From Breath to Text: Oral Scripture and the Transition Into Alphabetic Abstraction

For most of human history storytelling and scripture did not live on the page. Our stories lived in shared breath. Scripture and sacred stories were oral, relational, and adaptive. Oral storytelling encourages resilience and adaptation to shifting social, political, and ecological conditions. In oral cultures and the historical oral traditions, we see narratives that are intimately connected to their environments and concerned with right relationship to land. What happens when we start writing our stories down so that they no longer evolve? What happens when we shift from breath to text, from direct relationship to land to abstracted ideograph? We explore the ramifications of turning Jesus as an oral storyteller into a disembodied word written on a page. What if oral culture’s cultivation of resilient community and adaptability is exactly what we need in an age of ecological peril?