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

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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.

Clement of Alexandria and the (Canonical) Gospel of Mark (a pedantic post)

In Oxford this term we have a colloquium or reading group working through and discussing Simon Gathercole's brilliant new book, The Gospel and the Gospels: Christian Proclamation and Early Jesus Books (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022). Now this is a five hundred page book, so when in this post I point out an error on one of those pages, please (Simon!) take this in the spirit in which it is intended (straightforward academic one-upmanship) (pursuing the truth) and with a sense of proportion. (Also Simon Gathercole is not the only victim of this error; Chuck Hill made a similar error; cf. here in connection with my comment re p. 72 - this post now resolves the problem noted there.)

Anyway, here is page 4:

 

The specific problem that is obvious here is that Clement of Alexandria (like other patristic writers) barely ever quotes Mark's Gospel. The general problem is that all the figures for the canonical gospels look inflated and thus suggests the overwhelming preference of Clement for the canonical gospels. But the actual data is more complicated. Gathercole is quite clear that he gets these figures from Mutschler's monograph. He is also basically not adjudicating this data, but in his actual argument is showing that scholars differ in their assessment of the attestation of the various gospels so we need a theological content discriminator to make an argument for the distinctiveness of the canonical gospels from the noncanonical gospels. So maybe Gathercole can be slightly let off the hook; but the data as cited here is (as I will show) plainly wrong. Here is the relevant page from B. Mutschler's monograph,  Irenäus als johanneischer Theologe: Studien zur Schriftauslegung bei Irenäus von Lyon (STAJ; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004) (it is not necessarily a problem to go to a monograph on Irenaeus' use of gospel traditions to get data about Clement of Alexandria - since Mutschler has a chapter comparing the two writers; but in this case we are being mislead because of decisions made by Mutschler) (thanks to the Bodleian Library Scan & Deliver Team): 

We can see from this that Gathercole has accurately transcribed the numbers from Mutschler's chart (although Mutschler does not compare the noncanonical gospels so Gathercole has got those numbers - which are correct - from somewhere else). So where does Mutschler get his numbers and what are they actually counting? 'Anzahl der biblischen Bezugnahmen' means the number of biblical references; but really what is going on here? Well, now it is a little unclear. There is no footnote to this chart on p. 101. On the previous page, in relation to a more general chart we learn from the footnotes in Mutschler that Mutschler claims to get his data (the raw numbers) from A. van den Hoek, ‘Techniques of Quotation in Clement of Alexandria: A View of Ancient Literary Working Methods’ Vig. Chr. 50 (1996), 223-243, and that A. van den Hoek got her data from the indices to the Stählin GCS edition of Clement of Alexandria (vol. 4, pp. 1-59) (Mutschler note 5 on p. 100: 'Die Zahlen sind A. VAN DEN HOEK, Techniques, 240f Anm. 55 entnommen, die sich dabei auf die GCS-Indices von O. STÄHLIN beruft (s. GCS Clemens Alexandrinus IV, l- 59 STÄHLIN).'). The complication here is that van den Hoek doesn't give any figures at this level of granularity (i.e. for all the different books of the Bible), so the implication would seem to be that in fact Mutschler has taken van den Hoek's idea and done his own count based on the indices in the Stählin edition of Clement of Alexandria.

Now, an interesting subpoint here is that both van den Hoek and Mutschler are aware of problems with the data they are using. van den Hoek says that 'the index of Stählin, however, is less accurate [than the TLG] since it is a vast vessel of very diverse materials that were collected over the centuries. Experience suggests that it contains too many parallels, not all of which are valid.' (van den Hoek, ‘Techniques of Quotation', 230). Since she is mostly interested in Clement citing by author's name she thinks that the combined search (TLG and the Index to Stählin) for e.g. Παῦλος will be sufficient for her needs (and that the errors are probably the same for all of his searches, so that the comparison will still be worthwhile). Mutschler has an interesting comment about potential problems where he suggests that the Stählin Index might cause the results for the synoptic gospels to be overrepresented by almost three percent (note 7, p. 100-101). 

So it is time to check out the Index to Stählin. Here is a portion of page 14

It is true, I think, that there are 278 entries for Mark, but that doesn't really matter. If we look at the first example we will uncover the fundamental problem here. The index is supposed to be listing places where literary dependence is assumable or at least probable. (But it could include indirect or secondary citations - for these you need to check the apparatus to the edition.) Entries have italics for direct citations (from Stählin GCS vol. 4, pp. IX-X). 

The first entry here is: Mark 1.3: I, 9, 18f; 64, 10; 224, 16.

So vol. 1, p. 9 lines 18-19 should be a direct citation. Here is the page:

 

What we have there is a brief citation from Is 40.3 in a form that doesn’t appear to directly match any of the NT uses (or the LXX for that matter): εὐθείας ποιεῖτε τὰς ὁδοὺς κυρίου. The apparatus refers to Is 40.3 (Matt 3.3; Mark 1.3; Luke 3.4; John 1.23) – the four places where this passage is cited in the NT. Clearly there is no direct evidence for any relationship between Clement and Mark’s Gospel at this point.

Vol. 1, p. 64 line 10 should be a passage with literary dependence that is not a direct citation. Here is the page: 

We can see that this is a general allusion to this passage. The apparatus has ‘vgl.’ i.e. cf. Matt 3.3; Mark 1.3; Luke 3.4. Again no direct evidence for Clement and Mark's Gospel. 

Vol. 1, p. 224 line 16 should be a passage with literary dependence that is not a direct citation. Here is the page: 

This passage is also a general allusion to the making straight terminology (in the context of John the Baptist) and the apparatus has ‘vgl.’ i.e. cf. Matt 3.3; Mark 1.3; Luke 3.4; John 1.23 (Is 40.3). Again no direct evidence for Clement and Mark's Gospel.

I didn't bother going any further. These indices are not a little bit problematic (van den Hoek) or three percent out (Mutschler), they are totally useless and misleading on the use of Mark in Clement of Alexandria! There is no useful data to be drawn from the total number of references to Mark in the apparatus (i.e. 182 times, as noted above). It is all ‘contamination’ from the synoptic parallels. Please, please, please, may no one ever refer to this again. 

 Actually we do have useful books on this subject.

 M. Mees, Die Zitate aus dem Neuen Testament bei Clemens von Alexandrien (Quaderni di ‘Vetera Christianorum’ 2; Bari: Istituto di Letteratura Cristiana Antica, Universita di Bari, 1970). I bought a copy to check this out. He finds 18 passages where Clement might exhibit knowledge of Mark. 

C.P. Cosaert, The Text of the Gospels in Clement of Alexandria (NTGF 9; Atlanta: SBL, 2008). Cosaert is quite critical of Mees lack of methodological control. He finds only three passages in which Clement quotes Mark (one of which is the extensive and rather wild text of Mark 10.17-31). 

Lessons learned: 

1. Numbers are not actually raw data, there is usually a chain of scholarship and assumptions behind them (Gathercole → Mutschler → van den Hoek → Stählin).
2. The chain of scholarship and assumptions needs to be checked against actual data at some point. 
3. Statements that look or feel wrong may well be wrong, but you still need to check the actual data.
4. The attestation of Mark's Gospel in the early period is less full than the other canonical gospels (and in actual fact is more comparable in terms of citations and manuscripts with some of the non-canonical gospels).
5. It probably is better to cite monographs on the actual author or question when they are available (e.g. both Mees and Cosaert are far more helpful and accurate than Mutschler).
6. None of this makes much of an impact on the overall argument of Simon Gathercole's book.