Abstract
When Elizabeth Eisenstein famously argued for the revolution in knowledge production and dissemination brought on by the printing press, she made the poignant observation that “the conditions of scribal culture can only be observed through the veil of print” (The Printing Press as an Agent of Change [Cambridge University Press, 1979], 8). Although this observation was made in the interest of apprehending the revolutionary effects of print culture, a growing number of scholars of (ancient) scribal cultures are contending with this veil, as Matthew Larsen now does in his revised Yale dissertation, Gospels before the Book. Larsen’s “the book” resembles Eisenstein’s “printing press” as rhetorical shorthand. In this case it represents modern scholars’ ideas about ancient authorship and publication that have been shaped by print culture, which they apply anachronistically to diverse historical, exegetical, and theological studies of the four canonized Gospels. Larsen’s project, however, does not aim to expose the mechanics by which “print culture” effects such shaping. Rather, predicated upon “an investigation of a complex constellation of ideas: textual unfinishedness, unauthored texts, ‘publication’, textual revision, and a variety of diverse uses and functions of different kinds of texts” (p. 5), Gospels before the Book charts a path to rethinking the textualization of the gospel according to Mark (hereafter “Mark”) and its earliest engagement.
Chapters 2 through 4 take the reader on a journey through select ancient literary and material sources that address “publication” within a manuscript milieu in an effort to undermine scholars’ normative constructions of the practices of publication in antiquity. Whereas the consensus sees ancient publication as the straightforward authorial release of a bounded literary work for public consumption, Larsen canvasses examples of “unfinished and less-authored texts,” “accidental publication and postpublication revision,” and “multiple authorized versions of the same work,” in order to show that such deviations are not aberrant but deeply embedded in the practices, expectations, and anxieties of the writers of ancient literature. Larsen appeals to a diverse group of writers, ranging from Plato to Galen, Cicero to Josephus, the writers of the Community Rule to Philodemus in Herculaneum, and more, who describe their textual activity variously as open, fluid, revisable, unfinished, and uncontrolled. These surveys indeed challenge the notion that ancient Mediterranean writers in general experienced publication as a “clean, controlled act of the author and no one else” (p. 75). But readers may struggle to see Plato, the literate elite of late-Republican Rome, or the textualizers of the Community Rule, for example, as participants in a book culture relevant for comparison.
A unifying feature of Larsen’s broad survey is his attention to the recurrence of ὑπομνήματα (hypomnēmata) among his sources, a term used by a variety of ancient writers to refer to rough notes or transcriptions of speeches that often served as foundations for more ordered and stylized literary compositions. Although gospels scholarship has been known to see in ὑπομνήματα analogies with the gospels, Larsen grounds his account of the uses of Mark in how ancient writers understood the transition from ὑπομνήματα to “more finished” compositions. For writers like Galen and Lucian, ὑπομνήματα lacked order (taxis) and stylistic polish, but these were elements that could be added by revisers. As Larsen shows in chapter 5, adding order and style to ὑπομνήματα in the mode of Galen and Lucian explains how both Luke and Papias describe their engagement with their sources, including Mark. By the final chapter, we see that Larsen takes very seriously the identification of Mark as closely akin to ὑπομνήματα, articulating a convincing structure for Mark as an assembly of note collections, sets of stories organized according to topic and keyword, which is precisely the minimal extent of organization common to ὑπομνήματα.
The language of ὑπομνήματα also helps Larsen track a discursive shift between the second and fourth centuries in how Christian authors represent gospel authorship and their textual relations. At the end of the second century, Irenaeus initiated what would become the common discursive frame for gospel textuality: there are four bounded gospels, each with a distinct author. Larsen sees this as a notable shift from the way Papias described gospel textuality at the end of the first century, when he positioned himself in a line of textualizers, who continued to build upon and improve literary accounts of the life of Jesus. The language of ὑπομνήματα persists in the accounts of readers of Mark, such as Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius. But as Larsen perceptively observes, it is a legacy discourse that Clement and Eusebius reshape within a framework more in line with Irenaeus. Larsen thus tracks a trend (albeit a nonlinear one) into late antiquity that starts to see the four gospels as equally authored and finished, a viewpoint that modern scholars tend to reproduce, thus missing how Mark’s earliest users perceived and represented their own engagement with it. Left unanswered, however, is the degree to which these discursive shifts of the late-second to fourth centuries anticipate, mirror, or differ from the effects of print culture on modern scholarship’s understanding of book and author. Surely, we would be hard-pressed to see print culture as the culprit for Irenaeus’ views.
Chapter 5 directs the problem of modern anachronism to treatments of the so-called Synoptic Problem. Larsen’s critique, that the various solutions to the problem tend to treat each gospel as a discrete and bounded unit, is most overwrought here, insofar as it reflects the larger concern for the “book” anachronism. For the best in recent synoptic scholarship (including on Q and “Marcion’s Gospel”) treats textual relations between written “sources” rather than authored “books,” with close attention to ancient social and material constraints upon source-utilization. (In fact, Alan Kirk’s recent Q in Matthew: Ancient Media, Memory, and Early Scribal Transmission of the Jesus Tradition [London: T & T Clark, 2016] focuses at length on the concept of ὑπομνήματα to better understand Matthew’s particular composition.) This scholarship may in fact support Larsen’s ultimately incisive proposal: the close textual relationship between Mark and Matthew implies that they are really different versions of the same work. In Larsen’s account, Matthew’s revision of Mark joins the numerous “endings” of Mark to show that Mark was not in the first instance understood by other writers as complete, but the type of text understood to support further (re)writing.
Historians of religion are wise to avoid anachronism in their scholarship. And although Gospels before the Book leaves unresolved the question of how print culture, whatever it may be, shapes the assumptions of scholars of ancient texts, the volume does make a compelling case for viewing gospel textualization along the lines of the reworking and modification of ὑπομνήματα. As Larsen states in his conclusion, the implications of his analysis are broad, raising further questions about the textualization of gospels other than Mark, the diversity of ancient views concerning gospel textuality, and new ways for speaking about open, fluid textual traditions. Accordingly, Gospels before the Book is now required reading for anyone seeking to contribute in those particular fields and early Christian textuality more generally.