Oral Performance, Popular Tradition, and Hidden Transcript in Q

Book excerpt: This collection of essays pursues two new approaches to Q, the speeches of Jesus paralleled in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The essays in Part One suggest that recent work in ethnopoetics, the ethnography of performance, and theory of verbal art (especially that of John Miles Foley) both complements and challenges standard approaches to the teaching of Jesus. They explore how Q speeches might be appreciated as oral performance that resonates with listeners in a community context by referencing Israelite popular tradition. The essays in Part Two examine how the work of anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott on popular tradition, "the moral economy of the peasant," and "hidden transcripts" may illuminate the social context and political implications of Q speeches. --From publisher's description.