(Larry Hurtado):  Roger Bagnall’s recent book, Early Christian Books in Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2009) has now received a good deal of interest.  So, I thought I’d give a pointer to the review I wrote of it for Review of Biblical Literature:  http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/7289_7933.pdf.

As will be clear from that review, I have strongly mixed feelings about Bagnall’s book.  No question, Bagnall is an important figure in papyrology, and one disagrees with him at one’s risk.  But this particular little tome seems to me seriously flawed.  His attempt to calculate how many Christian copies of books we ought to expect from 2nd-century Egypt seems to me a wierd exercise in sheer speculation with no probative force at all.

It is a more serious objection that Bagnall seems to present the late Carsten Thiede’s lamentable efforts to re-date certain NT papyri earlier than commonly accepted as if this is indicative of biblical scholars’ attitudes toward the dating of Christian papyri.  Bagnall alleges that biblical scholars don’t take sufficient account of professional papyrologists.  But the best scholars in NT and Christian origins that I know who work on early Christian manuscripts try in fact to keep abreast of papyrological developments.  It seems to me that it is Bagnall who hasn’t made the effort to obtain a more representative sense of the matter.  In short, Bagnall’s exhortations to treat the dating of early papyri with caution and to avoid pushing the dates too early are all welcome, but hardly new to me or others who work with these items.

(Larry Hurtado):  Helen Bond’s posting about the “Nativity” TV series currently airing on BBC TV here in the UK reminded me of the round-table discussion among Alan Segal, John Kloppenborg and myself a few years ago commissioned by the online news/culture magazine, Slate.  We discussed the Christmas stories and other texts as to historical question about them.  Here’s the URL to the initial piece by Alan Segal (you can access the others in the dialogue-series by clicking on the numbers at the end of Segal’s piece):  http://www.slate.com/id/2132974/entry/2132989/

(Helen Bond) Readers in the UK and Canada (or with access to BBC iPlayer) may have seen the first of a new four-part adaptation of the nativity story which aired last night. I acted as ‘historical consultant’ for the film and, as my role was infinitessimally small, I can say without any embarrassment that it is a beautifull, thought-provoking and quite moving retelling of the story by writer Tony Jordan (who has credits such as Life on Mars and Hussle to his name).

Of course, acting as historical consultant on a retelling of the birth stories is quite a tall order. Like most biblical scholars I’m rather sceptical of the historical veractiy of the stories as they now appear in Matthew and Luke. My brief, though, was to put my uncertainties to one side, to accept a broadly harmonised story-line, and simply to add local detail and colour where I could.

I always find projects like this interesting as they make me look at the texts in a rather different way. Two things in particular struck me as I worked through the harmonised version.

The first is that while it is possible to some extent to link the accounts in Matthew and Luke (ignoring the fact that in Matthew the holy family seem to live in Bethlehem), the real difficulty is accounting for a Roman census under Herod. I don’t think any modern argument explains this in a credible way. Tony Jordan’s suggestion is that Augustus was checking up on Herod, that he suspected that Herod’s land was worth more than the King had claimed. This is just about possible, particularly in the later years of Herod’s reign when relations with Augustus were decidedly poorer, but is still fundamentally unlikely (and we haven’t even touched on the extremely odd detail that people returned to their ancestral homes!). With the best will in the world, explaining a Roman census on the land of a still-honoured client King is problematic.

A second thing which struck me has to do with Jewish messianic hopes at the time. The film follows the actions of three main groups of characters: Mary and Joseph, the Magi, and a shepherd. Overarching the whole thing, though, is the idea that events are following a blueprint already laid out in Scripture. The Magi, right from the beginning, realise that the prophecies of their predecessor Balaam are coming true, and throughout the film characters quote passages familiar to Christians from Matthew’s proof-texts or traditional carol servies. I did point out quite clearly that Jewish messianic hopes were much less clear than all of this supposes and that many of these texts only became  ‘messianic’ after the event. In many ways, though, Tony Jordan was entirely right to ignore my criticisms: for a modern (broadly) Christian audience there is huge dramatic and religious potential in seeing Jesus as the fulfilment of a set of prophecies and allowing characters in the story to point foward to his future role (we’re told already that he will be a light to the world, that he has come for the poor, and that he will die to take away sin). Furthermore, the bare story with no sense of prophetic fulfilment would read very oddly: a girl pregnant before marriage, a trip to a distant small town, visits by eastern astronomers and shepherds. This very strangeness, however, convinces me that the story cannot ever have existed apart from the proof texts, in fact that it was the proof texts that gave rise to the story. Deleting the scriptural texts, then, might have been truer to first century Jewish messianic hopes, but would not have produced a ‘historically accurate’ account of what happened. The prophecies and the story were intricately linked from the start.

I went down to London last week to see a screening of the whole film and I don’t think anyone was left unmoved by it. If it helps to fill in the Christian story for those who know little about it, and makes those that do think a little more about the characters involved, I think it will have achieved something really useful.

(Larry Hurtado):  I want to flag up a newly published book by William A. Johnson (Duke University):  Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire:  A Study of Elite Communities (New York/Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2010), which provides a wealth of information relevant also to those of us interested in earliest Christianity.  Essentially, Johnson focuses on the social settings, circumstances and conditions in which literary texts were read in the Roman period:  the typical people, settings, and actions involved.  This isn’t the place for a ful review, but a few tips to encourage others to consult the book.

Johnson shows that literary texts were typically read by/in elite social circles.  Indeed, these texts served to reinforce the elite status of these circles.  One of his most intriguing proposals is that the typical format of high-quality Greek literary texts (continuous text with no word-spacing, punctuation, etc.) was intentionally demanding and elitist.  In an essay forthcoming in 2011, I’ve proposed that the format of early Christian manuscripts of scripture-texts reflect a contrasting aim of assisting readers of a wider spectrum of competence and social standing.

Johnson also discusses evidence of personal/private reading and group reading of literary texts, and the distinguishable purposes of each setting.

He discusses memorization and reading of texts, the memorization of passages of prized/valued texts being a marker of one’s sophistication and participation in elite culture.

It is also interesting that in the group setting, one person reading out to a group, there could be demands that a give passage be re-read, and discussion (even arguments) about the meaning of the passage.  So, in these instances “reading” was a collegial and discoursive act.   Does this offer some light on what may have happened in earliest Christian settings, when scripture-texts were read out?

Johnson also shows the interest of these elites in comparing copies of a given text with a view to having the most accurate copy.  Should we think of earliest Christians as influenced at all by this concern as well?

(Larry Hurtado):  On Monday (06 December) my long-time acquaintance John Kloppenborg generously gave his time and thoughts to a day-long event here in New College.  Staff and students are very grateful for the chance to interact with this internationally-known figure in Christian Origins, especially famous for his many publications on the Gospels sayings-source, “Q”.  John is one of the clearest and most measured presenters you’ll hope to hear.  He clearly aims to avoid over-stepping the evidence, and shows respect for the views of others.   A few reflections arising from his presentation and the discussion that followed.

Though I’m content to accept the Q-hypothesis as fully plausible, indeed the most plausible way of accounting for the body of common sayings material in Luke and Matthew, and am also ready to accept the basics of efforts to reconstruct what Q might have included and how its contents may have been ordered, I remain puzzled at the inferential moves that Kloppenborg still seems drawn to make.  In the discussion, he acknowledged that Q wasn’t probably a full index of the outlook and traditions of those from whom it sprang, and that a lot of networking characterized earliest Christian circles.  Yet he still seemed to want to refer to Q as a “gospel” (which seems to mean a particular presentation of Jesus reflecting a particular outlook alongside other outlooks), and he also tends still to emphasize the particularities of Q as importantly indicative of significant variation in early Christian beliefs/outlooks.  So, e.g., the absence of a passion-narrative, the treatment of Jesus’ death in connection with OT martyred-prophet tradition, the divine validation of Jesus by way of heavenly ascent/exaltation, these Kloppenborg proposed as indicative of some real alterity of importance.  I.e., he still seems to want to make certain inferences about the social history of early Christianity from the putative contents of Q.  And the specific inferences he favors seem to me curiously less economical and cogent than others.

Let’s accept the following widely-shared views:  (1) Q was a real literary text; (2) it was composed in Greek (not, e.g., Aramaic); (3) it circulated widely enough and with sufficient favor to be appropriated generously and independently by the two authors of Matthew and Luke.

It seems to me that the most economical inferences are these: (1) Q was not likely the product of some significantly different or geographically delimited early Christian outlook (or at least wasn’t perceived to be such), but instead circulated trans-locally and was appreciated widely; (2) those who composed Q were likely early Jesus-followers in touch with fellow believers in other locations, and neither perceived themselves nor were perceived by other believers as holding beliefs significantly at odds with these fellow believers in other Christian settings; (3) the earliest function of Q is probably reflected in the use of the Q-material in our earliest extant instances in Matthew and Luke:  as a valuable body of teaching material that was seen as complementary to other early Christian material and beliefs, not as a rival or alternative.  It is, thus, both anachronistic and potentially misleading to refer to Q as a “gospel” (implying that it functioned as the full statement of how Jesus was viewed by some Christian circles).

As a further basis for my own inferences, the most commonly agreed reconstructions of Q show it as having an implicit narrative structure (at the point of incorporation by Matthew and Luke, I leave aside speculations about putative prior “layers” or editorial “stages” of Q), e.g., with Jesus-material set in a temptation-context early in Q and sayings about eschatological vindication coming later/last.  As Kloppenborg himself has noted, the appropriation of Q material into the narrative gospels of Matthew and Luke was a natural move compatible with the inherent dynamics of Q.  Isn’t the more reasonable inference, then, that Q presupposes and was originally composed to function along with something like the familiar earliest Christian beliefs about Jesus and the narrative-form of these beliefs that we have reflected in, e.g., the Gospels of Matthew and Luke?

Let me anticipate responses by emphasizing that I’ve no need to make earliest Christianity monochrome.  Paul’s letters reflect serious issues among earliest Jesus-followers, and sometimes harsh condemnations of one another.  Moreover, the lack of trans-local ecclesiastical structures and the trans-ethnic spread of Christianity made for variations.  But I just don’t find persuasive the specific inferences about Q that Kloppenborg still seems to find attractive.

I give a fuller discussion of Q and what I think it reflects about earliest Christianity in my book, Lord Jesus Christ:  Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 2003), 217-57, “Q and Early Devotion to Jesus”.