to get everything in the scene to the director's desired perfection of expression. This experience has increased my desire to visualize the setting of the scriptures and truly place myself in their day as I study them. Memorizing King Benjamin's speech, provides another opportunity to begin to place my self in the scriptures, giving my understanding another dimension as I fervently recite my verses out-loud.
While filming our group discussion after class yesterday, I began to think about the process of preserving King Benjamin's speech. Someone literally had to record every word as he spoke it with a booming voice across the crowd. They did not have digital recorders back then. I imagine paper was limited too, and the listeners would have to pay fervent attention in order to learn and remember this sacred speech. I have taken this speech for granted as I have read it so many times in the scriptures. However, it really took place as a speech first, and then was written down to share with the people present and preserve for thousands of years for our dispensation to study and learn from today. Amazing.
As I've previously mentioned, I've been working as an extra in the church's New Testament movie. The scriptures are coming to life for me as I get to witness the dialogue and and different rhetoric techniques the actors use. I missed class on Tuesday to shoot the scene where apostles Peter and John preach to a multitude of people after Christ's death. They are interrupted mid speech by Roman guards who then arrest them. However, I could feel of their urgency as they finished preaching to the people the message they had prepared. There is power in dialogue, especially in religious speeches/sermons. I got to hear the dialogue 20+ times as I was standing right behind the apostles and it took hours of repeating the same scene to get everything in the scene to the director's desired perfection of expression. This experience has increased my desire to visualize the setting of the scriptures and truly place myself in their day as I study them. Memorizing King Benjamin's speech, provides another opportunity to begin to place my self in the scriptures, giving my understanding another dimension as I fervently recite my verses out-loud.
While filming our group discussion after class yesterday, I began to think about the process of preserving King Benjamin's speech. Someone literally had to record every word as he spoke it with a booming voice across the crowd. They did not have digital recorders back then. I imagine paper was limited too, and the listeners would have to pay fervent attention in order to learn and remember this sacred speech. I have taken this speech for granted as I have read it so many times in the scriptures. However, it really took place as a speech first, and then was written down to share with the people present and preserve for thousands of years for our dispensation to study and learn from today. Amazing.
Sounds like an amazing experience. Another thing that really stuck with me was that they didn't exactly have iPhones to record the speech on. That's what made it so easy for me, I was able to copy exactly what he said from my recordings. Without such a device, King Benjamin would have had to talk extremely slowly, there would have had to have been outstanding scribes, or King Benjamin would have had to have written it all down before he gave his speech. How we learn today is in such stark contrast with learning of the past, and yet we take so much of it for granted.
ReplyDeleteI didn't see this post until now even though it was posted Saturday... I have no idea how I missed that.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I think it's really cool how you combine your personal spiritual experiences with what we're doing in class. It's always enjoyable to hear about this experience you've had.
Second, I think this oral tradition could also explain why there are so many variations of older texts, especially in the Bible. When we hear something, we generally remember the gist of it, but we don't usually remember it word for word. This oral tradition is one reason why the the four gospels in the Bible differ slightly in wording. Before, I had always thought this was due to language translation and that the different phrasings were therefore no less correct than each other, but now I think I see that there is more to it than that: the people who heard them- and subsequently told them before they were written down- did so without complete accuracy as if they had been playing telephone. In fact, now that I think about it, we don't really have any reason to believe that most of the apostles *could* write. While some individuals in the Bible, such as Luke, who was a scholar of Greek, and probably Matthew, who was kind of a government worker, definitely could write, those who spent their lives on a boat catching fish probably couldn't have. Perhaps that's why such a good portion of the New Testament is written by the same people over and over: not all of the apostles could write!