on how he preferred the living word and the living witnesses to anything written. We need to heed the warning of H. Gamble that “a strong distinction between the oral and the written modes is anachronistic to the extent that it presupposes both the modern notion of fixity of a text and modern habits of reading. Texts reproduced by hand, as all texts were before the invention of the printing press, were far less stable than modern printed texts because they were subject to accidental or deliberate