What is Biblical Performance Criticism? How does it work?
An article by David Rhoads first published as “Biblical Performance Criticism: What it is and How it Works,” Catholic Theology and Thought 72 (2013) 78–107. It is republished here with the generous permission of the journal.
Biblical performance criticism is the study of the oral telling of traditions in the biblical world. Biblical performance criticism seeks to re-imagine ancient Israel and the early church as predominantly oral and memory cultures, to construct scenarios of ancient performances as means to interpret anew the traditions of the Bible, to reconsider the disciplines we use to study the Bible so as to take account of orality, and to develop steps in a process of performance analysis of biblical texts.