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A Social Semiotic Multi-Modal Approach to Communication Practices in Early Christianity

ABSTRACT Increasingly, New Testament scholars have been calling attention to the interrelationship between spoken words and written words in the rhetorical world of the first century CE. In this essay, I examine these two forms of verbal expression through the lens of social semiotic multi-modal theory as articulated by Gunther Kress. In attending to how spoken words and written words give material realization to meaning through modality as well as how they are employed in systems of meaning making within specific historical, cultural and social contexts, I endeavor to introduce a new level of complexity to our understanding of communication systems in early Christianity and how they were employed to generate meaning. The studies of Pieter Botha on orality and literacy serve as my point of entry for the ancient world.