TY - JOUR
AU - Warkentin, Germaine
AB - Imagine an event of world-historical importance that everyone knows happened, but for which there exists no material evidence. No, not the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, a historical topic well beyond my powers. I mean writing about the crucifixion and its aftermath in the 150 years between the event (c. 30–33 CE) and the late second century, when we begin to see the first, often fragmentary, manuscript evidence of the epistles and gospels. The material history of the Christian Bible and its constituent books is among the most absorbing problems in European book culture, capable of precipitating almost any issue a bibliographer or book historian might want to study. However, explorers enter that forest on their own, challenged on every issue by new scholars and old ones, by theologians of different persuasions, by misidentified or stolen manuscripts, by potential news- paper and internet infamy. You are sitting an examination set by God, who will mark your paper. The Gospel as Manuscript adds to Chris Keith’s various articles on the making of the Christian scriptures. It is among several recent titles that have escaped from established scholarship to ask stimulating questions: the late Larry Hurtado’s studies of the manuscript record, Eva Mroczek’s innovative reading of the Hebrew scriptural books, Matthew D. C. Larsen on Graeco-Roman hypomnemata (rough notes), Alan Kirk on the intersection in memory of oral and written, Kim Haines- Eitzen on the independence of Christian scribes, Brent Nongbri on the suspect provenance of certain early Biblical manuscripts—and that is just the short list. This is the realm of specialists, of which the book has a rich bibliography, but Keith begins the last chapter of his book with an epigraph from D. F. McKenzie’s Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts: ‘If a history of readings is made possible only by a comparative history of books, it is equally true that a history of books will have no point if it fails to account for the meanings they later come to make’ (p. 233). Bibliographers and book historians are consequently bound to consider how he deals with his subject—the Jesus tradition as material artefact—from McKenzie’s perspective, and this review is a preliminary response from that standpoint. Keith’s book can be exasperating to read: there is much laborious signposting, and if he conscientiously sets out opposing views he then argues through them towards his own position. This makes coverage of most of the issues he raises tasking in a review of moderate length, so I will focus here on those of particular concern to the book historian, chiefly the material text and its social environment. ‘The Gospel of Mark is the earliest certain instance of narrativised Jesus tradition in the written medium, and thus it is taken here as the fountainhead of the reception history of the Jesus tradition in material form’, writes Keith (p. 73). There are two key terms here: reception history and material form, and ‘narrativised’ draws a line around them. The earliest textual indications of Jesus’s entry into history are actually Paul’s epistles, composed and sent between the Apostle’s conversion in the thirties of the first century and his martyrdom in the sixties. The epistles are not narratives, and Keith deploys them only as a source, yet they provide a first glimpse of material textuality among early Christians. There is no mystery about what they would have looked like physically, for Paul was a travelling evangelist, and his known writings take the form of letters, customarily small rolls of papyrus or bundled tablets to be carried by a messenger who could also be entrusted with a private oral report. Letters were a familiar textual and material genre at every level of Graeco-Roman social life, but the materiality of other early Christian writings is harder to document, as three well-known examples show: Didache, a handbook of Christian practice (the text datable in the first century, but the manuscripts are two fourth-century fragments and an eleventh-century codex), the Epistle of Barnabas (text c. 70–132, manuscript fourth century), and The Shepherd of Hermas, a personal conversion narrative (text c. 175–225, manuscript fourth century). As for Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, the first time we see them as a group is when around 175–80 Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, declared them ‘the foundation and pillar of our faith’. The Gospel as Manuscript begins not with the texts, but in cultural theory. In his Introduction Keith rehearses the many sources in antiquity from Plato to Papias, denigrating the written word in favour of the “living voice” that enabled Werner Kelber and others to contend that writing was not central to early Christian experience. Keith pushes back; he argues that illiteracy in antiquity does not diminish the value of the written word. In Chapter One we meet the two theoretical influences that thread through his study. One is William A. Johnson’s influential work on elite readers in Rome, with its attention to the culturally determined character of reading practices. The second is Jan Assmann, who traces how, in con- ditions of great stress, ‘a particular shared group identity survived the death of a present generation and continued to bind together subsequent generations’. Oral and written are separate, if related, information systems; Assmann contends that writing does not demand the presence of an audience as ritual enactment does. Writing can be lost or forgotten, but once institutionalized it enables forms of trans- mission for which the oral traditions of ritual and festival no longer suffice. For Christians, what prompted the institutionalization of writing was a cultural crisis— the fall of the Temple in 70 CE—in which the meaning of the past had to be stabilized in a form more secure than the fluidity of the oral. This is what Assmann postulates as the zerdehtne Situation (extended situation) in which written text must perpetuate cultural memory. Keith begins with the gospel of Mark (dating it firmly in the year 70 instead of the usual 60–80) because of what he regards as the absence of preceding material evidence, given the illiteracy of most social levels at the time. Yet in this supposedly illiterate, oral society, it seems the stabilizing function of writing was already at work. Around the end of the first century, Papias of Hieropolis (c. 60–c. 130), almost the last of the Apostolic Fathers, reported his research into the Christian book, a passage which Keith quotes: ‘If, then, any one who had attended on the elders came, I asked minutely after their sayings—what Andrew or Peter said, or what was said by Philip, or by Thomas, or by James, or by John, or by Matthew, or by any other of the Lord’s disciples: which things Aristion and the presbyter John, the disciples of the Lord, say. For I imagined that what was to be got from books was not so profitable to me as what came from the living and abiding voice.’ Papias had confi- dence only in the oral, yet if the books he mentions were the gospel writers or their antecedents, within what tradition of material practice might they have been written: Graeco-Roman, Hebrew, or documentary? The persisting hypothesis of a pre-gospel known as ‘Q’ (for Quelle, or well-spring) whether verifiable or not, has been a well-spring of ideas about the period 30–60 (see p. 11, n. 34). In Chapter Two, ‘Sociologies of the Book’, Keith responds to three important recent studies of early gospel writing: Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters (2000) on the training and practices of Christian scribes, Eva Mroczek’s much- admired The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (2016), and Matthew D. C. Larsen’s Gospels Before the Book (2018). I regret passing over Haines-Eitzen (whose badly-needed work I admire, but who I doubt, as Keith seems to think, coined the term ‘material turn’), and Mroczek, whose repudiation of Milton’s vision in Areopagitica of the book contained ‘as in a vial’ fuels her revolutionary reading of the books of the pre-septuagint Hebrew scriptures before the development of a canon by the rabbis. Larsen, however, raises the bibliographer’s question: was Mark writing in a vacuum? Did some of the very earliest Christians write or not, and if they did, what did they write on and in what format? Larsen approaches the gospel texts armed with the concept of hypomnemata (in Latin membranae, that is, parch- ments), the rough notes that writers in antiquity used to record ideas they had not yet written up, indeed might never. The evangelists, it has plausibly been argued, travelled with easy-to-manage notebook-sized collections of papers; Keith dismisses this idea, but in fact the notebook has its own rich history as a precursor of the codex format that was stabilized in the third century. Larsen’s ‘rough notes’ supply a bridge between speculation on the response of witnesses to the crucifixion and the eventual narratives. However, he extrapolates from his initial insight to conclude that the gospels themselves constituted an open tradition; Keith is not persuaded, and neither am I. Nevertheless Larsen provides a mass of material exciting to the book historian about such memoranda, firmly rooted in the mundane writing practices of authorship. In the following three chapters Keith turns to the period after the crisis of 70 CE, which saw the writing first of Mark and then the later gospels and other gospel-like texts; he speculates as many as twenty in all. ‘Mark’s textualization of the Jesus tradition’, he writes, ‘was a watershed act that was soon copied, and to great effect’ (p. 102). He interprets this as an emerging ‘competitive textuality’, in which the transmitters (tradents) of the Jesus tradition such as Mark and his fellow gospel- writers drew on the existing written forms both of the Hebrew scriptures, and of each other, to defend positions within a developing reception history. As an initiative, Keith argues, it stimulated the work of the other gospel authors, deter- mining the reception history of Christian writing up to the era of Constantine. I am deeply uneasy about this argument. For Keith, difference brings competi- tiveness as a strategy, but he fails to show why, as either a practice or a social value, it might arise. Haines-Eitzen, Raffaella Cribiore, and others have shown that correction and even revision, whether by the author or another, was endemic in Graeco-Roman writing culture. Irenaeus possessed a text of Paul’s epistles which he corrected to make the Apostle, he thought, just a little bit clearer. For centuries attention has been given to the variations among the four books, but as a biblio- grapher attentive to literary nuances I see the Synoptics and John attempting a com- mon task, seeking a language and form adequate to rendering the life of a man some of their great-grandfathers may have known. What had happened to him shook their world, which they still understood in the prophetic terms of the Hebrew scriptures, familiar because they were read in the synagogue. Yet those no longer sufficed completely. Writing the good news was an entirely new venture: get the facts (Mark, reputedly Peter’s amanuensis), turn it into a well-developed story (Matthew, possibly originally in Hebrew), get the details straight (Luke, ever the historian), and continue it into a hoped-for visionary future (John, who recorded his wonderment at the many books that had resulted). This is not a naive position; it emerges from the ontological view that all things, all meanings, matter. As the brilliant writer about literacy in Roman Judea, Michael Owen Wise puts it, ‘… on ordinary occasions, people do what they usually do. They perform the little tasks … that constitute the warp and woof of life as we experience it’ (Language and Literacy in Roman Judaea, New Haven, 2015, p. 2). Theorizing from an ontological perspective we gain fresh insight into the gospels’ genesis, historical, social, and textual. Is it possible that telling the Jesus story was a cultural project where everyone, but particularly the canonical four, was passionate in their belief they could somehow ‘get it right’? In Chapters Six and Seven Keith turns much more successfully to his proposed reception history of the gospels by examining reading in early liturgical practice. How did ‘the gospel as material artifact’ contribute to enabling and sustaining a distinct reading culture? There are two important achievements here: one is his report on the background for Justin’s much-quoted account of the reading of scripture in Sunday service in Rome about 150. The other is his insight into why the codex was so important to Christians that their scriptures appeared in almost no other format. Eldon Jay Epp first pointed to the symbolic significance of an evangelist’s notebook, his student Larry Hurtado provided the manuscript and textual data that supported Epp’s insight, and Keith, Hurtado’s student, also argues that ‘Gospel manuscripts, like Torah scrolls before them, came to serve as markers of identity’ (p. 219). The Gospel as Manuscript asks important questions, but it depends on three propositions I would have trouble defending: sharply distinguishing oral and writ- ten traditions, the conviction that the earliest audience for Christian writing was basically illiterate, and the assumption that we have no access to the material con- ditions of Christian writing before what Keith terms the ‘explosion’ of Mark into the oral transmission of the Jesus tradition. To take the last first, a concept of ‘evidence’ so constrained would eliminate inference about the materiality of many a Graeco-Roman or Hebrew text before the second century CE (Martial is a good example). Second, just how illiterate was the population of Galilee, Judea and the Hellenic diaspora in which the apostles evangelized? Peter may have been ‘unlettered’ (Acts 4:13, and see p. 95, n. 93), but Matthew, as a tax-collector, would have had to keep records. When John of Patmos, author of the Book of Revelation, sent his letters—on tablets, bundled and sealed—to the ‘seven cities’, he was addressing an audience in towns with governing and social institutions full of Matthews; they couldn’t have functioned without some degree of what has been dis- missed as ‘craftsman literacy’. Rather than a tiny literate elite and large sub-literate underclass, I would argue for an evidence-based social approach that would recognize literacy in antiquity as manifesting itself in many layers, from the author dictating and scribe copying, to readers with book-roll in hand, to the civil servants and literate slaves who kept small-scale, local institutions running, to merchants and craftsmen, down to the many who knew what writing was, but needed someone to read to them. Finally, should we assume the strict boundary between oral and written argued by Assmann? The work of inscription, as David Olson shows in The World on Paper (1994), does not always conform to our literate assumptions. Alan Kirk writes of ‘the intimate relationship of orality with writing in the ancient world’ (Q in Matthew, London, 2016, p. 102). ‘Scribes are media boundary figures … con- verting oral traditions into the written medium, and cycling written traditions back into the oral register’ (p. 114). In 1985 D. F. McKenzie asked for a history of books that accounted for the meanings they later come to make. Three decades later the bibliographer of digiti- zation Matthew Kirschenbaum, in his 2016 Rosenbach Lectures published as Bitstreams (Philadelphia, 2021), makes the same demand, in the face of the great cultural crisis that digitization seems to be causing: bibliography ‘is not a discipline about books, or even just about texts per se; it is a program of knowledge about what books and all textual forms can “reveal about past human life and thought”. It accomplishes this through its uncompromising attention to conditions of meaning. Which is to say that bibliography is a way of knowing, a habit of mind whose remit is nothing less than accounting for all the people and things that make meaning possible’ (pp. 13–14). The Gospel as Manuscript has some serious limita- tions, but both Keith’s successes and his failures provoke students of the book to attend more than we have done to all the conditions of meaning, not only in the earliest Christian writings, but to our own habits of mind in understanding them. Toronto © The Author 2022; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author 2022; all rights reserved
TI - The Gospel as Manuscript: An Early History of the Jesus Tradition as Material Artifact. By CHRIS KEITH
JF - The Library
DO - 10.1093/library/fpac024
DA - 2022-06-17
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-gospel-as-manuscript-an-early-history-of-the-jesus-tradition-as-ihR61YYFYh
SP - 261
EP - 265
VL - 23
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -