Sound Matters

Sound matters. The New Testament's first audiences were listeners, not readers. They heard its compositions read aloud and understood their messages as linear streams of sound. To understand the New Testament's meaning in the way its earliest audiences did, we must hear its audible features and understand its words as spoken sounds. Sound Matters presents essays by ten scholars from five countries and three continents, who explore the New Testament through sound mapping, a technique invented by Margaret Lee and Bernard Scott for analyzing Greek texts as speech. Sound Matters demonstrates the value and uses of this technique as a prelude and aid to interpretation. The essays that make up this volume illustrate the wide range of interpretive possibilities that emerge when sound mapping restores the spoken sounds of the New Testament and revives its living voice.

""Sound Matters has set itself the awesome task of transforming typographic space into soundscape. In this, the book has succeeded magnificently. Margaret Lee and the nine contributors are to be applauded for their formidable efforts in forging suitably analytical tools and criteria, and for placing sound mapping on a firm empirical basis. More than merely recovering lost or ignored meanings in interpretation, sound mapping, along with a number of other fields, is clearly driving toward a genuinely new paradigm in biblical scholarship.""
--Werner H. Kelber, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies, Rice University


Margaret E. Lee is retired as Assistant Professor of Humanities at Tulsa Community College. She is the author of ""Sound Mapping"" in The Dictionary of the Bible in Ancient Media (2017) and numerous articles on sound mapping. She is coauthor with Bernard Brandon Scott of Sound Mapping the New Testament (2009). Earlier she also wrote Reading New Testament Greek (1993) with Scott and others.