Gambl[ing] again, a story of relapse

I've returned to Harry Gamble's Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). But it's okay. I can stop whenever I want to.

The first part of Gamble's fifth and final chapter, "The Uses of Early Christian Books" (203–41), begins with a discussion of the form and function of written texts in early Christian liturgical practice. (Recall that Gamble spent considerable time discussing the form of early Christian texts—as codices [i.e., books]—in a previous chapter, where he postulated the Pauline epistolary collection as the formative influence over the early Christians' preference for the codex over the scroll; see my comments here.) The opening sentence deserves citing here:

Books are written to be read, but they are read for many purposes and in many contexts, and the act of reading varies accordingly. (203)

I have argued elsewhere that what it means to read is, for us, so self-evident that we assume we know what we're looking at when we find people doing it in ancient texts. When Jesus stands up ἀναγνῶναι ("to read") the Isaiah scroll in Luke 4, he must be doing the same thing I do when I read Isaiah 61, right? Of course, he's physically handling a scroll rather than a book; but still, his eyes and his brain are doing the things my eyes and brain are doing, right? Of course, the problem here is that what Luke reports that Jesus read doesn't exist on a page anywhere, until, that is, Luke writes it. If Luke can emphasize the image of Jesus reading the way he does in 4.16–21 and still report a nonexistent text, and all this without any sense whatsoever that anything is amiss, perhaps to read doesn't mean what we think it means. I know, I know: Inconceivable!


Gamble goes on to provide a marvelous explanation of the act of reading in antiquity. He makes a lot of the difficulty presented by scriptio continua ("continuous script"), though I think we need to recognize that no one in antiquity complained of the lack of spaces between words (at least, not as far as I am aware; Gamble certainly doesn't provide an instance of such a complaint). Even so, reading the "relentless march of characters across the lines and down the columns" (203) involved the voice and the ears in a way that "reading" in the modern sense doesn't, as ancient readers "organized [written syllables] as much by hearing as by sight into a pattern of meaning" (204). This aspect of "reading" in antiquity results in a more broadly social dynamic of texts, a social dynamic that vitiates, somewhat, the modern dismay at the shockingly low levels of literacy that scholars have estimated for antiquity since, at least, Harris's landmark study, Ancient Literacy: "the illiterate were as capable as the literate of hearing books read. Thus the absence of literacy had limited consequences in the context of public reading" (205; remember Gamble's phrase, participation in literacy, which I discussed here).

Gamble turns to the function of written texts in the early synagogues as an entrée into the function of texts in the early churches. The relation between Palestinian synagogal practices and the practices of synagogues in the Greek Diaspora is unclear.

It is less clear whether strictly Gentile Christian communities of the first century, though they were often spawned from hellenistic-Jewish missions, adopted synagogue usages. For these reasons it cannot be uncritically assumed that scripture reading belonged from the outset to specifically Christian worship or, if it did, that it played the same role that it did in the synagogue. (212)

Gamble may be right, but we need to remember that we're talking about specifically liturgical (i.e., as part of the worship service) uses of texts. The point is less debatable that the early Christians, like their Jewish neighbors, were from the start oriented toward textual traditions irrespective of whether and/or how written texts functioned as part of their worship. Behind a number of our earliest evidences (Paul [1 Corinthians], Matthew, Acts) are specifically and emphatically textual sources of tradition, even if those sources functioned symbolically more than textually. Paul is emphatic that Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection happened "according to the scriptures," even though he doesn't bother to clarify which, specifically, he has in mind. Matthew famously links to written biblical tradition in his account of Jesus, even to the point of explaining Jesus' return to erets Israel in terms of Hosea (11.1). Acts, too, appeals to written authorities in the disciples' actions in chapter 1, in the first presentation of the gospel in chapter 2, in Paul's denunciation of the Roman Jews in chapter 28, and at nearly every point in between. Whatever the early Christians did in their worship services, they were oriented to their world, at least in part, by means of written texts.

I'm also a little skeptical of an important assumption about written texts that Gamble accepts (uncritically, I might say); in an off-handed comment he says, "the text was fixed" (227). In light of the amazing textual fluidity we find within and between manuscripts, I'm not sure how we can say this. I assume he means that once a manuscript was written, that manuscript was no longer subject to change. This is close to true, though we are awash with ancient manuscripts that have been "corrected" (or simply emended) by later hands, sometimes by multiple later hands. Writing a manuscript was not the same as inscribing a stone tablet or stele. But Luke's citation of Isa. 61 in Luke 4, Mark's reference to "Isaiah" in Mark 1.2–3, James' enigmatic reference to "the scripture" in 4.5, and a host of other examples serve to suggest that if "the [written] text," ἡ γραφή with all its theological freight, "was fixed," its fixity looked and functioned rather differently than the stability of our own printed texts.

Gamble makes another interesting point, especially in the face of the claim made recently by a number of scholars (e.g., Richard Horsley) that written texts were prohibitively expensive. In his explication of "the private use of Christian books" (231–37), Gamble argues that Christian texts were rather widely available to anyone who wanted them and that Christian preachers often expected their hearers to have access to make use of written texts. Indeed, the problem for these preachers was often that not enough of their hearers did so! "Apparently the problem was not that Christian books were especially difficult or expensive to procure for private use, but that few troubled to obtain them, and fewer still to read them" (233). This doesn't suggest that Christians were broadly or usually literate; Origen, for example, "certainly does not assume the literacy of all Christians, but he does presuppose the availability of texts to those who could read" (232). The material costs of written texts, apparently, were not nearly as high a hurdle as the educational costs. Gamble concludes,

It seems clear that literate Christians were able to obtain Christian texts for private reading. Because the matter of their cost almost never comes up, expense does not appear to have been an obstacle. Some cost was involved, no doubt, but it was not prohibitive for most. (237)

Finally, Gamble raises the question of "the magical use of Christian books" (237–41), which provides perhaps the most striking difference between ancient and modern uses of written texts. Gamble rightly rejects the idea that only the common, vulgar populace used texts "magically"; Origen, John Chrysostom, and Augustine all attest such uses. The issue is interesting, and Gamble's discussion of it is helpful if only too brief.

Overall, this is a great book that deserves its near-classic status. For those of you interested in media criticism, literacy, the form and/or function of written texts in Christian antiquity, or a host of related questions, I highly recommend Gamble's book.

archaia in Ignatius

Ignatius, bishop of Antioch in the early second century CE who was marched to Rome and (presumably) martyred, records an interesting encounter with some of his opponents:

I heard of some people who said, "Unless I find it in the archives, I do not believe it in the gospel. When I told them, "It is written," they replied, "That is the question." But for me the archives are Jesus Christ; the sacred archives are his cross, his death, and his resurrection, and the faith that is granted through him.

ἤκουσά τινων λεγόντων ὅτι Ἐὰν μὴ ἐν τοῖς ἀρχείοις εὕρω, ἐν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ οὐ πιστεύω· καὶ λέγοντός μου αὐτοῖς ὅτι Γέγραπται, ἀπεκρίθησάν μοι ὅτι Πρόκειται. ἐμοὶ δὲ ἀρχεῖά ἐστιν Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, τὰ ἄθικτα ἀρχεῖα ὁ σταυρὸς αὐτοῦ καὶ ὁ θάνατος καὶ ἡ ἀνάστασις αὐτοῦ καὶ ἡ πίστις ἡ δι ̓ αὐτοῦ· (Ign. Phil. 8.2)

In his chapter on "Early Christian Libraries" (144–2202), Harry Gamble offers the following discussion of the critical word, "archives" [ἀρχεῖα; archeia]:

The sense of this anecdote has been much debated, but what is important for my purposes is the meaning of the term archeion. Its original sense is "governmental house" or "magistrate's office," whence it came to mean "records office" and could signify either the place where records were kept or the records themselves. Most commentators take the word to mean "the original records" and to refer to the Jewish scriptures regarded as "archival records" or "charter documents" of the church. This is surely correct but does not necessarily exhaust the sense of this unique designation of Jewish scripture, for the word alludes to the place where such writings were deposited and available. Since its use by Ignatius's opponents has no clear ulterior motivation, all the more may it imply the existence of an archive or library of the Antiochene church where the Jewish scriptures, among other documents, were kept. (Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995], 152–53)

stenographers in the late-antique church

I enjoyed this paragraph, particularly for the contrast it provides with both the processes and the products of text-production in the church in the fourth and first centuries ce and the relationship between text-production and oral performance:

The availability of scribes trained in stenography had another important result: it made possible the the transcription and publication of homiletical material and so added another dimension to early Christian literature. By early in the third century Origen's public addresses were taken down in shorthand transcriptions and published (Eusebius, H.E. 6.36.1). This practice became widespread, and as a result the ex tempore words of the most gifted preachers of the Greek and Latin church have survived. The extensive homiletical remains of Christian rhetores like John Chrysostom and Augustine suggest the great interest and wide readership that attached to their sermons, though they were not intended for transcription or circulation and for the most part were not published by their authors. (Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995], 140)

what constitutes an "edition"?

Toward the end of the third chapter of his monograph, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995 [YUP's website seems to have deleted the page for this book), Harry Gamble discusses the peculiar publication of Augustine's work, De doctrina christiana [On Christian Instruction]. The completed work takes up four books, but it was apparently originally made public in a two-volume edition. Augustine writes about his decision to bring the original, shorter work to its intended completion:

When I discovered that the books On Christian Instruction were not completed I chose to complete them rather than to leave them as they were and go on to the re-examination of other works. Accordingly I completed the third book. . . . Then I added a new book, and so completed the work in four books. (Retractationes 2.30; cited in Gamble, 136)

How interesting that Augustine can say he "discovered" his work was not complete; he should always have known this since he, apparently, never completed it. (I'm reminded of a certain breed of student who might claim not to have known that his or her research paper had been left undone on their harddrive.) It looks like Augustine released an early, unfinished version of De doctrina into circulation, and only later decided to return to his earlier project and finish it. From this, Gamble offers the following analysis:

The question whether a text of De doctrina in only two books constituted its first edition cannot really be answered. On the one hand, from the start the scope of the work was intended to be larger, so that a text in only two books would always have been incomplete; but, on the other hand, the work had apparently been corrected and given out for circulation. Hence it was not an edition in the modern sense—a complete, definitive text—but functionally it was an edition, for the work, though incomplete, was allowed to circulate and to be copied. This case shows how misleading the term edition can be when applied in the conditions under which texts circulated in antiquity. A text qualified as an edition only when it had been emended and released by the author for copying. (137)

The issues swirling around Augustine's De doctrina and Retractationes 2.30—and Gamble's analyses of those issues—raise interesting questions about the earliest texts of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke).¹ The dominant view of the gospels identifies Mark as the earliest written gospel, with Matthew and Luke dependent on Mark. One of the questions gospels scholars regularly raise is how (or why) the church preserved Mark once it had Matthew and Luke. This question is exacerbated by the fate of Q (if Matthew and Luke are independent), which was (apparently) allowed to return to dust.

What value—if any—might there be for thinking of Mark in terms similar to the incomplete, two-volume "edition" of De doctrina, and the other two synoptics as "completions" of the former? On the one hand, given Mark's abrupt beginning in 1.1–13 and—even more dramatically—the sudden ending at 16.8, the gospel of Mark does bear every indication of being an incomplete work that always anticipated "the rest of the story." On the other hand, however, Mark is its own carefully crafted, artistic, sophisticated account of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, and if Matthew and Luke originally intended their gospels to displace Mark they clearly failed.

I suspect these types of questions have already been set to Mark, Matthew, and Luke. But has anyone broached these questions from the perspective of book-production and -dissemination in the early Roman empire (and/or in late-Second Temple Judaism)?

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¹ Of course, De doctrina, the earliest books of which were written c. 397 and was completed c. 426, is over three hundred years later than the gospels. The dynamics of text-production—including its technologies and its cultural value—were certainly not identical in the first and fourth centuries. But according to Gamble, the testimonies of Augustine and Jerome "indicate that the traditional procedure of the first three centuries remained in effect" (132).

the [un]orthodox corruption of scripture

More from Harry Gamble, who refers to a polemical fragment from Little Labyrinth (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.28.8–19; see Gamble 1995: 122–23). I don't want to reproduce the quote; you can follow the link if you're interested. The point, however, is that Hippolytus (?) is writing against certain named Christian scholars in Rome who have disseminated copies of the scriptures (= the gospels?) in order to support a particular theological point of view. According to Gamble:

The work of each [viz., Theodotus, Asclepiades, Hermophilus, and Apolloniades] was current in many copies, so that copies were easily obtained and compared. It is unlikely that the ready availability of copies was due to purely private, individual copying. Despite its scholastic aspect, this textual work in Rome was not disinterested but stood in the service of exegesis and theological argument, which makes it still more probable that the emended texts were produced in numerous copies, the better to promote their wide use and thus sustain a particular theological viewpoint.¹

I can't help but remember Bart Ehrman's work, particularly in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Ehrman's thesis is that the "corruption" (in its technical, text-critical sense of variation rather than its popular sense of degradation) of scripture wasn't the sole domain of heterodox scribes and theologians; orthodox (or proto-orthodox) tinkerers also affected the readings in the text. As I read Ehrman, however, I couldn't help but think that Ehrman's analyses depended on too little data. That is, Ehrman made his claim for the orthodox corruption of scripture on the basis of individual variant readings and only rarely considered (i) the effect of a given change on the subsequent manuscript tradition or (ii) the effect of a given theological perspective on potentially problematic readings throughout a given manuscript. Of these, the latter is even rarer than the former.

Gamble's discussion, however, makes clear what Ehrman assumes: that changes to individual manuscripts had limited effect upon the tradition as a whole. If a person or a group of people wanted to conscientiously alter the reading of a text and wanted that change to displace an earlier reading, additional steps had to be taken. In the case of the Little Labyrinth that Eusebius cites, the heterodox teachers in Rome were involved not just in corrupting scriptural texts but also in disseminating their corrupted texts. The Little Labyrinth mocks its opponents' folly: "[The readings] of Asclepiades, for example, do not agree with those of Theodotus. And many of these can be obtained, because their disciples have assiduously written the corrections, as they call them, that is the corruptions, of each of them" (Eus. H.E. 5.28.17; my emphasis). But behind the author's scorn for the numerous copies then in circulation and the ammunition these copies provide against the scribes responsible for them, we can sense a certain frustration—even concern—that the flood of corrupted manuscripts might actually affect the Church's reception of the sacred tradition.

Perhaps, given the paucity and selectivity of the data that survives from antiquity, such evidence against the "proto-orthodox corruptors" of scripture is unlikely to have survived. Even so, this is the type of data I would look for in support of Ehrman's thesis. Gamble, who takes up the question directly of the relation between the authority invested in a text, its textual stability, and its preservation, provides a more helpful basis for historical discussion in that he appeals to actual textual evidence. Ehrman, it seems to me, often relies on the hermeneutical potential and theological possibilities of particular variants and their placement within the very interpretive framework for which he's arguing (viz., the orthodox corruption of scripture).

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¹ Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 123.

Eusebius, Origen, and text-production in antiquity

Harry Gamble quotes the following from Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, which provides an interesting discussion of text-production in the early-third (or perhaps early-fourth) century.

As [Origen] dictated there were ready at hand more than seven shorthand writers [tachygraphoi] who relieved each other at fixed intervals, and as many copyists [bibliographoi], as well as young women who were skilled in fine writing [kalligraphein], for all of whom Ambrose provided without stinting the necessary means.¹

In all that I've read about text-production in antiquity, I'd never run across the role of women as scribes. Origen, of course, is unusual in his literary output, the veritable Ben Witherington III of the third century (or perhaps Ben Witherington III is the Origen of the twenty-first century), so we certainly cannot assume his method of text-production is generalizable. But extreme as Origen's process may have been, it is nevertheless an extreme version of ancient text-production, and Origen's peculiarities seem to be quantitative (the volume of text-production) rather than qualitative (the method of text-production).

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¹ Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 120.

letter-collections and written tradition in antiquity

Now that I've finished reading Jesus in Memory, I've been able to return to Harry Gamble's very important monograph, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). Earlier in the book Gamble proposed the collection of (ten of) Paul's letters to seven churches as the motivating factor behind the Christians' early adoption of the codex format (rather than the scroll; see pp. 58–66). Now I'm reading Gamble's discussion of another collection of early Christian epistles: the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (109–12). Gamble's analyses of these letter collections are always interesting, even if I find parts of them still open to question.

Even so, what caught my interest is an almost off-handed comment about the early interest in written texts early in the second century among the church in Smyrna (western Asia Minor). Gamble has carefully teased out a surprising level of literary activity among the Smyrnaean Christians, and then he says:

This intense activity shows that the church at Smyrna in particular had both the interest and capacity to reproduce and distribute texts, and this, moreover, during the first two decades of the second century, a period often regarded as still heavily committed to oral tradition and little interested in the written word. (112)

Indeed. If Gamble has accurately reconstructed the letter-gathering, -transcribing, and -transmitting activities of the Smyrnaean church, then the interest in written texts at this Christian center is surprising. And Smyrna isn't the first major center of Christianity in the ancient world that comes to mind; if this state of affairs obtained in Smyrna, what must the text-production situation have been like in Alexandria, Rome, Jerusalem, or Antioch?

But what catches my attention, at least at this point in Gamble's analysis, is the way this textual interest breaks down generically. That is, the texts in which the church at this historical juncture (late-first to early-second century) exhibits such striking interest are all letters, and in fact the collections are of a single author's epistolary works. Collections weren't made on the basis of letters to specific churches or regions of churches (e.g., letters to Asian churches, or Syrian-Palestinian churches, or European churches, etc.). They also weren't all collected together in a single mass (important Christian epistolary texts). What we see are specific anthological interests in Paul's letters, Ignatius's letters, and so on.

Here's my point: What we don't see—and what makes Gamble's barb against the predilection for oral tradition that many of us assume among the general culture of Late Antiquity (and the early Christians in particularly) somewhat specious—are interests in written texts across multiple genre. We don't see at this stage in the Church's history a collection of gospels. Justin Martyr will demonstrate awareness of at least two and possibly all four canonical gospels in just a few decades, but this isn't the same as collecting and binding together multiple narrative texts. Tatian, a few decades after Justin, will bring together the four gospels in his Diatessaron, but this, too, is a far cry from collecting and anthologizing narrative texts. Irenaeus, just a few years after Tatian but on the other side of the Empire, may be the first instance we have of a four-gospel collection, but even here his interest in collecting narrative texts results more from Marcion's exclusive preference for [a corrupted version of] Luke's gospel rather than from the same sorts of impulses we see behind the collection of Paul's and Ignatius's letters.

So when Papias, the late-first- and/or early-second-century bishop of Hieropolis, says, "For I did not think that things found in books would benefit me as much as things from a living and abiding voice," he clearly demonstrates a preference for oral tradition over written texts.¹ In context Papias's preference for the "living and abiding voice" applies especially to evangelical and, perhaps, paraenetic tradition. Presumably, if Papias had been writing on the apostle Paul, his estimation of the value of written texts would have differed. And equally clearly Papias doesn't reject tout court the value of written texts; after all, Papias is writing his own text, the now-lost Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord.

Harry Gamble, then, hasn't actually demonstrated any parity between oral and written expressions of the tradition in the early church, though he has very helpfully encouraged us to consider how generic dynamics intersect with media dynamics.

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¹ οὐ γὰρ τὰ ἐκ τῶν βιβλίων τοσοῦτόν με ὠφελεῖν ὑπελάμβανον, ὅσον τὰ παρὰ ζώσης φωνῆς καὶ μενούσης (Papias, Frag. 3.4; Greek text from Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations [third edition; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007], 734).

papyrus and parchment, leaf and roll

HT: Kelli Macqueen

The second chapter Harry Gamble's Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995) offers a very interesting discussion of book formats in the ancient Mediterranean, including the properties and manufacturing processes of roll book (scrolls) and leaf books (codices) as well as the early Christian's distinct preference for the codex even while codices weren't really considered "books" but were more like Post-It Notes.

I especially liked Gamble's point of departure. After a brief introduction he notes the chasm between our perceptions of a book—what it is, what it does, how we handle it and its contents, what it's worth, etc.—and the ancients':

The modern book and its reader are removed from antiquity not only in time and culture but also by two major developments in the history of books: the change from the roll book (scroll) to the leaf book (codex), which transpired between the second and the fourth centuries, and the change from the handwritten to the printed book, which occurred in the fifteenth century. Ancient books, then, were fundamentally different from modern ones. (43; my emphasis)

More provocatively, Gamble argues that the early collection and distribution of Paul's letters (without the Pastoral Epistles) as a corpus led the early Christians to prefer codices well before their Jewish and Greco-Roman contemporaries made the switch. His argument is detailed and fascinating, if still fundamentally circumstantial.

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early Christian textuality

With the beginning of the semester barrelling down on us like a melodramatic steamtrain, I haven't had as much time to spend with Harry Gamble's book, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). So this morning I got up with my alarm and finished the first chapter, "Literacy and Literary Culture in Early Christianity" (1–41). As a reminder of my first impressions of Gamble's book, I especially like his discussion of early Christian literacy (2–10), and his phrase "participation in literacy" in particular. Gamble proceeds to survey the influence of Franz Overbeck, Adolf Deismann, and form-critical scholarship in scholars' understanding of early Christian literary culture—and to dismiss any strong polarization between Hochliteratur ("high literature") and Kleinliteratur ("common or vulgar literature").

From there Gamble traces "the scope and character of early Christian literature" (21–40). Here he finds a world of written texts, from those that remain from antiquity (e.g., the NT, the NT Apocrypha, etc.) to those we find referenced but that no longer survive (e.g., Paul's first [?] letter to Corinth; see 1 Cor. 5.9), and those we only infer (e.g., Q, various miracle or parable collections, etc.). He also points out, rightly, that even before these texts early Christianity was already involved with a rich textual tradition: the texts of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, and other Jewish writings.

But already there are problems. For example, Gamble takes a rather maximalist approach to detecting written sources behind the gospels. As part of that approach, he writes,

Futhermore, the extended genealogies of Jesus given in Matthew and Luke are not the sort of material to have been orally preserved; their documentary content suggests that they were in written form from the beginning, and they must have had an early and Jewish origin since they presuppose Jesus' human ancestry. (23)

Leaving aside the implication that later and non-Jewish Christians were uninterested in "Jesus' human ancestry," I'm not sure why the genealogies "are not the sort of material to have been orally preserved." Notice that Gamble isn't arguing on evidentiary grounds that these two related traditional accounts rely on one or more written sources; he's claiming that this type of tradition—records of one's ancestry—must've relied on written texts.

The problem is that this is patently and demonstrably false. Even just a quick search through JSTOR looking for the terms oral tradition, oral historiography, and genealogy turns up nearly twelve hundred hits, nearly half from 1994 and earlier. Anthropological work in Africa, Southeast Asia, among Native Americans, and elsewhere demonstrates the varied ways that diverse and sundry societies across vast temporal, geographical, and cultural expanses have taken up the past—including ancestral records—without relying upon (or without relying solely upon) written texts. In other words, there's no reason whatsoever that the genealogical accounts in Matthew 1 and Luke 3, irrespective of their historical value, must have relied on written accounts. It remains to be seen whether or not any evidence suggests they did rely on textual sources, but this is not settled a priori.

The problems continue from there. For example, in his discussion of early Christianity's relationship to the products of Jewish literary culture, Gamble writes:

Although it need not be denied that there was a period, possibly a long one, during which some Christian traditions were orally transmitted, during that same period Christians were deeply and continuously engaged with texts. Christians were from the beginning assiduous students of Jewish scriptures. This not only presumes the literacy of at least some of them, but also implies what may be called a scholastic concern and activity. (23–24; my emphasis).

I'm not sure what Gamble means by his description of early Christians as "assiduous students," but it strikes me, at least, as a bit anachronistic. Despite the hesitation in his presumption of literacy for "at least some of them," I wonder what happened to his very helpful concept of "participation in literacy" (see pp. 8–9), a phrase that among other things reminds us that even illiterate, non-literate, and otherly-literate people can have access to and make rather robust use of written tradition. This is not a trivial point, either. Gamble's assumpiton of a "scholastic concern and activity" leads him to formulate the early Christians' work with Hebrew biblical texts in terms of constructing "the textual warrants of Christian convictions and [of] making those texts serviceable for Christian preaching, apologetics, and instruction" (25). But this is only part of the picture, as those texts also (and simultaneously) participated in the construction of Christian convictions themselves—and not merely their "warrants." Like chickens and eggs, these come from each other. As a result, I rather doubt that there was any felt need to "mak[e] those texts serviceable for Christian preaching, apologetics, and instruction" because those activities were already considered the proclamation, defense, and teaching of the texts themselves!

Despite these criticisms, Gamble goes on to provide a rather helpful discussion of "the character of early Christian literary culture" (32–40) that locates early Christian texts among the informative, instructional texts of Greek scientific writing (rather than the "vulgar texts" of the papyri [á la Deismann] or the rhetorically stylized texts of ancient Greek historiography). My doctoral supervisor, Loveday Alexander, argued for just this location of Luke-Acts on the basis of Luke's prefaces (Luke 1.1–4; Acts 1.1), and Gamble makes many and useful references to her work. Most significantly—especially in light of the highly textually biased discussion I critiqued immediately above—Gamble stresses that

the earliest Christian writers participated in the rhetorical culture of antiquity and that the earliest Christain literature cannot be set outside the larger literary culture. (35)

This, I think, is much better. Early Christian writers and texts (and readers, too) participated in their surrounding rhetorical and literary cultures. Of course, written texts played vital roles in these cultures, but we should not suppose that these cultures are reducible to written texts. Instead, these cultures envelope and contextualize those texts and expand the possibility that even groups and subgroups with comparatively limited access to the texts might take up and employ the traditions they embody.

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Gambl[ing] with early Christian books and readers

I'm finally addressing a series gap in my professional reading. Considering that (i) my major work, Structuring Early Christian Memory, deals directly with media-critical issues, the significance and function of oral and written traditions in early Christianity, and issues of literacy in the ancient world, and that (ii) I've even published a more focused analysis of "orality" in "Reading and Hearing in Ancient Contexts," it's quasi-scandalous that I haven't read Harry Gamble's seminal work, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). Yesterday I began to rectify the situation. And my first impression: Only ten or so pages into it, and this book has well earned its reputation.

There are, naturally, a number of excellent points that I could highlight here; as I read I find myself underlining just about every line and trying to cram my comments into the margin. Here I think I'll just comment on one particular phrase that I've come across twice in the first ten pages; there will be plenty of time later for additional comments.

One of the problems facing scholars of Christian origins concerns how to understand the tension between (i) the nearly assuredly low literacy rates across the early Roman Empire (including among Christians), rates which may have rarely if ever exceeded twenty per cent in some urban areas, and (ii) the equally secure fact that the early Christians produced, transmitted, and poured over a surprising number of texts. These latter weren't simply early Christian texts (gospels, letters, homilies, etc.) but just as importantly Hebrew biblical texts; from the very beginning Christians valued Moses, the prophets, and (to a lesser extent) the later writings.¹ The impression that texts played a vital role in early Christianity isn't simply a by-product of the dominance of written texts among the extant evidence; from the very earliest images we get of the church the presence and public reading of texts loom large (e.g., 1 Tim. 4.13; Justin, 1 Apol. 67). Gamble rightly recognizes both poles of this tension. Most early Christians—probably more than four out of every five—were functionally illiterate, and written texts played a vital role in the construction and expression of early Christian identities.

In my own research I have used a distinction between literacy (the ability to read written texts) and textuality (access to written traditions) to navigate this tension. Gamble has a wonderful phrase that I find at least as helpful, if not more, for this purpose. On two occasions he speaks of participation in literacy.

If most Christians were illiterate, it did not prevent them from participating in literacy or from becoming familiar with Christian texts. . . . Thus, although the limited extent of individual literacy certainly had a bearing on the composition, transcription, private use, and authoritative interpretation of Christian texts, it had little adverse effect on the ability of Christians generally to gain a close acquaintance with Christian literature. The illiterate Christian found in the public reading of Christian texts at least as large and probably a more consistent opportunity than his pagan counterpart to participate in literacy and become familiar with texts. (8–9)

This phrase—participation in literacy—needs to gain wider currency among scholars of Christian origins. It will help us to recognize the centrality of written texts in early Christian experiences (pace, e.g., Richard Horsley, who can be read to imply that written materials were alien things that only existed in Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and other exotic places) even as we respect the rather different avenues of access available to the typical Christian, the believer who was completely unable to "take up and read" (pace the picture of early Christianity [and Judaism] Horsley is trying to displace).

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¹ Notice, for example, that when Luke enjoins gentile believers to abstain from the meat of animals offered to idols or from strangled animals, from blood, and from fornication (Acts 15.20), he bases these injunctions on the fact that "Moses, who is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath, has had in every city from generations past those who proclaim him" [Μωϋσῆς γὰρ ἐκ γενεῶν ἀρχαίων κατὰ πόλιν τοὺς κηρύσσοντας αὐτὸν ἔχει ἐν ταῖς συναγωγαῖς κατὰ πᾶν σάββατον ἀναγινωσκόμενος (15.21)]. Whatever Luke may mean here, the obvious point is that the church as he presents it values Moses and expects new members to make ethical decisions in light of others' high valuation of Moses and his texts (ἀναγινωσκόμενος).