THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIAN LITERATURE

BY

ROBYN FAITH WALSH

A.B., WHEATON COLLEGE, 2002 M.DIV. HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL, 2005

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE PROGRAM IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES AT BROWN UNIVERISTY.

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

MAY 2014

©Copyright 2014 by Robyn Faith Walsh

ii This dissertation by Robyn Faith Walsh is accepted in its present form

by the Department of Religious Studies as satisfying the

dissertation requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Recommended to the Graduate School

Date______Dr. Stanley K. Stowers, Advisor

Date______Dr. Ross S. Kraemer, Advisor

Date______Dr. David Konstan, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate School

Date______Dean Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

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Curriculum Vitae

Robyn Faith Walsh was born in the early morning hours of June 26th, 1980 in a sweltering Melrose, Massachusetts. An only child, she spent the early years of her life reenacting scenes from old Hollywood musicals, collecting natural ‘curiosities’ from the surrounding woods and believing that she was a cat who lived under the dining room table. Her thorough commitment to role playing and cataloging augured a future as a researcher and academic.

Growing up outside of Boston, she attended private Catholic schools where she was regularly told her failure to comprehend theology and her entrepreneurial exchange of school supplies made her a “bad Christian.” In high school, she enrolled in an independent study curriculum and took courses in ancient Greek philosophy. She went on to enroll at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where she majored in Ancient Studies (Classics and Religious Studies) and minored in Africana Studies. She was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa society in her junior year. She graduated summa cum laude and was class valedictorian.

After graduating Wheaton, Robyn attended Harvard Divinity School where she studied early Christianity and Roman archaeology and obtained a Masters in Divinity. She then began her Ph.D. work at Brown University in early Christianity, eventually moving into the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean program with a concentration in early Christianity, ancient Judaism and Roman archaeology.

In the spring of 2012, Robyn served as a lecturer at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. From 2012-2014 she returned to Wheaton College as a visiting instructor. Beginning in the fall of 2014, she will begin a tenure-track position in New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Miami.

iv Acknowledgements

It is difficult to convey the extent of my gratitude to the people have who supported me throughout the process of completing my degree, and this dissertation in particular. In many respects, the last few years have been tremendously challenging and the kindness and encouragement of my friends, family and colleagues has been extremely moving and means a great deal to me.

First and foremost a warm thank you to Stan Stowers for his many kindnesses and (seemingly limitless) patience. I greatly admire his clarity and judgment, and I appreciate the guidance he has given me over the years more than I can say. He is a brilliant scholar but, more importantly, he is incredibly intellectually generous and unfailingly supportive of his graduate students and colleagues. I owe him much.

I may have never told her this, but Ross Kraemer is the reason I pursued a career in the field. I read her work for the first time in college and I was hooked. To find myself at Brown working with her a few years later was surreal. Her questions and insights continue to challenge me more than any mentor I have had, and the care and concern she has for her students is something that I can only hope to emulate.

More than anyone else at Brown, David Konstan has become as dear to me as any friend and I consider him family. Both personally and professionally, I have never known someone more selfless, open and, most of all, equipped to handle a crisis. His “Q tips” for this dissertation were invaluable. He continues to be a great source of wisdom and inspiration.

Nancy Evans and Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus took me under their wing over fifteen years ago and to this day they are my most trusted colleagues and, I am fortunate to say, close friends. Their good humor and enthusiasm helped sustain me through the last year in particular. I attribute much of this project to their advice, guidance and encouragement.

There are a number of other mentors who have contributed to my development over the years, and for whom I hold a great deal of esteem. I am especially grateful to Nicola Denzey Lewis, Helmut Koester, François Bovon, Laura Hess, Pura Nieto Hernández and Susan Harvey. During the course of my research, I consulted many colleagues and appreciate their time and insights. A special thank you to Bill Arnal, Russell McCutcheon, Merrill Miller, David Frankfurter, Ron Cameron and Sarah Rollens. I would also like to thank my doctoral colleagues and dear friends at both Brown and Harvard, particularly Jennifer Eyl, David Berger, Robin McGill, Cavan Concannon and Emily Schmidt who suffered through many conversations about this material. I would also like to acknowledge John Robichaux for his support and companionship in the earlier stages of my graduate career.

v To my friends, Nick Doolittle, Ashley Taylor Doolittle, Nancy Wagner, R.C. Hammond, Amaren Colosi, Bridgit Murphy, Michael Bellafatto and Heather Wilson, thank you for being unconditional sources of love and strength. Also thank you to my godchildren, Jessica Mack, Claire Wagner and Mateo Doolittle.

I was fortunate to be hired as an instructor at The College of the Holy Cross and Wheaton College as I worked on this dissertation. I received invaluable training at these institutions and had a number of wonderful colleagues. My students also drove me continually to sharpen my thinking in ways that have helped me improve as a teacher and writer. I am especially grateful to Meagan Gagnon, Jonathan Gerkin, Matthew Guruge, Nicholas Ricciardi, Dan Lautenschlager, Arden Haselmann, Kaela Feit, Brian Jencunas and Emily Sampson.

Finally, I scarcely know how to begin to thank my parents, Thomas and Kathleen Walsh, for their love, encouragement, patience and perseverance. They have been unwaveringly selfless and devoted to supporting my ambitions over the years. If there is anything I ever need or any help that they can give me, they are always there at a moment’s notice. I admire them more than anyone and I love them very much.

And, while she can’t read this, I nonetheless want to thank my long-suffering dog, Sarah. She has endured many years of patiently (and not so patiently) waiting for me to finish one thing or another and reminds me not to take myself too seriously.

Lastly, I would like to dedicate this work to the memory of François Bovon and my former student, Paige Hicks, whom I think of everyday and who remind me of why it all matters.

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vi

Abstract

This dissertation offers a reevaluation of the Synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) and a hypothetical document thought to be common to Matthew and Luke, known as Q (Quelle). Scholars have often imagined the social environment for these texts to be a communal in some measure, with authors writing narratives about Jesus that mirror the social and theological interests of their communities or “churches.” I challenge that this approach stems from the mistaken premise that the cohesive and widespread social movement painted by the gospel writers was a historical reality. I demonstrate that accepting early Christianity’s own myth of origins has resulted in an extremely idiosyncratic approach to early Christian sources when compared with allied studies of ancient literature. By contrast, I establish that ancient Mediterranean authors tended to write within a competitive field of elite cultural producers, creating narratives that more or less conformed to established genres. Rather than attempt to read the gospels and Q under the related assumptions that they reveal cohesive communities and preserve strands of authentic material about Jesus, I situate them more coherently within a wider field of Greco-Roman literature as an example of “subversive biography,” in which a marginal figure is forced to succeed through the use of his wits and wonderworking skills.

This study also demonstrates the extent to which Romanticism continues to exact a strong influence on the field of early Christian Studies. I argue that the gospels and Q have been analyzed in twentieth and twenty-first century thought with an uncritical German Romantic communitarian framework that has imposed anachronistic, Romantic ideas of an implicit Volk (people, nation) or inspirational Geist (spirit) onto the text. This is a critique of current scholarship that has application not only in Christian thought, but also other religious traditions and texts studied within the academy.!

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Table of Contents

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Chapter One: The Myth of Christian Origins …………………………………. 1-51

Chapter Two: The Romantic “Big Bang” ………………………………… 52-89

Chapter Three: Authorship in Antiquity ………………………………… 90-135

Chapter Four: The Gospels as Subversive Biography ………………………… 136-172

Chapter Five: Redescribing Q …………………………………………………... 173-216

Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………. 217-246

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CHAPTER 1 THE MYTH OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS

When Thomas Jefferson took up a razor in order to piece together his Life and

Morals of Jesus of Nazareth his goal was to strip away, quite literally, the vestiges of ancient philosophy and so-called gnosticism that had convoluted the work of the “simple evangelists.” In a letter to John Adams he boasted that the “primitive simplicity” of early

Christianity was as plain as “diamonds in a dunghill.” Pasting together strategic passages from the canonical gospels, he imagined himself liberating the text from the “logos and demiurges, aeons and daemons” of Christian Platonists. This “Jefferson Bible” intended to lay bare the pure teachings of a remarkable, ancient moralist.1 Yet while Jefferson’s new text illustrates the extent to which scripture is “good to think with,” as Lévi-Strauss once said, it also stands as evidence for how scripture, in a sense, changes over time.2

Jonathan Z. Smith has somewhat ironically charged that the historical-critical study of the Bible suffers from an antiquarian bias. This bias is exemplified by the tendency for scholars to begin their evaluations of ancient materials from the point of a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Cited from Daniel Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 159. On the influence of Jefferson’s works and letters on the field of Late Antique Christianity, see Jonathan Z. Smith, “On the Origin of Origins,” in Drudgery Divine (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1-35.

2 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “The Study of Religion and the Study of the Bible,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39:2 (1971), 131-140.

! 1! text’s prehistory, “but never its subsequent history.”3 The Jefferson Bible is a fine example of the “subsequent” handling of ancient texts in the service of ascertaining something about the origins of early Christianity. Such activity need not be literal, as with

Jefferson and his razor, but can be evident in the frameworks, terms and methods used to describe the ancient world.

Jefferson’s larger correspondence reveals that his stitchery was a well-intentioned attempt at historiography. As Smith rehearses in Drudgery Divine, Jefferson and his cohort perceived that the gospel writers had injected popular philosophy into their accounts of Jesus’ life in order to make his teachings more palatable to a Roman (read:

‘pagan’) audience.4 The notion that the so-called primitive Christians would have been, in any way, “philosophical” agitated against a strongly-held vision at that time of Jesus as a humble moral teacher tailed by his “unlettered apostles.” Chief among these incursions was a breed of Platonism that, in their view, smacked of Trinitarianism. Jefferson cautioned “it is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the

Platonic mysticisms that three are one and one is three.”5 Jefferson’s planned “euthanasia for Platonic Christianity” remained fixed on this particular motif.

Hindsight suggests that Jefferson’s terms and methods were greatly influenced by eighteenth-century Deist and anti-Catholic polemics in which he was something of a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 J.Z. Smith, On Teaching Religion, Christopher I. Lehrich, ed. (London; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), 30.

4 Jefferson’s conversation partners on Christianity include John Adams and Joseph Priestly. See E.P. Smith, Priestly in America: 1794-1804 (Philadelphia, 1920), 122-24; 145-146. This source is also cited in Smith, “On the Origin of Origins,” 3, n. 2.

5 Smith, “On the Origin of Origins,” 9. L.J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill, 1959), 1-2, 2:433

! 2! participant-observer.6 Working from an Enlightenment vocabulary, Jefferson reinscribed binary categories of orthodoxy and heresy; theology and philosophy; Judaism and

Hellenism in his evaluations, while simultaneously professing to offer a more accurate representation of the first-century C.E.. Significantly, related arguments against “pagan imprinting” on the historical Jesus would continue to have enormous influence on subsequent studies of early Christianity and Late Antiquity.7

The conceit of The Jefferson Bible was that the gospel writers manufactured lives about Jesus and his followers reflective of certain strategic aims and sensibilities. They were constructed narratives with a purpose beyond offering a historically authentic account of the earliest stages of the Jesus movement. Of course, the irony of Jefferson’s charge is thick. But he was correct in positing that early Christian literature was not only concerned, to paraphrase Plutarch, with writing histories.8 The authors of these texts had particular objectives and their literary choices tell us a great deal more about their idealized imaginings for beginnings of Christianity, than the actual beginnings they profess to relate.

For instance, in the case of the gospels, Jesus is divinely authorized through his birthright, teachings and wonderworking as a son of God— a powerful figure, even if a social underdog. At times he is portrayed as a riddler and purveyor of esoteric !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6 Smith, “On the Origin of Origins,” 9; Cappon, The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 2:385.

7 Smith, “On the Origin of Origins,” 13.

8 Plutarch, Alexander the Great, 1.1-2: “It is not histories we are writing but Lives. And it is not always the most famous deeds which reveal a man’s good or bad qualities: a clearer insight into a man’s character is often given by a detail, a word, or a joke, than by conflicts where thousands die, or by the greatest of pitched battles, or by the siege of cities.” Translation: Bernadotte Perrin, Plutarch Lives, VII [Loeb Classical Library] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919). This passage is also referenced in Chapter 4 on subversive biography.

! 3! knowledge, at other points an ethical teacher and miracle-worker. Unlike the notable statesmen, poets and philosophers that populated civic biographies, Jesus’ extraordinary wit and otherworldly superpowers revealed his authority and status.9 The book of Acts’ accounts of healings, resurrections, miraculous mass conversions and angelically abetted prison breaks offer a similarly remarkable account of the origins and the development of the social movement later known as ‘Christianity’. Incorporating such astonishing events into these narratives functioned as a strategic means of legitimization. Miraculous beginnings and notable figures like these communicate a demand to be taken seriously.

When laying claim to a storied past, only ‘august roots’ will do.10

Literature was also a means for creating coherence out of what was otherwise an amorphous history that was far from linear. Establishing an origin story for the Jesus movement, or what Willi Braun has called “instant-aging” Christianity, created a foundation from which to claim continuity.11 In other words, literature like the gospels and Acts invented a tradition. A stark example of this is Acts’ treatment of Paul as the miracle-working apostle to the Gentiles and authoritative founder of a number of early

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 The subject of Jesus and his portrayal as a subversive, wonderworking figure is explored in more detail in Chapter 4. ! 10 William E. Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’ and the Second-Century Invention of Christianity” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23/3 (2011), 193-215, cit. 199: “even modern groups seeking to define themselves and their identity in the present do so by inventing or laying claim to an ancestral identity which unifies, identifies, and gives them august (or respectable, or congenial) roots.”

11 The full quote: “The past is convertible to social power in the present— hence the variety of ‘instant-aging’ maneuvers familiar to us from the early Christian groups we study. ‘Strategic tinkering with the past’ is a ubiquitous cross-cultural social rationalizing and formation device…” Willi Braun, “Schooled Intelligence, Social Interests, and the Sayings Gospel Q,” paper presented at Westar Seminar on Christian Origins, Westar Seminar on Christian Origins, October 2007 (Santa Rosa, CA, 2007), 55. Cited from Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’,” 201. !

! 4! Christian ‘churches’. Paul as figurehead and martyr would carry through later writers like the authors of the pastoral epistles, the Acts of Paul, Marcion and Irenaeus, despite the fact Paul’s own letters reveal that his activity stood on far more contested ground.

Moreover, the ‘churches’ and other communities described in Acts became a model for understanding social networks in the first-century, including the authors of the gospels and related writings.

Analyzing Odysseus’ speech on the art of poetry, Bruce Lincoln usefully suggests that the “ideological justification and idealized self-representation” embedded in the speech’s meta reflection is “a myth about myth: a story poetry tells about itself as a means to define, defend… romanticize… legitimate, exaggerate, mystify, modify and advance its own position.”12 The concept of ‘myth’ is multivalent; however Hesoid’s meaning of mythos is instructive: “an assertive discourse of power and authority… to be believed.”13

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 12 Odysseus’ speech is directed at Demodocus: Truly it is a good thing to have heard a poet Such as this, resembling the gods in voice. For I say there is no more gracious end Than when joy holds the entire people, And banqueters throughout the halls listen to a poet, Sitting in rows, and the tables beside are filled With bread and meat, and the wine-steward, drawing wine From the mixing bowl carries it about and pours it into cups. This seems to me the fairest of things. (Odyssey 9:3-11) See Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 21. For a more in depth examination on ancient discourses on poetry, see Peter T. Struck, “The Genealogy of the Symbolic,” in Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1-20. Struck also addresses the influence of Romanticism on contemporary understanding of poetry and allegory in “The Symbol among the Romantics,” in Birth of the Symbol, 272-277. Struck’s work will be discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 3.

13 Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 17.

! 5! Whether from the edge of Jefferson’s razor or Acts’ portrait of the first-century, mythos on the history, and prehistory, of early Christianity is ideologically freighted. If the gospels and Acts are myths that Christianity tells about itself, scholars must be careful not to reinscribe these myths as history. Or, as Lincoln states in his epilogue: “If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes.”14

Following along these lines, this chapter—which serves as an introduction to this study as a whole— reexamines a pervasive framework for early Christian writings that occupies scholarly imagination about the social world of early Christianity. Sometimes referred to as the “Big Bang” theory of Christian origins, it is characterized by three predominant assumptions: that the early Jesus movement grew explosively; that it was well established institutionally; and its followers comprised almost miraculously cohesive communities.15 Different early Christian texts have contributed to this (modern) myth of early Christian Big Bang. However, this vision of the early Christian landscape reaches an apex with Acts and its origin story, detailing the miraculous founding, growth and development of the Jesus movement.16

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 14 Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 209.

15 Some scholars who have used this terminology include: N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (COQG1; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 452; Burton L. Mack, “On Redescribing Christian Origins,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8 (1996), 247; Edward W. Klink, The Audience of the Gospels: The Origin and Function of the Gospels in Early Christianity (New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing, 2010), 32; John S. Kloppenborg, “Greco-Roman Thiasoi, the Ekklēsia at Corinth, and Conflict Management,” Redescribing Paul and the Corinthians (ed. Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller; Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature, 2011), 189.

16 As noted above, the origin story of Acts is adapted and perpetuated by the pastoral epistles, Irenaeus and others. Later leaders within the church would construct a similar kind of “miraculous founding” using stories of violence and martyrdom against early Christians. Tales of the Great Persecution were a mechanism for reconsidering (and amplifying) the role of ‘the Church’ within its own early history. Moreover, self-styled historians such as Eusebius, claiming

! 6! Related to this idea of an early Christian Big Bang, a subpoint I address in this chapter is that early Christian writings present strong ideas about certain kinds of social formations—including an ideal Israel, communities of disciples and ekklēsia — and that these literary constructions have greatly influenced what we regard as thinkable about those involved in this first-century social movement. Paul, for example, in an attempt to evoke a sense of unity among his addressees, invokes rhetoric about established groups and ekklēsia that is often mistaken by scholars for historical reality. However, as the sociologist Rogers Brubaker cautions: “We must… take vernacular categories and participant’s understandings seriously, for they are partly constitutive of our objects of study. But we should not uncritically adopt the engaged categories of ethnopolitical practice as our categories of social analysis.”17 As such, these miraculous “Pauline communities” require reevaluation. Luke and Acts, informed by Paul, contribute to the notion of an explosive growth of early Christian communities. And while Matthew lacks the same focus on institutionalization and rapid growth, it nonetheless expresses a sustained interest in group dynamics, communities of disciples and an ideal Israel.

Mark and hypothetical sayings-source Q (Quelle) make an interesting contribution to this paradigm. Mark, portraying an ornery Jesus who is more often misunderstood than revered, does not offer much by way of a Big Bang, explosive

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! to rely on eye-witness accounts, chronicled the unjust persecution of Emperors and other leaders, mobs and rogue citizens against early Christians in order to herald the bravery, virtue and obedience of these martyrs. Implicit in these stories was the message that the audience should act in kind. For a recent study on these issues, see Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2013).

17 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 10. Emphasis original.

! 7! growth and rapid institutionalization. After all, this is the gospel that originally ended with two women fleeing from Jesus’ empty tomb, bewildered and afraid, saying “nothing to anyone.”18 Similarly reconstructions of Q, based on textual similarities between

Matthew and Luke that are not found in Mark, suggest it was a collection of teachings of

Jesus and John the Baptist. Yet discourse about communities and related early Christian social formations routinely get projected back onto these materials (e.g., the Markan

“community of the new age” or the multiple wisdom, apocalyptic or scribal communities posited for Q).19 By this I mean that scholarly understandings of the social context for the authorship and development of these materials is based on assumptions about early

Christian communities, and not the content of the writings themselves, or what we know about ancient Mediterranean and West Asian authorship practices and networks. In this respect, Mark and Q reveal the idiosyncrasies of the Big Bang paradigm.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 18 Mark 16:8: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone (ou)deni_ ou)de_n ei}pan), for they were afraid.” (Trans. NRSV) ! 19 See Howard Clark Kee, Community of the New Age: Studies in Mark’s Gospel (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000). Dwight N. Peterson illustrates this confusion well in the case of the gospel of Mark: “…Mark’s community has not yielded a controlled field of interpretation. The reason for this is that virtually every scholar who discovers a Markan community behind the Gospel—that is, the community for which the Gospel was written, and which is supposed to serve as a control for a reading of Mark—discovers a different Markan community. The community behind the Gospel of Mark lived either before 70 or after 70, either in the tense times leading up to the destruction of the temple or in its immediate aftermath. It lived in Rome, or in Galilee, or in Southern Syria. It was a Gentile community, or a mixture of Jews and Gentiles or a Jewish community. Its interests were primarily to establish itself in opposition to a discredited Jerusalem Christianity… to forge a new, apocalyptic community… to steer a mediating political path between Roman imperialism and Jerusalem hegemony… to distance itself from Judaism in the Roman imagination because of the recent destruction of the temple… to forge a new myth of Christian origins out of a variety of disparate traditions… to explain to Mark’s Jewish-Christian community why the temple was destroyed and replace Israel with Mark’s Jewish-Christian community in God’s plan...” See Dwight N. Peterson, The Origins of Mark: the Markan Community in Current Debate (Leiden, Netherlands; Brill, 2000), 152. Q will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5. !

! 8! The approach I outline in this chapter proposes an alternative to the Big Bang model. I begin by “rectifying our categories” and reexamining scholarly vocabulary on the subject of early Christian social formations. I also examine the notion of “invented tradition” in more detail, with an analysis of the influence of second-century texts like

Acts on our understandings of so-called Christian origins.20 This leads into a discussion of Paul and the shortcomings that attend, as noted above, adopting his “categories of ethnopolitical practice as our categories of social analysis,” followed by a closer consideration of Q and the gospels.21 Finally, I propose that our modern adaptation of the mythic Big Bang of Christian Origins is informed, in part, by Romantic-era thinking on the inspired folk speech of primitive communities. The influence of Romanticism on studies of the New Testament and early Christianity is the focus of the following chapter.

Rectifying Our Categories

Without attention to the motivations and operational categories of a man like

Jefferson, the field risks uncritically adopting frameworks that are themselves artifacts of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 20 Dating Acts to the second-century is not uncontested, with some scholars dating it to the late first-century. I follow the arguments of Arnal and others, such as Richard I. Pervo, who argue that Acts demonstrates a familiarity with the later works of Josephus, as well as the pastoral epistles and Polycarp, all dated to the early-to mid- second century. See Richard I. Pervo, Dating Acts: Between the Evangelists and the Apologists (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2006); Margaret Y. MacDonald, “Rereading Paul: Early Interpreters of Paul on Women and Gender,” in Women and Christian Origins, ed. Ross Shepard Kraemer, et al. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 236- 252, cit. 237.

Also, my language in this study takes for granted that ‘Luke’ authored Acts, although this is also not uncontested. Whether or not the same author penned Acts, or an author closely imitating the literary form and style of Luke’s gospel, it does not substantially alter my larger observation about the later ‘invention of tradition’ for Christianity’s origin myth. For more on the history of Luke circulating with Acts and its attribution to Luke (which begins as early as late-second century), see François Bovon, Luke 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1-9:50, trans. Christine M. Thomas, ed. Helmut Koester (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002), 9. ! 21 Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups, 10.

! 9! the scholar’s historical milieu, and not that of the object of study. Any examination of the ancient world must necessarily include an evaluation of the history of vocabulary—not only the vocabulary of the text in question, but the inherited vocabulary or ‘language’ of

Christian theology, the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy that we use to characterize and describe our sources. More than a Gadamerian Wirkungsgeschichte that seeks the history of interpretation or effect of Biblical texts at particular historical moments, such an approach is part and parcel of a larger project of redescription for the study of religion aimed at de-mystifying objects of study and treating social phenomena as ordinary human processes.22 Related to what Smith elsewhere calls a “rectification of categories,” attention to the genealogy of and assumptions embedded in the terms, concepts and methods used to describe our subjects critically illuminates contemporary scholarship. In so doing, our approaches to our sources are open to reevaluation and fresh insight.23

Smith’s views on vocabulary and categories are informed by Wilfred Cantwell

Smith’s 1971 piece “The Study of Religion and the Study of the Bible,” wherein he

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 22 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Second Revised Edition (New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing, 2004), 300-302.

23 This systematic project, or more rightly method, involves a careful description of one’s subject, divorced as much as possible from uncritically adopting traditional, and potentially misleading, doxai; comparison between the object of study and similar social phenomena from other time periods and/or cultural contexts, allowing similarities and differences to reveal further detail; a redescription based on the description and comparison performed and that reflects on the seemingly simple questions the object of study evokes (e.g., what kinds of meals are Jesus people engaging in); and, finally, a “rectification of categories” that acknowledges that language is not disinterested and our descriptive terms require (re)examination. See Smith, “On the Origin of Origins,” 1-35; Burton L. Mack, The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy (New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing, 2001), 70-74; Stanley K. Stowers, “Kinds of Myths, Meals and Power: Paul and Corinthians,” in Redescribing Paul and the Corinthians (ed. Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 143.

! 10! advocates for an approach to Biblical texts that views them “not merely as a set of ancient documents or even as a first-and second-century product but as a third-century and twelfth-century and nineteenth-century and contemporary agent.”24 By this measure, we must recognize the gospels not as only first-century C.E. Mediterranean artifacts, but artifacts of eighteenth, nineteenth- and twentieth-century European thought.25 This paradox is even starker when it comes to the hypothetical saying-source Q; Q is not a first-century C.E. “Palestinian artifact,” but quite literally an artifact of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century.26 That is to say, the existence of Q as a possible source for the gospels of Matthew and Luke was not “discovered” (i.e. hypothesized) and compiled until the work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1784), Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1794) and, later, Herbert Marsh (1801), Freidrich Schleiermacher (1832) and Christian

Hermann Weisse (1838).27

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 24 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “The Study of Religion and the Study of the Bible,” 134. J.Z. Smith states of Cantwell Smith’s article: “For myself, as a teacher, this short piece has had the most decisive effect. It proposes nothing less than a Copernican Revolution with respect to the academic situation of the Bible. Consequently, I have tried, these past twenty years… to respond to Smith’s challenge in terms of the Jewish and Christian Bibles over the longue durée with comparative materials from the ancient Near Eastern, Late Antique, Islamic and Mormon traditions.” Smith, On Teaching Religion, 30.

25 J.Z. Smith raises this same issue in the case of the “J” and “Q” sources in On Teaching Religion (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), 30.

26 Smith, On Teaching Religion, 30.

27 Eighteenth century literary critic G.E. Lessing was the first to suggest that Matthew and Luke shared, in addition to Mark, a protogospel (Urevangelium) that is no longer extant. In his estimation, the literary similarities between the Synoptic gospels could not be adequately explained by Augustine’s claim of sequential authorship, theories of interdependence or oral tradition. He therefore hypothesized the existence of what he called the “Gospel of the Apostles”— a Hebrew or Aramaic text that chronicled the teachings and activities of Jesus, likely passed down from the apostles themselves. See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Theses aus der Kirchengeschichte,” in Theologischer Nachlass (Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voß und Sohn, 1784), 73-82. Lessing was followed by Johann Gottfried Eichhorn who, in 1794, proposed a collection of written sources (Quellen), not simply one shared gospel (gemeinschaftliche Quelle),

! 11! The specific case of Q will be examined in more detail in Chapter 5. In the case of studies of the New Testament and other so-called early Christian texts, taking the cautions of the J.Z. Smith and Cantwell Smith into account entails contending with three interrelated obstacles that impede proper analysis of our historical sources: terminology, translation and anachronism.

Terminology

First is the use of categories and terminology representative of the scholar’s social world and not that of antiquity, illustrated above by the example of Jefferson and his milieu. When Jefferson makes continual references to the “Platonizing Christianity” of the gospel writers, for instance, he is doing so through a very particular lens. The terminology itself is an anachronism and did not exist in antiquity. Moreover, in the context of Jefferson’s usage, the designation carried a great deal of ideological baggage related to Enlightenment-era thinking on the hellenization of so-called ‘primitive’

Christianity. J. Z. Smith offers a survey of the category of ‘Platonism’ in seventeenth- century and early eighteenth-century Protestant thought:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! in order to account for Matthew and Luke arranging their use of their common material in differing order. See Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, “Ueber die drey ersten Evangelien. Eynge Beytrage zu iher künftigen kritischen Behandlung,” in Allgemeine Bibliothek der biblischen Litteratur (Vol. 5 [Parts 5-6]; Leipzig: Weidmann, 1794), 761-996. At the turn of the century, an Englishman named Herbert Marsh went to Göttingen to study under Johann David Michaelis and, inspired by Eichhorn, appended to his translation of one of Michaelis’ works a “Dissertation” on bet). Freidrich) ”ב“ the Synoptic problem, proposing a single source that he termed Schleiermacher would also propose a single source, on the basis of Eusebius’ testimony (Hist. Eccl. 3.39.16). Christian Hermann Weisse would later simplify Eichhorn’s theory by hypothesizing a single source comprised of sayings (lo&gia) called “Quelle” or “Q.” See Herbert Marsh, Introduction to the New Testament by John David Michaelis..., 4 vols. (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1793), Vol. III, Part II, 161-409; C.H. Weiße, Die evangelische Geschichte kritisch und philosophisch bearbeitet (Vol. 1; Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1838), 48-83; Freidrich Schleiermacher, “Ueber die Zeugnisse des Papias von unsern beiden ersten Evangelien,” in Theologische Studien und Kritiken, 1832), 735-768.

! 12! ‘Platonism’ is employed as a generic noun, often triggered by a single word, most frequently logos, shorn of literary or intellectual context and historical situation. In this sense, ‘Platonism’ is a parallel to the generic notion of ‘heathen’ or ‘pagan idolatry’ or to that of ‘superstition’ employed with respect to Catholic cult practices in the early reformers. From another perspective, these early essays may be seen as largely comparing Christianity with itself, or, more precisely, with an idealized version of itself (the ‘simple gospel’). Any remainder was considered a ‘corruption’ for which the covering term was, most frequently, ‘Platonism’. If queried as to the reason for this internal discrepancy between ‘simple’ and ‘Platonic Christianity’, the answer given by the authors of these essays was, usually, a hypothetical, psychological one— the embarrassment of Christianity’s philosophical converts.28

As rehearsed at the beginning of this chapter, Jefferson was engaged with this same anti-

Trinitarian discourse. He held that the teachings of Jesus had been corrupted by “his inept and superstitious biographers,” “conniving Platonists” and, later, “illogical Calvinists.”29

Directly in line with his predecessors, Jefferson described these Platonists as underhanded priests invested in absorbing the philosophy of that “genuine [Sophist]” into

Christian theology in order to keep business booming:

The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Jesus… too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build an artificial system which might… admit everlasting controversy, given employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power, and pre-eminence… It is fortunate for us that Platonic republicanism has not obtained the same favor as Platonic Christianity; or we should now have been all living, men, women, and children, pell mell together, like beasts of the field or forest.30

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 28 Smith, Drudgery Divine, 17.

29 Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 189. ! 30 Cappon, The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 433. For more on Jefferson’s position on the corruption of Jesus’ teachings and its implications for historical study and contemporary Protestant thought, see Richard, “Philosophy,” in The Founders and the Classics, 168-195. !

! 13! In short, while Jefferson may have intended to use ‘Platonic Christianity’ as a historical description, the terminology possesses strong pejorative connotations and must be understood within the historical context of its usage. Even the category of ‘Christianity’, when disaggregated from ‘Platonic’, requires analysis. It is itself a category of

“ethnopolitical practice” or a folk designation that intends to evoke reference to particular kinds of social groups.

Through this example, it is evident that certain terms and categories can be proverbial square pegs if scholars fail to recognize their ideological or conceptual baggage. Recent work in the field has drawn attention to a number of problematic concepts that have lead to imprecise descriptions of the ancient world. Terms such as

‘origins’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘diversity’ and ‘community’ are increasingly recognized as requiring analysis and definition before they can be applied to historical data.31

A category that is emblematic of this struggle is ‘religion’. 32 The way religion is employed in scholarship on the ancient world is often anachronistic and can be enmeshed

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 31 On the concept of Christian origins, see Mack, The Christian Myth; Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’,” 193-215. On early Christian “diversity” see Keith Hopkins, “Christian Number and its Implications,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6/2 (1998), 185-226; Stanley K. Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’ and the History of Early Christianity,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011), 238-256, cit. 243; Karen L. King, “Factions, Variety, Diversity, Multiplicity: Representing Early Christian Differences for the 21st Century,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011), 216-237.

32 On the topic of religion as an analytical category, see Cantwell Smith, “The Study of Religion and the Study of the Bible”; Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 179-198. On the anachronistic, Christian importation onto this analytical category, see Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Stanley K. Stowers A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 26-27; Jonathan Z. Smith, “Bible and Religion,” in Relating Religion, 197-215; Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). On religion as a discursive second-order category, see Stanley K. Stowers, “The Ontology of Religion,” in Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, ed. Willi Braun and

! 14! with modern ideas of individual experience and related concepts.33 In part this incongruity has to do with the development of the term itself in Western intellectual history. A product of Enlightenment-era thinking, ‘religion’ or ‘a religion’ largely has come to be viewed as “an essentially private sphere of personal belief and activity separate from politics, law, economic activity.” 34 As such it has no neat equivalent with the ancient Mediterranean, where activities involving the gods and other non-human forces permeated many facets of politics, law, economics and daily life. How should one classify, for instance, a so-called binding spell (defixiones) that fails to invoke any specific deity?35 Or haurspices called upon by Rome to interpret a loud noise heard on the outskirts of the city?36

Some responses to this observation have included dismissing the category of religion all together as a definitional tool for talking about antiquity, the argument being !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Russell T. McCutcheon (Oakville, CT: Equinox Publishing, 2008), 434-449, cit. 436; Kevin Schilbrack, “Religions: Are There Any?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78 (2010), 1112-1128; Nongrbi, Before Religion, 154-159. ! 33 Approaches to the study of religion (both ancient and modern) that focus on the question of an individual’s personal experience have been roundly critiqued in the field on a number of fronts. Among the issues that arise from such studies is the tendency for scholars to treat the question of ‘experience’ as an implicit category. By ‘implicit category,’ I mean to say a concept understood to be somehow innate to human beings and, therefore, highly subjective and often described in critical literature with mystifying language such as ‘belief’ or ‘the sacred.’ Not only does such scholarship fail to achieve the kind of definitional clarity prized by history and the social sciences, its results tend to lack propositional content, therefore, risking simply reproducing the practitioner’s own folk understandings of their activities, rather than treating them as objects of social analysis. See Stanley K. Stowers, “The Concepts of ‘Religion,’ ‘Political Religion’ and the Study of Nazism,” Journal of Contemporary History 42.1 (2007), 12.

34 Stowers, A Rereading of Romans, 26-27. ! 35 Stephen G. Miller, “Excavations at Nemea, 1979,” Hesperia 49 (1980): 196-197; Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum 30.353.

36 In 56 B.C.E. a loud boom was heard near Latium and the Etruscan haruspices were called to Rome to interpret its meaning. See Cicero, De haruspicum responso, 1.93; 2.26-53. !

! 15! that if the ancients did not participate in activities that fit our contemporary notions of religion, then religion is not something that can apply to their practices and understandings.37 This is an overly narrow view of the concept that fails to recognize its utility as a category for scholarly analysis, provided one is willing to imagine ‘religion’ as a class of human activity that need not be isolated from other dimensions of social life.

One way to approach this issue is to focus on practices. Theorizing religion as a class of activities concerned with non-human phenomena, anthropomorphisms or other imagined forces recognizes religion’s place as a kind of human doing with particular contours that can be described and analyzed.38 By creating such second-order categories, scholars are able to assess a variety of social practices in terms of their organization and how they are bundled with one another. As Stowers notes in his piece on the ontology of religion: “there are an unlimited number of ways that religious practices can connect with !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 37 For example, see Brent Nongbri, “Dislodging ‘Embedded’ Religion: A Brief Note on a Scholarly Trope,” Numen 55 (2008), 451: “If our reading of the textual and material evidence is correct, what the Romans did was not religion, at least not in the sense that the term is generally used. Ceding this point should in no way lower our opinion of the Romans; it should only reinforce the idea that Romans were different from us in this regard. In spite of this urge to grant the Romans religion, neither the appeals to ancient discussions of religio nor an expanded definition of religion is an effective means of claiming that Romans had the modern concept of religion.”

Interestingly, Nongbri would later soften this approach in his 2013 Before Religion. After the rehearsing the history of the concept of religion from antiquity to the present, he effectively agrees with the earlier work of Jonathan Z. Smith and Stanley Stowers: “When Stowers writes that ‘the definition [or religion] ought to be an explicitly second-order conception,’ he seems to me to take for granted something very much like the arguments put forth in this book” (Nongrbi, Before Religion, 158). He ultimately proposes disaggregating the term religion in order to “correspond better to ancient peoples’ own organizational scheme… We will end up not with slightly tweaked books on ancient Greek religion or on Roman religion, but with books on Athenian appeals to ancestral tradition, Roman ethnicity, Mesopotamian scribal praxis…” and so on (Nongrbi, Before Religion, 159). Of course the difficulty with Nongbri’s proposal is that terms like “tradition” and “praxis” can be equally freighted and contested. ! 38 Much of my language in this section is influenced by Stowers’ theorization in “The Ontology of Religion,” 434-447, cit. 442.

! 16! other religious practices and practices that are not religious” and the extent to which religious practices are the predominant driver of a given aspect of social life would be “a matter of more and less.”39 In light of this approach, an Etruscan haruspex called upon to interpret an omen for the state would be performing a specialist’s task that is simultaneously religious and political, as well as ethnically coded. Exploring each of these different dimensions of such an activity would provide a much more thoroughgoing and dynamic understanding of the implications of this particular kind of practice.

Moreover, such an approach is sufficiently flexible to engage a range of time periods and cultural milieus, without the baggage that can attend studies bound by uncritical scholarly or folk categories of religion.

A theorization of religion along these lines has additional purchase for this study in that it reveals how categories of religion are imagined as inextricably tied to self- evident and cohesive social formations. Following Stowers, “[b]oth folk and scholarly conceptions of a religion are normally types of wholisms or totalities that attribute not only coherence and stability to the religion, but also assume that the category corresponds to bounded substantial traditions and social groups.”40 Language that has focused on putative and bounded social groups as self-evident actors has had enormous implications for early Christian studies. In terms of folk conceptions, acceptance of early

Christianity’s own categorizations is central to the Big Bang origin myth. Acts, for !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 39 Stowers, “The Ontology of Religion,” 444.

40 Stowers continues: "Both folk and scholarly conceptions have imagined social groups as basic constituents of social reality. The quality of “groupness,” then, would be social and mental coherence involving the actual solidarity of the individuals who make up the group and strong persistent boundedness in relation to other putative groups... It is central to the ideologies of the supposed religions and ethnic groups to conceive themselves as subjects of collective mind and action.” Stowers, “The Ontology of Religion,” 445.

! 17! instance, makes continual reference to miraculous deeds inspiring spontaneous conversions (“the great number of those who believed were of one heart and one mind”

4:32), resulting in the rapid development of Christian communities:

Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common... Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. (2:43-47)

Even if one recognizes the extraordinary nature of Christianity’s development in Acts as characteristic of origin myths, the idea of Christian communities as a social reality remains a tantalizing prism through which to make sense of passages that employ language about groups. Some examples include Matthew 21:43 (“the kingdom of God will be… given to a people [ethnē] that produces the first fruits of the kingdom”) and

28:19 (“go therefore and make disciples of all nations”). However the existence of such groups would need to be demonstrated. As Stowers states concerning New Testament texts, “Appeal to what Paul and other writers thought some population had miraculously become and ideally ought to be is not good evidence for actual community.”41 I will discuss this point further below.

Building on this foundation, scholarly conceptions that have aligned religions with social groups must be reevaluated to ensure that they are representative of historical circumstances. Again, this entails what J.Z. Smith terms a “rectification of categories.” It is my contention that contemporary studies of the New Testament and early Christianity continue to reinscribe terms and typologies that are heavily influenced by Romanticism.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 41 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 245. !

! 18! Chief among these is the concept of “community” which is rooted in certain anti-

Enlightenment and Romantic notions of a cohesive Volk, inspired by the Geist of a group’s oral teachings.42 To assume that sources like the Synoptic gospels or Q emerged from the folk speech of established early Christian groups presumes a social environment for the production of this literature that, among other issues, agitates against what is known about ancient authorship practices. It privileges one kind of social formation

(religious communities) over others (e.g., networks of literate specialists) without demonstrating why such a move is warranted. In other words, religion is not a matter of

‘more or less’ in this construction, it is a matter of ‘only’; the author’s assumed religious community is the only considered social context, leaving other plausible associations unexamined. This Romantic influence will be discussed in detail in the following chapter.

Vocabulary & Anachronism

Related to the issue of terminology is the problem of theologically-interested vocabulary affecting the translation of ancient sources.43 Similar to importing presumed or anachronistic social contexts onto historical evidence, translations have the potential to skew our understandings of an author’s literary environment and strategic intentions. The methodological challenges of translation writ large, as well as the translation of texts used in religious practices, have been addressed in the recent work of Jennifer Eyl.44

Eyl’s study focuses on the misleading rendering of the term ekklēsia as “church” in Paul, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 42 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 238-256.

43 Jennifer Eyl, “Semantic Voids, New Testament Translation, and Anachronism: The Case of Paul’s Use of Ekklēsia,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, forthcoming 2014.

44 Eyl, “Semantic Voids,” forthcoming.

! 19! with reference to other troublesome terms such as ta ethnē (pagan), hamartia (sin) and pneuma (spirit). To these we might add pistis (faith) and metanoia (conversion). While not a central focus of my study, this allied question of translation is relevant in that misleading or occluding translations affect our understanding of the so-called origins and social development of Christianity. As Eyl explains concerning the New Testament,

“translations inevitably contain theological commitments of one variety or another, and inscribe a later Christianized understanding of Christian beginnings.”45 As such, rectifying or reexamining our categories of analysis include attention to the uncritical adaptation of inherited terminology that reifies certain anachronisms about, among other things, the breadth and cohesion of the early Jesus followers—for instance, the category of ‘community’.

Correspondingly, scholars must recognize that there is no identifiable and stable

‘origin’ to the movement that becomes known as Christianity. The designation of

‘Christian’ for first-century texts like Q and the gospels is not representative of any social categorization or explicit claim made by the authors of these texts themselves. It is not an emic category and the writers do not demonstrate a concrete awareness that they are participating in a religion that is separate from the Judeans. In fact, many scholars have reasonably concluded that evidence for something like a new religion called

46 ‘Christianity’, distinct from Judaism, only begins to emerge in the second-century CE.

Thus, it is unclear whether our securely dated sources from the first-century constitute a representation of ‘Christian beginnings’, as this concept is traditionally understood, in !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 45 Eyl, “Semantic Voids,” forthcoming.

46 For example, Stowers, “Towards a Rereading of Romans,” in A Rereading of Romans, 1-41. Also Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’,” 193-215.

! 20! anything but the weakest sense. It is not until the second-century that actors invested in developing a coherent tradition for the history of Christianity begin to codify first-century sources like the gospels and Q as ‘Christian’. Given this, we must be cautious when using terminology that has the potential to reinscribe the kind of myth of origins found in Acts.

The Invention of Tradition

As noted at the onset of this chapter, the relationship that develops between first- century writings and what comes to be known as Christianity in the second-century is one of an invented tradition. By “invented tradition,” I mean the factitious development of continuity between an institution, state or other social group and a historic narrative, ritual, symbol or figure. This definition derives from Eric Hobsbawm and his work on the relationship between European nationalism and the construction of practices and narratives designed to link a given people to “a suitable historic past.”47 According to

Hobsbawm, invented traditions largely adhere to the following principles:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 47 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1. In the case of practices, Hobsbawm describes a repetitive process of “formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past”—for example, the choice of Gothic-style architecture for the British parliament in the nineteenth-century and, then again in the rebuilding campaigns following the Second World War (Hobsbawm, “Introduction,” 1-2). Other examples that appear in his edited volume The Invention of Tradition are the institution of the bagpipe and kilt as representative of Scottish heritage following the union of Scotland and England in the early eighteenth-century, or the reinstitution of the “traditional” English folk carol among “middle- class collectors” centuries after it had remained dormant and neglected. (See Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” in The Invention of Tradition; Hobsbawm, “Introduction,” 7). As it concerns notable figures or other symbolic interests, the appropriation of ancestral figures like Boadicea or the “Aryan” race among Germans beginning in the nineteenth century also loom large as constructed associations for nationalist movements (Hobsbawm, “Introduction,” 7).

! 21! a) those establishing or symbolizing social cohesion or the membership of groups, real or artificial communities, b) those establishing or legitimizing institutions, status or relations of authority, and c) those whose main purpose was socialization, the inculcation of beliefs, value systems and conventions of behavior.48

This process of invention seeks to build a legitimizing foundation for present interests through reference to the past, whether that past be the adaptation of a particular ritual action (e.g., the horsehair wigs of English barristers); the elevation of a relatively marginal or subversive figure to the center of an august ancestral inheritance

(e.g., Vercingetorix in France); or the reclamation of a previously neglected or forgotten artist or artwork, song or writing as a representative cultural product (e.g., the collected folktales of the Brothers Grimm in Germany or the paintings of El Greco in Spain).49

Turning to antiquity, similar machinations aimed at “laying claim” to status afforded by reference to the past are found in the divine genealogies of Roman emperors, the

Atticisms of the second sophistic, the post-Aristotelian writings and biographies of

Pythagoras, and later rabbinic collections of “oral Torah,” to name a few.50

William Arnal, reflecting on the work of Hobsbawm, ties the search for Christian origins to this notion of invented tradition by focusing on the “rapidly self-defining social

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 48 Hobsbawm, “Introduction,” 9. Also see Pascal Boyer, Tradition as Truth and Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse (Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology; Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), vii: “repetition or reiteration of tradition implies complex processes of acquisition, memorization and social interaction which must be described and explained.”

49 On Vercingetorix see Michael Dietler, “‘Our Ancestors the Gauls’: Archaeology, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Manipulation of Celtic Identity in Modern Europe,” American Anthropologist 96/3 (1994), 584-605. On the late influence of El Greco on the likes of Pablo Picasso, see Jonathan Brown, Picasso and the Spanish Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996) and John Richardson, “Picasso’s Apocalyptic Whorehouse,” in The New York Times Review of Books (April 23, 1987), 40-46.

50 Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’,” 200.

! 22! movement of the second century” and its role in establishing a legitimizing history through first-century artifacts such as the gospels, letters and figureheads like Paul and

Peter.51 By pulling these disparate first-century stories, teachings and legends together into a collective narrative, the compilers and redactors of the second century sought to develop a myth of Christian origins that was sufficiently unifying and novel so as to be worthy of place among the panoply of already established Mediterranean intellectual and religious traditions. To fail to recognize these efforts as the strategic maneuvers of later

‘inventors’ and myth-makers—in other words, to believe Christianity’s own myth of origins— is to begin our analyses from a limiting perspective that accepts the first- century Jesus movement a recognizable something called ‘Christianity.’ As Arnal explains, this kind of classification is both uncritical and misleading:

In short, we continue to speak and act as though “Christianity” represents a coherent, sensible, and informative classification for what we are studying when we study the writings of the New Testament, and this assumption continues to circumscribe what we regard to be thinkable.52

Again, among the assumptions authorized by an uncritical acceptance of Christianity’s myth of origins is that the ‘Christianity’ of the first-century was spontaneous, cohesive, diverse and multiple—that is, that Christianity as a new religious movement developed in something of a ‘Big Bang’.

It is important to pause at this juncture in order to be clear that there are two distinct-but-related observations I am making about how ‘tradition’ is invented for early

Christianity and how the concept of community becomes a normative social construction.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 51 Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’,” 201.

52 Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’,” 195.

! 23! While the activities and interests of the second century inform the way we have come to read the writings of the New Testament and other early Christian literature, this does not mean that we are unable to say anything concrete about the first-century and, specifically, the social context of the authors of these texts. However, it does require that we disaggregate our approach to the authorship of this literature from the models of religious communities that have been imposed on our thinking through second-century invention; through pervasive assumptions in scholarship; or through the testimony of the texts themselves.

First, to review, there is an active and on-going process of ‘invention’ of

Christianity that begins in the second century C.E. wherein first-century literature, notable figures and other artifacts are compiled and organized in strategic ways order to construct a more linear and cohesive ‘tradition’ or history for the movement called Christianity.

This invention can take place through the process of assembling what we might call a canon of literature, with certain texts circulating jointly. It can also take place, as I have suggested, through someone like the author of Acts, taking the figure of Paul, his writings and other sources and composing a narrative that establishes continuity of leadership and divine sanction for the Jesus movement in the aftermath of Jesus’ death. Act establishes an authorizing genealogy that extends back through Paul, Jerusalem and Peter to Jesus.

Arnal touches upon this strategy when he discusses the ways in which Acts establishes

Paul as a “pan-Christian hero”:

! 24! Multiple gospels alongside the letters and Acts show that Paul is part of a larger story still, that of Jesus, and specify and elaborate the objects of his “faith.” Bringing them all together both domesticates and authorizes the letters, verifies Acts, and interprets the gospels, which in their turn show us that Paul’s community organizing and rule-making was about Jesus; and so gives us a picture whose whole is greater than the sum of its traditional parts…53

Arnal points out that “hero-Paul” is not celebrated as an itinerant letter writer, interpreter of the scriptures or philosopher. On the contrary, one of his speeches drones on for so long in Acts that he inadvertently kills a man who falls asleep in a third-story window.54

Hero-Paul is a founder, a martyr and a miracle worker. Acts uses Paul’s letters to construct biographical details about Paul but, again, following Plutarch, only insofar as meditations on Paul’s virtues and, rarely, vices are explicated through minor details.

More important to the author of Acts is to establish a life of Paul that, to borrow a term from Arnal, ‘domesticates’ him.55 Acts spackles over the messiness of Paul’s real life

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 53!Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’,” 206. !! 54 “A young man named Eutychus, who was sitting in the window, began to sink off into a deep sleep while Paul talked still longer” (Acts 20:9). Luckily for Eutychus, his death was an occasion for Paul to perform yet another miracle and raise him from the dead. ! 55 Acts demonstrates some awareness of Paul’s letters—for example, in its description of his missionary activity (e.g., 2 Corinthians 11 and Acts 9; 1 Thessalonians 2-3 and Acts 17), the role of women in positions of leadership, the names of Paul’s ‘co-workers’ and certain linguistic and thematic parallels (e.g., Galatians 2 and Acts 15). Scholars have long agonized over the issue that if the author of Acts was aware of Paul’s correspondence, he often chose to ignore them. See, for example, Pervo, Dating Acts, 54-55. Also see a review of the debate and substantial bibliography in Joseph B. Tyson, Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining Struggle (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), esp. Chapter 1 “The Date of Acts,” 1-23. In my estimation, given that the ability to write literature or letters was the purview of so few in antiquity, and given what is evidently the wide circulation of Paul’s letters, the author of Acts may have only had a few written materials at his disposal; therefore, I judge that it is reasonable to think that some of Paul’s correspondence was among them.

Arnal uses the word ‘domesticates’ in reference to Irenaeus’ use of the Areopagus speech in Acts 17:22-31 in Against Heresies 14-15: “Note in particular the explicit way Acts is used to domesticate Paul...” Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’,” 205, n. 25.

! 25! mission, as evidenced in his letters, offering him a prominent role in the establishment of the Jesus movement, on par with the disciples. Acts also contributes the Big Bang paradigm to this invented tradition in order to offer an account of the founding and development of the Church through Paul. Crucially, as Paul was increasingly heralded as the founder of Gentile Christianity and early Christian communities, the idea of Christian communities became increasingly normative. And as other second-century figures like

Irenaeus began to circulate the gospels alongside Paul’s letters, it added to a manufactured or synthetic sense of Christian history, whereby “[t]wo distinct anthologies are… juxtaposed, each imagined to comment on, and serve as an interpretive filter for, the other.”56 Thus, a reader of the gospels and Acts may turn to Paul’s letters and accept that his addressees were cohesive Christian communities. This assumption would be based on the synthesizing of these texts into a collection representing Christian beginnings, as well as the systematic establishment of the early Christian Big Bang paradigm among subsequent adaptations of this literature.

Recognizing the second-century invention of tradition aids scholars in avoiding some of the anachronisms, vague categories and assumptions that have been the drivers of previous descriptions of the so-called origins of Christianity. However, this theoretical approach also has its own trappings if scholars fail to hold it in tension with the need to evaluate the social context and development of New Testament and early Christian literature beyond the expectation that when we talk about the social world of these texts we are talking purely about religious communities.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 56 Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’,” 204. Emphasis original. !

! 26! For example, Arnal argues in his piece on the synthesis of tradition: “if what we really want to explain are the origins of Christianity, we should not do so by looking at the origins and concomitant mythmaking of the earlier New Testament writings, but by looking at how these writings came to be collected together, shaped, and claimed as formative and ancestral.”57 What he is saying is that “Christianity” as a recognizable institution with levels of cohesion, self-recognition and strong organization is not formed until the second century; therefore, if a scholar wants to speak of “Christian origins” those origins begin in the second, and not the first, century. This move has proved confusing for some scholars. Some have looked to the letters of Paul and, continuing to misunderstand his talk of communities as indicating cohesive social groups, have suggested that this means we must class all of his letters as second-century forgeries.58 In the case of the gospels, some scholars have proposed that we pivot from attempting to speak of specific churches (e.g., the Markan community, Matthean community and so on) and instead reimagine the gospels as literature written for Christians throughout the

Empire. As Richard Bauckham argues in his 1998 work The Gospels for All Christians,

“the evidence of early Christian literature… is that the early Christian movement had a strong sense of itself as a worldwide movement… but Gentile converts were inculturated as Christians into a new social identity that was certainly not purely local.” Even recognizing that Paul’s letters contain language of “fictive kinship,” Bauckham nonetheless interprets this construct as a means for “converts to replace their natural ties of family loyalty with new Christian ties… A small minority group experiencing !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 57 Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’,” 202. Emphasis original.

58 For example, Hermann Detering, “The Dutch Radical Approach to the Pauline Epistles,” Journal of Higher Criticism 3/2 (1996), 163-193. This article first came to my attention through Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’,” 203.

! 27! alienation and opposition in its immediate social context could compensate… by a sense of solidarity with fellow-believers elsewhere.” 59 Bauchkam’s approach continues to assume a mystified and miraculous beginning for Christianity in which religious communities are considered normative and spread throughout the Empire.

Rather than begin from the position of positing a religious community for the authorship of this literature, scholarship should begin by comparing the authors’ literary activity with what we know about literary practices from the milieu in question. The focus of this dissertation on Q and the beginnings of gospel literature is to wrest these writings from this Big Bang model of Christian communities and to explain their literary production in ways known to be normal to the ancient Mediterranean and West Asian literary practices of the first-century. While it is quite possible, even likely, that the authors of the Synoptic gospels and Q were associated in some measure with a group of persons either interested or actively participating in what we might term early Christian practices (e.g., meeting in assemblies, sharing in eucharist meals, praying together, interpreting sacred Judean texts), this is not the only possible social formation for us to consider if we want to speak of the beginnings of Gospel literature. Among the other, plausible social contexts we might consider for the gospel writers and Q are networks of authors producing literature that engages specific genres and literary approaches with identifiable, strategic aims. Viewing these writings in this way transforms them from lives documenting the theology of various ‘Christian churches’ or ‘communities’ into an individual author’s account of the last days of a notable philosopher like the Phaedo, a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 59 Richard Bauckham, The Gospel for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), 33.

! 28! collection of chreia in the style of Demonax, a depiction of the figure of Jesus as a teacher of ethics, or a Jesus as an epic hero establishing divine lineage and authority in style of the Aeneid, and so on.60 Stowers explains:

In antiquity, where only a tiny fraction of the population was literate at all and a much smaller fraction literate enough to write and interpret literature, networks or fields of writers, interpreters of writings and readers educated into particular niches of the fields formed highly specialized social arenas that produced and contested their own norms, forms of power, practices and products of literacy. Banishing individual persons as writers from the account of Christian beginnings mystifies interests…61

What Stowers describes here is not the ‘Christianity’ imagined by the Big Bang, retrojected back onto the first century. It is not the kind of social formation that scholars of the New Testament and early Christian writings are typically looking for when they speak of seeking ‘Christian origins’ in either the first or second century. This approach to the beginnings of gospel literature looks at alternative social conditions for the production of these writings that does not rely on discourse about religious communities. It approaches Christian beginnings as the exchange of texts and ideas between authors within “networks of literate and specialized cultural producers” well before the full (and eventual) development and cohesion of communities as scholarship typically imagines

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 60 Scholars have certainly already recognized parallels between the gospels and Q and literary forms like chreiai or dialogues like the Phaedo. What I am proposing is that by disaggregating these writings from notions of church or community, we are better able to consider why the authors of these texts are choosing to engage these particular forms of literature and, thereby, better explore their interests in exchanging these kinds of writings with one another. On Jesus as a teacher of ethics, see Erin Roberts, Anger, Emotion, and Desire in the Gospel of Matthew (Ph.D. Dissertation; Brown University, 2010). On Luke-Acts as epic see Marianne Palmer Bonz, The Past as Legacy: Luke-Acts and Ancient Epic (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000). ! 61 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 250.

! 29! them.62 I will return to these questions of authorship and how to classify the gospels and

Q in Chapters 3 and 4.

Some natural questions arise from this proposal. Namely, if we think Acts’ Big

Bang paradigm of cohesive and widespread Christian communities is a mythic construction, and if we think there are other more cohesive social environments for the authors of Q and the gospels for us to consider, like literary networks, then how do we make sense of the communities to which Paul is writing? After all, Paul is our earliest source for evidence of the so-called Jesus movement. Aren’t his letters evidence that there are some recognizably cohesive Christian “communities” in the first century?

The letters of Paul, and the reputed social groups to whom he is writing, offer an interesting case study in how assumptions about community have affected scholarship on

Christian origins. Acts’ “Hero-Paul” helped elevate him from one among a number of interpreters of sacred books in a competitive field of first-century religious specialists, to the founder of Gentile Christianity. However, a reexamination of the rhetoric of group dynamics in Paul’s letters reveals that Hero-Paul is also a mythic construction.

Paul and the “Big Bang” Myth of Christian Origins: A Case Study

To review, the New Testament, the product of second- and fourth- century development, constructs a myth of origins for Christianity that continues to be immensely influential in both theological and secular scholarly circles. The contours of this account

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 62 This language can be found in Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 250; Stanley Stowers, “The Religion of Plant and Animal Offerings Versus the Religion of Meanings, Essences and Textual Mysteries,” in ed. Jennifer Knust and Zsuzsa Varhelyi, Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice: Images, Acts, Meanings (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011); Stanley Stowers, “Kinds of Myth, Meals, and Power: Paul and the Corinthians,” in ed. Ron Cameron and Merrill Miller, Redescribing Paul and the Corinthians (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

! 30! are familiar: following Jesus’ death, the disciples established the first church and an apostolic mission of teaching and conversion spread the movement rapidly throughout the Empire, culminating in the founding and development of the so-called early churches.

Again, Acts informs a great deal of this perspective, with the continual invocation of groupist rhetoric in Paul’s letters seemingly supporting Acts’ narrative if read in tandem.63 The notion that the practices, interpretive innovations, teachings and literature of what comes to be known as Christianity emanated from an identifiable, powerful genesis is central to the idea of an early Christian Big Bang. Implicit in this theory is the premise that Christianity as a social phenomenon materialized in a manner otherwise unprecedented when compared with the establishment of other “new religious movements.”64 Certainly, in order for there to have been thousands converted or “turned” in a single day, as claimed by Acts 21:20, the projected rate of growth of the movement would have to have been nothing short of miraculous.65

In terms of the texts that document this Big Bang, it is a standard claim among scholars of early Christianity that a ‘community’ is the proper social context for imagining their composition of texts. Usually, the author is described as belonging to a discrete community of Christians that possesses its own particular theological outlook. As such, the author, the proverbial ‘voice’ of this group, has developed his thinking within a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 63 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 243. Acts brings this full story together. Paul’s letters and Matthew are centrally “organized” by Acts in order to produce this narrative.

64 I borrow the concept of “new religious movements” from Rodney Stark’s work on Mormonism. See Rodney Stark, The Rise of Mormonism, ed. Reid L. Neilson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). For a comprehensive guide on the history of scholarship on so-called NRMs, see The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements, ed. James R. Lewis (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008).

65 Hopkins, “Christian Number and its Implications,” 243.

! 31! very specific environment and, therefore, writes his gospel (or other Jesus material) reflecting—either indirectly or, as is more regularly thought, directly—the interests and holdings of that community.66 The result is an approach that accepts communities as a fundamental and axiomatic element of the compositional fabric of early Christian literature and, relatedly, that these writings reflect not only the collective perspectives of these communities, but also document strands of Jesus ‘tradition’ that have been faithfully passed on by generation after generation of early Christians.67

A similar viewpoint can be brought to the letters of Paul. However, increasingly scholarship is recognizing Paul’s strategic license in constructing a myth of origins for his audience. While he consistently boasts of the numbers of those “in Christ” (Rom

12:5), it is far from clear that these people share a mutual awareness or acceptance of this designation.68 What is clear is that Paul was actively engaged in an ongoing struggle both to obtain authority and coalesce disparate social actors into a more cohesive unit. Among the many methods in his toolkit were the authority and interpretation of Mosaic law (Rom

3-4, Gal 3), appeals to popular philosophical motifs (Rom 7, 1Cor 12), shared narratives on cultural decline (Rom 1-3), instruction on the performance of particular ritual actions like baptism (Rom 6), flattery and requests for communal funds (2Cor 9), the use of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 66 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 245-246.

67 For example, John G. Gager, in some of his earlier work viewed, the gospels as products of disenfranchised early Christian “converts,” as evidenced by the more egalitarian sayings of the gospels and claims that much of the Jesus material in the gospels “span several generations and thus cover the time of the initial apocalyptic excitement as well as the first phases of consolidation [of the church].” See John G. Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (Prentice-Hall, 1975), 25-34.

68 I am greatly indebted to Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 238-256 for the following section on Paul and communities.

! 32! highly charged conceptual categories such as ekklēsia or, again, speaking of his audience as “of Christ and God” (1Cor 3:23), as well as moments of pique when news of quarrels and rupture lead him to class his recipients as immature and fools (Gal 3:1). Many of these rhetorical strategies are constituent of Paul’s larger project of religious and ethnopolitical group-making in which he proposes that God’s pneuma (spirit) is homologically shared among his addressees, bounding them together.69 His letters reveal the difficulties negotiating this change in status entail a posse ad esse. As a consequence, the reception of his message appears to have varied. While Paul was corresponding with assemblies that may have self-identified as bounded in some measure, close examination of his letters indicates that these associations were dynamic and variable— far from stable and organized ‘churches’ or ‘congregations.’ Thus one should be cautious about the degree to which Paul left behind him a stable and effective set of social institutions.

Keith Hopkins avers that “most ancient observations about Christian numbers, whether by Christian or pagan authors, should be taken as sentimental opinions or metaphors, excellently expressive of attitudes, but not providing accurate information about numbers.”70 Relatedly, Paul’s continual use of language aimed at group formation can be understood as largely performative in nature. Brubaker suggest that when

“ethnopolitical entrepreneurs” reify categories like community, assembly or congregation, it is often in the pursuit of “invoking groups they seek to evoke… summon

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 69 See Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’”; Caroline Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007).

70!Hopkins, “Christian Number and its Implications,” 243. !

! 33! them, call them into being.”71 In other words, the categories that participants engage in the course of constructing new social identifications can be one strategy for further fostering such relationships.72 Paul’s coaxing in Galatians 3 is a useful example: chiding his recipients collectively as fools and “bewitched” (3:1, 3), he launches into a series of rhetorical questions that serve as encouraging reminders that they are one in Christ, unified by pneuma, their “experiences” (pathe) and miracles (3:4-5, 26-8), despite social realities. Paul then outlines his myth of origins for Gentiles baptized “in(to) Christ”— namely, that they are coheirs with Christ and adopted into the patrilineal line of Abraham

(4:1-7). Paul is able to draw a new ethnic map for Gentiles that ties them back to a shared ancestor and emphasizes their mutuality. Attendant practices such as ritual meals or baptism further serve to affirm and inculcate these ties. This newfound affiliation asks that the Galatians recognize a kinship not just in genealogy and shared pneuma, but in outlook or mind as well. Paul also continually emphasizes the notion of fated, Empire- wide movement as he describes his own mission. In Galatians, 1 Corinthians and Romans he reminds his readers that he received the gospel from the risen Christ and not from human origins (Gal 1:11-12; 1 Cor 15:1ff.; Romans 15) and that he has been tasked with !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 71 Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups, 10. Emphasis original.

72 Following the critique of Rogers Brubaker on identity theory, the concept of identity “bears a multivalent, even contradictory theoretical burden” in the academy today (Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups, 35). For instance, in the case of issues of race, ethnicity and nationality, the term can be a puzzling appellation when it is employed without a clear and defined rubric of complementary meaning and analysis. Some recent proposals for rectifying this issue have suggested using the term “identification,” which encourages specificity as to the agents and practices involved in the act of identifying. Both relational and categorical acts of identification, in this sense, are “intrinsic to social life” in a way identity alone is not (Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups, 41). Language, gender, citizenship and ethnicity would be examples of categorical identifications that call for analysis of the practices or other interplays involved in establishing self-understanding and/or persons or institutions ascribing categorization onto others. This latter “mode” in particular I judge to be exceptionally helpful for thinking about religions.

! 34! winning “obedience from the Gentiles, by word and deed, by the powers of signs and wonders, by the pneuma of God.” Moreover, he claims that “from Jerusalem and as far around as Illyricum, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ” (Romans 15:19). One can see the roots of the Big Bang paradigm amplified by Acts in such passages.

Yet, as Caroline Johnson Hodge cautions in her groundbreaking work on Paul’s ethnic language, one cannot presume that “ethnic groups are mutually exclusive categories of identity” as individuals are capable of shifting their religious and ethnic identifications according to situational need.73 In the case of someone like Paul, a religious and ethnopolitical entrepreneur often functioning remotely and in a competitive field, ethnicity is not a “blunt instrument”; it is a frame for achieving cohesion among participants, one that calls for a sense of shared mind and practice, but does not create it.

Participants are fully capable of ranking their affiliations into hierarchies, establishing varying levels of association, breaking these associations all together when prudent, or never fully understanding or accepting a message like Paul’s.74 Even Paul variously or simultaneously calls upon his standing as a Ioudaios, a Pharisee, or even one among the

Gentiles (Gal 4:3), when doing so proves advantageous (1Cor 9:20ff.). With such mutable social dynamics, it can be difficult to untangle when information about group formation from a source like Paul is more or less representative or rhetorical. As such, vestiges of the same presumptions about an early Christian Big Bang tend to remain within scholarship that accepts Paul’s social categories as representative data about early

Christian communities. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 73 Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 118.

74 Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups, 18; Johnson Hodge, “Negotiating Multiple Identities” in If Sons, Then Heirs, 117-136.

! 35! Despite a mounting scholarly awareness of Paul’s precarious entrepreneurial undertaking, it is still commonplace to find studies that champion his rhetoric about community as representative of real social circumstances. To some extent this interpretive assumption can be attributed to a paucity of source material; Paul’s letters represent our only direct evidence for first-century ekklēsia and, therefore, if we want to say anything concrete about these associations, it becomes tempting to engage in an interpretive tautology that relies on Paul.75 In such cases, his idealized portrayal of his audience as a community bounded by shared pneuma, participation in Christ and moral perfection is accepted as genuine.

Building upon this foundation, the questions scholars tend to ask of Paul’s letters are to what degree are these groups following the guidelines of their titular leader, and why or why not. Stowers has likened this approach to the early Christian Big Bang insofar as it acts as something of a “[correlate] of an equally miraculous idea of

‘conversion.’” Stowers’ discussion of 1 Corinthians is instructive on this point. That the

Corinthians are not a cohesive social group has not escaped the notice of scholars.

However, the letter is often treated as the “poster child for the danger of divisions in the community”— an approach that implicitly or explicitly presumes that the group was at one time socially cohesive. A thoroughgoing social analysis of Paul’s correspondence challenges the notion that the Corinthians ever possessed the kind of commonality in mind and practice characteristic of a ‘community’. Stowers explains, “instead of scholars thinking that, as one might expect, Paul was never able to get the Corinthians, or

Galatians or Philippians to accept or fully accept his ideas, practices and demands” the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 75 Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 46 discusses this circular reasoning in Romans.

! 36! focus is turned to the possibility of outsiders inveigling the Corinthians away from the brand of proto-Christianity championed by Paul. Such assumptions trade on notions of orthodoxy and heresy, the initial acceptance of Paul’s message, and spontaneous social organization.76 The same critical eye that is brought to a source like Acts when it comes to phenomena of mass conversions and miraculously established churches tends to pass over Paul’s testimony.77

Much literature on Galatians, for example, has focused on the negative presence of “Christ-believing influencers in the Galatian communities” muddying Paul’s message among his people.78 The deduction that Paul’s letter reflects, to borrow loosely a framework from Mary Douglas, that the Galatians were a formerly strong group that had been sullied by an outsider and made weak, is seemingly underlined by moments in the letter in which Paul asks “who has bewitched you” (3:1) and “who prevented you from obeying the truth” (5:7).79 Accepting that there are a discrete communities being

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 76 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 243. A similar point was raised by Iris Marion Young in her feminist critique of the concept of community: “The ideal of community, finally, totalizes and detemporalizes its conception of social life by setting up an opposition between authentic and inauthentic social relations.” See Iris Marion Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York, NY: Routledge, 1990), 302.

77 Stanley K. Stowers, “Kinds of Myths, Meals and Power: Paul and the Corinthians,” in Redescribing Paul and the Corinthians (ed. Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller; Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature, 2011), 105-149; Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 243.

78 Mark D. Nanos, The Irony of Galatians: Paul’s Letter in First-century Context (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002), 138.

79 Douglas’ concepts of ‘group’ and ‘grid’, which accompany her theorizations on ‘weak’ and ‘strong’, are far more complex than I have indicated in this very superficial borrowing. The Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory explains that ‘group/grid’ indicates a: “formula for classifying social relations. [Douglas] is interested in how individuals are controlled by society. Group refers to a bounded social unity, whereas grid refers to the rules by which people relate to one another on an ego-centered basis. Strong grid consists of insulations between individuals which prevent free interaction. As insulation weakens, individuals have more freedom to relate to

! 37! addressed, scholars seek information about the composition of these communities by asking, for instance, to what degree they consider themselves Gentile Christian or Jewish

Christian? It is also not uncommon to find studies that hypothesize about the multiple

Pauline communities in Galatia that were “in communication and cooperation”—a question perhaps unwittingly rooted in Acts’ claim that Paul as the founder of the ekklēsiae in the region (16:6).80 Even if scholars disavow a Big Bang version of history like the kind in Acts, acceptance of Paul’s rhetoric about communities in Galatia—or

Corinth, Philippi and Thessaloniki, for that matter—reinforces the same myth of origins.

Among the problems this approach presents, two concerns are particularly significant. First, as is often acknowledged when noting the occasional nature of Paul’s letters, ancient letter writing was an activity conducted by social actors according to particular needs or in response to particular situations. Letters were not simply containers of information, but reflected social hierarchies, embedded carefully crafted attempts at persuasion and followed expected, well-established rhetorical or literary conventions. As such, Paul cannot be isolated from scrutiny when it comes to the categories he employs in his descriptions of the social relationships at play. As rehearsed above, Paul’s descriptions of the ekklēsiae he addresses must be held in tension with his rhetorical aims.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! each other as they wish. She creates a fourfold table: strong grid, strong group; strong grid, weak group; weak group, weak grid; weak grid, strong group; then uses the various combinations for comparative analysis of cultures.” Janet MacGaffey, “Group/Grid,” in A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, 2 ed., ed. Michael Payne, et al. (Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2010), 316. Also see Mary Douglas, Natural Symbolic Explorations in Cosmology (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003 [1970]). ! 80 Nanos, The Irony of Galatians, 30.

! 38! Second, in the interest of shedding the myth of origins reinforced by uncritically adopting the categories employed by our objects of study, the field is greatly aided by scrutinizing both modern and ancient categories, whether Paul’s ekklēsia or, again, contemporary uses of terms like community, society, culture, identity and so on. Rather than gloss over the messy processes of forming social groups, attention to the individual performances and networks of practices such an endeavor entails can lead to a less mystified and more fine grained analysis of so-called Christian origins.81 Such an approach is not limited by “normative theological concepts parading as descriptive and explanatory social concepts,” but would be based on analysis of what we know to be customary social activity for the era and subject in question.82 In case of Paul, this may mean further consideration of his activity as one among a number of itinerant figures touting themselves as specialists in textual interpretation, divination and other, what might be termed, religious practices.83 Again, an investigation along these lines would situate Paul in a highly competitive field of other self-styled apostles, superapostles and so forth, illuminating a dynamic social landscape for the early stages of the Jesus movement in which something like the cohesion of the participants involved would need to be demonstrated and not assumed.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 81 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 244.

82 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 245-246.

83 Two recent Brown University Ph.D. dissertations discuss Paul as a religious entrepreneur. See Jennifer Eyl, “By the Power of Signs and Wonders: Paul, Divinitory Practices, and Symbolic Capital,” (Ph.D. Dissertation; Brown University, 2012) and Heidi Wendt, “At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in Early Imperial Rome,” (Ph.D. Dissertation; Brown University, 2013).

! 39! Demystifying the Gospel Writers

Likewise, the predominant approach of the field to Q and the Synoptic gospels has been to mine each text for data on the communities imagined to be represented by the authorial choices the writer has made. This results in studies that discuss the Galilean

Markan community in conflict with Jerusalem; the Jewish-Christians in Matthew and

John dividing themselves from the synagogue; the possible Gentile or Jewish character of

Luke’s community; or the multiple wisdom, apocalyptic and other communities posited for Q, or for each hypothesized strata of Q.84 Often the primary interest in these analyses is how the text in question reveals the developing theology of the community to which the writer belongs, and how best to classify them (Jewish, Gentile, Christian, Jewish-

Christian). Interestingly, such concerns with the boundaries of normative Christianity are more akin to the debates about orthodoxy and heresy that appear in the following centuries of Christian history.85 For texts of the first-century, I have already outlined how the most historically plausible and relevant social frameworks for these authors may not be their imagined household or synagogue, but their fellow writers. The writing culture of the gospel writers will be addressed in detail in Chapter 3.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 84 For example, on Mark see Peterson, The Origins of Mark, cit. 11; on Matthew, see David C. Sim, The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism: The History and Social Setting of the Matthean Community (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998) and R.A. Burridge, “Who writes, why, and for whom?” in ed. M. Bockmuehl & D.A. Hagner, The Written Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); on Luke, see Philip Francis Esler, Community and Gospel in Luke-Acts: The Social and Political Motivations of Lucan Theology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Q will be discussed extensively in the last chapter. ! 85 See, for example, Karen King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 7): “The writings of the ancient Christian polemicists fostered the search for a single origin based on their claim that heresy had one author, Satan… Scholars accepted in principle that all manifold expressions of Gnosticism could be traced to a single origin, but they searched for the source in more historical places, like heterodox Judaism…”

! 40! As this chapter has outlined, the presumption that communities exist between the lines, as it were, of these sources is also indebted in some measure to the same myth of

Christian origins that has attended Paul. That is, this approach presumes a first-century landscape in which Christian communities as well established and widespread. It also tends to read any language about groups or mission in these texts as data on historical circumstances and not, for example, rhetorical claims. However, the interests that the gospel writers demonstrate in social formations, if they do so at all, still do not offer a plausible account of the development of the Jesus movement(s) into what will be called

Christianity.

A brief survey of the texts that constitute early Christianity’s Big Bang demonstrates very little by which to trace the development of the social practices that must have constituted the institutionalization and spread of Christianity.86 The hypothetical sayings-source Q is often cited by scholars as a genesis for the Big Bang; a now-lost source used by Matthew and Luke that may have dated back, in some proposals, to some of the earliest oral traditions of the Jesus movement. Q will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, but it is sufficient to note here that there is very little, if any, evidence within Q for concrete social groups. Some scholars, like John S. Kloppenborg, attempt to identify community language in passages like Q 12:33-34 and Q 16:13, which focus on issues of wealth and ethics:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 86 Stowers observes: “The problem that most challenges scholars… is that their scenario has no account of how social formations such as ‘Christianity’ or ‘the church’ formed in terms of ordinary social processes. ‘The church’ as a coherent trans-empire entity just appears when a handful of individuals make speeches…” He calls for a more concrete explanation for how “speeches and teachings, should they be understood and accepted, could have caused such a far- flung, but socially and ideologically uniform and cohesive social formation/institution in such a short time.” See Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 253.

! 41! Do not treasure for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and gnawing deface and where robbers dig through and rob, but treasure for yourselves treasure[s] in heaven, where neither moth nor gnawing defaces and where robbers do not dig through nor rob. For where your treasure is, there will also be your heart. (Q 12:33-34) No one can serve two masters; for a person will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. (Q 16:13)

Kloppenborg describes these passages as focusing on “the hoarding activities of the elite” and suggests that the message behind them is that the “Q folk,” an interesting turn of phrase Kloppenborg repeats frequently, are “not of the urban classes in which the Jesus movement eventually spread, but the villages and towns of the Galilee, where God’s actions and reign had everything to do with the basics of life.” He suggests that these passages “circulated not among urbanites, but among the rural poor, not in the Gentile cities of the east, but in the towns of Jewish Galilee.”87 Yet he does not sufficiently explain the social process through which this material was circulated among these “folk,” or how “this utopian vision was eventually effaced by the editing of Matthew and

Luke.”88

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 87 John S. Kloppenborg, Q: The Earliest Gospel: An Introduction to the Original Stories and Sayings of Jesus (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 97. Emphasis original. Kloppenborg suggests that “texts such as Q were composed to function more like musical script for performance than a textbook to be read” and that “oral-scribal interactions” account for the transmission of Q to other gospel writers (ix).

The Q passages cited above are cited from Kloppenborg’s translation; however, for this study I generally rely on James M. Robinson’s The Critical Edition of Q (Hermeneia Supplement).

88!Kloppenborg, Q: The Earliest Gospel, 96. !

! 42! Historically Q scholarship has focused on an itinerancy hypothesis—that is, Q’s internal “rhetoric of uprootedness” of implied social upheaval.89 Gerd Theissen, for instance, proposes, “the ethical radicalism of the sayings transmitted to us [in Q] is the radicalism of itinerants” who lived under extreme stress.90 Theissen’s reading of Q was influenced, at least in part, by an itinerancy thesis within the field that extends back to

Adolf von Harnack’s work on the Didache and his belief that the text offered a set of regulations for wandering and impoverished prophets who travelled from Christian community to Christian community, seeking shelter, food, money and other goods.91 This imagined class of “professionally homeless preachers of the Christian message” is first encountered with the “missionary journeys on the part of Jesus’ disciples… the wandering of Jesus himself, and Acts and Paul’s letters.”92 In other words, it derives from

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 89!William Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes: Galilean Conflicts and the Setting of Q (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 157. ! 90 Gerd Theissen, “The Wandering Radicals: Light Shed by Sociology of Literature on the Early Transmission of the Jesus Sayings,” in Social Reality and the Early Christians: Theology, Ethics, and the World of the New Testament, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992 [1973]), 40. Theissen even goes so far as to suggest that Jesus himself did not intend to establish communities of Christians, but to establish a band of “travelling apostles, prophets and disciples who moved from place to place and could rely on small groups of sympathizers in these places.” Later Theissen describes these ‘sympathizers’ or, as he also calls them ‘sedentary sympathizers’, in terms that resemble a ‘community’ of Christians, using the Essenes as a comparable example to what he has in mind in terms of their eventual hierarchical construction, leadership, etc.). He also suggests that these ‘sympathizers’ are banded together by Hellenistic “community organizers” like Paul; however, he continues to see the activities of the itinerants and the ‘community organizers’ as fundamentally distinct. See Gerd Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1978), 8, 18-21, 115. ! 91 Adolf von Harnack, Die Lehre der zwölf Apostel (Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 2, 1-2; Leipzig: Hinrichse, 1884). Arnal also identifies the Harnack thesis as a foundation for work on Q. See Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes, 14-18. ! 92 Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes, 13. Arnal does not hold the same strong association to Cynic-like wandering charismatics, as does Theissen. He does away with the strict itinerancy hypothesis and suggests instead that the travel implied by ‘itinerancy’, following John S.

! 43! Christianity’s own myth of origins and maps the same kind of explosive beginnings implicated by the Big Bang paradigm. While these studies attempt to give some idea of the kind of social formation that may have acted as a delivery system for Q, and other

Christian materials for that matter, they fail to explain the concrete processes by which the messages and teachings of these itinerant charismatics and preachers would have been received and understood, why they would be appealing in the first place, how they then instituted or added to the supposed existing communities they encountered, among a host of other practical concerns.93

Extending out from Q, Paul and his efforts are recounted above. Even if one wishes to argue that Paul’s mission and travel add support to the itinerancy model that has been associated with Q, Paul’s evident struggle to establish cohesive communities is instructive for considering how feasible such a model would be for establishing the kinds of expansive growth and stable formations imagined by Acts. Mark’s gospel is of little help for those seeking language about communities and community construction. As mentioned above, Mark’s Jesus is an elusive, ornery figure. A purveyor of esoteric teachings, Jesus does little to inculcate community. If anything, his continual insistence on secrecy and silence would suggest otherwise— for example in 8:30 (“And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him”). Moreover, Jesus’ own disciples are unable to comprehend who he is on the basis of his wonderworking or nearly any of his teachings. This so-called ‘messianic secret’ has been a source of conflict for many

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Kloppenborg, should be imagined more like a morning walk around the Sea of Galilee, than travel across long distances. See Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes, 71, 94.

93 See Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 253.

! 44! looking to uncover the Markan community behind the text. Tying the messianic secret to questions of Christology, representative scholarship on the question of Mark’s community have focused on the ways in which “the gospel grew out of a christological conflict within the church” as Mark attempted to “correct what it considered to be the dangerous or false Christology… Mark’s Christology is a Christology of the cross and is closely related to the title ‘Son of Man.’”94 Studies along these lines have offered little justification for considering Mark to be enmeshed in a Christological debate within a presumed community of fellow Christians. Notably, such concerns are more characteristic of later debates among church leaders in the second century and beyond.

Unlike Mark, Matthew does have a Jesus that calls for a worldwide mission

(28:18-20). Matthew is also concerned with ekklēsia (16:18; 18:17) and, in fact,

Matthew’s choice of the work ekklēsia over synagōgē is often cited by scholars as evidence of the “Matthean Christians” wanting “to ‘differentiate’ themselves from Jewish groups.”95 A similar argument is brought to bear with Matthew 21:43 (“the kingdom of

God will be… given to a people [ethnē] that produces the first fruits of the kingdom”), with some proposing that Matthew wishes to mark the followers of Jesus as the new

Israel. Among other first-century writers, the term ethnē/ethnos is firmly recognized to be !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 94 Adam Winn, The Purpose of Mark’s Gospel: An Early Christian Response to Roman Imperial Propaganda (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 12. In this chapter, Winn is drawing on the work of a number of notable early Christian scholars and their positions on Mark, including William Wrede, Rudolf Bultmann and Ludwig Bieler. See Wrede, The Messianic Secret, trans. J.C.G. Greig (Altrincham, UK: James Clarke & Co., 1971); Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel (New York, NY: Scribner’s, 1951); Ludwig Bieler, Theios Aner: Das Bild des ‘Göttlichen Menschen’ in Spätantike und Frühchristentum (Vienna: Höfels, 1935).

95 Ricahrd S. Ascough, “Matthew and Community Formation,” in The Gospel of Matthew in Current Study: Studies in Memory of William G. Thompson, ed. David E. Aune, et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 96-126, cit. 113. !

! 45! in reference to ethnic Judeans and similar groups; for example, Strabo (c. 63 B.C.E.- 24

C.E.), who identifies the Jews as one among four ethnē in Palestine, as well as Josephus

(c. 37-95 C.E.) and Philo (c. 20 B.C.E.- 50 C.E.) who use the category in reference to the

Jewish people.96 Moreover, studies of the term more broadly recognize that it does not intend to designate a new ethnic group or nation, but can refer to “a variety of specialized groups such as guilds and trade associations.” To suppose that Matthew is talking about issues pertaining to orthodoxy and heresy or a divide between Judaism and the rise of a new, ‘truer’ Israel is reading later theological debates back onto the text. Ethnē also has precedent in speaking of idealized communities. Plato, for instance, uses ethnē in

Republic 421c to speak of various groups within his utopian city.97

In short, Matthew does not require a religious community to speak of questions of ekklēsia or an ideal Israel. Among the source material at Matthew’s disposal are the

LXX, possibly Q, Paul and Mark. It is evident that one of Matthew’s prime objectives is to take Mark and clarify the mysteries presented by his obfuscating Jesus through an interpretation of Jewish scripture. Two recent studies on Matthew have also noted that the

Jesus in this gospel can be read through a Stoic lens.98 Matthew’s Jesus is a teacher of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 96 Strabo, Georgics, 16.2, 2; Philo, De fuga et inventione 185; De mutatione nominum 35, 191; De Abrahamo 276; De specialibus legibus I. 190, 2.263; De opificio mundi. 28; De vita Moysis I 2.12; Legatio ad Gaium 83, 102, 141, 145. Cited from Nicola Denzey Lewis, “The Limits of Ethnic Categories,” in Handbook of Early Christianity: Social Science Approaches, ed. Anthony J. Blasi, et al. (Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman Altamira, 2002), 489- 506, cit. 496. ! 97 Anthony J. Saldarini, “Reading Matthew Without Anti-Semitism,” in The Gospel of Matthew in Current Study: Studies in Memory of William G. Thompson, ed. David E. Aune, et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 166-184, cit. 172.

98 Erin Roberts, Anger, Emotion, and Desire in the Gospel of Matthew (Ph.D. Dissertation; Brown University, 2010); Stanley Stowers, “Jesus as Teacher and Stoic Ethics in the Gospel of Matthew,” in Stoicism in Early Chrsitanity, ed. Ismo Dundenberg, Troels Engberg-Pedersen and Tuomus Rasimus (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010). Interestingly, and as Jefferson’s objections

! 46! ethics, reexamining Judean law and engaging in the same kind of intellectual interpretive practices we see among other Judean writers like Philo or Paul. Moreover, it is also quite possible that Matthew could get his ideas about ekklēsia from his knowledge of Paul.99

Yet none of this literary activity requires the primacy of a ‘Matthean’ community. In fact, given the tautological nature of arguments that attempt to read Matthew’s language as a mirror onto his fellow Christians (that is, studies that use Matthew’s language to reconstruct an imagined community and then interpret Matthew through the lens of that community), reevaluating Matthew in terms of the literary precedents for terms like ekklēsia and ethnē weigh in favor of reading his communal references as rhetorical sign- posts and not as literal communities-behind-the-text.100

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! attest, the observation that the gospels and Paul had parallels with philosophical movements of the first-century was made very early on in historical critical reviews of this literature—albeit, in the context of citing the imposition of those paradigms on the original “primitive Jewish Christian eschatology” of the Jerusalem church. See, for example, Rudolf Bultmann, “Primitive Christianity as a Syncretistic Phenomenon,” in Primitive Christianity: In its Contemporary Setting, trans. R.H. Fuller (Edinburgh: R & R Clark, 1956), 210, 211: “Christian missionary preaching was not only the proclamation of Christ, but, when addressed to a Gentile audience, a preaching of monotheism as well. For this, not only arguments derived from the Old Testament, but the natural theology of Stoicism was pressed into service.”

99 See Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 253.

100 Although, as I will continue to argue, this does not preclude the existence of some kind of ‘religious’ group among Matthew’s social network. I simply question the primacy of any such group over other formative associations, like other writers. As noted above, Dwight N. Peterson makes a similar argument concerning the dubious nature of assuming that all potential ‘communal’ references within a text are in reference to a concrete fellowship of Christians, stating that the method overall is aimed at establishing a “means of attaining interpretive control…in order [for the scholar] to achieve desired results” from the text in question. Peterson enumerates several of, what he calls, “unjustified assumptions which are entailed within the drive to construct communities behind documents”— of these critiques, three are particularly striking and, in my view, relevant to the broader study of the Synoptic gospels and Q: first, that “community constructors” assume to be able to understand an author’s psychology, “as if one can reconstruct the intention of an author when one has no information about who the author was, or what that author wrote, other than that abstracted from the document one is reading,” cautioning that the “intentionality of a document is not the basis of interpretation, but the result”; second, he denies that one can assume to know the condition of the audience of the gospels and, furthermore,

! 47! The same observations about Acts that I have made throughout this chapter also apply to Luke. Luke’s communal language is wrapped up with its presentation of a larger myth of origins. Luke presents Jesus as a figure akin in particular ways to other Greco-

Roman literature, like Augustan epic, which has occasionally given scholars pause. As

Stowers observes about Luke-Acts, in acting “more like a normal Hellenstic author… the idea of something that suggested communal authorship was exposed for its oddness.”101

Marianne Palmer Bonz, for instance, notes the parallels between Luke-Acts and the

Aeneid’s efforts to bring “the Augustan present directly into contact with the heroic past.”

Virgil’s epic “incorporated a complex synthesis of patriotic, moral, and religious themes in its mythologizing history of archaic Roman origins and of the divine prophecies that would read their eschatological fulfillment in the Golden Age of Augustan rule.”102 The same themes of genealogy, eschatological fulfillment, cosmic destiny and mythologizing of origins takes place in Luke-Acts and, for that matter, Paul. Bonz also identifies a number of epic poems penned by “Hellenized Jewish” writers as precedent: the fragments of an epic poem and tragedy recorded by first-century CE historian Alexander Ployhistor, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! that this audience is “somehow constitutive of the meaning of the text”; third, he proposes that the exercise of attempting to retrieve the historical Markan community, for example, “obscures the interests of the reader of Mark behind a screen of alleged historical ‘objectivity.’” This then allows the interpreter to impose on the text any number of socio-historical reconstructions, utilizing preferred methodological devices in order to achieve desired interpretive results. He rightly likens this method to a house of cards that “has the potential to be quite beautiful and complex…but all one needs to do is to turn on a fan.” Peterson, The Origins of Mark, 156-61. ! 101 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 240.

102 Bonz, The Past as Legacy, 23-24. It is important to note that, although Bonz recognizes these parallels, she continues to subscribe to the Big Bang understandings of Christianity’s social development. Interestingly, however, she remains aware of the implausibility of that social model, even if she does not address it directly. Phrases like: “[Christianity’s] proclamation had met with a surprising degree of success” and “Equally as stunning as the rapid success of the Christian mission among Gentiles, however, was the finality of the rupture of the church with its religious past” are found throughout her monograph (Bonz, The Past as Legacy, 25).

! 48! preserved by Eusebius; the second-century B.C.E. Alexandrian Philo’s On Jerusalem;

Theodotus’s On the Jews (second century B.C.E.); and the Ezekiel’s The Exagoge of

Exodus.103 While not in meter, Luke-Acts nonetheless can be situated within an established genre of foundational epic. And unlike Luke-Acts, these other epics are identified with a specific author and not imagined to be the products of a Virgilian or

Philonic community.

The Gospel of John presents a dynamic and complex set of discussions about social formations, including references to “true worshippers” (4:23), Samaritans

(8:48,52), Pharisees (7:45-48; 12:42) and the synagogue (9:22; 16:2; 20:19). Scholarship on the imagined Johannine community represented by these polemics has linked it to

“Paul’s Jewish-Christian opponents in Corinth”; “the emergence of motifs that had a later flowering in Gnosticism”; or “inner-community controversy… in a period after the conflict with the synagogue had begun to subside.”104 Of the four canonical gospels, John is the gospel least associated with offering an account of the historical Jesus given its more cryptic and difficult teachings. Yet, because of its strong presentation of group, it is almost always associated with the historical circumstances of its supposed community, perhaps because it is otherwise difficult to understand. The vast and complex literature on this gospel is beyond the scope of this study, which will focus primarily on Q and the

Synoptic gospels; however, it is notable that John’s discussion of social formations does not lend itself to a sense of a worldwide movement or Big Bang. John has no mission and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 103!Bonz, The Past as Legacy, 27-29. ! 104 Robert Kysar, “The Contribution of D. Moody Smith to Johannine Scholarship,” in Exploring the Gospel of John: In Honor of D. Moody Smith, ed. R. Alan Culepepper, Carl Clifton Black, et al. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 3-18, cit. 4.

! 49! ends with the risen Jesus appearing to the disciples on several different occasions and

John concluding: “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). In this respect John explicitly situates itself with the activities of ancient writers, not with a mythic Big Bang of Christian communities.

Bruce Lincoln notes that, much like with religious communities, it is common for those studying myth to associate them with “specific, ethnically and linguistically defined populations” and that this orientation

takes for granted that nations, ‘cultures,’ and/or Völker (depending on the speaker’s discourse) are primordial, bounded, unproblematic entities and that myth is the equally primordial voice, essence and heritage of that group. Myth and group are understood to be linked in a symbiotic relation of co-production, each on being simultaneously producer and product of the other.105 Lincoln recognizes that this instinctual treatment of myth in contemporary scholarship has roots in the anti-Enlightenment elevation of völkisch and the national reclamation projects of men like Johann Gottfried Herder and the Brothers Grimm. These Romantic era projects possessed a strong political element, aimed at generating a sense of national identification; however, in the process, “they misrecognized and misrepresented” the myths they selected as “the reinstation of something ancient, eternal, and authentic.”

Romantic studies on the Volksgeist of the German people, James Macpherson’s Ossian, or Herder’s meditations on Shakespeare or the Geist evidenced in the Hebrew scriptures were what Lincoln terms “myth about myth.” Lincoln cautions that “[i]t is not always the case that myths are the product and reflection of a people who tells stories in which they effectively narrative themselves… myths are stories in which some people narrate others,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 105 Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 210.

! 50! and at times the existence of those others is itself the product of mythic discourse.” On

Herder specifically, Lincoln observes that he has been “highly influential well beyond romantic and nationalist circles and arise whenever myths and peoples are understood as mutually—and unproblematically—constitutive.” 106

Examining the intellectual genealogy of studies of the New Testament and other early Christian writings, Herder and the German Romantics are among its forefathers.

Herder in particular held significant influence with the History of Religions School and its adherents, Hermann Gunkel, founder of Form Criticism, and Johannes Weiss, teacher of Rudolf Bultmann who was the Doktorvater of Helmut Koester (who, coincidentally, was my teacher and mentor at Harvard Divinity School, before coming to Brown

University). In the next chapter I will examine the influence of German Romanticism on our approach to the question of the early Christian Big Bang and the concept of community. More than a product of Christianity’s own second-century invention of a myth of origins, the persistence of the community model within the field has strong, and not always immediately evident, ties with eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century political and philosophical thought.

!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 106!Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 211.!

! 51! ! ! ! ! !

CHAPTER 2 THE ROMANTIC “BIG BANG”

In August 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered the annual address of the Phi

Beta Kappa Society at the First Parish Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Titled “The

American Scholar,” it was regarded by the Fireside Poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. as

America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence” from Europe, proclaiming the scholar or “Man-of-Letters” to be the principal voice of society writ large.1 Borrowing imagery from Empedocles, Emerson opened his pioneering oration by musing on the so- called “divided Man”:

you must take the whole society to find the whole man… this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.2

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” in The Annotated Emerson, ed. David Mikics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 72-92. Oliver Wendell Holmes’ quote cited from Mikics, The Annotated Emerson, 72. Also see John Patrick Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 198.

2 See Empedocles, fr. 443: “Here sprang up many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders, unattached, and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads.” The same imagery is employed by Friedrich Hölderlin in Hyperion (1797-1799): “I can think of no people more disintegrated than the Germans… is it not like a battlefield, where hands and arms and limbs everywhere in pieces, while the life blood flows into the sand?” and Friedrich Nietzsche, the latter of whom was greatly influenced by Emerson, considering him his “Brother-Soul” (Friedrich Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck, December 24, 1883, in Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe III. I, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975-2004), 463. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of Salvation,” Thus Spake Zarathustra: “fragments and limbs and fearful chances—but no human beings.” For more on Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche, see Jennifer

! 52!

Of this divided man, according to Emerson, “the scholar is the delegated intellect… [i]n the right state, he is, Man Thinking.”3 This Man Thinking is unfettered by the dogmas and philosophies of others, and he is not among the bookworms and “bibliomaniacs of all degrees.”4 Man Thinking is inspired purely by nature, and it is through him that “the active soul” gives birth to genius and creates truth. Although universal to every human, the active soul is hindered—“unborn”—save within Man Thinking.5 His creation is

“proof of divine presence.” As Emerson avers, “if man create not, the pure efflux of the

Deity is not his” and one is rendered unable, as he states further along in his speech, to

“read God directly.”6

Despite the fact that Emerson, Holmes and their ilk viewed this address as the

American scholar’s liberation from the perceived shackles of European culture and influence, Emerson’s language betrays the very indebtedness he seeks to shed. His employ of the notion of a divinely-inspired and universal soul or spirit shared by human kind, yet finding expression through the mouthpiece of the scholar—this Man

Thinking—owes itself to certain lines of European Romantic thought about the divine

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1-9. Also see Mikics 2012: 74, n. 6.

3 Emerson, “The American Scholar” in The Annotated Emerson, 74. Emphasis original.

4 Johann Gottfried Herder maintains a similar anti-intellectualism when he makes reference to what Isaiah Berlin terms “tranquil philologists” and “detached literary epicures who turn over… pages idly.” See Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 241.

5 I am paraphrasing Emerson’s own words in this section, “This everyman is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn” (Emerson, “The American Scholar” in The Annotated Emerson, 77).

6 Emerson, “The American Scholar” in The Annotated Emerson, 77, 79.

! 53! Spirit, or Geist, working among the people, the Volk, as a revelatory source of creativity, genius and God’s word.7 For Emerson Man Thinking was, as he termed elsewhere, the

Poet; an interpreter of nature in both poetry and prose, standing “among partial men for the complete man.”8 To borrow a phrase from the French sociologist and philosopher

Pierre Bourdieu, the Poet was an elite “producer of cultural goods,” representing in literature the collective voice of an otherwise disjointed communal body.9

At the core of political Romanticism and German Idealism was the notion that human beings, and human culture, cannot exist outside of a community or state.10 The

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 7 Famously, Emerson declared in the inaugural issues of the Transcendentalism periodical The Dial (1840): “Those who share in it have no external organization, no badge, no creed, no name” but are united by the “spirit of the time.” Despite this protestation, among Emerson’s influences, Platonism, Neoplatonism and Hindu philosophy were particularly formative. As an early member of the American Transcendentalist movement, he also engaged the works of German Idealism and early Romanticism. Herder had particular influence among New England Transcendentalists more broadly, following the publication of James Marsh’s translation of On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry in 1833. Indeed, Emerson’s passage on Man Thinking has many resonances with Herder’s writings on the physiognomy of wholes. See, for example, Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy which borrows heavily from Herder’s Alteste Urkunde des Menschen Geschlechts: “Behold the human body! That fair investiture of all that is most beauteous—Unity in variety! Variety in unity! How are they displayed in their very essence!—What elegance, what propriety, what symmetry through all the forms, all the members! How imperceptible, how infinite, are the gradations that constitute this beauteous whole!” See Martina Reuter, “Physiognomy as Science and Art,” in ed. Sara Heinämaa and Martina Reuter, Pyschology and Philosophy: Inquiries into the Soul from Late Scholasticism to Contemporary Thought (Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind; London: Springer, 2008), 158-177, cit. 162. Similar imagery can also be found in the works of Herder’s mentor, Johann Georg Hamann and Herder’s student, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (e.g., Studie nach Spinoza, 1784). For more on Herder’s influence on Transcendentalism, see “Romantic Historicization: Christianity” in Kurt Mueller-Vollmer and Michael Irmscher, ed. Translating Literatures, Translating Cultures: New Vistas and Approaches in Literary Studies (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1998), 94-98.

8 Mikics, The Annotated Emerson, 200.

9 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Randal Johnson (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993), 115.

10 The question of what the category “Romanticism” encompasses is complex. It is widely accepted that it designates philosophical and theological lines of thought that emerge following the work of Friedrich Schlegel; however, one occasionally finds secondary material that refers to the German intellectual movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a period of

! 54! early Romantic poet Novalis (1772-1801), for instance, argued “To become and remain human, man needs the state. Without a state, man is a savage. All culture results from the relationship between man and state.”11 This sentiment also found expression in the work of Romantic thinkers Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) and Johann Adam Möhler (1796-

1838), who maintained that the “authentic Christian consciousness belongs not only to the solitary homo religiosus… [it] is fundamentally collective and communal, the sensus communnis of the faithful,” thus amalgamating “the identity of the Christian consciousness of the individual… with the consciousness of the whole Church.”12

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Romantic thought, subsuming the Idealists (e.g., J.G. Fichte, F.W.J. von Schelling, G.W.F. Hegel) under the Romantic banner. In some measure, this is a misleading designation that fails to appreciate the degree to which Romanticism proper emerges as a counter to post-Kantian idealist views, yet the term nonetheless acknowledges the complex of political, social and intellectual change that characterized the Romantic era following the American, French and so-called Copernican revolutions.

On the development of ideas of cultural community and cosmopolitanism within German Idealism and Romanticim, see Dieter Sturma, “Politics and the New Mythology: the turn to Late Romanticism,” in Ameriks, The Cambridge Companion to German, 230-231: “the state itself is understood as a person… every state is an individual existing with its own specific character, and… it governs itself according to specific laws, customs, and practices.” However, also see Herder who, in response to the French Revolution, would claim: “Nature creates nations, not States.” This emphasis on the state should not be confused with nascent appeals to nationalism or nationalistic sympathies. See Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, 213-234.

11 Novalis, Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, Vol. 3: Das philosophische Werk II, ed. Richard Samuel, Hans-Joachim Mähl and Gerhard Schulz (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer: 1968), 548. Cited from Karl Ameriks, The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 230. In this case, Novalis’ use of the term “savage” (Wilde) is pejorative; however, particularly in later German Romantic thought, the idea of the ‘noble savage’ would take hold—a man who is uncorrupted by civilization’s ills. I will discuss Herder’s position on the so-called ‘savage’ further later in this chapter.

12 Johann Adam Möhler, Unity in the Church, ed. and trans. with an introduction by Peter C. Erb (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995) [1825]: 39, section 12; James C. Livingston, Modern Christian Thought: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, Second Ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006): 193. The notion of a “sensus communis” was widespread and persistent in both Enlightenment and German Romantic thought. See Gerald Ernest Paul Gillespie, Manfred Engel, Bernard Dieterie, ed., Romantic Prose Fiction (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing, 2008), 517:” “By placing the source of myth in the collective conscious, German Romantic myth theorists, such as Görres, Kanne, the Grimm

! 55! Moreover, a divine Spirit, a communal Geist, which imparted revelation onto its members, bound this community. Thus, the notion of what Emerson terms ‘Man

Thinking’ is found in scripture through the writings of the so-called Hebrew poets and the evangelists. In the case of the canonical gospels writers, their chronicles of Jesus’ life and death were directives of the Geist or Holy Spirit, embodying the sacred tradition of the

Church; however, they were representative of their immediate communities as well. As

Möhler explains, “in this reception of the word, human activity… has necessarily a part.”13

Although divided by a generation and oceans apart, Emerson, Schlegel and

Möhler represent a pervasive notion in German Romantic thought: the author is synedochical of both a unifying, inspirational Geist and the community in which

(usually) he is writing. While Emerson himself is not a figure directly relevant to the history of the study of early Christianity, Bruce Lincoln’s observation that the Romantics and, in particular Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), have been “highly influential well beyond romantic and nationalist circles and arise whenever myths and peoples are understood as mutually—and unproblematically—constitutive” looms large.14 German

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! brothers and Bachofen presupposed a unified mythical Weltanschauung among all peoples, epochs, and generations that evidenced objectively knowable and legitimate Truth. This mythological sensus communis developed unmistakably from the Enlightenment construction of natural religion and vision of common beliefs in a common humanity and Herder’s cosmopolitanism.”

13 Möhler, Symbolism, or Exposition of the Doctrinal Differences between Catholics and Protestants as Evidenced by their Symbolical Writings, trans. James Burton Robertson (New York, NY: Edward Dunigan, 1844 [1832]), 350; Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, 194.

14 Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 211. On Herder’s influence on the academy, see Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, 7-25; 208-300, cit. 8: “Again, Herder’s conceptions of teleological or cultural explanation made, or at least widened, conceptual and psychological paths

! 56! ideas about the state, theory of knowledge and value theory (e.g., moral and political philosophy and aesthetics) that emerged as a response to the Enlightenment and the

French Revolution have had significant and persistent influence on European and

American intellectual life and culture. One might even say that the works of Romantics like Herder constituted something of their own Big Bang in approaches to historiography, philology and linguistic theory in particular.15 The vestiges of this influence are detectable in the writings of a man like Emerson, as well as in approaches within certain academic fields—for instance, those concerned with issues of historiography. Some of these fields have acknowledged their legacies of Romantic thought, with their terms, methods and dominant discourses taking derivative or innovative turns (e.g., literary theory). However, in many respects, the study of early Christianity remains perhaps as unwittingly steeped in Romantic influence as Emerson.

This chapter proposes that critical scholarship of the New Testament—a field that emerged within the Romantic philosophical, political and cultural movement—has inherited from German Romantic and Idealistic thought a number of presumptions about

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! not open to tough-minded and consistent materialists, positivists and mechanists—and this, too, leads to the widely varying positions of, among others, thinkers influenced by Marxism, by the doctrines of Wittgenstein, by writers on the sociology of knowledge of phenomenology.” For more on Herder’s influence on existentialism and psychology, see Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, 210, n. 2.

15 See, for example, Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983).

Of course any treatment that attempts to link such diverse lines of thought into a tidy framework is, by nature, something of an oversimplification. I do hold, however, that the parameters I have outlined here are, in the main, descriptive of developmental trends in the fields I have referenced.

! 57! the social formation of early Christianity, and the role of the author within their presumed community, that have contributed to the development of approaches to early Christian literature that are idiosyncratic when compared with allied studies of ancient literature.

Specifically, save certain lines of nineteenth century Homeric Analyst-Unitarian scholarship, the canonical gospels tend to be the only ancient sources in which scholars posit a community behind their production.16 To illustrate what I mean by this, borrowing a reference from Stanley Stowers alluded to in the previous chapter: “Classicists do not approach Vergil’s or Philodemus’s writings as the products and mirrors of Vergil’s or

Philodemus’s communities.”17 Yet for early Christianity, the community is too often taken as normative. I will not attempt to argue in this chapter that every time

“community” is mentioned in the field of early Christian studies or elsewhere that it is in direct reference to the Romantics. I am merely attempting to identify the roots of an issue of conceptual and definitional clarity that has troubled the field.

In order to demonstrate the connections between Romanticism and early Christian studies that I am proposing, this chapter focuses primarily on the work of two Romantic thinkers: the aforementioned Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Adam Möhler. In their

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 16 The Analyst debate was itself couched in Romantic ideas about oral traditions and national ethos. Some examples include Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Homerische Untersuchungen (Berlin: Weidmann, 1884) and Karl Lachmann, who attempted to trace the ‘stemma’ (genealogy) of the narrative strands of Homer, comparing the Iliad to the German Nibelungenlied. See Karl Lachmann, Liedertheorie in Betrachtungen über Homers Ilias (Berlin: mit Zusätzen von M. Haupt, 1847).

17 Stanley K. Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’ and the History of Early Christianity,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011), 238-256, cit. 247. Of course an author like Virgil is recognized as belonging to a social network of Augustan-era poets like Horace, Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus that one might term a “community” of a sort. This is precisely the kind of alternative social formation that I seek to identify for the gospel writers. I will discuss authors and social networks in more detail in Chapter 3.

! 58! respective theorizations on language and culture, each of these men envisioned an artificially narrow field of influence for writers. The frameworks they established have subsequently contributed to the idea that communities are the presumptive social environment of ‘the Poet’ or, in this case, the early Christian author. I offer a close reading of their work, prefaced by an overview of two main themes in Romantic thought germane to understanding the context of their treatments of literature: Romantic ideas about societal structure, sometimes referred to as theories of organic form and the role of language in the demarcation and development of culture. I approach these subjects through an investigation of the role of the poetic ‘Genius’ in Romantic imagination.

Finally, I segue into a discussion of the problematic use of the term “community” in the field of early Christian studies more generally, and propose an alternative social environment for the production of these texts, something that will also be addressed in detail in Chapter 3.

The Romantic Genius

The central focus of this study is to situate the authors of the gospels and Q in a social context that is historically plausible, given our knowledge of Mediterranean and

West Asian literary practices. Traditional approaches in the field have tended to give primacy to the author’s ‘community’ of fellow Christians as the most formative social environment for the production of their literature. I propose that a more appropriate social environment for these writers is networks of fellow writers and associated literate specialists who, “taught high literacy, interpreted and circulated writings” even perhaps

! 59! to persons who may or may not have shared in an understanding of being “in Christ.”18

As such, this approach asks us to reexamine our models for understanding the production and circulation of early Christian literature and, in kind, reexamine our understanding of the activities of the author.

Given these aims, before delving into an examination of Romantic influence on the study of early Christian writings, it is first necessary to situate my thinking in light of two pertinent issues in literary theory: the Romantic idea of the solitary ‘genius’ and developments in structuralist and deconstructive approaches to the author in the twentieth century—sometimes referred to as the ‘death of the author.’ Although in some respects similar insofar as each bring to light questions of authorial agency and subjectivity, the importance of these approaches for this study center around how I understand the role of the author in the production of literature.19 In short, I am not attempting to revive the

Author-Genius or the Romantic-expressive model of authorship. Nor am I going so far as to engage in structuralist lines of thought that would attribute the authorship to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 18 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community,’” 247.

19 See Andrew Bennett, “Expressivity: the Romantic” in Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Patricia Waugh (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006), 48-58, cit. 57: “Inasmuch as Barthes’s declaration of the death of the author may be said to be directed against the Romantic-expressive model of authorship, we might conclude, it is misdirected. What Barthes’s attack overlooks or misrepresents are precisely the complexities and self-contradictions that energize Romantic poetic theory. The expressive theory of the author as articulated by writers of the Romantic period interrogates the subjectivity and self-consciousness of the author; it interrogates problems of language, representation, and textuality; it interrogates questions of authorial intention, volition, and agency. And despite the important of the provocation of his essay, it is, in a sense, Barthes himself who closes down these questions by promoting a reductive version of expressive authorship in order to argue against it, and indeed to argue for a notion of the author that is already at work in the Romantic theory of authorship itself.”

! 60! “innumerable centres of culture.”20 I am instead proposing a rich and dynamic social context for ancient writers and other literate experts based on historical evidence of their activities. A brief overview of the contours of these theories will help explain why what I am proposing in this chapter, and the next, differs from these models.

Beginning with the former, the concept of ‘genius’ or ‘the genius’ in

Romanticism is not, as we might imagine in contemporary understanding, a theoretical or conceptual extension of reason. Following Immanuel Kant, it is a form of unconscious expression of literary or other artistic meaning that transgresses strictures of convention, while still remaining aesthetically successful.21 Kant referred to genius as the “innate mental predisposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art”—thereby establishing a symbiotic, and tautological, relationship between the artist and nature itself.22

Romantic thinkers like August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel would add to this doctrine a Romantic theory of literature. Friedrich Schlegel in particular brought to bear the autonomous activity of the poet, with “poetry” (Poesie) functioning as an act of continuous creativity or imagination that subsumes all other past expressions of literary

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 20 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1977), 142-148, cit. 146.

21 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 317-318. Also see Andrew Bowie, “Romanticism and Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism, ed. Nicholas Saul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 243-255, cit. 250.

22 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §46 (186). Emphasis original. On genius as “nature’s favorite” see §49 (191).

! 61! genius into its process of achieving “perfect totality.”23 For Schlegel, out of the “deepest depths of the Spirit (tiefsten Tiefe des Geistes),” poetry is an expression of “a progressive universal poetry (Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie)… Only it can, like the epic, become a mirror of the whole surrounding world, a picture of the age.”24 Poetry was an expression of its immediate milieu. However, to be clear, this was not to suggest that the poet was engaged in articulating stages within a grand narrative of history. The linear progression of history was an Enlightenment position rejected by the Romantics, who instead understood historical development as a continuous, cyclical processes of the birth, growth and decay. Past ‘organic forms’ of history could inform present understandings and artistic productions (e.g., the dramas of the ancient Greeks, the poetry of the ancient

Israelites), but each culture was uniquely expressed within its epoch, informed by its own particular historical circumstances.!

The period in which ideas about the genius were being discussed was known as the Geniezeit—the “age of the genius”— and would give rise to significant innovations in political theory, ethics and epistemology. It also provided the foundation for a shift in theories of language that willingly abandoned the dominance of French neoclassicism and the German Kanzleistil of the previous generations in favor of identifying literary figures representative of a less elite and unifying “Deutsch.” The late eighteenth and early !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 23 Jürgen Klein, “Genius, Ingenium, Imagination: Aesthetic Theories of Production from the Renaissance to Romanticism,” in The Romantic Imagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany, ed. Frederick Burwick and Jürgen Klein (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 19-62, cit. 59. Also see Gregory Moore, “Introduction,” in Johann Gottfried Herder, Shakespeare, ed. and trans. Gregory Moore (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), vii-xlii, cit. xxi: “the genius was a second Creator, a Promethean figure who imitated not the ancients or other writers but only nature… the genius created instinctively, promiscuously, with God-given powers.”

24 Athenaeum: Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm Schlegel und Friedrich Schlegel II/2 Vieweg, 1798 (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1960), 204 (fr, 116).

! 62! nineteenth centuries in Germany had seen the “Lilliputian statelets” and other relatively autonomous regions of that geographical expanse coalesce into the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, albeit without any cohesive political, economic or cultural keystones.25 It therefore fell to the Romantic thinkers, like Herder, to establish an invented tradition for Germany—one that demonstrated continuity between the present amalgamated culture and a conceptually unified past.26 In attempting to reclaim this past, the search for German heritage extended beyond the borders of what constituted

Germany, and past “the old fault line dividing Latin from Germanic Europe.”27!

Among the individual geniuses identified by Sturm und Drang and Romantic movements, William Shakespeare stands out as a seemingly peculiar choice to represent the language of unified Germany. However, his treatment by men like Herder is instructive for understanding why the individual ancient author I am attempting to redescribe in this project is not commensurate with the Romantic genius. Locating

German heritage—the language and art of the people, the non-elites—entailed looking to poets and geniuses like Shakespeare who were unencumbered by the délicatesse of the

French and, as such, better represented the unmediated spirit of the German people.

Shortly before the Romantic movement, Heinrich von Gerstenberg, for instance, imagined Shakespeare presenting “living pictures of moral Nature” and, later, Herder would herald him as a craftsman of Volkspoesie (popular poetry), along with the likes of! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 25 I follow much of Moore’s account of German history in the following section. See Moore, “Introduction,” viii-x.

26 For more on later German nation-building and invented tradition, see William Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’ and the Second-Century Invention of Christianity” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23/3, 199-200.

27 Moore, “Introduction,” xi.

! 63! Homer, the poets of the Hebrew Bible and Ossian.28 In a play on the same kind of synecdochical language used by Emerson, Herder avers that in Shakespeare: !

The whole world (die ganze Welt) is only body to this great mind: all scenes of nature limbs on this body (alle Auftritte der Natur an diesem Körper Glieder), as all characters and modes of thought traits to this mind (wie alle Charaktere und Denkarten zu diesem Geiste Züge)—and the whole (Ganze) may be named as that giant god of Spinoza ‘Pan! Universum!’29

What Herder means by this is that through Shakespeare there is not only an expression of artistic genius, but also a synthesis of history in the manner in which he is able to pull together disparate characters, plots, languages and circumstances into an organic whole.30

Elsewhere Herder would claim that “the proper subject of the historical sciences is the life of communities and not the exploits of individuals… great poets expressed the mind and experience of their societies.”31 Indeed, the anti-Enlightenment notion of society— and religion— as a unified organism, animated by its own particular Spirit (Geist) was widespread in the Romantic period.32

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 28 Heinrich von Gerstenberg’s Letters on Curiosities of Literature (1768) quoted from Moore, “Introduction,” xvi. Also see Moore, “Introduction,” xvii-xx.

29 Herder, “Über Shakespeare,” in Werke 5:220-226. Herder’s reference to Baruch Spinoza in this passage is likely in respect to the latter’s monist philosophy, but may also signal the Pantheismusstreit controversy between Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Gotthold Lessing.

30 Herder, Shakespeare, 30: “He took history as he found it, and with his creative spirit he combined the most diverse material into a wondrous whole.”

31 Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, 211.

32 Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, 213: “the spirit of a nation or culture had been central not only to Vico and Montesquieu, but to the famous publicist Friedrich Karl von Moser, whom Herder read and knew, to Bodmer and Breitinger, to Hamann and to Zimmermann. Bolingsbroke had spoken of the division of men into mantionalities as being deeply rooted in Nature herself.”

! 64! Therefore in Romantic thought, Shakespeare was a genius representative of his broader cultural milieu. Like Sophocles before him, he reflected the social life and customs of his epoch.33 But, crucially, that social life was not expressed through the oppressive literary scruples of his period. It was expressed through the plain speech of the people. In his introduction to a translation of Herder’s treatment of Shakespeare in Von deutscher Art und Kunst (On German Character and Art), Gregory Moore explains:!

… although Sophocles and Shakespeare may be outwardly dissimilar, they have a spiritual kinship that all geniuses share: they are true not only to nature… but also to the culture from which they emerged… Both are mouthpieces of the collective soul of the nation, expressing its thoughts and sentiments, manners and morals; in each case their art is a development of indigenous species of expression.34

German and English alike could unify under the cultural banner of the genius of

Shakespeare, insofar as his work expressed the spirit of the common people, the

Volksgeist, and their unique experiences and culture. By the later Romantic period, the institutionalization of Germanistik and proto-nationalist projects like that of the Grimm brothers would increasingly look to the Volkspoesie and language of the German people

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 33 Herder would also call Shakespeare “Sophocles’ brother” in these discussions. See Herder, Shakespeare, 49. Robert Edward Norton explains: “…in the Shakespeare essay [Herder] triumphantly displayed the one basic modus operandi that united the otherwise apparently so dissimilar playwrights… Sophocles and Shakespeare were literally worlds apart in every other respect but in their representative fidelity to nature.” Robert Edward Norton, “The Ideal of a Philosophical History of Aesthetics: The Diverse Unity of Nature,” in Herder’s Aesthetics & the European Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 51- 81, cit. 79-80.

Interestingly, in his “Demythologizing: Controversial Slogan and Theological Focus,” Rudolf Bultmann cites Shakespeare (Tempest IV, 1) and Sophocles (Ajax 125-126) as examples of “mythical eschatology,” thereby maintaining the comparison generations later. See Rudolf Bultmann: Interpreting Faith for the Modern Era, ed. Roger A. Johnson (The Making of Modern Theology: Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Texts; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991), 295.

34 Moore, “Introduction,” xxx.

! 65! for evidence of their shared history. Yet the Author-Genius continued to function as the inspired mouthpiece of the people and their collective experience of their environment.35

The Romantic ‘Genius’ acting as a spokesperson for his kinsmen is a model for understanding the production of literature that shares a great deal with the kinds of approaches in early Christian studies that focus on the author as a redactor of sayings, teachings and other materials deemed essential or representative of his community. As discussed in the last chapter, this community is traditionally envisioned as a religious group of some stripe, unified by their shared “mind and practice.”36 Stowers, reflecting on the concept of community as it pertains to its use in the field, notes that nineteenth- century ideas of Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society) were often associated with notions of “an essential and totalizing identity and commitment” akin to the idea of conversion.37 Again, this is the same kind of wholesale ‘turning’ of allegiance augured in passages like Acts 4:23: “the great number of those who believed were of one heart and one mind.” Thus sociological approaches to nineteenth-century Europe dovetail

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 35 Herder would not live to see Napoleon Bonaparte conquer Austria and Prussia (1805); however, the civic reforms and rebellions that would follow stoked the proto-liberal nationalism articulated by Herder, with the abolishment of serfdoms and the rise of the peasant class. See Hans-Joachim Hahn, “Germany: Historical Survey,” in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760- 1850, ed. Christopher John Murray (New York, NY: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 418-421.

36 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community,’” 238-239: “The range of meanings that has been important for scholarship on ancient Christianity, however, has a different history not only in Christian thought, but also in European and American social and political thought. This is the idea of community as a deep social and mental coherence, a commonality in mind and practice. Although Enlightenment traditions sometimes approached the idea as in the French Revolution’s fraternity in ‘liberty, equality and fraternity,’ it has been the anti-Enlightenment and Romantic traditions that have featured community in this sense.”

37 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community,’” 239. Stowers cites the late nineteenth-century work of Ferdinand Tönnies, stating: “with his dualism between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society), the former supposedly based upon the essential will (Wesenwille) of the participant.”

! 66! conceptually with traditional descriptions of the social environment of early Christianity writers that emphasize religious groups to the exclusion of other potential associations.

As I will discuss, the field of New Testament and early Christian studies owes a great deal to Romantic historiography and it is not unreasonable to posit that these parallels share Romantic roots.

However, it would be an oversimplification to say that when scholars in the field of New Testament and early Christian studies use the word ‘community’, they are consciously engaging the paradigms of the Romantics. Likewise, not all scholarship on the social world of the early Christians has engaged in discourse about communities or, if they have, some have recognized that the model is problematic.38 Yet it remains the case that the study of early Christianity largely persists in making appeals to concepts of community that are at best ill-defined or, more usually, myopically focused on religious groups that reinscribe Acts’ myth of origins in some measure.39 Moreover, much like the

Author-Genius Shakespeare speaking for the “illiterate, low-liv’d” Elizabethan, the early !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 38 For instance, John G. Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of the Early Christians (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975), 10: “My view is that past failures to deal with the rise of Christianity in social terms have resulted in serious distortions of the historical realities. Despite all their talk about the need to determine the Sitz im Leben of a given passage… students of early Christian literature have given remarkable little attention to the social dimensions of these communities. Thus the emphasis given here to the social aspect of world- construction stems from a basic conviction that the process of generating a sacred cosmos or a symbiotic universe is always rooted in concrete communities of believers. This conviction takes us beyond the standard claim that religious beliefs and institutions are subject to the influence of social factors in their environment, for it makes the assertion that without a community there is no social world and without a social world there can be no community”; Abraham J. Malherbe, Social Aspects of Early Christianity (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 13: “We must, for instance, resist the temptation to see so much of early Christian literature either as a community product or as reflecting the actual circumstances of the communities with which the writings are associated. We too frequently read of communities that virtually produced one or another of the Gospels or for which they were produced.” Malherbe cited from Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community,’” 250.

39 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community,’” 239-249.

! 67! Christian writer is often imagined within a coterie of illiterate fellow Christians.40 Again, as I will detail in Chapter 3, this model for ancient authorship agitates against what we know about the practices of those with sufficient education and training to produce and circulate writings in the ancient Mediterranean world.

Anticipating that discussion, the Romantic ideal of the Author-Genius is incommensurable with ancient writers in three fundamental and interrelated respects.

First, the literary practices of ancient authors were not the ‘pure’ and unmediated activities of a poet inspired by creative Nature to express the Geist of the people. Ancient writers possessed rich and complex reasons for composing their works as active agents, and their productions should not be understood as the expression of the totalizing “mind and experience” of their societies or immediate communities.41 Second, this is not to say that authors are not engaging certain canons of literature, literary traditions or attempting to represent particular kinds of discourses in their writing. On the contrary, these authors are self-consciously choosing and crafting their referents and source materials in a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 40 Bettina Boecker, “Groundlings, Gallants, Grocers: Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Audience and the Political Agendas of Shakespeare Criticism,” in Shakespeare and European Politics, ed. Dirk Delabastita, et al. (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont Publishing, 2008), 220-233, cit. 221-222: “one of the main functions of the Elizabethan audience has been to excuse the Bard’s perceived faults and shortcomings. It is already in the very early stages of Shakespeare criticism that this tradition is established: the representatives of an age perceived as uncivilized and rude, Renaissance theatergoers personify the allegedly detrimental influence of Shakespeare’s historical situation on his work… If blaming the audience for ‘corrupting’ Shakespeare seems, at first glance, to be nothing more than a less-abstract version of blaming the age, it is important to note that several eighteenth-century critics implicitly or explicitly characterize Shakespeare’s original audience as lower class. Taylor portrays Renaissance theatergoers as ‘illiterate, low-liv’d mechanics,’ while Pope ascribes Shakespeare’s faults to the necessity of pleasing ‘the populace.’ ‘the meaner sort of people.’ The nexus between Shakespeare’s ‘un-Shakespearean’ bits and the lower social orders remains undisturbed by the Romantics’ reevaluation of the concept of the people… Nevertheless… the eighteenth-century notion [remains] that Shakespeare’s genius is quintessentially ahistorical.”

41 Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, 211.

! 68! rational way. Speaking of Romantic, aesthetic values as they pertain to ancient literature,

Tim Whitmarsh notes that Greek literary culture of the Imperial period was for some time viewed by scholars as an “embrassing epilogue” given that its writers’ were perceived as failing to embody the Romantic “obsession” with ‘originality’ and ‘inspiration’ characteristic of the Author-Genius. Writers like those of the Second Sophistic, however, were prized in their milieu precisely for their ability to participate in the ‘creative imitation’ of other texts or the “intertextual refashioning of earlier literary works.”42 Skill was judged by the author’s ability to consciously select the traditions from which they wished to emulate and their ability to ‘play the game’ of participating in that literary culture. It was not judged by to what extent the author, propelled forward by the Geist of the age and their own aesthetic talents, could faithfully represent the Volk.

Lastly, it is misleading to associate writers exclusively with non-elites in an attempt to say something about the “common traditions and common memories” of the

Volk.43 Writers may reflect certain discernable aspects of the language, culture, politics and concerns of their milieu, but they are not unvarnished mirrors of the imagined experiences, traditions and needs of unique groups or other categories of people. For example, and relevant to the last point above, a study of literary culture in antiquity demonstrates it is the author’s critical writing “circle” of fellow elite cultural producers that is the most immediate and formative social context for the production of literature.44

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 42 Tim Whitmarsh, The Second Sophistic (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1.

43 Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, 234.

44 See, for example, William A. Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities (Classical Culture and Society; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Speaking of the literary communities of elite authors like Pliny, Johnson states: “The community is characterized by a reciprocity that mutually recognizes common values, ‘of

! 69! There is no compelling reason to think that the writers of early Christian literature should be situated in a different environment.

The Death of the Author

One of the central issues with the Author-Genius writ large is that it wrests agency away from the author as a rational actor. Interestingly, this approach to literature has much in common with twentieth-century structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to anti-authorialism. It is useful to pause for a moment and examine this turn in literary theory, in part because its missteps further demonstrate the historical implausibility of the

Author-Genius model. It is also necessary for me to situate this project in light of these developments, given my emphasis on the agency of the ancient author.

Briefly, born of the rejection of subjectivity by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, the so-called ‘Death of the Author’ eradicated the authorial subject from the production of literature by positing that language and knowledge exist before the consciousness of the author translates them into a particular discourse. Seán Burke describes this development as the “expulsion of the subject from the space of language… call[ing] into question the idea that man can properly possess any degree of knowledge or consciousness.”45 In other words, it is not a ‘self’ or an ‘I’ author who speaks in literature, but it is language. Barthes explains:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! which the most important is the rhetorical mastery of language’” (52). These networks of authors will be discussed in the next chapter.

45 Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (3rd ed.; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010) 14.

! 70! Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance of writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance of saying I: language knows a ‘subject’ not a ‘person,’ and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together,’ suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it.46

Thus, the author is not only excluded from literature, s/he is considered never to have existed in the first place. Informed by Russian formalists like Vladimir Propp—who, incidentally, were informed by Romantic poetics— the symbolic logic of the text and its cultural signifiers become the medium of composition.47 Simply put, cultures write texts, not authors. Barthes in particular held that the individual author, the genius, was a purely

“modern figure”—that is, a product of nineteenth-century theocentrism.48 It was this figure that Barthes and his sympathizers wished to eliminate from the text in order to foreground the neglected reader.

As noted at the onset, the work of Barthes, Foucault and Derrida continues to hold enormous sway in contemporary literary theory. Their approach to the author has become so formative that in structuralist and poststructuralist thought, it is often taken “almost as an article of faith.”49 However, critics of Barthes have noted that the elimination of the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 46 Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 145. Earlier Barthes explains: “As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function than that of the very practice of the symbol itself… the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins” (142).

47 For the Romantic influence on Vladimir Propp and other formalist critics, see Winfried Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

48 Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 143. Ironically, Sturm und Drang thinkers like Hamann similarly held that the language of symbols and feelings are antecendents of the activity of the genius. In some important respects, the Romantics and structuralists were not alien to one another. See Burke, The Death and Return of the Author, 14, 22, 30, 46, 88, 204.

49 Burke, The Death and Return of the Author, 16.

! 71! author has not so much destroyed the ‘Author-God’ as participate in its construction by

“creat[ing] a king worthy of the killing.”50 Moreover those who continue to claim that the text belongs purely to language have offered few compelling rationales for

“proceeding… from this calm insight to the claim that the author has no part to play in the processes of text formation and reception.”51 It is in this critique of the death of the author’s humanist opposition that I place my own project. Texts are the products of authors engaged in certain practices and conventions that correspond with their social contexts. They are not disembodied or passive filters of broader cultural structures.

Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ is instructive on this latter point. Habitus signifies an unconscious socialization that takes place among agents that drives them to the internalization of the various conditions (e.g., social, economic) that comprise their

“field” or sphere of social and cultural existence. Another way to describe habitus might be to say that people act in ways that are both practical and plausible given their social location and context. Bourdieu focuses his theorization on these actions in terms of practices: “the practices of the members of the same group or, in a differentiated society, the same class, are always more and better harmonized that the agents know or wish.”52

More than an amorphous designation of ‘culture’ on a broad scale, Bourdieu situates agents according to their relative power and cultural capital within specific fields of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 50 Burke, The Death and Return of the Author, 25.

51 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Preface to Of Grammatology,” in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976 [1967]), ix-lxxxvii, cit. lxxiv. Cited from Burke, The Death and Return of the Author, 26.

52 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990 [1980]), 59.

! 72! activity. Elsewhere, he describes habitus as a set of practices that are “internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions.”53 Rather than attributing something like authorship to a broad and amorphous concept like ‘culture,’ Bourdieu’s pillars of habitus and field allow for a

“socialized subjectivity” which unites structures with agents.54

The implications of Bourdieu’s theorization for understanding the ancient world are that it allows for authors to engage in literary practices that are normal for their historical circumstances and social location. This means that authors participate in particular standards and practices that are dictated by their levels of education, social class and background, as well as established methods for the composition and circulation of their texts. In other words, they are rational agents who make decisions in and about their writings based on knowledge of certain literary conventions, relevant bodies of literature and the kinds of issues being actively discussed within their historical field.

They are very much ‘alive.’ Moreover, contra the Romantics, they do not produce literature that is inspired by the Geist and communal mind of an ill-defined social body.

Their historical processes, literary fields and social networks can be described and analyzed.

The example of Luke-Acts offered in the last chapter helps to illustrate this last point. Beyond an interest in cultivating a myth of Christian origins, ‘Luke’ the author demonstrates knowledge of the letters of Paul, Mark and Q. Given the level of education

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 53 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996 [1979]), 170.

54 Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 126.

! 73! indicated by the quality of his writing, he was also likely aware of Augustan-era literature such as Virgil and other forms of ancient epic. Like Virgil, Luke claims to have a patron; he has an interest in establishing the divine genealogy of a dynastic family; he interprets visions and prophecy; and he writes about a founding figure tasked with establishing a new community. He may have also read bioi of notable philosophers and statesmen or some of the writings of the Second Sophistic or Neopythagorean pseudepigraphica.55 In short, Luke is an author situated within many interconnected networks of literacy. His prologue, in fact, alludes to others before him who have “undertaken to draw up an account” of the life of Jesus and that he has taken it upon himself to “write an orderly account” after consulting a variety of oral and literary sources. Scholars tend to focus on the possibility that Luke is offering evidence in this passage for the kinds of oral traditions and other ‘gospels’ imagined in the Big Bang; however, in effect, what Luke is saying is: “other writers and storytellers have tried to convey this story, but I can write a much better one.” Luke is situating himself in a competitive field of other writers from the very beginning of his work. He is not simply cataloging the developing theology of a community of Christians gathering in a house church. The subsequent chapters of this study will continue to expand on this argument—including a detailed argument in

Chapter 4 on why I believe Q and the gospels can be usefully classified in the scope of

Greco-Roman literature as what I term “subversive biographies.”

It is essential to reiterate that I am not attempting to claim that New Testament and early Christian scholarship has heretofore failed to recognize literary parallels

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 55 See Marianne Palmer Bonz, The Past as Legacy: Luke-Acts and Ancient Epic (Minneapolis, MI: Fortress Press, 2000) and John T. Fitzgerald, Passions and Moral Progress in Greco-Roman Thought (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007).

! 74! between the gospels, Q and material like bioi, chreia, epic and the like. Rather I am arguing that certain strains of Romantic influence have hindered our approach and analysis of these texts, often painting a picture of early Christian history that is ahistorical and idiosyncratic, particularly in its focus on (religious) communities. A reexamination of the social fields of early Christian writers may demonstrate that there are other, more plausible social environments for the production of this literature and, likewise, new and less-mystified ways to describe the beginnings of gospel literature.

Thus far, I have identified certain approaches to authorship and social structure in

Romanticism that have contributed to a view of literature as the product of the Volkgeist.

I now turn to Romantic theories of language, oral tradition and ‘primitivism’ that have had direct influence on the field of early Christian studies. By ‘direct influence’ I mean that it is possible to trace an intellectual genealogy from the lions of the Romantic movement to many of the theologians and secular scholars at the forefront of the historical study of scripture and Biblical criticism.

Herder, Möhler & The Study of Biblical Literature

To review, a student of Kant and Lutheran pastor, Herder is widely considered the originator of the notion of the Volkgeist—the spirit of the German people and nation.56

His major contributions to post-Enlightenment and theological lines of thinking were in !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 56 Coincidentally, Herder’s proto-nationalistic positions would have “fateful consequences for the twentieth century.” Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, 73. By the end of his life, however, Herder himself rejected nationalism. Isaiah Berlin explains: “He believed in kinship, social solidarity, Volkstum, nationhood, but to the end of his life he detested and denounced every form of centralization, coercion and conquest, which were embodied and symbolized both for him, and for his teacher Hamann, in the accursed State. Nature creates nations, not States [through language]. The State is an instrument of happiness for a group, not for men as such.” Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, 224-225.

! 75! his critiques of language and history. Considering language to be the “foundation of human consciousness” —and not, contra Hamann, principally of divine origin or, contra

Rousseau, a human invention—his construction of the circle of language and thought in many ways prefigured Wittgenstein’s “language-game,” viewing language as “a series of developing revelations” of the human race.57 Again, to be clear, this is not to say that he held that language signaled a progression of history per se. Rather, each epoch of history—each ‘cultural phase’— was its own unique expression of what Herder termed

Humanität (humanity).58

Herder’s view of language had particular implications for his theories of religion.

Each religion is embedded in a certain culture and unique to that context:

Who has noticed how inexpressible the individuality of one human being is… How different and particular all things are to an individual because they are seen by the eyes, measured by the soul, and felt by the heart of that individual? As disparate as heat is from cold, and as one pole is from another, so diverse are the various religions.

For Herder, “like nations and cultures, religions are singular, living organisms.” That said, while maintaining that each religious tradition is its own unique and valuable representation of a given culture, he still viewed Christianity as “the true conviction about

God and human beings… nothing but the pure dew of heaven for all nations.” 59

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 57 Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, 74.

58 Herder’s student, Goethe, would describe this theory as a case of nature evolving from “an unknown centre” moving toward “an unknown boundary.” J.W. von Goethe, Goethes Werke, Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften 1, ed. Erich Trunz, Hamburger Ausgabe, 14 vols. (München: C.H. Beck, 1981), XIII, 35.

59 Cited from Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, 74. The Tübingen philosopher Carl August Eschenmayer would put an even finer point on the matter: the highest expression of Geist in

! 76! In his First Dialogue Concerning National Religion (1802), Herder constructs a conversation between two friends in which one friend asks the other “Would you be annoyed if I hold Christianity to be the religion of all religions, of all people?” This then leads into an extended discourse on language as that which shapes the “corporate soul” and that those “who are ashamed of their nation and language destroy not only their religion but the bond that ties their people together.”60 Following Hamann, he would equate “linguistic petrifaction” with a valley full of corpses “which only ‘a prophet’ (such as Socrates, St Paul, Luther, and perhaps himself) could cover with flesh.”61 For Herder, the poetic language of biblical texts was the “mother tongue of the human race” and, in this poetry, “the spiritual genius of a whole people is found.”

Yet, one could not deny that human hands were at work on the composition of the

Bible. Herder acknowledges that the text reveals human “nature and language… according to their weaknesses and within the limitations of their ideas.” In other words,

Biblical poetry carries threads of the culture within which it was composed, expressing “a developing divine revelation” that ultimately grows not from autonomous authors alone, but through the language of the people.62 By studying the poetry and other writings of

Biblical authors, as well as Homer and Ossian, Herder proposed that one could know the

“modes of thinking and feeling” of the Volk: “how they were educated, what scenes they

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! human history is found not in art, contra F.W.J. Schelling, but in the early stages of Christianity’s development out of the dregs of antiquity.

60 Cited from Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, 75.

61 Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, 240.

62 Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, 77.

! 77! looked upon, what were the objects of their affection and passion…their dances, and their music.”63

Perhaps Herder’s best illustration of the association between nature and language comes in his On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782-1783).64 In this two-volume work he equates the sensory metaphors used by the Hebrew poets to the pure and child-like nature of their “savage nation.”65 “Savage” is not pejorative in this case, but a reflection of the simplicity of the Volk and their closeness to nature. Herder explains: “The more savage, that is, the more alive and freedom-loving a people is (for that is the simple meaning of the word), the more savage, that is, alive free, sensuous, lyrically active, its songs must be, if it has songs.”66 This is the framework through which Herder begins his investigation, opening with a celebration of the music he envisages accompanied the

Hebrew poets:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 63 Johann Gottfried Herder, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, 2 vols., trans. James Marsh (Burlington, VT: Edward Smith, 1833), 28.

64 Herder’s enthusiasm for the Hebrew poets (the Naturmenschen) should not be conflated with his views on eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century Judaism. Although he embraced the historical, national character and language of the Hebrew people represented by the scriptures, he was also adamant that epochs remain conceptually segregated and in essence that the modern Jew had little relationship to the heralded and more authentic Hebrew poetry and law. For instance, he held that the “nature of the soul is determined by the natural landscape” and, given the desert terrain of their God-given land, the Jews were “a decrepit corpse.” Moreover, he maintained a view of Jews as superstitious and power hungry, the latter a precursor to the fear of Weltjudentum and the former evident in the stagnation of natural science and historiography. See Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 59.

65 Herder, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, 26.

66 Cited from Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, 242.

! 78! The rattling of the ancient cymbals and kettle-drums, in short the whole music-band of [that] savage nation… is still ringing in my ears. I still see David dancing before the Ark of the covenant, or the prophets summoning a player, that they may feel his inspirations.

Correspondingly, he posits that the first stage of this poetry was chiefly oral. It is the unmediated expression of Geist among the Volk and the “simplest [form] by which the human soul expressed its thoughts.”67 He goes on to describe the work of these poets as

“imperfect”; “uncertain and far-fetched”; full of “parallelisms” so monotonous they are an “everlasting tautology.” 68 He also suggests “with the Hebrew the verb is almost the whole of the language,” offering the caveat: “but for this beggardly race of herdsmen, from what sources could they form a language?”69 However, like with the concept of the

‘savage’, these observations are not designed to be detractions. The language expressed by these poets is the “living language of Canaan… during the period of its greatest beauty and purity… before it was corrupted by the introduction of the Chaldee [and the]

Greek.”70 Its active verbs and sensory metaphors combined “form and feeling”; unlike

Homer, the words “creak and hiss” and, in its earliest stages, show no signs of having

“passed through a refining process.”71

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 67 Herder, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, 46. Also see 94: “All sensuous tribes have a knowledge of that nature, to which their poetry relates; nay, they have a more living, and for their purpose a better knowledge of it…”

68 Herder, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, 26.

69 Herder, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, 31.

70 Herder, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, 32.

71 Herder, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, 34, 168. Likewise, just as Herder considered the language of the Hebrews more simplistic and closer to an “unbiased and uncorrupted” state of nature, he considered the cognitive functions and morals of this Volk to be similarly “child-like.”

! 79! Eventually these oral traditions would be recorded as Volkspoesie, experiencing the “refining process” of being converted into literature. Therefore, while Hebrew poetry was embedded in the language of its Volk, Herder was also aware that it passed through the “weaving of the book according to later disposition”—that is, it passed through the hands of redactors.72 Naturally, this would result in a certain amount of degradation of the

‘purer’ forms of the original Poesie. However, an enterprising analyst could recover elements of the pre-textual oral/folk traditions of the ‘nation’ represented by the text. As mentioned previously, Herder’s model for an oral tradition behind the development of literature would go on to inform Romantic folklorists like Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm.

However, his methods would also indirectly influence later Form Criticism

(Formgeschichte) and Redaction Criticism (Redaktionsgeschichte) in the field of New

Testament studies— particularly, as noted in the last chapter, members of the History of

Religions School (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule) among them, Hermann Gunkel and

Johannes Weiss.

More immediately, Herder’s theoretical reconstructions would impact the work of other nineteenth-century thinkers like Johann Adam Möhler. Möhler was part of the

Romantic Catholic theological renewal of the early nineteenth century at Tübingen, until he left to become chair of New Testament exegesis at Munich. Particularly influenced by

Herder’s conception of society and religion as organic forms, Möhler would develop a theology that traced the Geist from its expression in the oral teachings of Jesus through to their present day. He equated this presence of the Geist to an understanding of ‘tradition’,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 72 Thomas Willi, Herders Beitrag zum Verstehen des Alten Testaments (BGH 8, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1971), 66.

! 80! calling tradition “ecclesial truths (Kirchenglauben) of the first Christian period to the extent that they are regarded as an instruction that has been considered a pronouncement of Christ or of the apostles and as such has been propagated by oral teaching.”73

Moreover, he understood the New Testament to be a record of these oral teachings of

Christ through the apostles, the “first written document of that tradition.”74

Building on Herder’s organic forms, in his The Unity of the Church (1825),

Möhler stressed the presence of the Geist within the Christian community, stating “The

Church is the body belonging to the spirit of the believers, a spirit that forms itself from inward out.” It is this notion of an inner ‘spiritual’ life of the community that would become increasingly central in scholarly treatments of early Christian texts, concerned with recovering the teachings, experiences and other holdings of imagined Christian communities. James Livingston explains: “Möhler’s ecclesiology is… influenced by the

Romantic conception of an organic, evolving, living tradition and a united and unbroken community consciousness that is guided by the Divine Spirit, in and through which alone the individual person can understand and appropriate the mysteries of Christian life and belief.” Challenging his Protestant interlocutors, however, Möhler did not see the gospels as infallible. Rather, he viewed them as a record of both the “expression of the Geist” at work in human history and the needs of the gospel writers or redactors as they selected the oral and written materials they were to include in their works, all the while carefully

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 73 Johann Adam Möhler, Die Einheit in der Kirche (Tübingen: Heinrich Laupp, 1825), 114.

74 Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, 193. Emphasis original.

! 81! preserving the continuity of the “purity and simplicity” of the earliest Christian teachings, to the best of their ability.75

As noted above, Möhler and Herder each represent facets or lines of German

Romantic thought that were to be found in later Form and Redaction criticism. For Form

Critics, early Christian communities possessed oral and/or small collections of written texts, preserving Jesus’ teachings as well as elements of their own collective, yet unique, folk interpretations and interpolations. In this construction of history, the notion of an autonomous author was absent. Authorship was fundamentally communal. Certain scholars would take these principles and associate the notion of communal Geist with the posited informal folk literature of the Christian communities, for which the gospel writer was a mere redactor of collected, communal materials.

Similarly, many notable early Christianity and New Testament scholars saw in this proposed folk literature a window onto the pre-literary, oral traditions of these early

Christian communities. Bultmann, for instance, proposed that one could demonstrate through “critical investigation… that the whole tradition about Jesus which appears in the three synoptic gospels is composed of a series of layers which can on the whole be clearly distinguished.” He maintained that it could be “easily proved” that “many sayings originated in the church itself; others were modified by the church” if one parsed the essential content from the “Aramaic tradition of the oldest Palestinian community” from the material of the manifestly distinct Greek, “Hellenistic Christian community” of the later gospel writers and their fellow Christians.76 Reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson, this

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 75 Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, 193.

76 Bultmann, Rudolf Bultmann: Interpreting Faith for the Modern Era, 97.

! 82! Hellenistic brand of Christianity was seen as imbued with Platonism, Stoicism, pneumatology and other elements that helped to make it palatable to its Gentile audience.77 These interpretive moves would have monumental influence on interpretations of Q as well, as Bultmann proposed that the supposed sayings-source was

“a primary source from which we can reconstruct a picture of the primitive community in which the Logia [the sayings] arose.”78 Again, the significance of this shift in methodology was that the group was now largely considered the primary actor in the course of authorship, not necessarily the autonomous author. That is to say, the idea of a writer of the gospels or Q was rarely discussed in early Christian literature outside of references to a representative scribe, a redactor, or the like. The idea of collective authorship became the norm or, at the very least, scholars began speaking in terms of the

‘community’ or ‘communities’ that produced these materials, and not individual writers or interpreters.

Redaction Criticism entered into this schema with the notion of a redactor compiling disparate remnants from past Christian communities into a text that reflected not only elements of an authentic more originary Christian past, but the redactor’s present social setting, their Sitz im Leben. This move found scholars reflecting on the ‘theology’

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 77 Rudolf Bultmann, “Primitive Christianity as a Syncretistic Phenomenon,” in Primitive Christianity: In its Contemporary Setting, trans. R.H. Fuller (Edinburgh: R & R Clark, 1956), 209-213: “On other occasions the Christian missionaries went direct to the Gentile population, and then, in the first instance, to the lower classes in the cities. There were probably churches of Gentiles only… Christianity found itself in a new spiritual environment: The Gospel had to be preached in terms intelligible to Hellenistic audiences and their mental outlook, while at the same time the audience themselves were bound to interpret the gospel message in their own way, in light of their own spiritual needs. Hence the growth of divers types of Christianity.”

78 Rudolf Bultmann, “The New Approach to the Synoptic Problem,” Journal of Religion 6 (1926), 337-362, cit. 341.

! 83! of the redactor: how their thought “was created or developed within a particular community, the theology that defined and differentiated the community from other communities.”79 The stories about Jesus’ life chosen by the redactor also were mined for information on precisely how they were representative of the “issues and needs of a particular community.”80 Once again, the poet—the Author-Genius—was the voice of the dissected whole.

For some the ‘community-writer’ perspective is simply cited in kinship with the idea that authors are embedded within particular social or cultural contexts (Sitze im

Leben), or that their writings are socially constructed products; however, again, it is rare to find a study that does not deem the author’s presumed Christian community to be the most immediate, formative and relevant social framework. Consequently, the Christian community is theorized in lieu of other kinds of possible social contexts or environments.

Some progress has been made in recent years in the field as the social sciences have added to the conversation questions about the social organization of the early Christian communities—were they egalitarian, sectarian, patriarchal— but the community has remained the starting point of analysis. As Stowers has noted, on the whole, this has been an extremely limiting approach to early Christian literature and one that has allowed

“normative theological concepts [to parade] as descriptive and explanatory social concepts.”81

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 79 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community,’” 241.

80 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community,’” 241.

81 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community,’” 245-246.

! 84! Reflecting on methodological approaches in the field more broadly, Stowers also suggests, “The form critics and many of their heirs have continued to deny that the early

Christian writings are properly literature. Letters and Gospels are rather deposits of folk speech or so-called oral tradition. The Gospels contained the Geist of the preaching, teaching and primitive churches because they are residues of oral speech.”82 The following chapters of this study attempt to treat early Christian writings as ‘proper’ ancient literature through an examination of literary networks, genre classification and a reimagining of historical fields, beginning in the following chapter with a redescription of writing practices in antiquity. However, before moving on, a few words on the use of the term ‘primitive’ by scholars like Bultmann and Koester in reference to the ‘Christians’ and ‘churches’ of the first-century further indicates that strains of Romantic thinking persist within the field.

The ‘Primitive’ Christians

In German, the word that is most often used in reference to the Jesus movement of the first-century is Urchristentum, sometimes translated into English as ‘early’ or, in the case of twentieth-century German scholarship, ‘primitive Christianity’. Correspondingly, the word for the ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ Christians is Urchristen. These terms generally take on one or a combination of valences, depending on context. Possible meanings include the temporal sense that one is speaking of the earliest stages and people of the movement that will come to be known as Christianity; that it is in reference to the kinds of “uneducated and ordinary men” referenced in Acts 4:13; or, relatedly, that one is

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 82 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community,’” 240.

! 85! speaking of a group of people akin to the Romantic ‘Savage’—simple, illiterate peasants who represent a more ‘authentic’ and pure form of the moral teachings of Jesus. In the case of references to the uneducated Urchristen, they are typically imagined as Galilean peasants or representatives of the “primitive Christianity [that] arose from the band of

Jesus’ disciples,” as well as the first ‘Hellenized’ communities that emerged out of the eschatological Palestinian Judaism of the Jerusalem church.83 This is a model that relies heavily on Acts. Bultmann provides an explanation of how this pattern of development is imagined:

The eschatological community did not split off from Judaism as though it were conscious of itself as a new religious society… The decisive step was taken when the good news of Jesus, crucified and risen, the coming Judge and agent of redemption, was carried beyond the confines of Palestinian Judaism, and Christian congregations sprang up in the Graeco-Roman world. These congregations consisted partly of Hellenistic Jewish Christians, partly of Gentiles, wherever the Christian sought its point of contact in Hellenistic synagogues. For here, without going father afield, it was possible to reach many of the Gentiles, who had joined the Jewish community, sometimes closely, sometimes more loosely. On other occasions the Christian missionaries went direct to the Gentile population, and then, in the first instance, to the lower classes in the cities… By and large, the chief differences between Hellenistic Christians and the original Palestinian version was that the former ceased to be dominated by…eschatological expectation… Christian missionary preaching was not only the proclamation of Christ, but, when addressed to a Gentile audience, a preaching of monotheism as well. For this… the natural theology of Stoicism was pressed into service… Thus Hellenistic Christianity is no unitary phenomenon, but taken by and large, a remarkable product of syncretism.84

In this description of the development of Urchristentum, Jesus’ disciples carefully preserved his oral teachings and an eschatological sect of Judaism was founded.

Subsequently, communities of other Christians began to manifest explosively throughout

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 83 Bultmann, Primitive Christianity, 209.

84 Bultmann, Primitive Christianity, 209-212.

! 86! the lower classes of the ancient Mediterranean, products of the missionizing activity of itinerant preachers and prophets. As these communities emerged, the oral teachings of the original Palestinian Urchristen were filtered through Platonic and Stoic philosophical frameworks familiar to the Gentiles. As the Christian movement grew, the eschatological imperative of the earlier and more ‘authentic’ message began to recede into the background. In essence, the urbanization of Christianity led to certain philosophical adaptations of the core, ‘original’ and more authentic Christian message. However, the central inspiration of Jesus’ moral philosophy remained. This message, and Jesus’ teachings, continued to circulate and develop among these urban communities, mirroring a kind of collective speech that closely resembled the Romantic idea of Volkspoesie. In certain cases, the continued growth of Christianity would be attributed to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. This Holy Spirit was synonymous in many respects to the notion of

Romantic Geist.

Continuing on with Bultmann’s representative model, certain communities sought to record their oral teachings and developing theology either in collections of sayings, like Q, or gospels. For this, they employed an author or redactor, who recorded or incorporated into an account of Jesus’ life the teachings that the community held dear.

Usually, this writer was imagined to be part of the community itself—perhaps a member of the ekklēsia who had enough education to write these oral traditions down. In some cases, thanks in part to the urbanization of Christianity, the gospel writer may have come from a more privileged background and is recognized as well-educated and affluent member of the church. Occasionally even the church itself is imagined to be a community

! 87! of affluent Christians.85 In either case, these writings expressed elements of the community’s collective experiences and concerns. Therefore the author acted as a spokesperson or mouthpiece for his fellow Christians, his Volk. Later, in the second- century, the canonical gospels would come to be associated with specific and known urban hubs of Christianity, such as Antioch, Rome, Ephesus and so on.

Bultmann’s description of the history of Christianity does not speak for early

Christian scholarship writ large, but the picture he paints of the social world of

Urchristentum continues to be prevalent. In particular, the contours of this model of

‘primitive Christianity’ are reinscribed when scholarship persists in imagining the production of early Christian literature in terms of presumed or accepted religious communities, authentic oral traditions and provincial ekklēsia. Such models of the first- century are informed in the main by Romantic ideas about the Author-Genius, the inspired oral speech and poetry of the Volk and related constructions that rob agency away from the writers of these texts and reinscribe a mystified idea of Christian beginnings.

It is also a model for the production of literature that follows closely with ahistorical and ideological procedures imagined by second-century thinkers like the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 85 For example, on Matthew’s ‘community’: “Since the church at Antioch had arisen in the late 30s, it enjoyed the lengthy, continued existence of a Jewish-Christian church necessary to explain the composition of Matthew’s gospel. The gospel has behind it a developed scribal tradition and even perhaps a scribal school in which the various forms of the OT texts—including the Septuagint or Old Greek version (see 1:23, 12:21)—were studied and appropriated for proof texts. In such a scholarly milieu, the adaptation and combination of Mark and Q (a collection of Jesus’ sayings) may have begun before Matthew set to work. The composition of this lengthy gospel would demand great financial resources as well as great learning. Indeed, some have claimed that internal evidence indicates that Matthew’s church was a relatively affluent urban church.” Antioch & Rome: New Testament Cradles of Catholic Christianity, ed. Raymond E. Brown and John P. Meier (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1983), 23.

! 88! author of Acts, Papias or the author of the Apocryphon of James. Helmut Koester, for example, cites the Apocryphon of James as a model for how we might rely on the

“trustworthiness of the oral tradition” in the canonical gospels as remembered by the most primitive Christians: “the twelve disciples [were] all sitting together at the same time and remember what the Savior had said to each one of them, whether in secret or openly, and [putting it] in books.”86 Interestingly, Koester goes on to mention that in the second-century context of the Apocryphon’s production, “controversy” had been rife with so-called Gnostics, “writers… composing their written documents on the basis of the claim that they remembered well from the apostles and from those who had followed them.”87 What Koester is describing is an interconnected network of writers, engaging with various first-century texts and oral stories, and competing with one another in order to develop, to borrow a phrase from the last chapter, an invented tradition. In the following chapter, I offer an account of first-century Christian literature that begins with a historical redescription of the activities of writers and writing culture in the ancient

Mediterranean and does not take the author’s Christian community as the starting point of analysis.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 86 Nag Hammadi Corpus I 2, 7-15, cited from Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1990), 34.

87 Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, 34.

! 89!

CHAPTER 3 AUTHORSHIP IN ANTIQUITY

Of the multiple volumes penned by rhetorician Athenaeus Naucratita, only his

Deipnosophistae (“The Sophists at Dinner”) survives.1 Comprised of a series of vignettes, Athenaeus combines verse and prose satire, philosophical reflection and biography with lexica of literary works, authors, sayings and other sundry, in the sympotic style of Plato.2 It is an ecclectic storehouse of a varitey of familiar literary genres and figures. Among the imagined guests in attendance are P. Livius Larensis,

Galen of Pergamum, Ulpian of Tyre, Cynulcus the Cynic, to name a few.3 And the subject on everyone’s mind, naturally, is food.

1 A native of Egypt but located in Rome, Athaneaus of Naucratis is writing in the late second- and early-third centuries CE on the basis of his literary and imperial references. His other lost works include On the Kings of Syria and On the First of Archippus. His style is in the register of Plutarch, Lucian and Galen. See The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3ed., ed. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003), 202.

2 In addition to his reliance on Plato and Lucian’s Symposium and Lexiphanes and Plutarch’s Table Talk, Athenaeus employs a version of prose and verse satire popularized by Menippus the Cynic. For more on his possible literary influences, see See Derek Krueger, “The Bawdy and Society: The Shamelessness of Diogenes in Roman Imperial Culture,” in The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, ed. Robert Bracht Branham, Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 222-239; Ronald F. Hock, “A Dog in the Manger: The Cynic Cynulcus among Athenaeus’s Deipnosophists,” in Greeks, Romans, and Christians: Essays in Honor of Abraham J. Malherbe, ed. David Balch, Everett Ferguson, and Wayne Meeks (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1990), 20-37; Christian Jacob, The Web of Athenaeus, trans. Arietta Papaconstantinou, ed. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (Center for Hellenic Studies; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

3 Several of the dinner guests correspond with a known individual. P. Livius Larensis was a pontifex minor (CIL 6.212); Galen of Pergamum fills the role of the Platonic physician; Ulpian of Tyre is either in reference to the well-known jurist or his son; the Cynic Cynulcus acts as

90 Beyond the various delicacies, recipies and drinking cups his diners discuss,

Athenaeus’ food-talk is also an occasion for exploring the moral constitutions—the virtues and vices—of a variety of noteworthy figures. For instance, Athenaeus relates the chreia of a third-century BCE poet, Machon, on Philoxenus of Cythera and his unfortunate experience with an octopus:

Philoxenus the dithyrambic poet, they say, was excessively fond of delicacies. One day in Syracuse he bought an octopus three feet wide, prepared it, and ate nearly all of it except the head. Seized by dyspepsia, he was very seriously ill. A doctor arrived, and seeing how poorly he was doing said, “If any of your affairs are not in order, Philoxenus, work on them at once, for you are going to die before the seventh hour.” Philoxenus replied “Everything is complete, doctor, and has been in order for a long time. By the gods’ grace I leave my dithyrambs behind grown to manhood and all crowned with garlands, and I dedicate them to the Muses with whom I was brought up. Aphrodite and Dionysus will be their guardians—my will makes all this clear. But since Timotheus’ Charon, the one in his Niobe, does not allow delaying but shouts that the ferry-boat is leaving, and gloomy Fate, who must be obeyed, is summoning me—so that I have all my belongings with me when I run down below, give me back the rest of that octopus!”4

The gluttony of Philoxenus is well attested elsewhere in ancient literature, including in the fragments of Aristotle and Theophilus.5 He is among a number of character-types favored by bios-writers, who looked to subversive figures to explore “discourse on excess

Ulpian’s foil. Other dinner guests include Myrtilus the Thessalin, who routinely attacks the Stoics, and a host of fictitious persons, such as Plutarch of Athenaeus. See John Paulas, “How to Read Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists,” American Journal of Philology 133 (2012), 403-439; Pauline A. LeVen, “Reading the Octopus: Authorship, Intertexts, and a Hellenistic Anecdote (Machon Fr. 9 GOW),” American Journal of Philology 134 (2013), 23-35; Jacob, The Web of Athenaeus.

4 Athenaeus 8.341b; Machon fr. 9 cited from LeVen, “Reading the Octopus,” 24.

5 See LeVen, “Reading the Octopus,” 30; Aristotle, fr. 83; Theophilus, Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (= FHG), ed. C. and T. Müller (5 vols.; Paris, 1843-70), iv. 6. Also see Athenaeus 8.341d who cites Machon’s account of Philoxenus desiring “a four-foot long throat so as to be able to enjoy food and drink all at the same time.”

91 and temperament.”6 Philoxenus’ example also engages the theme of ignoble death found in biographical writings like Diogenes Laertius, whose philosophers often come to unceremonious ends. Such episodes recall Plutarch’s preface to the Life of Alexander 2-3:

“it is not Histories I am writing, but Lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue and vice, no, a slight thing like a phrase or joke often makes a greater revelation of character….”7 Certain biographical subjects are a useful foil for considering dominant ethical principles, even in the breach.

A comparison of literary references to a figure like Philoxenus also demonstrates that, in many cases, the writers of these anecdotes or narratives are well aware of other writings that may employ the same character or ethical-type. For example, a favorite at symposia given his racy subject matter, Machon engages a variety of literary allusions in his bons mots.8 In the case of Philoxenus, his final words are a play on the last words

Socrates: Socrates asks Crito to fetch a cock for Asclepius, Philoxenus asks the doctor to

6 In the following chapter, I will characterize the gospels and Q as a type of ancient biography that I also call ‘subversive’. This classification was the brainchild of a collaborative piece forthcoming with David Konstan, “Civic and Subversive Biography in Antiquity,” Telling Ancient Lives. Narrative Technique and Fictionalization in Greek and Latin Biography, ed. Koen De Temmerman and Kristoffel Demoen (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press) and was initially written in 2011. Therefore, while LeVen’s “Reading the Octopus” is clearly influential for this chapter and the next, it was published after Konstan and I already considered the contours of the subversive character type. LeVen, “Reading the Octopus,” 33.

7 See Plutarch, Lives, VII, Demosthenes and Cicero. Alexander and Caesar, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919).

8 See LeVen, “Reading the Octopus,” 25: “Under the Roman Empire, chreiae will be used as preparatory exercises in rhetorical schools, but Machon’s chreiae seem to be of a different ilk, for their often-vulgar themes make them a poor fit for a school curriculum, and evidence suggests that they were performed at symposia… ‘there are elements that suggest that these witty sayings of parasites and prostitutes are not just crude popular entertainment but a literate, learned version thereof (and in that sense, typically ‘Hellenistic’).”

92 fetch him an octopus’ head.9 Machon makes an explicit reference to Philoxenus’ contemporary and literary conversation partner, Timotheus, as Philoxenus ponders his final moments. Likewise, Diogenes Laertius cites Timotheus’ Niobe in his account of the philosopher Zeno’s suicide, precipitated by a stubbed toe.10 Given that both Timotheus and Philoxenus relied on the linguistic and thematic elements of epic to help formulate their dithyrambs, it is likely that Machon also has Priam’s fast in Iliad 24 in mind. And then there is Athenaeus, writing centuries later, incorporating these chreiae into his larger program of, as Pauline A. LeVen explains, “Hellenistic scholarly modes of bios-writing, reading poetic works and connecting texts, figures, and life.”11

In the last chapter, I discussed Pierre Bourdieu’s twin concepts of ‘habitus’ and

‘fields’ as an alternative to Romantic approaches to authorship that attribute agency to communities and an inspirational Geist instead of to writers. I emphasized that

Bourdieu’s framework allows for authors to engage in literary practices that are normal for their historical circumstances and social location, and dictated by their relative levels of education, certain literary conventions, the influence of preexistent writings, social class and background, and established methods for the composition and circulation of texts. Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae is a fine example of a writer producing a piece of literature informed by his educational training and in conversation with other writers,

9 See Plato, Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). Also see Pauline A. LeVen, The Many-Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Poetry (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 139-140.

10 Diogenes Laertius, Poetae Melici Graeci (= PMG), ed. D.L. Paige (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1962), 786. Coincidentally, Zeno is also killed off by Athenaeus, but via raw octopus (8.341c).

11 LeVen, “Reading the Octopus,” 26.

93 storytellers and literary works. Moreover Athenaeus, although featuring a number of different types of chreiae, writes within an expected genre—that is, what he produces makes reference to known and established literary conventions.12 He does not craft an unprecedented or sui generis piece of literature. His points of reference and literary aims are intelligible and represent his social location as an author exchanging ideas with members of his intellectual circle. In short, his composition offers a window into the practices of writers and writing culture of the imperial period.

Athenaeus’ dinner guests in the Deipnosophistae also offer a sense of how literature was consumed. The personal libraries of the deipnosophists recall Philodemus’ library at Herculaneum or the caches of book collectors and ‘bibliomaniacs’ like

Trimalchio.13 Ulpian speaks of his quest for rare volumes from booksellers in Rome in a manner reminiscent of the characters in Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights who frequent bookshops and encounter there “true and fake scholars... reading out loud and discussing textual criticism and interpretation of difficult texts.”14 The deipnosophists are also able to recite certain quotations from memory, although only if the excerpt is relatively fresh

12 The term ‘genre’ is a modern designation. The ancients did not possess the same taxonomies that contemporary scholarship identifies for academic purposes. That said, ancient readers were aware that there were distinguishing features between kinds of literature (e.g., the novel, letter writing), even if they did not always use the same categories. When I use the term, I am indicating that writers conformed to certain literary conventions. While writers were perfectly capable of innovating, there are still certain rhetorical standards and training that are reflected in the works they produce. I will discuss the question of genre further in the next chapter. Also see Jennifer Eyl, “Why Thekla Does Not See Paul: Visual Perception and the Displacement of Erōs in the Acts of Paul and Thekla,” in The Ancient Novel and the Early Christian and Jewish Narrative. Fictional Intersections, ed. Marília P. Futre Pinheiro, Judith Perkins, Richard Pervo (Eeide: Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing; Groningen University Library, 2012), 3-12, cit. 3, n. 1.

13 See Jacob, The Web of Athenaeus, 56-57, esp. n. 7; Athenaeus 13.556b, 7.276a; Petronius, Satyricon 48.4; Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind 9.4-7; Lucian, The Ignorant Book-Collector; Pliny the Younger, Letters 1.8, 2.17.

14 Jacob, The Web of Athenaeus, 59. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 5.41, 13.31, 18.4.

94 in their minds and not something read long ago.15 Sometimes, with help, a forgotten text could be recalled— albeit not always properly.16 Even among ‘living libraries’ like

Longinus or Porphyry, they were understood to have reached a “culminating point of paideia, at the summit of grammar and rhetoric” within their literary circles.17 Training received in paideia to memorize and critique classical authors like Homer, Hesoid, the poets and philosophers was also known to serve a writer well when composing their own literature. Philo of Alexandria, for instance, while clearly knowledgable of the Hebrew scriptures, also indicates his knowledge of the Homeric epics, citing the Iliad and using a number of Homeric expressions in his writings.18

The portrait painted by Athenaeus, coupled with knowledge of literary culture from the likes of Philo, Pliny the Younger and Quintilian, reveal that writing was a specialist’s activity. While one might be trained in certain scribal practices or memorization techniques, the ability to produce literature according to accepted standards required an advanced rhetorical education.19 Moreover, a writer’s most immediate and

15 Athenaeus 3.126b; 8.359d-e.

16 Jacob, The Web of Athenaeus, 76; Athenaeus 3.83a-c.

17 Jacob, The Web of Athenaeus, 79: Longinus “embodies Alexandria’s erudition and critical authority, and his works fill the libraries of others.”; Eunapius, Lives of the Sophists, 455.

18 Philo, De vita contemplativa (= Cont.) 17; De Abrahamo (= Abr.) 10; De confusion linguarum (= Conf.) 170; De fuga et inventione (= Fuga.) 31; De somniis (= Somn.) 2:53, 2:275. Also see Maren R. Niehoff, Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2-3, cit. 3: “Other anonymous exegetes in Alexandria explicitly compared the biblical story of the Tower of Babel to a similar enterprise of the sons of Aloeidae recorded in the Odyssey (Conf. 4-5). Such references are not at all surprising given the known acculturation of Alexandrian Jews. They not only spoke and wrote in Greek but quickly read even their Scriptures only in the Greek translation. Homer’s epics, which constituted the most important pillar of Greek education in Hellenistic Egypt, were obviously familiar to them.”

19 Seneca, for example, speaks of a Calvisius Sabinus “who had bought high priced slaces trained to be living books: each one had learned one classical author by heart—Homer, Hesiod, or the

95 formative social network was his circle of fellow writers and literary critics— an interconnected network of professional authors and literate consumers with particular kinds of ‘intellectual’ knowledge and skill. In Chapter 1, following Stanley Stowers, I referred to such groups as networks of elite ‘literate and specialized cultural producers’.20

These networks could consist of close friends and teachers, such as the ones described by

Pliny; a group of writers supported by the same patron, like the Augustan poets; or activities performed within certain philosophical schools, such as writing commentaries.21 Writings produced within these networks could circulate outside of their immediate social group to associated, literate writers or other audiences, as Athenaeus’ account of the booksellers attests. However, literature was ultimately a product of an author’s education, training and range of literary and other interests, as well as the feedback received from social peers.22 In his work on reading culture in the Roman empire, William A. Johnson refers to these close-knit literary networks as ‘aimici’ who

Lyrics—and had the suitable quotations ready at the disposal of their forgetful master during the banquet conversations.” Jacob, The Web of Athenaeus, 79; Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius 3.27.5. This kind of training in memorization does not mean that Calvisius Sabinus’ slaves would also be in a position to produce literature.

20 For example, see p. 29.

21 William A. Johnson, “Pliny and the Construction of Reading Communities,” in Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities (Classical Culture and Society; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), 33: “Pliny also had luminary literary connections. Quintilian was his teacher… he counted among his amici Tacitus… and Suetonius… and Martial; he was less familiar but well acquainted with Silius Italicus… of the previous generation. He does not mention Plutarch directly, but they shared two close consular friends.” Also see Vergil, Philodemus and the Augustans, ed. David Armstrong, Jeffrey Fish, Patricia A. Johnson, Marilyn B. Skinner (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004); Elaine Fantham, Roman Literary Culture: From Cicero to Apuleius (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); H. Gregory Snyder, Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World: Philosophers, Jews and Christians (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000).

22 Stanley K. Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’ and the History of Early Christianity,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011), 238-256, cit. 247.

96 circulated writings for critique and then gathered to recite, discuss, promote or reject new works and would-be authors, and to “elicit advance criticism so that the author could revise his work for publication.”23 Pliny’s describes his own literary circle as a group of aimici or “friends dedicated to the literary enterprise… characterized by a reciprocity that recognizes common values, ‘of which the most important is the rhetorical mastery of language.’”24

The focus of the last two chapters has been the tendency within the field of New

Testament and early Christian studies to attribute the authorship of first-century writings like Q and the Synoptic gospels to ‘communities’. In the majority of cases, these communities are not imagined to resemble the kinds of literary networks described above, but are characterized as myopically ‘religious’ and, in some cases, illiterate.

Correspondingly, the writers of these texts are described as tasked with faithfully preserving the teachings, shared experiences, interests and developing theology of these religious groups. Scholars then read this literature not as the “rational manufacture of authors,” but as the “deposits of folk speech or so-called oral tradition” and attempt to reconstruct the first-century Jesus movement on the basis of communities the texts themselves do not readily reveal.25 In Chapter 1 I argued that there is little evidence for

23 Johnson, “Pliny and the Construction of Reading Communities,” 52-62, cit. 52. Johnson is citing the work of Roland Mayer, Tacitus: Dialogus de oratoribus (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 92 on Tacitus, Dialogus 2.1.

24 Johnson, “Pliny and the Construction of Reading Communities,” 52. Johnson is summarizing Pliny, citing Florence Dupont, “Recitatio and the Space of Public Discourse,” in The Roman Cultural Revolution, ed. Thomas Habinek and Alessandro Schiesaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 44-59. Also see Craig A. Williams, “Love and Friendship: Authors and Texts,” in Reading Roman Friendship (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 174- 258— particularly the sections on the letters of Cicero and Fronto.

25 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 239, 240.

97 the kind of miraculous social cohesion and breadth for first-century ‘Christianity’ claimed by second-century materials like Acts. Therefore scholarship that posits a relationship between first-century Christian literature and early Christian communities risks accepting what I have called Christianity’s ‘Big Bang’ myth of origins.

In Chapter 2, I demonstrated that this approach to early Christian literature owes much to ahistorical Romantic ideas about the Author-Genius acting as an inspired mouthpiece for the Volk. This is particularly evident in scholarship that not only presumes early Christian writings are the products of religious communities, but that also accepts the premise that this literature contain kernels of earlier and, therefore, more

‘primitive’ or ‘authentic’ Volkspoesie or ‘oral tradition’. This portrait of early Christian literature privileges these texts as “unique and incommensurable with other ancient literature and writing practices.”26 Namely, ascribing authorial agency solely to religious communities is at odds with what is known about the kinds of formative, interconnected social groups and intellectual practices of ancient writers illustrated at the beginning of this chapter. It is an artificially narrow approach to understanding the social world of these writings, assessing them on the basis of assumption rather than what is plausible and practical given the author’s level of education, the subject matters being addressed, how the work measures up to comparanda within its genre, its literary allusions and a variety of other evaluative criteria.

Based on our knowledge of ancient writers and writing culture, the aim of this chapter is to provide a redescription for first-century literature about Jesus that recognizes the author as an elite cultural producer. Rather than posit that an author’s reputed

26 Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 247.

98 ‘religious’ community is the most influential social group for the production of these materials, I argue that ancient authors were engaged in an intellectual practice that makes their literary circle of ‘amici’—fellow writers—a significant and formative social network, and the one with whom the author shares, following Pliny, significant and reciprocal ‘common values’.27 To be clear, this is not to deny that when an author explores subjects concerning the gods and associated practices, ethics and so on that they are not potentially involved with what we might term a ‘religious’ group of some sort.

However, this association, and the degree to which it is instrumental, must be demonstrated. Our understanding of an author’s social environment should not be limited to the subjects explored in their writings, as it is quite possible for an author to be engaged in an ideological exercise of group-making, “ethnicity-making” or “religion- making” that is a reflection of their aspirations or imagination, and not reality.28 That is, so-called ‘religious’ topics are no more determinative of an author’s network of social engagement than any other discourse. To limit our studies to such a narrow field of analysis risks uncritically accepting the writer’s own ideological categories as an accurate reflection of their social world, or allowing our own assumptions determine what we regard as thinkable. What is determinative, however, is the author’s ‘field’—the practices that we know are plausible, given the writer’s historical and social location. I will discuss this point further in what follows.

27 Stowers notes that these social networks may have contained members who were not personally known to one another: “Indeed, the most important social formations for these individuals as writers may have been other writers and associated networks that taught high literacy, interpreted and circulated writings, mostly people whom they had never known.” Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 247.

28 Stanley K. Stowers, “The Ontology of Religion,” in Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (Oakville, CT: Equinox Publishing, 2008), 434-449, cit. 446.

99 In this chapter, I begin by reiterating that approaches to the New Testament and early Christianity that focus on a writer’s ‘community’ of fellow Christians often do so at the expense of exploring other, more plausible, social conditions for the production of this literature, such as networks of fellow writers and associated elite cultural producers.

Moreover, I demonstrate that even in cases in which scholars have attempted to situate the activities of these writers in terms of literate elite culture, a continued focus on presumed early Christian ‘communities’ has resulted in implausible descriptions of social exchange. I preface this discussion with an overview of what we know about relevant ancient literary practices in antiquity, including among first-century Judean writers like

Philo. Philo is a particularly interesting comparandum in that he is addressing a number of interrelated themes in his writings also common to the gospel writers and Q, such as the proper interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures, the works of other writers, politics and so on. Finally I use Bourdieu’s theorization on ‘fields’ to help propose an alternative approach to categorizing ancient literature—and early Christian literature in particular— which does not rely on the notion of ‘communities’. By classing ancient writings in terms of ‘fields’ and ‘subfields’ that represent an author’s rhetorical training, social location and the established literary conventions for addressing particular subjects (e.g., ethnic literature, esoteric literature, moral philosophy), we can more accurately situate individual authors and their associated networks, without appealing to their imagined audiences. The subsequent chapters of this study will demonstrate how first-century writings about Jesus can be reread in light of this proposed framework—for example, in

Chapter 4, as a development out of the civic biographical tradition, which I term

‘subversive biography’.

100 Ancient Writers as Literate Specialists

My observation above that religious groups are not the sole determinative factor in the literary choices of an author relates back to an argument I made in Chapter 1 about the concept of religion in which I recommended that we theorize the category in terms of practices. In that chapter, I advised that we recognize religion as a class of human activity that can be described and analyzed. As such, we create a second-order category that can be assessed in light of other kinds of social practices, how they are organized and how they are bundled with one another, so that ‘religion’ becomes a matter of ‘more of less’.

The example I gave to illustrate this point was an Etruscan haruspex interpreting an omen at the behest of the political elite. As a religious specialist, this haruspex would be performing an act that is simultaneously ‘religious’, political and ethnically coded, with each facet of this activity requiring description. This approach to understanding religion recognizes practices having to do with gods, ancestors or other non-obvious beings as a kind of activity that need not be isolated from other dimensions of social life.

Similarly, just as we are well served by considering religion as a matter of ‘more or less’ when analyzing social practices, we should do the same when ‘religion’ features in a piece of literature. When writers engage a topic like ‘religion’ (e.g., talk of the gods), it is one among a number of the author’s overlapping interests and should be considered in tandem with the other subjects being raised. It should not be analyzed in isolation.

Authors possess the creative agency to address a variety of matters simultaneously: gods, ancestors, politics, war, food, ethics, daily life, the interpretation of other texts, issues of social class and ethnicity. Their reasons for doing so can be multivalent and reflect a number of strategic interests. Moreover, their use of certain categories or exempla, like

101 ‘communities’, can also be imagined, ideal or rhetorical. Awareness of the author’s rhetorical aims, literary field, conversation partners, historical context and other frames of reference help the scholar analyze the way in which discourse about religion functions within the text and its relative purpose.

As discussed in the last two chapters, talk of the gods and related subjects does not mean that an author is necessarily relating information about historical or ‘real’, on- the-ground social activities or associated social groups. We must pay attention to what the author tells us about their social world, but recognize that some of their claims may be strategic or aspirational. Again, this follows Rogers Brubaker’s caution that we “take vernacular categories and participant’s understandings seriously, for they are partly constitutive of our objects of study. But we should not uncritically adopt the engaged categories of ethnopolitical practice as our categories of social analysis.”29 In the case of an author’s claims to ‘groupness’ in particular, Stowers notes:

Historically it is almost always specific ethnic and/religious and/or political entrepreneurs or institutionally legitimated ‘leaders’ who cast events as struggles of, for example, one ethnic group against another, or persons as heroes and martyrs for a group. Such activities can be analyzed as entrepreneurial ethnic, religious (if there is appeals to gods and so on), and political practices and not the common mind/action of a supposed group.30

‘Groupness’ cannot be uncritically accepted or assumed, but considered in tandem with a variety of other social and historical factors. For example, in Chapter 1 I demonstrated

29 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 10. Emphasis original.

30 Stanley K. Stowers, “The Ontology of Religion,” in Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (Oakville, CT: Equinox Publishing, 2008), 434-449, cit. 446.

102 that Paul’s use of ‘groupist’ rhetoric was often an attempt to invoke community in order to evoke it. Recognition of Paul’s rhetorical efforts, in turn, challenges Acts’ depiction of

Paul’s successes in group-building and other claims such as miraculous conversions. It places Paul in a new frame that recognizes the strategic nature of his letter writing activity in relation to his evocations of community. Coupled with a historical analysis of similar practices among ‘religious entrepreneurs’ in antiquity, Paul emerges not as the heroic founder of a new religious movement, but as a self-styled apostle in a competitive field of other apostles, superapostles, pneumatic demonstrators and interpreters of ancient texts, vying for the status and capital that comes with sponsorship by interested consumers of his offerings.31

Likewise, we must consider acts of ancient writing in terms of our historical knowledge of the practical and plausible aspects of literary culture. That is, we must look to what we know about ancient writing practices in their milieu in order to speak accurately about what kinds of social networks a writer may have found formative in the production of their literature, in addition to considering what they tell us about their own interests and activities. Even if authors situate themselves clearly in an established ethnic or religious tradition—for example, first-century Judean literature—this kind of intellectual activity must be understood in terms of what we know about the social conditions for authorship in the ancient Mediterranean. Stowers explains:

31 See Jennifer Eyl, “By the Power of Signs and Wonders: Paul, Divinitory Practices, and Symbolic Capital,” (Ph.D. Dissertation; Brown University, 2013) and Heidi Wendt, “At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in Early Imperial Rome,” (Ph.D. Dissertation; Brown University, 2013).

103 Intellectual practices involve writing, texts, norms and methods of interpretation, speeches, second-order reflection upon beliefs, or doctrines or laws, and so on. Religions in which such practices play a defining or important role require specific social conditions. The social order must legitimate and economically support specialists, a class of people who are relieved from other sorts of labor so as to be able to devote substantial time to developing and maintain skills in such practices. Skill in intellectual practices must carry a certain amount of prestige and thus power in the social order. There must be educational and other institutions to train the specialists and to disseminate their productions, and there must be consumers of the intellectual and cultural products.32

Any act of writing requires a certain institutional structure, training and other “social conditions” that must be recognized and evaluated. Evaluations of ancient literary practices cannot treat the author simply as a mouthpiece or reflection on one particular kind of social group with which we imagine they have some quality of interaction or interest. Again, to do so fails to recognize ancient authors as specialists with particular rhetorical training, objectives, skills and social location, and risks mischaracterizing or myopically treating an author’s fields of influence and social membership.

A brief survey of ancient Roman education and rhetorical training demonstrates the degree to which being able to compose a piece of literature in antiquity was, indeed, a specialists’ activity. Literate culture was by and large the purview of men and of the elite.

The families of young men would pay a local litterator or ludi magister a monthly fee to teach initial skills in reading, writing and math. The wealthy might also call upon an educated slave or employ a private grammaticus to instruct members of the household, which Suetonius indicates offered the best education.33 Indeed, literate slaves were highly

32 Stowers, “The Ontology of Religion,” 447.

33 Suetonius, ‘De Grammaticis’ 9. Also see Elaine Fantham, Roman Literary Culture: From Cicero to Apuleius (Baltimore, MD; London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 24. I follow much of Fantham’s research in this section, coupled with my own readings of the primary sources. In addition to Fantham, I consulted: Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture; Snyder,

104 prized and were represented “disproportionately… among the educated.”34 Outside of economically privileged households, for the few who could afford to do so, boys would remain enrolled in ‘street school’ until about the age of twelve.35 However, this was very much dependent on the needs and means of the family. “Prosperous tradesmen” or artisans, for instance, might send their children for instruction just long enough to learn the fundamentals of bookkeeping, at which point they would return to the family business. Given the expense, the majority of Romans were not instructed beyond what one might term a very basic literacy, if at all. Even accounting for levels or gradations of literacy (e.g., from the ability to write one’s name; learning to read a piece of literature; possessing the scribal skills to compose a form letter; through composing your own writings), studies in ancient literacy suggest that no more than 5 – 10% of the Greek and

Roman world was literate.36

Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World; Tim Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001); Catherine Heszer, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 81; Mohr Siebeck, 2001) and; David Konstan, “The Active Reader and the Ancient Novel,” in Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel, ed. Michael Paschalis, Stelios Panayotakis, Gareth Schmeling (ANS 12; Eeide: Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing; Groningen University Library, 2009), 1-17.

34 Stanley K. Stowers, “Kinds of Myth, Meals, and Power: Paul and the Corinthians,” in Redescribing Paul and the Corinthians, ed. Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 105-149, cit. 120. Stowers explains: “A literate slave was very valuable to a master, and owners often educated them just to increase their value. Because Roman education developed under the influence of Greek education and by the first century C.E. most aristocratic and prosperous families wanted their sons to be educated bilingually, Greek- speaking urban slaves were considered ideal tutors and teachers. Slaves and freedmen, then, in some sense, dominated most areas of learning, but they faced a glass ceiling that kept them from the ranks of the aristocratic dominant culture of people like Vergil, Pliny, and Aelius Aristides.”

35 Fantham, Roman Literary Culture, 23.

36 William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 114- 115, 141, 259, 272, 327-330. Also see J. H. Humphrey, ed. Literacy in the Roman World (Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 3; Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1991), particularly the pieces by Keith Hopkins, “Conquest by Book,” 133-158 and Mireille

105 While there were certain opportunities for education within small provincial towns, quality teaching was found primarily in cities. Horace, for example, tells us that his father took him to Rome to study under the grammaticus Orbilius.37 Quintillian describes both public and private education involving tutoring in Greek, beginning with reciting Greek phrases and then reading and writing through imitation of the alphabet.38

Greek was the medium of training and, without it, no student “could embark on any kind of advanced education.”39 This ‘advanced education’ was only undertaken by the few who made it through the years of initial instruction.

Once a basic knowledge of Greek was obtained, a pupil would be ready for more sophisticated rhetorical training—namely, beginning to read Greek texts with a grammatikos. These texts might include poetry or histories. Lessons at this point would include recitation and word study, often of Homer. This work was accomplished with the aid of commentaries that would offer “grammatical analysis, explanation of rare or poetical vocabulary, mythological or factual information, and moral interpretation of the text for discussion.” Whole texts were not read but whatever portions were available, complemented with synopses. The emphasis in this instruction was not on writing, but

“functional literacy.” This functional literacy included being able to read basic texts,

Corbier, “L’Ecriture en quête de lecteurs,” 99-118. Catherine Hezser suggests less than 10% of the population of Roman Palestine could read and write, while similar studies have put that number as low as 3%. See Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, 24-25. M. Bar-Ilan, “Illiteracy in the Land of Israel in the First Centuries, C.E.,” in Essays in the Social Scientific Study of Judaism and Jewish Society, ed. S. Fishbane and S. Schoenfeld (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1992), 46-61.

37 Horace, Satires I 6.76-78. Also see Fantham, Roman Literary Culture, 23-24.

38 Fantham, Roman Literary Culture, 24-25.

39 Fantham, Roman Literary Culture, 27.

106 assess judicial speeches or, perhaps, later in life, record political or military memoirs. But the Romans “favored practical eloquence over imaginative literature” and, by and large, the “ability to speak would be enough” and the individual could make a “career in the courts or the Senate without further exposure to the culture of books.”40

In fact, it is unclear whether students at the stage of advanced rhetorical training received any meaningful instruction on writing in Greek. Elaine Fantham suggests:

“After his education with the grammaticus, a boy might still find considerable difficulty writing formal Greek, and his ability to read and comprehend Greek literature would probably be limited to Homer, to classical Attic prose, and to such poetry as he had been taught.”41 To be able to compose original pieces of literature, a writer required continued instruction or independent study. This continued instruction might take place under a notable philosopher, rabbi or other rhetorical specialist. Self-instruction was dependent on financial means, social connections and considerable free time to obtain and study literature and then learn to produce one’s own writings.

One option for further study was to gain entry into a library or the scholasterion

(‘study house’) of a willing patron. Cicero, for instance, describes going to the country home of Lucullus at Tusculum and seeing Cato in the library, “with volumes of stoical authors piled up around him.”42 Plutarch also paints a picture of Lucullus and his library as a meetinghouse for intellectual pursuits:

40 Fantham, Roman Literary Culture, 29.

41 Fantham, Roman Literary Culture, 30-31.

42 Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum 3.2.7. Cited from Cicero, De Finibus bonorum et malorum libri, trans. H. Rackham (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971 [1931]).

107 His libraries were thrown open to all, and the cloisters surrounding them, and the study-rooms (sxolasthri&wn), were accessible without restriction to the Greeks, who constantly repaired [there] as to an hostelery of the Muses, and spent the day with one another, in glad escape from their other occupations. Lucullus himself also often spent his leisure hours there with them, walking about in the cloisters with their scholars, and he would assist their politicians in whatever they desired.43

Catherine Hezser notes that Jews who wished to continue with higher education would attend study houses like the kind described by Cicero and Plutarch where they would train with Greco-Roman texts, in addition to Torah. Like their Gentile counterparts, they

“had been educated in the Greek language by Greek private tutors” and were “likely to have proceeded to higher studies with grammatici, rhetors, and philosophers” or sought instruction from local or well-known rabbis.44 Hezser explains: “In the Roman Empire three intellectual topics were dominant, grammatica, rhetorics, and philosophy, and all three were of Greek origin.”45 Knowledge of and participation in Greek literary culture was therefore a necessity for anyone who pursued advanced literacy in the Roman period, regardless of ethnic association. Moreover, as with Lucullus and his conversation partners, the social practices of the scholasterion were largely regarded as otium—a leisure activity.46 In other words, intellectual engagement that involved the close reading, interpretation, production and circulation of literature was perceived as an activity of the elite and wealthy.

43 Plutach Luc 42. Adapted from Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, 102, who is citing the Loeb Classical Library edition of Lucullus in the Parallel Lives.

44 Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, 103. While Hezser’s work is primarily focused on the later rabbinic movement, she does make several references to the early Empire. I have limited my citations to her discussions of the first-century.

45 Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, 107.

46 Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, 108.

108 After receiving sufficient training to try their hand at an original piece of writing, authors required the aid of a network of other literate specialists in order to, in some cases, sponsor the production of a particular text, circulate writings for critique, gather for recitation or other private readings and, ultimately, publish their works.47 Although representing a high register of Roman literary culture, the social interactions of writers like Pliny and his cohort are instructive for recognizing the complexity involved in producing writings that ultimately circulate widely. Descriptions of their literary exchanges and writing processes reveal “a larger fabric of social negotiations relating to literary production” than, for instance, simply recording popular oral stories or other folk speech.48

The publication process began with men like Pliny, Verginius Rufus, Vestricius

Spurinna, Titinius Capito, Octavius Rufus gathering, like the deipnosophists, in a private setting to read their compositions out loud and elicit comments from their colleagues.

A.N. Sherwin-White describes this activity as a “popular form of initial publication, providing the cheapest and quickest means of making works known to the largest educated audience available.”49 After discussing the material and making any necessary adjustments, the next stage for an author was ‘publishing’ (emitter, edere) their writing by allowing copies to be made. Even at this stage, there was no guarantee that a work would be read, continue to be copied or would circulate. Johnson notes that “[s]ince there

47 The Roman Empire occasionally even offered tax breaks for philosophers, teachers and other elite cultural producers. See Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 16.

48 Johnson, “Pliny and the Construction of Reading Communities,” 52.

49 Adrian Nicholas Sherwin-White, The Epistles of Pliny: A Historical and Social Commentary (New York, NY: Clarendon Press, 1985 [1966]), 115; Johnson, “Pliny and the Construction of Reading Communities,” 52-53.

109 were no ‘publishers,’ the only clear route to recognition as an author was by attachment to, and promotion by, one of these [literary] circles… by word of mouth, written letters, and by recitations to which a larger acquaintance was invited.”50 As such, the most important and crucial social network for an individual writer was other writers and associated groups that participated in the interpretation and circulation of literature.51

According to Pliny, knowledge and even memorization of excerpts, phrases or other passages from the works of your circle of literary aimci was, as Johnson puts it, a

“surprisingly common expectation.” Thus an author or writing might come to be known to a wider network of associated consumers through word-of-mouth or fragments—for example, an excerpt from a poem that is repeated and discussed.52 Pliny’s letters also demonstrate that discussion of literature, encouragement for authors to “concentrate on their own literary efforts” and the circulation of texts between writers for comment were fundamental elements of social exchange.53 As such, the author’s literary community was central and formative.

Again, a writer like Pliny represents truly elite literary culture and is not necessarily representative of the activities of all Roman-era writers. While a ‘leisure activity’, certainly not all authors were able to luxuriate in the ‘mastery of language’ like members of Roman high society. The modest skills of the author of the Gospel of Mark

50 Johnson, “Pliny and the Construction of Reading Communities,” 53.

51 I am following Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 247 in this description.

52 For an illustration of this process, see Johnson, “Pliny and the Construction of Reading Communities,” 55.

53 For a comprehensive list of these references in Pliny, see Johnson, “Pliny and the Construction of Reading Communities,” 57, n. 59-61.

110 or the Latin Apollonius King of Tyre, for instance, demonstrates that there were varying degrees to which a writer possessed expertise. However, with ‘functional literacy’ the purview of so few, the processes of training and intellectual development, as well as the nature of social exchange involved in the production and circulation of writings, likely followed along a similar trajectory in other literary (sub)fields. Therefore, it follows that authors like the gospel writers were constrained by the same practical aspects of writing ancient literature as any other writer in the ancient world—that is, they required the same relative levels of education, necessary training and associated social networks. They possessed a certain ‘habitus’ and composed their writings under the same plausible and practical conditions as other writers within the field of literary production in antiquity.

But how do we account for the distinctions in skill level between authors who represent dominant literary registers like Vergil and an author like Mark? As discussed in

Chapter 2, following Bourdieu, the author was an elite “producer of cultural goods.”54 As an agent located within a particular ‘field’ of social activity (in this case, writing and literary production) the author possesses habitus— a disposition to participate in practices based on an internalized understanding of convention and expectation. Each field possesses its own standards for what constitutes desirable ‘cultural goods’ and, likewise, how social and symbolic capital is generated and obtained. Another way to illustrate this activity within fields is to say that certain practices or performances “constitute a game that has its own distinctive order of power, of social and symbolic capital, through the

54 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Randal Johnson (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993), 115.

111 skills, productions, and prestige of its practices.”55 Each agent within the field participates in this ‘game’ in some manner.

Bourdieu is clear that fields are “a separate social universe having its own laws of functioning independent of those of politics and the economy.”56 As such, it is necessary to delimit the boundaries of each field in order to understand, among other things, the conditions for participation and the kinds of capital that can be obtained. He understands fields to be stratified or hierarchically structured. For instance, certain practices represent what he terms the ‘heteronomous pole’ of the field. This ‘heteronomous pole’ represents cultural producers whose work is most dictated according to the forms of capital specific to that field. That is, a product associated with this pole is judged by “the extent to which it manages to impose its own norms and sanctions on the whole set of producers.”57

While these works can demonstrate influence from ‘outside’ social factors, they are nonetheless bound to the conventions of their specific field. Here we might situate Vergil or Pliny—members of the literate elite with a highly developed skillset, investment in the social capital afforded by engagement with paideia, yet restricted in their ability to produce literature that innovates substantially on the pre-existing standards. Vergil, for instance, has a wealthy patron who demands deference, and is charged with producing an epic that meets certain literary expectations (e.g., meter). Although some scholars suggest that the Aeneid subverts Augustan Rome in subtle ways, Vergil is unable to break with

55 Stowers, “Kinds of Myth, Meals, and Power,” 121.

56 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 163. Also see 164: “The social universe functions somewhat like a prism which refracts every external determination: demographic, economic or political events are always retranslated according to the specific logic of the field.” Emphasis original.

57 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 40.

112 tradition to such a degree that he can write truly subversive literature.58 His characters, form and approach ultimately conform to expectation.

This dominated aspect of the field is located on an axis along with what Bourdieu calls the ‘autonomous pole’ or ‘semi-autonomous’ pole. This ‘autonomous pole’ is still within the field, but those functioning in relation to it are relatively free from the bounds and restrictions set by the heteronomous pole. It operates “according to principles derived from the field itself and which tends therefore to be isolated and removed from the rest of society.”59 To borrow an illustration from the first chapter, an example of an autonomous and innovative cultural producer might be Pablo Picasso, who was aware of the artistic traditions set within the mediums of painting, sculpture and ceramics, but who intentionally subverted these standards in his work.60 Turning to the ancient world, we might imagine an author who was able to receive instruction from a grammatikos for a certain period of time, but who is otherwise autodidactic. Looking ahead, the example I will offer of this kind of cultural producer in the next chapter is an author reading various kinds of literature (e.g., Judean texts, biographies) and trying his own hand writing what I

58 For a review of recent literature on the question of Vergil’s ‘resistance’ or ‘subversion’ of Augustan Rome, see Kenneth Haynes, “Classic Vergil,” in A Companion to Vergil’s Aeineid and its Tradition, ed. Joseph Farrell and Michael C.J. Putnam (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell), 421- 433.

59 The perennial illustration of this is the concept of ‘art for art’s sake’. See Understanding Bourdieu, ed. Jen Webb, Tony Schirato, et al. (London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2008), ix.

60 Of course, this is not to say that Picasso was not also concerned with the economic and aesthetic value of his work. Picasso’s preoccupation with his legacy is particularly evident in the writings of his former partner, and fellow artist, Françoise Gilot. See Gilot’s memoir, Life with Picasso (New York, NY: Virago, 1990). Also see John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (New York, NY: Random House, 2010), 218 who quotes Gilot’s account of Picasso stating that a painter “Should be too poor to afford a car or rich enough to hire a chauffer.” A reference to Picasso and his economic concerns is also found in “The Field of Cultural Production,” in Understanding Bourdieu, 146-165, cit. 162.

113 term a ‘subversive biography’ of Jesus that uses a relatively plain writing style and is informed, but not constrained by, firm literary conventions.61 I will discuss Bourdieu’s notion of fields, ‘sub-fields’ and ‘autonomous pole’ later in this chapter; however, this brief description demonstrates how disparity can exist among cultural products within a field, despite the conditions for membership in that field (a certain level of mastery of the skills and learning necessary to produce literature) remaining constant.

Bourdieu’s notion of ‘positions’ is also useful for understanding the role of actors within fields. Positions are related to the idea of ‘structures’. For instance, an agent’s habitus represents their ‘subjective structure’—it is a disposition acquired through the conditioning that comes with participation in the field, coupled with their own ‘position- takings’ or sense of place within the social or cultural dynamic. However, fields also possess ‘objective structures’, which are the common positions or sets of relations and relative capital in the field that exist regardless of an agent or subject’s expectations, will or intentions. For example, there are certain objective structures that exist in the production of literature in antiquity (e.g., paideia) that effect whether an individual is capable of becoming an author. In this respect ‘positions’ represent the “intersection of the structured social world with the dynamic agency of actors.”62 That is, there are objective structures that undergird any given field and agents take suitable positions within that field according to their habitus, relative skill and so on.

61 Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 107.

62 Anne F. Eisenberg, “Negotiating the Social Landscape to Create Social Change,” in Illuminating Social Life: Classical and Contemporary Theory Revisited, 5 ed., ed. Peter Kivisto (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2011), 380.

114 Again, I will return to Bourdieu later in this chapter, but this overview of his theory offers an alternative social description of writing practices in antiquity that does not rely on overly broad notions of ‘communities’ or imagines historical or social conditions for authors that are outside of what we know were the standards for being able to produce and circulate writings. In particular, his categories of field, habitus, position- takings and so on make clear that participants come to a given field with a variety of dispositions which must be assessed both in terms of what is plausible for their relative position in the field, as well as in light of what the agents themselves reveal about their interests and relative positions to one another. This is a useful model for considering the ancient world precisely because scholars often misconceive the social landscape of writing in antiquity, particularly in studies of early Christian literature. Reconsidering the nature of these social exchanges and writing practices helps us fine-tune our understanding of how literature like the Synoptics and Q may have been developed, without assuming that their later reception among religious groups mirrors the social conditions of their authorship.

I have already discussed some of the social conditions necessary for writers in the ancient world; however, they are not the only agents engaged in the field. While the production of literature was limited to a relatively small segment of society, this does not mean that people who were unable to read and write were likewise unable to participate in literary culture in some measure. For instance, non-specialists could attend public recitations or engage in debate over the interpretation of a particular text that was read out loud to them. Moreover, those with a very basic rhetorical training would likely have sufficient ability to interrogate a piece of writing, a theatrical performance or a speech.

115 Certain writings may have also lent themselves to different kinds of reception, depending on their place within the hierarchy of literature in the field—that is, relative to the culturally dominant ‘heteronomous pole’. David Konstan in his work on the ‘Active

Reader’, for instance, suggests that in second and third centuries C.E. “there arose, in response to a sharp increase in popular literacy, a new kind of text… [t]his new literature was addressed to middle levels of society, as opposed to the elite that formed the readership for earlier texts” including items such as cooking manuals, riddles, binding spells, “narratives of pagan martyrs and much Christian material” or romantic novels like

Chariton’s Callirhoe.63 As Konstan explains, these texts did not elicit the same scholia as

Homer or the Aeneid, but readers likely approached them with the same “interrogative relationship to the text for which we have found evidence in Plutarch, Synesius, and other sources.”64 In other words, this literature may not have been ranked among the ‘classics’, but it was engaged in the same manner as the poetry and prose encountered in paideia.

However, to be clear, possessing enough ‘popular literacy’ to interrogate a text, write a receipt, create a defixiones or draft a bill of divorce is not the same thing as writing literature. Authorship remained a specialist’s activity that required significant training and rhetorical skill. Again, while they may fall short of the literary prowess of a

Homer, Vergil or Hesiod, authors of the romantic novels or second-century hagiographies were producing literature in a particular social and historical context in which the

63 Konstan, “The Active Reader and the Ancient Novel,” 6. Of note, a recent Brown dissertation by Paul Robertson proposed that there is literary precedent for a ‘plain’ writing style seen in materials like the gospels and later Christian literature, the novel, etc. See Paul M. Robertson, “Paul’s Letters and Contemporary Greco-Roman Literature: Theorizing a New Taxonomy,” (Ph.D. Dissertation; Brown University, 2012).

64 Konstan, “The Active Reader and the Ancient Novel,” 7.

116 attendant practices and conditions for authorship still applied, insofar as they were conditioned by habitus. Konstan notes that “the expansion of literacy thus gave rise to two reading publics with distinct levels of cultural competence, and the texts they read differed accordingly in content, style, and organization.”65 Nonetheless, while geared to a less ‘elite’ audience, this literature was by no means a product of or produced by this new

‘community’ of readers. It was written by an author and designed to appeal to a field of consumers for the purposes of entertainment and edification, as well as to engage those for whom participation in literate practices, including the interpretation and circulation of writings, conferred a certain social capital, even if one did not hold a high degree of literacy.

While the cultural field of literacy contains both authors and readers, their relative interests and practices within the field differ. For ancient writers higher education was not something pursued solely for the sake or love of learning, perhaps save in the truly elite levels of society.66 Again, many engaged the discipline only to the extent that it aided their professional and social advancement. Or, in some cases, “parents would send their sons to philosophers to improve their moral character but not turn them into philosophers themselves.”67 But overall Greek paideia was a source of great cultural capital in Roman society, meaning that it conferred onto its participants a certain quality of influence and prestige. Greek literature, learning and cultural symbols had a profound and increasingly prominent place within Roman cultural imagination throughout the Empire—from the

65 Konstan, “The Active Reader and the Ancient Novel,” 6.

66 And, even then, this activity would not be value-neutral.

67 Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, 108.

117 imperial sponsorship of Greek intellectuals, to the literary tradition of the Second

Sophistic, to Hadrian’s beard. The representative value of paideia was that it demonstrated one’s participation in this complex of elite social practice. Tim Whitmarsh, for instance, explains that “‘Greekness’ (Hellēnismos) was constituted by an aggregation of civilized and intellectual values: praiotēs (‘gentleness’), sōphrosynē (‘self-control’), epieikeia (‘decency’), philanthrōpia (‘benevolence’) and—most importantly—paideia.”68

Thomas Schmitz, citing Bourdieu, refers to paideia itself as a habitus “within which the elite vied for social status and exchanged ‘symbolic capital.’”69

Likewise, the activities of readers and other consumers of literature were not value-neutral. As demonstrated by the deipnosophists or Petronius’s Satyricon, participation in the activities and interests of the dominant culture were perceived to hold particular kinds of purchase for those who desired, for instance, prestige and upward mobility. The perennial illustration of the cultural cache of literacy is Trimalchio, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, who amasses an impressive library, and opens it up as a scholasterion, but himself is unable to read.70 Examining the possible

68 Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 21. Interestingly, even well educated slaves were imagined to fall short of the virtues of paideia. As Stowers points out, in Petronius’s Satyricon the freedmen: “have a higher education” but “instead of possessing the virtue and noble character that such education was supposed to bring, they are utterly debase and out of control. They can create poetry, interpret their experience by myths and epics, and produce learned speeches, but Petronius makes these skills opportunities to show that theirs is a pathetic parody of true culture.”

69 Thomas Schmitz, Bildung und Macht: zur sozialen unde politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1997), 26-31. The description of Schmitz’s work and ‘habitus’ cited from Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, 19.

70 Petronius’s Satyricon 48.4; also cited in Stowers, “Kinds of Myth, Meals, and Power,” 121.

118 motivations for consumers of literature like the satyrical Trimalchio adds to our understanding of what was at stake for the recipients of various literary products.

Although an example from the domain of letter writing, Stowers offers a compelling case for what motivated consumers of Paul’s letters and his message of access to a divine lineage and special wisdom.71 Recognizing Paul addresses his letters to households, Stowers is able to consider the social makeup of these recipients and their relative interest in his offerings. Among the people who might be expected to constitute this group are slaves or freedpersons, as well as the heads of households who possessed the means to welcome both Paul and an assembly into their home. As mentioned previously, it was not uncommon for slaves to be well educated in order to act as teachers or tutors; however, as Stowers explains, “they faced a glass ceiling that kept them from the ranks of the aristocratic dominant culture” given their social status. Stowers also cites

Petronius and his ‘freedmen characters’ who “can create poetry, interpret their experience by myths and epics, and produced learned speeches” but their lack of sōphrosynē render them “a pathetic parody” of the culture of paideia. Stowers suggests that the alienation of these educated persons from the dominant culture might help explain the attraction to

Paul’s message of “alternative wisdom and the autonomous pole of the cultural field.”72

Paul offered an alternative means of achieving prestige and cultural capital within an otherwise limiting field. Similarly, for the elite head of the household, having financial means and social status “might allow one to give hospitality and patronage to a specialist, but that status alone did no confer an apitutde for skillful learning and literate

71 My language in this section follows Stowers, “Kinds of Myth, Meals, and Power,” 118-121.

72 Stowers, “Kinds of Myth, Meals, and Power,” 120.

119 practices.”73 Yet, in supporting and consuming the kinds of intellectual (and other) products Paul offered, even an illiterate head of a household could hold some distinction in the fields of learning and literate culture.

Although a specilized cultural producer, again, Paul is not solely concernend with writing. As mentioned in the first chapter, he is also offering membership in a cosmic genealogy, performing ‘pneumatic demonstrations’ and generating various means for obtaining cultural capital. Moreover, as Stowers notes, “his learning is of a different tradition, a dominated wisdom of a people, and not the dominant legitimized paideia.”74

Nonetheless, his activities and social interactions illustrate the diverse interests of producers and consumers of literate practices.

Interestingly, where Paul and his audience overlap is in their relative position to the ‘autonomous cultural pole’ of paideia. Prevented from joining the ranks of

‘aristocratic dominant culture’ due to relative skill, rank or other social position, they engage a form of intellectual practice that subverts the traditional and dominant models— for example, entertaining Paul’s interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures that champions a wonder-working Galilean peasant-cum-cosmic redeemer. However, in so doing, Paul continues to hold a certain position in the field of liteary production and associated literate activities. In the next chapter, I will propose that the authors of the Synoptics and

Q are similarly engaged in an act of suberverting the ‘autonomous pole’ of literary production by producing a form of ancient biography that suberts the standard generic

73 Stowers, “Kinds of Myth, Meals, and Power,” 121.

74 Stowers, “Kinds of Myth, Meals, and Power,” 119.

120 markers of the traditional ‘hero’ by focusing on the virtues and vices of a social underdog.

From this sketch of ancient literary practices it is clear that in order to compose and circulate a piece of writing, an author required a level of education, rhetorical training and social exchange that made their activity highly specialized. Approaches to first-century Christian literature like Q and the Synoptics has often ignored the historical and social processes involved in ancient literary activity, instead assuming that the most relevant social framework for understanding the production of this literature is the author’s presumed ‘community’ of fellow Christians. Relatedly, another mistake that scholars of early Christian literature have made is to conflate what is at stake for participants in the field of literary exchange, imagining that both the gospel writer and their ‘community’ are unified in their desire to record and share the oral traditions of their group, the teachings of Jesus or the like. In the next section, I will demonstrate how this approach to early Christian literature has contributed to an ahistorical and misleading view of the social conditions for these writings the continues to reinscribe the same mystified and Romantic frameworks discussed in the previous chapters of this study.

The Implausibility of Communities-as-Authors

Despite a continued emphasis on social formations like Christian communities, scholars in the field of New Testament and early Christian studies have routinely recognized a disparity between the notion of the ‘primitive Christian’ and the way in which literature was produced in antiquity—and, thus, the implausibility of the communities-as-authors model. Virginia Burrus, for instance, acknowledges, “certain

121 sociological factors complicate the view of Christianity as a strictly ‘lower-class’ or simply ‘anti-imperial’ movement even in the period of persecution,” including the

Synoptic writers’ clear familiarity with Greco-Roman literature and related rhetorical conventions.75 Harry Y. Gamble, while continuing to accept a Big Bang model for the development of Christianity, nonetheless acknowledges that the gospels and Q reflect a relatively high level of engagement with dominant literary practices, for example: “the early Christian appeal to Jewish scripture was not a simple matter of discovering texts, but a textual enterprise requiring close reading and constructive interpretation and thus literary sophistication.”76 He adds later on in his analysis: “from the very beginning

Christianity was deeply engaged in the interpretation and appropriation of texts” and that

“the earliest Christian writers participated in the rhetorical culture of antiquity and that the earliest Christian literature cannot be set outside the larger literary culture, but must rather be seen in continuity with more studied and self-consciously artful uses of rhetoric by non-Christian intellectuals.”77 He also concedes that traditionally “these writings were pronounced [by scholars in the field as] no more than ad hoc adaptations of nonliterary forms in service of practical religious needs” with an attendant “theological interest in minimizing the biographical-historical value” of this literature when, in fact, they can be securely situated within a larger scope of ancient Greco-Roman biographical tradition.78

75 Virginia Burrus and Rebecca Lyman, “Shifting the Focus of History,” in Late Antique Christianity: A People’s History of Christianity, Volume 2, ed. Virginia Burrus (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 8.

76 Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press), 26.

77 Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church, 27.

78 Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church, 36.

122 Some scholars have attempted to resolve this tension between communities-as- authors and the evidence of a skilled (and possibly autonomous) cultural producer by proposing alternative social formations as a means of literary production, or by looking to a broader knowledge of ancient rhetorical strategies for an explanation for these writings that preserves the voice of the ‘community’. Beginning with the latter, one method has been to assume that the author’s sole motivation in writing was to construct a narrative aimed at pleasing a targeted audience. This audience is then encoded in the text. John S.

Kloppenborg, for example, emphasizes the notion of ‘rhetorical situation’ in speech giving in the writing of Q:

Ancient rhetorical practice itself ensured a strong correlation between the values and interests of the audience and the shape of the text. In order to construct an effective speech, a writer had to consider carefully both the “issue” (stasis, quaestio) and the “rhetorical situation”… If one assumes that Q’s discourse was effective, it follows that its very architecture and fabric reflect the interests and values of its intended audience.79

The difficulty with Kloppenborg’s proposal is that it assumes a tight fit between this

“intended audience” and specific group(s) of Christians—“the Q people.” He argues, for instance, that the use of the second person plural and direct address in Q signals the

“presence” of these ‘Q people’ “at a grammatical level.” This argument allows him to pivot to the conclusion that these rhetorical strategies “would be meaning[less] without a real audience in view”—namely, a Christian or proto-Christian community more or less dictating the content of the writing on the basis of their experiences and expectations.80 I

79 John S. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 169.

80 Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, 169.

123 have already discussed that community language in a text can be inventive or aspirational, but need not be literal.

Out of the Kloppenborg school also comes the former approach noted above for justifying the involvement of a religious community in the writing of early Christian literature: proposed alternative social formations. Specifically, Kloppenborg and his student William Arnal have proposed that Q was likely composed by Galilean village scribes, informed by the wisdom of “itinerant preachers” or “wandering radicals” tasked with disseminating the teachings of Jesus. Resembling something of a Rube Goldberg

Machine of social exchange, the basis of this historical reconstruction is Gerd Theissen’s proposal, discussed in the first chapter of this study, that Jesus and his immediate followers were itinerant prophets and preachers. These ‘Cynic-like’ wise men traveled the countryside of Galilee and beyond, repeating Jesus’ teachings and dispersing the “oral life of these traditions” to communities of Q “tradents” or proto-Christians.81 Arnal recognizes the literary skill evident in Q (“Q is not merely a literate document but it is also literary”); in fact, he posits multiple authors and redactions in the text, according to identifiable themes: “sapiential materials” (Q1); “deuteronomistic understanding of the epic tradition” (Q2); evidence of “exegetical proficiency” (Q3) and so on.82 He therefore concludes, following Kloppenborg, that Q was a written or literary document, but produced by multiple “persons who are educated… but do not occupy the pinnacle of

81 William E. Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes: Galilean Conflicts and the Setting of Q (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 170. Arnal explains: “Theissen identifies itinerants as the formative factor behind the earliest Jesus movement. Jesus himself, Theissen claims, did not intend to found communities but to call into being a movement of wandering charismatics: ‘travelling apostles, prophets and disciples who moved from place to place and could rely on small groups of sympathizers in these places” (24).

82 Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes, 168-169.

124 learning antiquity had to offer.”83 Considering Q to be a “very, very old composition” and belonging to a period in which Jesus is “perceived to be a figure from… the recent past,” he places its composition in Galilee.84 Because an individual author is not considered, given the presumed communities and layers behind the text’s production Arnal, again following Kloppenborg, looks to village scribes as the most probable literate specialists available for the task of recording the oral traditions of Q. He cites Kloppenborg:

In accord with scribal values, the Sayings Gospel places a premium upon both clarity of perception, especially when it comes to matters of guidance (Q 6:40, 41-42), and good speech, the characteristic mark of good thinking (Q 6:45). Guidance and moral example are also the subjects of the sayings on judging (Q 6:37-38), scandal (Q 17:1-2), and forgiveness (Q 17:3b-4). This reflects the self-consciously “public” character of the scribal pursuit: although the scribe necessarily requires leisure not at the disposal of the peasant or hand-worker, the scribe’s responsibility is ultimately to the public and public approbation in the form of honour and fame crowns the sage’s achievement.85

Arnal adds to this model of the honor-bound village scribe “a network of villages” in which the scribes worked and lived with the ‘Q people’.86 This proposal for imagining the social process for Q resembles in many details the same mystified Big Bang for

Christian origins discussed in Chapter 1, including miraculous and cohesive communities of ‘primitive Christians’ seeking a literate representative to help them record their folk speech. Talk of the stratified and developing oral traditions of these communities also conjures associations with Romantic thinkers like Johann Adam Möhler and the idea of a

83 Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes, 170.

84 Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes, 172.

85 John S. Kloppenborg, “Literary Convention, Self-Evidence and the Social History of the Q People,” Semeia 55 (1991), 77-102, cit. 83. Cited from Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes, 170- 171.

86 Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes, 172.

125 developing inspirational Geist among the Volk, discussed in Chapter 2. Moreover, the depiction of scribal culture and training does not conform to what we know about so- called ‘village scribes’. While scribes could be hired to write an inscription, send a letter or use their access to literary materials to help copy or produce a piece of writing, such as a contract, they did not necessarily possess the training, skill and literacy necessary to write an original composition at the level of sophistication Kloppenborg and Arnal acknowledge is evident in Q.87 Hezser explains:

The writings of Josephus confirm the impression already gained from the gospels that before 70 C.E. the majority of scribes continued to be either Temple personnel or employed in the government administration…Village scribes (xwmw~n grammatei~) are only mentioned once, at the time of Salome and Herod, as an example for a very lowly and undesirable profession… The scribe was probably a person who could read and write and knew the social and legal formalities well enough to write letters, contracts and petitions. Although the village scribe shared the knowledge of writing with the Temple and royal scribes, he differed from them enormously with regard to his expertise, tasks, remuneration, and status.88

In light of our historical data for the literary abilities of village scribes, it is unlikely that an interrelated network of disparate Galilean scribes were responsible for the production of Q. As I will discuss in Chapter 5, it is possible to read Q as the writing of an individual author without the need for wandering charismatics, multiple redactions or communities.89

87 Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, 37.

88 Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, 119-120.

89 Interestingly, Arnal notes early on in his work that the itinerancy hypothesis advanced by scholars like Theissen and Adolf von Harnack closely resembles the “concerns of the Age of Progress” and “wandering radicalism” (Wanderradikalismus) prominent in Germany in the period between the World Wars. In particular, he notes that Harnack had an interest in German nationalist groups like the Wandervögeln (“migratory birds”) World War I youth organization. Arnal observes: “An essentially apolitical group, [the Wandervögeln] were primarily interested in revivifying their own cultural purity by escaping from the cities into the woodland and walking

126 While perhaps a seemingly extreme example, approaches to Q that have stressed its ties to religiously minded communities and subject matters are not particularly exceptional when it comes to the wider field of first-century Christian literature. As discussed in the first chapter, scholarship has been somewhat reluctant to recognize, for example, Stoic ethics in Matthew or the epic structure of Luke. Continued emphasis on the ‘religious’ themes in lieu of other interests expressed by the writers of these texts has resulted in myopic analyses of the social conditions for authorship that continue to focus on the notion of communities-as-authors. Throughout this study I have demonstrated why an approach to early Christian literature that only considers the author’s social location among imagined, like-minded fellow Christians is problematic and treats these authors as curiously unique when compared with other kinds of Greco-Roman literature. Again, authors can possess multiple overlapping or interrelated interests—marriage and food laws, politics, the virtues and vices of notable figures and so on— but just because issues pertaining to what we might classify as ‘religion’ ranks among them, does not mean that the author is a member of a cohesive or formative religious community. At the very least, the influential nature of any so-called ‘religious’ community on the author and their writings would be a matter of ‘more or less’ and must be demonstrated.

Philo of Alexandria: A Case Study

Philo of Alexandria is an example of an ancient author interested in ‘religious’ topics, but for whom an associated religious community is not considered central. A first-

about in the countryside. They were not migrating to any particular location but rather pursued these rural excursions as devices for putting themselves in touch with their own roots… The parallel to itinerancy as conceived by Harnack is plain.” See Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes, 19-20.

127 century Judean concerned with, among other things, the proper interpretation of Judean writings, he is treated by scholars like a normal, individual writer and not a spokesperson for the holdings of an associated, targeted community. Evidently trained in paideia, Philo does represent a literary practice emblematic of the ‘autonomous pole’ of the dominant culture. Yet he also engages with what Stowers terms ‘a dominated wisdom of a people’— that is, he participates in the evaulation of a class of literature not traditionally associated with the culturally dominant paideia.90 In this respect, he is a player in a

‘subfield’ of ancient literature with its own habitus and associated rules for obtaining capital. I will return to this latter point in a moment.

Connected with the Roman administration and a member of one of the wealthiest families in Alexandria, Philo is certainly a representative of the cultural elite.91 Famously, he headed a Jewish embassy to Gaius and spent at least two years in the capital. Maren R.

Niehoff notes that this time within elite Roman intellectual circles was formative for

Philo as he began “assuming positions strikingly similar to those of his contemporary

Seneca. His Exposition indicates a significant transition from his early Aristotelian environment in Alexandria to a distinctly more Roman as well as Stoic context.” 92

Among the indicators of Philo’s Greek education are his use of Homer, already discussed, as well as his knowledge and advancement of Greek philosophy and rhetorical methods for interrogating texts. Ranked among the so-called Middle Platonists of the

90 Stowers, “Kinds of Myth, Meals, and Power,” 119.

91 Maren R. Niehoff, Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 15.

92 H. Gregory Snyder, for example, notes: “…much of Philo’s writing activity was an individual pursuit, not simply a transcript of or a script for school or synagogue activity.” Snyder, Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World, 123. See Niehoff, Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria for more on Philo’s network of fellow Alexandrian intellectuals.

128 first-century, Philo “engaged Aristotelian methods of Homeric scholarship… His own exegetical approach can be understood as a new synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic notions… a highly significant predecessor of Longinus and Porphyry.”93 In his

Allegorical Commentary, for instance, Philo systematically evaluates Moses’ writings and their allegorical meanings, considering their potential inconsistencies, stylistic elements and merit as compared with the Greek poets. However, while he uses the

“problem of verisimilitude to anchor allegory” to analyze Judean literature in the tradition of Porphyry, he also emphasizes that any perceived irregularities, errors or redundancies in the text are an indication that the reader is improperly treating scripture as a collection of literal statements and, thus, hitting ‘stumbling-blocks’ (Conf. 14).94 Rather he proposes that one should approach Judean writings with a revelatory, allegorical lens and not “be astonished by the rules of allegory” (Somn. 1.73).

Because he does represent an aristocratic segment of literate society, in some respects Philo, like Pliny and Quintilian, provides only a snapshot of one stratum of

Judean literate practices and education. However, given that we know so little about

Judean education in the ancient world, he at least offers some perspective on the activities and training of these authors in the first-century.95 Although, it remains unclear to what

93 Niehoff, Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria, 14.

94 Niehoff, “Literal Exegesis in the Allegorical Commentary,” in Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria, 133-151, cit. 150.

95 Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, 497. According to Hezser, the majority of our knowledge about Jewish schools in antiquity comes from rabbinic sources. These sources indicate that elementary education did not include “practical writing skills” and was instead focused on the public reading of Torah. Among the dedicated Judean schools that did exist, instruction in reading Torah was primarily offered by scribes and “supported by rabbis” who could provide more specialized training.

129 extent the idea of an exclusively ‘Jewish’ education is even a useful notion, as Hezser explains, “not in the least because… Greek Jewish scholars may have been indistinguishable from non-Jewish Greek intellectuals.” 96

Despite the apparent discrepancy in social location and training between Philo and the authors of early Christian literature, Philo’s body of work is nonetheless a compelling piece of comparanda for these other first-century writings. To be clear, my concern in this study is with materials, like the Synoptics and Q, that are better classed with materials associated with what Bourdieu calls the ‘autonomous pole’ or are in some measure ‘subversive’, whereas Philo is more representative of the heteronomous pole.

However, Philo nonetheless demonstrates how an author can write about issues such as the proper interpretation of Judean scripture, ideal Israel, food laws, gender roles, moral psychology, politics and a variety of other shared subjects and not be considered a mouthpiece of a specific community. Of his extant works, his On the Contemplative Life is particularly noteworthy for its depiction of the practices and beliefs of a fellowship or community of like-minded Judeans—the Therapeutae. Yet, Philo’s illustration of this group is routinely read by scholars in concert with other kinds of related Greco-Roman literature and is understood to be, in some measure, rhetorical. This is due, in part, to the recognition that Philo is a highly trained, educated individual writing literature. While the

Therapeutae are occasionally associated with Essenes (as described elsewhere by Philo and Josephus), they are also understood to be a product of Philo’s literary imagination.97

96 Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, 497.

97 Josephus, Antiquities 13.171; 13.298; 13.311-13; War 2.119-61. Cited from Ross Shepard Kraemer, Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean (London; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), 65, n. 37. Also see n. 35 and 36.

130 Scholarly approaches to On the Contemplative Life, therefore, provide a model for how texts like the Synoptics and Q might be similarly analyzed.

Ross Shepard Kraemer offers a fine overview of the scholarly debate over the

Therapeutae in Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman

Mediterranean. Kraemer herself submits that she views the social formation Philo describes as “either entirely invented” or “so radically shaped [by Philo’s] representation of some actual persons” that the historical group is now “virtually inaccessible to us.”

She also suggests that Philo may have had elements of Genesis 1-3, Exodus 15 and other

Judean scriptures in mind when constructing his portrayal.98 Turning her attention to the influential work of Troels Engberg-Pedersen and Joan Taylor on the subject, she rehearses how scholarship has variously treated On the Contemplative Life as a piece of rhetorical literature. Engberg-Pedersen, for instance, views Philo’s writing as a

‘philosopher’s dream’ in the tradition of Plato’s utopian society; of Aristotle’s “well- known genre of a moral philosophical treatise… on the various ‘lives’ available to the ethical person”; or as an inversion to sympotic works like those of Plato, Xenophon and, later, Athenaeus.99 On the other hand Taylor, while acknowledging that Philo is employing some rhetorical license (perhaps as an apologetic in anticipation of his impending journey to Rome), avers that the level of detail offered in the text suggests that

98 Kraemer, Unreliable Witnesses, 66.

99 Kraemer, Unreliable Witnesses, 67. Kraemer is describing Troels Engberg-Pedersen, “Philo’s De Vita Contemplativa as a Philosopher’s Dream,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 30 (1999), 40-64.

131 he is relaying the substance of an actual historical and social group—but one of which he has had some dealings, not one of which he is a member.100

Scholars, then, are able to locate Philo within the ‘field’ of ancient literature both in terms of his relative skill and training as an author, the literature of the ‘autonomous pole’ that may have informed him, and his social standing as an allied member of the

Roman elite. However, in addition to these associations, Philo is also recognized as a writer engaged with what we might term a ‘literary subfield’: ethnic Judean literature.

Bourdieu’s theorization allows for sub-fields as both large and small-scale semi- autonomous productions within the field of power. They represent a distinct position in cultural production in their relation to the dominant field, as well as to all other subfields.

That is, they offer a primary source of distinctive ‘symbolic capital’, a subset of the kind of cultural capital characteristic of the broader field.101 Literature that engages Judean thought and practice constitutes a subfield to the extent that it is concerned with issues that are not typically represented by dominant players within the field like Vergil, Pliny,

Lucian and so on. To illustrate how Philo participates in this subfield of ethnic literature consider, for instance, the ways in which the two writings I discussed in this chapter

(Allegorical Interpretation or Commentary and On the Contemplative Life) subvert the dominant cultural field: he employs certain Aristotelian methods for interrogating Judean scriptures, but does so maintaining that these scriptures can only be read allegorically and contain no inherent contradictions; he goes into painstaking detail describing the

100 Kraemer, Unreliable Witnesses, 68. My language in this section follows Kraemer.

101 See Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 53; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996 [1979]), 170.

132 Therapeutae, but does so in such a way that he inverts the sympotic themes of vice in favor of depicting Judean virtues. The concept of ‘subversion’ emerges as one of a number of potential ‘field strategies’ for either the maintenance or acquisition of a stake in the field of power. David Swartz explains:

Bourdieu in fact speaks of three different types of field strategies: conservation, succession, and subversion. Conservation strategies tend to be pursued by those who hold dominant positions and enjoy seniority in the field. Strategies of succession are attempts to gain access to dominant positions in a field and are generally pursued by new entrants. Finally, strategies of subversion are pursued by those who expect to gain little from the dominant groups. These strategies take the form of more or less radical rupture with the dominant group by challenging its legitimacy to define the standards of the field.102

Along these lines, considering other types of ancient literature that tend to subvert dominant cultural paradigms, to ‘ethnic literature’ we might add subfields like ‘esoteric literature’, certain ‘popular’ romantic novels or even first-century writings about Jesus. In the next chapter, for instance, I suggest how we might imagine the gospels and Q subverting the field of ancient biography.

Literary Subfields and the Gospel Writers

By way of conclusion, then, how can we begin to imagine the author of first- century writings about Jesus, without placing undue emphasis on the notion of communities? The following exercise serves to demonstrate how we might redescribe the social and historical setting for the production of these materials.

102 David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 125. Emphasis original. Also see Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 106.

133 Taking the author of Mark or Q as an example, given his interest in the interpretation of Judean literature, perhaps he is a Judean himself, likely living post-War, who has read, among other things, a good deal Greco-Roman literature (e.g., Homer, some philosophy, bioi). His ability to read and write at this relatively high level indicates that he has received a Greek education and possesses both a specialist’s knowledge of texts and an awareness of current issues being discussed among other cultural producers, such as the significance of the destruction of the Judean Temple. He is also interested in certain kinds of esoteric materials: riddles, teachings, signs and wonder-workings. He is outside of the dominant cultural field; he is not Vergil. But he has enough skill, means and training to try his hand at a creative piece of writing. Aware of the civic biographical tradition of distinguished statesmen, philosophers and other leaders, he wants to engage that literary genre, offering a bios of another notable figure and philosopher who came to an untimely end—Jesus. However, here is he faced with a problem. Jesus was not a member of the dominant leadership or aristocracy.

But our author has among his collected texts that share his interest in Jesus the letters of Paul. There he finds talk of Jesus as ‘Christ’, a divine lineage of Abraham, and an active principle of God’s pneuma bounding people ‘in Christ’. Perhaps he finds through his own research or through exchanges of ideas and texts within his literary network one or two other ‘lives’ of Jesus or a collection of some of Jesus’ reputed teachings in the imaginative style of Pythagoras’ Golden Verses. He then begins to write his bios engaging a certain set of issues that are important to him. Those issues might include esoteric teachings, food laws, Stoic ethics or constructing a new, divine genealogy that subverts the one continually being reified by the Roman imperial family.

134 This author may be aware of other ‘Jesus people’. He may even loosely or strongly hold an identification with a particular group who share in common an interest in Jesus, the writings of Paul and so on. However, this group alone does not dictate the content of his writings. Instead, he is engaged in a writing practice that views other literature and fellow writers as chiefly formative. He exchanges his text among these other writers for comment, critique and discussion. Some within this network begin to make copies of his writing for circulation. The issues he addresses attract a variety of different kinds of readers: for instance, those interested in subversive biographies or in examples of Judean figures who offered teachings that were not centered on Temple cult. The following chapters will investigate the particulars of how this kind of literature may have developed.

135

CHAPTER 4 THE GOSPELS AS SUBVERSIVE BIOGRAPHY

In the last chapter, I offered a review of ancient literary practices as a corrective to approaches to early Christian writings that have relied on a ‘Big Bang’ model of

Christian origins. Rather than posit ill-defined religious groups or ‘communities’ as a framework for understanding the production of this literature, I accounted for the activities of these writers through the Bourdieusien model of ‘fields’ and ‘subfields’. The aim of this proposal was twofold. First, I demonstrated that there are certain literary conventions to which the gospels writers were bound. Locating these writers within a field of cultural production that makes sense for their milieu dismantles the kinds of

Romantic-inspired frameworks that have myopically viewed the early Christians ‘peasant

Volk’ or the gospel writers as their literate spokesmen. Second, I established that by treating these writings as proper Greco-Roman literature, they fit intelligibly within a broader scope of literary development in antiquity and were not unique to their epoch.

In this chapter, I carry on this critique of the perceived exceptionalism of the gospels by offering a detailed examination of the genre of biography in antiquity. While some scholars maintain that the gospels were a literary anomaly without clear precedent,

I instead argue that they are an innovative play on the civic biographical tradition.1 By

1 Some examples include Adela Yarbro Collins, Is Mark’s Gospel a Life of Jesus?: The Question of Genre (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1990), to be discussed. Also see Helmut

136 situating the gospels within this genre classification, I again work toward establishing an approach to this literature that is historically based and does not seek the author’s presumed religious ‘community’ in the rhetorical framework of their writings.

I begin with a brief discussion of the genre of biography, followed by a rehearsal of the development of the civic biographical tradition in antiquity. This provides the basis for then outlining the trajectory of a form of writing lives that I term ‘subversive biography’— a type of ‘life’ that emphasizes the capabilities of a figure perceived to be outside of the dominant culture in some measure. Instead of a chronicle of the military pursuits of a great general, for instance, we have the Life of Aesop that tells the tale of a wily and often bombastic slave, or the Alexander Romance that portrays its resourceful and clever leader as something of a antihero.2 I place writings about Jesus within this same trajectory, which alternatively emphasize his wisdom, ready-wit and wonder working as a strategy for demonstrating authority and gaining advantage when faced with challenges from more powerful figures. To employ language used in the last chapter,

Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1990), 24: “In the second half of the 2d century certain documents came to be called ‘gospels.’ But it is not evident why the term ‘gospel’—once the technical term for the early Christian missionary preaching—became the title for a particular type of literature. Explanations for this change have been closely associated with the attempt to define the special genre of the gospel literature. Most commonly accepted, in one form or another, is the thesis developed by Karl Ludwig Schmidt and Julius Schniewind. It states that the gospels, specifically the four Gospels of the New Testament canon, are representatives of a literary genre sui generis which cannot be related to other developments in the history of literature in antiquity… [According to Schmidt, Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Dibelius] the genre of the gospels cannot be determined on the basis of a comparison with the products of literary culture. Rather, they must be understood as collections and publications of traditions in the form of ‘casual literature’ (Klienliteratur) according to the needs of a developing religious community.”

2 As noted in the previous chapter, a version of this argument will appear in a forthcoming co- authored piece with David Konstan: David Konstan and Robyn Faith Walsh, “Civic and Subversive Biography in Antiquity,” Telling Ancient Lives. Narrative Technique and Fictionalization in Greek and Latin Biography, ed. Koen De Temmerman and Kristoffel Demoen (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press). I have employed a similar approach to the topic in this chapter with Konstan’s permission.

137 ‘subversive biography’ characteristic of a sub-field that takes the kind of liberties characteristic of the ‘autonomous pole’. Put differently, Jesus is an underdog forced to use his ‘little guy’ skills to succeed.

The Scope of Biography

Where today we speak of ‘biographies’, the ancients rather used the term

‘lives’— bioi in Greek, vitae in Latin. In itself, the difference in terminology is seemingly inconsequential, but when it comes to usage, the equation between the English and the

Greek or Latin words can be misleading. ‘Biography’ in contemporary practice suggests a well-defined genre, with norms and conventions that are widely understood. A biographer offers a cradle-to-grave account of the life of a person (unless the work is explicitly limited to a certain period in his or her life), and professes to relate accurately the events in which the subject participated, often along with details of their character and thoughts. A certain amount of invention is allowed in reconstructing the psychology or inner life of the subject; this is particularly the case in literature of this ilk produced in the past century. For instance, according to The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms:

[A] new movement emerged from 1918, known as the new biography… in which biography was treated as an imaginative art in which invented dialogues, interior monologues and other techniques borrowed from the novel were employed… The 20th century also saw the emergence of psychobiography, informed by psychoanalytic theories of development, and of sensational biographies exposing the sexual and other personal secrets of famous figures.3

Despite these innovations, all these types share certain readily recognizable conventions— even the most creative purport to represent the subject’s life truthfully,

3 Christopher Baldick, “Biography,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), accessed online 19 May 2010 at http://www.oxfordreference.com.

138 and offer evidence and sources to corroborate the story. Likewise, the boundary between biography and other narrative genres, such as history or the novel, is typically clear.

When this is not the case, one is usually conscious of deliberate experimentation or transgression that evokes, even as it disrupts, the standard generic markers.4

The case with ancient bioi is quite different. As Christopher Pelling observes in the article on Greek biography in The Oxford Classical Dictionary:

Biography in antiquity was not a rigidly defined genre. Bios, ‘life,’ or bioi, ‘lives,’ could span a range of types of writing, from Plutarch’s cradle-to- grave accounts of statesmen to Chamaeleon’s extravagant stories about literary figures… Consequently the boundaries with neighbouring genres— the encomium, the biographical novel on the model of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the historical monograph on the deeds of a great man like Alexander the Great— are blurred and sometimes artificial.5

How is one to classify, for example, the manifestly fantastical Alexander Romance, which has a historical subject but in many respects seems as much a work of fiction as the anonymous History of Apollonius King of Tyre, usually regarded as a novel? Or what are we to make of the Life of Homer, ascribed to Plutarch, which bears a strong resemblance to a fairy tale? The Synoptic gospels may seem like biographies, but some scholars have defined them rather as histories, a form of apocalyptic narrative or, often,

4 An example is Per Wästberg, The Journey of Anders Sparrman: A Biographical Novel (London: Granta Books, 2010). In a Times Literary Supplement review under the title, “Life’s Little Lacunae,” Peter Parker (30 April 2010) observes: “A biographical novel ... is free to fill gaps, to speculate and invent; but this requires a true immersion in and understanding of the subject and the world in which he or she moved” (20).

5 Christopher Pelling, “Plutarch’s Adaptation of his Source-Material,” in Essays on Plutarch’s Lives, ed. Barbara Scardigli (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2003), 241. Thomas Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012) wonders about “the generic label” one might apply to the Cyropaedia, and observes that whether we call it “historical (or biographical or philosophical) novel, romanticized (or fictionalized) biography, mirror of princes..., its main topic is leadership and government, not the life of the historical King Cyrus the Great of Persia” (51).

139 as sui generis literature in a genre all their own.6 All of these works are in some sense

‘lives’, but it can be difficult to specify what else they may have in common with each other, or with, for example, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives or, as mentioned in the last chapter,

Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers.

Given this variety of biographical ‘types’, it may seem fruitless to seek features that would lead to being able to classify ancient bioi (or vitae) more coherently.

However, certain elements stand out. Some bioi, for example, highlight the virtues of their subjects. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, often these subjects are great statesmen or military heroes who exemplify justice and courage. Similarly, there are biographies of brilliant thinkers and writers, such as philosophers and poets, whose lives might serve as models, even sometimes in a negative sense (when the subject was notorious for vices). Others endow their subjects with extraordinary abilities of a different kind—‘super powers’, if you will— that involve what one might term ‘magic’ or other sorts of wonder working. This latter type often also emphasizes the sharp wit of the protagonist, whose clever ripostes and wise sayings, sometimes in the form of

6 For full discussion with ample bibliography, see Collins, Is Mark’s Gospel a Life of Jesus?, esp. 1-16; Collins herself argues that “Mark is an apocalyptic historical monograph” (27). Similarly, Willem Vorster and J. Eugene Botha, ed., Speaking of Jesus: Essays on Biblical Language, Gospel Narrative (Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, 1999), 131, describe the so-called “kerygma theory” according to which “the gospel genre is something very unique” and “has no literary parallels prior to its origin and outside the canon.” Based on the historical framework of 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, 11:23-25, Acts 10:37-41 and 13:23-31 (among other passages), they argue that “the gospel genre is not a product of the literary activity of Mark but… of the apostolic preaching of Jesus from which it developed.” See also Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994 [1963]), 371-74; Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1990), 26-31; Richard A. Burridge, What are the Gospels?: A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004); Richard A. Burridge, “Reading the Gospels as Biography,” in The Limits of Ancient Biography, ed. Brian McGing and Judith Mossman (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales; Oakville, CT: David Brown Book Co., 2006), 31-49.

140 parables, catches their opponents off guard and turns the tables on them. Again, such lives tend to feature, in a somewhat picaresque fashion, a figure that is an outsider in some measure or marginal member of society—often of a low class or oppressed minority group— and, hence, a social underdog who must prove his worth to the more powerful people he (occasionally she) encounters.7

These latter elements, in combination, serve to identify a particular narrative form or strategy in the bioi that I characterize as ‘subversive’, in contrast to the civic tradition of biography that focuses rather on powerful and respected individuals, such as those written by Cornelius Nepos, Plutarch, and Suetonius. In other words, this form of

‘subversive biography’ possesses distinguishing features that set it apart in the ancient biographical tradition from the dominant, civic variety. While the civic biography is a type that is organized around the dominant social values, which are presupposed even in the breach (as in the case of imperfect or vicious subjects), subversive biography gives voice to those who are on the margins of power, and more or less subtly undermine or challenge the conventional ideology.8

7 An example is the anonymous Life of Aesop, discussed below. For bioi of female characters, see the so-called Lives of the Harlots, a collection of Christian lives that illustrate the transition from extreme depravity to exemplary piety and repentance.

8 There are, of course, other ways to classify ancient biographies, whose variety is neatly indicated the survey in Pelling, “Plutarch’s Adaptation of his Source-Material,” 241. As Konstan and Walsh explain: “One may sort them into lives of poets, philosophers, political leaders, wonderworkers, or saints; or again treat them as quasi-histories or novels or encomia. We do not question the legitimacy or usefulness of these alternative categories. Nevertheless, we are inclined to see the specifically biographical element in the ancient lives as assuming two polar forms, inspired by the two traditions inaugurated by, or at least crystallized in, Xenophon’s two seminal works, and marked above all by their relation to the dominant cultural values, the one affirming the traditional virtues, the other taking potshots at them from the sidelines, as it were, and particularly suited recounting the lives, and sometimes the doctrines, of those at the margins of society.” See “Civic and Subversive Biography in Antiquity,” forthcoming.

141 To be clear, such a distinction, if indeed it is valid for ancient bioi, evolved and changed over time and differed in different places. As Tzvetan Todorov, famously argued in the Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage, genres do not exist in isolation: they are always defined in the context of a constellation of kindred forms, and exist in a dynamic tension with them.9 What is more, these forms are not given a priori, but emerge historically; thus, the Russian formalist critic Boris Tomashevsky insisted that

“no firm logical classification of genres is possible. Their demarcation is always historical, that is to say, it is correct only for a specific moment of history.”10

Nevertheless, I believe that the distinction I describe remained stable, or at least relevant, from the classical epoch through late antiquity. In what follows, I will rehearse the contours of the civic tradition and then demonstrate the parallel development of the subversive form of bioi that I am proposing.11

Xenophon and the Civic Tradition

Two works that may be described as proto-biographies date to the fourth century

B.C.E. and are from Xenophon: an essay on the Spartan king Agesilaus and Memorabilia

9 Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des Sciences du Langage (Paris: Éditions du Seiul, 1972) 193-197.

10 Boris Tomashevsky, “Literary Genres,” in Russian Poetics in Translation 5 (Oxford, UK: Holdan Books, 1978), 55; cited in David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 147.

11 Although he two types of biography did not achieve the status of formal genres, I argue that they represented recognizable options within the biographical tradition. A modern example is the distinction, within the genre of the detective novel, between the traditional sleuth in the style of Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss. Marple, and the hard-nosed version associated with the American writers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

142 (U(pomnh&nata), or Reminiscences of Socrates. Taken together, they may be regarded as the sources of the two traditions I have outlined above.12 The Agesilaus is commonly described as an encomium, and it begins: “I know that it is not easy to write a praise

(e!painoj) worthy of Agesilaus’ virtue and reputation, but it must nevertheless be attempted; for it would be not be right if a man failed to obtain even inadequate praises just because he was consummately good” (1.1). Xenophon proceeds to mention

Agesilaus’ outstanding ancestry, and the splendor of the city over which he ruled. He goes on to describe in detail his achievements during his reign, “since on the basis of his deeds, I believe that his character too will be most manifest” (1.6). In respect to his military abilities, Xenophon affirms: “How might one better demonstrate what kind of general he was than by describing just what he did?” (1.9). During his incursions into the

Persian empire, Agesilaus is shrewd enough to realize that he cannot sustain his army on a country that is laid waste, and so he furthers his aims not by force alone but also by gentleness (prao&thj, 1.20), winning the favor of the local population and even making provision for children who are orphaned; “he frequently ordered his soldiers not to punish the conquered as criminals but to protect them as human beings” (1.21). After recounting further triumphs (and glossing over some of his more thorny entanglements), Xenophon turns from Agesilaus’ deeds, which need no further proof, to “making manifest the virtue in his soul, by which he achieved all these things” (3.1). He duly illustrates Agesilaus’ piety, his justice in money matters, his extraordinary restraint in respect to the pleasures of food and drink, to heat and cold, and sex, his courage and wisdom, his love for his city, his courtesy and good cheer, and his modest style of life. Xenophon concludes by

12 I refer to the Loeb Classical Library editions of these texts, unless otherwise noted.

143 insisting: “Let no one imagine that, because he is being praised after he has died, this is a funeral oration, for it is much more an encomium (e)gkw&mion),” since, Xenophon says, this is exactly the kind of thing that was said about him while he was still alive. Thus,

‘encomium’ here does not mean a one-sided eulogy but rather praise that is deserved.

Xenophon is providing his readers with a true account of a man he deeply respects, and his essay may plausibly be described as biographical in intention.

Indeed, the emphasis on character was to mark the entire biographical tradition.

Plutarch’s aim, for instance, was self-consciously that of providing exemplary models of character in his Lives.13 Like Xenophon, Plutarch supposed that character is revealed principally in actions, and he was conscious of the need to recount historical events as the backdrop to his illustrations of his subjects’ êthos, whether good or bad. In this respect, history was important, and Plutarch’s accounts had to be, if not veridical, then at least plausible. Nevertheless, Plutarch was more concerned to focus on the small detail that might shed light on a character’s personality, as opposed to narrating great wars and public events for their own sake: it was precisely this, according to Plutarch, that distinguished biography from historiography. To rehearse Plutarch’s programmatic statement concerning bios, already cited several times in this study: “We are writing biographies, not histories... A battle with ten thousand dead may tell us less of a man’s

13 Of note, I also situate comparable bioi written by Judeans like Josephus and Philo in the civic tradition. Philo’s Life of Moses, for example, presents Moses as a divinely sanctioned king, prophet, philosopher, lawgiver and exemplar. Philo even describes his bioi on Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as a study of three figures who are “nominally men but really, as I have said, virtues” De Abrahamo (= Abr.), 54-55. For more discussion on Philo’s biographical treatment of notable figures, see Maren Niehoff, The Figure of Joseph in Post-Biblical Jewish Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 54-83.

144 character than a brief anecdote.”14 Likewise, in his life of Galba, Plutarch observes: “To relate each individual event exactly is the job of factual (pragmatikh&) history, but neither is it appropriate for me to pass over all the things worthy of mention that bear on what the Caesars did and suffered” (2.3). Christopher Pelling raises the question: “Why this interest in character?”; the answer, he explains (citing Pericles 1-2), is that Plutarch

“hopes that his readers might be led by examples of virtue to become better themselves,” and, correspondingly, that they may be deterred from wrongdoing by the instances of wickedness, just as he himself has been thanks to his own studies (cf. Aem. 1.1).15

Whether or not Plutarch always followed his own introductory statements of intent in the biographies as a whole, he clearly conceived of his project in these terms.16

Cornelius Nepos, in his life of Agesilaus, which is included among the relatively brief sketches that make up his book on Excellent Commanders from Foreign Countries, was influenced directly by Xenophon’s account, as he states in the opening sentence:

“Agesilaus the Lacedaemonian has been praised (collaudatus) by various writers and

14 Trans. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Suetonius: The Scholar and His Caesars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 8. Also see Christopher Gill, The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (Oxford; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 415-417.

Timothy Duff rightly warns, however, against taking this notice as valid for all the Lives. See Timothy Duff, Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 15, 17, 20). Also see Françoise Frazier, who argues that Plutarch highlights the moral character of his subjects at the expense of historical causality. Françoise Frazier, Histoire et morale dans les Vies parallèles de Plutarque (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1996).

15 Christopher Pelling, “Plutarch’s Adaptation of his Source-Material,” in Essays on Plutarch’s Lives, ed. Barbara Scardigli (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995), 143, a propos Nicias 1.

16 D. A. Russell, “On Reading Plutarch’s Lives,” in Essays on Plutarch’s Lives, ed. Barbara Scardigli (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995) notes that “By the time a man is grown up, his pattern of conduct is normally well enough established for predictions to be made about how he will behave in most circumstances... Plutarch’s normal procedure in writing a Life is to state his conclusions on this point fairly early... and then justify them by the ensuing narrative” (82).

145 outstandingly by Xenophon the disciple of Socrates.” Nepos goes on to record Agesilaus’ achievements and, although he does not divide his biography into active accomplishments and moral excellences, as Xenophon had done, he concludes by contrasting Agesilaus’ gifts of virtues of the mind (animi virtutibus) with its parsimony in regard to his physical attributes (namely, he was short and had a limp), though these in no way impeded his success (8.1). There is, then, little to distinguish the genre in which

Nepos was writing from that of Xenophon.17 Plutarch too exhibits Agesilaus’ moral qualities through his military and political achievements. As the second year of his war in Persia rolled round, Plutarch tells us that word of his abilities reached the Persian king, and “a wonderful opinion of his temperance, frugality, and moderation prevailed” (14.1);

Plutarch also commends his sense of justice and civic duty (peiqarxi&a) in putting the interests of his city above his personal ambition (15.4-5).

However, for all his concentration on character, and the effort to mark biography off from history precisely by this emphasis, Plutarch, like Nepos before him, found it handiest or most effective to present the events and deeds by which the characters of his subjects are revealed in roughly chronological order— and to this extent his lives resemble historical narratives. Suetonius has been accused of having driven the wedge between history and biography still further; thus, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill affirms:

17 Jeffrey Beneker, “Nepos’ Biographical Method in the Lives of Foreign Generals,” Classical Journal 105/2 (December 2009/ January 2010) remarks of Nepos’ account of Agesilaus’ physical deformities: “Nepos has already advertised in the Preface that he intends to elucidate the virtues of his subjects, and our judgment of Agesilaus ought therefore to be made on that basis” (113); in general, Nepos, while recognizing the importance of objective achievements, “warns that in coming to terms with a man’s life, they are not to be given priority over virtue” (115). By distinguishing biography from history in this way, Nepos “anticipates Plutarch” (120).

146 “Rather than let biography become history, he would write non-history.”18 To this end, he divided his narrative into subsections (species), among which were included segments on the virtues and vices of the several emperors, without respect to chronological order.19

But if Suetonius to this extent transformed the genre of biography, which typically traced the life and career of a subject from childhood through maturity, he was in another sense returning to the model of Xenophon’s Agesilaus, with its division between the description of the Spartan king’s military achievements and his moral qualities. If the chief purpose of such bioi is the revelation of character through deeds, then the question of chronological order becomes tactical— a matter of narrative strategy. The fundamental feature that underlies this biographical tradition is the exhibition of character by way of actions, and the actions are selected with this view in mind. They may be recounted more or less in temporal sequence, but this is not essential, and other ways of organizing the narrative, for example around particular virtues, may do as well.

Xenophon and the Subversive Tradition

The second strand in the biographical tradition may have also had its origins in

Xenophon’s Memorabilia— the collection of anecdotes or conversations featuring

Socrates and various interlocutors. Like Agesilaus, Socrates is a paragon of virtue, but even though some of his virtues are analogous to some of Agesilaus’— for example, moderation and wisdom— the context in which they are manifested, and the complex

18 Wallace-Hadrill, Suetonius, 9.

19 See M.J. Edwards, “Birth, Death, and Divinity in Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus,” in Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity, ed. Thomas Hägg and Philip Rousseau (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 52-71.

147 character that they exhibit, suggest a different kind of portrait. Whereas Agesilaus’ personality was revealed in action, Socrates’ is manifested solely through words. His excellences reside less in erga than in logoi, though there is testimony in Plato and elsewhere to his courage in battle and his physical hardiness (e.g., Plato Symposium

219E-221C).20

However, a record of conversations, in contrast to heroic deeds in battle or successes in politics, does not so readily organize itself along chronological lines. One can, of course, proceed from signs of precocious brilliance in childhood to a representation of the subject’s more mature wisdom, and the context for discussions may evolve in accord with the stages of a person’s life; thus, nothing excludes the possibility of a more strictly biographical frame for such a narrative (some ancient examples are considered below). Nevertheless, there is a certain ‘openness’ inherent in such texts, in which any given episode of clever repartee may be added or omitted, or its position in the sequence altered, without noticeable effect on the coherence of the whole. This variability is characteristic of a certain tradition of ancient literature that David Konstan and

Christine Thomas have identified elsewhere as “open texts.”21 Once again, the form may

20 On the representation of Socrates in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Thomas Hägg observes: “it is important to note that much of the characterization of Socrates the individual is achieved through the way he speaks, his method of inquiry, his use of parables and examples from daily life, his irony and wit.” Thomas Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 27. These are just the qualities that cast Socrates as the antithesis to the portrait Xenophon draws of Agesilaus.

21 See David Konstan, “The Alexander Romance: The Cunning of the Open Text,” Lexis 16 (1998), 123-38; Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity, 99-101; Christine M. Thomas, “Stories without Texts and without Authors: The Problem of Fluidity in Ancient Novelistic Texts and Early Christian Literature,” in Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative, ed. Ronald F. Hock, J. Bradley Chance and Judith Perkins (Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series 6; Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1998), 273-291.

148 be a narrative strategy in the service of a biographical aim, a way of relating certain qualities of the subject that lend themselves particularly, but not exclusively, to this style.

But the difference between the two biographical traditions is not solely a matter of emphasizing the subject’s facility with words versus his capacity for action. For the active hero manifests his virtue in the public sphere, the world of war and statecraft; whether he wins or loses, the measure of his character is his conformity with the dominant ideals of society and culture. He is a central player, part of the system: he is a model for those who would govern. The Socratic type, on the contrary, is at the margins of society, puckish and non-conformist. In relation to the powers that be, he is the underdog, despite his sharp wits; indeed, it is precisely because he is politically weak that he must rely on clever ripostes and arguments to defend himself. In so doing, he tends to upset inherited beliefs and thereby threatens the establishment ideology. Thanks to the critical edge of his commentary, he is seen as subversive, not because he may wrest political control from his adversaries but because he seems to undermine the values on which society depends.

Xenophon introduces the Memorabilia as a defense of Socrates, designed to prove that the charges on which he was condemned to death were false, and that far from being a menace to society, who challenged conventional piety and corrupted the young,

Socrates was “never guilty in civic matters of a war that turned out badly or of civil faction or of treason, nor in private affairs did he ever deprive any person of good things or envelop anyone in evils” (1.2.63). Thus, Xenophon sets out to demonstrate that “he benefitted those who associated with him both in deed, by showing the kind of person he was, and in conversation” (3.1.1). To be sure, Xenophon does what he can to present

149 Socrates as an upstanding citizen, defending proper behavior in accord with social conventions; nevertheless, the corrosive nature of Socrates’ critique of conventional attitudes constantly emerges. For example, at the end of the first book, Socrates argues that no one who is not competent to rule should seek office in the state. Basing his claim on the familiar appeal to the arts, such as fluteplaying or piloting a ship, Socrates affirms that the greatest fraud is “the person who deceives others by persuading them that he is competent to rule the city, though he is worthless” (1.7.5). The clear implication is that many current leaders are both unskilled in the craft of politics and disguise the fact.

Therefore, it is natural that Socrates acquired enemies in high places. But hovering at the edges of his critique is the idea that the virtues, as popularly conceived, are faulty, and that a revolution in values is needed. It is this that lends his views an air of unorthodoxy, and it is confirmed by his eccentric outward behavior— such as going shoeless, neglecting his household, and buttonholing people in the street with abstract inquiries.

If Xenophon attempted to soften the outlines of this countercultural image of

Socrates, the Cynics took a much more aggressive tack. Through them, a type of life story entered the literature that was to have great influence on later biographies.22 The two traditions, civic and subversive, took on further definition over time, in part by

22 In a non-biographical context, one can see the posture of the subversive figure in Epictetus’ Discourses, e.g. at 1.18-19, where a person is imagined as protesting Epictetus’ doctrine that we accept all that is not under our control: “So am I only to have my throat cut?” To this Epictetus replies: “Do you want all people to have their throats cut?” The equivocation here is on the word monon, but the witticism recalls Socrates’ retort, as reported in Xenophon’s Apology (28); when Apollodorus affirms that it is terrible to behold Socrates being executed unjustly, Socrates replies: “would you rather see me be executed justly?” These are the verbal tactics of the jester, which may seem frivolous to a modern reader but were part and parcel of the diatribe tradition in antiquity.

150 interacting with each other; indeed, the same figure could be represented in either mode, as we will see below.

When collections of conversations like Xenophon’s Memorabilia and dialogues like those of Plato took the form of a life or biography is uncertain, and various influences may have helped to shape them. Early on, a work such as Ion of Chios’

“Visits” (Epidemiai), which apparently included a narrative by Sophocles on his own dramatic development, could have contributed to the stream, and so too Socrates’ own autobiographical sketch recorded in Plato’s Phaedo. It is tempting to suppose that the emergence of lives in the style of Xenophon’s Agesilaus catalyzed competing efforts in the rival genre. A major influence, however, came from abroad, in the form of a Greek version of the Ahikar romance.23 The Greek form appears fully developed in the anonymous Life of Aesop, in which the protagonist, who for much of the story is a slave of the philosopher Xanthus, consistently flusters his master by displays of his superior wisdom.24 I will return to a discussion of Aesop in a moment. First, the dual tracks of biography I have been discussing are perhaps best illustrated by contrasting two works

23 See William Hansen, Anthology of Greek Popular Literature (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998) 106-110; Grammatiki A. Karla, Vita Aesopi: Ueberlieferung, Sprach und Edition einer fruehbyzantinischen Fassung des Aesopromans (Wiesbaden: Verlag, 2001), introduction; Ioannis Konstantakos, Akicharos: He Diegese tou Ahichar sten archaia Hellada, 3 vols. (Athens: Stigme, 2008-13) on the Persian narrative; vol. 3 examines in particular its influence on the Life of Aesop.

24 On Socrates in relation to the Life of Aesop, see M. Schauer and S. Merkle, “Aesop und Sokrates,” in Der Äsop-Roman (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1992), 90-96. Also see Grammatiki A. Karla, Fiction on the Fringe: Novelistic Writing in the Post-Classical Age (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 13-32 for discussion of the Life as a “fictional biography,” as well as Corinne Jouanno, “Novelistic Lives and Historical Biographies: The Life of Aesop and the Alexander Romance as Fringe Novels,” in Fiction on the Fringe (33-48), who discusses similarities between Life and the Alexander Romance.

151 that purport to describe the life of the same individual: Plutarch’s Life of Alexander and the so-called Alexander Romance.25

The Two Faces of Alexander the Great

Plutarch’s Alexander has, as one might have expected, the iconic virtues associated with great men of action: courage and strategic brilliance (e.g., 6.1-5; 19.1-5;

20.1-8; 31.6-33.10) but also temperateness in his way of life, mercy toward enemies

(22.4-5; 23.1-6), and regal generosity (12.1-3; 30.1-3), though he is not without certain flaws in his character, especially in his overly passionate disposition (4.3-4), with a weakness for drink (4.3; 23.1; 38.1; 50.1-51.10; 67.4; 75.2-4), a susceptibility to flattery

(23.4) and, in his later years, a tendency toward superstition (75.1-2). Chronicling

Alexander’s life from his boyhood to his death, Plutarch strings together a variety of scenes, some from daily life, others drawn from the battlefield, aimed at demonstrating

Alexander’s character traits. Thus, the young Alexander observes an exchange between his father, Philip, and Philonicus the Thessalian over the purchase of the horse,

Bucephalus; “savage and intractable” (6.1). Bucephalus will not allow any of Philip’s attendants to mount him. A frustrated Philip dismisses the animal, but Alexander intercedes and asserts that someone possessing the appropriate skill and courage can control the horse, wagering that he is up to the task or he will forfeit the horse’s price to his father. Philip watches in amazement as Alexander, who realizes that Bucephalus is

25 Philosophers were particularly amenable to a double treatment, whereby on the one hand they might stand out for their exemplary character, while on the other they could be seen, like Socrates, as preaching against the grain of the dominant values. For a detailed survey of the topoi that characterize the lives in Diogenes Laertius, including a certain amount of charlatanism and wonder working, see Sergi Grau Guijarro, La imatge del filòsof i de l’activitat filosòfica a la Grècia antiga: anàlisi dels tòpics biogràfics presents a les Vides i doctirnes del filòsofs més il·lustres de Diògenes Laerci (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2009), esp. 251-428.

152 fearful of his own shadow, turns the horse towards the sun and masters him. The scene ends with Alexander dismounting the horse and his tearful father extolling his talents with the exclamation: “My son, seek out a kingdom equal to yourself; Macedonia has not room for you” (6.5), foreshadowing Alexander’s future greatness.

Alexander’s perceptiveness and self-control are qualities that he exemplifies later in life as well. A noteworthy illustration of his aplomb in war follows the battle of Issus.

When he learns that the mother, wife and daughters of his enemy, Darius, are among his prisoners, Alexander makes sure they know that Darius has not been slain and arranges for them to live unmolested, with allowances befitting their former status; he also allows the women to bury their war dead according to custom. Here we see Alexander’s ability to control his passions, as well as his clemency and a certain degree of compassion; as

Plutarch notes, Alexander was “more affected by their affliction than by his own success”

(21.1). Such leniency, however, would not be granted to all of Alexander’s enemies.

While in Persis, for example, he orders that the citizens be butchered (37.2) and, after the ensuing pillage, attacks an overturned statue of Xerxes as if it were alive (37.3). In another episode, he is incited by the nationalistic posturing of the Greek Thaïs to burn down Xerxes’ palace— with a garland on his head and a torch in his hand, he leads the mob (38.3-4), though he subsequently has second thoughts and gives orders that the fire be extinguished.

Plutarch makes it clear, too, that Alexander’s fondness for drink exacerbated his tendencies towards anger and impulsive action. Perhaps the most regrettable incident involved his officer and friend, Cleitus. At a drinking party, a quarrel between the two men escalates until Alexander, losing his temper, pelts Cleitus with an apple and has to

153 be physically restrained by others from attacking him with his sword. He finally runs his friend through with a spear and, feeling immediate remorse, has to be restrained once more, this time from slashing his own throat (51.1-6). He spends the rest of the night and the following day weeping and lamenting his actions (52.1-3), and only recovers from his despair with the help of Anaxarchus, a tough-talking philosopher (52.3-7).

Although Plutarch’s Alexander displays some wit here and there (e.g., 14.3, 64.1-

10), the emphasis is not on his ability to engage in clever exchanges so much as to exemplify his sagacity as a leader.26 The Alexander Romance, by contrast, presents itself not as a display of its hero’s virtues and vices but rather as an exhibition of Alexander’s canniness, his ability to turn his adversaries’ pretensions against them with a clever word or observation.27 For example, according to the Romance, Alexander was the son not of

Philip of Macedon but rather of the former king of Egypt, Nectanebo. Nectanebo is described as a magician who fled to Pella in Macedon when he perceived that the gods supported the foreign armies marching on his country (1.3). In Macedon, he seduces

Olympias, the wife of Philip. When Alexander comes of age he decides to participate in the Olympic games, and Philip takes this opportunity to divorce Olympias and marry

Cleopatra. Alexander appears at the wedding banquet and gives his father his victor’s wreath with the words, “when in turn I give my mother, Olympias, to another king, I shall

26 Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity treats Plutarch’s Lives under the heading of “ethical biography,” and he notes that in the Lives, as elsewhere in Plutarch, “moral value and usefulness take precedence over aesthetics” (277). We should be clear that, although figures like Coriolanus are subversive in the sense of undermining the state (something similar can be said of Catiline), his biography falls strictly within the civic type: he has vices that are to be avoided (an exemplum negativum); he is not a model of the weak turning the tables on the strong by virtue of their wits.

27 As Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity remarks, “Alexander is no conventional war hero, but a smart, witty, impulsive, rather contradictory figure whose success is more due to cunning and persistence than to courage or piety” (131).

154 invite you to Olympias’s wedding” (1.20).28 Lysias, the brother of Philip’s new bride

Cleopatra, in turn declares that Philip will now “have legitimate children, not the product of adultery— and they will look like you” (1.21). Alexander throws a cup at Lysias and kills him, whereupon Philip draws his sword but, as he rises, he trips over the foot of the couch. Alexander proclaims: “Here is the man eager to take over the whole of Asia and subjugate Europe to its very foundations— and you are not capable of taking a single step,” then seizes his father’s sword and wreaks havoc among the guests. Some days later, Alexander manages to reconcile his father and mother, and tells them: “Now embrace each other: there is no shame in your doing so in front of me— I was, after all, born from you” (1.22). The Macedonians are impressed by Alexander’s wiliness, and

Philip is sufficiently appeased to send his son with a large army to subdue the rebellious city of Methone, “[b]ut Alexander, on his arrival at Methone, persuaded them by clever argument to resume their allegiance” (1.23). Once again, Alexander achieves his purpose with words rather than actions.

When Alexander, in his campaign against Persia, reaches the city of Tyre, he is initially repulsed by the Tyrians. A dream warns him not to present himself at Tyre, so he sends a letter demanding that the city surrender (1.35). The Tyrians flog the messengers in order to determine which of them is Alexander, and then slay them. A second dream, involving a contrived pun on satyr (saturos), cheese (turos), and the name of the city,

Tyre, presages Alexander’s victory, and he proceeds to take the town without further ado or explanation. The Romance evinces little interest in scenes of war and courage; rather, it consistently draws attention to the role of insight and interpretation, the ability to

28 Translations are based on Ken Dowden, Death and the Maiden: Girls’ Initiation Rites in Greek Mythology (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 1989).

155 decipher or manipulate words— a technique more characteristic of the disempowered upstart than of a mighty general on the offensive.

Early in the war, Darius sends Alexander a strap, a ball, and a chest full of gold.

The accompanying letter explains that the strap is for Alexander’s chastisement, and the ball is a childish toy for him to play with. Alexander reads the letter aloud to his troops, then puts their minds at ease: “why are you upset at what Darius has written, as though his boastful letter had real power? There are some dogs too who make up for being small by barking loud, as though they could give the illusion of being powerful by their barking” (1.37). With this, he orders Darius’ messengers to be crucified, which provides the occasion for further repartee: Alexander explains that since Darius had described him as a bandit, “I am killing you as though you had come to a ruthless man, not a king.” The messengers win reprieve by affirming that he is truly a great king. Alexander then writes back to Darius, and proposes a counter-interpretation of his gifts: with the strap, he will beat the barbarians, while the ball signifies the world that Alexander will conquer (1.38).

Once more, the emphasis is on verbal and intellectual, not military skill.

When Alexander is encamped outside Persis, the seat of Darius’ empire, he has a dream that instructs him not to send a messenger but rather to go himself to Darius, dressed as the god Ammon (2.13). In this disguise, Alexander is invited in for dinner by

Darius, and at the table he stuffs all the cups that come his way in his pocket. When

Darius asks what on earth he thinks he is doing, Alexander replies: “Greatest King, this is what Alexander does when he gives a dinner for his officers and guards— he makes a present of the cups— and I thought you were like him.” The story continues: “So the

Persians were astonished and amazed at what Alexander said: for every story, if it carries

156 conviction, always has its audience enthralled” (2.15). This episode is not intended to make Alexander seem greedy but simply to illustrate his clever way with language, as the author or redactor cannot refrain from noting.

Although the Alexander Romance follows a more or less chronological arrangement, what stands out is the emphasis not on its hero’s conquests as such but his uncanny ingenuity and mastery of language. The personality of the protagonist is constituted by his wit rather than by ethical qualities, which are the core of the virtue- based biographical tradition.29 As mentioned above, a similar example is found in the extant Lives of Aesop, with Aesop in many respects representing the paragon of the witty and subversive biographical subject. Interestingly, however, some recent studies have attempted to align the more counter-cultural elements of Aesop with oral traditions from

Greek ‘popular culture’.30 This search for a “non-elite strata” of “Aesop tradition” mirrors similar approaches to the gospels that have sought early Christian oral traditions about Jesus in the gospels; this approach to Aesop, however, has been met with resistance among Classicists for reasons that are similar to those I have put forward in this study.31

Before moving on to examine the gospels as subversive biography, a review of Aesop’s contribution to the subversive paradigm, as well as the critique that follows attempts to

29 On the genre of the Alexander Romance, see also Richard Stoneman, The Greek Alexander Romance (London: Penguin, 1991), 17-23, who compares it, at least in its later redactions, with the apocryphal Acts of apostles, the Life of Aesop, and the Life of Apollonius of Tyana.

30 See, for example, the recent monograph by Leslie Kurke, Aesopic Conversations: Popular Traditions, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

31 Hayden Pelliccia, “Where Does His Wit Come From? (A review of Leslie Kurke’s Aesopic Conversations: Popular Traditions, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose), The New York Review of Books (November 8, 2012), 36-40, cit. 37.

157 seek out strains of popular Archaic culture behind it, is a useful corollary to literature about Jesus towards which scholars have taken a similar tack.

Aesop and Oral Tradition

The Life of Aesop stands as an early example of subversive biography from the

Greek tradition, along with Xenophon’s Agesilaus.32 Organized loosely around the stages of his life, Aesop’s story begins in Phrygia, with him working as a field hand, “sharp, clever and astute,” but suffering from a speech impediment.33 As a thank you for his generosity to a priest of Isis who had lost his way on the road, Aesop is granted the ability to speak “all the languages of people, and understand the songs of birds and all the signs of all the animals,” and to become “the inventor and writer” of many logoi.34 He is also able to engage people openly with his cutting wit. He recognizes that his newfound gifts are due to his piety, “charity, and love I have shown towards strangers” and, once endowed with them, he immediately begins to voice his opinions and verbally spar with those around him, beginning with admonishing an overseer who beats a slave without cause.35 In this respect, Aesop embodies some of the traditional concerns with virtue found in other lives; however, Aesop himself does not always act ethically—one case in

32 Translations for the Life of Aesop are from John Esten Keller and Louis Clark Keating’s version Aesop’s Fables: With a Life of Aesop (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), hereafter “Aesop’s Fables.” I also consulted Lloyd W. Daly, Aesop Without Morals (New York, NY: Thomas Yoseloff, 1961). These translations are based primarily on the “Vita G” (Grottaferrata) manuscript, with some additions from “Vita W” (Westermann).

33 Aesop’s Fables, 10.

34 Aesop’s Fables, 11.

35 Aesop’s Fables, 12-13.

158 point is when he beds his owner’s wife ten times in a row in exchange for a new shirt.36

In fact, the Life is laced with numerous examples of Aesop and the people he encounters behaving badly, with sexually explicit exploits and extremely violent imagery—from the severe and public beatings of slaves; to the amorous attentions Aesop receives from various women; to incest; to obtaining pig’s feet from live pigs; to Aesop, having offended the locals, being forced to throw himself off of a cliff at Delphi. Aesop acts as a foil at times for ethical behavior, but he is also as a source of what one might term ‘comic relief’. Hayden Pelliccia explains,

…stories such as these would not have been welcomed onto the classical reading lists of Victorian-era Eton; that does not mean, however, that they reflect non-elite Greco-Roman taste. Vases depicting the maniacally erect priapism of satyrs, for example, were unfailingly popular with the Greek upper classes. As for cruelty, slave-beating was a beloved staple of the comic stage. Even nonslaves could be turned to this purpose: for example, the unnamed protagonist of Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria, identified only as ‘Euripides’ kinsman,’ is literally crucified during the play’s last two hundred lines, and the shrieks he emits as he is stapled to the cross seem to have brought the audience no end of delight.37

By the time his lives are being written, Aesop was already well-known, earning mention in Herodotus and Aristophanes.38 Our first record of his logoi dates to around the late fourth century B.C.E. and it is not clear how his sayings and details of his life were passed

36 “One day Aesop lifted up his clothes and took his member in his hand so as to stimulate it. Xanthus’ wife saw him and said, ‘Aesop! What’s this?’ Aesop replied, ‘Lady, I was cold during the night, and it helps me if I hold it in my hand,’ When the woman saw how long and thick it was, her lust was roused, and she said to him, ‘Now, Aesop, if you’ll do what I want, you’ll get more pleasure than your master does.’ He replied, ‘Lady, you know that if the master finds out, what I’ll get will be too bad for me. He’ll be right to make me pay the price.’ She smiled and said, ‘If you do me ten times, I’ll give you a new shirt!’” From Life Chapter 75, cited from Pelliccia, “Where Does His Wit Come From?,” 36.

37 Pelliccia, “Where Does His Wit Come From?,” 37.

38 Aristophanes, Wasps, 1448; Herodotus 2.134, which describes Aesop as a logopoios. Also see Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, 21, 371.

159 on in the decades prior.39 Whether he ever existed is also something lost to history. But, regardless of our ability to retrieve the ‘historical Aesop’, what is clear is that the figure adopted a dual aspect in literary imagination: he was a representative of ethical actions in some measure through his observations, teachings and commentary yet, at the same time, he emerged as a subversive symbol who transgressed the norms of the dominant culture, to comedic effect.40

Aesop eventually finds himself in Samos, the house slave, again, of a philosopher named Xanthus who, humorously, proves no match for Aesop’s shrewd mind. Aesop’s wit earns him his freedom and, like Phaedo, Menippus and Epictetus, he rises from the position of slave, to honored statesman, hobnobbing with philosophers and the court of the Lydian King Croesus, who sends him on a number of diplomatic missions, including to Delphi. His death there is occasioned by the city’s collective fear that Aesop, esteemed and ever observant, would reveal to the outside world how morally corrupt their city had become. He is framed for theft, accused of impiety and sentenced to death as a common

39 See, for instance, Pelliccia, “Where Does His Wit Come From?,”: “The form of these citations does nothing to tell us if Aesop lore was circulating as written texts or only orally. The first clear evidence we have for a written collection of ‘Aesopian’ fables dates to the end of the fourth century BCE, and from that point on collecting and rewriting them becomes a busy side industry of classical culture…” (36). Also see Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, esp. 1-49.

40 Priapus is a useful comparandum for the dual model I am describing. Ralph M. Rosen and Catherine C. Keane, for instance, describe Priapus as, “a jumble of conservative and subversive ideologies. On the one hand, Priapus celebrates the enforcement of social norms. He defends private property, penetrates others, and, using brash circular logic, brans his victims as sexual deviants. He therefore seems to represent the way the traditional power structure virtually ‘stains’ marginal figures… for easy identification. On the other hand, Priapus seems to celebrate transgression against decorum when he asserts that his realm sanctions, even demands, obscene speech and action. These two qualities are combined, to comic effect, in the sexualized Roman satirist figure.” Ralph M. Rosen and Catherine C. Keane, “Greco-Roman Satirical Poetry,” in A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities, ed. Thomas K. Hubbard (Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell, 2014), 381-397, cit. 387.

160 criminal, dragged through the streets from the safe house of the Temple to Apollo.41 In the wake of his forced-suicide, Aesop received many posthumous honors— Phaedrus, for instance, tells us that Lysippos crafted a statue of Aesop, standing in front of the Seven

Sages in Athens.42 And, of course, there is the long tradition of his treatment in literature.

As is often noted, Aesop’s unjust death and posthumous admiration are biographical elements shared with the likes of Socrates and Jesus.43 Bracketing Jesus for a moment, there is another characteristic shared by Socrates and Aesop that further demonstrates their ability to simultaneously engage certain ethical principles representative of the dominant culture, but in a distinctively subversive key: their physical appearance. Both are described as particularly unappealing. Socrates is likened to a satyr or a flatfish, with a “bald head, bulging, crab- or frog-like eyes, a protruding forehead, fleshy lips” and, like Aesop, a potbelly and large mouth.44 Aesop, even more harshly, is described as deformed: “misshapen of head, snub-nosed, swarthy, dwarfish, bandy-legged, short-armed, squint-eyed, liver-lipped—a portentous monstrosity.”45 On its face, this shared, sorry depiction is unusual for a heroic subject, as heroes are usually

41 Aesop’s Fables, 47-51.

42 Phaedrus 2.9.1-4; François Lissarrague, “Aesop, Between Man and Beast: Ancient Portraits and Illustrations,” in Not the Classical Ideal: Athens and the Construction of the Other in Greek Art, ed. Beth Cohen (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 137. Some traditions claim that the Delphians also dedicated a temple to Aesop and worshipped him as a hero. See Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, 5; P. Oxy. 1800.

43 For a discussion and bibliography, see Emily R. Wilson, “Pain and Revelation: The Death of Socrates and The Death of Jesus,” in The Death of Socrates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 141-169.

44 Iōannēs-Theophanēs A. Papadēmētriou, Aesop as an Archetypal Hero (Athens: Hellenic Society for Humanistic Studies, 1997), 35.

45 Daly, Aesop Without Morals; cited from Pelliccia, “Where Does His Wit Come From?,” 36.

161 depicted as handsome and possessing impressive physiques. Pseudo-Aristotle, for instance, states that “a well-proportioned body indicates an honest, valiant, and intelligent individual, while a badly-proportioned one reveals deceitfulness.”46 A survey of Greek and Latin literature indeed bears this out— unattractive figures like Homer’s Thersites act in a base manner, while traditional heroes, like the virtuous men (and women) populating the ancient novel, are described as beautiful.47 The exception appears to be in the case of philosophers, like the Cynics, or men described as short in stature; in Aesop’s Life, for example, one character remarks in reference to Aesop: “little fellows who are short on looks are long on brains.”48 Likewise, in the Alexander Romance, Alexander stuns the

Persians with his “small stature” (1.18.9) and is challenged to a duel by a king, Poros, who judges him easy to beat on account of his size (2.15.1). And, again, Xenophon tells us that Agesilaus was similarly proportioned. Thus, such unlikely ‘heroes’ and leaders come to be recognized in this literature as possessing certain qualities on the basis of their appearance: ‘little guys’ make for powerful leaders and sharp thinkers, while ‘ugly’ characters are anticipated to be either unethical or, in some cases, to possess particularly impressive knowledge or wit. In other words, their physical form communicates something to the audience about their subversive qualities from the start.49

46 Here I am citing Papadēmētriou, who provides the Greek text. See Papadēmētriou, Aesop as an Archetypal Hero, 16, n. 17.

47 Iliad 2, 216-219.

48 Cited from Papadēmētriou, Aesop as an Archetypal Hero, 24 who, again, offers the Greek: “ta_ a)nqrwpa&ria ta_ leipo&mena th~? morfh?~ fre&nav e!xei” (19.84.12-13).

49 At another point in the Life, Aesop refers to himself as someone speaking “sensible” (phrenêrês) things, “in a cheap little body.” The same term is also found repeatedly in the Alexander Romance. See Pelliccia, “Where Does His Wit Come From?,” 37.

162 What is significant about this observation is not necessarily that this trope exists but that, along with the subversive biographical type, the physically unappealing hero develops in the literary tradition from Homer on forward. It further demonstrates, much like Athenaeus’ account of the deipnosophists, that writers were trained with certain texts, engaged with interconnected networks of literacy and played off of one another’s ideas. This is a particularly important point in the case of Aesop, given some recent studies that have attempted to attribute aspects of Aesop’s Life— such as his appearance and more outrageous actions— to earlier, oral traditions about the figure. Scholarship of this ilk claims that particular characteristics of the subversive subject should be traced back to (illiterate) Greek ‘popular culture’ and not attributed to the literary imagination of the elite writer.

Leslie Kurke’s recent Aesopic Conversations: Popular Traditions, Cultural

Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose, for instance, argues that a first-century C.E. recension of the Life of Aesop, known as “Vita G” (after the monastery, Grottagerrata, where it was once known to be housed), preserves a “wisdom tradition” about Aesop that dates to around the sixth-century B.C.E..50 By ‘wisdom tradition’, Kurke means “a native

Greek conceptualization of Hesoid, Theognis, Pythagoras, and the Seven Sages (among others) as a coherent tradition, designated as sophia… [embracing] poetic skill, practical political wisdom, and religious expertise.”51 Elsewhere in her monograph, Kurke explains that she is chiefly concerned with what she terms “ancient Greek popular culture”—the

50 The manuscript itself is from the tenth or eleventh-century. The content was dated to the first- century on the basis of philological evidence by Ben Edwin Perry in the early twentieth-century. See Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, 4.

51 Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, 95.

163 folk traditions and interests of non-elites that heretofore has only been able to be accessed

“through the finds of archaeology, nonliterary texts like papyrus documents, lead curse tablets, and funerary inscriptions.”52 Citing Peter Burke’s work on early modern Europe, she also refers to this aspect of society as the “little tradition” that was necessarily excluded from elite culture (the “great tradition”).53 In her estimation, there is a parallel track of non-elite popular thinking that developed alongside the elite ideologies exemplified by the remnants of high ancient literary culture. This distinct, non-elite track she believes marks the beginnings of later Greek prose writing. She further determines that elite culture was invested in erasing the memories of this more simplistic, rustic discourse—like the kind preserved in Vita G. This is evident, she claims, in the figure of

Aesop himself. She states, “just as Aesop himself is poor, lowly, and marginal” he represents the comparatively lowly consumer of this literature.54 Given that his Life was written in “colloquial” koinē and “highly permeable” (that is, configured in a manner similar to what I have referred to above as the ‘open text’), she suggests it is fundamentally unlike the canon of classics (e.g., Homer, Vergil) that were “treated with the greatest care and respect and transmitted in pristine form” by the ancients. Therefore, she suggests that a writing like Vita G is best understood to contain a record of certain

“long-lived popular oral traditions.”55 She illustrates this difference with another comparison to Burke: “Thus we might imagine stories about Aesop continuing to

52 Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, 3. I am not terribly sure what Kurke means here when she calls certain texts ‘nonliterary’ except to think that she means “non-elite,” given the context.

53 Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, 7-8.

54 Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, 2.

55 Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, 6-7.

164 circulate orally as ‘old wives’ tales’ or popular tales told at festivals, while the written text in turn might even be read aloud in other public contexts where different social strata mixed (like Burke’s ‘tavern’ or ‘marketplace’).”56 She also makes a comparison with the peasant folktales of prerevolutionary France, which she imagines were passed onto the literate elite from their “servants and wet nurses.”57 As such, she sees in Aesop the remnants of the folktales of the ‘little tradition’ of Greek culture, later coopted and transmitted by those with the education and means to produce writings.

Kurke’s folktale analogy is necessary precisely because she does concede, as I argued in my last chapter, that the nature of producing literature in antiquity required an elite cultural producer and certain social conditions. To use her words, “it [is] impossible to postulate an author who is not a member of an elite of wealth and education.”58 Herein lies the difficulty with the oral tradition thesis. As noted previously, Kurke turns to aspects of Aesop like his shabby appearance, vulgar speech and explicit encounters, as evidence of a set of more ‘low-brow’ or ‘little culture’ interests. This is the “wisdom tradition” of Aesop, calibrated to a less learned audience. However, her model for retrieving oral tradition and popular culture is as fraught as it is for scholars of early

Christian literature.

First of all, there is the acceptance of the Romantic model of the Author-Genius, as I discussed in Chapter 2. Beyond this critique, there is also the matter the more boorish or fantastic elements of Aesop displaying, as Hayden Pelliccia calls them, “certain

56 Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, 9.

57 Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, 9.

58 Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, 6.

165 literary pretentions.”59 Pelliccia points out, for instance, that after Aesop gains his voice,

“he is able, in spite of the rustic isolation of his previous life, to name Euripides and quote his poetry verbatim… all the more impressive if we consider that Euripides would not begin his career for another century.”60 There are other examples where Kurke attempts to align certain Greek words and phrases myopically with a less-elite Greek culture (e.g., prostatēs [prosta&thv] as a “slave overseer,” instead of as an honorific for

Apollo), as well as the examples I have provided above of literary precedents for Aesop’s unflattering physical description that need not come from a lower-class oral tradition.

None of these efforts reveal why such references must come from an oral tradition, and not an author’s own literary imagination. Moreover, Pelliccia notes that another fundamental difficulty with Kurke’s reclamation project is that our knowledge of non- elite culture is so fragmentary, that if there is evidence of the lower classes in upper-class writings, we may not even know that we are looking at it.61 Futhermore, with Aesop’s supposedly ‘little tradition’ references grounded in strong ‘great tradition’ literary parallels or precedent, it would seem that the author of Aesop is not so much reliant on some oral stories about the figure, rather “exuberant if heavy-handed plundering of the literary tradition is more his stock-and-trade.”62 This literary ‘plundering’ would also go a long way in accounting for the somewhat fluid or open structure or organization of the text itself.

59 Pelliccia, “Where Does His Wit Come From?,” 37.

60 Pelliccia, “Where Does His Wit Come From?,” 37.

61 Pelliccia, “Where Does His Wit Come From?,” 37.

62 Pelliccia, “Where Does His Wit Come From?,” 37.

166 As I mentioned above, critiques of Kurke’s work are compelling comparanda, given that a similar approach to the ‘oral traditions’ of the ‘primitive Christians’ has been employed in scholarship on literature about Jesus so often. Kurke claims that one of the difficulties in studying Aesop’s Life is that it has long been segregated or “in quarantine” from comparison with the traditional canon of classical literature, which is a fate some might argue is shared by the Synoptic gospels and Q.63 Of course, unlike Aesop, Jesus fails to deliver Euripidean speeches; his teachings, however, appear to engage certain lines of ancient philosophical thought including, as mentioned in the first chapter,

Stoicism.64 Accounts of his life also share many of the subversive elements that I have rehearsed thus far in this chapter. As such, more than a sui generis category of literature, first-century literature about Jesus can be situated coherently within the trajectory of the subversive biographical tradition.

63 Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, 5.

64 Erin Roberts, Anger, Emotion, and Desire in the Gospel of Matthew (Ph.D. Dissertation; Brown University, 2010); Stanley Stowers, “Jesus as Teacher and Stoic Ethics in the Gospel of Matthew,” in Stoicism in Early Chrsitanity, ed. Ismo Dundenberg, Troels Engberg-Pedersen and Tuomus Rasimus (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010). Also see Abraham J. Malherbe, “Hellenistic Moralists and the New Testament,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt [ANRW] II.26.1, 267-333. If the gospel writers were indebted to Paul’s letters as source material, then a further argument could be made for the presence of philosophical lines of thought (e.g., so- called Middle Platonism). See, for example, Abraham J. Malherbe, “‘Gentle as a Nurse’: The Lyric Background to I Thessalonians ii,” Novum Testamentum 12 (1970), 203-217; Abraham J. Malherbe, Paul and the Thessalonians: The Philosophic Tradition of Pastoral Care (Mifflintown, PA: Sigler, 1987); Abraham J. Malherbe, Paul and the Popular Philosophers (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989); Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (Edinburgh: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000); Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology of the Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

167 The Gospels as Subversive Biography

Odd as it may seem to subsume the Alexander Romance, the Life of Aesop and the gospels under the same genre, these narratives of Jesus’ deeds and sayings may be seen as pertaining to the same biographical tradition. Like Socrates or Aesop, Jesus is at the margins of society, powerless in relation to the state. In his encounters with Pharisees or other interlocutors, he wins his victories by means of his astute wits and his ability to turn the words of his opponents against them— in this, resembling Alexander when he finds himself in the palace of Darius, alone and defenseless. Although we are not given a description of his physical appearance, he is nonetheless depicted as an underdog from a lower class of society and of few means. He is followed by fisherman and teaches and interacts with other ‘commoners’. He is baptized by John, who lives as a Cynic-like recluse in the desert and wears “camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist”

(Matthew 3:4), eating nothing but locusts and honey. And, as mentioned previously,

Jesus comes to an untimely end, accused of impiety and publically executed.

Yet scholars have often resisted comparing the gospels and Q with the tradition of ancient biography. Adela Yarbro Collins, for instance, challenges the status of the Gospel of Mark as biography, preferring to read it as a version of historical narrative. As Collins notes, comparisons between Mark and such works as the Life of Aesop or the Life of

Homer have been drawn on the basis of their literary style as well as their structure, and in particular their chronological organization.65 She also cites Vernon Robbins’

65 Adela Yarbro Collins, Is Mark’s Gospel a Life of Jesus?: The Question of Genre (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1992), 20, citing David Aune, The New Testament in its Literary Environment (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1987), 57. Richard I. Pervo, “A Nihilist Fabula: Introducing the Life of Aesop,” in Ancient Fiction and Christian Narrative, ed. Ronald F. Hock, et al. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 81-82 proposes to read Aesop “as a gospel,” classifying it

168 hypothesis that “the author of Mark conflated Jewish prophetic traditions about teachers, such as Socrates in Greco-Roman culture.”66 Collins objects, however, that “the argument that these similarities mean that Mark and the Memorabilia of Xenophon belong to the same genre is not compelling,” on the grounds that “similarities in form do not outweigh differences in content.” More particularly, Jesus is “introduced as an exorcist,” with the ability to cast out demons, something absent in the Socratic tradition; Collins suggests that in this respect “he is more like Empedocles than Socrates.”67 Collins also questions

“whether the main purpose of the work is to depict the essence or character of Jesus

Christ” and “to present Jesus as a model, to indicate who possesses the true tradition”— this is, the function of “didactic biographies,” like Philo’s On the Life of Moses— “or to synthesize the various literary forms taken by the tradition about Jesus and their theologies.”68 It is by this process of elimination that Collins concludes that Mark is rather a species of history, with the closest analogy being a monograph like Sallust’s

Conspiracy of Catiline.

However, although Jesus’ message is obviously different from that of Socrates, both run counter to the prevailing ideology, and are delivered from a position of relative weakness, at least in temporal terms. Jesus’ wonderworking or miracles, like his gift for parables and subtle sayings, are precisely the weapons of choice in such a case. In this tradition, the moral excellence of the biographical subject is assumed, but it is not as a novel with some possibly historical features and akin to the “popular narratives” concerning Alexander, Apollonius of Tyana, Jesus, the apostles, Daniel, Mordecai and Tobit.

66 Collins, Is Mark’s Gospel a Life of Jesus?, 22, citing Vernon K. Robbins, Jesus the Teacher: A Socio-Rhetorical Interpretation of Mark (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 53.

67 Collins, Is Mark’s Gospel a Life of Jesus?, 22.

68 Collins, Is Mark’s Gospel a Life of Jesus?, 25-27.

169 illustrated by an enumeration of the classical virtues, as in the civic type, which seeks by this means to delineate character. The focus is rather on how the protagonist demonstrates his superiority in spite of his humble or precarious position (the Alexander Romance contrives to place its subject in the latter situation). Moreover, what links Xenophon’s

Memorabilia and the gospels as biographical narratives are the way the subjects of both challenge conventional values and the character traits that underpin them. In these respects, the gospels are situated in conversation with the literary tradition of biography, demonstrating that certain details of Jesus’ life may have been the product of an author’s engagement with an established genre of writing lives, and not necessarily the reflection of an ‘oral tradition’.

Yet, the question still stands: to what degree are these bioi the creative activity of an author and to what degree are these authors obtaining their information about these figures from elsewhere? Unfortunately, beyond with we can assess in terms of literary borrowings from other pieces of literature, we have no way of knowing with absolute certainty. However, what we do know is that these biographies, whether full and cohesive narratives, or more representative of the ‘open text’ tradition, are the products of creative literary activity. This also holds for other forms of literature that purport to represent a particular figure or figures, their lives or their thought in some manner—for instance, pseudepigrapha, chreiai and so on.69 It is conceivable that this literature may hold some

69 At a future stage I would like to delve further into the various categories of literature produced about or in imitation of various high profile, ancient figures. One area I would like to consider in particular is the proliferation of Pythagorean materials during the later Republic and into the early Empire. This subject was treated in some measure, albeit with different emphasis, by Wendt in her aforementioned dissertation, “At the Temple Gates.” See, for instance, 111: “efforts to recast Rome as a city akin to Alexandria and other notable cultural centers provided a stimulus to would-be cultural authorities of all stripes, especially ones skilled in textual practices. It is in this vein that Cicero complains of Italy’s saturation with Epicurean writings, which were rivaled only

170 thread of ‘oral tradition’; however, as Pelliccia cautions about Aesop, how would we know that we are looking at it?70 Given what we know about the training involved in producing a piece of writing in antiquity, it stands to reason that our first line of inquiry when approaching an ancient text should be to consider the ways in which it is engaging various literary conventions, precedents and on-going conversations—subversive biography among them.

It is with this position in mind that I now turn to Q. As discussed to this point, Q stands outside of other first-century literature about Jesus in some measure because it is imagined to be a ‘sayings-source’— a literary form akin to chreiai, used by Matthew and

Luke to help them construct their narratives about Jesus. Some scholars also have speculated that Q preserves certain oral traditions about Jesus’ teachings, its non- narrative form signifying a more simplistic and less sophisticated channel of transmission. As with the search for an oral tradition behind the Life of Aesop, I judge that this hypothesis is difficult to maintain. Even if one were to accept the premise that Q was a ‘sayings-source’, again, this would also be a form of literature that would still take skill and a specialist’s knowledge to produce. Moreover, although reconstructed on the basis of abbreviated portions of Matthew and Luke, Q retains enough details about Jesus, as well as John the Baptist, through their respective teachings, that they too fit the model

by the brisk trade in Pythagorean documents at Rome proper. Indeed, King Juba II of Maurentania, an avid student of Pythagorean teachings, was known to travel to Rome to acquire new writings of ‘Pythagoras’ from the vast literature in circulation there.” Wendt’s dissertation is focused on the activities of what she terms ‘religious specialists’ or ‘religious entrepreneurs’ and not principally on the activities of writers, although they are referenced in this quote. An expansion of my project would include a closer examination of what we know about literary networks and the production and exchange of texts in places like Rome and Alexandria.

70 Pelliccia, “Where Does His Wit Come From?,” 37.

171 of subversive biography. Namely, both figures are presented as Judean teacher-types, offering teachings or ‘sayings’ that, among other things, subvert certain elements of the dominant culture and power structure. One of these elements is Judean culture and religion, as symbolized by the Temple. Interestingly, references to the Temple in Q have long been associated with later additions or redactions to Q. However, if we reexamine Q and the figures it presents through the lens of subversive biography, I suggest that the writing might be better understood as an account of the teachings and lives of two Judean figures for whom the Temple, and its associated dominant religious and cultural system, was not central.

172

CHAPTER 5 REDESCRIBING Q

In the last chapter, I offered a close reading of two strains of Greco-Roman biographical tradition, situating first-century writings about Jesus within a category I termed ‘subversive biography’. The aim of that chapter was to demonstrate how the gospels and Q could be evaluated within a recognizable field of ancient literature, without presuming that they were written by or represent the holdings of religious communities.

Correspondingly, I challenged the notion that the gospels are a sui generis form of literature, undermining a Romantic tradition that has viewed these writings as exceptional in their milieu. This chapter’s treatment of Q will make clear that the accounts of Jesus and John the Baptist fit the model of similar figures in the subversive biographical tradition and, likewise, that Q might be considered a form of subversive biography, focused on the teachings of the related, subversive figures.

As with the previous chapter, my aim is to approach Q as a piece of ancient writing produced in a manner customary for its first-century Mediterranean context. Q is a particularly compelling object of study because its treatment by scholars manifests many of the issues discussed throughout this project: acceptance of the Big Bang myth of

Christian origins, an ahistorical Romantic framing of the social world of the first-century and an approach to literature about Jesus that unduly views it as an unique or unprecedented kind of literature. For example, much thinking about Q has emphasized

! 173! that it reflects the ‘oral traditions’ of the early Christians. Fractured strands of teachings and sayings are sometimes even bundled by scholars into discrete thematic units (e.g., wisdom sayings, eschatological sayings) that are subsequently linked with similarly distinct, imagined communities of Jesus followers. Scholarship on Q that follows along these lines exemplifies the strong desire by many in the field to establish continuity between Christian literature like Q and the Synoptic gospels and an ‘authentic’ or

‘primitive’ Christian past and, concomitantly, early Christian groups or communities.1

As discussed in Chapter 2, such methods frequently betray an inheritance from certain theological positions or lines of thought that grew to understand “Geist-filled literature [like the Hebrew Bible]… not [as] the rational manufacture of authors” but expressions of folk speech that “grew organically from people, cultures and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 The approach to Q that I describe here—namely, one that divides the ‘text’ into discrete, thematic sayings, associated with various communities— is by no means the majority opinion on Q. It is particular to a handful of ‘schools’; for instance, scholars at or trained at Toronto, Claremont and Harvard. That said, it could be argued that scholarship produced from these venues has largely dominated discussion of Q over the last several decades (e.g., John S. Kloppenborg and his students) and, therefore, represent an approach that more or less has been dominant of late. See, for example, the works of (represented in my bibliography): Kloppenborg, Heinz Schürmann, Julius Wellhausen, Rudolf Bultmann, James Robinson, Helmut Koester, Paul Hoffmann, David R. Catchpole, Dieter Zeller, Ulrich Luz, John Dominic Crossan, Burton Mack, Géza Vermès, Christopher Tuckett, William E. Arnal and Sarah E. Rollens.

Some exceptions to the ‘strata’ or ‘layer’ approach include those who advocate for Matthean or Markan priority and, therefore, argue that Q does not exist. See, for example, Albert Schweitzer, E. P. Sanders, Mark Goodacre. Among those who propose alternative genre for Q (e.g., in the style of Cynic biography, an adapted life of John the Baptist) and are either agnostic on ‘strata’ or do not address the issue directly, see: F. Gerald Downing and Clare Rothschild.

Also see Bartosz Adamczewski, who proposes that the Synoptics are dependent on the letters of Paul and that the Q hypothesis is an invention of nineteenth-century Romantic thought. Bartosz Adamczewski, Q or not Q? The So-Called Triple, Double, and Single Traditions in the Synoptic Gospels (Berlin; New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010). In many respects, Adamczewski follows the thinking of Gustav Volkmar, who held that the life of Jesus as narrated in the gospels in fact follows the life of Paul. See Gustav Volkmar, Jesus Nazarenus und die christliche Zeit mit den beiden ersten Erzählern (Zürich: Caesar Schmidt, 1882). !

! 174! communities.”2 Later Form and Redaction Criticism took the substance of this view and developed a highly complex methodology championing the twin assertions that we can trace texts like the Synoptics back to their oral roots, and that these literary creations can reveal specific information about the historical people who are judged to have produced them—that is, Christian communities or “churches.” The embrace of the “community- writer” (or Author-Genius) model of authorship still dominates studies of this literature, yet the appropriateness of the approach goes largely unjustified. It is rarely entertained that other kinds of social environments for these authors are possible, such as the networks of elite cultural producers discussed in this study.3 In addition, these schools of thought have often reproduced and reinforced categories of practice and analysis, like

‘community’ or ‘tradition’, that are devoid of explanatory force.

Given its role as the presumptive wellspring of information on the teachings of the historical Jesus for Matthew and Luke (and, sometimes it is argued, Mark), Q also uniquely emblemizes the Big Bang in that it is frequently attributed to not one, but multiple authors or redactors. Again, in some circumstances, multiple groups are also sought in the text. Among those who seek the development of a Q ‘community’ or

‘communities’, Q is viewed as a collection of sayings produced by Christians or proto-

Christians who were curiously myopic in the concerns they chose to express (i.e. the community that produced material on prayer instruction, like the Sermon on the Mount, did not deviate from providing only prayer instruction; sectarians convinced that the end !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2 Stanley K. Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’ and the History of Early Christianity,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011), 238-256, cit. 239.

3 As discussed elsewhere in this study, the notable exception is Luke-Acts. Scholars have openly contended with the tension between wanting to ascribe a community, yet recognizing that the text strongly mirrors the Hellenistic novel or travelogues usually attributed to lone authors. Also see Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’,” 240.

! 175! times were upon humanity, produced sayings that took an apocalyptic tone and little else). This interpretive understanding demonstrates, among other things, an uncritical acceptance of Christianity’s own manufactured myths of origins— namely, that early

Christianity was relatively cohesive and widespread.

At times, scholars who have advocated for the stratification of Q have also attempted to date these ‘layers’ ever more ‘early’ until, in some circles, one can reach the disciples pondering their fate in the immediate aftermath of crucifixion. These evaluative procedures have had little to do with establishing a comprehensive approach to the hypothesized content of Q, and more to do with justifying the conviction that we can locate the oral foundations of Christianity and, likewise, put a lens to the minds and practices of the earliest Christians. Armed with a more comprehensive understanding of our inheritance from Romanticism, Form and Redaction Criticism and functionalism, it is clear that Q requires new models of analysis.

This chapter begins with a critical analysis of three recurring assumptions about

Q: that it is a document that is self-evidently Christian; that it possesses compositional strata and; that from these strata one can cull information about the so-called

‘communities’ that produced them. To be clear, while these assumptions do not represent the most widely held views about Q in the field of early Christian studies writ large, they are nonetheless representative of a dominant school of thought that has been highly influential among Q scholars in recent decades.4 As such, I judge that this specific, and prominent, trend in Q scholarship requires reconsideration.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 See n. 1 above. !

! 176! Following a review of the relevant scholarship, I then offer a critical reevaluation of the composition of Q.5 As discussed in the last chapter, we have no way of knowing for certain whether the author of Q had a source of some kind, or whether the material is a product of the author’s imagination. We also cannot be sure that the version of Q that has been reconstructed by scholars is comprehensive. But what do know is that, whether a sayings-source or a more structured narrative, Q is the product of specialized literary activity. In an effort to imagine more a plausible historical and social background for Q, I suggest that the writing depicts subversive, Judean ‘hero’ figures as an alternative to the dominant Temple system. Among the options for why such a creative exercise may have been necessary is to fill the vacuum left in the wake of the War and Temple destruction.

While less traumatic scenarios are also possible, through the tenor of their teachings, both

Jesus and John the Baptist arguably exemplify what Jonathan Z. Smith refers to as

‘heroes-that-succeeded’— that is, figures who managed to recognize and remain outside of the confines of an ill-fated, dominant social order.6 Therefore, in this chapter, I consider whether material on Jesus’ (and John the Baptist’s) teachings and biographical details may be the product of a post-70 C.E. reimagining of a new cosmic order after the destruction of the Temple.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 5 The numbering system for Q is taken from The Sayings Gospel Q in Greek and English With Parallels from the Gospels of Mark and Thomas, ed. James M. Robinson, Paul Hoffmann and John S. Kloppenborg (The International Q Project; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002). Translations are based on the Greek provided by the critical edition and are my own, unless otherwise noted.

6 Jonathan Z. Smith, Map is Not Territory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993 [1978]), 139. !

! 177! Interpretive Assumptions in Q Scholarship

John Kloppenborg begins his 2000 monograph Excavating Q by drawing a rather grand analogy between the “discovery” of Q and Karl Schwarzschild’s 1916 theoretical discovery of what we now call “black holes.”7 Kloppenborg muses: “The idea of a black hole…turned out to have much broader theoretical implications for cosmology, cosmic history, and the geometry of space. In a similar way, [Q] brought with it the need to rethink the history and character of the early Jesus movement and to redraw its theological, textual, and social map…[and] the understandings of gospel origins.”8 For

Kloppenborg and others informed by the redaction movement of the mid-twentieth century, revisiting the Q hypothesis ushered in a new wave of scholarship which sought to attend to a seemingly newfound “distinctiveness” and “difference” within the presumed “unity and concord” of the early Jesus movement.9 Unlike the canonical gospels, the ‘tradition’ manifested by Q was thought to testify to a group or community

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 7 John S. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 1-2. My focus on Kloppenborg in this chapter is aimed at illustrating the kind of language that is typically used to talk about Q among interested scholars. While there are other lines of thought within the study of Q, the Toronto School, of which Kloppenborg is the most preeminent scholar, is the most dominant in the field.

8 Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, 1-2.

9 Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, 2. Alan K. Kirk summarizes the role of Form Criticism and redaction theory in twentieth-century Q scholarship well: “The inchoate, accretional growth of traditions posited by this approach made it inevitable that frequently the redaction history of Q would be tacitly or openly equated with tradition history. Correspondingly, it entailed that reconstruction of that history would depend on the analytical virtuosity of individual scholars aided by whatever social and theological histories of early Christianity might be apposite for retracing Q’s formative trajectory. Because this approach by its nature has difficulties formulating consistent criteria which might arbitrate in cases of conflicting results, analysis of Q… has produced a number of redaction histories difficult to reconcile with one another.” Alan K. Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source: Genre, Synchrony, and Wisdom Redaction in Q (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 1. With Kirk’s criticism in mind, the ‘distinctiveness’ and ‘difference’ that Kloppenborg proposes may in fact reflect differences between individual scholars and scholarly approaches more so than what is self-evident in Q.

! 178! wholly uninterested in the soteriology of Jesus’ death, of a deuteronomistic stripe and privileging “sayings rather than wondrous deeds.”10 Scholars chiefly concerned with studies of the so-called historical Jesus in particular, set the goal of determining “the literary evolution of Q as a document of primitive Christianity” by analyzing perceived compositional layers of Q.11 Paul Wernle and Adolf von Harnack, for instance, declared the earliest layers of Q “the free, almost revolutionary Gospel of Jesus himself” as recorded in “blocks of sayings.”12 Thus, while one might argue that Kloppenborg’s black hole analogy is somewhat amusing given the scale of Schwarzschild’s discovery, the perceived impact of Q’s so-called ‘discovery’ was nonetheless as significant for those seeking some potential evidence, however minor, of the sayings, concerns—and perhaps even writing and social practices—of what some consider earliest Christianity.

Even in the very brief descriptive account of Q scholarship above, a number of assumptions are evident which are typical of Q studies more broadly and would benefit from further scrutiny.13 The first and perhaps most obvious assumption is that Q is representative of something that is specifically and self-consciously Christian. As

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 10 Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, 2.

11 John S. Kloppenborg, Q Parallels: Synopsis, Critical Notes & Concordance (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1988), xv. The majority of sources date Q to around 50-60 C.E., to be discussed.

12 John S. Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1987), 12-13. Helmut Koester, for instance, claims: “The most obvious signs of a secondary redaction of Q can be found in the apocalyptic announcement of judgment and of the coming of the ‘Son of Man’ which conflicts with the emphasis upon the presence of the kingdom in wisdom sayings and prophetic announcements.” Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, 135.

13 I will not be addressing the issue of Q’s ‘hypothetical’ nature in detail in this project. I take for granted that both Matthew and Luke used a document of some kind; however, the nature of my proposal does not demand that this document be significantly ‘earlier’ than these other writings, among a number of other assumptions that attend Q, as I will discuss.

! 179! William Arnal states in his piece, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’ and the

Second-Century Invention of Christianity,” the issue with making such an assumption “is not merely one of nomenclature, but one of fundamental conception: in referring to texts like the letters of Paul, or Q, or the Synoptic Gospels as ‘Christian,’ we are making covert or at least unargued assertions both about these documents themselves, and about the nature of their relationships to one another and to subsequent socio-cultural formations.”14 This is to say that writings that have been circumscribed as representative of the Christian tradition do not, or should not, again, to quote Arnal, “imply some sort of unity of conception or agenda behind them”; they do not naturally relate as cohesive documents that possess unifying and taken for granted “core commitments and convictions.”15 Similarly, they should not be assumed to represent a broad yet cohesive social movement or formation. I would add to Arnal’s claim that, in the case of Q, the question of its inherently Christian character—that is, whether it perhaps derives from

Jesus and/or his followers—is particularly problematic given a number of factors, among them its “pronounced Baptist Tendenz.”16 With this is mind, if one suspends an

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 14 William E. Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’ and the Second-Century Invention of Christianity” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23/3 (2011), 193-215, cit. 194. Arnal, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, is a student of Kloppenborg and represents the tradition of Q scholarship coming out of the Toronto School.

15 Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’,” 194.

16 Clare K. Rothschild, Baptist Traditions and Q (WUNT; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 6. Also see Wilhelm Bussmann, “Synoptische Studien 2: Zur Redenquelle,” in DLZ 53 ([1929]; 1932) who proposes that Q adopts a Greek document “T” (for “Täufer” or “Baptist”) written by Baptist disciples. Koester counters this observation by claiming that later “Christian additions” to Q “[diminish] John’s status” – for example, Q 7:28a “I tell you: There has not arisen among those born of women (e)n gennhtoi~v gunaikw~n) anyone who is greater (mei&zwn) than John…” is presumably softened by the ‘Christian’ addition of Q 7:28b “Yet the least (mikro&terov) significant in God’s kingdom is greater (mei&zwn) than he is.” Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, 139. Also see Risto Uro, “Apocalyptic Symbolism and Social Identity in Q,” 67-118; Risto Uro, “John the Baptist and the Jesus Movement: What Does Q Tell us?” in The Gospel Behind the

! 180! examination of Q centered purely on establishing and analyzing its Christian genus, a number of interesting possibilities for other literary formations opens up. For example, given the weight attributed to John the Baptist (John the Baptist) in Q, coupled with its relative lack of explicit references to the messianic nature of Jesus, perhaps it was a document focused on the teaching activities of exemplary Judean thinkers.17 Some other

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Gospels: Current Studies on Q, ed. Ronald Allen Piper (NovTSup 75; New York, NY: Brill, 1995), 231-274.

Interestingly, Koester still maintains that the “preaching of John the Baptist” was an “initial section” of Q but that the “context in which they originally appeared” can no longer be retrieved. By “initial section” I take him to mean one of the earliest layers of the Q source; however, Koester’s clever denial of the historical context of these sayings absolves him from any implicit association with Bussmann’s “T” hypothesis. Note that a lack of knowledge of the historical context of the so-called Christian elements of Q does not prevent Koester (or Rudolf Bultmann before him) from postulating a Christian Q community and redactor. It is not clear why seemingly John focused passages should be exempt from the same theoretical treatment as other thematic portions of Q from those in favor of the multiple-redaction approach in this case, save the scholar’s personal theological commitments or assumptions. From my own conversations with Koester on this subject, he rejects the Baptist disciple theory in its entirety and considers Rothschild’s proposition absurd.

Also see Uro, “John the Baptist and the Jesus Movement,” 239 which highlights the substance of this issue with the question: “Why was a collection of Jesus’ sayings introduced by a collection of John’s sayings?” and proceeds to attempt to justify the presence of a number of thematic associations with John the Baptist throughout Q. In my view one could also convincingly argue that some of the logia traditionally attributed to Jesus could just as easily belong to John the Baptist. For instance, a particularly troubling passage for scholars has been Q 7:22-35 in which Jesus addresses John’s disciples and which also contains a collection of “miscellaneous sayings of different origins” that are not easily attributed to either figure. Uro notes: “one gets the impression that John’s authority as a true prophet is largely accepted among the readers and it has been used to support the authority of Jesus as an even more powerful figure” on the merits of Q 3.16b-17 (“I baptize you with water (u#dati bapti&zw), but the one to come after me is stronger (i)sxuro&tero&v) than I…”), a passage which remains contested in some circles and, otherwise, does not reference Jesus specifically. It is not clear that the ‘Coming One’ is in fact a messianic title before it is used in later Christian contexts. Uro, for instance, argues that it is a literary device in the text simply indicating that we are at the beginning of the document. Similarly, another assumption by Q scholars is that the references to the ‘Son of Man’ in Q correlate to specific claims to a messianic figure— namely Jesus. See Uro, “John the Baptist and the Jesus Movement,” 240-242.

17 The balance of the shared sayings which constitute Q tend not to present Jesus as a messianic figure or ‘Son of God’ in an explicit fashion. Again, Q 3:16b-17 is often cited as a reference to Jesus (see n. 13 above), however Jesus is not named and this reading may be inspired by its later incarnations in the Synoptics. The baptism of Jesus in Q 3:21b-22 is highly fabricated with only a

! 181! alternative literary formations could include chreiae or sententiae or, perhaps, the kind of loosely connected teachings found in bios like Lucian’s Demonax, to name a few possibilities.18

The second assumption among some is that constitutive ‘layers’ of Q can be peeled back to reveal earlier (that is, pre-70) content considered more originary to Jesus, his followers and/or some ancient Christian community. This position stands in contrast to the possibility that Q as a whole is simply a composition written during or after the events surrounding the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., or perhaps even some other traumatic conditions associated with that event.19 As Kloppenborg notes in Excavating Q,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! handful of general words shared by the Matthew and Luke ()Ihsou~ Baptisqe&ntov, pneu~ma, ni(o&v) and is often bracketed as questionable (e.g., Uro, “John the Baptist and the Jesus Movement” excludes it entirely). The temptation of Jesus (Q 4:1-4, 9-12, 5-8, 13) does reference Jesus as “God’s son” (Q 3:4) but, again, this terminology is ambiguous. Counter arguments to this position include the presumption of the Christian nature of the document precluding any other presentation or compositional aim; that many elements in Q (e.g., what are commonly referred to as the “mission” pericopes) are “widely attested, both in the Gospel of Thomas and elsewhere” and indicate that they “must have existed independently, in oral or written form, prior to the composition of Q” within professed Christian circles; and the impression that John the Baptist remains a lesser focus in Q than Jesus and, therefore, the primary object of the document is an account of the life of the messianic ‘Son of Man’. See Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, 141. Ultimately, it is not clear that all of the teachings in Q are from Jesus alone as neither figure is explicitly named, nor is it clear that ‘Son of Man’ was a title for Jesus. Of course, the nature of a reconstruction project like Q makes at least some ambiguity inevitable. That said, my concerns regarding the issues that attend presuming the Christian character of a text still stand—including the question of whether we need assume that more of these so-called theological narratives were present in the text.

18 Kirk, for instance, compares Q to Egyptian, Greco-Roman and Hellenistic-Jewish instructional speeches (e.g., Ptahotep, Amenemope, Pseudo-Phocylides, Syriac Menander) as well as the Golden Verses of Pythagoras and the Sentences of Sextus. See Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source, esp. 87-150, 273-289.

19 It is worth noting that, in the past, traditional form-critical approaches to the canonical gospels often deemed them, as Richard A. Burridge describes, “a collection of individual pericopae, separated or ‘cut off’ (periko&ptw) from their contexts, strung together like beads on a string with little overall coherence.” Richard A. Burridge, “Reading the Gospels as Biography,” in The Limits of Ancient Biography, ed. Brian McGing and Judith Mossman (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2006), 31-49, cit. 35.

! 182! scholars have long been divided on the issue of Q’s dating; however, dates as early as the

20 late 30s C.E. to, more usually, 50/60 C.E. have been regularly proposed on the basis of

Q’s supposed failure to adequately “[announce]…the Temple’s ruin or abandonment and the relative absence of overt signs of imminent war,”21 despite passages like Q 13.34-35

(“Jerusalem, Jerusalem…Behold, your house is forsaken!”) which are generally attributed to later additions to Q of a more apocalyptic or eschatological character.22 Of note, the proposal that there are later, ‘end-time’ elements added to the Q document has roots not only in the question of dating, but also in the debate over the apocalyptic and

‘political’ interests of Jesus and his early followers.23 This long-standing debate—was

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 20 See Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, 82 in which he reviews the work of Gerd Theissen who dates Q shortly after 40 C.E. on the basis of the story of Jesus’ temptation in Q 4.1-13 as a response to Caligula’s “attack on Jewish monotheism.”

21 Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, 87. It should be noted that scholars have also looked to a pre-70 date for Q is because it is generally presumed that if it was used by Matthew, it had to have been ‘in circulation’ at least a generation before the Judean War. I have not found a source that gives a sufficient explanation for why this time frame must be the case, particularly given what we know about literary networks as discussed in Chapter 3. Oddly, perceived parallels between the Gospel of Thomas and the first letter of Clement (namely, wisdom and prophetic sayings) have also been cited as a rationale for dating Q to before the war, despite the fact that Thomas and Clement are routinely dated to the late first- and early second-centuries. See Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, 137.

22 Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, 87. Another justification Kloppenborg raises for dating Q to around 50 concerns Q’s ‘silence’ on the matter of Jesus’ resurrection: “Under what conditions would such a silence be intelligible?.. Since in real letters… one normally does not discuss matters of common knowledge but only issues that are new or under dispute, it is likely that Paul’s use of Christ’s resurrection as an analogy for the resurrection of the believer in 1 Corinthians 15 was a ‘new’ issue in the 50s [the approximate date of that letter]… Hence… the terminus ad quem for Q was ca. 50 C.E.; every year after that, Q’s silence about Jesus’ resurrection would be increasingly difficult to explain.” I caution that the absence of a concern for the resurrection in Q is not necessarily in itself data.

23 I use both terms here recognizing that scholars define ‘apocalyptic’ differently in these debates. Crossan, Mack and Vermès, for instance, emphasize that the term signals an imminent eschatology and is not inherently ‘political’. Scholars like E.P. Sanders, Paula Fredriksen and Richard A. Horsley, by contrast, connect the concept of apocalypticism to social and historical tensions. Fredriksen explains: “the nature of the apocalyptic is political… Its message of an impending new order at least implies a condemnation of the present one.” Paula Fredriksen, From

! 183! Jesus apocalyptic or not—is significant in that it often corresponds to different approaches to Q. Because Q is a hypothetical document, it has allowed an inordinate amount of flexibility for scholars to construct claims about its composition to fit their preferred paradigm. That is, if one believes the earliest Christians or the historical Jesus were not apocalyptic, any language that appears to signal an end-time scenario can be attributed to a later ‘redactor’.24 However, not all scholars have accepted the premise that the so-called ‘layers’ of Q have such clearly defined boundaries, or that attempting to delineate Q’s stages of development or editorial ‘stitchery’ is even a fruitful endeavor.

Elisabeth Sevenich-Bax, for instance, maintains that “Die Endgestalt eines Textes die Entwicklungsphasen seiner Teile immer schon umfaßt” and, therefore, tradition- redaction readings of Q have failed to account for the acceptance and strategic incorporation of previous strata by later editors.25 Building on the notion that Q was

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 124-125. Also see Edith M. Humphrey, “Will the Reader Understand? Apocalypse as Veil or Vision in Recent Historical-Jesus Research,” in Whose Historical Jesus?, ed. William E. Arnal and Michael Robert Desjardins (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997), 215-237. For the work of other scholars in this note, please see the bibliography.

24 The divisive ‘apocalyptic’ or ‘not apocalyptic’ debate in the field is complex and involves a detailed history of scholarship that is beyond the scope of this present study. A future version of this project will include more on this issue. See Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 132-133.

25 Elisabeth Sevenich-Bax, Israels Konfrontation mit den letzten Boten der Weisheit: Form, Funktion und Interdependenz der Weisheitselemente in der Logienquelle (Altenberge: Orlos, 1993), 20; Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source, 63. Notably Dieter Lührmann’s highly influential 1968 Habilitationsschrift, Studien zur Redaktion und weiteren Überlieferung der Logienquelle argues along similar lines. Lührmann proposes that Q was compiled by a (post-War) redactor and he was the first to reflect upon the possibility that Q possessed a certain inherent logic and was not merely an aggregate of disparate logia. However, he also maintained the notion that the implied previous stages of the source were “zusammengewachsen” by discrete, primitive Christian communities. He also failed to make comparisons with other kinds of ancient literature, save a few broad allusions to Judaism. Therefore, although his contribution marked a positive sea change in Q studies, his insistence that Q was compositionally ‘primitive’ nonetheless preserved

! 184! intended to be read as a cohesive document, Alan Kirk has similarly rallied against the lack of “literary-critical controls” in Q scholarship and proposes that Q’s compositional structure closely resembles that of ancient instructional speeches with identifiable compositional conventions.26 These projects have largely focused on reconfiguring the traditional strata in such a way that they demonstrate intentional editorial juxtapositions and/or that larger thematic typologies are plausible and can subsume seemingly disparate clusters of sayings (wisdom sayings, eschatological material, etc.) under a single umbrella (‘macro-composition’).27 However, while such readings are beneficial for establishing a new set of criteria by which we can begin to reevaluate critical approaches and methods with a view towards Q’s composition, the majority of these projects have !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the tradition-formation approach. See Dieter Lührmann, Die Redaktion der Logienquelle (WMANT; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Verlag, 1969).

26 Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source, 65.

27 Although I will also be speaking at times in terms of ‘macro-composition’, this is not to suggest that I necessarily view Q as some sort of continuous narrative in the sense of, say, the modern novel. As I have argued, it is quite possible (perhaps even probable) that Q may have followed the conventions of other ancient episodic narratives like the Iliad, Alcman’s Partheneion, The Life of Aesop, Apollonius of Tyre, Iamblichus’ Pythagorean Life, some of Diogenes’ Lives or even the gospel of Mark. Characterized by a set of linked narrative building blocks spliced together into a cohesive story, episodic narratives possessed a certain degree of independence in terms of compositional strategy. As Whitney Shiner notes in “Creating Plot in Episodic Narratives,” the episodic format did not signal that ancient episodic narratives were not cohesive literary works. She explains, “If the reader or listener tries to make psychological sense out of the entire chain of an episodic narrative in the same way that modern readers approach modern novels, the results may be incongruous…The relative independence of episodes correlates with the understanding of character found in Greco-Roman literature…Characters were often treated in terms of moral types…A person’s character is understood through the sum of these revelatory moments…It has different conventions from modern continuous narrative, but skillfully employed it can achieve effects as dramatic or as subtle as those created in the continuous style.” Therefore, if Q were an episodic narrative, differing thematic elements (so-called wisdom saying, apocalyptic sayings, et al.) could still happily (and intentionally) coexist within a larger narrative framework without having to posit differing authors, communities, etc. See Whitney Shiner, “Creating Plot in Episodic Narrative: The Life of Aesop and the Gospel of Mark,” in Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative, ed. Ronald F. Hock, J. Bradley Chance and Judith Perkins (Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series 6; Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1998), 155-176, cit. 175-176.

! 185! been grounded in text-linguistics, Form Criticism and rhetorical analysis. Furthermore, few, if any, have taken steps to then propose what kind of social formation these evaluations of the Q text suggest, instead often reifying the notion of an attendant community of some sort behind them.28

Third is the related conclusion that Q contains various stages of composition and redaction, and that these layers each represent distinct communities of Jesus followers or redactors. This position is largely influenced by the works of Julius Wellhausen29 and

Rudolf Bultmann, the latter of whom proposed “so far as the Logia are concerned…they are a primary source from which we can reconstruct a picture of the primitive community in which the Logia arose.”30 In Bultmann’s estimation, by using form-critical techniques, one can identify “Q’s formation diachronically in terms of tradition history and corresponding community development” including the oral pre-history of the text.31

Scholars like Martin Dibelius, Heinz Schürmann and Dieter Zeller followed suit positing finer and finer stages of influence (and, concomitantly, communities or, in the case of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 28 Although not all scholars hold that redacted layers of Q correspond to defined communities, as I will discuss later in this chapter.

29 Wellhausen was an early influence on Bultmann with his proposal that Q derived from a “charismatic Jerusalem community”; however, the two seemingly part ways in regard to Wellhausen’s position that Q was a “well-integrated whole.” Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source, 4. Wellhausen explains that Q’s: “Zusammenhang ist gleichartig und wohl geordnet, kein Gemisch von unverdauten Brocken” compared to a text like Mark which he regards as a more ‘primitive’ document both in terms of content and style. Julius Wellhausen, Evangelienkommentare (Berlin; New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter, [1935] 1987), 75.

30 Rudolf Bultmann, “The New Approach to the Synoptic Problem,” Journal of Religion 6 (1926), 337-362, cit. 341.

31 Cited from Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source, 6.

! 186! very fine variations, perhaps a lone editor) and, as in the case of Kloppenborg, similarities with various ancient literary genres, such as wisdom literature.32

In my view, there are a number of shortcomings that attend this conclusion, for instance, the association (or perhaps more rightly conflation) between thematic elements and literary motifs in Q (e.g., wisdom sayings, the sinfulness of Israel, ‘instruction’, Son of Man sayings) and distinct social groups.33 Whether an author or encoded audience, these historical persons are thought to be reflected in the particular interests and leanings manifested in the ‘text’ and any subsequent claims about the beliefs of these people often simply reinforce the scholar’s initial interpretation of a given motif or passage, severely limiting proper analysis.

One catalyst for this approach, beyond an interest in culling data about the early

Jesus movement, is the sayings-source construction itself and an apparent assumption that such documents are rife with interpolations and the fingerprints of significant thematic additions, more so than other literary forms.34 However, if one does not assume that Q

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 32 See Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q; John S. Kloppenborg, Shape of Q: Signal Essays on the Sayings Gospel (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994). Later scholars like Walter Schmithals and Uro would also adopt these principles in the nascent development of theories pertaining to the layers of Q later known as Q1, Q2, Q3, et al. Kirk explains concerning the work of Uro in particular: “Like many of his predecessors, Uro uses certain theological and social-history categories to work out Q’s formative history. These include (1) a trajectory from an enthusiastic movement of early charismatics to an institutional structure, (2) application of an Israel-to-church paradigm, (3) development from low to high Christology, and (4) the deuteronomistic rejection of the prophets motif. Missing from this account of abrupt shifts in the constitution and setting of the tradent group is discussion of how these shifts were mediated and how or why later community configurations appropriated the ethos of traditions accepted from previous stages.” Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source, 33.

33 Kloppenborg, Shape of Q, 153.

34 See David Konstan, “Acts of Love: A Narrative Pattern in the Apocryphal Acts,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998), 15-36; David Konstan, “The Alexander Romance: The Cunning of the Open Text,” Lexis 16 (1998), 123-138.

! 187! was composed in stages by a variety of disparate communities, it is difficult to support the notion that it is a pre-70 document.35 That is, if Q is simply the writing of an ancient author, it makes better sense to accept that material in Q that suggests a post-70 date is concurrent with the other thematic elements that have been identified in the source.

Reimagining Q in this way— not as a nebulous work but a literary piece with its own congruity and internal logic—offers a wealth of opportunities for reconsidering the objective(s) and purposes of this writing.

One example of this kind of reconsideration, as noted above, is that Q is the product of an ongoing conversation on the state of Judaism after the fall of the Temple, with an eye to exemplary Jewish prophetic teacher-types—namely figures whose teaching activities did not rely on a central Temple cult. Such an approach necessitates delineating the issues the author of Q is raising and, in some cases, attempting to resolve in the text. Of these, I am particularly interested in the biographical data Q supplies that, when considered against the backdrop of other first-century ‘Christian’ literature, reflect an activity that appears to find its genesis principally among War-era or post-War writers like Mark. Viewed within this new framework, Q represents a transitional period in

Judaism after the fall of the Temple during which, in the face of a disrupted cosmic order,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 35 Traditional proposals that posit a pre-70 date tend to argue that Q lacks a clear allusion to the Judean War and the fall of the Judean Temple. See, for example, Dieter Lürhmann, Die Redaktion der Logienquelle (WMANT 33; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Verlag, 1969); Paul Hoffmann, “The Redaction of Q and the Son of Man: A Preliminary Sketch,” in in The Gospel Behind the Gospels: Current Studies on Q, ed. Ronald Allen Piper (NovTSup 75; New York, NY: Brill, 1995), 159-198; Matti Myllykoski, “The Social History of Q and the Jewish War,” in Symbols and Strata: Essays on the Sayings Gospel Q, ed. Risto Uro (Publications of the Finnish Exegetical Society 65; Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 199; Kloppenborg, Excavating Q.

! 188! attempts were made to overcome a perceived ritual and social ambiguity by searching for a new center for symbolic-social meaning.

As mentioned above, Jonathan Z. Smith notes in his piece “The Influence of

Symbols on Social Change,” that it is often the case that in instances of social upheaval

“man is no longer defined by the degree to which he harmonizes himself and his society to the cosmic patterns of order, but rather to the degree to which he can escape the patterns.”36 Additionally, Smith suggests that this can manifest itself in the “raising of an individual to a new status,”37 for instance in the abandonment of “the hero-that-failed of the locative world-view” for the “hero-that-succeeded… in escaping the tyrannical order.”38 I find Smith’s theoretical model useful for thinking about the presentation of both Jesus and John the Baptist in Q, particularly given their dual messages of repentance, judgment and the sinfulness of those who did not properly recognize or honor

God and the prophets. Again, each exemplifies the ‘hero-that-succeeded’ insofar as he managed to recognize and remain outside of the negative influences of the Temple as well as predict its destruction. In furtherance of Smith’s model, they now stand as archetypes of a ‘new’ and viable form of Judaism in a post-War context. Moreover, they represent precisely the kind of subversive figures discussed in the last chapter.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 36 Smith, Map is Not Territory, 139.

37 Smith, Map is Not Territory, 145.

38 Smith, Map is Not Territory, 139.

! 189! Some Caveats

There are a few implicit interpretive issues that are relevant to any study of Q and my position on these matters is best addressed at the onset. The most obvious of these is that I regard Q as a legitimate theoretical document. For the purposes of this investigation and redescription, this will be a taken-for-granted position (namely, that Q stands for something real). That said, it is the case that scholarship has not come to a consensus on the content of Q and there are a number of disputed passages within the corpus. As such,

I will limit myself to discussing passages that are largely uncontested.39

Also, I am not convinced of the proposal that Q is, as Kloppenborg has stated, “a different type of Gospel form”—that is, a sayings-source and not a full, narrative text. 40

The evidence is inadequate to draw a firm conclusion on this matter, particularly given the fact that Q is reconstructed through overlapping passages in Matthew and Luke and, therefore, often possesses narrative detail that surpasses that of our other known sayings- source, the Gospel of Thomas.41 This issue is significant in that scholars tend to associate the sayings-source genre with the nascent stages of the Jesus-movement by virtue of its seemingly simplistic or abbreviated compositional form. While a certain compositional

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 39 Contested passages include some of the exorcisms (e.g., the Beelzebul accusation in Q 11.14- 20), Q 11:21-22, Q 10:13-15 (only attested in Matthew), Q 10:16a (only attested in Matthew and Thomas), Q 9:61-62 (only found in Luke) among many others. For more on this issue see, for instance, Piper, The Gospel Behind the Gospels.

40 Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, 1.

41 Although, obviously, this is difficult to determine, given the nature of Q’s reconstruction. F. Gerald Downing, for example, notes that the chreiae in Q are longer and more detailed than in the philosophical Lives, which may be an indication Q was a narrative writing and not a sayings- source. See F. Gerald Downing, “A Genre for Q and a Social-Cultural Context of Q: Comparing Sets of Similarities with Sets of Differences,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 5 (1994), 3-26, cit. 7.

! 190! simplicity and flexibility within the saying-source is not implausible, there are no data to suggest that this was a normative feature of these kinds of texts more so than, for instance, the other gospels, bioi or even the novels— again, this is a point that has been argued by both David Konstan and Christine Thomas in their discussions of the so-called

‘open text’, mentioned in the last chapter.42 As such, it is my position that one should not approach Q’s literary formation with a specialized set of criteria rooted in the assumption that the text is inchoate and amorphous. Rather, analysis should begin from the position that certain programmatic principles and controls guided its composition and that these are intelligible and subject to investigation.

In what follows, I begin by arguing my own position for the dating of this writing on the merits of its content, attempting to avoid specific conjectures regarding either Q’s genre or imagined theological leanings. My focus will be on the passages that I believe may demonstrate Q is a post-War piece, namely logia on repentance and judgment.

Possible War references in Q

In “The Gospel of Mark as Reflection on Exile,” William Arnal recognizes the difficulty in identifying a recoverable and distinct Christian ‘group’ behind the gospel given that its author “provides so little information about his audience that we cannot even be sure that he has any discrete Christian group in mind.” He clarifies, however, that this does not mean that Mark fails to provide the reader with any clues concerning the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 42 Konstan, “The Alexander Romance”; Konstan, “Acts of Love”; Christine M. Thomas, “Stories without Texts and without Authors: The Problem of Fluidity in Ancient Novelistic Texts and Early Christian Literature,” in Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative, ed. Ronald F. Hock, J. Bradley Chance and Judith Perkins (Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series 6; Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1998), 273-291.

! 191! historical context of his work; in fact, much can be gleaned from considering why Mark makes certain choices in regard to “the various cultural-mythic fragments” used in his writing.43 For Arnal, the most obvious of these elements is Mark’s emphasis on the

Judean War and the subsequent “fallout,” including the realities of dislocation and exile and its attendant “opportunities for re-imagining identity, nation and location.” He suggests that Mark’s use of Jesus-traditions may be a means for him to “revel in the inversionary effects of the War” as an “occasion for new thoughts.”44

Arnal’s reflections on Mark are applicable to Q as well insofar as Q also uses what appears to be post-War commentary at various points within its known logia. While some of these references are self-contained (with the subject matter explicitly recalling the War and Temple destruction), others address judgment or the Temple in more oblique terms but, nonetheless, the circumstances of the War (even if not an explicit focal point of the passage) permeate the writing. Overwhelmingly these references are couched in language and narrative indicating an impending or, on at least one occasion, realized judgment. As such, the implication that Q was composed in a post-War context is reasonably clear from these passages and accords with the more general content of both

Jesus and John the Baptist’s teaching activity, which is similarly focused on messages of judgment, repentance and the inversion of power; for instance, John the Baptist’s outburst in Q 3:7b-9: “Snakes’ litter (gennh&mata e)xidnw~n)! Who warned!(u(pe&deizen) you to run

(fugei~n) from the coming wrath (mellou&shv o)rgh~v)?” This suggests a thread of literary

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 43 William E. Arnal, “The Gospel of Mark as Reflection on Exile and Identity,” in Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (Oakville, CT: Equinox Publishing, 2008), 57-67, cit. 59. Emphasis original.

44 Arnal, “The Gospel of Mark as Reflection on Exile and Identity,” 60.

! 192! consistency or structure in Q that, in some sense, defies traditional tendencies to identify redactional stratifications. Q 13:34-35, 6:47-49, 11:49-51 and 4:9ff. in particular—again, in conjunction with thematic elements in the teaching logia of Jesus and John the

Baptist—serve to illustrate this topos and may provide a basis for re-considering the dating of Q.

The most overt reference to the War and Temple destruction in Q is 13:34-35:

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets (tou_v profh&tav) and stoning those sent to her, how often did I want (h)qe&lhsa) to gather (e)pisuna&gagei~n) your children [together] as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you did not want (ou)k h)qe&lhsate) it. See your house is forsaken (i)dou_ a)fi&etai u(mi~n o( oi)~kov u(mw~n). But I say to you (le&gw u)mi~n), you will not see me (ou) mh_ i!dhte& me) until the time comes when you will say, ‘Blessed (eu)loghme&nov) is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’

Traditionally attributed to Jesus as a prophetic invective, some debate exists as to the precise meaning of this passage. Harnack, for instance, suggested that 13:34-35, along with Q 12:39-46 and 17:23-37, were “discourses announcing judgment and Jesus’ parousia”45 and were featured as a framework for clusters of Jesus’ teachings. Bultmann and Dibelius designated this passage, as well as Q 4:1-13; 10:21-22 and 11:49-52, as

Christological “retrospectives…[which] have not been able to obscure the original character of this collection of the words of Jesus,” assenting to the fact that the passage pertains to the destruction of the Temple, yet insisting it was a later addition to the Q source.46 Risto Uro makes a similar claim when he attributes this passage to the last stage

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 45 Adolf von Harnack, The Sayings of Jesus: The Second Source of St. Matthew and St. Luke, trans. J. R. Wilkinson, (New Testament Studies 2; London: Williams & Norgate; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,1908), 177-78, 228, 235-36. Also see Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source, 3.

46 Martin Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel, trans. B.L. Woolf (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935), 245-46.

! 193! in the formative history of Q (characterized by a deuteronomistic rejection of the prophets).47 In other words, each of these scholars argues that Q 13:34-35 is, in some measure, a later and isolated interpolation within Q.

Migaku Sato and Kirk, on the other hand, have argued persuasively that the passage fits well within the larger compositional architecture of Q 10:23-24 (“Blessed are the eyes which see what you see”/maka&rioi oi( o)fhalmoi_ oi( ble&pontev a$ ble&pete) through 13:34-35 (“you will not see me until the time comes when you will say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord’”).48 In their view, 13:34-35 falls within a broader schema which utilizes compositional techniques like macarism (e.g.,! maka&rioi/eu)loghme&nov), inversion and thematic frameworking (e.g., sight is granted in

10:23-24 and then denied in 13:34-35), also found in ancient wisdom literature.

Furthermore, this framework is bridged by Q 11:26b: “The last state of that person becomes worse than the first.” In other words, Q 13:34-35 is an integral part of a larger rhetorical strategy aimed at illustrating a linear regression from sight to blindness or, as

Kirk explains, a “declination from a group raised through revelation to elect status, to a status-degraded group denied revelation and handed over to judgment.”49 Although both

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 47 Risto Uro, Sheep Among Wolves: A Study of the Mission Instructions of Q (AASF; Dissertationes Jumanarum Litterarum 47; Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1987), 241-43; Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source, 33. Uro’s stages of Q’s development include: (1) a trajectory from an enthusiastic movement of early charismatics to an institutional structure; (2) application of an Israel-to-church paradigm; (3) development from low to high Christology, and; (4) the deuteronomistic rejection of the prophets motif. Kirk comments on Uro’s categories: “Nothing intrinsic… prevents Uro’s account of the formation of Q from being correct. The problem is lack of composition-critical controls which might verify or correct theories which plot Q materials along postulated tradition-history trajectories.”

48 See Migaku Sato, Q und Prophetie (WUNT 2.29; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988), 39. Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source, 310.

49 Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source, 312.

! 194! Sato and, to a larger extent, Kirk make this argument in the context of reimagining the contours of customary Q divisions (e.g., the so-called Mission Discourse, Prayer instruction, the Eschatological Discourse, the Controversy Discourse) and not explicitly in order to problematize the particular redaction theory which has traditionally attended Q

13:34-35, their work nonetheless aids in demonstrating that other compositional iterations for Q 13:34-35 are possible outside of the position that it is a product of later interpolations by a community of deuteronomistic redactors. And, crucially, their analyses suggest that the broader literary context of Q 13:34-35 enhances the notions of loss and absence already present in those two verses. Put differently, Sato and Kirk demonstrate that there is no compelling reason to pry Q 13:34-35 from its literary moorings and label it an interpolation, save for the individual scholar’s desire to disassociate any potential reference to the War in order to date Q before the conflict.

Regarding the notion that Q 13:34-35 refers specifically to the socio-historical context of the War, again, this position has been debated in some circles. F. D. Weinert, for instance, maintains that “house” in “Jerusalem, Jerusalem…Behold your house is forsaken” refers to a Lukan notion of ‘household’ and is not a reflection on the Temple.50

More common, however, is the position that ‘house’ is the Temple— specifically, a reference to the now defunct Temple cult which was the central axis, the oi~+kov,!of

Jerusalem.51 Kloppenborg goes so far as to suggest that the passage is intended to convey that “the official cult is…no longer functional but rather under judgment.”52 However, he

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 50 F. D. Weinert, “Luke, the Temple and Jesus’ Saying about Jerusalem’s Abandoned House (Luke 13: 34-35),” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 44 (1982), 68-76, cit. 75-76.

51 See Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source, 31 for a comprehensive list of scholarship on this issue.

! 195! also reads into these verses the implication that in the absence of the Temple, Jesus has emerged as a new axis between heaven and earth. He is a “revealer-figure” come to dwell

“amidst the Q group”—that is, in Kloppenborg’s view, the later post-war Q community that has (crudely) added their reflections to what was, at that point, the already highly redacted bricolage of Q.53!

Similarly, Harry T. Fleddermann reads the passage as a nod to the Temple yet, interestingly, he denies its immediate relevance to a post-70 historical context: “We need not think of the Jewish War and the physical destruction of the Temple. Instead, the

Temple no longer functions as a source of salvation; the kingdom of God, the Christian community, replaces it as the place of salvation.”54 Although a clever anachronism,

Fleddermann’s hypothesis fails to adequately address the reasons for assuming that the

War or the Temple destruction is not an appropriate historical context for these verses or, for that matter, Q writ large.

In my view, the question of whether or not “house” refers to the Temple is reasonably clear, notably in light of a precedent set in Q 11:49-51 in which Sophia

(Wisdom) says, likely echoing Sirach 24:

I will send them prophets and wise men and from them they will kill and persecute so that upon them will come the blood of all the prophets that has been shed on earth, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah whom they killed between the altar (tou~ qusiasthri&ou) and the house (tou~ o!ikou), truly I tell you, this generation will be held accountable… !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 52 Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source, 314; John S. Kloppenborg, “City and Wasteland: Narrative World and the Beginning of the Sayings Gospel (Q),” in How Gospels Begin, ed. D. E. Smith (Semeia 52; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 145-60, cit. 156.

53 Kloppenborg, “City and Wasteland,” 156.

54 Harry T. Fleddermann, Q: A Reconstruction and Commentary (Leuven; Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2005), 705.

! 196!

Both passages—Q 13:34-35 and 11:49-51—invoke ideas of prophetic judgment. This is akin to the tenor of preceding material which primarily offers accounts of Jesus and John lashing out at crowds with censures (e.g.,!“gennh&mata e)xidnw~n”!in Q 3:7) and laments over the repeated failure of those around them to recognize them as prophets (e.g., “For

John came to you… but the religious authorities rejected him” in Q 7:29-30).55 Themes of impending judgment and Israel’s failure to recognize its prophets are, in fact, laced throughout the teaching activities of Jesus and John the Baptist in Q. Q 7:1ff, for example, contrasts the ‘faith’!(pi&stiv) of the centurion to the whole of Israel (ou)de_ e)n tw~? )Israh_l tosau&thn pi&stin eu(~ron), to be discussed further below. Similarly, Q 7:31-

35 chides those who only recognized John the Baptist’s!daimon!(dai&mwn)!and labeled the

Son of Man a “glutton and drunkard.”56 The logical result of this repeated misrecognition is the destruction of the ‘house’: the Temple. Q 11:49-51 in particular may be a play on

Jeremiah 22:5 LXX: “this house will be for destruction.” Thus, Q 13:34-35 refers to a predicted event that has been fulfilled.!!!

This reading is bolstered further by the reference to Zechariah in Q 11: 49-51, which likely refers to the death of Zacharias ben Barachiah during the events of the War, as detailed by Josephus in The Jewish War 4.335 (and also found in Matthew 23:29-36).57

Counter arguments to this identification include the possibility that the Zechariah in Q refers to Zechariah ben Jehoiada in 2 Chronicles 24: 20-22. However, I judge that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 55 Q 7:29-30 is particularly interesting given that the misrecognition of Jesus (e.g., 10:23-34) is what scholars often emphasize.

56 That these characterizations are rejected in some measure in Q is interesting in light of my ‘subversive biography’ in Chapter 4.

57 Josephus, The Jewish War, Books III-IV, trans. H. St. J. Thackeray (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1956]), 4.5.4 §334-44.

! 197! Jospehus’ Zechariah makes a great deal more sense given the emphasis in the passage on the repeated misrecognition and unjust persecution of the prophets from the death of Abel until the present day or “this generation.”58 The subsequent sentence in which Sophia warns that “this generation” will be held accountable for this death (among others) would then refer to a context following the events of 66-73 C.E.. If my reading of these passages is correct, this would also suggest that the author of Q has used a combination of teaching logia on judgment as well as details and imagery from the devastating events of the War as a strategy for commenting on the events and aftermath of the Judean conflict. More properly one might say that the author of Q is using the figures of Jesus and John as, in the words of Arnal, ‘mechanisms’ for reconsidering the social and symbolic significance of a new world order in the wake of the upheaveal of the War.59 Again, this is significant, for if this passage potentially reflects an acknowledgment of the War and, moreover, is shown to be a fully integrated part of Q’s narrative (i.e. not an interpolation), it suggests that the Q as a whole may be a War or post-War composition.!

Beyond Q 13: 34-35 and 11: 49-51, there are at least two further references to the house motif in Q that may also suggest the War and Temple. First, Q 6:46-49 presents themes of stability and instability among those who heed the teachings of the “Master”

(ku&rie, Jesus) and those who fail to do so, respectively:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 58 Of note, the Protoevangelium of James claims Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, was killed in the forecourt of the Temple after hiding the infant John in the altar during the slaughter of the innocents (Chapter 23-24).

59 See Arnal, “The Gospel of Mark as Reflection on Exile and Identity,” 65.

! 198! “Why do you call me: Master, Master and do not do what I say? Everyone hearing my words (tou_v lo&gouv) and acting (poiei~) on them, is like a person who built [one’s] house (oi)ki&an) on (bed)rock (pe&tran) and the rain (broxh_)!came down (kate&bh) and the rivers (potamoi_) came [and the winds (a!nemoi) blew (e!pneusan)] and fell against (prose&pesan) that house (oi)ki&a? e)kei&nh?), and it did not fall (ou)k e!pesen), for it was founded/ (teqemeli&wto) on the (bed)rock. And [everyone] who hears my words (a)kou&wn mou tou_v lo&gouv) and does not act on [them] is like a person who built (w)?kodo&mhsen) [one’s] house on the sand (a!mmon) and the rain came down and the rivers came [and the winds blew] and beat against (prose&koyan) that house and promptly it fell (e!pesen), and its [fall] was great (kai_ h~)n h( ptw~siv au)th~v mega&lh).”! ! Considered a type of ‘admonition parable’, this so-called parable of the builders is widely recognized as a “conditioned announcement of… doom.”60 Kloppenborg deems the use of the house motif in this passage a simple “stock metaphor for didactic speeches” which does not “require [as much]… discussion” as other parables within what he calls the

“formative stratum” (or Q1).61 This formative stratum, in his view,62 is characterized by

“sapiential speeches and admonitions…augmented by the addition and interpolation of apophthegms and prophetic words which pronounced doom over impenitent Israel.”63 In other words, the first layer of Q contained a series of hortatory sayings of Jesus without any explicit reference to an apocalyptic worldview; any arguably apocalyptic elements

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 60 Sato, Q und Prophetie, 147.

61 See in John S. Kloppenborg, “Jesus and the Parables of Jesus in Q,” in The Gospel Behind the Gospels: Current Studies on Q, ed. Ronald Allen Piper (NovTSup 75; New York, NY: Brill, 1995), 301. According to Kloppenborg, the other parables in this layer include the so-called rich farmer (Q 12:16-21), the mustard and the leaven (Q 13:18-19), the lost sheep and the lost drachma (Q 15:8-10).

62 This view is shared by Robinson and Koester and modified by Downing and Mack who suggest that the stratum contains elements of Cynic chreiae. See, for example, Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, 385, n. 45. Kloppenborg characterizes scholars who deny his position as “silly” and “sloppy.”

63 Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, 244; James D. G. Dunn, “Q1 as Oral Tradition,” in The Written Gospel, ed. Markus Bockmuehl and Donald A. Hagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 45-69.

! 199! were added by a post-War Q community expressing “eschatological hopes” of the kind found in Q 6:46-49.64 Consequently 6:46-49 has received relatively little scholarly attention in Q studies outside of its designation as a later apocalyptic addition.

I propose that if one examines 6:46-49 absent the notion that it is an interpolation to the traditional formative stratum of Q, it could very well be understood as a commentary on the War. Specifically, this passage may be a commentary on the Temple, its corruption and destruction, as well as the efficacy of the teachings of Judean figures like Jesus and John who did not center their worldview on an adulterated Temple system.

Furthermore, as was the case with Q 13:34-35, Q 6:46-49 fits well within a larger—and cohesive—compositional architecture as a capstone to a series of logia also centered on conflict and judgment. Among the logia in question are teachings on loving one’s enemies and persecutors (Q 6:27-28), offering the other cheek (Q 6:29), withholding judgment lest one be judged (Q 6:37-38), the blind leading the blind (Q 6:39), seeing the speck or beam in the eye of one’s brother (Q 6:41-42) and no healthy tree bearing rotten fruit and nor sick ones healthy fruit (Q 6:43-45). Each of these teachings portends appropriate action in the aftermath of some manner of conflict and/or offers metaphorical exhortations on recognizing legitimacy and authority—or, conversely, corruption—as

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 64 Kloppenborg proposes that this ‘originary’ layer of Q is our best evidence for the historical Jesus’ “brilliance and wit… verbal acumen, his narrative skill, and his incisive commentary on the human situation before God.” Kloppenborg, “Jesus and the Parables of Jesus in Q,” 275. As discussed in notes 22 and 23 above, those in the Toronto school of thought are somewhat unique in their insistence that the apocalypticism expressed in Q is essentially ‘apolitical’: “Crossan, Mack and Vermes, then, equate apocalyptic with imminent eschatology, highlight the idea of judgment and consider apocalyptic to be, in the technical sense, quietistic and ‘apolitical’—even though the actions of John the Baptist were seen by contemporary political powers as potentially dangerous. John sent his newly baptized back to ‘wait for’ the action of God… apocalyptic eschatology led the sectarians into the world of ‘fantasy’… apocalyptic highlighted the limitless power of the Deity, had a propensity for the grand and the mystic and appealed to the transcendent for judgment of evil.” Humphrey, “Will the Reader Understand?,” 220.

! 200! does Q 6:46-49. They imagine a scenario in which reader is a victim of a wrong (Q 6:27-

28, 6:29, 6:37-38), or negotiating their position in the face of a certain malfeasance (Q

6:39, 6:43-35). Q 6:46-49 is also followed by a chreiic story of a centurion seeking out

Jesus to heal his son (Q 7:1-9). Although Jesus does not actually perform this requested miracle in Q, the tale serves as both a potential demonstration of supernatural ability and, coupled with the centurion’s claim to be one with “soldiers under me” (Q 7:8), a demonstration that even a Gentile authority respects Jesus. This reading is heightened by

Jesus’ subsequent claim that “not even in Israel” (Q 7:9) has he experienced such ‘faith’.

Within this context, 6:46-49 acts as a transitional parable that metaphorically illustrates the validity of Jesus’ previous teachings while simultaneously making a claim as to his authority as a teacher and religious expert.

On this reading, Q 6:46-49 fits well among a series of logia on conflict

(themselves a commentary on the War) which progresses into teachings on Jesus’ authority. In other words, upon closer examination of Q 6:46-49 in context, its contours as an editorial addition are far from obvious. The progression in question follows a basic trajectory: Jesus provides a series of logia that address, broadly speaking, how one should respond in the face of conflict or betrayal. If you are wronged, do not judge the wrongdoer and be accepting, not vengeful (Q 6:27-28, 6:29, 6:37-38). If you align yourself to a “blind” (Q 6:39), declining or improper authority (Q 6:39, 6:43-35), only ill can follow. Those who have recognized that Jesus is a legitimate teaching authority have a house built on bedrock that withstands all manner of destruction (6:48). However, those who have denied him and/or have misplaced their loyalties, have a house that has fallen

! 201! (6:49). Israel is among those who are named as having denied Jesus in some measure (Q

7:9) and, therefore, it is a candidate for this fallen group.

In my view, if we imagine a post-War context for these passages, the references above to corrupt or ineffective rulers would act as an allusion to the Temple cult. Jesus’ teachings on how to cope in the aftermath of conflict offer an alternative manner of authority in the wake of the loss of the Temple. That is not to say it is an outright censure of the Temple per se, but may signal opposition to the fraudulent people who formerly were running it. Jesus, as noted above, therefore serves as a mechanism for considering

“the inversionary effects of the War” as an “occasion for new thoughts.”65 Again, this plausible, alternative reading situates Q 6:46-49 within a compositional framework which belies its traditional characterization as an apocalyptic interpolation and, indeed, it may be offering direct commentary on the War itself.66

Finally, the Temple is mentioned in the narrative on Jesus’ temptation as well, although its association with the question of dating Q is slightly less transparent. In the well-rehearsed scene, Jesus is brought by the!dia&bolov to Jerusalem and he is placed on the pinnacle of the Temple and instructed to throw himself onto the stones below in order for the angels to save him and prove that he is the son of God (Q 4:9ff). This is the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 65 Kloppenborg, “Jesus and the Parables of Jesus in Q,” 275.

66 Some other passages that may also reference the War and Temple include: Q 12:39-40 (“But know this: If the householder [oi)kodespo&thv] had known in which watch the thief [kle&pthv] was coming, he would not have let his house [oi)ki&an] be plundered/dug through [dioruxqh~nai]”); Q 3:16-17 (“[The one coming], his pitchfork [is] in his hand and he will clear the threshing floor [diakaqariei~ th_n a#lwna autou~] and gather the wheat [suna&cei to_n si~ton] into his granary/barn (a)poqh&khn), but the chaff [a!xuron] he will burn on a fire that can never be put out [puri_ a)sbe&stw]”); and Q 3:7b-9 (“He said to the [crowds coming to be] bapti[zed]: Snakes’ litter! Who warned [u(pe&deicen] you to run [fugei~n] from the impending rage/coming rath [mellou&shv o)rgh~v]”).

! 202! second of three temptations in the passage and, in each case, Jesus responds with a quote from Deuteronomy. In this particular response, he quotes Deut. 6:16, “Again, it is written, ‘you shall not test/tempt the Lord your God,’” a passage which recalls the episode at Massah and cautions Israel not to forget to recognize their God lest they be

“destroyed from the face of the land” (6:15) promised to them through Abraham. I therefore find it plausible that this passage—the only instance in Q in which the Temple is explicitly named—is a tacit reference to the aftermath of the War through what was likely a familiar Deuteronomic verse. This reading complements the motifs of judgment and penalty elsewhere in Q: misrecognition of God (and of prophets) results in destruction, in this case the destruction of Jerusalem.

Burton Mack also interprets this scene in light of the War and as a site for negotiating, as he puts it, the “lessons learned” as a result of the conflict.67 He explains that, when considered in tandem with the other temptations Jesus faces in the passage, the

Temple “is associated with the kingdoms of the world on the one hand, and with the appropriate worship of God on the other.” For Mack, Jesus demonstrates little interest in the Temple in this passage because he knows “his kingdom will not be affected by its destruction…[it] serves merely as the setting for a debate about piety and power.”

Although a convenient analysis for my purposes, Mack’s position is ultimately informed by the dual assumption not only that this passage is one piece of a ‘development’ within what he deems a later stage of the Q ‘movement’, but that it is also the work of a

‘community’ seeking to add material to a pre-existent and known Q source that expresses

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 67 Burton Mack, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q & Christian Origins (New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993), 174.

! 203! their particular view of the Temple as a “sad symbol of misplaced loyalties.”68

Incidentally, this approach also reads back onto Q that Jesus has superseded Judaism with a ‘new religion’. Therefore, while I concur with Mack that the passage is likely a post-

War composition, I continue to question the position that this material must necessarily be a later redaction or, for that matter, that it is the work of a myopic post-War

‘community’ and not simply an author reflecting on the state of Judaism in the aftermath of the conflict.

Regarding this notion of implicit communities in the Q text, it is certainly the case that Mack’s work exemplifies the approach in Q scholarship, discussed at the beginning of this chapter, which emphasizes that individual thematic elements in Q correspond to discrete communities of Jesus followers. Likewise, he regards this activity as evidence of successive stages of “mythmaking.” Again, this approach allows Mack and others to dismiss evidence of the War or Temple destruction, like the examples just provided, as later additions, thereby preserving the notion of Q as a record of the earliest, successive

Jesus-movements and even, perhaps, the verbatim teachings of Jesus himself. Although a deeply problematic methodology, this kind of work is in fact a good springboard for continuing to consider the issue of the dating of Q. A brief examination of these counterarguments suffices to demonstrate the ways in which Redaction Criticism and societies like the Jesus Seminar have severely limited the interpretive possibilities for Q in their quest for data on, among other things, the earliest retrievable evidence of so- called Christian origins.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 68 Mack, The Lost Gospel, 174.

! 204! Alternative Voices in Q Scholarship

Continuing with the model of Mack’s scholarship on the subject, his The Lost

Gospel: The Book of Q & Christian Origins outlines the rationale behind the systematic division of Q into three stages or strata of development (Q1, Q2, Q3).69 Characterized by rather vague and general observations on the thematic similarities and relationships throughout Q, the majority of evidence justifying these firm authorial and temporal divisions is drawn from claims about the social situation of the imagined audience/authors of the material, with the scholar often setting his or her own criteria for determining these details (e.g., the location and date of composition).

For instance, recognizing what he calls a “Cynic-style social critique” in the teaching logia of Jesus and John the Baptist, Mack deems these aphorisms and invectives the earliest stage of Q—“Q1”—and associates the themes of frank speech and simple living with the “challenge of the times in Galilee” immediately following the death of Jesus.

Having set the parameters and scope of his investigation, Mack is then able to make claims about these ‘Jesus people’ and their ideologies, for instance:

The Jesus people are best understood as those who noticed the challenge of the times in Galilee. They took advantage of the mix of peoples to tweak the authority of any cultural tradition that presumed to set the standard for others… The aphorisms in Q1 set the Cynic-like tone, and the injunctions reveal a strong sense of vocation that corresponds with the Cynic way of life. The Jesus movement began as a home-grown variety of Cynicism in the rough and ready circumstances of Galilee before the war.70 !

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 69 Arnal and Kloppenborg divide Q into similar strata, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.

70 Mack, The Lost Gospel, 120.

! 205! Mack justifies the themes of judgment and destruction in these aphoristic passages by associating them with a pre-War apocalyptic imagination. Rather than an authorial reflection on the consequences of the Temple destruction, Mack claims that “prophetic pronouncements, images of destruction, and the parables of exclusion” in Q do not reflect any historical context or circumstance but a more broad-based theological position that imagines “the rule of God as a realm to be revealed only at the end of time.”71 However, counter to what one might expect given the features of other recognized works of apocalyptic literature, Q does not imagine an end-time scenario in which the kingdom of

God supersedes earthly-rule and/or vindicates the just. There are no undertones of hope or expectations of immanent transformation. Mack simply regards this exclusion as evidence that this imagined early Q community was more concerned with “substantive issues of self-definition and loyalty to the movement than… in seeing these issues resolved at a final judgment.”72 He also extends this so-called apocalyptic disposition in the text to a subsequent layer of Q (Q2), and employs this as evidence of a shift among

Jesus’ followers of a general, internal sense of being “distressed and incensed,” a distress outwardly focused on “this generation” of wicked persons (Chorazin, Pharisees, the

“snakes’ litter,” among others) in response to a scenario in which these Jesus-followers feel displaced from the larger society given their conspicuous status as proto-Christians.73

It is clear from this brief overview that much work must be done on Mack’s part in order to argue away these so-called apocalyptic tendencies in Q and simultaneously maintain his position that any whispers of post-70 material are added or interpolated by !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 71 Mack, The Lost Gospel, 133.

72 Mack, The Lost Gospel, 134.

73 Mack, The Lost Gospel, 136.

! 206! later ‘communities’. This effort allows him the latitude to continue to discuss the ‘Cynic- strands’ of Q1 and their implications for earliest Christianity and the historical Jesus.

Likewise, scholars like Kloppenborg and Robinson have continually nuanced their understanding of Q and its redactional layers, attempting to get at what they judge to be the earliest “wisdom instruction” of Q. Deemed the earliest layer of Q because the passages in question share “the same projected audience” and suggest a certain community rule, these wisdom sayings are, as in Mack, held as distinct from the so-called

“apocalyptic sayings” or chreiae that suggest a post-70 date (again, any “prophetic- apocalyptic sayings” in the “wisdom blocks” of Q are dismissed by Kloppenborg as interpolations).74 To my mind, reflecting on the missteps of Mack and of scholars engaged in similar projects adds to our understanding both of how poorly the content of

Q has been theorized to date and the apparent motivations of the theorists in question.

Therefore, even if my particular reading of Q fails to convince, my proposal at the very least highlights the need for a more critical examination of Q’s literary purposes.

On that note, there have been some notable dissensions from the ranks of those who have posited strong redactional stages to Q. Similar to the work of Sevenich-Bax,

Kirk and Piper cited above, Downing has criticized these projects as lacking controls with respect to ancient compositional methods as well as the performance of texts or reading practices. Kirk summarizes the shared critique:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 74 Fleddermann, Q: A Reconstruction and Commentary, 33.

! 207! In the absence of such controls, the critic can be easily misled into resolving the diverse thematic or even theological data of a text such as Q into spurious redaction-history strata. Moreover, the discordant distinctiveness of the layers posited by stratigraphical approaches is hard to reconcile with the fact that the text would have been produced, recited and received as a coherent whole… [raising] the possibility that we have Q essentially as it was first composed.75 ! Similar to Kirk, Downing deems that the “discrepant” stages of Q proposed by those before him are the result of rather “unconventional authorial procedures.”76 In his view, it makes little sense to postulate significant disjunctions between strata of Q only to then maintain that later redactors would have failed to revise these discrepancies for their own audiences.77 That such “diverse sources, times and contexts must have been involved” is untenable, particularly if one imagines the performance of this text according to ancient reading practices. Using Romans as a model, he demonstrates that elements of

“apocalyptic eschatology,” “deuteronomic account[s] of Israel’s past” and “constant refusal of God’s messengers” all exist in tandem in that one document, written by “one” author for a single audience.78 With this as well as Cynic Lives in mind, Downing proposes that Q is a coherent and cohesive literary unit similar to the “commonplace form” of philosophical bioi. He argues that Q falls in line with the general form of the bios: a leading figure linked to a predecessor, teaching material ordered “by theme and catchword, in the main” and, on occasion, an account of the philosopher’s death (but not

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 75 Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source, 53.

76 Downing, “A Genre for Q and a Social-Cultural Context of Q,” 29.

77 Downing, “A Genre for Q and a Social-Cultural Context of Q,” 42.

78 Downing, “A Genre for Q and a Social-Cultural Context of Q,” 45.

! 208! always).79 In other words, he views Q as a hybrid of a bios and a series of loosely related chreiic collections.

Downing ultimately falls short of being able to demonstrate a concrete parallelism between Q and his proposed document types without severely mischaracterizing Q’s compositional structure in order to fit the chreia collection model he has in mind (Q, to the best of our knowledge, contains significantly fewer chreiic constructions, and provides a great deal more narrative detail, than one finds in the Lives).80 Although his work has subsequently been critiqued for failing to demonstrate these form-critical similarities, among a variety of other objections, his initial work nonetheless has served to open up discussion for an alternative view of Q divorced from the kind of scholarship discussed above. 81 In short, Downing’s project stripped Q of its privileged status as a unique and unprecedented compositional form, with its own unique structure and rules for analysis, and considered it within a larger ancient literary context. His proposal was one of the first to imagine a new genre placement for Q and his recognition of its family resemblance to Lives is significant for considering Q within a larger framework of ancient biographical traditions, as discussed in Chapter 4.

A New View of Q

If we begin from the vantage point that Q is not the product of multiple redactors writing over the course of decades and infusing the document with threads of some

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 79 Downing, “A Genre for Q and a Social-Cultural Context of Q,” 46.

80 Downing, “A Genre for Q and a Social-Cultural Context of Q,” 200; Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source, 54.

81 See, for example, Kirk, The Composition of the Sayings Source, 54-55.

! 209! manner of community philosophy, then we are left with the possibility that it was produced by a writer in a particular historical context—that is, at a particular point in time. I have argued that the period of composition that appears to make the most sense given the content of the work is some stage during or following the Judean War and

Temple destruction. Beyond what I have argued above in favor of thematic unity within the logia, both Matthew and Luke (the source material for reconstructing Q) are themselves dated at least one generation after the War; thus this proposal presents no immediate conflict on its face.

To locate the author of Q, the first step is to examine the literary choices made in the text. Of these features, the most prominent is the depiction of both Jesus and John the

Baptist as teacher-types. Compellingly, not only is Q exclusively focused on these teaching chreiae, it also conspicuously lacks what some might anticipate as taken-for- granted details about the teaching activity of Jesus—including distinct accounts of miracles, healings, exorcisms or even simply a few words about his death and resurrection. Unlike Paul, this content is not essential to Q’s strategic project and interests.

There is also the additional question of why John the Baptist is emphasized in the text. Although he does perform Jesus’ baptism and provides the well-known logia on the

“One to Come” (Q 3:16b-17), he nevertheless delivers a number of his own chreiae.

Additionally, as in the depiction of Jesus, Q lacks any specific details of John’s eventual imprisonment or death. Armed with these observations, one can see that the author of Q’s paramount concern is for the teachings of John and Jesus.

! 210! With these observations in mind, a great deal could be made of the traditional literary type of which Q might be representative (e.g., biography, sayings-source, a philosophical document, a hybrid of all three). Before tackling this issue, however, it is useful to question what kind of socio-cultural and historical situation might generate the kind of creative reflection found in Q, without positing communities-as-authors.

Again, Jonathan Z. Smith’s “The Influence of Symbols on Social Change” is a useful tool for considering the questions above and for beginning to understand the possible motivations behind the kind of imaginative project we see in Q. In this piece,

Smith reflects on the dynamic, symbolic systems in which people engage as they negotiate—that is, as they realize the parameters and limits of—their role(s) in the

“encompassing cosmic order in which man, society and the gods all participate.”82 The utility of his work for thinking about the circumstances of Q lies in his discussion of

“cosmic paranoia” and its attendant consequences. He clarifies that human beings must cope with the reality that non-obvious beings and other cosmic powers are not solely benevolent forces, “guarantors of order, the guardians of a good cosmic and human destiny.”83 In fact, they can be hostile aggressors with the ability to oppress through manipulation of the cosmic order, and it is this potential for upheaval that creates a sense of paranoia. This paranoia also stems from the realization that any disruption in the equilibrium of cosmic order forces a dramatic shift in the ways in which human beings understand their position not only in the cosmos more generally, but in various socio- cultural dynamics as well. It forces a difficult process of (re)negotiation. Smith ultimately

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 82 Smith, Map is Not Territory, 132.

83 Smith, Map is Not Territory, 138.

! 211! links this observation to the notion of place, insofar as it has implications for identifying the limits and bounds of those (cosmic) ties.

Expanding this notion of ‘place’, Smith states “[t]he question of the character of the place on which one stands is the fundamental symbolic and social question.!Once an individual or culture has expressed its vision of its place, a whole language of symbols and social structures will follow.”84 Furthermore, Smith observes that “social change is preeminently symbol or symbolic change,” dictating that one adopt a new symbolic universe in order to continue the process of negotiating the parameters of the cosmic order and, naturally, one’s ‘place’ within it. 85 He explains:

Each society has moments of ritualized disjunction, moments of ‘descent into chaos,’ of ritual reversal, of liminality, of collective anomie. But these are part of a highly structured scenario in which these moments will be overcome through the creation of a new world, the raising of an individual to a new status, or the strengthening of a community…[The] man finds himself in a world which he does not recognize; and perhaps even more terrible…finds himself to have a self he does not recognize. Then he will need to create a new world, to express his sense of new place…86

This overview of Smith’s work should suffice to illustrate his theoretical model’s applicability to Q. As has been rehearsed a number of times to this point, Q is, in my view, engaged in a creative project that imagines Jesus and John the Baptist as teacher- types concerned with issues of, among other things, repentance, judgment and recognition. In the course of this teaching-activity, great resistance is brought to bear against those who fail to properly recognize God and the prophets, those who do not exhibit thoroughgoing faith and those—like the Pharisees (Q 11:39a, 42, 39b, 41, 43-44) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 84 Smith, Map is Not Territory, 141.

85 Smith, Map is Not Territory, 143. Emphasis original.

86 Smith, Map is Not Territory, 145-146.

! 212! and exegetes of the Law (Q 11: 46b, 52, 47-48)—who impose themselves between the people and the correct worship of God. These emphases in the text are part and parcel of a larger project of identifying what constitutes a proper relationship with God in the course of negotiating one’s (new) place in the cosmic order. Consequently, teaching logia like the so-called beatitudes in Q may be guidelines for reimagining how this goal was to be accomplished. The figures of Jesus and John the Baptist thus become mechanisms for this activity—namely, the process of reconsidering one’s place within, in this case,

Judean practices and philosophy. They represent, in the words of Smith, a ‘symbolic’ turn.

Taking Smith’s theoretical work into further consideration, I judge that the evidence for the kind of negotiation taking place through the figures of Jesus and John suggests there may have been some shift or rupture in the cosmic and social order to necessitate this reimagining. It makes a great deal of sense that the War and Temple destruction should play this role; with the Temple now destroyed, cultural producers like the author of Q may have been seeking a new ‘symbol’ of what constitutes Judean practice and philosophy. In this case, the Q author is reflecting on the teachings of known pre-War prophetic Jewish figures who managed to thrive, at least relatively, without explicit ties to what they (Jesus and John) evidently envisioned as a corrupt Temple system/cult. As Smith notes in the course of his argument, in the face of what are perceived to be oppressive social or cosmic elements, “man is no longer defined by the degree to which he harmonizes himself and his society to the cosmic patterns of order, but rather by the degree to which he can escape the patterns.” Through the teaching logia highlighted by Q, it is evident that Jesus and John are imagined as knowing these “escape

! 213! routes.”87 Consequently, the teachings of these figures become important in the face of the socio-cultural upheaval that attended the War and Temple destruction.

Thus, I view the interest in Jesus and John as teachers that emerges in Q and, for that matter, in the later narrative gospels more generally, as a symptom of the larger problem of how to envision Judaism in light of the socio-cultural upheaval of the War and Temple destruction. The elevation of these figures is a means for writers like the author of Q to begin to explore this question through a creative reflection on two well- known teachers— subversive figures— who did not rely on established Judean institutions. To borrow a phrase from Arnal’s work on Mark, the author of Q “may… be using the figure of Jesus to comment on the Jewish War, the destruction of the Temple, and his own… identity... The War has become the occasion for new thoughts, thoughts congenial to this author, and Jesus has served as a mechanism for expressing these thoughts.”88 Although Arnal limits his comments to Jesus alone, I would also add John the Baptist to the mix. Again, if one finds my arguments for recognizing references to the

War within Q convincing, Smith’s theoretical model becomes useful for understanding how people are apt to cope in the wake of major social or cosmic disorder. I also find that it lends much to the question of why the Q author elected to reflect creatively on the teachings of Jesus and John, as well as why the author chose to emphasize themes of judgment, repentance and wisdom for a new age.

Finally, Arnal’s observation above also raises another crucial issue in regard to the so-called ‘biographical details’ that Q and the other gospel writers provide in their

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 87 Smith, Map is Not Territory, 139.

88 Arnal, “The Gospel of Mark as Reflection on Exile and Identity,” 60.

! 214! works, which may also have some relevance for reconsidering Q’s date of composition.

As noted briefly above, the prime evidence used by scholars to justify labeling Q as a pre-70 work is the fact that sayings collections are the earliest literary form of Jesus material recorded and handed down by proto-Christians. Marvin Meyer, Helmut Koester and Gerd Theissen, for instance, maintain that sayings-sources like Q and the Gospel of

Thomas lack features typical of later, more developed material, such as the “use of parables without allegorical amplification” or explicit references to the Hebrew Bible and, therefore, are indicative of a nascent or ‘primitive’ stage of the Jesus-movement when these positions are still taking shape within communities.89 Put differently, the

‘theology’ expressed in these sayings collections is often considered grossly underdeveloped when compared to other, narrative sources like the Synoptics.

Given my argument on the internal coherence of the logia in Q, I clearly take issue with this traditional approach. Such claims have much more to do with the theological expectations and assumptions of the scholar in question than a proper analysis of Q. Furthermore, even if one grants that Q is a collection of sayings, while I agree that there are some clear differences between the form and character of sayings-source materials and narrative gospels, I nonetheless find it compelling that what these texts do share in common is an interest in Jesus (and John the Baptist) as teachers and, in a more limited sense, on small biographical details of their lives.90 This is a phenomenon largely

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 89 Marvin Meyer, “Albert Schweitzer and the Image of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas,” in Jesus Then & Now: Images of Jesus in History and Christology, ed. Marvin Meyer and Charles Hughes (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001), 73.

90 Scholarship often makes the claim that Q does not contain any significant biographical details of Jesus’ life. This largely appears to be a gripe among those interested in retrieving information about the historical Jesus from what is considered our most ‘primitive’ source on the early Jesus movement. However, we see that Q wants us to know that these men were teachers, that their

! 215! missing from the extant work of our only secure pre-70 material: the letters of Paul.

Therefore, I find it tempting to suppose that the emergence of gospel material on these teachings and, in some cases, the travels, births and deaths of Jesus and John are a product of a kind of post-70 reimagining of how exempla from the teachings and lives of these figures can serve a variety of strategic purposes. In the case of Q, I have argued that this purpose was to act as a site for the negotiation of a new cosmic order in the wake of the destruction of the Temple.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! logia have similar thematic elements and, in the case of John the Baptist in particular, we are provided with information that suggests he is an ascetic of some kind and, conversely, that Jesus is not. While this short list may not satisfy the historical Jesus crowd, it is nonetheless a small window into what one might call the bioi of these figures.

! 216!

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