A relevance-theoretical perspective on the question of why Jesus never wrote a book

• Patrick Duffley ^[1]
  1. [1] Université Laval, Canadá
• Localización: Word: Journal of the International Linguistic Association, ISSN-e 2373-5112, ISSN 0043-7956, Vol. 65, Nº 3, 2019 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Language and Religion), págs. 154-163
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Many reasons have been given for why Jesus never wrote anything. Some have argued that this was because he, or his audience, was illiterate; some that it was because Jewish rabbis only gave oral teaching; others that it was to avoid the idolatrizing of a divinely authored book. Moreover, given the deep reverence among the Jews for the written word found in the Torah, and the fact that Jesus claimed for himself the same authority as that upon which the Torah was based, it would seem legitimate to ask the question: why did he not seek to displace the Torah by a book of an equivalent or greater authority, like that claimed for the Koran in the Islamic tradition? The goal of this paper will be to bring to the table some linguistic arguments for why Jesus never committed any of his teachings to writing based on certain characteristics of natural language that have been highlighted by Relevance Theory, namely the underspecified nature of linguistic meaning and the consequent need for some way of narrowing down the range of possible interpretations of an utterance, as well as on the decontextualized character of written language.