2015-03-13T23:04:02-04:00

The article by Andreas Dettwiler (translated by Eric Gilchrest and Nicholas Zola, the former of which is one of my own former students) has much the same orientation as the article by Sterling, reviewed in the previous post in this particular series. That is, it involves a comparison of the supposedly deutero-Pauline Colossians and Ephesians to the portrait of Paul in Acts. Like so many who take this view of the pseudonymous character of those Pauline letters, the author talks about a Pauline school, something for which we have no historical evidence or basis whatsoever. Dettwiler however wants to emphasis that authority stressed in these documents.

Thus, for example Dettwiler points out that in Colossians and Ephesians Paul is presented as an uncontested authority figure, in contrast to the earlier Paulines. This contrast forgets that: 1) Colossians is written to a congregation Paul did not found and had not gotten embroiled in controversy with, and 2) Ephesians is a circular document not an ad hoc particularistic one. This does not allow the confident conclusion “Therefore, the Paul of Colossians, and even more noticeably the Paul of Ephesians, seems to have been a figure detached from any historical contigency or individuality.” (p. 249).

With those sorts of presuppositions, Dettwiler then is somewhat surprised that the image of Paul conveyed in these documents doesn’t amount to guilding the lily, or turning Paul into a hero. He is also somewhat surprised that in the case of Ephesians the writer “does not seem to have made any effort to create a strong and convincing ‘pseudepigraphical situation’.” And then he endorses the conclusion that “we are dealing here with a pseudepigraphy that lacks real pseudepigraphical elements.” (p. 251), in contrast to some efforts in that direction in Colossians. Of course these puzzles disappear if these are Pauline documents, and the later one is a circular letter. Sometimes scholarly presuppositions create more problems than they solve. Of course all of this is brought into question by Ehrman’s now very detailed demonstration that there was no literary convention in antiquity of pseudepigraphy that made it an ethically unobjectionable practice.

I agree with Dettwiler however that Luke does not present Paul as a largely polemical figure. It is untrue to say that Paul is not presented as a controversial figure, at least in the context of Jerusalem. To the contrary, Paul is constantly embroiled in controversy in Acts when he goes to Jerusalem, and finally it leads to his incarceration. What is interesting about this is that Luke is fair enough to show that the controversy was with both non-Christian Jews, and Christian ones (see Acts 15). Note as well, that not even the Christian ones come to his defense when he is under house arrest in Caesarea Maritima. Not even Luke presents us with an uncontroversial, non-polemical Paul. Dettwiler explains the lack of calling Paul an apostle in Acts as a result of Luke being in a community where the term was limited to the 12. This hardly explains what we find in Acts 14. Is Paul then presented as a figure of uncontested authority in Acts and Ephesians? No, in the former case, and the matter is not an issue in Ephesians.

Dettwiler then turns to the dialogical nature of ancient friendly letters, as outlined by Cicero and Seneca. Here he is on more solid footing. He quote Stan Stowers approvingly when he says that letters convey a fictive presence of the author to the recipient when the author is absent (earlier scholars called this the apostolic parousia–see p.255). Dettwiler however makes a good point when he stresses that the mention of Paul being in chains underscores the forced absence of the apostle, and gives more pathos to these Pauline letters especially underlining his suffering on their behalf. I also agree with Dettwiler that Luke, while alluding to the demise of the person of Paul, stresses the ongoing endurance of the Word, boldly proclaimed in the capital city– Rome (p. 256). But then Luke is writing salvation not a biography of Paul.

Dettwiler goes on to emphasis the ‘musterion’ dimension of both Colossians and Ephesians, with Paul being the special emissary who unveils the mystery of God’s inclusion of the Gentiles into God’s people without their becoming practicing Jews. Dettwiler admits that this seems to be stressing that Paul has a very high authority, indeed a unique one to unveil this form of the Gospel and so reach the Gentiles for Christ. It is going too far however to speak of a quasi-soteriological status for Paul (p. 258). Yet Paul is the paradigmatic presenter of the Good News for the Gentiles, and both Colossians and Ephesians allude to this, but so does Acts in a different narratival way.

Dettwiler is however on to something in stressing that in Acts it is Paul the founder of communities that is stressed whereas in the letters it is Paul the developer and nurturer of communities, hence Luke does not mention the letters. Put another way Luke is focusing on evangelism, Paul in his letters on discipleship. (see p. 260). This should have led to the conclusion that it’s not a big deal that Luke chooses not to mention the letters. It’s outside the scope of what he is trying to unveil in Acts— the spread of the Word across the Mediterranean to more and more people groups. Dettwiler concludes his essay (pp. 262-63) by rightly stressing that more reflection should be given to the relationship of Paul as paradigmatic presenter of the Gospel, and Paul as a unique and distinctive proclaimer of the Good News to the Gentiles. Here I would just suggest that as 1 Cor. 3 says, there is a difference between the historical role the man played as church planter, which was often unique, and the message or Word that he planted, which was shared by Apollos and others.

2015-03-13T23:04:02-04:00

It is a long standing tendency of certain streams of NT scholarship to claim or blame Paul for the way the Jesus movement turned out– namely a largely Gentile religion based not on the teachings of Jesus but on what was later viewed as his soteriological significance and work. This in turn led to a ‘back to Jesus’ and ‘away with Paul’ thrust which we still hear the echoes of today from various members of the Jesus seminar, and most recently from the book by James Tabor Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity (Simon and Schuster: 2012), quite properly critiqued by James Dunn in a review in the latest issue (March 2013) of BAR.

The article we are dealing with in this post by Gregory Sterling (found on pp. 220-47 of Paul and the Heritage) deals with this very matter, and at some length and depth. It deserves our close attention. This article was previously test-driven at the SNTS Reception of Paul seminar in 2005 and thereafter revised.

Sterling begins by acknowledging that letters and a narrative like Acts are of different literary genre and therefore deserve different kinds of analyses when it comes to biographical material found in one or the other. This is a good and necessary observation. But in both cases one must take into account the rhetorical shaping and uses being made of the materials. Sterling is also right to note that in Hellenistic historiography such as one finds in Acts there was a regular biographical orientation when it comes to major figures like Jesus or Peter or Paul, and we certainly see that in Acts. Sterling also subscribes to the notion that we have a variety of pseudepigrapha in the Pauline corpus, including Ephesians so that biographical material in such sources fall under the heading of reception of Paul, rather than expression of Paul. We have already noted how Ehrman’s recent treatments of forgery bring this whole line of reasoning into question, from a ethical point of view. Sterling chooses to focus on what Ephesians adds to the discussion of the ‘legacy’ and ‘reception’ of Paul. Sterling also accepts the received wisdom that the author of Ephesians used Colossians in the composition of his document, which I agree with. Ephesians is a circular discourse for various groups and it does draw on Colossians. There is nothing preventing Paul from having done this himself. What Sterling completely fails to take into account is the rhetorical character of Ephesians— namely that it is both Asiatic rhetoric and more particularly epideictic Asiatic rhetoric.

Sterling rightly points out that Ephesians doesn’t mention a co-sender, but rather the focus is entirely on Paul the apostle. This is basically correct though Tychicus is clearly said to be with Paul and his go between to the audience in Ephes. 6.21-22. Sterling points out of course that in Acts Paul is only in Acts 14 called an apostle, whereas this is emphasized in Paul’s letters, including Ephesians. The problem with citing the parallel use of apostle (to mean emissary of a particular church– 2 Cor. 8.23) is that elsewhere in Luke-Acts Sterling takes the reference to apostles to be a terminus technicus. Sterling settles for the idea that Luke was inconsistent in his use of the term. The problem with all this is the basic assumption that ‘apostle’ is a technical term in the first place meaning something like: 1) a member of the 12; 2) one of the original eyewitnesses of the ministry of Jesus. But what if it simply means an agent of Jesus, an emissary sent by Jesus? Paul believes that what makes him such an agent is: 1) the resurrection of Jesus, and 2) his having seen and been commissioned by the risen Lord. In Acts, the commission is for him to testify to Gentiles, Kings, and the children of Israel. In short, I think the discussions of the term ‘apostoloi’ have been overly problematized.

On the basis of Ephes.3.3-6 Sterling attempts to claim that the revelation of the mystery (of Gentile salvation) came to Paul before it came to the other apostles and prophets. In other words “his argument is that Paul has pride of place in the revelation of God’s mystery.” (p. 235). Of course the problem with this is that Ephesians is based on Colossians, and it would be hard to argue that Ephesians is intended as a correction of Colossians, not to mention a correction of Acts, where Paul and Peter both get revelations about the mystery (Acts 9-10) in close sequence (though Paul comes first). Sterling argues that Luke is basically doing the same thing Ephesians is, namely focusing on Paul as the pre-eminent apostle to the Gentiles by placing his conversion first. Thus, he is not sublimated to the Jerusalem authorities— whether the 12 or later James etc.

Sterling goes on to argue that Luke presents Jesus as the founder of Christianity, and then the 12/apostles, and then Paul as his successors. In fact he says Luke’s view is that while Jesus is the founder, Paul is the architect and builder of early Christianity (pp. 239-40– appealing to Irenaeus’ evaluation of Acts in ad. haer. 3.15.1). But this is probably to view Acts too much through a biographical lens. Luke is a historian recounting the signal events in a historical progression. His primary interest is in how the good news about Jesus gets from Jerusalem through the Empire to Rome, it’s center. This is why we do not have resolution of Paul’s fate in Acts. Luke believes it is God and the Spirit who is the prime agent of the spread of the Gospel, not Paul. Indeed, the book of Acts might be best called the Acts of the Holy Spirit (not the apostles, including Paul). Sterling also makes the mistake of assuming Galatians could not be an early Pauline letter written before the Acts 15 council. The matter is not even argued or discussed, it is just assumed, and this leads to the further assumption that Acts relates many more journeys of Paul to Jerusalem than Paul does. That is in fact not really correct. The ultimate journey to Jerusalem is alluded to in Rom. 15, but is still in the future, whereas Acts relates it as a past event with consequences. In other words, Sterling doesn’t synch up the accounts in Acts and the letters very well. Another example of this (see p. 243) comes when he tries to argue that Ephesians and Acts both suggested that while the life of Paul is over, the voice and message of Paul carries on into the next generation. This works for Acts, but not for Ephesians, where Paul is still sending emissaries to churches, like Tychicus. In the end, Sterling endorses the notion that Ephesians is the quintessence of Paulinism, a sort of summary of his thought from a later period. The reader has access not merely to Paul’s thought but the man himself through his letters, even this one thought to be written after his death. According to Sterling, in Ephesians, Paul goes from being the apostle to the Gentiles, to being the apostle to all the churches, and he argues that the letter reflects the later situation when the church is largely Gentile and the Jew-Gentile controversy that wracked the early period of the church was well and truly over (p. 244). So it is that while there are clear agreements between Acts and Ephesians, the former emphasizes his career, the latter his thought, according to Sterling, but they both agree he is the pre-eminent apostle of any sort, especially to the Gentiles, who turn out to be the dominant church population by the time Luke is writing.

2015-03-13T23:04:05-04:00

Perhaps for the first time in this whole volume, Jens Schroter in his article on “Paul the Founder of the Church” provides a rationale for the title of the volume in saying “The Acts of the Apostles and the Pastoral Epistles belong to a trajectory of early Christianity committed to the heritage of Paul’s mission and theology.” (p. 195). As I have already said, there is a reason to connect those two sets of documents, the middle term being Luke, but if the Pastorals are ultimately from Paul they are not part of the reception of Paul. Acts however can be said to chronicle and be concerned about the heritage of Paul’s mission (though there is much less interest in his ‘theology’ in Acts). As Schroter adds, it is better to focus on documents like the Acts of Paul to get a later perspective on the mission and heritage of Paul. Even better one could look at the later encomiums to Paul by Chrysostom in so many of his homilies (and see M. Mitchell’s work on this The Heavenly Trumpet).

Scroter admits that there have been quite a few studies linking Acts and the Pastorals in terms of vocabulary, style, perspective on Paul (p. 196) and rightly so if Luke is the actual composer of both. The big disconnect for Scroter however is that there is no mention of Paul the letter writer in Acts, and so he does not accept the hypothesis. This conclusion totally ignores the fact that Paul in Acts is depicted as a missionary church planter, not a discipler of Christians who already exist in community. The emphasis is on his travel and being in various places, not on what he did when he was away from his converts, which is hardly chronicled at all, except to focus on Paul’s trials and how he reached Rome. Paul the letter writer is no more the interest of Luke in Acts than is Peter the letter writer. Only James the letter writer comes up for discussion, and that for the specific reason of the Apostolic Decree, not to discuss general communication with converts in the diaspora (see the homily of James). Schroter further confuses the issue when he tries to contrast Acts 20.4 which refers to a journey of Timothy from Ephesus to Greece with 1 Tim. 1.3 where Timothy is to stay in Ephesus, never considering we are talking about two very different points in time with the reference in the Pastorals being from a much later period in time.

On page 197 Schroter admits that the old German contrast of Dibelius and others between the Paul of the speeches in Acts 13 and 17 and the Paul of the letters is no longer sustainable. As the volume edited by Stan Porter on the Paul of Acts shows, what we see in Paul’s letters is the application of Paul’s theology to specific situations. But Paul in Acts does not yet have specific situations to address by letters when he is founding churches. Schroter is also right to dismiss the old idea of Luke trying to paint a picture of Paul as some sort of hero of the faith. Schroter however clings to the assumption of the Pastorals being pseudepigrapha, and one wonders how he would respond to Bart Ehrman’s two books on this matter, the more popular one entitled Forged. He does conclude the Pastorals are likely to all be composed by one person. What he does not reckon with adequately is the possibility of both Luke and Paul being involved in these documents. As I like to put it, the voice is the voice of Paul, but the hands are the hands of Luke.

One of the assumptions Schroter shares with those who want to maintain that the Pastorals are pseudepigrapha is that nonetheless, they address ‘real’ situations in the Pauline mission field (in this case Crete and Ephesus). But this causes more problems then it solves. Are we really to believe that churches in those places are unaware that Paul has been dead for some time, if we date the Pastorals to the post-Pauline period? This seems a huge assumption that cannot be sustained.

Another assumption that cannot be sustained is that while Paul is depicted as an enemy of God in the Pastorals and Acts, before his conversion, he is not so depicted in the ‘authentic’ Paulines (p. 201). I have to say, I don’t know which authentic Paulines he’s been reading, because we see the same admission in a different form in Galatians 1 and 1 Cor. 15. Paul was at odds with the new Christian movement, and so at odds with God’s will, as Paul freely admits. Schroter then makes the further mistake of thinking that 1 Tim. 1.12-17 portrays Paul as the first of the converted sinners, when in fact what it says is he evaluates himself as the most heinous one. Protos here, as elsewhere means ‘chief’ not chronologically ‘first’. About one thing Schroter is right. The person who composed the Pastorals knows a lot about the Pauline circle and earlier mission work. The question is which is easier to believe— that the author of the Pastorals knows: 1) Acts, and 2) the personalia of all the earlier Paulines, and so can 3) write in a manner that would convince a new audience in Crete or Ephesus, that it was actually from Paul, though post mortem, or is it easier to make sense of these being the latest Pauline letters composed at the end of his life when he is indeed passing the torch to Timothy and Titus and others, and helping with the transition to a post-apostolic era. All other things being equal, the simplest theory which best explains all the facts, not just some of them, is to be preferred. Schroter prefers a much more complex theory, which frankly has more problems with explaining all the data. At no point does Schroter deal with the facts of Roman jurisprudence and the likelihood that after two years under house arrest, Paul was set free, somewhere around A.D. 62 in Rome and continued his ministry thereafter. Confusingly, Schroter seems to think that the Pastorals depict a period in time BEFORE the Miletus speech in Acts 20 (p. 205). But they don’t. It is true that the Miletus speech vocabulary is similar to the Pastorals, and this is because Luke was involved in the composition of both. Schroter finally admits “the agreements are striking” (p. 214).

Schroter goes on to point out that Paul’s sufferings, as seen as a part of the sufferings of Christ, is not found in Acts or the Pastorals, but only in the earlier Paulines (p. 211). This is true, but there is reference to Paul’s sufferings in those later works, and so to read a difference of authorship into this difference is an argument from silence.

Schroter admits that Luke seems to know Paul’s theology of justification by grace through faith, and so he is right to complain that attempts to contrast Paul’s theology with the later Paul in Acts doesn’t much work. “Rather, Luke’s portrait of Paul has to be regarded as a creative treatment of Paul’s heritage in a new situation within early Christian history.” (p. 213). Just so, and this implies Luke’s considerable familiarity and agreement with Paul’s thought.

On p. 216, Schroter stresses that the theme of rebirth (Tit. 3.5) and the concept of the epiphany of the Savior which is found in all three Pastorals distinguishes these documents from the earlier Paulines. This is correct, but it does not distinguish them from Luke-Acts where we do find such language. Schroter concludes that Paul is presented as both missionary and theologian in Acts and the Pastorals, and that the label early Catholicism does not suit in either case. “The Acts of the Apostles and the Pastorals are thus connected in that they depict Paul in specific ways as the missionary and theologian upon whom the characteristic form of the Christian church is founded.” (p. 219).

2015-03-13T23:04:13-04:00

The next essay in Paul and the Heritage of Israel is one by Michael Wolter, based on sociology of knowledge paradigms as a key to interpreting Paul and as a way of distinguishing Paul from what Wolter calls the later pseudepigraphic Paul (in his view this includes 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastorals). Basically, Wolter wants to make a hard and fast distinction between a religion of conversion (see 2 Cor. 5.17) and a religion of tradition (see the later Paulines). The problem with this hard and fast either/or, is that it doesn’t work. Paul makes perfectly clear in his undisputed letters that he also is passing along sacred tradition (see e.g. the last supper tradition in 1 Cor. 11, and the very language of passing on of tradition in 1 Cor. 15 in regard to the credo about the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus). While it is certainly true that in various places Paul stresses the discontinuity between Christian communities and faith on the one hand and Jewish communities and faith on the other, and he certainly affirms a theology of transformation so that one can be ‘in Christ’ it is also true that Paul draws on and affirms the Jewish Scriptures and a variety of early Christian traditions to help create the ethos of the new community. The trick is to see the balance between elements of continuity and discontinuity. Wolter is however right that in the later Paulines there is more emphasis on tradition and its being passed along. This is understandable since Paul is coming to the end of his ministry and helping his churches make the transition into the brave new post-apostolic world. And I have to say… in view of Bart Ehrman’s enormously detailed refutation of the idea that pseudepigraphal letters were a recognized literary genre and practice, and raised no moral problems, I am afraid Wolter has taken for granted something he should not, namely that there are definitely such documents in the NT, and thus that they reflect the post-Pauline reception of Paul. It should also be noted that while Wolter allows that there is some future eschatology in Colossians and Ephesians, he fails to take into account that Ephesians in particular is a different sort of rhetoric than say Romans. It is epideictic rhetoric, and the temporal focus of such rhetoric is on the present, not the future. Then too, Wolter assumes that the fact that Colossians and Ephesians assume a prior knowledge of Pauline eschatology and therefore are written to a post-Pauline situation fails to take into account the possibility that this tradition or prior knowledge came from previous oral or written communications from Paul or his co-workers like Epaphras. In any case, a religion of conversion, if it is at all successful in converting anyone, immediately becomes a religion of tradition, for there has to be teaching of the new converts once they become followers of Christ. Even if it is true that we find in Ephesians, Colossians and the Pastorals an attempt to recontextualize Paul’s theology of grace and justification, there is no good reason why Paul could not have been the one to do this himself when new situations presented themselves with new problems, and to some degree new audiences as well. And one more point— all of the Pauline letters are addressed to those who are already Christians. The fact that some of them reflect a theology of conversion and some do not is hardly surprising, and does not necessarily reflect chronological development from a religion of conversion to one of tradition. It is simply not the case, even in the case of the Pastorals, that one can say a religion of conversion is left behind and replaced by a religion of tradition, especially when we know that conversions continued to happen in these communities long after Paul died, indeed well into the second century. It is interesting however that Wolter, accepts that Luke was the sometime companion of Paul and was raised in the Pauline theological tradition, and that his portrait of the evangelizing Paul is on target (p. 68– and compare his 2008 Luke commentary). He adds that Luke differs from Paul in this respect— his whole aim in Luke-Acts is to show that Christianity is a religion of tradition with a rich heritage in Jewish salvation history.

2015-03-13T23:04:43-04:00

Here is the second part of my dialogue with my friend and colleague Beth Sheppard.

4) One of the things I hear regularly from folks like Bart Ehrman is that a true modern critical historian must bracket out the whole notion of the miraculous, which of course leaves large chunks of the NT in the lurch since the miraculous is on almost every page of the Gospels and Acts, and is found elsewhere in the NT as well. Do you think it is necessary to ignore or dismiss the miraculous in order to be a good critical historian in the 21rst century? Or is that just a different form of methodological narrow-mindedness (a narrow mindedness that rules out some of the data ab initio)?

Thanks for this question, Ben. I think that when it comes to the “supernatural,” history can tell us some things, but theology and metaphysics also have a role to play. To be sure, historians may come in both flavors; those who believe in miracles and those who don’t. Granted, the question of whether miracles are possible doesn’t seem to be something historians could tackle easily. History is focused on what happened, why, and how it might be understood. Whether or not God is more powerful than the laws of natural physics and whether or not He does choose at times to act in contradiction to the laws may be a question for the discipline of theology instead of history. The bottom line? Just because someone believes that miracles do happen doesn’t make that individual an inferior historian, it is merely an indication that they likely have a different theology.

I’m not certain of the nuances of your conversation with Ehrman, but I’d think that to bracket off a miracle account (not just New Testament accounts, but those related to the Saints in the Middle Ages or those that people believe are occurring today) completely from the possibility of historical investigation may be to overlook aspects of the miracle narrative where history might provide insights related to the wider culture. Take the raising of Lazarus as an example. An historian might think of all sorts of questions to ask about the passage. Why did Lazarus die? Was there a plague or new virus that was making the rounds in that time period? Taking a different tact, one may ask “ How did John understand the passage of time?” After all, there are many time references in the pericope and different cultures understand the passage and implications of time differently. Are the time references in this passage similar to or different from norms found in the wider culture in which John was operating? And so on. There is no end to the questions that an historian might choose to investigate.

5) There is a lot of talk these days about our being in a post-modern, post-Christian era, even in America. And indeed the prefix post- seems to come up a lot in discussions of history and the Bible these days. We have post-colonial readings of the NT, post-Enlightenment readings of the NT and so on? What are the pluses and minuses of these new sorts of readings of the NT from an historical point of view? Do you think that we must really commit ourselves to saying that ‘texts’ do not have meanings, we give them their meanings as active readers”? This would seem to sound the death knell of traditional historiography because it suggests that even if texts do have ancient meanings, we are such strong readers that the original meaning is unknowable.

As I tried to indicate in Craft of History (164-169), postmodernism was bitter medicine for many historians to swallow – whether those historians studied WWI, or the history of the Ming Dynasty, or the New Testament. It is essentially a philosophy that some embrace, some reject, and some have found elements that are helpful and thus have found a middle way.

What are the extremes? A very harsh criticism of postmodernism for instance, may be found in Steven Cowan and James S. Spiegel’s “The Love of Wisdom: A Christian Introduction to Philosophy” pp 34-35. They contend that the postmodern assertion that there are no absolute truths is itself an absolute assertion. Thus the claim that all truth is relative is self-defeating. Further, they observe that if one makes the move that truth is subjective for oneself, then there is no reason for anyone else to adopt any particular view that is advanced either; this is solipsism in its purest form. It is on these two grounds, Cowan and Spiegel argue, that postmodernism fails. Purist postmodernists, for their part, might point out that Cowen and Spiegel are trapped in using Western logic and they are not offering a valid criticism because their use of logic proves that they are thinking in accordance with the culturally bound norms. In other words, by the very act of using logic Cowan and Spiegel prove the postmodernists’ point.

That does not mean that we are at a standstill. Historians outside of the field of Biblical Studies have, by and large, made their peace with postmodernism. Postmodernism wasn’t history’s death knell and historians have not abandoned the enterprise. Essentially they have taken the criticism offered by postmodernism seriously while at the same time still think that some elements of the past can be known with a reasonable degree of certainty. Remember my example of the puzzle from one of the previous questions in this blog interview? I mentioned that if an historian tried to put together an historical puzzle in ways analogous to forcing border pieces with straight edges together in the middle of the picture the resulting portrait probably wouldn’t really “work”. Nevertheless, historians will never have a complete picture of history because they will never have all the missing pieces. This is a radical shift in thinking from an era where it was believed that the past might be known with 100% certainty.

As a result, many historians might now speak not of “ the” answer but of a “plausible” answer, interpretation, or reconstruction.

So to answer your question, do I think that we are stuck saying “texts do not have meanings, we give them their meanings as active readers” (I’m not certain whom you are quoting here—I’m afraid that I’m not as well read as you are – ), I’d have to say that is certainly not where I’d go. I’d hang out with the moderates.

In the Craft of History (see pp 167-169) I summarize the work being done by Biblical Scholars Michael R. Licona and Pieter Craffert on these issues. They have slightly different perspectives from each other, but are both extraordinarily helpful. I would classify them as moderates. I’d also recommend that those who are reading this blog and who might be interested in more detail look at the volume edited by Donald Yerxa — Recent Themes in Historical Thinking: Historians in Conversation (University of South Carolina Press, 2008).

6) What new trends in historical study do you find promising for the study of the NT? What trends seem more like cul de sacs?

To be honest, I worry a bit about the current fashion for Marxist interpretations. It isn’t so much that they are cul de sacs, but more that the fascination with them may obscure the fact that other methods, such as cultural history (ethno-history) may be horses that have the potential for running longer. Not every subject or question lends itself easily to a Marxist interpretation. But there is very little that isn’t fodder for the cultural historian, for instance.

I also think that there are some methods, that when used in moderation, may really break open some new seams for investigation – particularly economic history and imaginative history. Now, since this is a blog with many readers, I feel obligated to state that imaginative history and counter-factuals generally require a very well read historian who knows the literature and subject well in order for the parallel history to work correctly. And we don’t need a deluge of them, likely just a few. A historian who uses this method isn’t just writing fiction, but instead feeds the insights gained from the parallel history back into the actual historical event in order to evaluate it. How about it Ben? Are you up for writing one?

Thank you, Ben for inviting me to participate in this blog. Happy Epiphany!

And the answer to Beth’s last question—- see A Week in the Life of Corinth!

2015-03-13T23:04:46-04:00

According to William Johnson (pp. 87-91), the standard bookroll tended to have 20 sheets, though production of rolls with up to 50-70 sheets are known, but they are surely special orders. If a scribe ran out of space, he would simply glue a new blank roll on to the end of the used up one. This process continued until the copying was complete, and then the excess or blank remnant would simply be cut away. “A reinforced sheet, with fibres at right angles to the roll itself could (but need not) be added at the beginning, perhaps also at the end, to help prevent fraying.” (p. 91). The tools needed were papyrus, pen, ink, sponge, knife, glue. The standards of construction seem to have been exceedingly exact when it came to bookroll production. Johnson is able to demonstrate how across a wide sample size the normal column width, and the normal width of an intercolumn between the two columns on a page was remarkably standard across hundreds of papyri. This in turn suggests to him, I think rightly, that we are talking about professional scribes producing the vast majority of ancient documents that have survived, scribes who had professional training. We have had occasion to review another crucial book about ancient scribes on this blog, namely K. Van der Toorn’s Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible. (See the previous incarnation of this blog at Beliefnet).

What is clear enough to me is that the under-estimation of the importance of scribes and their roles in the production of NT documents is a big mistake especially when it comes to authorship issues. This mistake is one of the things that characterizes the recent work of Bart Ehrman on forgery and the NT. He does not take into account that often scribes would assemble documents out of oral and written memoirs of persons, sometimes even after they were dead, and attribute them not to themselves but to their source, or most important source. In such circumstances, modern notions of authorship should not be anachronistically applied to documents like 2 Peter, which is a composite document (involving portions of Jude, a Petrine source, and other sources of information) or say the Gospel of Matthew (assembled out of Mark, Q, and some special M material).

Here are some of my notes from the important latter part of Johnson’s book.

There is a definite difference between prose and poetic texts. Prose texts determinate at the right margin at a regular spot down the page, poetic lines do not.

Literary prose texts are more uniformly written in neat narrow columns than mundane documents, subliterary texts, or letters…. The tendency in any case was narrower columns earlier in the Roman period and wider ones by the third century.

p. 112 One interesting finding is that nicer volumes have wider intercolumns between the columns to go along with a fair hand, often majuscule.

p. 119 While width of a column varied not a great deal, the heighth of a column could vary enormously… from 10.8 to 29.3 cm with most between 12-27. Interestingly, when we are talking about verse in the Oxy. Papyri they tend to be 16cm… and below. Dramatic texts tend to be the shortest in column height whether tragedy or comedy. From A.D. 100 and before 63% of such texts tend to have a shorter column 16cm or less.

p. 122— By the second century AD elegant prose also tended towards shorter column height.

p. 124— In regard to lines per column it varies a lot from 18 to 64 as the extremes, and most between 25 and 50 with poetry and elegant prose tending to have less lines per column.

p. 125-26— There is a regular correlation between narrow width and shorter height.

p. 128— “In sum, the papyri show the following tendencies: 1) a short column is almost always narrow and a large percentage of short, narrow columns are also written in fine scripts; 2) a tall column is usually wide (and is rarely written in a fine script)…” during the Roman period.

p. 129 Almost all examples where the width of the column is more than the height in cms would have been striking to ancient readers and almost all such examples are written in fine scripts. By contrast, tall and thin columns are associated with inelegant mss.

p. 134 Margins are difficult to estimate since so few ancient papyri have their original dimensions at top and bottom due to wear and tear. In general, bottom margins tended to be a little bigger than top ones, but mostly these are 3-5 cms anyway at the bottom, and 3-4 cms at the top so not huge.

p. 135 It has been often asserted that finer mss. tended to have bigger margins… and this conclusion seems largely correct.

p. 136 “…the largest margins do in fact tend to associate themselves with better-written manuscripts.”

p. 140 Shorter columns tend to prefer larger margins and taller columns prefer smaller margins. There is no basis for the assumption that finer mss. tend to be written on taller rolls. “…finer mss with short columns and large margins, resulting in rolls of unexceptional height.”

p. 141—Normal height of a roll seems to have varied between 25-33 cm for the most part in the Roman period.

p. 143-44—The length of a bookroll seems to have tended to depend on the length of the document copied— if a letter, then short, if a longish book like Homer, then long, sometimes involving several rolls. There’s not a lot of evidence of combining several substantial books into one lengthy roll, but there are examples of a collection of Demosthenes’ Phillipic speeches on a single roll. Multiple short prose works in a single role do exist in the 3rd century examples. Unlike with speeches, we do not find multiple plays on a single roll but you do find this with later codices.

As for length of the roll it varied between 3 meters and upwards of 11 meters. There is even one that is 23m long.

p. 146— “by far the majority of the longest examples are written in very fine scripts. Could it not be the case that longer works or books were sometimes subdivided, so as, for example, to accommodate the ample format of a deluxe copy…’book’ and ‘bookroll’ are only usually and not uniformly coextensive” When a book went on too long, a separate roll would be used. See Orosius (5th century A.D.) the end of his second book.

pp. 148-50— The full Illiad would require 19 meters in length with 108 columns. But rolls above 15m were abnormal and considered awkward and bulky it would appear. Kenyon thought 35 feet (10.7 m) was an upper limit, but he was wrong. The normal upper limit seems to have been closer to 15m with some examples exceeding that.

A roll of 15 meters would be about 9 cm rolled up. A 7.5 meter roll would roll up to a circumference of about the width of a soda pop can. A 20 meter roll would roll up into the size of a 2 liter container of Coke. For a scroll of 15 meters you would need 105 windings of the scroll! Obviously, the fatter the scroll gets the less windings needed so for example a scroll of 10 meters requires 85 windings. Again, in general a roll contained a single book, or a single volume of a larger work.

p. 151 Nothing in the data suggests a standard length roll. It would be as long as it needed to be, unless the size became too much, in which case another roll would be used. Nothing in the data suggests that a scribe regularly filled out a roll with other books or plays etc. though of course there are some rolls that have several speeches etc. Roll length was determined by knife. “That the roll length was not predetermined by a ‘standard’ would not seem to need such emphasis.”

See Pliny Ep. 120.4-5 for a preference for longer books… but also for a complaint about a roll too large to fit comfortably in the hands of a old person Ep. 2.1.4.

p. 152 Johnson moots the possibility that short books of Greek romantic novels were deliberately slim so as to match the look and feel of love poetry, and books of history were deliberately fat, so as to suggest the weightiness of the enterprise. When it comes to prose however the hard evidence does not suggest that scribes tended to treat different genre of prose works differently when it came to line length etc.

p. 155 Philosophical texts from Egypt did tend to conform to a particular set of conventions including being unique in the use of dicolon and a tendency toward pre-defined letter counts and width to height groupings.

p. 156 A typical deluxe edition will not look different from an ordinary one except in the fineness of the script and often the largeness of the letters (and perhaps of the paper quality). Other features sometimes found in deluxe editions are wide margins, and so a short height for columns and an excessively long roll for a large book. In other words aesthetics to please a wealthy reader seem to be guiding this sort of decision making by the scribe.

p. 88– “As for bookrolls, there is no hint that the book began life in any way except as a roll.” If one was writing a one page document, one would cut a piece off a roll.
Interestingly, when the columns are laid out on a roll, no attention is paid at all to where there are glue joints.

Pliny the Elder NH 13.78 talks about papyrus and its various grades and qualities. Pliny rates it on width, thinness, denseness, smoothness, whiteness.

Papyrus grades by width

Macrocollum— 44.4 cm
Claudian (after reform)—- 29.6 cm
Optimae chartae—- 24.1cm
Hieratic— 20.4 cm
Fannian—-18.5 cm
Ampitheatric—- 16.7cm
Emporitic—- 11.1cm
( the Oxy. Papyri for this study varied between 21cm and 23.7cm)

p. 91— “The scribe then generally picked up a roll of high (not highest) quality for a bookroll, and, even though he was aware, perhaps acutely, of the sheet joins, he viewed the space available for his design in terms of a roll, that is, as a white space, bounded by height, but virtually unbounded by width.” It is mundane documents and subliterary texts that tend to be written on inferior rolls. Scribes were picky and in the early Roman era there was a strong preference for a slightly forward tilt to the letters, and the lack of any tilt was anathema.

2015-03-13T23:07:24-04:00

Here is a sane response to the recent kerfuffle (which is much ado about not very much) about the existence of Jesus.

The “Did Jesus Exist” Controversy and Its Precedents
by larryhurtado

Well, the internet is buzzing nowadays with positive and negative responses to Bart Ehrman’s recent book: Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, written in response to the recent mini-wave of people denying that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical figure. I haven’t read Ehrman’s book, but to judge from the range of comments on the Amazon listing, it’s generating some heat.

I was emailed last week by someone asking why scholars don’t engage the “mythicists” (as they are called) on the issue. Were we afraid that we’d be out-gunned in an argument? Did we secretly know that the denyers had it all? Were we being elitist?

For me, it’s a matter of having a good many prior commitments to produce positive contributions to the study of early Christianity (e.g., right now, I’m trying to get on with an essay on “Who Read Early Christian Apocrypha?” for a multi-author volume). But another reason for feeling it less than necessary to spend a lot of time on the matter is that all the skeptical arguments have been made and effectively engaged many decades ago. Before posting this, I spent a bit of time perusing my copy of H. G. Wood, Did Christ Really Live?, which was published in 1938. In it, Wood cites various figures of the early 20th century who had claimed that Jesus of Nazareth was a fiction, and patiently and cordially engages the specifics of evidence and argument, showing that the attacks fail.

So in one sense I think I’m not alone in feeling that to show the ill-informed and illogical nature of the current wave of “mythicist” proponents is a bit like having to demonstrate that the earth isn’t flat, or that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, or that the moon-landings weren’t done on a movie lot. It’s a bit wearying to contemplate! And now, I really must get back to that essay.

2015-03-13T23:08:04-04:00

Here, thanks to Eric Sawyer, is my dialogue with Bart Ehrman as an audio file.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA2BCFB708740268F&feature=view_all

2015-03-13T23:08:05-04:00

Perhaps you’ve seen this bumper sticker before, or a variant thereof. I saw one in Lexington recently that said ‘Born Once: Doing O.K.’ What we are talking about here is just another manifestation of the rising tide of ire, frustration with, and outright rejection of Evangelical Christianity in America. And while a rising tide may not float all boats, it is certainly true that you have a variety of people riding the wave of growing opposition to Evangelicalism in our increasingly post-Christian culture, and making good money doing it. What is especially interesting is that it is a variety of people taking their rejection of Evangelicalism to the bank through publishing and/or TV including: 1) former Evangelicals like Bart Ehrman and Jennifer Knust, 2) atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens, 3) TV pundits like John Stewart, 4) shock jocks like Howard Stern and many others.

It’s now open season on Evangelicals at least in some quarters, and they are being accused of: 1) racism, 2) sexism, 3) bigotry, 4) homophobia, 5) general intolerance of other religions and ethnicities, 6) being somewhere right of Attila the Hun politically, 7) being too good to be true, 8) being hypocrites (n.b. it can’t be both 7 and 8), 9) having an overly literal way of reading the Bible, and 10) being xenophobic whilst amalgamating Americanism with Evangelicalism.

It must be admitted that some of this criticism has a basis in reality. For example, the majority of Evangelicals do tend to be politically conservative (i.e. Republicans or Libertarians), though by no means all of them. Or again, many American Evangelicals have a hard time distinguishing between, or indeed enjoy amalgamating their patriotic fervor for America with their Christian values. Or again many Evangelicals don’t see the inherent contradiction between proclaiming oneself ‘pro life’ but then being in favor of capital punishment and war in various forms.

Of course the stereotype or critique of such Evangelicals is that they are pro-birth, rather than being truly pro-life. Or again many Evangelicals are accused of being escapist and blindly Zionistic– being pro rapture and pro Israel, regardless of the policies of the Israeli government when it comes to Christians, especially Palestinian Christians in Israel/Palestine.

In this election season of course, all these religious and political juices get flowing again, and as one African American Christian friend of mine said— ‘It looks like white Evangelicals will have to choose between their latent racism and their dislike of Christological heresies like Mormonism.’ Sadly, there is some truth in this analysis. Interestingly, we seem to have less problems with the heresy.

Make no mistake, we may have thought it was a new day four years ago when a bi-racial man (with a white mother, and a non-white father) was elected President, but it will be a truly new day if we elect a man who is a product of a uniquely American offshoot religion from Christianity, namely Mormonism. Up to now, we have had only Protestant or Catholic Presidents (or in the case of a couple of the Founding Fathers, probably Deists).

Anyone who has actually taken time to read the Book of Mormon side by side with the Bible knows that the Mormons, in terms of their official credo, are certainly not Evangelical Christians, however they may present themselves. Indeed, there are sadly many things in the Book of Mormon simply incompatible with Christianity of whatever flavor (Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox), but that is a post for another day.

Americans may wear their credo on their bumper stickers, but right now, we appear to be unsure what our American credo is or should be vis a vis any sort of orthodox Christianity, including Evangelicalism. And truth be told— we are deeply religiously confused. It is a bad day when we can more clearly see and say what we oppose, what we stand against, than being able to articulate in what and in whom we truly place our faith. Looks like we do need to be born twice…. or at least reborn once.

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