Starr is So Hot Right Now OR Why the Study of Reading Circles is Taking the Field of New Testament and Early Christianity by Storm

[1]In the past decade, the work of Raymond J. Starr on reading circles have become more and more popular in the work of early Christianity. Starr’s analysis of Roman practice of reading and writing through concentric circles of social networks challenges the idea of a point action authorship but rather suggests peer editing was a common practice.[2] His argument presents texts as social creations rather than the isolated ideas of one particular individual. William A. Johnson’s argument of elite reading circles in Roman antiquity shows that reading was an equally social practice.[3] Harry Gamble has shown that Christian use of books was not fundamentally different from the larger Roman use.[4] This creates a fundamental continuity between reading and writing. Both are social practices and challenge the concept of point authorship and audience. This has been very attractive to scholars of early Christianity because the practical implications of the theory cause one to look into the text to attempt to find the community reflected in it. This came as a breath of fresh air to a scholarly community that struggled to find author’s who are separate from the text which thereby drove the analysis away from the text and into a highly speculative practice of psychoanalyzing a person one has never met.[5]

Reading as a social act

It is well known that literacy rates in the ancient world were limited. To be as generous as possible, the very most literate society might have up to 30% literacy.[6] Most communities, though, literacy was probably somewhere between 5-10%. Catherine Hezser has argued that contrary to some popular opinion, Jewish literacy in Roman Palestine was probably at least no higher than any other community. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest literacy would have been even lower than other areas of the Roman Empire.[7] As such, it is true that books were a social status symbol. Owning books suggested that one could read and that one could afford such a luxury. It is from this observation that William Johnson develops his idea of elite reading circles.[8] However, as Mary Beard points out, it is not necessary to be able to read to be involved in literary practice.[9] Those who attend a community reading event are listening to and studying the text – real question can be asked how “illiterate” these people are. They do not possess the technical skill of being able to read; however, they certainly are literate in its true sense of the term. This is precisely why reading “circles” are so helpful – one did not need to read so long as one in the group could read. In this way, reading was always a social act.

It has long been held that reading in the ancient world was always “out-loud.” The argument that silent reading did not exist was primarily based upon Augustine’s famous observation of Ambrose silently reading and his surprise. However, the challenge of the reading is far less an issue of the ability to silently read as much as Ambrose not following the social protocol of creating a reading circle. Augustine writes in his Confessions:

When Ambrose read, his eyes ran over the columns of writing and his heart searched out the meaning, but his voice and his tongue were at rest. Often when I was present – for he did not close his door to anyone and it was customary to come in unannounced – I have seen him reading silently, never in fact otherwise. I would sit for a long time in silence, not daring to disturb someone so deep in though, and then go on my way. I asked myself why he read in this way. Was it that he did not wish to be interrupted in those rare moments he found to refresh his mind and rest from the tumult of others’ affairs? Or perhaps he was worried that he would have to explain the obscurities in the text to some eager listener, or discuss other difficult problems? For he would thereby lose time and be prevented from reading as much as he had planned. But the preservation of his voice, which easily became hoarse, may well have been the true cause of his silent reading.[10]

What is noteworthy is Augustine’s surprise. The surprise is far less that Ambrose could read silently and far more that Augustine walked into his office to learn and rather than reading aloud to his auditor, Ambrose forced Augustine to simply sit there quietly while he read to himself. The usual practice would have created a social element – that Ambrose would read out loud so his audience could hear. This is functionally abandoned when Ambrose ceases from doing this.[11]

Johnson goes even farther and argues that the reason reading out loud was so common was merely because reading was an expected social action. To read by oneself was not nearly as popular. Silent reading certainly happened in private – usually as a follow up study of what was read in social actions.[12]

In these reading circles, reading was certainly a social act, but not formally a performative one. There was a key difference between reading and acting in a play. Acting suggests a memorized script and a dramatization. This can pull the audience from the text and into the theatre of action. Reading, on the other hand, while it was aloud, is not the same thing. It was often done at the dinner table. The lector is certainly not drawing the audience to the drama of his reading but rather into the words of the text.[13] It is in this sense that such reading was literary rather than performative and the blurring of the lines between the literate and illiterate.

Martin Jaffee has made a clear distinction between the Oral and Written Torah which is a very helpful illustration of this issue. Jaffee argues that all Torah (both written and oral) was spoken. The difference lies in its use.

[The distinction] did not at first describe the media in which texts were composed or preserved. Rather, they described the modes of their public performance as literature…The Written Torah was ‘read’ (qr’)  in the sense that the text was sung aloud from a scroll in the course of its study and exposition. The Oral Torah, by contrast, was ‘repeated’ (snh) – quoted from memory, without recourse to the mnemonic crutch of a written text.[14]

Jaffee’s point shows that the distinction between reading “out loud” or silently is always due to its use in a social context.

Christianity did have a formally public act of reading in their early services. As early as we have evidence for the Christian worship service, the reading of text seems integral. At first, this reading was only of the Hebrew Bible, but then the New Testament quickly took root in the same manner. Therefore, reading was a social act encouraged by the use of the same in the ritual practice of the church that then spilled over into the private lives of the individuals. At Christian gatherings that were not necessarily worship services, the prospect of reading socially was present and encouraged.[15]

Continuity Between Reading and Writing

This analysis is not particularly surprising for a culture wherein such a small percentage could read. It has been presented for quite a long time that ancient literacy needs to be understood in its cultural context. One should not expect something like unto the modern dependence on literacy for a culture wherein such a small portion could read. Instead, one should expect a culture where reading was not as essential to one’s life.[16] If that is so, then it is not surprising that reading was done socially which provided access to the illiterate to the knowledge found in written text. This solves the seeming contradiction of the vast amount of written text that is preserved while at the same time having a culture with such a small minority able to read it.

What is less appreciated is that writing is as much a social act as reading is. Writing of works in the ancient world is not that different from the modern world. Most people do not publish works on their first drafts (except for those of us who decide to publish on blog sites!). Rather, authors usually present portions of their work to colleagues who provide feedback. Further, peer editing is frequently done. There is no suggestion that the sending out the work to be edited is “publishing” it. Rather, publishing is not done until after the feedback is given (often a number of times), it is presented to a company who oversees it and even sends out some “blind” reviewers to provide even more feedback. Writing is clearly a social activity in the modern world.

The ancient world had a generally similar practice. Johnson points out that in these elite literary circles authors could read out their own work. Authors could then get feedback on the work and would rewrite based on that feedback (not unlike a conference paper in the academic world).[17] Starr goes a step farther and discusses the type of peer review an author used – through friendship networks – to get feedback. He argues that an author would send the work out to some friends with the understanding that it was not a finished work. Instead, the author wanted feedback to rewrite. After that first round, the author would generally then send out a new draft to a larger audience – who were still in the friendship network – again, with the idea that it was not yet finished. Finally, the author would send it out to some very far from his own friendship network (nearly like the “blind review”) and gain feedback. After all of this, then the work was “complete” and “published” – sent to the same people with the idea that it was complete and that the recipients could feel free to copy it and distribute it as they liked.[18]

Through this practice, it is clear that both reading and writing were social acts that involved a large community. It is then fair to expect that the work was relevant to that community and that the feedback one received led an author to make it relevant. It is not, therefore, surprising to find the community’s interest in a work.

When considering religious texts, the community interest can be even further expressed into identity discourse. A religious text developed socially should portray the larger community within the text. Therefore, it should not surprise us to find a community of non-apostolic Christians who hold to something like unto the theology of the cross expressed in the Gospel with the ironic insider/outsider dichotomy wherein the disciples cannot understand Jesus’ works of power or suffering whereas the outsiders (encapsulated in the Centurion) completely understand who Jesus is (despite the type of secrecy that is presented).

Advantages of this approach to the field of Early Christianity

The value of this approach for the study of the New Testament and later literature is that it, as compared with traditional discussions of authorship, pragmatically pushes one into the text rather than distancing oneself from it.   

In the more traditional discussion of authorship of New Testament, one expects all authors to work in the way that Paul seemed to work. Paul wrote letters to real communities which he wrote relatively quickly in order to address particular issues. The assumption seems to be that he wrote them mostly by himself (though the extent to which Sylvanus and Timothy helped is unclear) either through dictation or actually penning them. We are left to assume that he did not write these to present to his friends but rather to address very real issues in churches where he was not present. In fact, most of the letters are merely precursors to his arrival where he will really address the controversies he explains. This type of work would not seem – at least on the surface – to fit with the concept of reading circles expressed by Gamble, Starr, and Johnson.

While Paul’s model works very well for Paul’s letters, there is no indication that any other work in the New Testament should be expected to be written in the same way. For example, the Gospels and Acts are not texts that address particular communities at particular times the way that a letter would. In fact, it is usually assumed that the gospels were written to support one’s own community and their identity. If that is the case, then most all of what Starr and Johnson are presenting would fit nicely into the context of the New Testament.

The Gospels do seem to see themselves as presenting a type of literature that will be edifying for more than a point event of one author’s idea at one time. Further, they seem to be texts that reflect community ideas of the identity of the group. There does seem to be an indication that the gospels were written so that readers could identify themselves in relationship with the story of Christ. Therefore, we should expect that the Gospel of Matthew is written for an audience that is probably a mixed group of Jews and Gentiles who probably follow many aspects of Torah obligation.

The value of this type of analysis is its pragmatism. It has been argued previously that looking for the author of the text pushes one from examining the text and into an apologetic conversation concerning the merits of Christian tradition. While there might be much value in Ecclesiastical tradition (and it surely is an absolutely fascinating study), it is not particularly helpful for considering the meaning of the gospels. For example, whether one thinks that Mark is written by someone who had a relationship with Peter and Paul does not change its meaning. However, considering the texts as documents of a community will push one to look closely at the text itself – not ecclesiastical tradition – for identity discourse.

Some might argue that both activities – considering an author in ecclesiastical tradition and looking for community identity developed in the text take away from the “plain sense” of scripture. While I firmly agree with the former, the latter could be debated. I would present, however, major challenges in how “plain” plain sense of scripture is. In order to understand the text at all, it is necessary to set up an ideological platform. The platform of “what seems to make sense” is the sneakiest of all because it does not admit to using a theoretical background. Here, I am not necessarily arguing that Starr and Johnson’s approach is the best approach to understanding texts in Early Christianity. I am merely arguing that compared with an idea of “authorship,” the social world of writing and reading is better suited to aiding in understanding the actual texts themselves. Any theoretical analysis should be measured by how well it explains the texts at hand and the concept of “reading circles” certainly pushes one further into the text while “authorship” philosophically separates oneself from them.

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[1] My compliments to Alex Kocar – and Will Ferrell – for this title

[2] Raymond J. Starr “Circulation of Literary Texts in the Roman World.” Classical Quarterly, New Series, 37(1), 1987, 213-223.

[3] William A. Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[4] Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Christianity: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995).

[5] See my previous blog post “Authorship as Remoteness: How the Discussion of Authorship in the New Testament is Distanced from the Study of the Text.”

[6] William Harris FILL IN REST OF CITATION

[7] Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001).

[8] Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture, 3-16.

[9] Mary Beard, “Writing in Religion: Ancient Literacy and the function of the written word in Roman religion” in Mary Beard (ed.) Literacy in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplement Series 3, 1991) 35-58.

[10] Augustine, Confessions, 6.3.3.

[11] The common argument that Uncial manuscripts (with no divisions between words) forced one to read out loud as Gamble (203) presents is equally unpersuasive. The idea that an Uncial manuscript could not be understood without sounding it out loud is simply inaccurate. If one looks at an English uncial manuscript, it is certainly possible to read it without speaking aloud. The reader might find that it is easiest to “mouth” the letters, but there is no reason one needs to express them. If this were the case, it would be even more the case that Hebrew consonantal texts would be impossible to express without sounding them out for which there is also no good data that suggests such.

[12] Holt N. Parker “Books and Reading in Latin Poetry” in William A. Johnson and Holt N. Parker (eds.), Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 186-229.

[13] See Hezser, Jewish Literacy, 190-209.

[14] Martin Jaffee “A Rabbinic Ontology of the Written and Spoken Word: On Discipleship, Transformative Knowledge, and the Living Texts of the Oral Torah” JAAR 65 (1997), 525-549 quoted in Hezser, Jewish Literacy, 203.

[15] See Gamble, Books and Readers.

[16] See Mark A. Chancey, Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus (Cambridge: CUP, 2005).

[17] Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture.

[18] Starr, “Circulation of Literary Texts,” 213-216.

Authorship as Remoteness: How the Discussion of Authorship in the New Testament is Distanced from the Study of the Text

Authorship issues in the New Testament have been of particular interest in the past few centuries of Christianity. Several of the works of the New Testament have had their traditional authorship attributions challenged. Some of these works were written anonymously and it is only the title that has been challenged (such as the gospels) whereas others have been challenged as being written pseudonymously (such as the Pastoral Epistles). Some scholars have accepted this view wholeheartedly[1] while others are more skeptical. Amidst this conversation, a very unusual dichotomy has arisen. Exegetical studies of the content of the New Testament have increased and presented new and interesting material in the same time period. What is striking is that these two conversations have happened along side one another, but they never seem to intersect. In fact, it seems that the more one discusses authorship, the less one discusses the actual text. To discuss this relationship the book of James will be used as a case study as it is one of the texts in the New Testament which is often discussed in regard to authorship issues.

The book of James is one of the books in the New Testament wherein there is not scholarly agreement about authorship – some see it as written by James the Just – the brother of Jesus. Others read it as a standard practice of pseudepigraphy in antiquity and that it was intended to be taken as the brother of Jesus but really was not. Finally, a third group argues that it was written by someone named James, but that is not necessarily the same James as the brother of Jesus. The reason there is so much disagreement is that the evidence for authorship is slim. Unlike the works of Paul, we have only one book attributed to James and therefore there is nothing to compare. Further, the text itself never claims that the author is the brother of Jesus. Additionally, we do not have clear indications of its precise audience.

The interest in authorship; however, is quite laudable. As scholars do want to put books in their proper setting, one way of doing so is by means of considering a historical author. In regard to the book of James, Sophie Laws points out the possible value that considering authorship might have:

The traditional questions of an Introduction, of the date and place of origin of a document, its purpose and its probably recipients, would be easily answered if the identity of the author were known.[2]

This is certainly the case – if the author of the text was known, its purpose and recipients would be easier to detect. This example shows why the interest in authorship has been so persistent – knowing who wrote the texts (or perhaps who did not write the texts) would provide possible insight into the study of the New Testament.

The problem with the drive for authorship is that the evidence in the book of James is so scanty that no consensus can be reached. As such, the hermeneutical principles of the author govern the conversation about authorship as opposed to the data from the text itself. Therefore, an inverse relationship exists between discussions about authorship and dialogue with the text itself.

Arguments for Authorship in James

To understand how authorship studies on James have progressed, it is helpful to consider two different perspectives about authorship in James. Bart Ehrman believes that James is a pseudepigraphic text – meaning that the author was not the brother of Jesus but that he claimed he was. Luke Timothy Johnson, on the other hand, does not quite argue that the author was the brother of Jesus, but suggests that it is highly likely.

Ehrman’s position concerning the Epistle of James is that it is pseudepigraphic. He is aware that the text itself does not suggest that this was the brother of Jesus, but argues that the lack of definition of the author suggests that the author felt the audience would know “which James” it was:

With respect to authorship, in any event, the point is that this is a letter intended to be read far and wide by someone who simply calls himself “James” without indicating with James he was; the recipients would have no way of knowing his identity unless they assume he is “that” James: the most famous one of all, the brother of Jesus is charge of the mother church in Jerusalem.[3]

Ehrman therefore considers this as a pseudepigraphic work for a few reasons (one being his argument that the brother of Jesus would not be able to write)[4] but the most worthwhile is his argument that this letter (particularly James 2:14-26 on faith and works) is written to challenge Paul:

Despite occasional disclaimers, there should be no doubt that Paul, or at least the tradition associated with Paul, is under attack in the letter attributed to James in the New Testament…The book is about nothing if not “doing good works” and so being a “doer of the word” instead of simply a hearer.[5]

This passage, of course, suggests that James must have been addressing Paul’s work and therefore would have to be at a later time than James’s own lifetime.

While Ehrman’s presentation might lead one to think that it is his dialogue with the text that has led him to the conclusion that James is an anti-Pauline tract, it is in fact his larger hermeneutic that forgery and counterforgery were done in order to correct “errors” that authors saw in the interpretations of sacred authors. In fact, Ehrman argues that the most common reason for forgery was to combat previous forgeries (what he calls counterforgery). This is something that he argues was present throughout the early Christian movement and James fits nicely into that fold. Ehrman presents that James is in fact primary addressing Ephesians and Colossians (texts he sees as forgeries – the veracity of which claim I will not address here):

What I will be arguing is that even though the author based his arguments against Paul on “authentic” Pauline traditions, he read these traditions through the lens provided by later Pauline interpreters, so that what he attacked was not (the “real”) Paul but a kind of Deutero-Paul, one evidenced, in fact, in surviving Pauline forgeries. The book of James, in other words, is a counterforgery.[6]

Ehrman, therefore, has set James as a corrective polemic in relation to Paul. This is not so surprising given that his entire work is dedicated to this practice which he sees as widespread in the developing Christianities of the first several centuries.

In contrast to Ehrman, Luke Timothy Johnson opposes this type of interpretation and values the traditional approach to the book of James. Johnson argues that the mistake most readers of James suggest is a seeming antagonism between James and Paul – precisely what Ehrman argues:

The most troublesome aspect of most theories of authorship and provenance, whether conservative or liberal, has been the insistence on reading James and Paul in tandem.[7]

Johnson argues that precisely Ehrman’s premise – which Johnson argues was developed in the Tubingen school – is faulty. He argues that there is not necessarily a contrast between James and Paul and as such, it does not make sense to make that a necessary requirement for the letter of James to be particularly late and therefore it suggests that it well could have been written by the traditional author:

These arguments do not prove that James of Jerusalem, the ‘Brother of the Lord,’ wrote the letter. Such proof is unavailable, for the simple reason that, even if early, the document could still have been penned by some other “James” than the one who became famous in the tradition. But the arguments do tend strongly toward the conclusion that James is a very early writing from a Palestinian Jewish Christian source. And James the Brother of the Lord is a reasonable candidate.[8]

Johnson does not suggest that the brother of Jesus had written this, but it is certainly clear that he is ready to accept that idea.

What is of interest here is that Johnson’s arguments are not primarily concerned with the data of the text. Instead, Johnson uses as his main argument a critique of the scholarly development of the concept of Pseudepigrapha:

By the end of the nineteenth century, the battles within the historical-critical approach had reached a stalemate. Using the same methods and identical evidence, scholars came to diametrically opposed conclusions. No one convinced anyone else. Criticism was less a matter of incremental progress than of proclaiming allegiance.

As in the nineteenth century, the debate concerning James’ place in early Christianity ahs [in the twentieth century] largely consisted in ‘talking past each other,’ which continues with little new evidence or insight. The growth of the more radical position [the view that the letter is pseudonymous] owes as much to the politics and fashion of scholarship as it does to argumentation.[9]

Johnson’s critique here is clearly as much concerned with the history of scholarship (and he indeed does have an entire chapter devoted to this) as it is concerning the text.

Both sides of the discussion, rather than appealing to the text itself, draw upon later tradition to support their claims. Nearly all conversation moves to the first time the text was used (Origen of Alexandria in the third century), its reception in Eusebius (as one of the “disputed” writings), and the brief comment made by Jerome that it was only accepted gradually. This conversation has nothing to do with the text itself and instead is a conversation about church history and what kind of reception history is expected for early texts. This drives us back to the original issue wherein figures such as Ehrman see texts received only insofar as they are dialoguing (and essentially arguing) with one another whereas Johnson discusses essential continuity and harmony between different Christian groups in the early going. Therefore, the conversation is once again concerning this theoretical framework and the actual text of James is lost.

Matt Jackson-McCabe has pointed out that the conversation is a political one. While he affirms Johnson’s above critique of the Tubingen school, he levies the same critique against those holding traditional authorship:

If this is true with respect to the position that the letter is pseudepigraphic, the continued affirmation of its authenticity itself surely owes no less to the politics of New Testament scholarship – a point that is ironically underscored by Johnson’s repetitious use of the highly charged term “radical” to effectively marginalize the position he sides against.[10]

Jackson-McCabe suggests that the authorship of James has become a political football that is being used to have a conversation about the role of Christianity in scholarship. He argues, “the academy is itself one of the arenas in which Christian apologetics play out.”[11]

Jackson-McCabe is certainly correct and he points out that both sides will consistently speak past one another as both are trying to do very different things:

But it is equally certain that this very scholarship represents a tangle of what are in fact two fundamentally different projects: a history-of-religions project that seeks to explain the letter’s composition in relation to a historical account of early Jesus veneration; and an ecclesiastical project that seeks to clarify the letter’s authority in relation to the primal, sacred (i.e., apostolic) authority of Christianity itself.[12]

While he considers these two projects as fundamentally different, he does admit to being a member of the “history-of-religions” project and therefore is more sympathetic to that position. However, his observation that authorship has become the focus of conversation of some kind of apologetic argument is certainly correct. Once again, though, the conversation is about the nature of the text and not the contents of it.

Significance of the authorship issue for the meaning of the text

The authorship arguments presented above do present an interesting argument concerning the way texts were composed in the New Testament. However, one will note that very few of them had anything to do with the content of James itself. In fact, it seems as if the more one discusses authorship, the less the text itself is a primary part of the conversation.

The reason that authorship does not seem of primary importance is that very few commentators use authorship to interpret the meaning of the text. All commentators take it as a point of fact that the book of James is fully in the Hellenistic world. The book is fully cognizant of complex Greek language, uses Greek analogies, and borrows frequently from Greek philosophy. This would not be surprising for an interpreter who held that the text was pseudepigraphic, but even Luke Timothy Johnson argues that James is best understood in the genre of a Greek moralist. While most discussion of the authorship of James will use this data and either use it to support their idea that the brother of Jesus could not have had this knowledge, or they discuss how the brother of Jesus could have gained this knowledge in his time in Jerusalem.[13] What should be noted is that neither interpretation of the author’s knowledge of Greek actually changes the meaning of James itself.

What would seem to be of more importance would be the issue of “faith and works” in James 2:14-26. It is, in fact, the relationship of this pericope to Paul’s presentation of faith and works of the Torah that determine the relationship between the two. This, on the surface of it, would seem to be primarily about the text rather than above it. However, when one looks at James only as James – and not as in relationship to Paul, there really is very little debate as to what James means. James uses the term “faith” as “You believe that God is one.”[14] This is usually understood as a reference to the Shema in Deut. 6:4 and is more than likely appealing to that entire tradition of belief in that sense.[15] “Works” on the other hand seem to be general ethical obligation – likely based upon Leviticus 19.[16] Further, the relationship of the two is relatively standard – that James argues for the necessity of faith – if it is truly faith – to be expressed.

Most all scholars agree with this assessment of James. Where they divide is when comparing this with Paul. Does this work oppose Paul or does Paul oppose this? While scholars have a variety of conversations about that particular topic, it is noteworthy that the actual meaning of James is not on the table – only what that might have meant in the larger Christian milieu.

The one value of authorship – as presented by Laws at the beginning of this paper – is that if we knew when the piece was written, then it would be particularly helpful in understanding the purpose of this. James Ropes argues that authorship is usually determined by scholars given when they want to date the epistle:

Those who hold the author to be James the Lord’s brother assign the epistle to a date before c. 50 (so Beyschlag, Zahn, Mayor, and many others) or to one shortly before the death of James (62 or a little later), and naturally think of Jerusalem as the place of composition. Among critics who reject the apostolic authorship, the dates given show wide variation, but are seldom earlier than 90 or later than 130, although a few carry the possible date down as late as 150. As to the place, these critics are for the most part divided between Palestine and Rome.[17]

This issue of dating is something wherein the conversation about authorship could aid in understanding the text itself. However, all of the conversation about particular dating in the late first and early second centuries are absent from the text. There is no conversation one way or the other about the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E., no discussion of Torah, no conversation about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, and not even a conversation about Jesus’ life in any of its facets. Therefore, the type of discussion that would normally place the epistle is simply missing. There is nothing in the epistle that could not be from either period. It is for this reason that Ropes argues that authorship does not in fact affect the meaning of the epistle:

For the significance of the Epistle of James in the history of early Christian thought it makes not much difference whether it was written by James the Lord’s brother about the year 60, or by another Palestinian teacher fifty years later. In either case the place of origin and the kind of Christians whose life the epistle reflects are the same, and the epistle itself shows how little development of Christian thought took place there in those decades.[18]

Ropes shows that the conversation about authorship is not significant for the conversation about the meaning of the epistle.

Conclusion

What is striking is where the conversation about authorship lies in the study on James. Nearly every commentary has at least a section on the authorship of James in the introduction to the work. What is striking is how exceedingly rarely does that conversation bleed into the actual commentary (and the rare places it does, it presents poor analysis of the text).[19] Instead, it seems that authorship is a conversation kept to the margins.

Authorship moves the conversation away from the text and into a far more speculative social reconstruction of the composition of the texts. It seems to be something that could have some value for the development of the social world of Early Christianity, but it might not be the best way of understanding what the text is saying. The conversation about the text avoids authorship and authorship avoids the text – this inverse relationship calls into question how the authorship question ought to be addressed in New Testament scholarship.

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[1] Easily exemplified by a variety of works, but for a recent exposition, See Bart Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (Oxford: OUP, 2013).

[2] Sophie Laws, Commentary on the Epistle of James, 38.

[3] Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery, 284.

[4] Ibid., 285-287.

[5] Ibid., 290-291.

[6] Ibid., 291.

[7] Luke Timothy Johnson, Letter of James: A New Translation and Commentary, 110-111.

[8] Ibid., 121.

[9] As quoted in Matt Jackson-McCabe “The Politics of Pseudepigraphy in the Letter of James” in Jorg Frey et al., (eds.), Pseudepigraphie und Verfasserfiktion in fruhschristlichen Briefen, WUNT 246. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009, 601.

[10] Ibid., 601.

[11] Ibid., 604.

[12] Ibid., 606.

[13] For a discussion of this precise issue, see my previous blog post ‘They Couldn’t Have Known Greek”: An Argument for Abandoning a Common Trope.”

[14] James 2:19.

[15] Hutchinson Edgar, David, “The Use of the Love-Command and the Shema in the Epistle of James” Proceedings of the Irish Biblical Association 23 (2000), 9-22.

[16] Johnson, L.T. “The Use of Leviticus 19 in the Letter of James” JBL 101 (1982), 391-401.

[17] James Ropes, Critical and Exegetical Commentary on St. James, 47.

[18] Ibid., 52.

[19] See James B. Adamson, The Epistle of James (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976).

The Critical Edition: The Bane and Boon of the New Testament Scholar

Most every New Testament scholar when looking at the text of the New Testament, opens up their Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament. This resource is the standard New Testament that is used for most academic study. This critical edition is valuable not only because it is standard but also because it is very well done. The problem with it is that this critical edition also creates a standard which does not give respect to the actual manuscripts that we do have. Further, while most scholars are questioning how much the concept of a single Urtext is helpful, there is a practical one in scholarship in this critical edition.

A critical edition is the term for a scholarly compilation of all of the manuscripts that are available in order to create a text that seems to be as close to the original as possible. These are created due to a very good problem – we have so many manuscripts of the New Testament (Bart Ehrman claims that we have approximately 5700 manuscripts of the Greek new Testament) that scholars try to piece them together to make the one they feel is closest to the original.  

As many might know, we have very few manuscripts within the first century after the documents were written and our best manuscripts come from the fourth and fifth centuries. Before this time, we do have some manuscripts, but they are all fragmentary and do not include the whole New Testament. Further as these are handwritten documents it is not surprising that no two are exactly alike. The job of the text critic is to look at all of these, collate them together, and create a critical edition.

Scholars use several criteria in order to establish this text. These criteria include the age of the manuscripts, the number of the manuscripts, the reliability of the manuscript, the geographical diversity of the manuscript, and the difficulty of the reading.[1] These criteria are applied, but many arguments can be made for a variety of different readings (as many readings satisfy some, but not all of the criteria). Therefore, the editors of the critical edition have to make a difficult judgment – and therefore it is not surprising that the Nestle-Aland is now on its 28^th edition. A critical edition then makes a standard text, but then also provides the significant variant readings in the notes.

The value of the critical edition (both for the New Testament and all ancient texts) is that it provides a standard text which can be referenced by all scholars. Further, the Nestle-Aland critical edition is very well done and I would agree it is probably the most historical text that we can put together. In addition to it being historical, it also makes relatively good sense as far as ease in reading (grammatical mistakes are very difficult to interpret in texts). Further, the footnotes showing differences are helpful as they try to inform the reader of significant variances.

The challenge to the critical edition is that it is a complete modern invention. There is no text in antiquity that is exactly what is in the Nestle-Aland. This is a significant issue. While it might be a very good reconstruction, it is a reconstruction. This does take us a few steps away from the actual texts and into this reconstruction.

In graduate school, I did most all of research on the Nag Hammadi texts in which there would be no dream of possibly creating a critical edition that avoided the different manuscripts. While it is true that there are vastly fewer manuscripts for the Nag Hammadi library, the attitude was that of considering the manuscripts themselves. Therefore, rather than using a critical edition that combines the 5 different manuscripts of the Apocryphon of John, the standard edition, put together by Wisse and Waldstein simply puts them in parallel so the reader can depict their individual meaning for themselves.[2]

The value in looking at manuscripts themselves is that one can note the tendencies and interests of each individual manuscript. The differences are quite shocking and collating them together would lose this difference. Karen King has shown this in translation by having parallel columns of the “short” and “long” versions of the Apocryphon of John showing that it is not a difference merely in just a few expanded sections, but that there is a major difference in the tenor of the entire text.[3]

While it might be true that a critical edition such as in the New Testament does provide alternate readings in the notes, the attitude of the Nestle-Aland is opposite that of the texts of the Nag Hammadi. The Nestle-Aland provides on scholarly reconstruction with some notes here and there from various texts. The Nag Hammadi library presents full manuscripts together with various notes here and there from others to reconstruct the missing pieces (as some are badly damaged). Therefore, the attitude is precisely opposite – both are dealing with the manuscripts, but in very different ways. The Nestle-Aland masks the interests of a particular manuscript by citing it here and there; whereas the Nag Hammadi texts mask some of the uniformity of the text. Both approaches have their own merits, but the Nag Hammadi approach is valuable in that it brings readers face to face with the extant manuscripts rather than a modern reconstruction.

My recent study on the book of James revealed a trend in New Testament scholarship. The Nestle-Aland probably was never meant to be the be all end all of the text of the New Testament; however, for the majority of the major commentators of the New Testament it was. Very few mentioned variant readings, and when they did, it was not based on the interest of a particular codex and why it presented the variation that it did; rather, it was based on the fact that the Nestle-Aland text was a bit confusing, so they used a variety of texts and coded them together to present an alternate one. Essentially, they were locked into the Nestle-Aland and they only considered an alternate plan long enough to get a reading they wanted – not based upon going back to an original text – instead, to simply bolster their own interpretation.

The reason that this is so shocking is that the Nestle-Aland has become a de facto urtext – original text – while at the same time New Testament scholarship has challenged how much there was a single “original” text. Rudof Bultmann encapsulates the interest of seeing redactional layers in the New Testament text. He argued that the Gospel of John had at least two major redactions that came together.[4] While many of Bultmann’s interpretations have not stood the test of time, his argument that the text seems to have editorial activity in a systematic scale (meaning full editions) has been convincing. Other texts in the New Testament have been presented in the same way.[5] Therefore, scholars are coming to a general agreement that there was not a single original text. This challenges many of the presuppositions that a critical edition depends upon for its existence.

It is becoming clear that ancient books – much like modern ones – were not written at one time, but had several editions that needed editing. Raymond Starr has argued that an earlier draft frequently was sent to friends in order to get edits and then the text was rewritten.[6] However, as nearly every author on the circulation of books in antiquity emphasizes, as soon as something was out of the hands of the author, there was no control over it.[7] The friend could easily have something copied and now that first edition – which, of course, never was intended to be read the way it was, is now being circulated.

To show that editions of texts could be circulated before the author wanted them to, consider the example of Augustine and Tertullian who complained of this very problem. Tertullian argues that he had an early edition of Adversus Marcionem which was circulated:

The first edition, too hastily produced, I later withdrew, substituting a fuller treatment. This too, before enough copies had been produced, was stolen by one who was at one time a brother but later became an apostate, and who copied excerpts very incorrectly and made them available to many people. Thus emendation was required. This occasion persuaded me to make some additions. Thus this composition, a third following a second, and instead of a third from now on the first, needs to begin by reporting the demise of the work it replaces in order that no one may be confused if in one place or another he comes across varying forms of it.[8]

Tertullian clearly wrote several editions and did so because while writing one that was not meant to be circulated, was stolen and was sent out. There clearly is no clear point at which the text was “done” and therefore a real question is asked as to what was “the original.” Tertullian wants people to consider his third edition as the only one – he does not want someone to later collate the three together into an “original” text. That would be losing much of his point – and of course it would not be original at all. It would be a new fourth edition that Tertullian could not have imagined. Augustine similarly rewrites his De Trinitate because it was taken before he was ready: “I had laid the work aside after discovering that it had been carried off prematurely or purloined from me before I had completed it or revised and corrected it as I had planned.”[9] Due to this challenge, he, like Tertullian, wrote a new edition that was being published in order that it could be clarified.

The fact that authors did not have a single edition of the text makes us rethink the value of a compiled critical edition. There is real question as to what is the “original.” It is even questionable when something becomes an “edition” and when it is still being originally composed. The line between writing and editing is a very blurry one and we seem to be working from the idea that there was one original that we want to reconstruct – even though in scholarship we generally assume there wasn’t a single “original.”

This conversation is not meant to imply that all manuscripts of the New Testament are amazing documents that need to be considered on their own – they certainly can be, but there are some very poor manuscripts. There are some that are so rife with errors that it leads us to think that the reason the text diverges so greatly is simply due to incompetence. These manuscripts probably are not the ideal candidates to study; however, I question how true this always is – we have some very good manuscripts (codex Alexandrinus, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus being among the best). These manuscripts ought to be studies as they are – we can now say they have “mistakes” but that is only comparing them to the critical edition we completed. The far more important discussion would be if one could see patterns and interests in that codex itself. There might well be a systematic pattern as to why it has divergences from the norm on a variety of levels.

The functional value of studying manuscripts themselves rather than the critical edition is attitudinal. It might be far better to think of these documents as “editions” rather than an attempt at the urtext which is full of “errors.” It might be quite likely that these manuscripts have a point to make as living documents rather than merely data to be chopped up and reconstituted.

After this brief discussion of the critical edition compared with the use of the texts on their own, I happily admit that I tend to use the critical edition in much of my own study. This is due primarily to the universality of the critical edition (and as mentioned earlier, they are generally very well done). My guess is that the reason more work is not done at the level of the manuscript is simply its difficulty. It is hard work to compare the different manuscripts of the New Testament and see those differences between whole codices rather than just a single verse.

The second challenge to the practical application of this is the atomization of a study. If one only studies Sinaiticus on James, much of the content is not particularly unique to Sinaiticus and the same themes and arguments could be made about Alexandrinus. As a result, scholars want to appeal to as large an audience as possible and so they simply use the common source. However, if it is true that these works do have common themes, why is it so impossible for someone studying Alexandrinus to look at a study on Sinaiticus? If the challenge is universality, then we can continue to look universally without the value judgment of the manuscripts compared to the “original text.”

The hard work is precisely what needs to be done to remain consistent. It is far better to work hard than it is to claim that we do not hold to an urtext when it was originally composed, but silently accept one that was put together by modern scholars now on its 28^th edition.

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[1] See Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration 2^nd edition (New York and Oxford: OUP, 1968).

[2] Michael Waldstein and Frederik Wisse The Apocryphon of John: Synopsis of Nag Hammadi Codices II,1; III,1; and IV,1 with BG 8502,2 (Leiden: Brill, 1995).

[3] Karen L. King, The Secret Revelation of John (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

[4] Rudolf Bultmann The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. G.R. Beasley-Murray, R.W.N. Hoare, and J.K. Riches (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971).

[5] See Delbert Burkett Rethinking the Gospel Sources: From Proto-Mark to Mark (Bloomsbury: T&T Clark, 2004).

[6] Raymond J. Starr “The Circulation of Literary Texts in the Roman World” Classical Quarterly, 37(1) 1987, 213-223.

[7] See Harry Y. Gamble Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995) and Catherine Hezser Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001).  

[8] Tertullian, Adv. Marc. 1.1 quoted and translated in Gamble, Books and Readers, 118-119.

[9] Ep. 174 quoted in Gamble, Books and Readers, 133.