Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus

A Window into Early Christian Reading Practices

Brian J. Wright

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506432502
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506438498
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Much of the contemporary discussion of the Jesus tradition has focused on aspects of oral performance, storytelling, and social memory, on the premise that the practice of communal reading of written texts was a phenomenon documented no earlier than the second century CE. Brian J. Wright overturns that premise by examining evidence that demonstrates communal reading events in the first century. Wright disproves the simplistic notion that only a small segment of society in certain urban areas could have been involved in such communal reading events during the first century; rather, communal reading permeated a complex, multifaceted cultural field in which early Christians, Philo, and many others participated. His study thus pushes the academic conversation back by at least a century and raises important new questions regarding the formation of the Jesus tradition, the contours of book culture in early Christianity, and factors shaping the transmission of the text of the New Testament. These fresh insights have the potential to inform historical reconstructions of the nature of the earliest churches as well as the story of canon formation and textual transmission.

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Communal Reading Events in the First Century: The New Testament Corpus

I put you all under oath before the Lord to have this letter read aloud to all the brothers.

—1 Thess 5:27

Devote yourself to the communal reading of Scripture.

—1 Tim 4:13

After this letter has been read aloud to you all, make sure that it is also read communally in the church of the Laodiceans. Make sure that you also read communally the letter from Laodicea.

—Col 4:16

Christ-believing communities were much like other scholastic communities in that they focused on the reading and interpretation of texts.^[1] In over three hundred passages, the New Testament includes 317 direct quotes of the Old Testament.^[2] If allusions and verbal parallels are included, there are another 2,310 Old Testament references.^[3] When comparing the formulas introducing Scriptural quotations in the New Testament corpus with other literature, such as the Mishnah, Bruce Metzger notes that “in the NT the frequency of this type [of formulas involving a verb of saying] is more evenly balanced by the type containing a reference to the written record.”^[4]

With that in mind, I seek to demonstrate here that communal reading events according to the New Testament involve a broad range of venues, participants, and cultures. They were widespread socially, as well as geographically. Even more specifically, Christian communities are depicted as communally reading more than just the Jewish scriptures or apostolic writings.

In modern terms, activities in these communities included reading, preaching, teaching, words of exhortation, catechesis, apologetics, and proclamation.^[5] In light of the previous chapter, readers or reciters often operated under the assumption that the audience had intimate knowledge of other communal reading events. A speaker often assumes that what he or she shares regarding a written text faithfully represents what others have already heard communally and that they would be able to recognize it as such; even if the quotes or allusions are not exact in all the particulars, they are in principle.

Still other features enhance the notion that the earliest Christian communities were didactic: office of teacher, gift of teaching, commands to teach, traditions passed on, and communal teaching. The picture more often than not is of a didactic community that used texts. In fact, many outsiders attended and imitated Christian communal reading events.

Whereas the previous chapter examined certain literary evidence from the first century CE in order to identify and map communal reading events in the Greco-Roman world, now we want to determine how widespread these events were according to the New Testament authors.^[6] To accomplish this, we will identify and categorize several geographically and culturally separated locations in the Roman Empire in order to draw overall conclusions from the individual writings examined within each locale. Gauging the basic geographical framework of communal reading events in various first-century communities will better equip scholars to determine the extent to which these types of events controlled and shaped the New Testament tradition in the first century CE. The goal is not, then, to determine how many communal reading events occurred at any given location or how they collectively shaped the Christian tradition, but rather to determine where geographically there is enough evidence to find a plausible context for communal reading events according to the New Testament.

Excursus: Notes, Excerpts, and Compilations

[He left] me 160 notebooks of selected passages, written in a minute hand on both sides of the page, so that their number is really doubled.

—Pliny, Letters 3.5.17 (ca. 61–113 CE)

However, other comic poets too, if you do not read them too critically, contain passages you can excerpt.

—Quintilian, Inst. 10.1.72 (ca. 35–90s CE)

People took notes in the first century CE. This fact is confirmed by Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman sources.¹ Just a sampling of such available evidence makes clear that there was a broad spectrum of note-taking practices. This diversity is readily seen by the variety of terminology used, writing materials utilized, and explicit statements made by authors writing in the first century.

It is reasonable to argue, then, that as many people as there were who could take notes, there were as many different ways in which people could and did write them. The main reason this is being emphasized here is that many passages examined in this chapter either indicate or insinuate that someone was reading or reciting from some form of abridged notes derived from a longer literary work or collection of works. Thus, we should not expect or imagine that every time a person is reading or reciting a text, they had the complete work or that it was solely from memory without any written text.

While none of these note-taking practices automatically rule out the possibility that on certain occasions, there was a complete scroll or literary work present or directly accessed,² it seems more probable and practical from the available evidence that more often than not, people read or recited from some condensed form of a particular text(s). Although some scholars have attempted to be more specific regarding the exact contents of some of the abridged notes, excerpts, and/or compilations, such as an anthology of prooftexts from the Jewish Scriptures to show that Jesus is the Christ,³ I accept and underscore the more general case that people in the first century CE, such as the apostles and disciples, were using excerpts, notes, and incipient testimonia, especially during many communal reading events, or at least according to the author’s portrayal of them.

The main point being stressed here is that even if the assumption is correct that orality dominated the earliest proclamation, it does not mean that was always the case. The use of notes, excerpts, and compilations was already happening in Christian communal reading events in the first century, as we seek to demonstrate, with some use of rolls of the Jewish Scriptures and written gospels likely as well. The precise way in which and the extent to which a text was used, however, is beyond the scope of our purposes here.

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1. Some note takers even published books without an author’s permission. For several examples and an excellent discussion, see Michael Winterbottom, ed., The Minor Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1984).

2. David Lincicum, “Paul and the Testimonia: Quo Vademus?,” JETS 51, no. 2 (2008): 297–308, esp. 305.

3. For a concise overview of the so-called testimonia hypothesis, as well as a few case studies, see Martin C. Albl, “The Testimonia Hypothesis and Composite Citations,” in Composite Citations in Antiquity, vol. 1, Jewish, Graeco-Roman, and Early Christian Uses, ed. Sean A. Adams and Seth M. Ehorn, LNTS 525 (London: T&T Clark, 2015).

“The most difficult question to answer in working on an ancient Jewish or Christian document,” James Charlesworth writes, “is its provenance.”^[7] While acknowledging and agreeing with this difficulty, it needs to be emphasized here that we are not attempting to identify the provenance of any New Testament writing. Rather, the writings discussed in this chapter will be categorized based solely on the author(s) stated or implied reference(s) to communal reading events.

The Gospels and Acts

Matthew, Mark, and John

Jesus is universally described as quoting from Scripture, making scriptural allusions, and directing people to consider what they have read in the Scripture. The overwhelming depiction of Jesus as a teacher in all of the gospel traditions (including apocryphal gospels) and non-Christian sources depicts a didactic movement focused on the transmission of written traditions, prophecies, exhortations, and Scripture.^[8] The further depiction of Jesus reading, teaching, and speaking in formal venues like synagogues and temple, reveals, at the very least, that the evangelists included such events because they knew about and perhaps even shared in similar reading commun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introducing a New Control Category
• Finding Communal Reading Events in the Time of Jesus
• Economic and Political Factors
• Social Context
• Communal Reading Events in the First Century: Selected Authors and Texts
• Communal Reading Events in the First Century: The New Testament Corpus
• Concluding Remarks
• Appendix: Some Additional Evidence
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Author Index
• Scripture Index