broader scope of earliest Christian history than the (assumed) oral traditions
behind the gospels.
Ancient literacy in antiquity was different in many respects from the form of
literacy practiced in contemporary Western societies. Literate people habitually
read aloud, had texts read to them by slaves, or listened to public readings
(Starr, 1987; Johnson, 2000; Parker, 2009). Owning books had the significant
function of signaling social and intellectual status (Houston, 2009), and reading
was mostly a social activity (Johnson, 2000, pp. 612–15; Parker, 2009; White,
2009): books were read and discussed in bookstores or at dinners and symposia
held in private homes. In a Jewish setting, synagogues and study-houses
also gave opportunities for intellectual exchange about religious literature
(Hezser, 2001, pp. 101–3). When listening to a text and subsequently discussing
it, people encountered literature as an oral/aural rather than as a visual event.
People had to maintain a memory of the text throughout the discussion as
well as they cited other relevant literature from memory. Authoring texts also
involved memory in different ways. The use of written sources was limited by
several factors. First, books were written without visual clues, such as inter-
punction or word division, that would aid the eye infinding particular passages.
Second, the scroll format made it difficult to jump across different parts of a
book tofind a passage or compare different passages. Third, ancients did not
use desks for writing on which they could have laid out scrolls to work with
multiple sources efficiently (Small, 1997, pp. 133–7; Downing, 2000, pp. 174–98;
Houston, 2014, pp. 197–204). Again, they tended to rely on memory (Small,
1997, pp. 156–9) or have slaves who read out sources aloud—which involved an
oral/aural step. Fourth, authors often composed texts in memory and used
dictation to put it into writing (Small, 1997, pp. 160–5). Overall, we can
conclude that reliance on memory was a major characteristic of ancient literacy
(Downing, 2000, pp. 152–73). Insights about the practice of ancient literacy
are highly relevant for forming intuitions about the possible compositional
techniques and activities that could be used in the process that lead to the
formation of the New Testament. Appreciating the technicalities can inform our
understanding of the composition of the texts. Given the considerable role
memory played in ancient literacy, the memory processes relevant for under-
standing textual transmission, discussed in this chapter, were at least partly
responsible for variation and selection in literary composition, as well.
In section 1.2 we have seen that it is often illuminating to think about
cognitive processes being distributed across a network of people and artifacts.
In this sense, we can model ancient literary composition as a distributed
cognitive process. Figure 4.1 shows the components of the system and how
it relies on various cognitive and neuroscientific processes. The diagram does
not include the preliminary steps of excerpting sources, taking notes, and so
on; the additional steps of proofreading, corrections, and preparing copies are
not indicated either.
84 Cognitive Science and the New Testament