Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 175:698 (Apr 2018)
Article: A Performance-Critical Analysis Of Revelation 1:5b–8
Author: David R. Seal

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A Performance-Critical Analysis Of Revelation 1:5b–8

David R. Seal

David R. Seal is an adjunct faculty member at Cornerstone University, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Abstract

Understanding that biblical texts were intended for oral delivery, the performance critic attempts to discover how the authors constructed their texts to arouse a listener’s emotions and solicit audience engagement and participation. This performance-critical reading of Revelation 1:5b–8 suggests that the passage was recited responsively by the lector and audience. The author engaged the audience using interjections and allusions to Scripture. Recitation of the passage would have aroused emotions of reverence, gratitude, confidence, hope, grief, awe, fear, joy, guilt, and shame.

The literacy rate in the first century likely ranged from 10 to 20 percent, “depending on the culture and the subgroup within the culture that is being discussed.”1 As a result, most of the original recipients of the writings that later became the New Testament heard the texts recited. The author of Revelation 1:3 remarks, “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear.”2 Harry Maier describes it as “oral literature” that, like other rhetorical texts from Greco-Roman antiquity, “deploy[s] writing in the service of oral performance”

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to elicit an emotional response from listeners.3 The seven congregations receiving Revelation were not readers of the text, but audiences witnessing an oral recitation.4

Performance criticism is based on understanding that the biblical texts were originally intended for oral delivery.5 The performance critic studies them as oral performances presented to audiences in a predominately oral culture. Authors of literature that was intended to be spoken attempted to arouse a listener’s emotions and used various methods to solicit audience engagement and participation. Performance criticism attempts to appreciate the conventions of orally performed texts—features often neglected when employing other methodologies.6

This study investigates Revelation 1:5b–8 through the lens of...