| Lectors functioned as the primary individuals through which early Christian texts were communicated to their first audiences. These ancient readers/lectors performed texts to largely illiterate audiences in settings similar to Greco-Roman symposia by following the Greco-Roman conventions of delivery that included gestures and vocal inflection. These lectors were identified by the early churches because they were either literate slaves trained in the conventions of Greco-Roman grammar and rhetoric or were capable of imitating the conventions readily observable in public recitations and art.;In order to determine the conventions the lectors likely employed in performance, this project studies conventions in Greco-Roman speeches, novels, rhetorical handbooks, Progymnasmata, historical treatises, plays, sculptures, reliefs, vases, masks, paintings, and manuscript illustrations. What emerges from this data is a common fund of conventions largely discussed in Quintilian, Cicero, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus that provide criteria for gestures and vocal inflection. While not ignoring evidence from Jewish literature, this project argues that Jewish conventions had been largely subsumed under Greco-Roman conventions by the time of the performance of Acts in the late first and early second centuries C.E.;These conventions can be applied to an early Christian audience's expectations they brought to the performance of the book of Acts. Because the book of Acts contains six explicit gestures, as well as numerous speeches, the book provides an appropriate test case in which to propose how the book may have been performed by a lector following these Greco-Roman conventions. Chapter five provides examples of the gestures that a lector likely used when imitating the explicit gestures in Acts and identifies a number of exegetically significant implicit gestures as well. This chapter also shows how the lector would have used appropriate vocal inflection in prosopopoiia and adventure scenes to enhance the ironic nature of the work and to evoke laughter from the audience. What emerges in the end is a new method that complements other audience-oriented approaches and a way of reading the book of Acts and other early Christian literature with the ancient reader in mind. |
