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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.