Thinking about Oedipus Rex through the lens of testimony leads us down two possible roads: to the courtroom or to church.
In contemporary usage, testimony has an important legal dimension as a form of evidence in a court of law. If we think of Oedipus's inquiry along legal lines, we see that some witnesses present their information freely or even accidentally, while others testify under pressure, knowing full well the consequences of their words. Some figures, like Creon, sound a bit like lawyers. In a courtroom and in this drama, testimony leads to the truth of what really happened. Testimony in Oedipus Rex gets us to the bottom of things so that justice can be served, even if that means the judge's own condemnation.
On the other hand, testimony has an important religious significance in the Christian tradition, which I'd like to spend more time exploring. Many churches today, especially in the Evangelical tradition, use personal testimony as a way of spreading the good news about Christ. In religious testimony, an individual comes forward to tell a story about how God has changed their life. Religious testimony is an act of witnessing and a profession of faith, and its purpose is to open the hearts of those who are listening and convert them to the faith. Within the Christian tradition and ritual, testimony has a truth-telling function (like in courts of law), but the truth being told is about how the transcendent and invisible power of God manifests itself in the world. Testifying religiously often helps Christian believers cope with tribulations and work through traumas by working them into a story that tells a new truth about these events.
Although testimony can be a simple story told by an individual, it often evolves into something more – narration becomes a performance, and this heightens the emotional stakes and gets the audience involved. Song and dance make testimony into art. Here are two examples of Christian religious testimony from recent times:
1. The Brown Sisters use testimony as part of their musical ministry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9WKJdsLqkA
2. Kanye West's song "Low Lights" from The Life of Pablo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj0C2oet2r0) which samples religious testimony from Kings of Tomorrow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1inbG7Lqxc)
Testimony is one of the major points of intersection between Greek Christianity and the Christian tradition, going back to the first centuries CE. Beginning with the first sightings of the risen Christ and the empty grave with the stone rolled away, the scripture of the New Testament (note the similarity of testimony / testament), has made use of the eyewitness accounts of the followers of Jesus as the primary way of transmitting the Gospel. These eyewitness accounts as they appear in the written scriptures, according to Biblical scholars today, are often based on the common trope of "messenger speeches" in classical Greek tragedy. That is, some of the writers of the Gospels (especially Mark) were deeply influenced by the power of the messenger speeches in Greek tragedy to elicit emotions and transmit the truth of what really happened in the off-stage space.
Whereas in Greek tragedy – Oedipus Rex being our favorite example – the message being transmitted from off-stage to on-stage is about something dreadful that happened in the past, or about violence that has occurred outside the audience's view, the Gospels turn away from suffering and toward redemption: the New Testament is a witness to the good news of Christ's resurrection, and testimony continues to have a positive connotation and associations with miracles throughout the Christian tradition. What remains the same, however, is the importance of the telling of events after the fact of their occurrence. For those of us who were not there to witness the events ourselves, testimony brings them vividly to life before us, as if we had been there ourselves.
--Ella
PS - Here is a little bonus tidbit--- In the Christian tradition beginning in the early Middle Ages, the lives of saints were considered a testimony to the power of God. That tradition is alive and well today, and saints are still being canonized in the Catholic church. One figure on his way to canonization today is Father Augustine Tolton, the first ordained African-American priest in the Catholic church, who founded a church here in Chicago in the late 1800s and served as minister there until his death. Read more about him here: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/fr-augustus-tolton-former-african-american-slave-advances-toward-sainthood-24806
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