Scripture in the reader’s voice
John Hobbins has an excellent post on the voices that mediate scripture to us, from the voice of the author, through the parental story-teller, to the synagogue cantor. So often, the meaning of scripture for us is the one we were first told, whether by the echoes of the childhood story, the way it was read in the liturgical assembly, the particular point of a gifted preacher, or the phrasing of the translation with which we are most familiar.
His comments prompt me to reflect how easy it is for us to overlook the role of speaking (or singing) in the text we tend to come to as written scripture. Perhaps this is most obviously noted in the Hebrew Bible, where the vowel marks give reading guidance, and the cantillation marks intoning advice. Yet it ought to be obvious also in the gospels, where we sometimes have no idea what tone of voice a story might have been told in.
Consider the story of the Prodigal Son, and in particular these lines, in which I have inserted instructions for the reader:
But when he came to himself he said,
(Pondering) ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger!
(Determined) I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him,
(Sarcastic, dramatic, thinking of Dad as a soft touch) “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”‘
(Dryly ironic) So he set off and went to his father.
(Normal) But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. (Luke 15:17-20 NRSV)
If read in this way, then “repentance” comes in the father’s act of restoration, rather than in a preceding act of contrition. That in turn would fit with the preceding parables: what after all was the sheep doing to get found by the shepherd? Nothing. Was the lost coin jumping up and down saying “I’m under the sideboard”? I don’t think so. But we have become accustomed to the voices that tell us what repentance means, and read the story as voicing contrition.
Obviously, I have no way of knowing whether the voice in which I have always been told that story, or the voice I have here put on for telling it, is the voice in which Jesus spoke it. At most, I can make a plausible case that it is the voice Luke tells it in. But in the end, the voice is part of the meaning.