Before stylus ever pressed against stone or clay, before ink ever stained skin or papyrus, the Word of God spoke. The Word was spoken, and the world was created. The Word was spoken, and covenant was made with Abram. The Word was spoken, and Moses echoed, "Let my people go!" At every point in time when the Word was scribbled on stone or clay or in ink, it was always written in order to be spoken. Just as Ezra read aloud to the people as the Levites explained what he read, the Word of God, even when it was written, was heard by almost everyone who encountered it. Even when it was written, it was written to be heard.

For too long, we have confined the Word of God within our text-centered paradigms. We pose documentary hypotheses and ponder "oral phases" before the Word was solidified into text. But even the ancient texts we have do not tell a story of a solidified standard of word for word stability for the Word of God. The New Testament readers were as comfortable with the divergent Greek translation of Scripture as they were with any Hebrew texts they had. The manuscript evidence from the Desert Scrolls provide a context of multiformity, not rigid stability.

The Word of God is the standard for what is real, what is true, and what is good about all of life. Let's read it today in light of what it was and not what our culture would make it.

What does it mean for us that the texts we have today emerged from an oral traditional culture and not from within a modern, post-Gutenberg, text-saturated culture like what we in the West have experienced for the past two-hundred years?

I was born and raised in Texas in a family of educators - my dad was superintendent and my mom a teacher and counselor.  After graduating from high school, I soon moved to Zephyr Baptist Encampment and served there as Program Director.  I crammed 4 years of college into 5 and graduated from Howard Payne University majoring in Christian Studies. I met Rebekah Mauwmenyo Holt at Zephyr, and, after a little chasing and pleading, I convinced her to marry me in March of 2005. I was also called to First Baptist Church of Edinburg as Youth Pastor in 2005 and began my seminary studies.  I crammed 3 years of seminary into 7 and received my Master of Divinity degree from Logsdon Seminary in August of 2012. Somewhere in those 7 years Rebekah and I had a beautiful girl named Zoe, and a boy, a comedian in the making, named Liam.  First Baptist Church of Edinburg called me as Senior Pastor in January of 2012, and we served in that capacity for 5 wonderful years. In June of 2017  Beka and I believed God was moving us to California to pastor Grace Church and work on a PhD in Old Testament Studies through B.H. Carroll Theological Institute. Not long after arriving here, we discovered we were going to have another little boy, Baxley. We have been serving here blindly/faithfully ever since. 

When I discovered recent theories of orality and textuality, I thought, "This changes everything for me!" I was reading The Jesus Legend, by Paul Rhodes Eddy and Greg Boyd, deepening my understanding of the historicity of the Synoptic Gospel tradition. But when they began to talk about recent studies in oral traditional cultures and how those cultures actually share and preserve their important traditional materials, I was possessed with an awareness that these theories did not line up with my views of the Bible.

I immediately began to direct my PhD studies toward this aim. Now, over ten years after I first began pursuing this line of inquiry, I am more convinced than ever - This changes what the Bible is and how we should read it.