Nicholas Elder: Common Myths about Ancient Reading, Writing, and Circulating Jesus Traditions

This week I received a nice new copy of Nicholas Elder’s new book Gospel Media: Reading, Writing, and Circulating Jesus Traditions (Eerdmans). In it, he addresses various myths that prevail in NT studies about ancient reading, writing, and publication. By “myth,” he doesn’t necessarily mean they are false but that they exercise a powerful influence on our thinking and are often left unscrutinized (p. 1). Well, he scrutinizes them! Given my soft spot for books correcting myths and given that this book should be of keen interest to ETC readers, I asked Nick if he would give us a taste of the book. Enjoy. —Peter

---

There is a notion that in the ancient world people always read aloud. Especially in biblical and patristics studies, the idea is connected to an anecdote about Augustine coming upon his teacher, Ambrose, reading to himself. The details of the account are often fuzzy when one recalls it. An individual may not immediately know how the account suggests that reading aloud was the normal mode of reading in antiquity, but they know the tale supports the notion. It is Exhibit A for the claim that most persons could not or did not read silently in antiquity.

The account is found in Confessions 6.3. In it, Augustine tells how he would often happen upon Ambrose alone with a text that he, Ambrose, was reading not aloud, but silently. Augustine explains that even when his pupils were present, Ambrose read silently to himself. This explanation has spiraled into the myth that most persons could not read silently in the ancient world.

The logic is that because Augustine explains that Ambrose read silently, he must be surprised that Ambrose did so, and he must have been surprised that Ambrose read silently because most people could not or did not.

However, nothing in Augustine’s anecdote suggests surprise at Ambrose’s supposed unique abilities. Rather, his point is to commend Ambrose’s scholastic diligence. He was so committed to his study that he continued doing it even when his pupils came calling. In fact, Augustine himself could and did read silently. In the famous “take up and read” account in book 8 of the Confessions, Augustine reads Romans 13:13–14 in silence (Conf. 8.12).

It is a myth that persons in antiquity could not or did not read silently. The reality is that those who were literate did read silently regularly, and there are just as many, if not more, primary sources that narrate persons reading silently to themselves as those that narrate persons reading aloud to themselves.

This is the first media myth that I address and correct in my new book, Gospel Media: Reading, Writing, and Circulating Jesus Traditions. The book is divided into three parts, each one addressing one of the three media practices mentioned in the subtitle: reading, writing, and circulation. The chapters in each part identify a “media myth” that is prevalent in biblical and New Testament studies and, in its place, offer a more complex “media reality” on the basis of what I find the primary source evidence to indicate. These myths and realities are as follows:

Chapter 1

Media Myth: Reading was always or usually aloud.
Media Reality: Literate persons read both silently and aloud.

Chapter 2

Media Myth: Texts were always or usually engaged in communal read­ing events.
Media Reality: Reading was both a communal and solitary affair. Indi­viduals read texts to themselves, both aloud and silently. Communal reading events were diverse. Small groups read and engaged texts together. Texts were publicly read to large gatherings of people. An­ tiquity was characterized by a variety of reading events, constituted by different numbers of persons in participation of the event. A given text could be read in different ways and in different social contexts.

Chapter 3

Media Myth: Each gospel was written to be experienced the same way.
Media Reality: Each gospel expresses its textuality differently, indicat­ing that the gospels are different kinds of texts that made for different kinds of reading events.

Chapter 4

Media Myth: Persons in antiquity did not often compose texts in their own hands.
Media Reality: Handwriting played an important role in the composi­tion process of various kinds of texts, though how and why it was used varied on the basis of a text’s genre and the author’s social context, literacy, and compositional preferences.

Chapter 5

Media Myth: Composition always involved dictation, which was an act of freezing an oral discourse in written form.
Media Reality: Composition was an interplay between writing by hand and by mouth. Even when a text was dictated, the act of inscribing af­fected the spoken words. Not all forms of writing by mouth were equal and not all should be considered dictation.

Chapter 6

Media Myth: The gospels were all written using the same composi­tional practices.
Media Reality: The gospels were composed using a variety of composi­tional practices.

Chapter 7

Media Myth: Texts were distributed following a “concentric circles” model in which the discourse gained more influence and readers as it went systematically through these different social circles.
Media Reality: Texts were distributed in a variety of different ways.

Chapter 8

Media Myth: The gospels were all circulated the same way and in the same physical format, whether it be a codex or roll.
Media Reality: The gospels, like other texts in their media context, were circulated textually in a variety of socially constructed ways and physical forms.

To address and correct these myths, the book engages various kinds of primary source evidence: Second Temple Jewish narratives and histories, documentary papyri, Greco-Roman literature, letters written by elite literary figures, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament. The ultimate aim of the book is to explicate the complex media environment of the New Testament context situate the gospels within it.

Brian J. Wright on Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus

Today I’m happy to introduce a guest post from Brian J. Wright who is currently an adjunct professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He has a forthcoming book on communal reading published by Fortress. I heard Brian present some of his research at ETS last year and thought our blog readers would be interested in his work.

---

I’ve been a follower of this blog for over a decade, and have benefited from it in numerous ways. I also genuinely appreciate the work you all continue to do and look forward to getting my hands on a copy of the THGNT.

In my new work on communal reading, I’m essentially asking, “Who was reading what in the first century AD, and where?” The main reason I’m asking this question is because over the past few decades various scholars have argued for or against certain “quality controls” that must have been in place—consciously or unconsciously—in order to account for the transmission of the earliest Jesus movement (eyewitnesses, communal memory, memorization, performance, etc.). By successfully identifying one or more of these controls, it is thought, one can better account for the similarities and differences between the various Christian traditions, get closer to the earliest sources of the nascent Jesus movement, and ultimately understand the historical Jesus more accurately.

The problem, as I see it, is that the entire subject of communal reading events and their role in controlling literary traditions has been largely neglected in early Christian studies. Academic literature even hinting at the fact that communal reading events were a means of controlling literary traditions is sporadic and implicit at best—often centuries removed from the traditions’ inception. By asking the question I mentioned above, we can begin to answer the first of a series of important historical questions regarding communal reading events in the first century, namely, what evidence exists that would suggest that they were a widespread phenomenon? I ultimately argue that communal reading events were already a prevailing practice over a wide geographic range in the first century CE, and that these events acted as a conserving force over the transmission of literary traditions.

For readers of this blog, let me briefly mention just one important aspect that might not be immediately evident from the title and that I will not be covering specifically in my different presentations on various aspects of my book at the annual conferences next month (i.e., one at ETS, one at IBR, and two at SBL).

I document and discuss various comments made by first-century authors regarding manuscripts they hear, read, excerpt from, or examine. Based on their comments, it seems to me that more people in the world of the ancient biblical scribes and translators did care about consistency, and the aspiration for consistency was not merely an invention of later centuries. I’ll summarize just a few of the sorts of remarks here to illustrate my point.

Some first-century authors mention their community getting angry and throwing away manuscripts they receive to read because they contain mistakes. Other first-century authors write at length about textual differences, such as changes to earlier manuscripts and spelling differences between them, in order to highlight a quality control they think should be in place when audiences hear poets read their works. Still other first-century authors mention posting their communal readings publicly so others can read and verify the content, and/or they write about making corrections to manuscripts during readings.

Even in spite of the radical suppression of literature at certain times during the first century, such as the exiles, book burnings, and bans during the reign of Domitian, there was still a “vast flood of literature,” to use one of Petronius’s phrases; “thousands who recite,” as Epictetus states; and opportunities for “advertising your abilities” before “a multitude of fans” at communal reading events, according to Seneca the Younger and Martial, respectively. As I now see the evidence, the prevalence of literary works, activities associated with them, and more kinds of quality controls embedded in literary traditions in the first century CE suggests a world carefully shaped and controlled by a book culture typified by commonly held, albeit highly diverse, communal reading events. I believe the implications this will have on many other disciplines and subdisciplines, such as canonicity, NT textual criticism, orality, social identity, and performance criticism, are wide-ranging.

That said, perhaps I should conclude with a first-century quote: “One thing remains: please be equally honest about telling me if you think there are any additions, alterations, or omissions to be made. […] It is more likely to be long-lived the more I can attain to truth and beauty and accuracy in detail” (Pliny, Letters 3.10.5–6).