does Paul quote Hosea from memory?

The concept of "memory," especially of "social memory," is a live issue among New Testament scholars. (Social memory refers to a field of inquiry within the Humanities that raises questions about the social distribution, function, and contestation of knowledge about the past. In other words, how do humans, as part of the social groups of which they find themselves members, remember, utilize, and argue about the images, narratives, and rituals of the past?) I'm certain that social memory research holds potential for Pauline scholarship just as much as it has opened up new questions and routes of inquiry in Jesus scholarship, but I don't know specifically how.

As I was working on my comments on Romans 9 for a graduate course I'm teaching, I noted that Paul's citation of Hosea (and Isaiah, too) in this chapters seems a bit haphazard. Robert Jewett (Romans [Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007], 599) provides a nice chart showing how re-arranged is Paul's citation(s) from Hosea 2:

It might be difficult to read, but the basic point is that Paul cites passages from Hosea in the following order:

• Hos. 2.25c
• Hos. 2.25b
• Hos. 2.1b
• Hos. 2.1c

My question: Does this suggest that Paul is citing Hosea from memory? Does it matter that neither his citations from Hosea here or of Isaiah in 9.27–29 exactly match the Septuagintal form of either text? If Paul is citing from memory, does this offer us a glimpse into how the traditions as well as the written texts of the Hebrew Bible worked (or functioned) in early Christian memory?

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)

gospels as messengers

I'm reading an essay by Kristina Dronsch and Annette Weissenrieder, entitled, "A Theory for the Message for New Testament Writings or Communicating the Words of Jesus: From Angelos to Euangelion" (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], 205–35). The argument is highly technical and dense, and the authors' specific proposal is not very clearly communicated. But they do engage the media dynamics of early Christian traditioning processes in a sophisticated and nuanced way.

Their argument, in a nutshell, is that the written texts comprising the New Testament—and specifically the gospels of Mark, Luke, and John—bridge the distance between the absent Jesus and the present audiences of the texts. The evangelists, or actually the gospel texts themselves, serve as messengers (Boten) mediating the message and making present the message's sender to the message's recipients. You can find one particularly useful statement of their thesis on p. 222: "[M]essengers are not only a link in an information chain, they also have to be understood as a medium of communication. Messengers do not just bear messages; they are also media of transmission."

All that simply to introduce the following quotation, found in the authors' introductory comments to their discussion of Luke's gospel as postal communication:

The messenger plays an important role behind the transference of information. That is, the reliability of the messenger has a prominent role in successful communication. . . . The qualities demanded here like dependability and credibility were transferred to the messenger to fulfill the purposes of the absent transmitter; nevertheless, this is to be understood not in a sense of fidelity to the letter of the message, but the fidelity to the sense intended by the sender. It is not about preserving, but about passing on directly. Therefore, the protection of the message aims as Horst Wenzel has explained, not at the authentic preservation of the message, but at the dependability of the messenger. (228, citing H. Wenzel, Hören und Sehen. Shrift und Bild. Kultur und Gedächtnis im Mittelalter [Munich: Beck, 1995], 262; my emphases)

on imagining new worlds

I'm currently reading Richard Horsley's essay, "The Gospel of Mark in the Interface of Orality and Writing," 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). If you're familiar with Horsley's other works then you'll already know what to expect from this essay: a critique of certain culturally inappropriate models sustaining biblical scholarship and a striking reliance on certain key binary oppositions (Judean vs. Galilean, élite vs. ordinary people, etc.).

Despite the need to improve on and further Horsley's work, he nevertheless does provide a helpful opportunity to think more largely about biblical studies and the concrete social functioning of the texts we analyze. This has always been one of the key strengths of Horsley's scholarship. So I thought I'd reproduce this helpful quote on the need for us to get past ourselves and appreciate Mark's gospel as, perhaps, a single performance of the Jesus tradition rather than a collection of previously independent short stories (novella, according to Dibelius).

What remains difficult even for those who recognize Mark as a sustained story, I think, and perhaps also for those of us who also recognize the interface of orality and writing, is to imagine the formation, the composition, of the whole (Gospel) story. Perhaps because we are so habituated to composition in/as writing we have particular difficulty imagining how a text of the length and complexity of Mark could have been composed other than in writing—even though many epics that are orally performed (and composed) are much longer and more complex in plotting than Mark and the other Gospels. (157)

Of course, worlds of difference separate Mark and the other gospels from the epics I think Horsley has in mind (Homer, Moslem Yugoslavian epics, etc.). But that's not the point Horsley's making. He's reminding us that Mark's story—impressive and complicated as it is—isn't really so impressive and complicated that it had to be composed by an author in possession of himself, deliberate and laboriously working at a table or desk, free of the distractions of the wide world around him.

Instead, Mark certainly could have been (I think probably would have been) the kind of story Jesus' followers told as they gathered together to learn, to worship, to fellowship, and to pray. Certainly at some point someone (let's call him Mark) wrote the story down—though strangely Horsley would disagree. But that doesn't mean that Mark's written gospel was the first time the story ("the whole [Gospel] story") was apprehended in a single social engagement by women and men devoted to Jesus. In fact, given that the first mention of Mark's gospel doesn't occur until early in the second century CE (Papias), I suspect no one thought what Mark had done to Jesus' story was particularly groundbreaking or innovative (pace Kelber). Mark's gospel provided another in a very large number of possible performances of the Jesus story, and before long Matthew and Luke (and even John) would show that Mark's story, indeed, wasn't even that long!

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.

a fortuitous find

I have assigned a selection of readings from Plutarch's Moralia (the Quaestiones romanae et graecae) and from Seneca's Epistles (the Epistulae morales) in my graduate course, World of the New Testament. I'm interested in both Plutarch and Seneca as presentations of features of the Greco-Roman world from elite, pagan perspectives. Plutarch explicitly is trying to explain features of Latin culture to his Greek readers; Seneca, on the other hand, is exploring and commending certain behaviors or ways of thinking to his friend, Lucilius.

I'm certainly no Latin scholar; still less do I know anything about Seneca. So I was pleasantly surprised when I came across the following:

I shall therefore send to you the actual books; and in order that you may not waste time in searching here and there for profitable topics, I shall mark certain passages, so that you can turn at once to those which I approve and admire. Of course, however, the living voice and the intimacy of a common life will help you more than the written word. You must go to the scene of the action, first, because men put more faith in their eyes than in their ears, and second, because the way is long if one follows precepts, but short and helpful, if one follows patterns. Cleanthes could not have been the express image of Zeno, if he had merely heard his lectures; he shared in his life, saw into his hidden purposes, and watched him to see whether he lived according to his own rules. Plato, Aristotle, and the whole throng of sages who were destined to go each his different way, derived more benefit from the character than from the words of Socrates. It was not the class-room of Epicurus, but living together under the same roof, that made great men of Metrodorus, Hermarchus, and Polyaenus. Therefore I summon you, not merely that you may derive benefit, but that you may confer benefit; for we can assist each other greatly. (Seneca, Ep. 6.5–6)

Seneca's view of texts—what they are, what they're good for, and how to use them properly—is particularly interesting to me, given my own interests in media criticism and Christian origins. Seneca is a member of the Roman elite social class (he was Nero's tutor!), highly educated, familiar with the range of philosophical texts produced by and for the Greek and Roman upperclasses, able to live a life of relative leisure even in comparatively difficult times (see Ep. 1.4), and sufficiently resourced to send a barrage of letters to a friend who is physically distant from him. Even so, Seneca is no raw bibliophile; he isn't interested in amassing and reading texts for their own sake (see Ep. 2). Instead, although he exhibits familiarity with texts from outside his favored Stoic tradition (Epicurean, Platonic, etc.), he exhorts Lucilius to confine himself to familiar and more profitable texts. Reading too many texts is akin to knowing too many people, and being a friend to none (Ep. 2.2).

So how does Seneca suppose texts function (or ought to function) in order to maximize their benefit? Texts only work properly, according to the excerpt quoted above, within the context of social relationship. The value to Lucilius of Seneca's Moral Epistles isn't in the reading but in the relationship between the two men established prior to the epistles and evoked, strengthened, and furthered by means of the texts. Similarly, Cleanthes embodied and furthered Stoic philosophy via his relationship with Zeno rather than by reading his texts. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, of Socrates' followers; indeed, famously Socrates didn't even leave behind any textual remains!

And so Seneca says (and this really is quite amazing), "Of course, however, the living voice and the intimacy of a common life will help you more than the written word. You must go to the scene of the action, first, because men put more faith in their eyes than in their ears, and second, because the way is long if one follows precepts, but short and helpful, if one follows patterns." The written text enables Seneca to face and overcome the problem of geographical distance (he is physically removed from his friend, Lucilius). But the text is no substitute for the interpersonal relationship and interaction that is given concrete expression in face-to-face conversation; indeed, the text—when it behaves properly—mimics social interaction. Seneca becomes present to Lucilius via the written text. For this reason, Lucilius read a different text than the one before me; when I read Seneca, there is no extratextual relationship invoked (and evoked) in my act of reading.

Notice that this is a far cry from the standard opposition between "orality" and written texts we find in much biblical scholarship. We're not juxtaposing oral tradition over and against written text. Rather, we're on the lookout for how written texts functioned in a world conditioned by and geared toward the actual social engagement of human beings with one another. Thus the significance of Seneca's allusion to social script of autopsy (eyewitness testimony) when he says men prefer their eyes to their ears. On the surface this may seem to elevate written texts—accessed with the eyes—over spoken words—perceived with the hear. But in fact this is exactly the opposite of Seneca's point! Seneca privileges the concrete experience of knowledge shared through interpersonal relationships (including words spoken between people) over that gained second hand, through the reports of someone else or mediated by means of written reports.

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).

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.

the stability of [hand]written texts

One of my perennial interests centers on the ways different cultural and historical perspectives influence the way we perceive written texts. This difference in perception affects every level of our understanding of texts, from what they are to what they're for to what kind[s] of information they contain. This is part of the reason I expressed an interest in reviewing Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (Werner Kelber and Samuel Byrskog, eds.; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009). One of the consistently interesting scholars in these issues is Alan Kirk, who wrote Chapter 6, entitled simply, "Memory" (155–72).

I'm indebted to Alan for a number of reasons, so my comments here are not meant to be disparaging in any way. In fact, what I've read of his essay so far helpfully and honestly takes up Birger Gerhardsson's work on memory and tradition and sets it on a firmer footing. As one example, Kirk has an enviable grasp of the dynamics of fluidity and fixity at work among the evidence for the early Jesus tradition:

The formal features of such genres ensure stability and thus continuity across many oral enactments. However, through their equally core property of variability, or better, multiformity, the tradition is brought to expression in ways responsive to the different social and historical contexts in which it is enacted. (160; my emphasis)

I love that formulation: "their equally core property [relative to their stability] of . . . multiformity." Too often we think of the tradition as some "thing" that exists on its own and that suffers corruption if/as it changes. Research on memory, oral tradition, and oral performance, however, have encouraged us to reconfigure our understanding of the Jesus tradition to account for the ways the tradition could be multiply expressed in different forms, for different purposes, on different occasions, etc. The tradition contains within itself the capability of multiform expression and variation, so that change ≠ corruption.

Even so, Kirk shares an assumption (if I may call it an assumption) with the vast majority of biblical and related scholarship that the codification of tradition in written texts—even handwritten texts—stabilizes that tradition. Immediately following the excerpt quoted above, Kirk adds,

Oral genres, in other words, though stable are not fixed in the sense that the written medium fixes a text. To fix them would be to impair their capacity for oral (as opposed to written) transmission, for loss of adaptability to different social and historical settings entails erosion of relevance and hence survivability. (160–61)

I understand the basic logic undergirding this assumption. If I give a speech this afternoon, I can't "re-hear" that speech a week or even ten minutes later without the aid of some recording technology (which obviously did not exist in antiquity). But if I write a text this afternoon, I can return to that text ten minutes, a week, even ten years later and the wording will be the same then as it is today. Once inscribed, a text can be corrected, erased, commented upon, whatever. But unless I'm stuck in some J. K. Rowling story, the words set in ink won't change and, within limits, aren't even subject to change.

But Kirk's essay isn't focused on written texts; it's focused, instead, on the conjunction of memory and tradition. And I cannot see how an inscribed text fixes tradition and places limits on its variability (or, to use Kirk's preferred term, multiformity). I'm not suggesting that written traditions can't be fixed, relatively or absolutely. But the fixing (= stabilizing) of tradition requires certain social forces that transcend the presence or the absence of written texts. One need look no further than the synoptic gospels to see that, if Matthew and Luke are dependent on Mark and Q (a proposition Kirk accepts), nothing about the entextualization of the Markan or Q tradition rendered that tradition fixed. Bart Ehrman's work on "the orthodox corruption of scripture" [my comments are available here] highlights the way [hand]written traditions were still responsive to (even subject to) the social contexts in which they were employed.

Within the Hellenistic milieux of early Christianity, second Temple Judaism, Roman Egypt, etc., tradition in both written and oral expressions experienced the "core properties" of stability and multiformity. That may strike us as odd, given the ease with which we naturally expect multiple copies of [printed] texts to be identical, whether we bought them in east Tennessee or South Yorkshire. But we simply cannot even recognize the data of the ancient world—let alone account for it—as long as we think that "the written medium fixes a text."

on books and memory

I'm currently reading through Loveday Alexander's chapter in Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (Werner H. Kelber and Samuel Byrskog, eds.; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009): "Memory and Tradition in the Hellenistic Schools" (113–53). Reading this essay reminds me of the most enjoyable moments of researching my PhD under Loveday's supervision; she offers very much to think about and references to a broad range of Classical data that is quite simply beyond my realm of consciousness.

But in this post I only want to repeat an anecdote from the ancient world that Alexander shares with her readers:

The ambivalent relationship between memory and text in ancient understanding is captured nicely in a floating apophthegm attributed to Diocles of Carystus: "Someone once told Diocles the doctor that he would not need any more teaching because he had bought a medical book. Diocles responded: 'For those who have studied, books are reminders, but for the unlearned, they are tombs.'" (148)

[Διοκλῆς ὁ ίατρὸς λέγοντος αὐτῷ τινος βιβλίον ἠγορακέναι ἰατρικὸν καὶ μὴ προσδεῖσθαι διδασκαλίας εἶπε· τὰ βιβλία τῶν μεμαθηκότων ὑπομνήματα εἰσι, τῶν δὲ ἀμαθῶν μνήματα.]

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).

out last month

The December 2009 issue of Journal for the Study of the New Testament [JSNT 32/2] arrived in the mail today, though the website still has September 2009 listed as the current issue. The actual current issue includes the following articles:

• Lochlan Shelfer, "The Legal Precision of the Term 'παράκλητος'" (131–150).


• Rafael Rodríguez, "Reading and Hearing in Ancient Contexts" (151–178).


• John C. Poirier, "The Synoptic Problem and the Field of New Testament Introduction" (179–190).


• Alan J. P. Garrow, "The Eschatological Tradition behind 1 Thessalonians: Didache 16" (191–215).


• Joshua Jipp, "Rereading the Story of Abraham, Isaac, and 'Us' in Romans 4" (217–242).

All five essays look promising. I have half an essay on a topic related to Poirier's topic idling on my hard drive and waiting for my renewed attention. And given my current reading among the Apostolic Fathers as part of a revision of my History of New Testament Interpretation course, Garrow's essay piques another of my interests. I am also developing a graduate-level course on Romans (see Jipp's essay) and continuing to refine/develop my freshman-level Gospel Narratives course (see Shelfer's essay).

I'll try to add links to the articles when JSNT updates their website.

the changing social value of words

I still remember—vividly—the first time I actually heard someone refer to someone else as colored. I was nineteen, and I think I was actually naïve enough to believe that no one actually used language like that, unless they were trying to draw attention to their language. Certainly no one I knew would use that language. But this was someone in my family, and it took me a few hours to formulate any response at all.

Tonight I'm doing some reading on speed reading, both the techniques and the psychology of. I found an article, "An Approach to Speed Reading," by Joe W. Andrews (The English Journal 41/7 [1952]: 352–6), that evoked a similar reaction. Actually, my response, on a visceral level, to the words quoted below was much more acute because I hadn't noticed that the article was published in 1952. It wasn't until after I read the following paragraph that I had to find some sort of explanation for this language. At any rate, this is what made my jaw go slack:

That is the essence of the drills, and my experience indicates that the crudest execution can hardly fail to accomplish the results intended, ignoring the problem of the retarded and maladjusted, who require the individualized work with which this article is not concerned.

I should stress that Joe Andrews, according to the article, was in 1952 somehow affiliated with Kent State University (his title and qualifications are not listed), so his language must have been, it seems to me, within the bounds of appropriate professional usage at the time. And of course the tenor of this quote, on second glance, isn't the negative or condescending tone it would automatically be if such language were used today. Notice that, despite the conjunction of the terms problem, retarded, and maladjusted, Andrews is simply excluding a group or type of person from his focus and recommending them for "individualized work" rather than neglect, benign or otherwise.

When I recovered from my initial shock, though, I began to wonder: What language do we use today, as part of our professional practice, will seem backward and ill-informed fifty years from now? Will students in 2059 see Geza Vermes's book, Jesus the Jew, on the library shelf and snicker that the verboten word "Jew" was so boldly and unashamedly printed right on the spine? Will the now-standard formulations African-American, Asian-American, Native-American, or any of the other -Americans seem passé to our grandchildren? Neither of these seem likely to me, but it does seem likely that some of the language we currently find perfectly appropriate will pass out of favor.

So what? Well, I can't help but wonder how pointless much of our debates about terminology ultimately will be. Should we translate Ἰουδαῖος Jew or Judean? Did Mark write for Christians or Jesus followers? And so on. Don't get me wrong; we trade in language, and nothing subverts that trade like imprecision and the shoddy use of language. But formulations such as "non-Judean participants in the cult of Jesus," which may be more precise than the potentially misleading gentile Christian, are so unwieldy they distract from the discussion rather than contribute to it. I seem to remember, somewhere in the nether regions of my brain, that James Crossley had to defend his use of the label Christian, even though he is explicitly aware of and involved in examining the problems of projecting modern categories on ancient phenomena. I can't help but think that, perhaps, when we don't understand a person's argument it's easier for us to attack their language.

review of Why Did They Write This Way?

In the most recent issue of RBL Werner Kelber offers a typically poetic review of Katherine M. Stott's book, Why Did They Write this Way: Reflections on References to Written Documents in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Literature (LHBOT 492; London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008). I look forward to reading Stott's book primarily because in my own work (Structuring Early Christian Memory, as well as "Reading and Hearing in Ancient Contexts," forthcoming in JSNT) I suggest that biblical scholars would do well to shift their focus away from strictly compositional interests and ask questions regarding reception.

Too often we have focused on the text in front of us and neglected the way that text would have "worked" in its ancient context. In addition, when we suspect the use of written traditions in the composition of other texts, we have neglected the ways that composition represents an instance of reception (viz., of the source text).

Kelber's review leads me to suspect that Stott's work advances our interest in compositional dynamics precisely by broadening her focus to include dynamics of reception. If any of you have read this book, I welcome your comments here.

remembering Jesus' death

In the ninth installment of her series, "Creating Jesus," April DeConick asks, "Why did Jesus die?," though her post doesn't actually address that question. Rather, DeConick asks what answers Jesus' early followers provided for that question. Her answer focuses on two themes which are readily attested in the gospels: Jesus was a [the?] rejected prophet (like Moses), and Jesus was the faithful martyr whose death atoned for the sins of the people. Her discussion of the martyrology current in the first century CE may be a little anachronistic; I say may be because I'm not qualified to argue that it is. She relies on ideas that find their source in the Maccabean literature, but the development of those ideas is notoriously complex. I can only point to Daniel Boyarin's very interesting book, Dying for God, which argues in very close detail that Jewish and Christian martyrological ideas influenced and informed one another in the three or four centuries after Jesus and the destruction of Jerusalem's Temple.

I don't have very much to add to DeConick's ideas. For example, I have always marveled at the scholarship that can make very strong disjunctions between Jesus' parable of the tenants and the citation from Psa. 118 that builds upon it precisely because the parallel in the Gospel of Thomas follows this same parable with this same citation from Psa. 118! DeConick recognizes this connection, too, and rightly notes that, if the parable and the Psalm weren't connected in Jesus' telling, this connection happened very early on.

I would, however, like to call special attention to one of DeConick's arguments. Too often we read the gospels as if they were legal documents, carefully parsing each word and making precise distinctions on the basis of what is and what is not explicitly said. But the language of the gospels is not coldly descriptive. Rather, it is richly evocative, metonymic language that summons a whole world of ideas and images. DeConick writes,

We must take caution to keep in mind that the development of christology was not a linear, philosophically reasoned, completely coherent process. The first Christians were not deliberately creating a divine Jesus. The process is extremely complex, it involved intense personal and interpersonal negotiations. It was responsive to certain questions that they were trying to resolve. It is organic and dynamic.

For me this means that when they were wondering about a question, and they had an idea about an answer, the idea didn't come to them as a single notion upon which they built another single notion. Rather they got an idea, and that idea brought with it an entire set of images and traditions and scriptures that were already associated with that idea.

In some ways I think this calls into question the "first death then exegesis" analysis in which DeConick engaged in an earlier post. But nevermind. She's exactly right here. As certain connections were made between the disciples' experiences of Jesus' life and death and life again, those connections burst into the Christian imagination (which was always already a Jewish imagination) already embedded in established patterns of discourse. Jesus' death could be interpreted so compellingly in the light cast by the Hebrew biblical traditions not because Bartholomew said, "Hey, I was just reading Psalm 22 . . .," and then sometime later Judas (not Iscariot) said, "Guys, check out what I was just reading in Isaiah 53 . . ." Rather, the earliest Christians were able to understand and make sense of Jesus' death as part of the pattern of the history of God's people, a pattern in which Psa. 22, Isa. 53, and many other traditions functioned.

Despite the relative failure of the church's proclamation of Jesus among first-century Jews, the fact that they were somewhat successful in convincing not just themselves but also other Jews suggests that this pattern already characterized (some?) Jews' understanding of their scriptural traditions prior to the church's proclamation of the gospel. Justin Martyr, a hundred years after Jesus, will have exactly this problem with a Jew named Trypho: The Jews have forsaken their previous understandings of the Law and the Prophets in order to obscure the messianic potentials on which the Christians were capitalizing in their preaching. And while I wouldn't historicize Justin's polemical maneuvering as if he were merely describing Jewish exegetical practices prior to their efforts to mask the relationship between the Bible and Jesus, I would suggest that Justin and Trypho reveal the discursive aspects of reading Jesus in Hebrew biblical traditions and the effort it would take to make (or not make) intertextual connections.

Jesus in absentia

Installment no. 8 in her series, "Creating Jesus," focuses on issues of "Rereading and Remembering," and I have to confess that these areas are the heart of my own methodological interests. Here we get to issues that (a) are typically overlooked in historical Jesus and Christian origins research, and (b) make DeConick's work very interesting for me. I'm glad she's taken the time look up out of the well-worn rut trod by most historians of Jesus to point out some interesting sights that are easily missed. As always, my comments here are appreciative and, hopefully, constructive.

I'm going to skip over her discussion regarding resurrection bodies and the various conceptions thereof in second Temple speculation. I'm not at all sure Paul's discourse in 1 Cor. 15 opposes the concept of bodily resurrection, though he certainly argues for qualitative differences between "what is sown" and "what is raised." But our definitions of the relevant terms are also an issue here; for instance, I note that DeConick acknowledges that Paul argues for an "embodied" view of resurrection, and she's exactly right. Oh . . . and I note the curious statement at the end of her first paragraph: "[The early Christians] understood the visions of his spirit not as a ghost (as a non-Jew might have framed it) but as a resurrected body (as a Jew would have framed the afterlife)." But as I pointed out in my previous post, problems plague this ethnic division (Jew/non-Jew) of perceptions of the no-longer-dead.

Unfortunately, our first stop involves what I perceive to be a serious flaw in DeConick's argument, a flaw that she's inherited from more traditional perspectives on the subject. DeConick writes,

Now these two impulses resulted in two activities. First, they reread their bible, the Jewish scripture in order to figure out what the suffering and death of their Messiah meant, and they talked to each other, "remembering" what they could of Jesus' teachings whether public or private and began to write it down.

Scientists have long been aware that observing a thing necessarily alters it, so that the act of observation itself distorts the thing we're trying to understand. Dissecting a frog might give us greater insight into the layout and function of its internal parts, but we destroy the frog in the meantime and interrupt the processes that enable those parts to be the frog. A similar problem attends historical analyses of the early Christians' response to Jesus death. I agree with DeConick that Jesus' followers turned to the Jewish scripture[s] to "figure out what the suffering and death of their Messiah meant," but our view of these processes is distorted if we take a sequential view of this process, "first Jesus' death, then examination of scripture to interpret Jesus' death."

Jesus and his followers lived in a traditional world framed by Jewish biblical traditions, and those traditions, as frames, oriented them (and their contemporaries) within their world and gave it meaning. Much like certain verbal utterances invoke standard (and larger) images in our own culture (in certain contexts the word commando recalls Joey standing in Monica's apartment with all of Chandler's clothes on at once, or Hasta la vista . . . baby recalls Arnold Schwarzeneggar in a leather jacket and a bad case of red-eye), allusions to and invocations of Jewish biblical traditions were, in some cases, part of the original perception of Jesus' ministry and death in the first place! Certainly there was also later reflection (John's gospel is explicit in this regard; e.g., John 2.22). But we get a distorted picture if we envisage Jesus' followers, nearly in shock by the sheer incomprehensibility and brutality of Jesus' death, desperately leafing through the pages of their Bible looking for anything that could help them interpret their experiences and happily stumbling upon what we now call Psa. 22 or Isa. 53. DeConick, of course, is well aware of and largely avoids the problems with this simplistic scenario, unlike many other historians. But she still assumes a "first Jesus' death, then turn to scripture" schema that never really existed.

I also think we need to nuance our understanding of the transformative effects of Jesus' death on the early Christians' interpretation of the scriptures. DeConick writes,

So after Jesus' death, the first Christians turned to scripture and began to read it with new questions and a new perspective - that is they were trying to understand why the Messiah suffered and why he died as a criminal. They took passages that traditionally had nothing to do with messianic prophecy and made them such, which the other Jews loudly protested.

Yes, this did happen. Especially in Luke-Acts we see that the early Christians were involved in re-evaluating the significance of the traditional stories. But modern historians and exegetes presume too much when we classify some scriptures as messianic and others as not messianic and then impose that classification on the ancient evidence. Unless we take a very technical (and overly restrictive) view of "messianic scriptures" as only those which explicitly refer to an "anointed one," messianic is a label that applies to how traditions were appropriated rather than an inherent property of the tradition itself. Certainly there were debates about how biblical traditions should be understood, and as these debates took shape between Jesus' followers and other Jews, many of them concerned the messianic interpretation the Christians imposed on them. But there was also a move away from messianic understandings of some scriptures on the part of some non-Christian Jews (as Justin Martyr attests). And there were other factors, too; Daniel Boyarin (Border Lines; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) has argued that rabbinic Judaism expelled Logos/Memra theology from within Judaism in response to Christian appropriation of that theology for its own purposes.

Finally, DeConick offers a historical possibility for understanding the origin of the sayings genre. I have one very minor quibble and a major complaint. First, the quibble: DeConick says, "We know they [sayings source books] existed because we have Thomas," but I would like some clarification about how far we can generalize Thomas's genre. So we have Thomas; how much support does that fact give to the supposition that sayings sources were common (and how common?) in early Christianity? But my major complaint is this: Even if "sayings source books" were a dime a dozen, I would like us to make sure to avoid two excesses of traditional Jesus scholarship. First, the emphasis on Jesus' sayings is methodologically problematic and rooted in assumptions regarding the ipsissima verba Jesu ("the very words of Jesus") that are no longer sustainable. Second, we should not assume (and I'm not sure DeConick does) that written sources (a) provided a stability to the Jesus tradition that the oral tradition lacked, or (b) eased any anxiety the early Christians may have felt regarding the authenticity of their traditions. The traditions of Jesus' sayings and his actions were vouchsafed by the communities preserving, actualizing, transmitting, celebrating, recounting, and proclaiming those traditions; the church wouldn't begin to turn to written sources as guarantees of their traditions for some time, and not in the same way we turn to their texts until the Enlightenment.

What really mattered when reading the Bible?

I'm reading a pre-publication version of an article on the significance of the (later) insertion of the Pericopae Adulterae (John 7.53–8.11) into John's gospel. The author, Chris Keith, is a good friend of mine, and I find that he and I seem to be making very similar arguments, more or less independently of each other, with respect to different sets of data (I have focused my research on Jesus' logia pertaining to his acts of healing and exorcism). Since this is a tentative version of Chris's paper I don't want to reveal too much. But he does present a wonderful opportunity to formulate a question I've been wrestling with for a few months.

When we read the Bible (and by we here I mean primarily the church, believers in and worshippers of God, rather than the scholarly community) we have certain expectations about the texts before us. Those texts reveal the God of whom they speak. Those texts describe the history, current state, and future of this world. Those texts make certain claims on my own life as one who lives within the world under the reign and/or care of the God mentioned above. I don't intend to argue with any of these expectations. But I wonder how much these expectations have led us to assume, perhaps even unknowingly, that what matters when reading the Bible is the relationship between the text and the reality behind—as well as above!—the text. Again, no complaints here. But I wonder if this focus on the relationship between the text and something else betrays an unwillingness to affirm the text in itself.

This question was raised for me originally by the argument of, among others, James Dunn, that the textual dynamics relevant for understanding the relationship between the synoptic gospels is best described as variation within the same (a point Keith is discussing in his paper). What accounts for this variation, a phenomenon many of us wouldn't accept today? With respect to the synoptic gospels (Dunn), this variation is evident in readings across the synoptics (compare, for example, the three different versions of the Parable of the Vineyard [Mark 12.1–12 parr.; note also the parallel in the Gospel of Thomas]). With respect to the Pericopae Adulterae (Keith), this variation is evident in the manuscript tradition of John's gospel, which at some point did not contain this tradition and then, without a sense of corruption or intrusion, it did.

If, in church, we would never accept the kind of flux with respect to the Bible that seemed to be at the very least acceptable—and at most commonplace—what significant difference between the church then and the church now explains this contrast? Is our way of reading the Bible "better" than theirs? or is theirs better? How can we know? In other words, I am serious about the past-tense verb in the title of this post: What really mattered—to the early Christians more than to us—when reading the Bible?

One answer—not the answer but one answer—may focus on the reception of the Bible and the God that we believe reveals himself through it. In the assumptions undergirding how we read the Bible we expect the Bible to mean what it means, and our job is to meet the Bible where it is. This assumption is facilitated by the widespread availability of printed Bibles, in which anyone of any age and life circumstance can have their own copy (and often their own copies) of the Bible and read it for themselves. In an ancient environment where the Bible was much less accessible and many people only had access to it through another person's reading and/or performance of the text, things may have worked a bit differently. Instead of a reader "figuring out" what the text means, a performer (or lector) had to connect the text's meaning with the people listening. The meaning of the text, rather than the text itself, occupied the church's focus.

How exactly we could—or even whether or not we should—distinguish between the biblical text and its meaning isn't clear to me. But one thing I'm increasingly sure of: For us the Bible's text is relatively (even firmly) stable (often we cite Matt. 5.18 here), but its meaning might fluctuate depending on circumstances of reading. I'm not willing to say that meaning was stable in the earlier church, but I am confident that the text could shift and adapt in service of what mattered: the text's meaning, its significance. And I can't shake the feeling that the church today could learn something from our ancestors in the faith in this regard.

what is reading?

A good friend of mine has recently put me on to an article that is giving me the language to say things I've been struggling to say for a couple years now. The article, "Toward a Sociology of Reading in Classical Antiquity," by William A. Johnson (The American Journal of Philology 121/4: 593-627; available here if you have access to JSTOR), examines acts and significances of reading as more than individual, cognitive events.

I mention the article here mostly to highlight Johnson's definition of reading, which I think deserves some consideration. Read this and feel free to offer comments. (This quote begins in mid-sentence; I recommend reading the entire article if you're interested in more.)

I prefer to look at reading as not an act, nor even a process, but as a highly complex sociocultural system that involves a great many considerations beyond the decoding by the reader of the words of a text. Critical is the observation that reading is not simply the cognitive process by the individual of the "technology" of writing, but rather the negotiated construction of meaning within a particular sociocultural context. (Johnson 2000: 603; original italics)