more from Pieter Botha

I haven't read Pieter Botha before. I've done quite a bit of reading in oral traditional research and the gospels (including the gospel of Mark), so I've run into Botha's work on numerous occasions. But I've never read him before. So his essay, "'Publishing' a Gospel: Notes on Historical Constraints to Gospel Criticism" (see this post), has come as a very nice surprise. Here's yet another quote worth working through:

Incidentally, these practices remind us forcibly of the fluidity of all manuscript traditions in antiquity. What we would call an edition simply did not exist in antiquity; ἔκδοσις (usually translated with "publish") merely indicated the stage at which the author let a version out of his own hands. Copying was basically ad hoc, determined by innumerable factors and completely outside any formal control. It is impossible to speak of fixed traditions. . . . When we think about books in Greco-Roman antiquity, we should accept that single, final autographs probably never existed. In reality many participated and contributed to textual traditions endlessly in flux. (347; original emphases)

The phrase, "endlessly in flux," seems a bit exaggerated to me. But the point that writing a text did not fix the tradition is well taken. Too often, NT scholars talk about writing as the point at which a variable oral tradition becomes fixed; oral traditional scholars (both inside and outside biblical scholarship) have known for quite some time that written texts are only as stable as the cultural practices that facilitate their use.

texts in context

A common refrain among scholars and people who want to appear scholarly is, "Context is king" (or some something similar). So when we read, for instance, the story of Mary and Martha entertaining Jesus in Luke 10, it should matter to us that Luke has included this story immediately after his account of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. That is, the Good Samaritan is a vital part of the context of the story of Mary and Martha.

Many examples of how "Context is king," including the one just given, concern the history of ideas. If you want to understand, for example, the various conceptions of "the messiah" in the New Testament documents, then you need to know something of how the idea, messiah, functioned in the world in which the NT was written. So the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, pseudepigraphical texts (esp. 1 Enoch and 4 Baruch), and other texts come into play.

But context isn't simply about ideas. The historical figures who interest us—Paul, Peter, Herod, and even (or especially) Jesus—lived in real time and real space, handled real objects, engaged in real social interactions with other real people, and so on. And the realness, or the materiality, of the world these people lived in can have important consequences for our own efforts to understand ancient texts and reconstruction historical scenarios.

So I especially enjoyed the following paragraph, from Pieter J. J. Botha's essay, "'Publishing' a Gospel: Notes on Historical Constraints to Gospel Criticism" (pp. 335–52 in The Interface of Orality and Writing: Speaking, Seeing, Writing in the Shaping of New Genres [A. Weissenrieder and R. Coote, eds.; WUNT 260; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010]):

Readers, audiences and authors are products of particular historical conditions. By studying the formats of books and their typographical disposition(s) we can learn how they were created, how they were read, and undersatnd something about their possible meanings. In writing and reading materials, technology and human activity interact, and these various specifics must be taken into account when written artifacts are to be understood. Historical investigation requires that textual criticism, the historical study of books and cultural history be interrelated to describe "the variations that differentiate the 'readable space' (the texts in their material and discursive forms) and those which govern the circumstances of the 'actualization' (the readings seen as concrete practices and interpretive procedures)." (336, citing R. Chartier, "Laborers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader," Diacritics 22 [1992]: 50)