My First Experience Performing

by Margaret E. Lee

I used to think that I appreciated the importance of performance because I have long been interested in the spoken character of the New Testament and have long thought that its compositions are organized by sound rather than by concepts. But after spending more than a decade studying the sounds of the Sermon on the Mount, I received a great gift: the challenge to perform the Sermon. My work up to this point had focused on sound because I had become convinced that the New Testament's first audiences experienced these compositions almost exclusively by hearing them spoken aloud. Sound, I reasoned, must organize the compositions and train a listener's ear, much like music. But for all my appreciation of sound and its communicative power, I had never attempted a performance of the Sermon. So at the 2008 meeting of the SBL, David Rhoads laid down the gauntlet. "You have to," he said. I realized he was right. So when I was invited to speak at Snowstar's annual conference in 2009, I saw my opportunity and began preparing my performance.

Performance Criticism Meets Perspective Criticism:

Critiquing the Use of Point of View in David Rhoads’ Performance of Mark

By Gary Yamasaki, Columbia Bible College, Abbotsford, BC

Presented at the Synoptic Gospels Section, SBL Annual Meeting in New Orleans, November 23, 2009

It is an undeniable fact that a live performance of a biblical text has the potential of making a significant impact on its audience.  The nature of the impact felt by the audience will, of course, be determined by the interpretation of the text that has informed the crafting of the performance; and the sounder the interpretive work, the better the chance the impact felt by the audience will match the impact intended by the narrative itself.

However, the soundness of the interpretative work informing the crafting of performances of biblical texts must be called into question when it is realized that one crucial component of narrative interpretation-the literary concept of "point of view"-has never been afforded any serious attention.  In this paper, I will first lay out the basics of a methodology for analyzing point of view in biblical narratives--what I call "perspective criticism"--and then will explore the significance of point-of-view analysis for the performance of a biblical narrative.