Problems with studying memory in antiquity

On The Forbidden Gospels blog, April DeConick follows up her earlier post (discussed here, More SBL Dating Discussions) with a fresh post entitled SBL Memories 3: Become More Scientific. The first half of the post appears to be aimed at a kind of fundamentalist view according to which Jesus' words were recorded with verbatim accuracy in the Gospels, a view in which (of course) I have no stake or interest, so I will pass over it. About half-way in to the post, though, April turns to the section of my paper on the "missing middle" in Thomasine parallels with the Synoptics, drawing special attention to Thomas 57, the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. April's disagreement with me here is based in part on a critique of an imagined model that I do not work with and which I regard as untenable:

What is the evidence that writers who have a literary document in front of them from which they are copying ever leave out the middle because they are rushed? Just based on logic, I would think that literary copying would be otherwise. That the copyist would be more careful to preserve the material he is using, that he is working slowly, that he can stop and go back and double check, and that he can erase and correct. Such is not the case, however, when an author is relying on human memory, when he cannot double check a written source.

Few writers who think that Thomas is familiar with the Synoptics are using a model of scribal copying, whereby the author of Thomas has a literary document in front of him. (Perrin may be an exception here, but see my comments on his work). The way I imagine the process is of familiarity with the Synoptics by means of memory through regular reading aloud (by himself or others).

April goes on to make several interesting observations about studying memory, and it is here that the real interest in the post lies. I will withhold any lengthy discussion until I have had the chance to read April's new article on the topic (I have the book in which it appears on order), but I will make a comment about the classic she mentions, F. C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; original ed., 1932). Bartlett's fascinating experiments with memory bear on the topic, not least given that one of his examples (72-3) features a "missing middle" similar to the one I have been illustrating in Thomas. It is worth mentioning that Bartlett was testing his subjects' memory of a written text. He gave his subjects a text called "The War of the Ghosts" and asked them to read the text a couple of times, and then he tested them for recall of the piece after selected periods of time, with interesting results, including a good example of an individual retelling the story without its middle section (in his first retelling, 20 hours after his reading of the text). I might claim that this coheres with my own view on Thomas's knowledge of the Synoptics, but alas, I have to confess that I can't help thinking that it does not recreate anything like the conditions that may be in view in antiquity, with communal texts read aloud by the literate to the community over a period of time, not a single unfamiliar text read by a modern individual and then recalled. Given my curmudgeonly scepticism on the transference of such studies to investigations into memory in antiquity, I am loathe to make anything of Bartlett's studies for our studies of issues like Thomas's familiarity with the Synoptics, even though they would help me, but I will concede one important point. Analysis of the way that moderns attempt to recall texts can at least stimulate our reflections on antiquity, even if that reflection ends up being about contrast more than comparison.

More SBL Dating Discussion

April DeConick responded to my paper, Dating the Crucial Sources in Early Christianity (Handout; Blog Series on Dating), at this year's SBL Annual Meeting, in the second meeting of a new consultation on Cross, Resurrection and Diversity in Early Christianity, and now she offers some useful reflections on that response on her Forbidden Gospels blog, SBL Memories 2: Dating Our Sources. One of the things I like about April DeConick's writing is that she often gets me thinking -- she has a great way of approaching subjects from a distinctive angle.

In the current post, April speaks of division in the academy and I think the implication is that we are on different sides of that divide. One side uses "older models" that are now "being seriously questioned" while April emphasizes "three major shifts in the field" that "must be taken very seriously" (though she goes on to enumerate four). In spite of the talk about division, there are actually several areas here where we are in agreement. In each of the four categories, I will begin with our agreement and then make clear where we differ. Let me add a quick word too on "older models", to use April's term. I too am in favour of questioning older models, though they are not always the same ones that April wishes to question; sometimes April works with some older models that I wish to question. And sometimes, of course, the old wine is good.

(1). As April mentioned at the session, she agrees with my post-70 dating for Mark and so too for Matthew, Luke and John. This is an important agreement because it establishes a working model for dating the crucial works, Paul well before 70, the Gospels after. April's sketch, however, expands to inclusion of hypothetical sources and earlier versions of documents, which I avoided in favour of discussing the materials to which our texts bear witness. Unlike me, April is conservative on the existence of Q, and even speaks of different versions of the text, and their provenance. I am also sceptical about the existence of kernel Thomas. I have not done enough work on James and the Didache to express a firm opinion on whether or not they post-date 70. So April's pre-70 block is much more richly populated than mine. I would love to be able to share her confidence in that area, but I remain sceptical about the survival of key materials from the earliest period.

A further difference is that the model I discussed in the paper was a genealogical one. Where April organizes documents into groups, I attempted to sketch sequence, Galatians post-dating 1 Corinthians, Matthew post-dating Mark, Luke post-dating Matthew, John post-dating the Synoptics and so on. The reason that this kind of work might be helpful is that it can map the evolution and development of ideas from one literary work to another. Working on relative dating in this way is tough because we simply have to get our hands dirty engaging in study that a lot of us would rather avoid, Synoptic Problem, Pauline chronology, John's relationship to the Synoptics and so on. But the potential pay off is major and the work is worthwhile.

(2). April's second point, about textual criticism, echoes my own warnings on this subject, which I am happy to repeat:

It is easy to engage in this kind of discussion without thinking through the broader issues of what it means to talk about “texts” and “literary works” in antiquity. It is a somewhat hackneyed to point out the obvious facts that none of the autographs have survived and that there were no printing presses, but textual critics rightly remind us to behave like we actually know that that is the case. Too often, we lapse into treating our scholarly constructs as if they are the actual artefacts that they can only aspire to be. At the very least, we need to keep reminding ourselves in discussions like this that we are not dealing with fixed points and known entities but with reconstructions and approximations. (3)

Nevertheless, with the appropriate cautions in place, it is also worth reminding ourselves that the texts are all we have. The situation is no different here than it is for any other set of ancient texts. We are dealing with manuscript witnesses. Indeed, in many respects the situation is a great deal better for scholars of early Christianity because of the relative earliness of the textual evidence as well as the richness of the manuscript deposit. We have to work with what we have, and what we have is pretty good.

April offers a valuable caution against "basing our conclusions on 'same' words here and there", but as I mentioned in the session in response, this is why we should also look at patterns of agreement and disagreement, tracing parallels in structure, order, theme, motif and imagery as well as the more minor parallels in wording. My own caution in this area, previously expressed in discussions of the Synoptic Problem, and especially of the Minor Agreements, is that one should be wary of appealing to conjectural emendation as a means of resisting texts that are difficult for one's theory, not least given the fact that absent textual evidence is as likely to have caused further problems for one's preferred theory as it is to have provided solutions.

(3)-(4): I will take these together since they are closely related. I sympathize with the desire for memory experiments but I am highly sceptical of our ability to recreate the necessary conditions for providing useful information on the way that memory worked in the first century. As I mentioned in the session, one of my favourite television programmes is Doctor Who, and in a recent episode, the doctor and Donna went to Pompei in 79. I would have loved to have joined them and to conduct some experiments there. But as I also mentioned in the session, there are indeed useful experiments that we can do, using the texts that we have. As some of my readers will know, I have been an advocate for developing tests on Synoptic (and other related) theories with a view to seeing whether they work or not. Given our current state of knowledge, and tools available, serious work on the ancient texts we have is preferable to experiments on our contemporaries.

Tony Chartrand-Burke on Secret Mark at the SBL

Tony Chartrand-Burke today offers an excellent summary of the session on Secret Mark at the 2008 SBL Annual Meeting, which I chaired, and on which I offered a briefer summary here in with my general travel diary from the conference (Some More SBL). Tony concludes his interesting post with some some of his own reflections and I would like to comment on these, not least because I think that Tony may be a little unfair to those he criticizes here:

Many who came out of the session may have been surprised at Brown’s demeanour. But I think it justified. The two main writers against the authenticity of the text, Carlson and Jeffery, are not biblical scholars. Their arguments are not based on the methodology used by biblical scholars. Yet many of their readers have been convinced by them, likely because their arguments merely confirmed in their minds what they hoped would be the case and not because the readers had sufficient knowledge of the contents of the text, nor of previous scholarship on it to make an informed decision.

First, Tony appears to underestimate Stephen Carlson's scholarship (I will comment on Stephen Carlson since he and his work is much better known to me than Peter Jeffery's). It is true that Stephen does not yet have his PhD in this area, but he is already an outstanding scholar whose work is widely admired by those in the guild. He was already published in New Testament Studies (Clement of Alexandria on the "Order" of the Gospels) before his book on Secret Mark was written, and he has, of course, made pioneering contributions to the advancement of scholarship on the internet. But the point at issue in both the book and the recent SBL session is one not of credentials but of the quality of scholarship. Stephen has produced some fine scholarship on an issue that has been log-jammed for years. Indeed it may be that the outsider's perspective has helped Stephen to shed light on the issue. I understand that some people disagree with Stephen's conclusions but I hope that we can all agree on the quality of the scholarship.

Second, I think we should be wary of the idea that those who agree with Carlson and Jeffery do so out of ignorance or prejudice. Speaking for myself, I wrote an endorsement for The Gospel Hoax because I read it carefully in the light of familiarity with other scholarship on the issue and I was persuaded by its case. I know of others who feel the same way.

Tony continues:

Furthermore, Brown and Pantuck have crafted some very detailed responses to Carlson and Jeffery that seem to be getting overlooked—Ehrman, for one, did not seem to be cognizant of the one article refuting the salt claim, and there were two allusions made to the size of Brown’s and Pantuck’s responses, as if thorough, detailed scholarly work was a bad thing. Brown is justifiably frustrated at the state of so-called scholarship (much of it he called “poppycock”) on Secret Mark.

I regard the remark about "so-called scholarship" here as unfortunate. Similarly, I regarded Scott Brown's references to "poppycock" in the session as unfortunate. On issues as important as this, it is generally preferable to keep one's language measured and to focus on the key issues of scholarly disagreement. I don't recall the references to "the size of Brown's and Pantuck's responses", though my guess would be that the point of mentioning it is that a response to a large and detailed piece is inevitably time-consuming; it is something that cannot be taken lightly. Nevertheless, it is worth bearing in mind that Peter Jeffery has produced a lengthy response to Scott Brown's review of his book. Moreover, sometimes an author may legitimately choose not to respond to a review or an article, feeling that it is up to the reader to weigh the arguments on both sides.

Tony goes on to reflect on the role played by Secret Mark in the work of those he discusses in his recent "Heresy Hunting" article, but I am not sure how relevant this is to the discussion at the SBL, which was a balanced one in which I did not pick up any kind of ideological objection to the authenticity of the text.

SBL Boston: Final Thoughts

I am away from home at the moment, enjoying the sights of Washington DC, so I have been away from the net most of the time and not able to post these assorted reflections until now.

(1) I didn't notice the divorce from AAR as much as I expected to. The TOTE bags looked different from usual (and they had run out before I got a chance to get mine on Sunday, which was annoying); the programmes were thinner; I didn't run into as many current or past colleagues from Religion and Theology departments, and there were fewer conference people around in general. Our hotel, the Boston Marriott Copley Place, was hosting a Bridge tournament and one was more likely to run into a bridge player than a Biblical scholar in the elevators. But on the whole, it felt like business as usual, just slimmed down a bit. I suspect that the AAR people would have felt the split more than we did given that they were meeting earlier. We had the same travel home on Tuesday, arriving to the Thanksgiving break.

(2) The organization of the conference was, as usual, excellent. I have nothing to complain about at all. Oh, except the lack of TOTE bags.

(3) The location was excellent. Although I got horribly lost on the Saturday on the way to the Cross, Resurrection and Diversity Consultation, it was easy enough to find places after a while, and there were plenty of people around to provide directions.

(4) But it was really freezing cold. Why on earth did I not take a proper thick coat? Have I got so used to North Carolina temperatures that I am forgetting what bitter cold is like?

(5) If you were willing to brave the cold, there were lots of great restaurants. I ate at three different Thai restaurants on three successive occasions, Saturday evening, Sunday lunchtime and Sunday evening and all were excellent.

(6) I didn't get a chance to go to the Book Exhibit this year so can't comment on that, but I heard good things about it. I wonder if I am the only person at the SBL who didn't darken the door of the Book Exhibit? Normally, I quite like walking round the book exhibit, though I find it a little depressing seeing so many new books out, especially when I don't have one of my own.

(7) I feel much less inclined to go on my usual rant about the presentation of papers this year. The ones I heard were, on the whole, excellent, with no examples of speed reading, few examples of bad timing and few examples of inaudible or incomprehensible reading.

(8) The sessions I attended were also very well chaired, which is also a plus.

(9) The academic highlights for me were at the new Cross, Resurrection and Diversity Consultation. I think this is going to be a fascinating section at the SBL and I am looking forward to future sections. I am pleased to have been invited to be a part of it and delighted to see that there is such interest in the group.

(10) The non-academic highlights were twofold, our visit to the Cheers bar on Friday evening, fulfilling an ambition of many years, with the souvenir pint glass to remember it by, and the traditional visit to the Bond film on the Monday evening, as enjoyable for the company as for the occasion.

Some More SBL

It looks like I had reached Sunday night in my narrative of my own experience of this year's SBL Annual Meeting, and so we reach Monday. As usual, it was an early start, and the Synoptic Gospels Section Steering Committee Meeting. This was my last meeting with that group because I am standing down from this meeting. As usual, it was a most enjoyable and stimulating meeting and I will miss the group, but I have served for six years, which is quite long enough, and it is time for new blood. We had the meeting in the Sheraton and my goodness, did we get a lot of hassle from the staff there, who wanted to move us on as soon as possible because of the long queue. I then did a quite bit of blogging before going to the SBL Forum Advisory Board Meeting, also useful and interesting, and I agreed to serve another term. I dashed from there to the fag end of the Synoptics Section on Pedagogy and the Synoptic Problem. It's a section I would have liked to have attended in toto. By the time I arrived, it was the discussion, ably chaired by Mark Matson, and featuring contributions from Robert Derrenbacker, John Poirier and others.

I skipped lunch as part of my policy to avoid troughing my face too much this year, and found a little time to prepare to chair the 1pm session. I like to take some time to prepare when I am chairing, to work out how long we have, to check that I have everyone's names and job titles right, to think about how I am going to introduce the session and so on. It was the last SBL Synoptics Section that I would be chairing too and I wanted to make sure that I didn't make a mess of it. The session was on "Secret Mark After Fifty Years". We asked for a large room, and it was absolutely packed -- very few spare seats. We had worked hard to make sure that the panel was perfectly balanced. We began with Birger Pearson, "Secret Mark: A Twentieth Century Fake", a helpful summary of Stephen Carlson's and Peter Jeffery's cases, with some reflections on his own change of mind on the issue. Stephen Carlson himself was second, with a paper asking how the guild can save itself from one of its own. It was a polished paper, well read, and just right for the session. We then turned to those who defend the authenticity of the document, first Allan Pantuck, who had a nice powerpoint presentation that took the audience through some fascinating excerpts from Morton Smith's archive, though with no "smoking gun", as Pantuck admitted. Scott Brown had planned to speak on ten enduring miconceptions about Secret Mark, but had decided to limit them to five, and he got through four of them in the available time. The two respondents were Charles Hedrick and Bart Ehrman, both excellent speakers, and we had thirty minutes at the end for discussion.

The first person on his feet was Helmut Koester, who came to the front and asked for the microphone. His contribution caused a bit of a stir, beginning with his lament that the SBL had now taken to "dishonoring the dead" and going on to suggest that Morton Smith could not have forged Secret Mark since it represented a form-critically earlier version of the Lazarus story of John 11, and Morton Smith was not a good form-critic. "If the Secret Gospel of Mark is a forgery," Koester said, "then I am the biggest fool in the SBL."

The session was a success, I think, with stimulating, lively exchanges, only some of them bad-tempered, key issues addressed and a large audience. Once it had finished, and my own direct involvement in SBL sessions over, I was ready to unwind. After a drink with a friend in the Champions bar at our hotel, the Boston Copley Marriott, four of us met and headed to Cambridge on the subway. We ate at the Intermission Pub and then watched the new Bond film, Quantum of Solace, at the same cinema where we watched The World is Not Enough during the SBL in 1999, the last time we were in Boston. It's not the best Bond film; it may even be the weakest since Licence to Kill in 89, perhaps longer. But it was still fun, and the last ten seconds at least partly redeemed it for me. Still, it's a great tradition to get to the Bond film at the SBL, and nice too to get over to Cambridge, albeit just for the evening.

And that was more or less the lot. I flew back on Tuesday, and one of the great pluses of living in America is that you don't go straight back to work. There are no classes, and a Thanksgiving break to enjoy.

More of my SBL Meeting

It's Tuesday evening and I am home again, and I can now offer a bit more narrative and chat about the rest of how the SBL Annual Meeting panned out for me. In my previous post, I had reached Sunday lunchtime, and my second visit to a Thai restaurant, for the Cross, Resurrection and Diversity consultation's steering committee meeting. I did not know a lot about the group before being invited to join in but I find myself pleased to be involved. There was a lot of good feedback on both of Saturday's inaugural meetings, and it was encouraging to see the rooms absolutely packed. The organizers clearly did not expect these sessions to be so popular, and next year the chairs are going to ask for somewhere much bigger. And the plans for next year are already coming together very well. I look forward to enthusing about these plans here once they are firmed up.

Back to Sunday afternoon, I went along to the Q section at which there were four papers, the first by Duke PhD student Ken Olson who talked about the evidence for an Aramaic Vorlage behind a couple of key Q verses, arguing that they made sense in Greek and that there is no need to postulate mistranslation from the Aramaic to make sense of the texts. It was a great paper, well presented, and convincing, even if I did nod a little in all the papers given the previously mentioned candle-at-both-ends issue. Joseph Weaks from Brite Divinity School gave a paper on his doctoral research, which imagines that there was no Mark, and attempts to reconstruct Mark on the basis of Matthew and Luke. I am familiar with the research because I am on Joe's dissertation committee and I greatly enjoyed the presentation. There were some nice powerpoint slides at the end where he showed just how much we would lose from scholarship on Mark if we attempted to reconstruct it on the basis of Matthew and Luke. And next up was Jeff Peterson of Austin Graduate School who presented a nice piece on Q 1.31 and Q 22.64 as evidence for a Q Birth and Passion Narrative -- also excellent. It was the only one of the Q sections I was able to get to this year, but it was a shame to see it so poorly attended, only about eight or nine of us in the audience.

I had more Thai food in the evening, now for the third meal on the trot, and loving it. At 9, it was the Duke Reception, which was very well attended. The big event was Ed Sanders being given his Festschrift, introduced by Fabian Udoh. It was difficult for him to get heard in the big room, and Ed too chose to cut his remarks short because it was so difficult to be heard. But he did explain that his students had been crafty. Knowing him to have insisted that he would not like a Festschrift, they organized a conference in his honour and then published the proceedings in this volume.

--
So my narrative is up to Sunday night now. I'll add Monday later on, and then some general reflections on the highlights of the conference.

SBL Boston, It's Already Monday

So it's got to Monday before I have even had a chance to get the blogging machine out. I'm in between my 7am Synoptics Steering Committee meeting and my 9.30am SBL Forum Board meeting, and the opportunity has presented itself to check in briefly on the blog for the first time since arriving. I'll have to write some proper, ordered reflections in due course, but so far the meeting has been most enjoyable. It appears that I am not taking my own advice about not burning the candle at both ends and with only a few hours sleep each night, I am not always finding it easy to stay awake in the sessions I have attended though I have been Ok when I have been presenting or involved in some other way in a session.

Let me go back briefly, in the ten minutes or so that I have spare, to how my SBL has panned out. The highlight so far was the fulfilment of a lifelong ambition to visit the Cheers bar on Friday evening. I even have my souvenir mug to take back with me. It was a genuine thrill to see it there, and to walk down the stairs, even if a little surreal going in and seeing an interior somewhat different from what we saw on the series.

On Saturday morning, I attended the first of the two meetings of the new consultation on "Cross, Resurrection and Diversity in Early Christianity", chaired by Jimmy Dunn and featuring papers by Jeff Peterson and Jerry Sumney, with responses by Marcus Bockmuehl and Jennifer Knust respectively. A lively, entertaining, stimulating session, I thought, in an absolutely packed room, people spilling out into the corridors. Lunch was our Library of New Testament Studies editorial board meeting, over at the Vox Populi restaurant, and a little later I was speaking in the second of the Cross, Resurrection and Diversity Consultation sessions, again with people crammed into the room and spilling out of the door. I was speaking on Dating the Crucial Sources in Early Christianity with a response from April DeConick, followed by Simon Gathercole on Thomas as a witness to the development of Christianity, with a response by Stephen Patterson, and some lively and I think informative discussion. John Kloppenborg was in the chair. More anon on that session if I get a moment.

Sunday's breakfast meeting was the University of Birmingham breakfast, and I was delighted to see lots of old friends. Discovering that I had not left enough time to get across town for my next appointment, I grabbed a taxi and just got to the Radisson on time. This was for the Biblical Archaeology Society Fest where I spoke on "When were the Gospels written?" with plenty of time for interesting questions. I dashed back to the Sheraton, walking in the absolutely freezing cold, to the Sheraton, and joined the steering committee of the previously mentioned new consultation on Cross, Resurrection and Diversity Consultation, for their meeting. In a Thai restaurant for the second time, I decided just to have soup so that I slowed up on the relentless troughing that takes place at these meetings.

I've run out of time to continue my little sketch now because I have to dash to my next meeting, but I'll check in again when I get a moment. I look forward too to reading all the other blog posts on the SBL that are no doubt out there by now.

SBL Dating Game Handout

Here is my handout for my paper at this year's SBL Annual Meeting:

Dating the crucial sources in early Christianity (Handout)

Enjoying SBL

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post on Surviving SBL. It was in response to a request from Sean Winter who was, at that time, a newcomer to the meeting. This year I have had a couple more requests for my own tips about surviving the meeting, so I thought I would revisit and revise the original post, but now under the heading "enjoying" rather than "surviving" SBL. I am one of those for whom SBL is both duty and joy.

(1) Beer and Good Company: Find people you like spending time with (and who like spending time with you, I suppose!) and your experience will be ten times more enjoyable than otherwise. I have heard some people say that they find the SBL a bit of a maze and rather overwhelming. I have never found that, and perhaps because I have been lucky enough to spend time with people whose company I greatly enjoy. The intellectual stimulation will often come more from those small gatherings with friends over a beer than it will at the sessions.

(2) Choose Sessions Carefully: Don't be over ambitious about how many sessions you can get to. I used to treat the SBL a bit like the way I used to treat the Christmas Radio Times and TV Times when I was a child. I used to fill every moment in the day with telly, allowing just little slots for five or ten minute "breaks" in viewing. SBL sessions, though sometimes enjoyable, are no Christmas TV, and you can get conferenced out.

(3) Be a Tart: Don't feel obliged to stay for the whole of each two-and-a-half hour session that you go to. Several times I've got stuck in the world's most boring papers by accident because I was interested in the paper just before it or just after it. Once, I attended a paper in a packed room, over 100 or so in the audience, but I did not make a sharp enough exit when it had finished. I got stuck listening to the next paper with four other people and felt so sorry for the guy presenting that I felt obliged to stay and feign interest. Unlike the British New Testament Conference, where one is encouraged to be loyal to one seminar throughout the conference, you are allowed to be a complete tart at the SBL.

(4) Burning the Candle at Both Ends: Try not to burn the candle at both ends, socializing until late and then getting up before the crack of dawn for a breakfast meeting. I am talking to myself here. I walk round the SBL perpetually exhausted because I don't have the discipline to go to bed early when I have to be up early. Every year I tell myself not to arrange breakfast meetings, or get invited to them; every year I end up with breakfast meetings each day. I've done it again. Bummer.

(5) Budget beating breakfast buffets: To develop some advice from an older blog post, here's a tip for those at SBL on a budget: get to one of those great American breakfast buffets and eat to your heart's content. Don't be put off by earnest looking professor types who only visit the buffet once. Keep going for as long as you can. Eat so much that you won't want lunch. You can then make it through to the evening when you'll be just peckish enough to enjoy something else. In fact you might even be invited to one of those evening receptions where there is a lot of food. On days like that, you have only had to buy breakfast and the budget is looking healthier than it might have been.

Birmingham never gave me enough to travel, and so troughing my face at breakfast was my standard survival strategy. And the American breakfast buffets are great, though for Brits it can be a little off-putting to see Americans putting their fruit on the same plate as their sausage and bacon, or worse, putting corn syrup on their scrambled egg. So Brits abroad may need to avert their eyes. There is also an unappetizing pastey coloured concoction called "grits", which is to be avoided.

(6) Getting to Receptions: Receptions are a great way of meeting people, and can be fun. They are held by publishers, universities and others and are often generous in their invitations, and it is good, once again, to be a tart. There are signs, though, that the seven years of plenty may be coming to an end. This is the first SBL meeting since the split with AAR, the credit crunch is biting and universities and publishers are all feeling the squeeze. Several publishers no longer hold receptions and several universities have pulled the plug too. My guess is that there we will some cash bars instead of free bars, and less food at the receptions that remain.

(7) Presenting Papers: Regular readers will know that I have outspoken views on this topic, but I continue to be amazed by the lack of investment that many make in presenting their papers. The gist of my concern is this: far too many people simply read their paper out verbatim at SBL sessions in the most inarticulate way imaginable, often with no attempt to communicating with the audience. A particular problem is speed-reading. People write their fifteen page screed and have a bloody-minded determination to read through the whole lot if it kills them, whether or not it fits into the time. This is a particular problem with graduate student papers, and it is related to nerves. My advice: practise your paper beforehand and think about issues like pausing, breathing, adding light and shade and varying your intonation. I never cease to be amazed, though, to see seasoned scholars completely unable to time a paper, selfishly praying on the good will of the chair and the other presenters. This is really elementary stuff -- overrunning on a paper is egotistical and unprofessional. If you are chairing a session, be ruthless -- the presenter who is unable to time their own paper does not deserve your compassion. I feel like having a longer rant on this, but perhaps I'll save it for my conference thoughts.

(8) Seeing the city: It is very easy to spend several days in a city and not see the city. It's really worth taking some time out to see the city, especially a city as fine as Boston. Too many of my SBL memories merge into one because I spent 95% of my time on the inside of hotels and convention centres. Actually, my hope this year is that I might bump into Doctor Who. Meeting in the same city and at the same time this year is the New England Fan Experience, at which Peter Davison (the fifth doctor) is a special guest. It would make my day to meet him.

Warning to SBL Visitors from the UK: your pound is weaker

In recent years, UK travellers in the US have had a good time of it. The pound has been strong, and the considerable expense of attending the SBL has been reduced by the fact that buying books and eating out have seemed relatively cheap. This time last year, the pound was at historic highs against the dollar (£1 = $2.08 at the beginning of November 2007). Now it is at a six-year low, currently $1.469. The calculations for Brits abroad will be a little different this time round -- no more simple halving of the price to get the pound equivalent. Meanwhile, for those of us now drawing a salary in dollars, trips to the UK start getting much cheaper, and this Christmas we might be able to afford a couple of extra glasses of sherry.

Dating Sacred Texts on the Basis of Fulfilled Prophecy

In a recent post, the ever intriguing N. T. Wrong discusses the Scholarly Dating of Daniel to After the "Prophecies" were "Fulfilled". Here in the biblioblogging community, we are all on first name terms, so I hope the bishop will not mind my calling him Tom. Tom quotes and then argues against a character who sees "The practice of late-dating the books of the Bible . . . as a position of faith on the part of those scholars who do so"; Tom pays special attention to John J. Collins on Daniel, and the quotation is worth repeating here:

The issue is not whether a divinely inspired prophet could have foretold the events which took place under Antiochus Epiphanes 400 years before. The question is whether this possibility carries any probability: is it the most satisfactory way to explain what we find in Daniel? Modern critical scholarship has held that it is not.
- John J. Collins, Daniel, First Maccabees, Second Maccabees, with an Excursus on the Apocalyptic Genre (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1981): 11-12.

Tom's timely post coheres with what I have been arguing here (especially in Dating Game VI and Dating Game VII) with reference to the predictions of the temple's destruction in the Gospels. Allow me to quote from a section of my forthcoming SBL paper (31-32 in the current draft):

One of the standard arguments against the idea that Mark shows knowledge of the destruction of Jerusalem is the reassertion of the text’s own character here as prediction. In his Introduction to the New Testament, David A. DeSilva suggests that “The primary reason many scholars tend to date Mark’s Gospel after 70 CE is the presupposition that Jesus could not foresee the destruction of Jerusalem – an ideological conviction clearly not shared by all.” But this kind of appeal, while popular, tends not to take seriously the literary function of predictions in narrative texts like Mark. Successful predictions play a major role in the narrative, reinforcing the authority of the one making the prediction and confirming the accuracy of the text’s theological view. It is like reading Jeremiah. It works because the reader knows that the prophecies of doom turned out to be correct. It is about “when prophecy succeeds”.

My concern about the popular appeal to what Jesus could or could not have done is that it does not take seriously the real issue, which has nothing to do with making a judgement about the historical Jesus. Rather, it is about observing the literary function of successful prophecy in the narrative in which it appears. The prediction only gains traction because the reader is saying, "Hey, yes! I know what that's about!" The issue is parallel to the one discussed here by Tom Wrong, and I am grateful to have his Daniel discussion to inform my own. James McGrath weighs in on Exploring our Matrix, with similarly helpful observations.

SBL Paper on Dating the Crucial Sources in Early Christianity

My paper for a session at the SBL is now available online here. I was invited to write this paper for a new consultation on the Cross, Resurrection, and Diversity in Earliest Christianity (I have also been asked onto the steering committee). Session details are at the previous link, along with other papers for this consultation, and the paper is available here:

Dating the Crucial Sources for Early Christianity (MS Word)

Dating the Crucial Sources for Early Christianity (PDF)

Regular readers may spot some overlap with my blog sketches on the same topic, though the paper is longer and more detailed and on the whole post-dates the blog posts.

The Dating Game VIII: John, Thomas and Authorial Self-Representation

With the momentous events of last night still fresh in our minds, I hope readers will not mind my returning to the question of dating, as we approach the conclusion of this series.

In the most recent post, we looked for corroborating evidence that Matthew and Luke indeed post-dated 70, something that their dependence on a post-70 Mark would of course lead us to expect. In this post, I would like to turn to the Gospels of John and Thomas. Is there knowledge of the destruction of the temple here too? I think that there is, though their greater distance from 70 may be reflected in the fact that there are fewer references now to the destruction of the Temple. In Thomas’s case, this is also no doubt a function of its genre (Sayings Gospel in which narratives about the Temple are of course absent) and theological proclivity (the relative lack of so-called apocalyptic eschatology). Nevertheless, both texts allude to the destruction of the Temple, John in 2.19-20, “Destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days . . . “ and Thomas in logion 71, “I shall destroy this house and no one will be able to rebuild it.”

The more blatant signs, though, of the relative lateness of John and Thomas lie in their attempts at authorial self-representation. Where earlier Gospels like Mark and Matthew are anonymous and avoid attempting to project an authorial presence to lend authority to their work, the author of the Fourth Gospel makes claims to have been present, most notably in 19.35 and of course 21.24, “This is the disciple who testifies to these things and wrote them down (καὶ ὁ γράψας ταῦτα). We know that his testimony is true,” similar in style and literary function to the Incipit of Thomas, “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.” In both, the authorial self-representation legitimizes the message of the book in a way absent from the earlier Gospels but found explicitly in later texts like the Apocryphon of James. John’s claim enables the author to establish his Gospel’s authority – he knows that the things he reports are true because he was there. In Thomas, there is a further step: the author was present and, moreover, he was privy not just to the public teaching but also the secret teachings (Incipit, Thomas 13).

There is a trajectory among these early Christian texts, from the absence of authorial self-representation in Mark and Matthew, to hints in Luke and Acts (with the first person found in Luke 1.1-4 as well as in the “we” passages in Acts), to the marked but nevertheless still unnamed authorial presence in John, to the explicit self-representation of Didymos Judas Thomas in its Gospel’s Incipit, a naming that also leads the reader to pay special attention to Thomas 13. The same texts likewise witness to a growing consciousness of predecessor texts, from the πολλοί of Luke’s preface, to the many other books that could fill the world in the last verse of John, to the twelve disciples sitting around writing their books at the Last Supper in the Apocryphon of James.

These observations depend in part on the work of Ismo Dunderberg, “Thomas and the Beloved Disciple” in Risto Uro (ed.), Thomas at the Crossroads: Essays on the Gospel of Thomas (Studies of the New Testament and Its World; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), 65-88, especially 80-88, though his use of the term "authorial fiction" (derived from John Kloppenborg) is not ideal. The term “authorial self-representation” is preferable because it characterizes the process more precisely and less prejudicially, and uses terminology familiar in literary criticism.

The Dating Game VII: Dating of Matthew and Luke

In the previous post in this series, we looked at the case for Mark's dating in the post 70 period, suggesting that the predictions of the destruction of the temple function to underline the authority of Jesus as the one who successfully predicted what the reader knew had now happened. The repeated and pervasive emphasis on the temple and its destruction is most plausible in this post-70 period. It is worth investing time on this question because if Mark was written after 70, and if Matthew, Luke and John are all familiar with Mark, then they too post-date 70. But does a closer look at the later Gospels correlate with this picture? For J. A. T. Robinson (Redating the New Testament), it was the lack of reference to 70 anywhere in the New Testament that proved decisive in his attempts at redating:

The fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, and with it the collapse of institutional Judaism based on the temple - is never once mentioned as a past fact. It is, of course, predicted; and these predictions are, in some cases at least, assumed to be written (or written up) after the event. But the silence is nevertheless as significant as the silence for Sherlock Holmes of the dog that did not bark.

The claim is unimpressive, though, given that most of the documents in question are either written in the pre-70 period (Paul’s letters) or set in the pre-70 period (Gospels-Acts). What is remarkable is that documents set a generation before 70 appear to speak so clearly about the destruction of the Temple. For Robinson,

That Jesus could have predicted the doom of Jerusalem and its sanctuary is no more inherently improbable than that another Jesus, the son of Ananias, should have done so in the autumn of 62.

The problem for this perspective is that Jesus ben Ananias’s prophecy occurs in a document that post-dates 70, Josephus’s Jewish War. As with Mark, it is important to ask the question about the literary function of the prediction in the narrative, here in a document that climaxes with the story of Jerusalem’s destruction. Indeed, a comparison between Jesus ben Ananias in Josephus and Jesus of Nazareth in Matthew and Luke provides further striking parallels. The oracle Matthew 23.37-39 // Luke 13.34-35 has marked similarities with the oracle in Jewish War 300-1, the same threefold focus on the people, the city, the temple. Jesus ben Ananias cries “a voice against Jerusalem . . .” and Jesus laments “Jerusalem, Jerusalem”. Jesus ben Ananias singles out “the holy house” and Jesus says “Behold your house is forsaken.” Jesus ben Ananias raises “a voice against this whole people” just as Jesus exclaims, “how often would I have gathered your children.” Moreover, the same context in Josephus features a portent of voices being heard in the temple saying “we are departing from hence” (μεταβαίνομεν ἐντεῦθεν, War 6.299), similar to the implication here in Matthew and Luke that God has left the temple – “Behold your house is forsaken and desolate” (Matt. 23.38). Such prophecies and portents function similarly in each of the texts and they point to a post-70 dating.

The Dating Game VI: Was Mark written after 70?

In the previous post in this series, we concluded by looking briefly at James Crossley’s commendable effort to rethink the dating of Mark. If that attempt is unsuccessful, it is nevertheless worth asking how secure the standard scholarly dating is. One of the values of challenges to the consensus is that they can send us scurrying back to the texts to think again about the issues and to reexamine our reasons for coming to particular views. My own thinking on the subject has been strongly influenced by three recent studies which successfully reinforce the grounds for locating Mark in the aftermath of 70, Brian Incigneri’s The Gospel to the Romans, H. M. Roskam’s The Purpose of the Gospel of Mark in its Historical and Social Context and John Kloppenborg’s article “Evocatio Deorum and the Date of Mark”. Although these three disagree with one another on the details (e.g. the precise referent of Mark 13.14), all agree on the significance of the key text:

Mark 13.1-2, Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another which will not be torn down.

For many, so blatant a prediction of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem settles the question of Mark’s date – it is written in full knowledge of the disastrous events of 70. For Kloppenborg,

“The fact that this seems to correspond so precisely to what occurred invites the conclusion that it was formulated (or reformulated) ex eventu” (431).

For Roskam,

“The evangelist could not have presented the prediction of the destruction of the temple as an utterance of Jesus with such firmness unless he was very certain about its fulfilment” (86).

Objections to this view are ably discussed by Incigneri (Chapter 3, "No stone Upon another"), who stresses Mark’s “over-arching concentration on the Temple” (154), the destruction of which is so important in his narrative that it is implausible that it was still standing when Mark wrote.

One of the standard arguments against the idea that Mark shows knowledge of the destruction of Jerusalem is the reassertion of the text’s own character here as prediction. To take one example among many, David A. DeSilva, in his Introduction to the New Testament, suggests that

The primary reason many scholars tend to date Mark’s Gospel after 70 CE is the presupposition that Jesus could not foresee the destruction of Jerusalem – an ideological conviction clearly not shared by all (196).

But this kind of appeal, while popular, tends not to take seriously the literary function of predictions in narrative texts like Mark. Successful predictions play a major role in the narrative, reinforcing the authority of the one making the prediction and confirming the accuracy of the text’s theological view. It is like reading Jeremiah. It works because the reader knows that the prophecies of doom turned out to be correct. It is about “when prophecy succeeds”.

The text makes sense as Mark’s attempt to signal, in a post-70 context, that the event familiar to his readers was anticipated by Jesus, in word (13.2, 13.14) and deed (11.12-21) and in the symbolism of his death, when the veil of the temple was torn in two (15.38). The framing of the narrative requires knowledge of the destruction of the temple for its literary impact to be felt. Ken Olson has alerted me (especially in a paper read at the BNTC three years ago) to the importance of Mark 15.29-30 in this context. It is the first of the taunts levelled when Jesus is crucifie:

So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself!

For the irony to work, the reader has to understand that the Temple has been destroyed; the mockers look foolish from the privileged perspective of the post-70 reader, who now sees that Jesus’ death is the moment when the temple was proleptically destroyed, the deity departing as the curtain is torn, the event of destruction interpreted through Gospel narrative and prophecy.

The point that is generally missed in the literature, especially that which comes from a fairly conservative perspective, relates to the attempt to understand the literary function of the predictions of destruction in Mark's narrative. John Kloppenborg is one of the few scholars who sees the importance of the literary function of the predictions, noting the role played by the literary motif of "evocation deorum" echoed here in Mark, e.g.

This raises a crucial distinction between omens and rituals that (allegedly) occurred before the events, and their literary and historiographic use in narrative (446).

Discussions about whether the historical Jesus was or was not prescient may be interesting, but in this context they miss the point. The theme of the destruction of the temple is repeated and pervasive in Mark's narrative, and it becomes steadily more intense as the narrative unfolds. Jesus' prophecies in Mark attain their potency because "the reader understands" their reference.

The Dating Game V: Document and tradition

So far in this series of posts, we have been looking at the relative ordering of the crucial documents, focusing on the sequence of the documents without attempting to pin them to particular decades. As far as the canonical Gospels are concerned, we are looking at an order like this: Mark > Matthew > Luke > John. The time comes, though, when we need to attempt to pin these texts to points in time. As anyone familiar with New Testament studies will know, the dating issue is determined by a pivotal question: do the documents post-date the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE? Since Mark is the first in this sequence of documents, dating Mark would be a very helpful way of moving forward. If Mark post-dates 70, so do Matthew, Luke and John.

Before tackling that question, however, there are some necessary reminders. The discussion is inevitably clouded by the complications of textual tradition (observable) and textual tradition (hypothesized); I have spoken already (Preliminaries) about some of the difficulties involved with a document's evolution and range of dates and the inevitable difficulties that that causes the historian. Nevertheless, it is possible to speak reasonably about the dating of the documents as long as one bears these kinds of difficulties in mind. History, and especially ancient history, often needs to deal in approximations. It is a heuristic and not a descriptive discipline, and reasoned discussion of the date of given documents is achievable provided one proceeds with care.

It is important, for example, to distinguish clearly between the date of a given document and the date of the traditions within it and to avoid allowing document dating to get bound up with tradition history. How, then, should we conceive the question of dating a document? It should refer, I think, to the date of the given document as a observable, substantive entity with recognizable parameters such that it distinguishes itself from other documents. Matthew, for example, is recognizably Matthew and not Mark, even though it contains a lot of Mark. Luke is recognizably Luke; it is not Matthew and it is not Mark even though it contains a lot of the shape and the substance of those documents. In this kind of discussion, then, we need to be clear about what it is we are trying to date. We are dating the documents to which our texts bear witness, and not prior oral traditions, written traditions, or hypothetical earlier versions of the document in question. In this context, we are not investigating the dating of elements within the larger, later document; we are attempting to date the document itself.

A document can be no earlier than its most recent datable tradition. This is why, when we come to Mark, the question of its knowledge of the destruction of the temple is so important. If Mark is familiar with the events of 70, the presence of traditions earlier than 70 will be irrelevant. A good example of an approach that recognizes the distinction between the date of the document and the history of its traditions is Gerd Theissen's work on Mark's Apocalypse and Passion Narrative. He argues for versions of Mark 13, and of Mark 14-15, that date from the late 30s or early 40s, but thinks that Mark itself was written after 70.

It is in this context that I find myself reflecting on James Crossley's recent book, The Date of Mark's Gospel, published in the series I edit called Library of New Testament Studies in 2004. Crossley argues against the consensus that Mark should be dated somewhere in the region 65-75CE, suggesting instead that Mark's knowledge of Jewish Law, and the assumptions he makes about it, make best sense at a very early point, as early as mid to late 30s or early 40s. There are many things I like about James -- I am all in favour of young, attractive British blogging scholars who are willing to stick their necks out against the consensus on important issues, and who publish in LNTS. So I wish I were able to agree with the thesis of The Date of Mark's Gospel, but I don't. One of the book's virtues, I think, is that it effectively strengthens the case for a law observant Historical Jesus and Crossley's arguments to that end are effective. I am not persuaded, though, that James succeeds in narrowing the gap between Jesus and the author of Mark. As David Gowler points out in his review of James's subsequent Why Christianity Happened, "Jesus' Torah observance could still have been adequately represented by Mark in the 60s" (CBQ 69 (2007), 815-6 [816]). The notion that the originating circumstances of the tradition correlate directly with the perspective of the evangelist is problematic given the possibility that Mark is sometimes a faithful retailer of traditional material. Or, to put it another way, it is always going to be a tall order to demonstrate that assumptions apparently made in given traditions are identical with assumptions made by the author of the document in which they appear.

Moreover, where there are clear signs of Marcan redaction, they point away from Crossley’s thesis. In the key passage about hand-washing in Mark 7, the narrator’s framing of the material explains that hand-washing before eating food is something practised by “the Pharisees and all the Jews” (καὶ πάντες οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι). This does not set up the debate as an intra-Jewish one of the kind that Crossley’s thesis requires. The practice of hand-washing is established as something that all Jews do, and which Jesus’ disciples do not do (7.2, 5), setting up a contrast that Jesus’ words then speak into, a contrast that makes good sense on classic form-critical grounds. For Crossley, the reference here to “all the Jews” is a Marcan exaggeration, but this concedes the ground about the accuracy and precision of Mark’s knowledge of Judaism that is a major and necessary element in his case.

The Dating Game IV: What about John?

It is easy to find oneself spending so much time with the vexed question of the chronological sequence of the Synoptic Gospels, and the big Synoptic Problem questions that arise, that one can forget about the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas. To an extent, the relative neglect of these Gospels in this context is understandable. Whereas the Synoptic Gospels are clearly related on the literary level, there is no consensus about whether the same is true of John and Thomas. Does John know the Synoptics? Some say yes, some no. Does Thomas know the Synoptics? Again, opinions are divided. Clearly, this series of blog posts is not the place to solve this fascinating problem, but I would like to suggest a couple of ways in which we might be able to sketch out the possible lines of relationship between the Synoptics and Thomas and the Synoptics and John. I am currently in the middle of a book on the relationship between Thomas and the Synoptics, so the full argument will have to wait for its publication in the (I hope) not too distant future. As for John and the Synoptics, let me just say that I am persuaded by the evidence set out by several including C. K. Barrett and Frans Neirynck concerning John's knowledge of the Synoptics and that I would like to add an observation that may be of relevance.

So let us go to John and focus on an issue related to the phenomenon of fatigue in the Synoptics, discussed in the previous post. One of the indicators of familiarity with prior texts is a rewriting of elements in those texts in such a way that the author inadvertently creates anomalies or inconcinnities. One of the clear examples of this phenomenon in John occurs in his story of the anointing of Jesus by Mary in John 12.1-8. The story is parallel to Matthew 26.6-13 // Mark 14.3-9. The Johannine incident is clearly the same as the Synoptic incident: (1) It takes place in Bethany (2) just before Passover, (3) at a dinner where a woman has a jar of very expensive perfume of pure nard (Mark 14.3, ἀλάβαστρον μύρου νάρδου πιστικῆς πολυτελοῦς; John 12.3, λίτραν μύρου νάρδου πιστικῆς πολυτίμου; (4) she anoints Jesus; (5) there are complaints about the costliness of the perfume (τριακοσίων δηναρίων) which could have been given to the poor (καὶ ἐδόθη πτωχοῖς, John 12.5; καὶ δοθῆναι τοῖς πτωχοῖς, Mark 14.5); (6) Jesus says "Leave her. . . The poor you will always have with you . . . But you will not always have me" (ἄφες αὐτήν . . . τοὺς πτωχοὺς γὰρ πάντοτε ἔχετε μεθ' ἑαυτῶν ἐμὲ δὲ οὐ πάντοτε ἔχετε, John 12.7-8; ἄφετε αὐτήν . . . πάντοτε γὰρ τοὺς πτωχοὺς ἔχετε μεθ' ἑαυτῶν καὶ ὅταν θέλητε δύνασθε αὐτοῖς εὖ ποιῆσαι ἐμὲ δὲ οὐ πάντοτε ἔχετε, Mark 14.6-7); (7) Jesus interprets the anointing in connection with his burial (John 12.7, Mark 14.8).

John appears to have crafted this account on the basis of the Marcan narrative; the structure, the story, the wording have substantial links. The only major fresh elements in John are the naming of the woman as Mary, contextually determined by his resetting of the account as a postlude to the Lazarus story, and the naming of the one who complains as Judas, which itself may be derived from Mark 14.10-11, which comes straight after the anointing, and links Judas with an unhealthy interest in money. But there is one element in John that appears not to be found in Mark, Mary's wiping Jesus' feet with her hair (καὶ ἐξέμαξεν ταῖς θριξὶν αὐτῆς τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ, John 12.3). This detail appears to come from Luke 7.38 (καὶ ταῖς θριξὶν τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτῆς ἐξέμασσεν. . . ), where it forms part of Luke's story of the anointing, 7.36-50, his version of the Marcan // Matthean anointing. As there, it is an anointing by an anonymous woman in the house of a man called Simon, though Luke relocates it at an earlier point in the narrative, as often (cf. the Rejection at Nazareth, brought forward to Luke 4.16-30; Paul's first visit to Jerusalem, brought forward to Acts 9.25-6 and the Jerusalem Council, brought forward to Acts 15 from its "true" location in Acts 18.22), a move that necessitates some reworking of the details, especially the stress on the forthcoming death and burial. It is now a story about a "sinner", whose hair hangs down.

The anointing in each of the Synoptic accounts makes sense. In Mark and Matthew, Jesus' head is anointed with perfume. No hair is mentioned, no feet are are mentioned. In Luke, the woman wets Jesus' feet with her tears, an act of repentance, and she wipes them with her loose "sinner's" hair before she anoints them with perfume. But John's reminiscence of the Lucan detail about the wiping of Jesus' feet with her hair creates an anomaly. First, there is no reason for Mary, in John, to be wearing her hair like a "sinner", which is the point of the Lucan story. Second, because there are no tears in John, Mary's wiping of Jesus' feet with her hair means that the perfume ends up on her hair and not on Jesus. Jesus is the one who is supposed to be being anointed. This appears to be an example of John's secondary use of prior texts that has generated narrative inconcinnity and which helps us, therefore, to sketch John into a relationship of post-dating the Synoptics.

The Dating Game III: Getting the Synoptic Gospels in Order

Getting the Gospels in order is one of the fundamental issues in the dating the crucial sources in early Christianity. Before attempting to work out whether we can locate the Gospels in any particular decade, there is preliminary work to be done, to see whether we can get them into sequence in relation to one another. The issue is separable into several separate questions, all of them controversial, all of them interesting, (1) the Synoptic Problem, (2) the question of John's knowledge of the Synoptics, (3) the question of Thomas's knowledge of the Synoptics. There are still other additional questions that we could add, like the relationship of the Gospel of Peter or the Didache to the others, but to make the task manageable, at least in an introductory discussion, it is worth focusing on the texts generally regarded in the scholarship as crucial to the task at hand.

Let us begin with the Synoptic Problem. I have written a couple of books on this topic and it is pointless for me to pretend that I am beginning fresh here so let me instead summarize my conclusions and then offer a special illustration of how I think we can stack up the Synoptic Gospels in sequence.

(1) Mark is the first Gospel and it was used as primary source by both Matthew and Luke. The Priority of Mark is rightly the consensus view in Gospel scholarship. Its major contemporary competitor, the Griesbach (Two-Gospel) Hypothesis does not adequately account for much of the Synoptic data, especially the combination of Mark's alleged omissions from and additions to the combined witness of Matthew and Luke, which generate a curious profile for Mark the redactor. (See further The Case Against Q, Chapter 2 and The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze, Chapters 3-4).

(2) Luke is dependent on Matthew as well as Mark. This theory (the Farrer theory) dispenses with the need to posit a hypothetical document, Q, to explain the extensive verbatim agreement between Matthew and Luke that is not mediated by Mark. This is the thesis of my Case Against Q, summarized also for introductory students in the last chapter of The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze (see also the Case Against Q website). It is an argument against a major element in what is currently the majority view in Gospels scholarship, the Two-Source Theory, which argues that Matthew and Luke used Mark independently of one another, which necessitates Q. Arguments for Luke's independence of Matthew are unconvincing, and evidence of Luke's familiarity with Matthew needs to be taken seriously. To take just one area, it is commonly said that Luke's re-ordering of Matthew's discourses is inexplicable, but it makes good sense when one pays attention to Luke's redactional habits with respect to Mark, and his narrative habits overall.

The direction Mark > Matthew > Luke can be observed by paying attention to an important but underestimated indicator of the genealogy of documents, the phenomenon of editorial fatigue. I have argued (Fatigue in the Synoptics) that Matthew's and Luke's dependence on Mark, and Luke's dependence on Matthew, can be seen in the way in which each evangelist will, on occasion, begin by making changes to a pericope, only to lapse into the wording of the source as time goes on, creating minor contradictions. Thus we can see Matthew using Mark in the story of the death of John the Baptist (Mark 6.14-29 // Matt 14.1-12), beginning the pericope by changing Mark's Herod "the king" to his own more accurate "Herod the tetrarch", only to lapse into calling him "king", with Mark, half-way through the passage. Moreover, he adjusts the plot of the story. Where in Mark, Herodias wants John killed, Matthew has Herod himself desiring to kill John, but then Matthew retains Mark's notice that Herod grieved John's death.

Luke appears secondary to Mark in the Feeding of the Five Thousand story (Matt 14.13-21 // Mark 6.30-44 // Luke 9.10-17), which he begins by resetting it in "a city called Bethsaida", which causes an inconcinnity when he later repeats, with Mark, "we are in a desert place here" (Luke 9.12).

The same phenomenon of editorial fatigue also shows Luke to be secondary to Matthew. In the Parable of the Talents / Pounds, Luke, who loves the 10:1 ratio, begins with a major change: ten servants, not three; and with one pound each. Yet as the story progresses, Luke gets drawn back to the plot of the Matthean parable, with three servants, "the first", "the second" and "the other". The wording moves steadily closer to Matthew's as the parable progresses.

I offer these brief examples of the phenomenon of fatigue to draw attention to the possibilities for using literary criticism to theorize about the direction of dependence among related documents. What will be of interest next will be to explore the still more vexed questions of the relationships between the Synoptics, John and Thomas.

The Dating Game II: Getting Paul's letters in order

One of the easy mistakes in the dating game is to shoot too quickly for absolute dates, to look in a given document for hints that might help us to pin it to a a specific date. Some of our documents, though, are not of the nature that will allow us to pin them to a particular decade, let alone a particular year, and in such circumstances, it is important to try to get them into the right relative order, to make sure that we are stacking them up in the right order with respect to one another. Our general reluctance to do this may have something to do with our general reluctance to get our hands dirty doing serious work on the Synoptic Problem, or to do the related, equally difficult work on other big issues that make some of us recoil, Pauline chronology, John's familiarity (or not) with the Synoptics, Thomas's use (or not) of the Synoptics. But if we are to make progress on dating our crucial sources, these are the kinds of specialist areas that we need to invest in.

Let us take what is perhaps the most straightforward area first, the issue of getting Paul's letters in order. We are lucky here to have a degree of consensus on the parameters and general shape of the question. We agree, broadly, that Paul's letters were written in the 50s, with the late 40s the very earliest we can go. And we have general agreement on the basics of how to frame Paul's life. No one seriously thinks that 1 Thesslaonians is a late letter, or that Romans is an early one. If there are serious disagreements about the integrity of 2 Corinthians, and the authenticity of 2 Thessalonians, there is nevertheless broad consensus that the order of the undisputed letters goes something like this:

1 Thessalonians
Galatians
1 Corinthians
2 Corinthians
?Philippians
?Philemon
Romans

It is easy to be sure about Romans. Paul is explicit that he has preached the gospel fully in a circle from Jerusalem to Illyricum (15.19), and that he is on the way now to Jerusalem with the collection for the saints there, with a view to heading off next to Rome and then to Spain (Rom. 15.23-9). Now the collection provides us with the most helpful basic piece of sequential dating material because it is mentioned, at different states of development, in three other epistles, all of which predate Romans.

Gal. 2.10: Only they would have us remember the poor, which very thing I was eager to do.

1 Cor. 16.1-4: Now concerning the collection for the saints: you should follow the directions I gave to the churches of Galatia. 2 On the first day of every week, each of you is to put aside and save whatever extra you earn, so that collections need not be taken when I come. 3 And when I arrive, I will send any whom you approve with letters to take your gift to Jerusalem. 4 If it seems advisable that I should go also, they will accompany me.

2 Cor. 9.1-4: Now it is superfluous for me to write to you about the offering for the saints, for I know your readiness, of which I boast about you to the people of Macedonia, saying that Achaia has been ready since last year; and your zeal has stirred up most of them. But I am sending the brethren so that our boasting about you may not prove vain in this case, so that you may be ready, as I said you would be; lest if some Macedonians come with me and find that you are not ready, we be humiliated - to say nothing of you - for being so confident.

This is a fine example of the way in which sequential biography mentioned in documents can help us to date those documents. Clearly the collection is at an early point in 1 Cor. 16 -- Paul has recently instructed the Galatians about it, and he is only beginning now to talk to Achaia about it; presumably he has not yet begun to talk to Macedonia about it. By 2 Cor. 9 it has advanced much further. At least a year has passed; Paul is expecting Achaia to be ready, and Macedonia is ready too. So 1 and 2 Corinthians are placed in their expected sequence with respect to one another, but both also earlier than Romans.

There is actually one more opportunity the material here provides, but it is an invitation often and surprisingly refused. The major, marked difference between 1 Cor. 16 on the one hand and 2 Cor. 8-9 and Rom. 15 on the other is that Galatia has dropped out. Where Paul, when he was writing 1 Corinthians, had expected the Galatians to participate, they are out of the picture by the time that he was writing 2 Corinthians, something further confirmed by their absence from Romans. The crisis in Galatia, therefore, appears to have taken place between the writing of 1 and 2 Corinthians. This is when Paul lost the allegiance of the Galatians who had turned to what Paul saw as "another gospel" and getting circumcised (Galatians). The order of Paul's letters, then, goes something like this:

1 Thessalonians
1 Corinthians
Galatians
2 Corinthians
?Philippians
?Philemon
Romans

Getting the relative dating of 1 Corinthians and Galatians right illustrates the value of dating questions in the study of Christian origins. The hints provided by Paul's biography for establishing that 1 Corinthians precedes Galatians correlate with other factors of interest in the study of Paul. What is the source of his gospel? Is it through human agency (1 Corinthians 15.1-11) or directly from God (Galatians 1.6-12)? What about his use of Jesus material? Is it a coincidence that his earlier epistles, 1 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians, are rich in Jesus material but his later epistles are not? What about Paul, the Law and justification? Is it significant that the earlier epistles, 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians, are light (to put it mildly) on the forensic language while the later epistles (Galatians, Romans, Philippians 3) feature it heavily?

The Dating Game I: Preliminaries

I have been asked to present a paper at this year's SBL Annual Meeting in Boston on "Dating the Crucial Sources" for a new consultation entitled "Cross, Resurrection and Diversity in Early Christianity". Simon Gathercole is speaking in the same session; April DeConick is responding to me and Stephen Patterson is responding to Simon. John Kloppenborg will be in the chair.

It is a pleasure to be invited to give a paper, and a special pleasure to do so at one of the inaugural meetings of a new consultation. When one is invited to present, it will usually be in an area that overlaps with one's area of expertise, but which at the same time provides a fresh challenge, as here. I have written a little about dating issues but not a lot. It is something that interests me, but this is providing me with an opportunity to spend some time thinking through things in a more systematic and serious way. But where does one begin with such a broad topic? One of the pitfalls of attempting to date early Christian documents is to shoot too quickly for absolute dates, to try to pinpoint each text to a specific moment without doing the prior work on working out the relationships of documents to one another. Thus however much we might find matters like the Synoptic Problem not to our taste, it is essential to get on top of such things if we are to get some feeling for the most plausible relationship of documents to one another. It is a necessary prior step before attempting to fix documents to a specific date or range of dates.

Before that, though, several more preliminaries and important reminders:

(1) What is a document? I once wrote an article on Q called "When is a text not a text?". Although it dealt specifically with the hypothetical document Q, it got me thinking about the broader issues of what we mean when we talk about "texts" and "documents" in antiquity. Of course we all know that we do not have autographs and we know that there were no printing presses, but textual critics rightly remind the rest of us to behave like we actually know that that is the case. Too often, we lapse into treating our scholarly constructs as if they are the actual artefacts that they are only aspiring to be. At the very least, we need to keep reminding ourselves in discussions like this that we are not dealing with fixed points and known entities but with reconstructions and approximations.

(2) A Document's Evolution: there is a related issue here, that the more we become text-critically sensitive, the more we are inclined to reflect on the evolution of the documents we think we know. When we try to date Mark's Gospel, what are we dating? Something that approximates to our scholarly reconstructions of Mark 1.1-16.8 or something akin to what the vast majority of witnesses have, a Mark that goes on beyond 16.8? When we try to date John, are we imagining a version with or without the pericopae adulterae, with or without Chapter 21? When we date Thomas, are we dating textual antecedents to the Oxyrhynchus fragments, where where Coptic Thomas's Saying 77 is found with Saying 30, or constructs more akin to the Coptic, or both or neither? Even in our print culture, a document's history is often about a date range rather than a fixed point in time. When I refer to John Knox's Chapters in a Life of Paul, do I date it to its original influential edition in 1950 or the revised version of 1987, in which he reacts to his own critics of his earlier work? (And to make it still more complicated, we could insist too that even the 1950 edition featured revised versions of articles written in the 1930s). The point here is that sometimes our attempts to date documents precisely ignore what we know to be the case, that documents are not static entities even today, let alone in antiquity.

(3) Text and Tradition: There is a further related issue that often causes confusion. We sometimes speak as if a document is as early as the traditions it contains. Or, to put it in another way, we confuse tradition history with a document's dating. Thus a document first penned in the year 80CE might contain good traditions from the early 30s. One first penned in the 60s might be full of historically dubious legends. We should be careful to make sure that in attempting to date a document we are not simply dating the traditions contained in that document.

It is not my intention, though, just to talk about the difficulty of the task at hand, but rather to make sure that certain warnings are in place before embarking on the journey ahead. I want to make clear that where I do talk about dating documents, I am doing so in full knowledge that there are difficulties here, and that we speak in a shorthand that sometimes has to bypass complex issues to which we will have to return.