“Communal Reading” in Early Christianity

A forthcoming book by Brian J. Wright, Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus:  A Window into Early Christian Reading Practices, is a solid and valuable contribution to our grasp of how texts functioned in early Christianity.  View the publisher’s advance notice here.  Due out December this year, it’s available for pre-order now.

Wright invited me to write a Foreword for the book, and after reading the manuscript I was entirely happy to do so.  Here’s what I wrote:

 

This book is an important contribution to our understanding of how texts were handled in early Christian circles and in their larger Roman-era cultural environment.  For a few decades now, both in biblical studies and in classical studies, scholars have explored and debated a variety of questions about the distribution and usage of texts, the level and degrees of Roman-era literacy, the relationship between “orality” and texts, and the factors affecting the transmission and stability of texts.  In the process, some earlier exaggerations and romantic notions (such as claims about an original “orality” in earliest Christian circles that involved the oral “performance” of texts from memory rather than the reading of manuscripts) have been corrected.[1]  But there continues to be a need for more data to be placed into discussion about texts and reading in the world of earliest Christianity, and one of the major strengths of Brian Wright’s book is that it addresses this need, with a commendable abundance of primary sources drawn upon, which he submits to a careful and cogent analysis.

The rich body of evidence surveyed in Chapter 5 on “Communal Reading Events” in the Roman-era setting alone makes the book worth its price, and the Appendix provides still more!  That is, he documents amply the frequent, perhaps even characteristic, manner in which texts were used, one person reading from a manuscript while others listened.  By giving attention to the provenance of his evidence, he is also able to show that this reading practice was followed trans-locally in various parts of the Roman Empire.  In Chapter 6, he shows further that this was the common practice among earliest Christian circles as well, and from the first century onward.  In short, early Christianity reflected the reading practices of the Jewish matrix in which it emerged, and, indeed, the reading practices of the larger Roman-era cultural environment.

One of the effects of Wright’s study is to show that, whatever the levels of literacy in the Roman world, written texts were experienced and engaged widely and by people of various social and educational levels.  For, even among circles in which the great majority were illiterate, all that was needed was one person capable of reading a text out for the rest.  So, the low level of literacy that we assume (and it is basically an assumption) cannot be a basis for marginalizing the place and influence of written texts in the Roman world.  Indeed, Wright adds further data to the growing conviction among historians of the Roman period that it was a time characterized by a remarkable salience of writing and reading of all kinds, from graffiti to inscriptions, and from letters and bills of sale to popular and elite literary texts.

Wright also notes rightly that the communal reading of texts functioned as one factor affecting the transmission of texts, particularly those that were read repeatedly.  For as these texts were read they became, so to speak, the textual property of the circle(s) of those who heard them read.  Wright shows that people were often concerned to have a reliable version of the wording of texts, and could object when any significant alteration was attempted to texts that they knew well.  In making this point, Wright underscores a factor that is relevant for our estimates of how writings that came to be treated as scriptures, such as those that form our New Testament, were transmitted textually.[2]  Michael Holmes noted how some early Christian texts suffered what he called “macro-level” alterations, such as the Gospel of Thomas, whereas other texts, particularly those that early on acquired a scriptural status and usage, exhibit “micro-level” variants (i.e., smaller variation in such things as verb tense, presence/absence of the definite article, word-order of small phrases, etc.).[3]  Wright’s emphasis on the role of the repeated communal reading of texts helps us to account for this.  Those texts that were read out communally more frequently acquired a comparatively greater textual stability.

I do not wish to distract readers further from the rich feast of data and discussion in this book, and so I shall conclude simply by reiterating that it is a study that anyone interested in the realia of early Christianity should note.  I hope that Wright’s study will quickly acquire the attention that it deserves.  As others have noted, early Christianity was a particularly “bookish” religious movement, evidenced in the place given to the reading of texts, and also in the production, copying, and trans-local circulation of texts.[4]  Wright’s valuable book illumines in specific ways the social dimension of that early Christian bookishness, and we are all thereby enabled to perceive better features of that remarkable religious movement.

[1] Larry W. Hurtado, “Oral Fixation and New Testament Studies?  ‘Orality’, ‘Performance’ and Reading Texts in Early Christianity.” New Testament Studies 60.3 (2014): 321-40.  Cf. also Kelly Iverson, “Oral Fixation or Oral Corrective? A Response to Larry Hurtado,” New Testament Studies 62.2 (2016): 183-200; and my reply, “Correcting Iverson’s ‘Correction’,” New Testament Studies 62.2 (2016): 201-206.

[2] In a very brief manner, I pointed to this factor myself in an essay published several years ago:  Larry W. Hurtado, “The New Testament in the Second Century:  Text, Collections and Canon,” in Transmission and Reception:  New Testament Text-Critical and Exegetical Studies, ed. J. W. Childers and D. C. Parker (Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2006), 3-27.  So, I am happy to have now Wright’s supporting analysis.

[3] Michael W. Holmes, “Text and Transmission in the Second Century,” in The Reliability of the New Testament:  Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace in Dialogue, ed. Robert B. Stewart (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), 47-65.

[4] E.g., see my discussion of this in Destroyer of the gods:  The Distinctiveness of Early Christianity in the Roman World (Waco:  Baylor University Press, 2016), 105-41.