Memory, Memorization, and Memorizers

This book is about the spoken word. It is about words spoken in the first century of our era and later put down in writing as confirmation of what had been said and done. Here, Marcel Jousse answers his own fundamental question: “How did the human being, placed at the heart of the countless actions of the universe, set about to conserve within him the memory of these actions and to transmit this memory faithfully to his descendants, from generation to generation?” To all oral societies, tradition is memory, and of all oral societies, ancient Galilee, perhaps more so than any other, developed ways and means of capacitating memory to levels we no longer fathom. This book is about how Ieshua’s deeds and sayings were first faithfully recorded in the memory as and when they happened, how they were then faithfully transmitted orally within and without Palestine, and how they were finally faithfully—literally—recorded anew, as oral tradition put in writing.

Edgard Sienaert is Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Africa Studies of the University of the Free State, South Africa. He is the author of two books on Marcel Jousse's anthropology, based on the unpublished 1931-1957 lectures: In the Beginning Was Mimism: A Holistic Reading of Marcel Jousse's Oral Lectures (in French), and In Search of Coherence: Introducing Marcel Jousse's Anthropology of Mimism (Pickwick, 2016).

Edgard Sienaert is Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Africa Studies of the University of the Free State, South Africa. He is the author of two books on Marcel Jousse's anthropology, based on the unpublished 1931-1957 lectures: In the Beginning Was Mimism: A Holistic Reading of Marcel Jousse's Oral Lectures (in French), and In Search of Coherence: Introducing Marcel Jousse's Anthropology of Mimism (Pickwick, 2016).


Werner H. Kelber is the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at Rice University. His publications include Imprints, Voiceprints, and Footprints of Memory (2013) and The Oral and Written Gospel (1983).