First-Century Gospel Storytellers and Audiences: The Gospels as Performance Literature

These essays explore the reconception of the Gospels as first-century compositions of sound performed for audiences by storytellers rather than the anachronistic picture of a series of texts read by individual readers. The new paradigm implicit in these initial experiments is based on the recent realization that the majority of persons—85 to 95 percent—were illiterate and experienced the Jesus stories as members of audiences. Either from memory or from memorized manuscripts, the evangelists performed the Gospels as an evening’s entertainment of two to four hours. The audiences were predominantly addressed as Hellenistic Judeans who lived in the aftermath of the Roman-Jewish war. When heard whole, the Gospels were vivid experiences of the central character of Jesus. These studies of audience address and the interactions between first-century storytellers and audiences reveal a dynamic performance literature that functioned as scripts for an ever-expanding network of storytelling proclamations whose envisioned horizon was the whole world. When the Gospels were told at one time from beginning to end, they invited the listeners to move from being peripherally interested or initially opposed to Jesus to identifying themselves as disciples of Jesus and believers in him as the Messiah.

Thomas E. Boomershine is Professor of New Testament emeritus at the United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio. He is the founder of the Network of Biblical Storytellers, International and founder and past chair of the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media group in the Society of Biblical Literature. He is the author of The Messiah of Peace: A Performance Criticism Commentary on Mark's Passion-Resurrection Narrative and Story Journey: An Invitation to the Gospel as Storytelling.