Chapter 2

EARLY CHRISTIAN BOOK CULTURE

AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE FIRST WRITTEN GOSPEL
Chris Keith

1. Introduction
The book culture of early Christianity has been one of the most excitingand changingsub-disciplines of NT studies at least since the
publication of Gambles 1995 Books and Readers in the Early Church.1
Larry Hurtado has been a leading voice in this discussion. I went to the
University of Edinburgh in August of 2005 in order to write a Ph.D.
under Hurtado on the signicance of the textualization of the gospel
tradition from the perspective of the then-emerging methodology of
social memory theory. My primary supervisor ended up changing from
Hurtado to Helen Bond due to Hurtados 2005 sabbatical. My topic also
ended up changing, from the textualization of the gospel tradition to
literacy and the Pericope Adulterae. Nevertheless, my work remained
rmly anchored in scribal culture and I continued to meet with Hurtado
regularly, as he was a very involved secondary supervisor who read and
commented upon everything I wrote. I also continued to think upon
the textualization of the Jesus tradition and discuss with him a variety
of topics related to literacy and early Christian book culture. By the
beginning of my nal year at Edinburgh, the fruits of his 2005 sabbatical had been published as The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts
and Christian Origins, a groundbreaking collection of essays on the
1. Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early
Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). For two other important
studies situating early Christian book practices within broader Greco-Roman
practices, see Loveday Alexander, Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of
the Gospels, in The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences
(ed. Richard Bauckham; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), pp.71111; H. Gregory
Snyder, Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World: Philosophers, Jews and Christians
(RFCC; New York: Routledge, 2000). For an earlier, but still important, study,
see Colin H. Roberts, Manuscripts, Society and Belief in Early Christian Egypt
(London: British Academy, 1979).

2. KEITH Early Christian Book Culture

23

signicance of early Christian manuscripts as part of a distinct early

Christian material culture and one of the most signicant contributions
to studies of early Christian book culture since Gambles Books and
Readers.2 The NT Ph.D. students read through it during their selfconducted weekly reading seminar, and Hurtado agreed to meet with
us. During one of those discussions in Rainy Hall, and in light of my
continued interest in my abandoned initial Ph.D. topic, I noted that
Earliest Christian Artifacts treated several artifactual elements of early
Christian manuscripts (margin widths, nomina sacra, staurograms,
readers aids, etc.), but not manuscripts themselves as artifacts. I knew
from my reading in social and cultural memory theory that the manuscript itself would have functioned as a signicant commemorative
artifact. Several years later, I have nally been able to return to my
abandoned topic.3 As initial steps toward that larger project, I offer my
Doktorvater the following essay in gratitude for his contributions to the
eld, expert supervision, mentorship, and friendship.
This brief study will present the signicance of William A. Johnsons
research on ancient Roman reading cultures for a particular issue
within early Christian book culturethe transition of the oral Jesus
tradition to the written medium in the textualization of Marks Gospel.
Marks actions may have had precursors in early Christianity in the form
of testimonia, the hypothetical text Q, or Pauline letters.4 A fuller consideration will need to assess the signicance of these possibilities, but in
this preliminary treatment I will focus upon Marks Gospel because it
remains the rst certain instance of the textualization of narrativized
Jesus tradition and thus worthy of scholarly attention as an important
development in early Christian book culture. This topic is particularly
appropriate in a volume that honors Hurtado because he was one of the
rst and strongest critics of Werner Kelbers 1983 theory about the
textualization of Marks Gospel in essays from 1990 and 1997.5 To my
2. Larry W. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian
Origins (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).
3. The project is under contract with Oxford University Press and currently titled
The Gospel as Manuscript: A Select History of the Jesus Tradition as Material
Artifact.
4. Recently, Gerd Theissen, The New Testament: A Literary History (trans. Linda
M. Maloney; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), p.42, has presented the hypothetical Q as
the rst written form of the Jesus tradition and argues that it was a prophetic text in
terms of genre.
5. Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of
Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (VPT; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983); L. W. Hurtado, The Gospel of Mark:

24

Mark, Manuscripts, and Monotheism

knowledge, Hurtado has not addressed the specic topic of the textualization of Marks Gospel since then, though he has, as recently as 2014,
continued to argue against a line of research whose roots are in Kelbers
approach (performance criticism).6 I will argue below that Johnsons
work invites a re-assessment of the signicance of the emergence of the
rst written Gospel that takes into consideration the reception-history for
the gospel tradition that Mark enabled when he textualized the oral
tradition.7 This perspective adds an important nuance to the proposals of
Kelber and Hurtado alike.
2. Books and Reading Cultures in the High Roman Empire
In a programmatic article published in the American Journal of Philology in 2000, classicist William A. Johnson outlined an approach to
Greco-Roman book culture that he described as a sociology of reading.8 He begins the article by briey rehearsing the history of research
on whether ancient Greeks and Romans ever read silently. Many scholars
have assumed that all ancient reading was aloud, and some have assumed
that scriptio continua required this vocalization of the text.9 (Johnson
includes in this history of research Achtemeiers inuential JBL essay
Omne verbum sonat.10) As Johnsons history of research reveals,
Evolutionary or Revolutionary Document?, JSNT 40 (1990), pp.1532; GrecoRoman Textuality and the Gospel of Mark: A Critical Assessment of Werner
Kelbers The Oral and the Written Gospel, BBR 7 (1997), pp.91106, respectively.
6. Larry W. Hurtado, Oral Fixation and New Testament Studies? Orality,
Performance and Reading Texts in Early Christianity, NTS 60 (2014), pp.32140.
7. This essay thus complements Chris Keith, Prolegomena on the Textualization
of Marks Gospel: Manuscript Culture, the Extended Situation, and the Emergence
of Written Gospels, in Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity: A Conversation with Barry Schwartz (ed. Tom Thatcher; SemSt 78; Atlanta:
Society of Biblical Literature, 2014), 15984.
8. William A. Johnson, Toward a Sociology of Reading in Classical Antiquity,
AJP 121 (2000), pp.593627.
9. Johnson, Toward, 595, traces the connection between reading aloud and
scriptio continua to Josef Balogh, Voces Paginarum: Beitrge zur Geschichte des
lauten Lesens und Schreibens, Philologus 82 (1927), pp.84109, 20240. For a full
response to Balogh, see Bernard M. W. Knox, Silent Reading in Antiquity, GRBS
9 (1968), pp.42135.
10. Paul J. Achtemeier, Omne verbum sonat: The New Testament and the Oral
Environment of Late Western Antiquity, JBL 109.1 (1990), pp.327: It is apparent
that the generalindeed, from all the evidence, the exclusivepractice was to read
aloud (p.15); The sheer physical nature of the written page in classical antiquity
militated against its ease of reading and in that way also contributed to the cultures
1

2. KEITH Early Christian Book Culture

25

however, both claims are simply incorrect.11 There are plenty of instances
of silent reading in Greek and Roman sources and there are no good
reasons to suspect that ancient readers were cognitively or neurophysiologically incapable of reading scriptio continua silently.
Johnsons real problem, however, is not with this debate in and of
itself, but with the telescopic manner in which it has proceeded and
especially the manner in which the winning side of the debate expressed
the signicance of their ndings. He cites a 1997 article in which
Gavrilov concludes his demonstration that ancients did occasionally read
silently with the following statement: These ancient reections help us
to see that the phenomenon of reading itself is fundamentally the same in
modern and in ancient culture. Cultural diversity does not exclude an
underlying unity.12 Gavrilov meant that ancients could read aloud or
silently, just like modern readers. For Johnson, however, Gavrilovs
manner of expressing this point is roughly the equivalent of settling for
vanilla when fudge ripple was available. He says,
But is this a proper conclusion? If we accept that the ancients did read
silently, yet know also (what no one disputes) that they commonly read
aloud, does it follow that ancient reading was really so like our own? Has
this century of debate in fact brought us no better understanding than that
the ancient readers experience was, essentially, ours?13

For Johnson, the history of research and the sources culled for the sake
of making the arguments reveal a more interesting and protable line
of enquiry. As he says elsewhere, The question I wish to pose is not,
Did the Romans read silentlyof course they didbut how they
constructed the signicance of the circumstances in which reading took
place.14 Johnson sets out to demonstrate that ancient reading practices
reliance on the oral mode of communication (p.10). Similarly, Whitney Shiner,
Proclaiming the Gospel: First-Century Performance of Mark (Harrisburg: Trinity,
2003), p.1: First-century literary works were almost always heard in a communal
setting rather than read silently by individuals. This is generally accepted today.
11. Johnson, Toward, pp.5939. It is unfortunate that NT scholars have almost
entirely ignored the 1993 rebuttal of Achtemeier by Gilliard, also published in JBL:
Frank D. Gilliard, More Silent Reading in Antiquity: non omne verbum sonabat,
JBL 112.4 (1993), pp.68996.
12. A. K. Gavrilov, Techniques of Reading in Classical Antiquity, CQ 47
(1997), p.69.
13. Johnson, Toward, p.600.
14. William A. Johnson, Constructing Elite Reading Communities in the High
Empire, in Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome (ed.
William A. Johnson and Holt N. Parker; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009),
p.328 (emphasis original).

26

Mark, Manuscripts, and Monotheism

were sometimes radically different from our own, but that these differences are most clear on a broader cultural level rather than through a
narrow consideration of reading as a cognitive act:
I prefer to look at reading as not an act, not even a process, but as a highly
complex sociocultural system that involves a great many considerations
beyond the decoding by the reader of the words of a text. Critical is the
observation that reading is not simply the cognitive process by the
individual of the technology of writing, but rather the negotiated construction of meaning within a particular sociocultural context.15

Johnson thus speaks of reading communities or reading cultures in

order to draw attention to the culturally determined aspects of reading
practices. In the rest of the article, he discusses specic descriptions of
such reading cultures in the works of Pliny, Lucian, and others, observing the intricate ways in which reading practices were bound up with
larger constructions of group identity. In a subsequent monograph, Johnson expands the article and treats in-depth multiple examples of reading
cultures in second-century Rome (for example, Pliny, Tacitus, Galen,
Gellius, Fronto, Lucian), as well as the papyri found at Oxyrhynchus.16
Johnsons study is necessarily restrictive, as he notes.17 A fuller
consideration of the evidence even from Roman culture would need to
include documentary papyri and grafti, for example, which were
embedded in their own distinct reading cultures that were different socioeconomically from the elite, formally educated circles that Johnson
studies.18 Furthermore, scholars especially may be as impressed with
similarities between their bookish enclaves of the academy and the

15. Johnson, Toward, p.603 (emphasis original). Similarly, William A.

Johnson, Reading Cultures and Education, in Reading between the Lines: Perspectives on Foreign Language Literacy (ed. Peter C. Patrikis; YLS; New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003), pp.910: But what do I intend by speaking of reading as
reading culture? Readingis a social rather than an individual phenomenon, one
that develops over time, with deep roots in the traditions of a given society. Reading
is not, in my view, an act, or even a process, but a system, a highly complex cultural
system that involves a great many considerations beyond the decoding by the reader
of the words of the (authors) text (emphasis original).
16. William A. Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman
Empire: A Study of Elite Communities (CCS; New York: Oxford University Press,
2010).
17. Johnson, Toward, p.625.
18. See, for example, Craig Evans, Grafti and Bruce W. Longenecker,
Pompeii, both in The Dictionary of the Bible and Ancient Media (ed. Tom
Thatcher et al.; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, forthcoming).
1

2. KEITH Early Christian Book Culture

27

ancient elite circles as they are with Johnsons articulation of differences

between modern and ancient book cultures. Nevertheless, his study is
thoroughly convincing in drawing out the ways in which reading practices were embedded in larger cultural realities that both shaped those
practices and gave them their meaning. Again, prima facie these observations should make sense to biblical scholars accustomed to striding to the
podium at their conferences with a Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia or
Nestle-Aland in tow, even if not planning to read from it.
More importantly, and as Johnson himself suggests, this approach
to book culture from a sometimes startingly wide-angle lens19 is
immensely fruitful for scholars interested in early Christian book culture
as another distinct book culture in the Roman Empire.20 For, in the words
of Gamble, Christian congregations were not reading communities in
the same sense as elite literary or scholarly circles, but books were
nevertheless important to them virtually from the beginning.21 Thus,
when Johnson notes how Pliny actively circulated his epistles in order to
construct an idealized community around himself and thus his own role
in that community,22 one may comparably ask about the role that proactive circulation of Pauline epistles (Col 4:16) played in the construction
of the conception of churches as a community of Christ-followers and
their conception of Paul. Similarly, when Johnson observes Galens
conviction that proper expenditures for a gentlemen include, rst,
underwriting the purchase of books, the costs of copying books, the
training of scribes in shorthand and advanced writing, or the training of
lectors in reading ability,23 we should think of the roles that wealth
played in controlling access to and interpretation of Jewish holy texts24 or
early Christian texts.25

19. Johnson, Readers, p.10.

20. Johnson, Readers, p.15 n.22: Further work along these lines could be
protably pursued also for the classical periodand for the context of early
Christian writings.
21. Harry Y. Gamble, The Book Trade in the Roman Empire, in The Early
Text of the New Testament (ed. Charles E. Hill and Michael J. Kruger; New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012), p.34.
22. Johnson, Readers, pp.4256.
23. Johnson, Readers, p.93.
24. Cf. Sirachs claim that only those not engaged in manual labor can become
authoritative Torah scribes (Sir 38:2439:3).
25. Cf. the description of Origens many writers provided through Ambroses
patronage (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.23; Jerome, Vir. ill. 61).

28

Mark, Manuscripts, and Monotheism

In the remainder of this essay, however, I will focus on an issue that

runs like a thread through the entirety of Johnsons studiesbooks
(bookrolls in this case) as physical, material artifacts. Books in these
ancient communities were not merely carriers of content; they played a
central role in helping their readers construct their identity and became
emblematic of that identity. Consider Johnsons description of how
Romans reading habits interlock as a system:26
The system is symbiotic, in that the focal text provides fodder for the
communitys activity (this is what they get together to do), while the
interrogation of the text validates the communitys sense of self-identity
as the educated, able to derive special meaning from this exclusive text.
The successful use of the text in this way both revalidates the text as
worthy and recommends the community as suitable gatekeepers.27

One could easily substitute the synagogue or the church for

Johnsons italicized the educated and understand the import for Second
Temple Judaism or early Christianity,28 but the primary focus at present
is on the book itself. It is not simply the idea of a book or an oral performance of its contents, but the actual manuscript that they can search
to study its nuances. Throughout his study, Johnson comments on the
portrayal of public reading as a social event (especially the reading aloud
of a text during a meal) and the interrogation of manuscripts in social
contexts.
Two examples of the latter phenomenon from Gelliuss Attic Nights
are particularly instructive. In the rst example, Gellius presents an
account of a visit to Fronto wherein Fronto has many of his friends
famous for learning, birth or fortunegathered around him.29 When
someone uses the word praeterpropter (more or less), Fronto stops
26. Johnson, Readers, p.201 (emphasis removed).
27. Johnson, Readers, p.202 (emphasis original).
28. Cf. John S. Kloppenborg, Literate Media in Early Christ Groups: The
Creation of a Christian Book Culture, JECS 22.1 (2014), p.41: The application of
the notion of a reading community to the Christ groups at a lower rung of the social
ladder is obvious: whatever the literacy levels among early Jesus follower and Christ
groups, the depiction of its earliest purveyors as literate and the constant iteration
of quotations of, and allusions to, the Scriptures reinforced the notion that books
and the knowledge associated with books was of central importance. Of course,
not all early Christian texts portray notable gures as literate (John 7:15; Acts
4:13). Kloppenborg is correct that this is a clear trend, however. With regard to Jesus
in particular, see further Chris Keith, Jesus Literacy: Scribal Culture and the
Teacher from Galilee (LHJS 8/LNTS 413; London: T&T Clark International, 2011),
pp.15663.
29. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 19.10; quotation from 19.10.12 (Rolfe, LCL).
1

2. KEITH Early Christian Book Culture

29

and asks about the meaning of the word. The one who spoke the word
defers to a grammarian in their company. The grammarian claims that
the word is a lower-class term and thus unworthy of further comment, an
utterly plebeian expression.30 Fronto disagrees and cites Catos and
Varros usages of the term. Another friend claims that the word is used
in the Iphigenia of Ennius, and asks that the work be produced and read.
It is, and upon the reading of the passage, the shamed grammarian takes
his leave.
A second example from earlier in Attic Nights also features a text by
Varro. In a bookstore, Gellius comes upon a man trying to pass himself
off as a grammarian, boasting that he was the only one under all heaven
who could interpret the Satires of Marcus Varro.31 Gellius pulls out a
copy of the Satires and asks the would-be grammarian to read aloud a
particularly difcult passage. The man asks Gellius himself to read.
Playing the fool, Gellius insists that his reading would no doubt be
problematic for such a learned man. When others join in pressuring the
man to read, Gellius hands him the manuscript, upon which he performs
poorly (so wretchedly did he pronounce the words and murder the
thought),32 is mocked, and leaves, blaming his eyesight for his reading.
Signicantly in this honor/shame event, Gelliuss status is underscored
since his very possession of an ancient copy of Varro,33 as well as his
selection of the specic text that gave the grammarian difculty, displays
his own intricate knowledge of it and thus his status as a man of letters.
There are many interesting things about these examples, but I draw
attention to the manner in which the events consist entirely of knowledge
of the text and especially how the manuscript itself becomes an active
witness to an argument.34 Appreciation for, possession of, and intricate
knowledge of the texts in questionand the manuscripts that contain
themfunction as a social but nevertheless real border for group identity. Being able to read and recall intricate texts accurately determined
social realities about whether one stood on the rejected or accepted side
of a groups laughter. It is not insignicant that the shamed intellectuals
physically leave the scene of their defeat in both examples.

30. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 19.10.9 (Rolfe, LCL).

31. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 13.31.1 (Rolfe, LCL).
32. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 13.31.910 (Rolfe, LCL).
33. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 13.31.6.
34. Johnson, Readers, p.95. Johnson makes this comment in reference to another
example from Galen.

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Mark, Manuscripts, and Monotheism

Although it is perhaps an obvious thing, it bears stating explicitly that

these particular reading events hold at their center not simply traditions, oral performances, or even texts in the strict sense,35 but
physical manuscripts that contain those traditions and texts. This is not to
deny the performance nature of these events. But group cognizance that
there was a manuscript created a very specic type of cultural encounter
wherein the material artifact itself was vested with signicance that
reected group identity. The bookroll seemsan egregiously elite
product intended in its stark beauty and difculty of access to instantiate
what it is to be educated.36 Similarly focusing upon the symbolic signicance of the manuscript itself while commenting upon Galens circulation of texts to friends for their personal benetand thus not for wide
distribution or publicationJohnson observes that manuscripts could
function in some instances roughly similar to the way in which a
personally autographed copy of a book might function in todays society:
Most strikingis the physicality of the notion of the work: in the
manner of an artifact like sculpture or ceramic, the bookroll is created at
the request of a friend and passed along to him as a unique copy.37
The very simple but important point of this rehearsal of Johnsons
research is that manuscripts in the ancient world functioned as cultural
artifacts whose signicance extended far beyond the content or tradition that they transmitted.38 Reading functions as group entertainment,
35. In line with D. C. Parker, An Introduction to the New Testament Manuscripts
and Their Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp.24, I understand manuscript as a physical artifact (for example, 66 or 75) and text as the
tradition transmitted by manuscripts (for example, the Gospel of John), though, for
the sake of convenience, I will use the adjective textual in reference to manuscript
phenomena.
36. Johnson, Readers, p.21.
37. Johnson, Readers, p.88 (emphasis original). Similarly, Florence Dupont,
The Corrupted Boy and the Crowned Poet or, The Material Reality and the
Symbolic Status of the Literary Book at Rome, in Johnson and Parker, eds.,
Literacies (trans. Holt N. Parker), p.149: If the book (volume) at Rome is an object
whose material reality is ceaselessly recalled, that is because it is so often integrated
into the social practice of the gift. Its value then lies as much, if not more, in its
material beauty as in the texts that it contains.
38. Similarly, Larry W. Hurtado and Chris Keith, Writing and Book Production
in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods, in The New Cambridge History of the Bible:
From the Beginnings to 600 (ed. James Carleton Paget and Joachim Schaper;
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p.63: Whether in modern or in
ancient times, a book is itself an object whose physical and visual properties are
signicant, not only for the history of books but for wider historical questions as
well.
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2. KEITH Early Christian Book Culture

31

intellectual fodder, and aesthetic delight, but sociologically plays a

role beyond the sum of its functional components.39 Obviously, early
Christian reading cultures did not approach their manuscripts in the
exact same manners as elite Roman literary cultures approached their
manuscripts. Early Christian communities were dissimilar to the elite
circles of the high empire in any number of ways, especially in overall
social status and wealth. But the sociological principle that their revered
texts were bound up with their concepts of who they were was as true for
synagogues reading Torah, Pauline churches reading epistles, and Justin
Martyrs church reading the Gospels and prophets40 as it was for Pliny,
Galen, Gellius, and their friends reading antiquarian Greco-Roman texts.
The manuscript both enabled and reected a specic reading community
that is a distinct cultural phenomenon.
3. Kelber and the Textualization of Marks Gospel
Johnsons insights on the sociological roles of manuscripts in Roman
book culture yield a new perspective on what Mark enabled when he
textualized the oral Jesus tradition.41 As I will suggest below, Marks
actions amounted to much more than the fossilization of an oral performance or the creation of a memory aid.42 This topic has been pursued with
vigor among scholars focusing upon the ancient media context of
Christianity since at least the 1983 publication of Kelbers landmark The
Oral and the Written Gospel.43 Kelber had no shortage of critics, and, as
aforementioned, Hurtado was one of the strongest.44 Along these lines, it

39. Johnson, Sociology, p.623.

40. Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. 67.
41. In a related stream of research, Jan Assmanns cultural memory theory yields
a similar perspective. I have pursued this matter further in Keith, Prolegomena.
42. In reference to the common claim that written texts primarily functioned as
aids for memory, cf. Johnson: Memorization is not an aspect or reex of oral
culture or the like, but is fundamentally tied to the text (Readers, pp.11819). This
issue requires more attention than I can give it in the current context. I note briey,
however, that the present point is not that manuscripts did not ever function as aids
to memory, but that understanding manuscripts primarily in this manner is to
underestimate their broader social signicance.
43. Kelber, Oral. For the seminal nature of this book, see the essays in Tom
Thatcher, ed., Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Beyond The Oral and the Written
Gospel (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008).
44. See nn. 5 and 6. Kelber responded to critics, though not Hurtado, in Werner
Kelber, Introduction, in The Oral and the Written Gospel, pp.xixxxxi.

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Mark, Manuscripts, and Monotheism

is also signicant that Hurtado has been perhaps the most vocal of NT
scholars in drawing attention to the signicance of Johnsons work for
understanding early Christian book culture. Hurtado has typically offered
short descriptions of Johnsons work in service of underscoring the signicance of the material and visual features of early Christian manuscripts
such as the nomina sacra, readers aids, or manuscript layout.45 As noted
at the beginning of this essay, however, he has not yet given full consideration to the implications of Johnsons work for our understanding of
a manuscript itself as a material artifact. A consideration of this matter is
timely since it relates directly to Hurtados earlier criticisms of Kelber.
In The Oral and the Written Gospel, Kelber argued that Marks transition of the oral Jesus tradition into manuscript form was a cataclysmic
event that irreparably altered the Christian experience of stories of Jesus.
Far from being logical and evolutionary, as the form critics asserted,
Kelber argued that Marks actions were revolutionary, bringing about
a freezing of oral life into textual still life.46 If early Christianity was
profoundly illiterate, Kelber asked, what need did it have of a text?47
His answer to this question was that Mark sought to replace the oral
traditions Christology of a living Lord with a Christology focused on the
past of Jesus, and thus the media transition was part of a christological
replacement strategy.48 Perhaps more than any other study, this study
awakened NT scholars to the signicance of early Christianity being a
primarily illiterate and oral culture, though few would still afrm the
sharp juxtaposition of orality and textuality that pervades it or the notion
that a media transition necessarily entails a differing Christology.
45. See, for example, Larry W. Hurtado, Early Christian Manuscripts as Artifacts, in Jewish and Christian Scripture as Artifact and Canon (ed. Craig A. Evans
and H. Daniel Zacharias; LSTS 70/SSEJC 13; London: T&T Clark International,
2009), p.78; The Early New Testament Papyri: A Survey of Their Signicance, in
Papyrologie und Exegese: Die Auslegung des Neuen Testaments im Licht der Papyri
(ed. Jens Herzer; WUNT 2/341; Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), p.16 n.54; Oral
Fixation, 32630, 337; What Do Early Christian Manuscripts Tell Us about Their
Readers?, in The World of Jesus and the Early Church: Identity and Interpretation
in Early Communities of Faith (ed. Craig A. Evans; Peabody: Hendrickson, 2011),
pp.18892. For a fuller application of Johnsons insights, see Larry W. Hurtado,
Manuscripts and the Sociology of Early Christian Reading, in Early Text, pp.49
62. Other New Testament scholars who have called attention to Johnsons work
include Kloppenborg, Literate, pp.25, 4058, as well as my contribution to
Hurtado and Keith, Writing, pp.778.
46. Kelber, Oral, p.91.
47. Kelber, Oral, pp.1434.
48. Kelber, Oral, pp.184226.
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33

As mentioned already, Kelbers groundbreaking work attracted plenty

of criticism (as well as praise). Two things regarding the research that
came in its wake are pertinent for present purposes. First, Kelber published The Oral and the Written Gospel over thirty years ago. In the
intervening period, his perspectives have shown substantially more
sensitivity to the similarities between oral tradition and written tradition
and their mutual inuence in the ancient context.49 Consider the following statement of Kelber in praise of Parkers study of the living text of
the Gospels:50
From Parkers perspective, not only are the Gospels the culmination of a
stream of a free manuscript tradition, but they stand in a living tradition
that remained uid for centuries As early as 1983, I had argued in The
Oral and the Written Gospel that the concepts of original form and
variants have no validity in oral life, nor does the one of ipsissima vox, if
by that one means the authentic version over against secondary ones
(30). It turns out that my challenge to the search for the single origin was
inadequate insofar as it was restricted to the oral medium.51

Similarly, in a 2007 review essay, he states:

I hope that Parkers studies of the early scribal life of the Jesus tradition can be brought into a fruitful collaboration with orality studies,
because the variability factor, natural to oral tradition, now turns out
to be likewise characteristic of the early scribal phase of the Gospel
tradition.52

49. See now the collection of essays in Werner Kelber, Imprints, Voiceprints,
and Footprints of Memory: Collected Essays of Werner H. Kelber (RBS 74; Atlanta:
Society of Biblical Literature, 2013).
50. D. C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
51. Werner H. Kelber, On the History of the Quest, or: The Reduction of
Polyvalency to Single Sense, in Imprints, p.255. Previous versions of this essay
appeared as The Quest for the Historical Jesus: From the Perspectives of Medieval,
Modern, and Post-Enlightenment Readings, and in View of Ancient, Oral Aesthetics, in The Jesus Controversy: Perspectives in Conict by John Dominic Crossan,
Luke Timothy Johnson, and Werner H. Kelber (Harrisburg: Trinity, 1999), pp.75
115, and Der historische Jesus: Bedenken zur gegenwrtigen Diskussion aus der
Perspektive mittelalterlicher, moderner und postmoderner Hermeneutik, in Der
historische Jesus: Tendenzen und Perspektiven der gegenwrtigen Forschung (ed.
Jens Schrter and Ralph Brucker; BZNW 114; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), pp.1566.
52. Werner H. Kelber, Orality and Biblical Scholarship: Seven Case Studies,
in Imprints, p.330 (emphasis original); repr. from Review of Biblical Literature 9
(2007), pp.124.

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Mark, Manuscripts, and Monotheism

Kelber offers similar assessments in a 2010 essay that discusses the

mouvance and pluriformity of biblical texts.53 In this light, it would not
be an overstatement to say that the later Kelber has led the charge in
correcting some perspectives of the early Kelber.
Second, it nevertheless is the case that certain sections of NT scholarship remain entrenched in a paradigm that one can trace to The Oral and
the Written Gospel. Insofar as Kelbers treatment of Marks textualization of the oral Jesus tradition focused upon what Mark brought to a
screeching halt in the oral tradition instead of what he set in motion in
the written tradition, and how Marks Gospel, as written text, continues
to reect its oral legacy, his approach exhibited what I have elsewhere
called the oral-preference perspective.54 By this, I mean simply that the
scholarly consideration of the signicance of Marks action privileges
the oral aspects of that transaction over the textual aspects of it. Stated
otherwise, the emergence of the rst written Gospel is understood against
a backdrop of ancient orality rather than ancient book culture.
Signicantly, scholars reect the oral-preference perspective even
when disagreeing with other aspects of Kelbers The Oral and the
Written Gospel. Clear examples are Dewey and Achtemeier. In a critical,
though appreciative, dialogue with Kelber, Dewey states:
I think that the Gospel of Mark is basically an oral narrative built on oral
storytelling, employing an oral style, and plotted according to oral conventions Whether composed in performance, by dictation, or in writing,
the Gospel of Mark was composed in an oral style and performed orally.
The gospel remains fundamentally on the oral side of the oral/written
divide.55

Elsewhere, Dewey quite explicitly claims that Christian texts had little
signicance as manuscripts: While texts were produced that later
became very important within Christianity as texts, these texts began as
aids to orality, and seemingly had little importance in themselves.56
53. Werner Kelber, The History of the Closure of Biblical Texts, in The
Interface of Orality and Writing (ed. Annette Weissenrieder and Robert B. Coote;
WUNT 260; Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), pp.7282; rev. and repr. in Imprints,
pp.41340.
54. Keith, Prolegomena, 161.
55. Joanna Dewey, The Gospel of Mark as Oral Hermeneutic, in Jesus, pp.72,
86.
56. Joanna Dewey, Textuality in an Oral Culture: A Survey of the Pauline
Traditions, in Orality and Textuality in Early Christian Literature (ed. Joanna
Dewey; Semeia 65; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1995), p.51 (emphasis
original). Cf. similarly Richard A. Horsley, The Gospel of Mark in the Interface of
Orality and Writing, in Weissenrieder and Coote, eds., The Interface of Orality and
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35

Likewise, in an article in which he throughout interacts critically with

The Oral and the Written Gospel, Achtemeier says, That means that
apart from any unique characteristics they may possess in the matter of
form or language, [the NT documents] are oral to the core, both in their
creation and in their performance.57
In light of such claims, one must ask what it means for the creation of
a documentthe writing of words on a papyrus or parchmentto be
oral to the core? How could writing a text on a manuscript remain
fundamentally on the oral side of the so-called Great Divide? If it
is the case that such an act would theoretically remain fundamentally
oral and on the oral side of the oral/written divide, would not this
scenario indicate the fundamentally awed nature of the theoretical
framework?58 This is not to claim that such an act would be detached
from the ancient oral environment, but how could such an act fail also to
be textual?
4. Hurtados Criticisms of Kelber
These questions are important in the present context because they are,
along with other matters, the source of Hurtados trenchant criticisms of
Kelber in 1990 and 1997, as well as Hurtados more recent criticisms of
performance criticism, which grows directly from the oral-preference
perspective, as the quotations of Dewey and Achtemeier illustrate.59
Hurtado takes issue with at least two specic matters. First, he argues
that dening literacy and textuality in contrast to orality mischaracterizes
the cultural context of early Christianity, wherein a predominantly oral
environment nevertheless hosted thriving textuality.60 One cannot,
Writing, p.156: Before [the time of Constantine] (and perhaps afterwards as
well)written copies of texts were evidently of secondary, ancillary importance in
the communication of the Gospels, but surely helped enhance their authority.
57. Achtemeier, Omne, p.19.
58. Most scholars have now rejected the so-called Great Divide. See further
Chris Keith, A Performance of the Text: The Adulteresss Entrance into Johns
Gospel, in The Fourth Gospel in First-Century Media Culture (ed. Anthony Le
Donne and Tom Thatcher; ESCO/LNTS 426; London: T&T Clark International,
2011), pp.5463.
59. Hurtado, Gospel of Mark; idem, Greco-Roman; idem, Oral Fixation.
60. Hurtado, Greco-Roman, pp.937. Hurtados comment that especially in
Jewish society, literacy was a valued and widely-shared competence and the writing,
reading, and hearing of texts had deeply and widely affected the populace for
centuries (95) now needs heavy qualication, as does a similar statement from
Gospel of Mark, p.16. If he means that many Jews were literate, that is incorrect

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Mark, Manuscripts, and Monotheism

Hurtado rightly insists, construe orality in Second Temple Judaism and

early Christianity as a lack of inuence of textuality.61 Second, he
argues against Kelbers portrayal of ancient book culture and especially
the notion that books were frozen and still in contrast to oral uidity.62
On these particular points, Hurtado is correct, though it is once more
worth noting that the later work of Kelber has moved toward these
positions as well. As to Kelbers 1983 theory for the textualization of
Marks Gospel, however, Hurtado concludes in 1990:
Kelbers case for Mark as a revolutionary development in early Christianity rests upon an inaccurate description of the oral and written culture
of the Greco-Roman era He is right to underscore the importance of
Mark and to focus attention on the question of why the text was written,
but his own answer to this question must be rejected and his case for a
revolutionary Mark must be judged to have failed.63

Similarly, Hurtado concludes in 1997:

Mark is not a single revolutionary document that created textuality in
early Christianity. It was a step in a line of developments, many of the
crucial ones well beyond the lifetime of the author and beyond the
horizon of his intentions. The sort of xity in the Jesus tradition Kelber
portrays in fact took a few centuries. The standardization and, ultimately,
the canonization of the textual pictures of Jesus in the Gospels was part of
a process of social development in early Christianity that involved many
factors, and Kelbers attribution of key responsibility to Mark must be
regarded as incorrect.64

(see Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine [TSAJ 81; Tbingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 2001]; Keith, Jesus Literacy, pp.71123). Hurtado is correct about
the cultural inuence of texts, however, and here Stocks distinction between
textuality and literacy is important (Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy:
Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth
Centuries [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983], p.7); see further Keith,
Jesus Literacy, pp.858. Hurtado offers more careful statements along these lines
in, for example, Gospel of Mark, pp.1617, and later in Earliest, p.25 n.59.
61. Hurtado, Gospel of Mark, p.17. See further Eric Eve, Behind the Gospels:
Understanding the Oral Tradition (London: SPCK, 2013), pp.114; Rafael Rodrguez, Oral Tradition and the New Testament: A Guide for the Perplexed (London:
T&T Clark International, 2014), pp.111.
62. Hurtado, Gospel of Mark, pp.1719; idem, Greco-Roman, pp.97105.
63. Hurtado, Gospel of Mark, p.19.
64. Hurtado, Greco-Roman, p.106.
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5. Assessment and Conclusion

Hurtados criticisms of Kelber raise a number of important points, yet, in
my estimation, fail to address Kelbers foundational question (a question
that Stanton had articulated before Kelber):65 In an oral environment that
had previously functioned presumably ne with the Jesus tradition in
oral form, why did Mark commit the tradition to the written medium?
This question involves Marks intentions, concerning which we can only
speculate, though it is signicant in this regard that Mark presents his
Gospel as a text that will be read publicly (Mark 13:14).66 But one can
also ask the question in terms of the broader signicance of Marks
actions and what he accomplished rather than his intentions. It is here
that Johnsons research becomes particularly important.
From the perspective of Johnsons work on Roman reading cultures,
we may reject Deweys claim that early Christian texts had little importance in themselves.67 Manuscripts were integral factors in the maintenance and articulation of group identity, often becoming shorthand
expressions of the group identity. We need only think of the imperial
attempt to attack Christians by burning their texts in the Diocletianic
Persecution to note how outsiders also came to view Christian books as
expressions of their identity.68 Oral performances, too, were related to the
maintenance and articulation of group identity. But with manuscripts,
reading cultures gained physical emblems of the community. Once more,
that Marks Gospel came to function in this manner stands independently
of whether he intended for it to do so, though his actions did create that
possibility.
The implications of Johnsons work for Kelbers and Hurtados
respective viewpoints are more complex because, and in contrast to
Dewey, Kelber and Hurtado have both insisted that the emergence of
Marks Gospel was indeed a signicant act while disagreeing about how
and why that act was signicant. If Kelbers original work overstated the
revolutionary nature of Mark by portraying it as a radical break with
orality, Hurtados criticisms of Kelber understated Marks act by portraying it as simply one action on a logical and evolutionary path and
65. Graham Stanton, Form Criticism Revisited, in What about the New
Testament? Essays in Honour of Christopher Evans (ed. Morna Hooker and Colin
Hickling; London: SCM, 1975), p.15.
66. In claiming that Mark 13.14clearly has a reader rather than an auditor in
view, Kloppenborg, Literate, p.39 seems to present a false choice. More likely,
Mark has a lector in view who reads aloud for a listening audience.
67. Dewey, Textuality, p.51.
68. See further Gamble, Books, pp.1412, 150.

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Mark, Manuscripts, and Monotheism

relieving Mark of any key responsibility. What constitutes a revolution

is perhaps in the eye of the beholder, but at least two things are clear.
First, until a manuscript of Q is found and it turns out to have been a
narrativized account of Jesus life and ministry, Marks textualization of
the narrativized gospel tradition remains an unprecedented event in early
Christian book culture. As Hurtado himself notes, in a comment that is
closer to recognizing the innovative nature of Marks actions than his
aforementioned comment that downplays Marks key responsibility,
Considered as the earliest written narrative of Jesus ministry, the
Gospel of Mark was of course a major event in the literary history of
early Christianity and a major step in the transmission of the Jesus
tradition.69 Second, Marks textualization of the oral Jesus tradition gave
birth to a distinctive and powerful reception-history for the gospel
tradition wherein manuscripts nurtured, shaped, and maintained various
(often competing) Christian identities in ever-new expressions.70 Nomina
sacra, staurograms, preference for the codex, and other artifactual expressions of Christian identity were intricate parts of this unfolding process.
Furthermore, as Assmann notes, manuscripts allow these expressions
of identity to move beyond the barrier of copresence that is required for
oral performance and thus cross space and time.71 Butand this is the
important pointnone of this is possible for the Jesus tradition with oral
tradition in the specic ways that it is possible with a manuscript.
Thus, although Mark did not create the kind of rigid and xed textuality that Kelber originally envisioned, by shifting the oral Jesus tradition
to the manuscript medium, Mark nevertheless did create a distinct textuality whereby early Christians eventually read those texts liturgically in
the manner that non-Christian Jews read the Hebrew sacred texts in
synagogue and elite Romans read their classics in the context of meals.
69. Hurtado, Greco-Roman, pp.1056.
70. Kloppenborg, Literate, p.59, observes, In spite of widespread illiteracy
and modest resources, and no doubt because of constant exposure to literate media,
some second-century Christ groups took steps in the direction of a book culture.
One implication of the present argument is that one can trace such steps even earlier
to the rst century C.E.
71. Jan Assmann, Form as Mnemonic Device: Cultural Texts and Cultural
Memory, in Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark (ed. Richard A.
Horsley, Jonathan A. Draper, and John Miles Foley; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006),
pp.737; Religion and Cultural Memory (trans. Rodney Livingstone; CMP; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp.1018. More broadly, see Jan Assmann,
Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political
Imagination (trans. David Henry Wilson; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011).
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39

Although the developments of the Jesus tradition in that receptionhistory, such as the public reading of the texts as Scripture, the rise of the
fourfold gospel canon, Christian adoption of the codex, and the canonization of the New Testament, do indeed lie outside Marks horizon of
intentions, as Hurtado notes, scholars should not underestimate Marks
contribution to what came after him. Again, Mark might not have
intended this reception-history, but he did enable it.
For these reasons, although Kelber was not right concerning why
Marks act was signicant, he was entirely right in thinking that it was
signicant and that this signicance related directly to early Christian
identity. Hurtado has likewise insisted that Marks act was signicant,
and his most recent work on early Christian manuscripts as material
artifacts, including his incorporation of the perspective of Johnson on
ancient Roman reading cultures, points to one reason why. Manuscripts
not only reect reading cultures, they enable them. It remains for future
research in NT scholarship to esh out the fuller ramications of Marks
creation of a Gospel-reading culture in early Christianity.