Scholarly Reflections
Kelber, Werner H. "Oral Tradition in Bible and New Testament Studies." Oral Tradition 18:1 (2003), 40-42.
Kelber observes that biblical scholarship has generally operated on the assumption that the Bible is a printed work, something that was not conceived of until the technology of the 15th and 16th centuries (Kelber 2003, 40). Form criticism, which arose to deal with the role of orality, has had a strong influence on biblical scholarship, but the discipline is running aground, largely because it, too, makes assumptions which could be taken as "post-Gutenberg." The complexity of the oral and literary environment which brought forth the Bible deserves a more nuanced scholarly approach.
Kelber suggests that "the search for the historical Jesus, the nature of pre-gospel tradition, and the interrelationship among the synoptic gospels" are areas which require special study (Kelber 2003, 41).