Rethinking ‘Authority’ in Late Antiquity: Authorship, Law, and Transmission in Jewish and Christian Tradition (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies) [1 ed.] 9781138480223, 9781351063425, 1138480223

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Authority in contemporary historiography
The problem
History beyond authority
Authorship and authority
Authority and the law
Transmission beyond authority
Conclusion
2 Reading beyond authority
The authority paradigm in Seconding Sinai
Philology beyond authority: the case of Homer
Vitality of traditions beyond old and new philology
The vitality of Scripture: reading with and beyond authority
Part I Authorship and authority
3 Authenticity and authority: the case for dismantling a dubious correlation
“Acta conciliorum non leguntur.”
Reading councils
Reading acta
The unreliability of proceedings
The chorus at Chalcedon
The hand of the editor
The unreliability of proceedings
Resistive readings and an institutionalized suspicion of documents
Another layer of reading: Chalcedon at Constantinople
Christos epistolographos
A dissenting opinion
Conclusion
4 Beyond attribution and authority: the case of Psalms in rabbinic hermeneutics
Identity of author: Asaph as case-study
Compositional circumstances of Psalmist
Authorship and historical anchoring
Conclusion
5 Correcting the gospel: putting the titles of the gospels in historical context
Didymus Chalkenturus and the personal and city editions of The Iliad
Galen and the correcting literary activities of Mnemon of Side
2 Maccabees 2:13 and Nehemiah’s records
Gospel texts and the Kat’ Andra formula
Irenaeus and “gospel authorship”
Conclusion
Part II Authority and the law
6 Glimpses from the margins: re-telling late ancient history at the edges of the law
The apostolic past in the Didascalia Apostolorum
Glimpses of Late Antiquity in the canonical writings of ‘Abdīshō’ bar Brīkhā
History from the margins of the law in Syriac Christian writings
7 Concealing the law: the limits of legal promulgation among the rabbis of Babylonia
Rabbinic teaching to non-rabbis: the absence of civil law
Exclusive legal knowledge and the advantages of sages in court
Concealing the law and judicial discretion
Textual authority without textual transmission
Legal flexibility: an ancient Near Eastern tradition
Conclusion
Part III Authority and transmission
8 Truth and doubt in manuscript discovery narratives
Find stories as authority
Find stories beyond authority
9 The orthodox transmission of heresy
Irenaeus of Lyon, Against the Heresies
Tertullian, Against the Valentinians
Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies
A provisional conclusion
Pirating heretical texts in the defense of orthodoxy: Epiphanius of Salamis and Augustine
Epiphanius, Aetius, and dueling editions
Augustine as editor of Pelagius
Conclusion
10 Consuming texts: women as recipients and transmitters of ancient texts
Rabbinic texts and traditions
The soṭah ritual, the transmission of Torah, and the consumption of biblical texts
The transmission of the soṭah text by a woman
Food consumption and female transmission of rabbinic knowledge
Christian texts and traditions
Women as readers and transmitters of written texts
Reading as eating
Conclusions: every corpus has a corpus
Epilogue: Reading without authority
Index locorum
Index

Citation preview

Rethinking ‘Authority’ in Late Antiquity

The historian’s task involves unmasking the systems of power that underlie our sources. A historian must not only analyze the content and context of ancient sources, but also the structures of power, authority, and political contingency that account for their transmission, preservation, and survival. But as a tool for interpreting antiquity, “authority” has a history of its own. As authority gained pride of place in the historiographical order of knowledge, other types of contingency have faded into the background. This book’s introduction traces the genesis and growth of the category, describing the lacuna that scholars seek to fill by framing texts through its lens. The subsequent chapters comprise case studies from late ancient Christian and Jewish sources, asking what lies “beyond authority” as a primary tool of analysis. Each uncovers facets of textual and social history that have been obscured by overreliance on authority as historical explanation. While chapters focus on late ancient topics, the methodological intervention speaks to the discipline of history as a whole. Scholars of classical antiquity and the early medieval world will find immediately analogous cases and applications. Furthermore, the critique of the place of authority as used by historians will find wider resonance across the academic study of history. A. J. Berkovitz is Assistant Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, USA. His forthcoming book focuses on the reception and practice of the Psalms in Late Antiquity, and explores issues related to book history and the Jewish-Christian encounter. Mark Letteney is a PhD candidate in Princeton’s Department of Religion, USA. His dissertation considers the effects of Christian governance on scholarly practices in the late fourth and fifth centuries. He is also an archaeologist, co-directing the Solomon’s Pools Archaeological Project in Palestine.

Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies

TransAntiquity Cross-Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Ancient Workd Edited by Domitilla Campanile, Filippo Carlà-Uhink, and Margherita Facella Aeschylus and War Comparative Perspectives on ‘Seven Against Thebes’ Edited by Isabelle Torrance The Etruscans and the History of Dentistry The Golden Smile through the Ages Marshall J. Becker and Jean MacIntosh Turfa Masculinity and Dress in Roman Antiquity Kelly Olson Juvenal’s Global Awareness Circulation, Connectivity, and Empire Osman Umurhan The Greek and Roman Trophy From Battlefield Marker to Icon of Power Lauren Kinnee Rethinking ‘Authority’ in Late Antiquity Authorship, Law, and Transmission in Jewish and Christian Tradition Edited by A.J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney Thinking the Greeks A Volume in Honour of James M. Redfield Edited by Bruce M. King and Lillian Doherty www.routledge.com/classicalstudies/series/RMCS

“This book delves into two of the most crucial themes in contemporary critical theory: authority and transmission. The essays cover a wide variety of themes in Jewish and Christian textual history, but share one mission: to revisit, question and complicate the common (mis)conception that subjugates transmission to authority, and sees the latter as the key to the former. This superb collection is essential reading for anyone grappling with questions of literary transmission, authority in literature, and the complicated connections between them.” – Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Rethinking ‘Authority’ in Late Antiquity

Authorship, Law, and Transmission in Jewish and Christian Tradition Edited by A.J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, A.J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney; individual chapters, the contributors The right of A.J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-48022-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-06342-5 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of contributorsxi Acknowledgementsxiii   1 Authority in contemporary historiography

1

A. J. BERKOVITZ AND MARK LETTENEY

The problem  1 History beyond authority  2 Authorship and authority  3 Authority and the law  5 Transmission beyond authority  8 Conclusion 12   2 Reading beyond authority

17

HINDY NAJMAN

The authority paradigm in Seconding Sinai 17 Philology beyond authority: the case of Homer  19 Vitality of traditions beyond old and new philology  22 The vitality of Scripture: reading with and beyond authority  24 PART I

Authorship and authority

31

  3 Authenticity and authority: the case for dismantling a dubious correlation

33

MARK LETTENEY

“Acta conciliorum non leguntur.” 34 Reading councils  34 Reading acta 35

viii  Contents The unreliability of proceedings  36 The chorus at Chalcedon  37 The hand of the editor  39 The unreliability of proceedings  40 Resistive readings and an institutionalized suspicion of documents  41 Another layer of reading: Chalcedon at Constantinople  43 Christos epistolographos  44 A dissenting opinion  47 Conclusion 48   4 Beyond attribution and authority: the case of Psalms in rabbinic hermeneutics

57

A. J. BERKOVITZ

Identity of author: Asaph as case-study  59 Compositional circumstances of Psalmist  62 Authorship and historical anchoring  66 Conclusion 69   5 Correcting the gospel: putting the titles of the gospels in historical context

78

MATTHEW D. C. LARSEN

Didymus Chalkenturus and the personal and city editions of The Iliad 80 Galen and the correcting literary activities of Mnemon of Side  84 2 Maccabees 2:13 and Nehemiah’s records  85 Gospel texts and the Kat’ Andra formula  86 Irenaeus and “gospel authorship”  89 Conclusion 94 PART II

Authority and the law

105

  6 Glimpses from the margins: re-telling late ancient history at the edges of the law

107

MARIA E. DOERFLER

The apostolic past in the Didascalia Apostolorum 108 Glimpses of Late Antiquity in the canonical writings of ‘Abdīshō’ bar Brīkhā  111 History from the margins of the law in Syriac Christian writings  113

Contents ix   7 Concealing the law: the limits of legal promulgation among the rabbis of Babylonia

123

JONATHAN A. POMERANZ

Rabbinic teaching to non-rabbis: the absence of civil law  124 Exclusive legal knowledge and the advantages of sages in court  125 Concealing the law and judicial discretion  129 Textual authority without textual transmission  130 Legal flexibility: an ancient Near Eastern tradition  131 Conclusion 133 PART III

Authority and transmission

137

  8 Truth and doubt in manuscript discovery narratives

139

EVA MROCZEK

Find stories as authority  139 Find stories beyond authority  142   9 The orthodox transmission of heresy

161

WINRICH LÖHR

Irenaeus of Lyon, Against the Heresies 161 Tertullian, Against the Valentinians 163 Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies  165 A provisional conclusion  166 Pirating heretical texts in the defense of orthodoxy: Epiphanius of Salamis and Augustine  167 Epiphanius, Aetius, and dueling editions  167 Augustine as editor of Pelagius  169 Conclusion 170 10 Consuming texts: women as recipients and transmitters of ancient texts SARIT KATTAN GRIBETZ

Rabbinic texts and traditions  182 The soṭah ritual, the transmission of Torah, and the consumption of biblical texts  182 The transmission of the soṭah text by a woman  183 Food consumption and female transmission of rabbinic knowledge 184

178

x  Contents Christian texts and traditions  185 Women as readers and transmitters of written texts  185 Reading as eating  187 Conclusions: every corpus has a corpus  190

Epilogue: Reading without authority

207

C. M. CHIN

Index locorum Index

216 223

Contributors

A. J. Berkovitz is Assistant Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, USA. His forthcoming book focuses on the reception and practice of the Psalms in Late Antiquity and explores issues related to book history and the Jewish-Christian encounter. C. M. Chin is a writer and historian working as Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California at Davis, USA. His work moves between the religious and technical literatures of Late Antiquity and contemporary puppet theatre. He is the author of Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman World (2008), and co-editor of Late Ancient Knowing: Explorations in Intellectual History  (2015) and  Melania: Early Christianity Through the Life of One Family (2017). Maria E. Doerfler serves as Assistant Professor of Late Antiquity in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University, USA. Her work explores late ancient approaches to reading authoritative texts in times of crisis. Sarit Kattan Gribetz is Assistant Professor at Fordham University, USA. Her first book, tentatively titled Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism, examines the ways in which time was employed in rabbinic texts to create and disrupt difference – between rabbis and Romans, Jews and Christians, men and women, heaven and earth. Matthew D. C. Larsen is a Cotsen Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2017. His first book, Gospels Before the Book, was published in 2018 by Oxford University Press. Mark Letteney is a PhD candidate in Princeton’s Department of Religion, USA. His dissertation considers the effects of Christian governance on scholarly practices in the late fourth and fifth centuries. He is also an archaeologist, codirecting the Solomon’s Pools Archaeological Project in Palestine. Winrich Löhr is Professor of Historical Theology (Antiquity and Middle Ages) at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany. In 2011, he was Directeur des études invité at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Ve section) in

xii  Contributors Paris, France. He is also co-editor of the Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum (RAC). Publications include: Basilides und seine Schule (1996); Pélage et le Pélagianisme (2015). Eva Mroczek is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis, USA. She is the author of The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (2016) and other work at the intersection of early Jewish literature and Book History. Hindy Najman is the Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oriel College, University of Oxford, UK. Her research interests encompass  composition and author function; construction and imitation of Biblical figures; practices of pseudepigraphy and pseudonymous attribution; revelation, divine encounter and prophecy; idealized sage and perfectionism;  philology  and philological practices; diaspora and exile; authority and tradition; allegorical interpretation and midrash; destruction and recovery; collection and canon; the history of Biblical interpretation; and scholarly practices of reading the Bible and biblical traditions. She has written on the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic literature and Pseudepigrapha. Her publications include Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future: An Analysis of 4 Ezra, Past Renewals: Interpretive Authority, Renewed Revelation and the Quest for Perfection, Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism, and a recent essay entitled “Ethical Reading: The Transformation of Text and Self.” She is currently working on a new book entitled: Reading Practices and the Vitality of Scripture. Jonathan A. Pomeranz holds a B.A. in Classics from Princeton University, USA, and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Yale University, USA. He is currently studying for a J.D. at Stanford Law School, USA.

Acknowledgements

This project began in fall 2014 as a series of lunchtime conversations between the two editors. We were both surprised by the centrality that “authority” had found in recent years as a historical explanation for why it is that texts were composed and transmitted in Late Antiquity, especially among studies of Jewish and Christian communities. Consultation with colleagues through the spring of 2015 made it clear that we were hardly the only scholars thinking about the problems related to the concept of authority as historical explanation, and we decided to hold a conference at Princeton University in March of 2016 that brought together a group of historians who had been thinking about these issues in recent years. In attendance were over one hundred friends, colleagues, and new acquaintances who helped us to conceptualize the place of the concept of authority in contemporary historiography, and the work that it does in our individual and collective analyses of Late Antiquity. During three days of pre-circulated papers, responses, and round-table discussion, we heard from an extraordinary group of scholars, including Dina Boero, Aaron Butts, C. M. Chin, Maria E. Doerfler, Philip Fackler, Anthony Grafton, Martha Himmelfarb, Sarit Kattan Gribetz, David Lambert, Matthew Larsen, Winrich Löhr, AnneMarie Luijendijk, Naphtali Meshel, Eva Mroczek, Hindy Nahman, Elaine Pagels, Jonathan Pomeranz, Alberto Rigolio, Ishay Rozen-Zvi, Jeremy Schott, Blossom Stefaniw, Moulie Vidas, and Stephen Young. As organizers of the conference, we were pleased by the collegiality of the participants and the extraordinary level of engagement offered to every ­presenter – senior scholar, junior scholar, and graduate student alike. The conference was generously funded by the Princeton University Program in Judaic Studies, the Center for the Study of Late Antiquity, the Department of Religion, the Council of the Humanities Stewart Fund in Religion, the Department of Classics, the Center for the Study of Religion, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Center for Human Values. The conference, and the subsequent book project, was administered with indefatigable skill, grace, and attention by Baru Saul, to whom we owe a great debit of gratitude. Rethinking ‘Authority’ in Late Antiquity: Authorship, Law, and Transmission in Jewish and Christian Tradition represents only a selection of the conversations that took place among presenters and attendees that weekend. We hope that this book, however, will spur further engagement across traditional disciplinary lines.

xiv  Acknowledgements We would like to thank our editor Amy Davis-Poynter for taking an early and enthusiastic interest in the project and Elizabeth Risch for ensuring a smooth and timely publication process. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers who contributed sharp critique tempered by encouragement about the project; the introduction, especially, benefitted from their incisive comments. Finally, this book would not have been possible without extensive guidance and encouragement from three scholars who we are lucky to call colleagues and friends: Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ra’anan Boustan, and Moulie Vidas. Their fingerprints are visible throughout this book, and we thank them especially for making it possible. A. J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney April 2018 Princeton, NJ

1 Authority in contemporary historiography A. J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney

We met recently with a colleague to discuss the central place that “authority” has found among explanations for the creation and dissemination of texts in Late Antiquity. As the conversation shifted to social theories of authority, our colleague commended Bruce Lincoln’s magisterial Authority: Construction and Corrosion as being particularly influential on his own thinking about the authority-as-­ motivation paradigm. In particular, he reflected on the central paradox of the book. According to Lincoln, authority is, at base, thinly veiled violence, or at least the implication thereof. Authority is compromised, however, whenever that violence is brought to fruition. “So, for instance, I don’t hit my children because in so doing, my authority would be brought into question.” He was referring to Lincoln’s contention that authority, when challenged, can be cashed out either in terms of persuasion or in terms of violence, though always with a loss of value in the process.1 Our colleague paused for a moment, returning to reality from the realm of theory, and retorted to himself, “I don’t hit my kids for a lot of reasons – mostly moral and psychological. My own authority doesn’t have much to do with it.” In his position as a parent, our colleague’s authority permeates every interaction he has with his children. To describe the relationship without reference to the structures of power that govern their interactions would be irresponsible, and myopic. Yet, to understand this parent-child relationship solely under the rubric of authority and (im)balances of power would be perilously reductive; the analysis would fail to grasp that the individuals under analysis are just that: people, with myriad interests and motivations. Our colleague does not hit his children because he loves them, and it is his duty to care for their well-being in a way that precludes any number of actions that would otherwise serve his purposes and reinforce his authority. Authority is a necessary touchstone in order to understand the parentchild relationship, but it is not sufficient. The central claim of this book is that “authority” is a necessary but ultimately insufficient category of analysis for the writing and understanding of ancient history. We begin by examining how and why authority has become part and parcel of contemporary historiography.

The problem In the wake of the “linguistic turn” in late ancient studies, the truth, or the relative effectiveness of a historical claim has come to be considered in light of its

2  A. J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney explanatory value regarding the question of cui bono – who benefits?2 That is, a core feature of the historian’s task entails the unmasking of the systems of power that underlie our sources. A historian must not only analyze the content and context of ancient sources, but also the structures of power, authority, and political contingency that account for the transmission, preservation, and survival of these sources. Which is to say, in the wake of the linguistic turn, historiographically valid accounts of our ancient evidence must speak to the possibility that the text might just as easily have not survived. The fact that it did, and that we can engage in textual research whatsoever, must be understood in light of the fact that, in most cases, survival is no accident: our sources survive precisely because someone benefited from their preservation, and usually someone or some group in power. What we term a “reduction to authority” was born in this context: uncovering and acknowledging the structures of authority embedded within our sources became the hermeneutical key to unlocking a source’s meaning and import. Understanding of the fragility and contingency of historical sources, and of the writing of history itself, constituted an advance in the field. Introductions both to granular and wide-ranging works of history in the past 25 years almost invariably bemoan the teleological certainty and framework of inevitability expressed in an earlier positivist historiography; a statement about the contingency and precariousness of historical development has become de rigeur. We hold these to be positive developments in historiographical method. For instance, Hindy Najman’s rightfully influential Seconding Sinai was an early example of the enormous advances to be found in understanding the invocation of Moses and Sinaitic revelation by ancient Israelite and Second Temple sources as attempts at authorization. Najman demonstrated that, if we focus on discourse instead of authenticity, and thus authority as opposed to positivist historiography, we can understand later claims of Mosaic authorship not as pious forgery, but rather as attempts to establish membership in an already authoritative “founder discourse.” In the words of Najman, re-presentations of Sinai and Moses, “serve to authorize the re-introduction of Torah into the Jewish community at times of legal reform and of covenant renewal.”3 Historiography based on an authority-driven paradigm – a history written with the aim of explaining who were the winners, who were the losers, and whose voices are amplified or muffled by our sources – has become so well-integrated into current scholarship that it is often a challenge to look beyond or between “authority” as an explanatory paradigm. We have become so aware of the tautology of “power always wins out,” and the conviction that “history is written by the winners” that alternative factors, those which do not fit neatly into a paradigm aimed at explicating systems of power, are marginalized, deemed irrelevant, or considered beneath the task of the historian.4

History beyond authority This book disturbs the centrality of the authority-driven paradigm of historiography, arguing that even as power and authority always influence our sources

Authority in contemporary historiography  3 and must be taken into consideration, there are other factors worth analyzing in our study of the production, preservation, and transmission of ancient texts and traditions. This exploration begins with a chapter by Hindy Najman, who builds a new theoretical framework for thinking about ancient sources by reflecting on the historiographical impact of Seconding Sinai, a milestone in the “authority-asexplanation” paradigm. She examines the Foucauldian underpinnings of Seconding Sinai and appeals to Nietzsche and Schlegel in order to develop new strategies for “reading beyond authority.” She argues that attention to the vitality of a tradition and fragmented reading allows for close analysis of Second Temple sources that does not reduce them to questions of authoritative practices, authoritative people, and expressions of power. Hindy Najman’s chapter opens the door to reassessing types of historical contingency that have faded into the background as authority gained pride of place in the historiographical order of knowledge. By fixing our attention on authority, historians have obscured the possibility of accidental survival and the “super-added” extra beyond the authoritative facets of legal material; we have read the place of an author as the source of authority in a manner that is ahistorical, and obscures more than it enlightens. The present book focuses on three uses of “authority” in contemporary historical writing – authorship and authority, authority and the law, and un/authoritative transmission. Each chapter demonstrates the vitality of ancient Jewish and Christian traditions by supplementing our historiographical toolkit in ways that move beyond the authority paradigm. The book concludes with an epilogue by C. M. Chin, who invites us to set aside, for a moment, human concerns for authorization and sense-making, with the promise that “we may find sensations, some human and some not, sitting a little askew from it.”5 Chin warns historians about the false security brought by familiarity and scholarly expertise, and encourages a return to our sources with a renewed sense of possibility, ready for a new “blow of encounter.”

Authorship and authority Reading authorship as a function of authority seems eminently natural – the two English words themselves are cognates of the Latin root “auctor,” which means both “progenitor” and, in some instances, “power over another” (auctoritas). Viewing authorship as a creative process that results in the authority of the creator over her product opens a range of possibilities before the historian to create a genealogy from the originary moment of authorship forward through various, secondary stages of reception and interpretation.6 The notion of an author or “authorial voice” allows a trajectory to be traced from the text’s moment of creation through nodes of reception along a timeline that ends, inevitably, with the historian herself. We can see the whole history of the text because we have an idea both of where it began – with the author – and where it has ended up: in our own hands. There are many paradigms by which the relation of an author to his work may be understood. But scholars who wish to tell the story of a textual tradition as one of decline from an originary moment, through contamination of later less- or

4  A. J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney un-authorized tradents require that the progenitor/auctor/author is coeval with the source of the text’s authority. In this way, the author functions as a primary node through which all source and textual criticism flows, because the identification of the author allows historians to delve into a text beyond its final material form – say, the Teubner edition, or the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Because there are two ends of the discourse – the auctor and the contemporary reader/historian – the intervening time and space may be reconstructed as an evolutionary process. The concept of the “author” as “authority” allows historians to return to Eden and consider, if only for a moment, how far we have fallen.7 Beyond glimpses at a text’s originary moment, the action of binding the progenitor of a text to its source of authority allows historians and readers to presume that the meaning of a text itself is singular, unified, and discoverable in the persona of the author.8 So, for instance, the names attached to gospel books allow for the idea of a person who can be known through analysis of his textual production, whether the named “person” is understood to represent a community or singular individual. The unification of a text under the authority of its progenitor in turn allows for the meaning of the work itself to be perceived as a single, unified, and discoverable entity. The text is presumed to cohere in some sense, with incongruities and fissures explained either as the intention of the author or as the result of contamination by later tradents whose own residuum is visible in the present state of the text. Thus, authorship-as-authority allows no contradiction except for that which is intended by the person who created the text – its author. As a tool of historiography, authorship-as-authority supposes that initial meaning can be extracted from a discourse, and that if one could perfectly reconstruct the originary moment and understand the habitus of the text’s originator, one could tell an authoritative genealogical story of the discourse itself, from origination to the present. The aim of our book, to move in some sense “beyond authority,” does not univocally dismiss the identification of an author with the authorization of a discourse. Contributors approach questions of authorship and authority from different angles, and each finds different uses for these categories in the analysis of Late Antiquity. Each contributor, however, points to the subtle and consequential distortions in our reading of late ancient sources occasioned by modern conceptions of authorship and contemporary notions of authority as a primary driver of composition and transmission. Mark Letteney argues in Chapter 3 that scholarly discussions of composition, transmission, and canon formation in Late Antiquity have assumed a false and monolithic understanding of the correlation of authorship and authority, and that modern intuitions fail to account for the textual practice of late ancient Christians. He does so by adducing two opposite and complementary case studies: the case of 5th century church council documents, in which a text that is known to be forged is nevertheless considered wholly authoritative, and a corpus of letters between Jesus and King Abgar of Edessa, a tradition that is considered by its earliest source as unimpeachably authentic material authored by Jesus himself, but that is nevertheless contrasted explicitly with authorized, scriptural texts. This study argues that there is no necessary or predictive connection between the authorship of a text in Late Antiquity and its authority.

Authority in contemporary historiography  5 A. J. Berkovitz, in Chapter 4, moves from the dubious correlation of authorship and authority to the problematic connection that contemporary scholarship draws between attribution and authority. Through an examination of psalm superscriptions in rabbinic literature he argues that ancient rabbis did not invariably view textual attribution as constituting a claim to authority. Rather, attribution allowed late antique rabbis to interpret both the text of a psalm and its author in new light. It enabled questions regarding the identity of the Psalmist, the circumstances under which the Psalm was recited, and the historical implications of a psalm’s composition. He argues that rabbis were interested in attribution not because of the authority that names confer, but rather because attributions are useful for interpretation; they answer both biographical and bibliographical questions. He concludes that ancient texts did not reduce attribution to authority in a simple or predictable manner, and nor should contemporary historians. In Chapter 5, Matthew Larsen continues the work of reframing authorship and attribution. He turns our gaze to one of the most apparent instances of authorial ascription in the ancient world – the names attached to canonical gospels – in order to demonstrate that appearances can deceive when we import modern, western notions of authorship into foreign and ancient contexts. In fact, he disputes the scholarly consensus that the “Gospel according to [name]” formula in New Testament manuscripts and early Christian sources was used to denote authorship at all. He demonstrates that the formula “according to,” prior to late 2nd century Christian re-interpretation, was never used to denote the author of a book. Instead, the formula was used to refer to the corrector of a fluid, open tradition of stories, often one which lacks any single originary moment whatsoever. Thus, the interpretation of the “according to” formula as a denotation of authorship serves to import falsely the idea of an author into the early history of gospel texts, and to cast what was initially a fluid tradition of stories and their “correctors” into an authorized literary product with an originary moment and a unitary meaning. Gospel “titles” did not originate as authorizing formulae; scholars unduly bias their reading of the texts in favor of an “authorized” model of authorship and publication by reading gospel titles in an ahistorical manner. Reading authorship beyond authority consists in destabilizing the connection between the two, and in being ever-vigilant against importing modern notions of each into the late ancient world. It also provides new directions of inquiry by paying attention to various and competing notions of what it means to be the progenitor of a text in antiquity – what is an “author?” Understanding authorship beyond authority, at base, involves a reaction against the flattening of complex negotiations of both authorship and authority themselves. Our intention is to make late antiquity look a little stranger, occupied by strangers who do not share contemporary values or sensibilities. In the words of L. P. Hartley, “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”9

Authority and the law Of all ancient literature extant today, none more clearly presupposes the connection between authorship and authorization than legal corpora, whose authority are

6  A. J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney understood to flow directly from the authority of their promulgators. Laws are considered as such, and not merely “guidelines” or “suggestions,” because their source holds the authority to pronounce. Laws embody the authority of the lawgiver, be that lawgiver god, the Roman Senate, Babylonian state courts, or revered patristic commentators of centuries past. If we are to demonstrate the virtue of a historiography that moves meaningfully beyond authority, we should be able to demonstrate that new insights and fresh readings are waiting even in sources whose explicit aim is the construction of their own authority. Maria E. Doerfler and Jonathan Pomeranz have each taken up this challenge in chapters considering the possibility of reading legal corpora beyond authority, with attention paid to surplus motivations underlying the law apart from bare expressions of power. The use of authority as a lens through which to read late ancient legal material is of recent interest and has proven a useful framework. Before the law was read chiefly as an expression of authority – a wish on behalf of those in power – it was read in a less skeptical vein. Scholars often imagined legal statements as the product of “The Law”: an embodied agent conceived by people, but that acts upon its own volition and system of logic once instantiated.10 Thus conceived, “The Law” as an agent shares a conceptual framework with modern notions of a business corporation.11 Like a modern business, the Law says, does, and demands; it has its own agency. Unlike corporations, however, the Law does not vie for power. Rather, it was imagined as an expression of power in its very nature.12 Such a conception of “The Law” as an embodied entity, in turn, suggested a reading of legal sources as both descriptive and normative. In other words, the presumption is that legal statements reflect an embedded social reality, and that historians can use legal pronouncements to understand social history. This approach to legal sources we have termed “Law-centered.” In recent years, attention to the place of power and authority in the creation of legal material has shifted the dynamics of scholarly readings of law. This “authoritycentered” approach seeks to unmask the social-historical frameworks, systems, and mechanisms that underlie legal pronouncements, and as a result places the promulgators of legal material directly within the line of inquiry. Instead of asking questions regarding “How does the Law work?,” an approach sensitive to authority and authorization asks “Who created the law?” and “Why did they do so? What did they stand to gain?” An authority-centered approach strips legal materials of both normative and descriptive status, and reads them as attempts by a particular social group to create a specific reality by exerting power in the form of legal discourse.13 For instance, the exemption of women from time-bound commandments in Mishnah Qiddushin 1:7 is not understood to reflect a reality in which most women abstain from time-bound commandments, as it might be read under a Law-centered hermeneutic. Rather, an authority-centered approach reads the statement “any time-bound commandment, men are required women are exempt” as an attempt to create the proposed reality by fiat. The legal statement, in truth, tells a story about male actors – rabbis – seeking to limit, control, and discipline women.14 At its core, the turn to authority restores a fragile and tempestuous form of human agency to legal

Authority in contemporary historiography 7 history by decentering the text and de-personifying the corpus in view of finding the people that lie behind it. An authority-centered approach encourages strategies of counter-reading: Did Jewish women keep time-bound commandments? Where? When? How? This reading against the grain, in turn, allows for a fuller and richer history of Late Antiquity. Approaches that focus on the place of authority and authorization in the creation and promulgation of law have proven eminently useful in rereading late ancient sources, but they too have limits and drawbacks. Instead of providing insight into questions surrounding legal literature, they find answers mainly within domains of power: identifying winners and losers becomes the framework into which studies of law and legal promulgation fit. When the dominant explanatory framework for any legal pronouncement is cast primarily in the guise of authority,15 we have emulsified our sources, and caused them to lose their particular textures and flavors. The methodology which prioritizes counter-reading law with an eye toward understanding the material conditions of its production (an authority-centered approach) often obscures other approaches; the entirety of the literary product is reduced to its utility in propping up the authority of its promulgators. Thus, to return to Mishnah Qiddushin 1:7, the only profitable answer to questions of why time-bound commandments are incumbent upon men alone necessarily engages with questions of bodily autonomy, perceived and proposed realities, and to what extent such a pronouncement reflects a social history, or attempts to create one.16 When taken to an extreme, the reduction inherent in the authority-centered paradigm refuses law its own genre and form of reading. By reclassifying law solely under the rubric of authority, we obscure the contours of legal literature and what they can offer beyond prescriptive hopes and partisan politics. We would like to ask: What are promulgators doing beyond solidifying their own power? What are the unintended consequences of issuing laws? Legal sources are authoritative – that is their nature. But what are we missing when we focus exclusively on the source and expression of that authority? Maria E. Doerfler, in Chapter 6, begins to grapple with these questions by reenvisioning the role of narrative in legal codes and by analyzing the non-legal stories found in two Syriac legal sources separated by a millennium: the Didascalia and the canonical writings of ‘Abdīshō’ bar Brīkhā. Her exploration of narratives embedded in prescriptive, legal sources resists the trend of scholarship that wishes to see narrative solely as an authorizing agent. Instead, she suggests that the combination of law and narrative serves to highlight the role of foundational narratives, reflecting and constructing a community’s sense of self. Doerfler advises that we need not jettison attention to authority entirely, especially when reading genres like law that place it at the center. Nonetheless, we should pay attention to the surplus of motivations beyond authority, allowing for a more vibrant conception of law as a genre. Jonathan Pomeranz continues the reappraisal of legal authority as an explanatory device in Chapter 7 by examining the phenomenon of unpromulgated civil law in the Babylonian Talmud. Why would rabbis keep others in the dark about the legal system? Under modern jurisprudence, the dominant rationale for hiding

8  A. J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney legal knowledge from the masses is to prevent them from abusing the system, or to allow for those “in the know” to use the system to their own advantage. In other words, esoteric legal knowledge serves to supplement the authority of specialists. Pomeranz argues that in Babylonia, while such a practice inevitably placed non-rabbis under rabbinic control, the practice ought not be conceptualized as an authorizing device. Rather, Babylonian rabbis followed in the footsteps of a longstanding Near Eastern tradition which left law unpromulgated, a type of jurisprudence that provided room for legal flexibility and prevented external manipulation. The rabbis themselves, according to Pomeranz, never thought of unpromulgated law as a source of authority. He suggests, instead, that the scholarly reduction of talmudic law to authority merely expresses contemporary scholars’ discomfort with the rabbinic legal system and its jurisprudential underpinnings. The chapters by Doerfler and Pomeranz offer a similar argument, but from two distinct sets of literature, suggesting the interdisciplinary utility of re-examining our core presuppositions about authority and the law. Both advance the central argument of this book by demonstrating that authority is not a sufficient lens through which to examine legal materials. Together, they show that the narratives which surround the law, that are about the law, or are embedded in the law, afford glimpses into both the mechanics that produce legal knowledge as well as its early reception. These narratives do not understand the law they frame in terms of authority, and thus to read the narratives primarily as claims to authority is to misunderstand both the narrative and the law to which it is attached. Following the lead of Doerfler and Pomeranz, this book next addresses the methodological liability of reading reception itself as authority.

Transmission beyond authority The fact is so obvious that it hardly warrants the ink: no process more dramatically shapes the way that scholars conceive of and construct the past than transmission. Without a transhistorical network of tradents, we would possess no physical literary evidence beyond the few cases of accidental preservation: texts found in hidden jars, graves, city dumps. Historians who use sources that claim to be earlier than their earliest physical witnesses have no choice but to trust the relative fidelity of transmission through time. In the realm of ancient studies, it is not uncommon that the first extant witness to a source postdates the text’s composition by several centuries. The oldest complete physical copy of the Mishnah (redacted ca. 200 CE) is found in an 10th or 11th century hand; the only extant copy of Tacitus’s Annales 1–6 (composed ca. 115 CE) are found in a 9th century manuscript; the first complete copy of the Hebrew Bible is the 11th century Leningrad Codex, produced at least a millennium after the last of its contents were composed. There is simply no way around the fact that we are continually indebted to traditory processes that are all too human, and that we rely on the way that our ancient sources represent their own transmission for information about the path that led from ancient composition to contemporary consumption. Scholars have undertaken a variety of strategies to interpret the very fact that ancient literary material survives. Relative to the current authority-focused

Authority in contemporary historiography 9 paradigm, older traditions of scholarship have more often accepted as uncontroversial that transmission of most ancient texts occurs in a generally faithful process, occasionally disrupted by the errant and eager scribe; our ancient sources, when they discuss transmission, can be believed about what they transmitted and how they did so. Thus, if rabbinic sources declare that Oral Torah was transmitted only orally, what evidence can we bring to suggest otherwise? More importantly, transmitted content has been assumed to reflect more or less accurately the voice of the tradent. Thus, when the Babylonian Talmud (redacted ca. 500 CE) cites a statement of a tannaitic rabbi (living ca. 70–200 CE), we may assume that at least the core of that saying is historically attributable to the named sage, or at minimum, to someone from his school. More recently, a critical hermeneutic with an eye toward authority has unsettled many of these assumptions about transmission with two key questions: “By whose authority, and through what processes, did transmission occur?” An approach to antiquity that is sensitive to authority must situate a source not only within its most immediate historical context, but must also ask more fundamental questions regarding the availability of the material in the first place.17 The very fact that sources survive from antiquity has been reformulated in light of radical contingency – the admission that our sources might just as well have not survived – and led to new questions, generally based on the presumption that transmission itself is an expression of power, and that the ability to pass down texts and traditions is always inflected by political, social, and technological factors. Canons, especially scriptural canons, have come to be viewed as contrivances born out of controversy, rather than objects of consensus or simple conglomerations of material. In a scholarly environment where the very existence of literary sources has come to be understood in light of social groups vying for power in antiquity, the act of transmission has become intimately associated with authority. The fact that the writings of so-called “proto-Orthodox” Christians remain,18 while those of Valentinus and his school do not has been rightly understood as no accident – the group that “won out” resigned opposing voices, in most cases, to the dustbin of history; the literary remains of Late Antiquity were intentionally curated by victorious social groups to tell a history of their inevitable rise and success. Some of the great material discoveries of the 20th century have served to drive this point home. The chance survivals of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi codices, and many of the Oxyrhynchus papyri shed significant light on heretofore unknown or scarcely documented movements. The groups presumed to be represented by these improbably surviving texts have been traditionally understood in oppositional terms: “heresy” or “apocrypha” versus the “orthodoxy” witnessed not by chance finds, but by scribes in scriptoria, and other transhistorical institutions of transmission. To scholars of ancient history, the great textual discoveries of the 20th century demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that we are not only working with a half-full deck, but one stacked in favor of the house. All of these insights have been facilitated by a strong theoretical connection between authority, power, and the act of transmission. And the insights have been staggering. Ultimately, putting transmission-as-authority on display has allowed for the daunting but liberating question to be asked of bishops and rabbis alike:

10  A. J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney What if the “powerful majority” that we read from traditionally surviving materials were, in actuality, an embattled minority?19 How does this affect the way that we read heresiography, scriptural interpretation, law codes, and the act of transmission itself? If acts of transmission are intimately connected with authorizing processes, then historians can no longer assume that transmission was the faithful act of passing along traditions of earlier authorities unchanged. Particular attention must be paid to the way later tradents reworked earlier ones. ‘How did Rufinus translate Origen, why did he do so, and what purposes did it serve?’20 ‘Is the Babylonian Talmud transmitting a false tannaitic statement in order to authorize a particular opinion?’21 Even authorizing figures themselves were understood as a product of the authorizing process. Thus, ‘should every rabbinic attribution be assumed false until proven otherwise?’22 ‘When Basil quotes Jerome does he actually have an authentic work of Jerome in front of him?’ Variation, likewise, is no longer conceived to be the sole province of scribal variation or oral parallels, but rather the product of traditory agents. ‘Does the Talmud rework an earlier tradition to suit its own narrative?’ All of these questions are pivotal to our understanding of ancient sources. The methodological lens that authority provides for analyzing processes of transmission, however, obscures just as much as it enlightens. At its core, it contends that all acts of transmission – from translating the Bible to passing a note – are carried out under the guise of gaining, exerting, or resisting authority; that is to say, under the guise of a particular form of interpersonal power relations that is ultimately reductive. This form of reductionism stretches the bounds of history. It suggests a certain kind of intentionality behind the movement of any tradition, and it erases the potential for accidents, for surplus or competing motivations, and for vitality in history.23 It reduces our ability to appreciate, among other things, whimsy. And if our lenses have blinded us to whimsy, have we really succeeded in glimpsing the human lives that lie behind our sources? Combining transmission and authority into one episteme does not only affect the ways in which we think about transmission, but also the ways that we construct the analytical category of “authority.” The fundamental insight that transmission is often carried out by authorized tradents has caused scholars to turn the paradigm around, and understand that transmission implies some sort of authoritative status. An authority-centered paradigm demonstrates that the texts of the Nag Hammadi codices index pluriform Christianities, often with rival or contradictory claims to sources that are extant through more traditional processes of transmission in ancient scriptoria. But the authority paradigm smuggles in another set of assumptions about the Nag Hammadi material that is neither necessary nor obvious: it simultaneously posits that those texts carried some form of authority in the communities that created and transmitted them. Consider, for instance, the appellation of “gospel”24 or “Scripture”25 to texts from Nag Hammadi, and the initial presumption that the Coptic codices comprised a counter-canon of authoritative Scriptures intended to rival that of the contemporaneous (4th century) “Catholic” movement.26 In this instance, the fact of that the Nag Hammadi codices were transmitted is used as a justification for presuming that they were authoritative

Authority in contemporary historiography 11 to their users. While more recent studies have argued plausibly for an Egyptian monastic provenance of the codices, the authority paradigm remains intact in so far as interpretation of what the Nag Hammadi texts “meant” to ancient tradents is still adjudicated in light of the manuscript’s (now monastic) origins.27 We have simply shifted the blame for heterodoxy from heretics to the marginally orthodox; we have not overturned the connection between the transmission of a text and what we suppose the fact of transmission says about its tradents. The reduction of transmission to authority may be no more evident than in the widespread scholarly practice of reading manuscript discovery narratives as devices that authorize transmission. Eva Mroczek’s chapter  in this book questions the common assumption that manuscript discovery narratives act primarily or merely as paratexts that authorize the text discovered, or as simple data points that allow scholars to follow a text’s transmission. Instead, she suggests reading them as a literary tradition. Through a focus on the familiar story of “books hidden in caves,” which comprises both ancient and modern exempla, Mrozcek explores ways in which theological expectations about what Scripture is are embedded in manuscript discovery narratives. Her model of transmission, in this case the transmission of a discovery narrative, focuses our gaze on the ways in which the passing along of text teaches us about the transmitters quite apart from questions of their authority to say, to write, or to pass down. Embedded in these ancient and modern manuscript discovery narratives are not merely claims to authority, but also theologies of space, time, and knowledge. In this sense, dichotomies of Jewish/Christian, true/fabricated, and even primary/secondary obscure our understanding of transmission in Late Antiquity. Mroczek commends attention to the same “super-added extra” in find stories, beyond questions of authorization, as Doerfler and Pomeranz demonstrate in their re-reading of the law. Each finds new insights and fresh angles on well-worked material by asking questions of their sources quite apart from “who benefits?” It is clear that late ancient people composed and transmitted texts for reasons apart from or beyond concerns of authority. The authority paradigm, however, has so thoroughly taken hold that we have lost sight of what those motivations might be. And we have reduced all instances of transmission – those known to us by purposeful tradition and accidental discovery alike – to the purview of authority. It is for these reasons that we must move beyond self-satisfaction with explanations of transmission and composition that attend only to questions of authority. It is for these reasons that we must move beyond authority as a central paradigm. The pervasiveness of the paradigm means that it is exceedingly difficult conceptually to unbind authority from transmission. Thus, even the transmission of a non-authoritative text, like the quotation of “heretical” material within “orthodox” heresiological sources, has traditionally been read as an expression of doctrinal and scholastic authority. This approach is unsatisfactory.28 Winrich Löhr turns to orthodox transmitters of “heretical” texts in Chapter 9, which considers the Christian heresiologists of the 2nd through 5th centuries. He disputes the scholarly consensus that the inclusion of “heretical” texts in heresiological sources had the intention or effect of bolstering the authority of the

12  A. J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney heresiographer, arguing rather that a variety of motivations and concerns are visible among the sources. Heresiologists like Justin Martyr and Irenaeus of Lyon, for instance, took modes of argument current in the schools of Greek philosophy as a model, combining dialectics and doxography into a new, Christian form whose purpose moved far beyond the merely polemical. On the other hand, bishops such as Epiphanius of Salamis and Augustine of Hippo published heretical texts in order to unmask and embarrass their opponents, with less concern paid to what has been traditionally considered as the heresiographer’s prime motivation: nailing down doctrinal error. He argues that the transmission of “heresy” among the orthodox of Late Antiquity was fraught, and that the authority model of transmission has obscured the varying motivations of heresiologists. Finally, focusing solely on authorized forms of transmission, and assuming that transmission in material or oral form implies some sort of authority, blinds our gaze to types of transmission that occur through what may be conceived as “unauthorized” channels. That is to say, acts of transmission that do not bolster authority are not viewed as acts of transmission at all. For ancient Judaism and Christianity this particularly affects the way scholars describe the passing on of traditions by any historical actor beyond the elite male. When a mother teachers her daughter Torah or a rabbinic religious practice, can we ignore the fact that this is an act of transmitting tradition, even if it occurs outside of the channels that historians are accustomed to monitor? Sarit Kattan Gribetz takes up these questions in Chapter 10, where she examines how historians might move beyond an authority-centered model of transmission by paying closer attention to both audience and gender as operative categories. Her chapter involves two central claims: first, transmission necessarily involves both a transmitter and a receiver. Kattan Gribetz demonstrates that the authority model, by focusing on the transmitter alone, overlooks the many examples of “unauthorized” recipients (and, in turn, transmitters) of rabbinic and Christian traditions. Second, she examines the central role of embodiment for women’s transmission, pointing to the fact that women tend to be cast as transmitters of authoritative texts with their bodies: consuming texts and preparing them for others’ consumption. This reframing of transmission and displacement of authority opens up the possibility of recovering instances of unauthorized transmission. Ultimately, Kattan Gribetz allows historians to include voices beyond those of male elites in the process of transmission. These three authors invite historians to step back for a moment and imagine a new paradigm that puts authority in its place – as one among a variety of competing motivations and explanations for the fact of textual transmission.

Conclusion C. M. Chin’s epilogue reflects on what he terms “the vitality of words” – the ability of texts and traditions to inspire and induce awe, to ward off demons and to punish the wicked. Instead of putting the vitality of words to use in understanding hierarchical structures of authority, Chin invites historians to

Authority in contemporary historiography  13 linger on the “blow of encounter, in which the reader is moved by the motions of the text.” He considers, as well, notions of familiarity with and affection for texts, as well as anxiety over textual “loss” as motivating factors that must be understood as part of the process of composition and transmission. Chin’s reflections conclude the book by asking what the scholarly expertise looks like “beyond authority,” and he commends that we return to our texts as historians with a renewed commitment to letting the sources surprise and confound our expectations. This book is not intended as a call to arms against the analysis of structures of power and authority which underlie authorship, law, or transmission. Rather, each contributor attempts to rethink and reframe the place of authority, and the value that is assigned to it as an explanatory device in the writing of history. We present a polite but persistent revisionism, a call to a new form of sensitivity to competing, contravening, and seemingly contradictory motivations behind the composition and transmission of our sources from Late Antiquity A similar argument could be made regarding the authority paradigm and potential supplements or alternatives in the study of Classical Antiquity, Medieval history, and beyond.

Notes 1 Lincoln, Authority, 6. “The fact that force is implicit within authority, however, and that authority may deploy force rather than argumentation in response to anything it regards – or chooses to regard – as a challenge is something known to all who are involved in the asymmetric relations constitutive of authority: ruler and ruled, officer and private, teacher and student, parent and child. But if force is actually used, or if threats of force are made with anything less than extreme delicacy (a delicacy that insures deniability), authority risks being perceived as a fig leaf of legitimacy that conceals the embarrassment of naked force. And when authority operates (and is seen to operate) on pain and fear rather than on trust and respect, it ceases to be authority and becomes an attempt at coercion.” 2 An account of the “linguistic turn” may be found in Elizabeth A. Clark’s magisterial History Theory Text. 3 Najman, Seconding Sinai, 36. 4 See, for instance, Eva Mroczek’s chapter in this book, which engages and reads theology in a manner that bridges the divide between traditionally secular historians and those more attuned to constructive theological projects. 5 Chin, Epilogue: Reading Without Authority, 207. 6 In this sense, “authorship” is meant to be broadly conceived, denoting creation of a text or discourse. Thus, the term “text” employed here should be understood as a product of discourse, and not necessarily one that has found a written, material form. 7 Our thinking on the function of an author is indebted to Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 141–60. 8 For more see Larsen, Gospels Before the Book. 9 Hartley, The Go-Between, 1. 10 See Safrai, “Halakha,” 121–210. For an attempt to historicize law but nonetheless views it a corporate entity with its own exclusive internal logic, see Urbach, The Law. For a critique of this approach, see Schäfer, “Research into Rabbinic Literature: an Attempt to Define the Status Quaestionis,” 139–40. 11 This is especially the case in the United States, as made clear in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. 310 (2010).

14  A. J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney 12 In the sources considered here, the deity is often the ultimate source of authorization for law. For a recent exploration of the relationship of God, revelation and law in ancient Judaism, see Hayes, What Is Divine about Divine Law. 13 See most recently Wimpfheimer, Narrating the Law and Mokhtarian, Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings and Priests. 14 For some recent advances see especially Rosen-Zvi, The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual, and Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity. For gender and time-bound commandments see Alexander, Gender and Timebound Commandments in Judaism. 15 To wit, “This law was enacted to promote or undermine [insert person or social group’s] authority.” 16 See especially Jonathan A. Pomeranz’s chapter in this book, 123–36. 17 For a compelling revisionist historiography of rabbinic Judaism that pays attention to the location of evidence, see Schwartz, Imperialism. See especially his statement of method on pp. 2–3: “The realization that the evidence is socially specific leads to self-consciousness about the act of generalization. Thus, a positive statement in an ancient Jewish literary text cannot be taken without further argumentation as evidence for what “the Jews” thought or did. Rather, it is a nugget of ideology, telling us what some limited (perhaps more or less elite) group of Jews considered worth committing to writing at a specific time, which is in itself nothing to sneeze at. We may then ask, Did its authors have the means to impose their view on others? Are others likely to have agreed with them for other reasons? Thus, it may indeed correspond to what other classes of Jews, or Jews living at other times, thought or did, but this needs to be demonstrated.” 18 And have been codified in the modern era to form what might be considered a second canon. Anderson, “Canonizing the Apostolic Fathers in Modern Publication Practices.” 19 In this sense, the great textual discoveries of the mid-20th century bore out what Walter Bauer scandalously claimed in 1934. Bauer, Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum. On the marginal place of the rabbis, see Schwartz, Imperialism, 103–28. 20 Chin, “Rufinus of Aquileia and Alexandrian Afterlives: Translation as Origenism,” 617–47. 21 See Jacobs, “How Much of the Babylonian Talmud is Pseudepigraphic,” 46–59. It must be noted that false tannaitic statements captured scholarly attention before the rise and prominence of authority-centered discourse. How to explain these false statements, however, is often inflected by contemporary historiography. 22 For a position that treats named tradents with a high degree of skepticism, see Neusner, The Documentary Foundation of Rabbinic Culture, and Kraemer, “On the Reliability of Attributions in the Babylonian Talmud,” 175–90. For a more accepting position, see Elman, “How Should a Talmudic Intellectual History Be Written? A Response to David Kraemer’s ‘Responses,” 361–86. For a middle-ground approach, see Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud, 10–11. 23 On this, see both Hindy Najman’s chapter and C. M. Chin’s conclusion in this book. 24 Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels. 25 Layton The Gnostic Scriptures. 26 Initially suggested by Doresse, Les livres secrets des gnostiques d’Égypte, and restated by Robinson, “The Nag Hammadi Gospels and the Fourfold Gospel,” 71: “it is almost as if the Nag Hammadi Codices were prepared as a kind of countercanon, an alternative to the New Testament, or at least claiming equal status.” For analysis and critique of the counter-canon paradigm, see especially Lundhaug and Jenott, The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices, 80ff. 27 Lundhaug and Jenott, The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices. 28 Todd Berzon has argued as much in his recent treatment of the early heresiographers: “I am not arguing that the heresiologists, by demonstrating their detailed knowledge of and ability to refute the heretics, amassed for themselves some vague notion of

Authority in contemporary historiography  15 scholastic or ecclesiastical authority. Instead, I am claiming that the heresiologists’ stated understanding of the heretics cut in precisely the opposite direction. Heresiologies were not texts of control and totalization but catalogues marked by vulnerability, hazard, and fissure” Berzon, Classifying Christians, 10.

Bibliography Alexander, Elizabeth Shanks. Gender and Timebound Commandments in Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Anderson, Sonja. “Canonizing the Apostolic Fathers in Modern Publication Practices.” Paper presented in the Book History and Biblical Literatures section at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in San Antonio, TX, November, 2016. Bauer, Walter. Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum. Tübingen: Mohr, 1934. Berzon, Todd S. Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. 310 (2010). Chin, C. M. “Rufinus of Aquileia and Alexandrian Afterlives: Translation as Origenism.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 18(4) (2010): 617–47. Clark, Elizabeth A. History Theory Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Doresse, Jean. Les livres secrets des gnostiques d’Égypte. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1958. Elman, Yaakov. “How Should a Talmudic Intellectual History Be Written? A Response to David Kraemer’s ‘Responses.’ ” The Jewish Quarterly Review 89(3/4) (1999): 361–86. Fonrobert, Charlotte E. Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” In Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-­ Structuralist Criticism, edited by Josué V. Harari, 141–60. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. Hayes, Christine. What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Hartley, L.P. The Go-Between. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953. Jacobs, Louis. “How Much of the Babylonian Talmud is Pseudepigraphic?” Journal of Jewish Studies 28(1) (1977): 46–59. Kraemer, David. “On the Reliability of Attributions in the Babylonian Talmud.” Hebrew Union College Annual 60 (1989): 175–90. Larsen, Matthew D.C. Gospels Before the Book. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Layton, Bentley. The Gnostic Scriptures. London: SCM Press, 1987. Lincoln, Bruce. Authority: Construction and Corrosion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Lundhaug, Hugo and Lance Jenott. The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. Mokhtarian, Jason S. Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Najman, Hindy. Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Neusner, Jacob. The Documentary Foundation of Rabbinic Culture: Mopping Up after Debates with Gerald L. Bruns, S.J.D. Cohen, Arnold Maria Goldberg, Susan Handelman, Christine Hayes, James Kugel, Peter Schaefer, Eliezer Segal, E.P. Sanders, and Lawrence H. Schiffman. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995.

16  A. J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979. Robinson, James. “The Nag Hammadi Gospels and the Fourfold Gospel.” In The Earliest Gospels: The Origins and Transmission of the Earliest Christian Gospels – The Contribution of the Chester Beatty Gospel Codex P45, edited by Charles Horton, 69–87. London: Continuum/T&T Clark, 2004. Rosen-Zvi, Ishay. The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual: Temple, Gender and Midrash. Translated by Orr Scharf. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Rubenstein, Jeffrey L. The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Safrai, Shmuel. “Halakha.” In The Literature of the Sages: Part One, edited by Shmuel Safrai et al., 121–210. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1987. Schäfer, Peter. “Research into Rabbinic Literature: An Attempt to Define the Status Quaestionis.” Journal of Jewish Studies 37(2) (1986): 139–52. Schwartz, Seth. Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Urbach, Ephraim E. The Law: Its Origins and Developments. Givatayim: Yad LeTalmud, 1993. Wimpfheimer, Barry S. Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

2 Reading beyond authority Hindy Najman

This is a book which is dedicated to rethinking assumptions about authority, authorship, and textual fixity. For my own contribution, I was asked to reflect upon the ways in which my own thinking has moved “beyond authority” in describing historical instantiations of textual composition and transmission. I  want to first consider the impact of Seconding Sinai by rethinking some of the presuppositions underlying the theoretical framework for that book. Second, I want to reflect on some new directions around philology and reading practices in my later writing.1

The authority paradigm in Seconding Sinai In some of my earlier work, including Seconding Sinai and the essays in a collected volume, Past Renewals, my writing was deeply rooted in accounts of interpretive authority which were a product of critical engagement with biblical criticism and a commitment to understanding ancient Judaism as a continuation of that biblical tradition.2 But the nature and extent of such a continuation asked my readers to rethink the relationship between Judaism and Christianity at a time when the traditions themselves were considered by scholars to be intimately separate.3 The scholarly discourse has dramatically shifted, however, in recent decades; it has come to be understood that these traditions were and are intertwined and ­interlinked – the extant texts demonstrate ongoing creative and deep imagination of past texts in the present.4 Seconding Sinai thus acknowledged that the repetition and authorization of Sinaitic revelation continued to find expression in the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic traditions of Jewish and Christian communities, and well beyond in later rabbinic and Medieval traditions. In the planning and writing of Seconding Sinai, I became increasingly critical of a tradition of Protestant biblical theology that shaped the field of biblical studies and arguably the critical and scientific study of Rabbinics as well. Over the course of my graduate training, I became increasingly worried about the ways in which Judaism was said to have died to its own revelatory tradition and had been relegated to mere scribalism and to a kind of memory of the “spirit.” I began asking questions about how to make sense of the world of ancient Jewish writings and their role in the ongoing shaping and reception of the biblical texts.

18  Hindy Najman I found that it was wrong to assert that scribalism simply replaced prophecy. Instead, it seemed, writing and scribalism were themselves ongoing manifestations of a continued revelatory process. So when we speak of a Second Isaiah, or a Davidic Psalm, it became clear to me that these traditions were produced as continued expression of inspired scriptures.5 We could not insist on a canonical divide between biblical and non-biblical or between pseudepigraphical and genuine scriptural texts in antiquity. Those assumptions could only make sense in a much later environment. Thus, in the writings of Philo of Alexandria, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Dead Sea Scrolls (among many other texts and collections), the Hellenistic context itself came to play a very important role for me in understanding the growth and dynamic dimensions of the Jewish imagination in antiquity. These “non-canonical” texts need to be integrated, or rather re-integrated, in the world of ancient Judaism in order for us as historians to understand the development, imagination, and survival of what we came to call “ancient Jewish traditions.” By jettisoning much later canonical divides, I found that we could make sense of pseudepigraphical strategies of traditions that invoke the name of Moses, Isaiah, and Solomon. In short, Seconding Sinai sought to understand the variety of reading practices that were operative in ancient Jewish texts. When I began writing Seconding Sinai, I found myself tracing a variety of ways that authority was constructed by considering the authority-conferring strategies that underlay the texts on which I was working. Was it really the case that we were seeing early midrash or signs of the hermeneutical principles with which the rabbis wrote invoked in much earlier texts like the Damascus Document and Jubilees? Did we see early forms of the later commentary tradition in a text like Pesher Habakkuk? I wanted to emphasize the variety of ways that reading and re-authorization are operative within ancient Judaism. And, yet, there are profound ways in which continuity is at play. This was captured by the notion of “Mosaic Discourse,” which is a generic category constructed out of deuteronomic features that highlight the figure and the text of Moses, long after Moses. In the end, my hope was to raise questions about the authority of canon and the dynamic growth of tradition. I hoped to challenge the anachronistic and fundamentally uncomprehending assumptions with which contemporary historians approached this ancient material. The goal of the book was to redirect prior expectations and assumptions about canon and about the formation of religious community, thereby creating new paths for the organization and conceptualization of ancient Judaism and its textual productions. Thus, my general strategy was to historicize a term that had been used uncritically in philological circles: authorial ascription. Whereas past philologists understood authorial ascription as an indication of claims of historical authorship, I  argued that it actually signified the production of authority-bound discourse. Since then, I have broadened the scope of my research in order to historically locate and contextualize the historicist assumptions of philology in general, with the aim of enabling new ways of understanding ancient Judaism in its vitality. Here I want to say something about how my work has proceeded since Seconding

Reading beyond authority 19 Sinai, and about future projects that move, along with the other contributions to this book, beyond authority.

Philology beyond authority: the case of Homer While Foucault was to some extent the muse of Seconding Sinai, I subsequently came to see that Foucault’s insight into the historicization of authorship was anticipated by Friedrich Nietzsche – whom Foucault acknowledges as an influence – and who was trained and initially worked as a classical philologist. Although it explicitly deals with the significance of ground-breaking work on Homer by Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), Nietzsche’s inaugural lecture at the University of Basel has rich implications for the philology of ancient Jewish texts.6 This is not least because Wolf’s methodological model was the equally ground-breaking work of Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1753–1827), especially his Introduction to the Old Testament, published in 1780–93.7 Wolf employed the Alexandrian scholia, just as Eichhorn had used the Masoretic notes, in order to trace developments in ancient practices of reading and editing. Both scholars took such projects to be necessary prolegomena to the preparation of a critical edition of an ancient text. The topic of Nietzsche’s inaugural lecture was “the Homeric question.”8 This was understood – and is still understood – to consist of two related parts: 1) How are we to identify and reconstruct the original Homeric text? 2) How are we to identify and contextualize Homer himself, the original author?9 These were, of course, parallel to familiar questions about the Urtext of the Pentateuch, and the identity and context of the historical Moses. However, Nietzsche took a decisive step beyond both Eichhorn and Wolf by changing the question when he wrote: “Was the person created out of a concept, or the concept out of a person? This is the real ‘Homeric question,’ the central problem of personality.”10 For this radical move, Nietzsche was much derided at the time.11 Nietzsche argued that the concept of an authorial personality was the product of a long development, which involved specific social changes; the concept came into its familiar form only in late ancient Alexandria. Textual traditions are generated by living individuals and communities who continue to imagine and reimagine them. In order to best characterize the distinction between Wolf/Eichhorn and Nietzche, I want to distinguish between two sorts of approaches to textual unities. First, there is the approach taken by scholars who seek either the Urtext, or at least the archetype, underlying a given text; there are also those who seek the Urschrifsteller, the original author, or at least the original composer of a text in question. I have called this the retrospective approach, since its goal is to get back to the origin. Such scholars want to peel away the layers of copyists’ errors and editors’ emendations and redactions in order to expose the original textual unit or units, and to contextualize their original composers. Second, there is the approach taken by scholars who seek to trace the various stages and factors in the formation of textual units. I will call this the prospective approach, since its goal is to trace the developments that lead up to the textual

20  Hindy Najman unit in question. What scholars of the retrospective approach strive to strip away is precisely what scholars of the prospective approach seek to study.12 Eichhorn and Wolf both take a prospective approach in their work. But they do so only as a prolegomenon to the retrospective approach, which they still consider to be the ultimate objective of philology. In contrast, Nietzsche, in his inaugural lecture, argues for the intrinsic value of the prospective approach, which is, for him, no mere prolegomenon.13 He proceeds to suggest three stages in the development of both the Homeric collection and in the concept of the “Homeric personality.” What interests me here is not whether Nietzsche is correct. Of course Homer scholars, who tend to ignore Nietzsche in any event, still hotly contest this very question, in both its details and in its very aim. Rather what interests me is the sort of story that Nietzsche tells, the way that he links textual formation and the gradual emergence of the concept of the author. And ultimately the question of whether this sort of story can be told in biblical studies. Especially important here are the stages prior to the development of the concept of the author and the way his narrative suggests – not only the idea of a discourse tied to a founder – but also other models appropriate for a variety of ancient texts and corpora. The first stage in Nietzsche’s discussion is the latest, chronologically speaking: At this stage, the Alexandrian grammarians [e.g., Zenodotus of Ephesus in the third century bce and Aristarchus in the second] . . . conceived the Iliad and the Odyssey as the creations of one single Homer; they declared it to be psychologically possible for two such different works to have sprung from the brain of one genius . . . in contradiction to the Chorizontes [attributing the two works to different authors], who represented the extreme limit of the skepticism of a few detached individuals of antiquity rather than antiquity itself considered as a whole.14 Here, in the work of the Alexandrian grammarians, the textual unity of the Iliad and the Odyssey, taken as one collection, went together with the unity of the author’s personality: To explain the different general impression of the two books on the assumption that one poet composed them both, scholars sought assistance by referring to the seasons of the poet’s life, and compared the poet of the Odyssey to the setting sun.15 The text is configured – unified – through a concept of a figure’s individual personality.16 And this assumption of a unitary collection along with a unitary authorial personality had lasted until his own day. Nietzsche writes, [T]he personality of Homer is treated seriously; that a certain standard of inner harmony is everywhere presupposed in the manifestations of the personality; and that, with these two excellent auxiliary hypotheses, whatever is seen to be below this standard and opposed to this inner harmony is at once

Reading beyond authority 21 swept aside as un-Homeric. . . . Individuality is ever more strongly felt and accentuated; the psychological possibility of a single Homer is ever more forcibly demanded.17 Here we may speak, as I did in Seconding Sinai, of a discourse tied to a founder: stylistic harmony is linked to the harmony of a single personality. Thus, where stylistic harmony is lacking or incompletely achieved it must be explained in the same ways in which personal disharmony is explained. The unity of the Homeric discourse is inextricably linked to the idea of a Homeric personality, an idea that guided the scholiasts who played a crucial role in forming and refining a late ancient edition of Homer, a project of central importance for all textual developments up to modern times, an edition that may yet be reconstructable. Now, if we go back before the Alexandrian grammarians to Nietzche’s second stage, we simply do not find – or so Nietzsche argues – the same emphasis on Homeric personality. Instead, when we look back before the Alexandrian conquest to Aristotle and his predecessors in the fourth and fifth centuries bce, we find that: [T]he inability to create a personality is seen to increase; more and more poems are attributed to Homer; and every period lets us see its degree of criticism by how much and what it considers to be Homeric. In this backward examination, we instinctively feel that away beyond Herodotus [in the fifth century bce] there lies a period in which an immense flood of great epics has been identified with the name of Homer.18 At this stage, it would not be appropriate to speak of a discourse tied to a founder in the same ways as at the first stage. We neither have the same, fully-blown concept of a concrete personality. Nor do we find the associated demand to harmonize the various texts. Nevertheless, it would be appropriate to speak here of a tradition tied to a founder, where the founder is a figure with whom a disparate range of texts and characteristics are associated, and where the tradition accordingly lacks the unity found in what I have called a discourse. If we go further back, to a third stage, before the time of Pisistratus (an Athenian tyrant in the mid-sixth century BCE, who sometimes was said to be responsible for a “recension” of Homeric poems) then we find, according to Nietzsche, that at this earliest stage, “Homer” was a name attached not to a personality at all, but rather to a genre or to an epic tendency.19 Thus, before Pisistratus we see something related to, but different from a discourse tied to a founder. Perhaps it should be called a genre tied to a founder. Let us return to Nietzsche’s first stage, to when the ancient Alexandrian grammarians had assumed that there had been an actual poet called Homer, and that on the basis of his personality, a concept of the poet had been formed. This assumption was still dominant in Nietzsche’s own day. As in the case of the text, the philologist’s goal – attainable or not – was to strip away the representational layers until the original person, who existed at a particular time and in a particular place, was exposed.

22  Hindy Najman However, if we suspend the assumption that personality came first, and if we look at the textual evidence, then we find, according to Nietzsche, that prior to the Alexandrian grammarians there was very little conception of Homer’s personality, and that many texts were associated with his name. At the earliest discernible historical periodization it seems that all heroic epics were ascribed to Homer, and all didactic epics to Hesiod. So, Nietzsche suggests, what came first was not the personality, but rather the concept and, in particular, the concept of a certain genre. In the first place, the name of Homer stood not for a concrete person, but rather for the heroic epic. To ascribe a work to Homer in this early period was to say that it was an heroic rather than a didactic epic. Later, however, some of these texts were excluded, since they were not of the highest quality, and were thus imperfect instances of the genre. Only gradually, as some of the higher quality texts came to be read as a unit – and at least partially harmonized – did the name of Homer come to stand for an author who had, in representation, a distinct personality. This personality both reflected the unity of the texts in question and also served as an idea guiding further harmonization and, perhaps, further textual production. Ultimately, this gave rise to a text collection, and at some point to an ancient edition of this collection. Nietzsche concluded, We believe in a great poet as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey – but not that Homer was this poet. . . . And the wonderful genius to whom we owe the Iliad and the Odyssey belongs to this thankful posterity: he, too, sacrificed his name on the altar of the primeval father of the Homeric epic, Homeros.20 In other words, the great poet and wonderful genius deserving of study is not the actual, historical Homer, assuming that there was such a person. Even if we could find this original Homer, contextualizing him would shed little light on Homeric texts.21 Nietzsche did not last long in the academy. The reaction to his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was vicious. The seeds for this disaster may already be seen in some of the more provocative aspects of Nietzsche’s inaugural lecture.22 One unnecessarily provocative feature of Nietzsche’s argument is his statement that the prospective investigation of authorial formation responds to “the real ‘Homeric question.’ ”

Vitality of traditions beyond old and new philology In my view, both questions about textual formation and questions about stages of authorial formation are legitimate, and so are both retrospective and prospective approaches to these questions. My intention is not to repudiate the retrospective quest for Urtext and Urschriftsteller, or the quest for multiple versions of these. If we could find the original Homer and his compositions, this would be extremely interesting, even if it would shed little light on Homeric texts, most of whose formation is connected to a concept of the personality (i.e., the author) with hardly any connection to the historical figure. The same would be true if we could find

Reading beyond authority  23 the historical Moses, Jesus, Jeremiah, or the historical Ezra. Rather, my intention is to endorse the importance of the retrospective search for the original text and writer, while arguing at the same time for a prospective examination of the traditionary processes by which both textual units and concepts of personalities are produced, redacted, and revised. It is important to note that the approach that I am recommending moves beyond the distinction between what has come to be called “old philology” and “new philology.”23 If “old philology” – as pioneered by Eichhorn, Wolf, and others – seeks ideally to reconstruct the original text and/or author, and seeks as a second best option to trace the history of distortions that have produced multiplicity since the earliest known archetype, then “new philology” seeks to know and determine what can readily be understood: the physicality of the manuscript, the live hand or hands of the scribal community, the signs of correction, and the variations of form and object. The depth and richness of this engagement with the manuscript is surely productive and illuminating. However, the worry that has been raised by people such as Hans Gumbrecht or Christian Benne is the objectification of the text or textual tradition.24 While “old philology” seeks to freeze the text in a reconstructed or imagined past from which the author is summoned, “new philology” freezes the text in a single concrete moment, objectifying it in a particular manuscript. In In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, Bernard Cerquiglini tries to expose the limitations of both old and new philology.25 But the question on which I want to insist is: How can we understand and exhibit the source of the text’s dynamism, of its life over time? This is especially pressing in the case of texts that enjoy – at some point in time, within some community – scriptural authority. Let me quote from Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay on the task of the translator: The notion of the life and continuing life of works of art should be considered with completely unmetaphorical objectivity. Even in ages of the most prejudiced thinking it has been suspected that life must not be attributed to organic corporeality alone . . . it is only when life is attributed to everything that has a history, and not to that which is only a stage setting for history, that this concept comes into its own. For the range of the living must ultimately be delimited on the basis of history and not of nature.26 In general, works of art are what they are by virtue of the distinctive way in which they matter within human life. Consequently, they are reducible neither to natural objects nor to mere instruments. They have a life, a history, of their own – ­derivative from human life, to be sure, but nevertheless their own. Works of art have sometimes been said to constitute, in a secular age, a secular scripture. And we may accordingly transfer what Benjamin says to Scriptures – to texts that are what they are because of the ways they matter, and because of the authoritative roles they play, within a community’s religious life. Scriptures are reducible neither to natural objects nor to instruments. They have a life, and a history, of their own.

24  Hindy Najman It is to this idea of an autonomous life that Benjamin relates translation: Just as expressions of life are connected in the most intimate manner with the living being without having any significance for the latter, a translation proceeds from the original. Not indeed so much from its life as from its Überleben [its survival, i.e., its excess of life]. Nonetheless the translation is later than the original, and in the case of the most significant works, which never find their chosen translators in the era in which they are produced, indicates that they have reached the stage of their continuing life [Fortleben].27 In other words, some texts have an excess of vitality that expresses itself in the fact that they provide the basis for translations, for new texts in languages other than the original, texts that purport to “say the same” as the original text although they are self-evidently different.

The vitality of Scripture: reading with and beyond authority Again, I want to say the same about Scriptures: such texts have an excess of vitality that expresses itself in the fact that they provide the basis for new texts. For example, they give rise to emulations that purport to “say the same” as the original Scripture although they are self-evidently different. Thus, Jubilees and the Temple Scroll claim to “say the same” as various Pentateuchal texts. They speak in the voice of Moses, or in the voice of the angel dictating to Moses, or even in the voice of God. Far from contradicting the authoritative status of Scripture, texts such as Jubilees and the Temple Scroll, I contend, arise precisely from that authority. To acknowledge certain texts as scriptural is to recognize them as possessing an excess of vitality, more life than ordinary texts, and it is the nature of life to generate life, to sustain and reproduce itself. Insofar as Scripture is authoritative, it is also generative. The authority of Scripture should focus our gaze also on this excess of vitality, that which is generated by and beyond the authority of the text itself. That which is generated by a scriptural text or tradition may be regarded as a dynamic textual unity, and these unities come in many varieties. Three varieties were already mentioned earlier in connection with Nietzsche’s inaugural lecture: discourse tied to a founder, tradition tied to a founder, and genre.28 Only the first was discussed in Seconding Sinai. There are, of course, other examples of discourse to consider, and there is also much work to be done, not only on the other two sorts of unity, but also on others. In Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future, I focused on an example of another variety of textual unity, which I called a constellation.29 I drew the notion of a constellation from the work of Walter Benjamin and, more remotely, from that of Max Weber.30 Two points made this notion particularly suitable for my purposes. First, a constellation expresses an idea, not a concept, and hence, in particular, not the concept of genre. A concept is a universal instantiated by the particulars to which it applies by virtue of criteria that, once settled, could be put

Reading beyond authority  25 in the form of a definition. By contrast, an “idea” – as Benjamin uses the term – is the determining ground of particulars, but it does not apply in virtue of criteria on which there could ever be any settlement. The explanation of an idea consists not in a definition, but rather in the presentation of an exemplary particular. In the case of Losing the Temple the exemplar was 4 Ezra. It is not a set of criteria or generalizable features, but rather the particular elements of a constellation exhibited in the exemplary particular that enable one to employ the idea to illuminate other particulars.31 Thus, my goal was not to define the concept of a genre or class of possible texts, but rather to illuminate an array of actual texts by means of an idea expressed by a constellation, which is to be found in an exemplary particular.32 Second, the constellation-idea illuminates a peculiar temporal dimension that made it especially useful for the study of a work that responds, as 4 Ezra does, to a cultural devastation that freezes the flow of time. In Benjamin’s words: Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with ­tensions – there the dialectical image appears. It is the caesura in the movement of thought. Its position is naturally not an arbitrary one. It is to be found, in a word, where the tension between dialectical opposites is greatest. Hence, the object constructed in the materialist presentation of history is itself the dialectical image. The latter is identical with the historical object; it justifies its violent expulsion from the continuum of historical process.33 The historical process is continuous and forward moving. When, while exploring this history, our thought comes to a standstill because it has encountered, say, a constellation that interests it, this is because the constellation in question already represents a standstill in the historical progress, and this standstill is in some way especially pertinent to us. To understand how the constellation represents an historical standstill is to explain – or to take a significant step towards explaining – the standstill of our own thought. In the case with which I am concerned, the constellation represents the trauma of destruction and exile and the attempt to work through this trauma. Conversely, to see how the 4 Ezra constellation enables something to happen again is to allow our own thought to go on (until it is captivated by another object of interest). In the case of 4 Ezra, the constellation expresses the idea of revelation inflected by destruction. Of course, many other constellations deserve study, and there are surely other varieties of textual unity that stand in need of conceptualization. When I speak of textual unities, I do not want to be misunderstood. These unities are not totalities, because they are not complete. All we ever have left from past lives are, in a sense, fragments, even when we have complete manuscripts. “Old philology” seeks to reconstruct an abstract totality of which the remnant is a fragment, while “new philology” treats particular fragments as material totalities. In contrast, the philology that I envisage seeks instead to reimagine the past life that animated the texts in their dynamism, all the while acknowledging that our imagination can never revive the dead, and that our works must always remain fragmentary and untimely.

26  Hindy Najman As Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), one of the deepest thinkers about philology, wrote: “Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments from the moment of their emergence.”34 His point is that all works are fragmentary – whether ancient or modern, whether physically intact or not – since their meanings depend in part on what is supplied by the reader. Instead of stating his thesis, however, in a way that would seem to claim completeness, Schlegel ironically formulates an epigram that invites the reader to reflect and thereby to enact the fragmentariness of the work. The development of philology over the past two centuries has broadened and deepened our understanding of ancient Judaism tremendously. In order to build on this progress, we now have the exciting opportunity to learn, not only from the great practitioners of biblical and rabbinic philology, to whom we owe so much, but also from those who have practiced and theorized philology in other areas. The fragmentary remains of the past still exhibit their vitality by inviting our contributions. In my most recent work, I have come to focus on modes of reading practices as a way of understanding the growth of tradition which is forward moving. Instead of thinking in terms of authority and interpretation, I am thinking in terms of expansion and development of texts beyond the forms we recognize as scriptural or biblical. So for example 11Q5 (the so-called “Great Psalms Scroll”) column 22, “Apostrophe to Zion,” is not simply an intertextual interpretation of prior texts which now poses as a psalm. Rather, embedded in the Great Psalms Scroll is yet another psalm which transforms concepts of Zion, temple, redemptive prayer, and memory, and provides us with a snapshot in time of how people thought of hope, loss, recovery, and ongoing revelation and access to the divine. This is not merely attaching itself to older texts to appeal to authority as it turns some of the concepts from Isaiah and Psalms on their head. Instead it continues a tradition of writing in new, bold, and nuanced ways that commemorate and memorialize Zion. A second example is “4QInstruction” (Mussar laMevin), which engages in wisdom and legal traditions, but also creates a new vocabulary for thinking about perfection and imitation (imitatio Dei) through notions of paradigm (tavnit) as well as holiness (ruaḥ qedosha). This too is a text which needs to be located beyond authority and within time and history, as it refracts Hellenistic as well as late Second Temple discourses all the while appropriating and repurposing earlier biblical traditions. Both of these examples can help us understand how to move beyond authority and beyond looking backward in order to reconstruct texts, and instead to look forward and in ways that are essential to the dynamic and ever growing traditions and collections of authoritative literature. However, even that recognition needs to be complicated and problematized insofar as the texts themselves are fixed at any given time; they are not, but rather are ever growing through a variety of modes such as translational changes, expansion, refinement, but also through cantillation and reading traditions, as well as

Reading beyond authority 27 vocalization. There is much work that needs to be done now as we begin to integrate the findings and readings from the biblical traditions both from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Cairo Geniza. Instead of focusing on the biblical traditions as authoritative, I want to think together with the editors and contributors to this book of “beyond authority” or “after fixity” in a realm that is vital and dynamic: embracing oral, written, and ever transforming traditions of manuscripts, texts, and communal expectation and interpretation – scholarly and lay communities. This book now turns toward a new and forward moving dynamic that seeks to trace that very dynamism.

Notes 1 Najman, Seconding Sinai. 2 Najman, Past Renewals. 3 See my article on Philo of Alexandria where I claim his writings belong to a time when Judaism and Christianity can said to be “intimately separate.” Najman, “The Writings and Reception of Philo of Alexandria.” I am extending this point here in this essay well beyond Philo’s writings. I think that across the so-called “Second Temple Period” we can identify many texts that only retrospectively will be said to be Christian or Jewish, rabbinic or gnostic, or even Pauline. To be sure this is to engage in anachronism. But I want to suggest that there is something important during this period which precedes the “parting of the ways” which renders it integrated and not yet distinctive or separated into different religious traditions later to be knows as Judaism and Christianity. On the parting of the ways see Reed and Becker, The Ways That Never Parted. 4 This is of course true of the biblical texts themselves, but it is also true of the Masoretic text itself; see the recent work of Geoffrey Khan (British Association of Jewish Studies, July 2016 lecture). See also Reed and Becker, The Ways That Never Parted. 5 For further elaborations on this theme, see A. J. Berkovitz’s chapter in this book, as well as Mrozcek, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity. 6 Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer. See Rajak, “Jews and Greeks,” 535–58. See also Anthony Grafton’s argument that Wolf was a lot less “revolutionary” than credited, in Defenders of the Text, 214–43. 7 Eichhorn, Introduction to the Study of the Old Testament, 232. 8 The lecture was titled “Über die Persönlichkeit Homers,” later published as Friedrich Nietzsche, Homer und die klassische Philologie: ein Vortrag. 9 This combined quest for both original text (Urtext), and original writer (Urschriftsteller), is, of course, central to much of biblical studies as well. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer and Classical Philology,” 155. 11 See Willamowitz-Möllendorff, “Future Philology!,” 1–32. 12 See my most recent discussion of this in Najman, “Ethical Reading: Transformation of the Text and the Self,” 507–29. 13 See my discussion in Najman, “Configuring the Text in Biblical Studies,” 3–22. 14 Nietzsche, “Homer and Classical Philology,” 152–53. 15 Ibid., 153. 16 For analysis of this process at work for the gospels, see the chapter by Matthew Larsen in this book. 17 Nietzsche, “Homer and Classical Philology,” 154. 18 Ibid., 155. 19 “The only path which leads back beyond the time of Pisistratus and helps us to elucidate the meaning of the name Homer, takes its way on the one hand through the

28  Hindy Najman

20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33

reports which have reached us concerning Homer’s birthplace: from which we see that, although his name is always associated with heroic epic poems, he is on the other hand no more referred to as the composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey than as the author of the Thebais or any other cyclical epic. On the other hand, again, an old tradition tells of the contest between Homer and Hesiod, which proves that when these two names were mentioned people instinctively thought of two epic tendencies, the heroic and the didactic; and that the signification of the name “Homer” was included in the material category and not in the formal” Ibid., 155. Ibid., 156. For a somewhat similar view to that of Nietzsche, see Nagy, Homeric Questions, 110–11: “The comparative evidence of living oral epic traditions goes a long way to show that unity or integrity results from the dynamic interaction of composition, performance, and diffusion in the making of epic. Such evidence, added to the internal evidence of the Iliad and Odyssey as texts, points to an evolutionary process in the making of Homeric poetry. And yet, this envisioning of Homer in evolutionary terms may leave some of us with a sense of aching emptiness. It is as if we had suddenly lost a cherished author whom we could always admire for the ultimate achievement of the Iliad and the Odyssey. But surely what we have really admired all along is not the author, about whom we never did really know anything historically, but the Homeric poems themselves. To this extent, the evolutionary model may even become a source of consolation: we may have lost a historical author whom we never knew anyway, but we have recovered in the process a mythical author who is more than just an author: he is a cultural hero of Hellenism, a most cherished teacher of all Hellenes, who will come back to life with every new performance of his Iliad and Odyssey.” Nietzsche argued that philology included at least as much aesthetic subjectivity as objective science, and called for philology to become philosophy – none of which went over well with his colleagues. On the distinction, see Nichols, “Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” 1–10. Gumbrecht, Production of Presence. Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 70. (Translation is modified.) Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 71. (Translation is modified.) For reflections on the usefulness of the notion of genre for the study of ancient Judaism, see Najman, “The Idea of Biblical Genre,” 308–21. Najman, Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future. Weber, Ancient Judaism. See Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 34: “Phenomena are not incorporated in ideas. They are not contained in them. Ideas are, rather, their objective, virtual arrangement, their objective interpretation. . . . Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. This means, in the first place, that they are neither their concepts nor their laws.” Cf. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 38: “Conversely, the idea is the extreme example of a form or genre, and as such does not enter into the history of literature. Trauerspiel, as a concept, could, without the slightest problem, be added to the list of aesthetic classifications. But not as an idea, for it defines no class and does not contain that generality on which the respective conceptual levels in the system of classification depend: the average.” For a helpful discussion, comparing Benjamin’s constellation-ideas with the aesthetic ideas of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, see Rush, “Jena Romanticism and Benjamin’s Critical Epistemology,” 123–36. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 475. By this late point in his life, Benjamin rejects the earlier idea, found in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 34, that, “Ideas are timeless

Reading beyond authority 29 constellations.” Instead, he writes in Arcades, 463, “Resolute refusal of the concept of ‘timeless truth’ is in order.” 34 Schlegel, Atheneum, Fragment 24.

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, translated by Harry Zohn, edited by Hannah Arendt, 69–82. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. ———. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: NLB, 1977. ———. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Cerquiglini, Bernard. In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried. Introduction to the Study of the Old Testament. Translated by C. G. Reeve. London: Spottiswood, 1888. Grafton, Anthony. Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Mrozcek, Eva. The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Nagy, Gregory. Homeric Questions. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Najman, Hindy. “The Writings and Reception of Philo of Alexandria.” In Christianity in Jewish Terms. Edited by T. Frymer-Kensky, et al., 99–106. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. ———. Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism. Supplements to the Journal for the study of Judaism 77. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2003. ———. Past Renewals: Interpretative Authority, Renewed Revelation, and the Quest for Perfection in Jewish Antiquity. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 53. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010. ———. “The Idea of Biblical Genre.” In Prayer and Poetry in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature: Essays in Honor of Eileen Schuller on the Occasion of Her 65th Birthday, edited by Jeremy Penner, Ken M. Penner, and Cecilia Wassen, 308–321. Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 98. Leiden: Brill, 2011. ———. “Configuring the Text in Biblical Studies.” In A Teacher for All Generations: Essays in Honor of James C. VanderKam, vol. 1, edited by Eric F. Mason, Samuel I. Thomas, Alison Schofield, and Eugene Ulrich, 3–22. Leiden: Brill, 2012. ———. Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future: An Analysis of 4 Ezra. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ———. “Ethical Reading: The Transformation of the Text and the Self.” The Journal of Theological Studies 68 (2017): 507–29. Nichols, Stephen G. “Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture.” Speculum 65(1) (1990): 1–10. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Homer und die klassische Philologie: ein Vortrag. Basel, 1869. Rajak, Tessa. “Jews and Greeks: The Invention and Exploitation of Polarities in the Nineteenth Century.” In The Jewish Dialogue With Greece and Rome: Studies in Cultural and Social Interaction, 535–558. Leiden: Brill, 2002.

30  Hindy Najman Reed, Annette Yoshiko and Adam H. Becker. The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 95. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. Rush, Fred. “Jena Romanticism and Benjamin’s Critical Epistemology.” In Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, edited by Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin, 123–36. New York: Continuum, 2002. Schlegel, August Wilhelm von. “Fragment 24.” Athaneum (1798). Weber, Max. Ancient Judaism. Edited and Translated by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. New York: The Free Press, 1952. Willamowitz-Möllendorff, Ulrich von. “Future Philology!” Translated by Gertrude Postl, Babette Babich, and Holger Schmid. New Nietzsche Studies 4 (2000). Wolf, F.A. Prolegomena to Homer, 1795. Translated by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E. G. Zetzel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Part I

Authorship and authority

3 Authenticity and authority The case for dismantling a dubious correlation Mark Letteney

The notion that textual authority derives from the identity of the author is so commonplace that we have forgotten a time where any other paradigm reigned.1 A  text-critical understanding, or in the words of Hindy Najman, retrospective approach to authorizing forces has led historians to conclude that “had [person] known that [text] was a forgery, s/he would not have held the text to be authoritative.”2 That is, scholars tend to understand late ancient authors as the originator of a tradition, and in that position as originator, the possessor and dispenser of authority. The connection between authorship of a text and its source of authority appears natural. This understanding of the nexus of authorship and authority has merits both in its continuity with modern conceptions and in its apparent demonstration in discussions surrounding the formation of a New Testament canon in the second and third centuries. In these debates our modernist intuitions and prejudices find an unexpected mirror, and we are able to bridge the gap of nearly two millennia by seeing a bit of ourselves in the faces of our late ancient forbearers. It appears that we and they both understand that the dual binaries of authoritative/unauthoritative and authentic/inauthentic map on to one another with relative fidelity and predictability, and that ancient readers likewise understand that successful demonstration of inauthenticity corresponds to an automatic abrogation of a text’s authority. But seeing a mirror in the past should always cause discomfort on the part of the historian, and our data present good reason to mistrust this modernizing intuition. This chapter considers two divergent streams of tradition, both of which confound a simple correlation between textual authenticity and authority. First I explore acta (“proceedings”) from the Council of Chalcedon – a corpus of texts that attained the highest form of authority in the Theodosian Empire, but that were known by their transmitters and receivers alike to be forged. I then move on to consider briefly the Abgar tradition – a set of documents considered undoubtedly authentic by Eusebius, but that he did not consider to be authoritative in any way. Eusebius thought that the Abgar documents were authored by Jesus, but they did not thereby inherit his authority. These two traditions suggest a disconnect between the scholarly concepts of textual authenticity and authority in Late Antiquity, and demonstrate that neither one can be used as an explanatory device for the other; we cannot argue that

34  Mark Letteney conciliar acta continued to be transmitted throughout late antiquity because they were authentic – they were not, at least according to their Orthodox users. Nor can we explain the transmission of the Abgar tradition by tradents like Eusebius because he thought that the authorship of the text confirmed its authority – he did not. The successful demonstration of one criterion – authenticity or authority – cannot be assumed to imply the other. I argue that these examples are not aberrations, or the “exceptions that prove the rule,” but rather that they point to a misunderstanding by historians of Late Antiquity regarding the nature of both authorship and authority during the period. This chapter will reevaluate these concepts as evidenced in the visible, extant reading practices of late ancient interpreters. I hope that this study serves to denaturalize the concept of authorship, and spurs renewed investigation into the place of authorship and the formation of authoritative canons in the late ancient world.

“Acta conciliorum non leguntur.”3 Proceedings (acta) that survive from the so-called “ecumenical councils”4 of the fifth, and sixth centuries paint a colorful picture of late antique negotiation of authority, one wonderfully foreign to our own in which the nexus correlating the dual binaries of authoritative/unauthoritative and authentic/inauthentic are broken. In the case of the Council of Chalcedon, the collection’s layered structure presents us with a rare opportunity to watch the negotiation of textual authority first-hand, as the texts form a crucible in which historians may test assumptions about notions of both authenticity and authority. These documents’ peculiar structure allow scholars to look over the shoulders of bishops in the text as they interact with documents that are undoubtedly authoritative, but just as securely known to be doctored, edited, forged. I argue that conciliar acta demonstrate two competing modes of reading arising in the space between the expectations and the reality of documents with which the actors in the text interact. On the one hand, we are able to see in successive layers of the Proceedings of Chalcedon a form of resistive reading – an institutionalized mistrust in the integrity of physical documents and the invisible processes behind their production and authorization. On the other hand, we find an equally potent submission to authorized corpora as incontrovertible witnesses to truth. These two reading strategies find voice within the text of the acta of Chalcedon themselves, and form a discursive equilibrium that confounds models of Late Antique authority which rely on categories like forgery and editorial intervention. The acts of the council of Chalcedon were unmistakably authoritative, and unquestionably doctored. It is this seeming contradiction that I explore below.

Reading councils What the designation “labyrinthine” lacks in diplomacy it makes up for in aptitude when characterizing the structure of the Proceedings of Chalcedon. Within the account of the Council’s first session lies a cascade of clearly delineated textual

Authenticity and authority  35 layers in which acta from successively older councils are read out, recorded, and reacted to, all within the text itself. These are not user-friendly documents, and the account of Chalcedon’s first session is among the most abstruse. The acta of Chalcedon (451) begin with a pronouncement that acta from the first session of Ephesus II (449) be read before the assembly and entered into the conciliar record.5 This practice appears to have been relatively common in late antique episcopal councils; in the acta from the first session of Ephesus II (which are embedded in the first session of Chalcedon) we find a call to read the acts of the preceding synod: Constantinople (448).6 Likewise within the acts of the Synod of Constantinople (448) is a request to read a letter of Cyril embedded within the acts of a previous council, Ephesus I (431).7 At an assembly where each council reads out and copies down in their records the proceedings of the first session of the previous meeting, multiple, successive layers are embedded within a single document. We are left with what amounts to a textual nesting doll. It is for this reason that the acts of Chalcedon contain copious information about the proceedings of previous councils and, more important for my purpose, information about the way that these documents were read and interpreted in antiquity.8

Reading acta The Council of Chalcedon was convened chiefly to deal with the strife caused by the Second Council of Ephesus (449) and to censure Dioscorus for his part leading it. The first pronouncement at Chalcedon was a call to reading. It is intriguing that Eusebius and Dioscorus, arbitrating opposing sides of a dispute, both look to the same corpus and the same documents for justification. They call for the reading of conciliar acta because they think that in them they will find the truth. The truth, it turns out, is more slippery than either Eusebius or Dioscorus expect. [DIOSCORUS]: “Regarding

the proceedings relating to Flavian, then bishop of the holy church of Constantinople, minutes were taken at the holy council (hupomnēmata eisi pepragmena en tēi agiai sunodō), and I ask that they be read.” EUSEBIUS THE MOST DEVOUT BISHOP OF DORYLAEUM SAID: “We too make the same request.” THE MOST GLORIOUS OFFICIALS AND THE EXTRAORDINARY ASSEMBLY SAID: “Let everything relating to this affair be read in proper order. . . .” CONSTANTINE, ACTING AS SECRETARY, OFFERED IN RESPONSE:  “I have at hand the various divine letters (ta theia grammata) concerning the recent council, and I shall read them.” (ACO 2.1.1.18–23 [p.67]) The near-constant attendance to documents from previous councils indicates something about what the acta, these so-called “divine letters,” are thought to be, and how the editor of the proceedings of Chalcedon understands the authority of the documents in his traditional past.9 This opening scene in the conciliar proceedings evokes as strongly as any the extent to which doctrinal disputes had

36  Mark Letteney undergone a “revolution . . . [that] heralded a new order of books” in the Theodosian age, and it suggests the presence of another step in the process, whereby conciliar acta themselves received a patina of patristic authority in the same way that Athanasius’s writings became theologically dispositive in the late fourth century.10 From the standpoint of characters narrated within the proceedings of Chalcedon, acta from previous councils are assumed to be verbatim transcripts of the council from which they stem. This attitude is not evidenced in the acta from Chalcedon only, but also in the proceedings from Ephesus II, where Quintillius of Heraclea requests that the acta of the preceding meeting (the Synod of Constantinople) be read, claiming that “it is fitting that the proceedings in renowned Constantinople be read to the holy council to give fuller information about the hearing.”11 Another bishop declares “the reading of the proceedings at Constantinople about this case is necessary, for this will give accurate knowledge of the matters raised there.”12 Contemporary scholars approaching the proceedings of Chalcedon almost unanimously mirror the expectation of these bishops, expecting that the acta comprise something akin to verbatim transcripts of the proceedings. Conciliar acta hold pride of place by positivist historians, being possibly as close as a source can come to relating “history as it was.”13 Should the aforementioned suggestions by bishops within the text to remain uncomplicated by further revelations, the suggestion that conciliar proceedings comprise “verbatim transcripts” might be defensible. But the situation is quite a bit more intriguing than what even a reading with the grain will allow. While bishops within the text of the acts of Chalcedon are seen reading previous acta and expecting to receive an unimpeachable window into the events of the past, Chalcedon’s acta themselves confound this expectation.

The unreliability of proceedings The first crack in the unimpeachable authenticity of acta comes from the mouth of Dioscorus, who responds to the reading of documents from the Second Council of Ephesus that he has been unfairly charged. [DIOSCORUS]:  “Your

clemency has heard that our divine emperor did not entrust judgment to me alone, but also gave responsibility for the council to the most god fearing Bishop Juvenal and the most sacred Bishop Thalassius. Therefore, we pronounced judgment accordingly. The whole council gave its assent. (Hēmeis toinun ekrinamen ta kekrimena. Sunēinesen hemin pasa hē sunodos.)” (ACO 2.1.1.53 [p. 75])

In this case, Dioscorus has appropriated the authority of the acts in attempting to constrain the extent of his personal responsibility. The next crack in the integrity of the acts comes with the choral response in which the “most devout Eastern bishops” (part of the party opposing Dioscorus) proclaim in unison that, while the acts from Ephesus II do contain an accurate account of the events of 449, they nevertheless should not be considered binding. The documents, they claim, were

Authenticity and authority  37 signed under duress, and thus the account bears the authoritative weight of tradition in a technical sense, but cannot be considered binding on the basis of external, extenuating circumstances.14 “God is witness,” offers Stephen of Ephesus in support of the Eastern bishops, “it all took place by force and constraint. God is witness, we signed the condemnation of the blessed Flavian unwillingly.”15 This passage illustrates a situation in which acta are found to hold a negotiated authority that can be countermanded based on particular mitigating circumstances, and which confounds the expectation of bishops within the text (and readers without) that the acts provide an “accurate account.” Readers learn that the account is “accurate,” but it does not comprise sufficient information upon which to base a claim of culpability. No single pronouncement from the Council of Chalcedon may be more illustrative of the authority afforded to the proceedings of previous councils than the interjection of Aëtius, Archbishop of Constantinople, and his cohort of bishops during the reading of documents from Ephesus II. Here, the acta report that a letter from Archbishop Leo (the so-called “Tome of Leo”) had been received and read out before the assembly and that the document had been entered into the acta on the request of Juvenal of Jerusalem. During the reading of this section of the acta, Aëtius yells out:

“The letter of the most sacred Archbishop Leo was neither received nor read!” THE MOST DEVOUT EASTERN BISHOPS AND THOSE WITH THEM EXCLAIMED:  “The letter was not read to us. If it had been read, all would have been included [in the minutes] (Ouk anegnōsthē hemin hē epistolē. Ei anegnōsthē, pantōs kai empheretai).” (ACO 2.1.1.87–88 [p. 83])

We see here that even after the authenticity of the document before them has been repeatedly questioned, Aëtius of Constantinople and his partisans nevertheless expect that if an event occurred, it will necessarily be included in the account of the proceedings. Their conviction in this regard appears impervious to the scourge of evidence to the contrary. Later in the first session, these initial cracks in authority of previous acta widen, and the place of the documents which came down through tradition as unimpeachable arbiters of truth falls apart in spectacular fashion in the presence of accusations about scribal and editorial malfeasance. Before this investigation, however, it will prove useful to take a closer look at one particularly salient literary device used by the editors of the proceedings of Chalcedon while producing the document passed down through tradition – the fabrication of a chorus.

The chorus at Chalcedon Surprisingly little work has been carried out on the presence of a chorus within the proceedings of the Council of Chalcedon, let alone on the narrative and political utility of this ever-present group. It is often assumed in scholarship on the

38  Mark Letteney proceedings from Chalcedon that the group of “Eastern bishops” likely reflects a group of less well-known clergy who concurred at the council and were added into the proceedings speaking with one voice, and this suggestion does have its merits. I am interested, however, in the way that the chorus of Eastern bishops complicates the demonstrable readerly expectation, on the part of the bishops in the text, that proceedings constitute something like a verbatim transcript of the council. Consider the text in note 14, for example, where the “most devout Eastern bishops” shout in unison a relatively lengthy pronouncement concerning duress at Ephesus II. Is the reader to expect that some nondescript group actually said what they are cited for in the proceedings? Or is something more complicated happening in this text – some sort of literary fashioning? Is it possible that the editor of the document shows his or her hand in the invocation of a chorus? The chorus of “the most devout Eastern bishops,” a group never explicitly identified otherwise, functions at Chalcedon to do the work of justification. The voice of the masses is added to that of individual, named bishops in support or in defiance of the statements of others. The chorus is shown resisting the authority of the acts of Ephesus II (ACO 2.1.1.53–59 [p. 75]), representing the undifferentiated Orthodox masses in counterbalance with a hoard of “heretics” (62–63 [p. 76]),16 interjecting during the reading of acta to clarify events (69 [p. 77]), interjecting during the reading of acta to complain about seating arrangements (71 [p. 77]), insisting on the verbatim authority of acta (1.88 [p. 83]), charging that the acta contain forgery (121 [p. 87], 496 [p. 140], 530 [p. 143]), enforcing Nicaean standards of Orthodoxy against heretics (161 [p. 91], 162 [p. 91], 250 [p. 111], 252 [p. 111], 254 [p. 111], 262 [p. 112]), and adding their voice to the weight of anathema (171 [p. 93], 257 [p. 111], 530 [p. 143], 965 [p.191–2]). Often the chorus is invoked many times in quick succession, proclaiming the will of the undifferentiated Orthodox and adding to dramatic tension within the narrative, as in 1.32 (p.88) “Drive out the murderers!,” followed by a pronouncement in 1.36 (p. 88) concerning Theodoret, “He is worthy! He is worthy!,” followed by “Admit the orthodox one to the council! Drive out the troublemakers! Drive out the murderers!” in 1.38, and shortly after, “Drive out Dioscorus the murderer!” in 1.40 (p. 88). The presence of a chorus of “most devout Eastern bishops” necessarily complicates any reading of the proceedings of Chalcedon, and offers insight into the hand of the editor of this collection of documents, an editor who found the use of this literary trope – whether reflective of events at the council or pure literary fiction – in authorizing the pronouncements of the council in the eyes of the clerical “masses.” It is unfortunate that any significant information is lacking regarding the editorial process by which hupomnēmata/monumenta (“notes/minutes,” “records”) became acta (“proceedings”) in a formal sense. Evidence for this process must be sought in the gaps, including in that space opened by the presence of such a transparently literary device as the chorus. For instance, it is only in passing, during an accusation of violence, that we learn that at least some notaries took down minutes on wax tablets that were prone to erasure.17 It is further only due to conflict that Dioscorus admits that another bishop asked his notary to alter the bishop’s own statement before the notes were dispatched to be collated into official record. (ACO 2.1.1.854 [p. 179–80])

Authenticity and authority  39 There is one scene, however, from the first session of Constantinople (449), in which the process by which notes are edited into acta is discussed. The acta from this session are replete with scenes of contention, as one side or another disputes the validity of the documents before the assembly. The session in question sees a group of bishops claiming that an anathematization recorded as having come from the entirety of the assembly did not happen in any wise – at least the complainants had not added their voice to a condemnation that was recorded in the acta as having been made unanimously. Aëtius, a deacon at Constantinople and the official notarius of the meeting in 449, responds with a revelation: It often happens at these most holy gatherings that one of the most Godbeloved bishops present says something, and what one man says is recorded and counted as if everyone had pronounced it together (to para tou henos legomenon hōs para pantōn homou ekphōnoumenon). . . . So if it now turns out that one or two spoke, as the most God-beloved bishops have testified and expressed agreement, and the most holy clergy then added their acclamations, we ask that this statement not be erased or deleted from the proceedings, since all the most holy bishops manifestly signed it. (ACO 2.1.1.767 [p. 170–1], emphasis mine) It is due to the contentious nature of these meetings that we have access to such an admission by the editor (in this case Aëtius, the functionary tasked with oversight of the documentary process) that statements have indeed been altered to reflect the feel of the meeting and not its verbatim procedure. We know that the chorus is a literary invention in part because, at least here, the document itself admits it.18

The hand of the editor Thomas Graumann’s “ ‘Reading’ the First Council of Ephesus (431)” is to be commended for taking note of editorial incursions into the text of the acts of Ephesus I and their attendant political motivations, suggesting that the acta as such “were deftly used to construct a case.”19 Graumann takes cues from the structure of the acta to suggest that the proceedings themselves are productive of a particular political reality. But the content of Chalcedon’s acta as well offer readers a glimpse of the editorial process by which notes were transformed into authoritative documents. The narration of the editorial process within the proceedings themselves complicates the authority of the text-as-transcript, and serves to authorize resistive readings of, and within, the acta. During the reading of documents from Ephesus II, the Eastern bishops at Chalcedon interject with a startling charge of editorial forgery, (“We didn’t say this. Who said this?”) prompting an investigation into the creation of the documents at hand.20 This crucial moment occurs on the heels of the choral objection concerning the text of the proceedings, at a point where the acta’s editor shows his or her hand and gives the reader a front row view into the material production of the document. In addition to offering a fortuitous window on the production of acta,

40  Mark Letteney the choral objection vividly illustrates the tension between readerly expectation and reality regarding conciliar acta. THEODORE THE MOST DEVOUT BISHOP OF CLAUDIOPOLIS SAID:  “Let

him bring in his notaries, for he expelled everyone else’s notaries and got his own to do the writing. Let the notaries come and say if this was written or read in our presence, and if anyone acknowledged and signed it.” THE MOST GLORIOUS OFFICIALS AND THE EXTRAORDINARY ASSEMBLY SAID: “In whose hand are the minutes written? (ta hupomnēmata tinos cheiri gegraptai;)” DIOSCORUS THE MOST DEVOUT BISHOP OF ALEXANDRIA SAID: “Each one wrote through his own notaries. Mine recorded my [statements], those of the most reverent Bishop Juvenal recorded his, those of the most reverent Bishop Thalassius recorded his, while the other most devout bishops had many notaries keeping record. Thus, the text is not the work of my notaries; each has his own (houtos ouk estin tōn emōn notariōn to gramma. hekastos echei ton idion.).” (ACO 2.1.1.122–124 [p. 87]) To a modern reader, this admission of the particularities of the production of acta is jarring, to say the least.21 The acta record discussion surrounding the notes (ta hupomnēmata) which serve as basis for the document, along with a correlating discussion of the final product: the documents brought before the council, likely provided by the imperial legate. But the work of the editor, standing between the notes that left the previous meeting and the acta which arrived at the next, is to be understood.22 There is a disconnect between the notes of each bishop, who had only their own statements taken down, and the final, imperially authorized document whose authority is here under attack.23 Correspondence attendant to the council of Ephesus II reveals that the acta were dispatched to the emperor approximately ten days after the council ended, leaving time for the editor and his team to compile the official dossier – including the compilation of minutes from each bishop or group’s notary, insertion of full length documents of which only parts were read, the manufacture of a consistent choral voice from the interjections of various groups, and the condensation of more theologically fraught sessions into rather more univocal pronouncements of Orthodox belief.24 The hand of the editor is visible in the blank space between the notes that each bishop had taken of their own statements alone, and the final, authorized product recognized by the imperial administration and read at the opening session of Chalcedon.25 The hand of the editor is accused here of being careless at best, and at worst, malicious.

The unreliability of proceedings If the bloom were not yet off the rose for bishops (and scholars) wanting to view the acta of previous councils as verbatim transcriptions of past events, the Bishop Basil’s accusation of forgery within the proceedings themselves appears to pull the last petal.

Authenticity and authority  41 DIOSCORUS THE MOST DEVOUT BISHOP OF ALEXANDRIA SAID:  “The

most reverent Bishop Basil attacked his own statement in the minutes when he said, ‘I didn’t say that; it is counterfeited (houtōs ouk eipon, alla eplastographēthē).’ ” (ACO 2.1.1.168 [p. 92])

Similarly during the council of Ephesus II, Basil of Seleucia rose to declare forgery in the proceedings which made him appear to be a heretic. [BASIL]: 

“This statement that they say I made I did not make in these words. I am not aware of having said this; . . . JUVENAL BISHOP OF JERUSALEM SAID:  “Then was your statement forged?” (hautē oun ē phōnē parapepoiētai;) BASIL BISHOP OF SELEUCIA SAID:  “I have neither memory nor knowledge of having made it.” (ou memnēmai oude oida eirēkōs.) (ACO 2.1.1.546–548 [p. 144–5]) Apparent in every concatenated layer of the acts issued from the Council of Chalcedon is a confusion on the part of bishops between what acta are expected to be – verbatim transcripts – and the reality of the documents before them. Particularly interesting about these passages is that forgery and editorial malfeasance is admitted to have been an issue as far back as acta survive, and yet, paradoxically, the authority of these documents remained intact. Acts were still relied upon within the tension of their own faulty transmission history. This aspect alone suggests that modern conceptions of authority and authenticity can do no justice to the late ancient discourse engaged here. As has been demonstrated, characters narrated within the acts who initially hold the text in high regard are more than willing to resist readings of the text which they find to be erroneous – sometimes the only error being that the reading suggests heresy, postpositively defined.26 The text itself confounded readerly expectations, and yet the text remained as an authority and as a primary site of contestation.27

Resistive readings and an institutionalized suspicion of documents Two forms of the negotiation of documentary authority are visible in the proceedings from the Council of Chalcedon, fortuitously displayed in detailed relief on account of the multiple levels of reading and the layering of documents. One form demands assent to the text handed down by tradition as the authorized source of truth. The other privileges readings that challenge the text of authorized documents while submitting to the authority that they convey. Both of these reading strategies engage a set of documents in a manner that requires readers methodologically to decouple the concept authority from both authorship and authenticity. Many actors in these texts offer what I have called resistive readings: bishops within the text interact with a set of documents that they accept as the authorized arbiter of truth regarding the proceedings of previous councils, but these characters nevertheless dispute details of the account through charges of editorial

42  Mark Letteney malfeasance and forgery. This mode of interaction in particular points to an institutionalized suspicion of the integrity of conciliar documents in the Theodosian age, and mirrors a contemporaneous institutionalized suspicion of legal documents from the same time-period evidenced in the Theodosian Code. Consider, for instance the Law of Citations (CTh 1.4.3), part of an oratio of Valentinian III and Theodosius II confirming the writings of Papinian, Paulus, Gaius, Ulpian, and Modestinus as of equal stature with each other and with a selection of previous jurists (Sabinus, Marcellus, etc.). Before receiving official legal sanction, however, the law requires that each author’s text be confirmed by way of a new collation of manuscripts, “on account of the uncertainty of antiquity (propter antiquitatis incertum).”28 The Theodosian Code, promulgated first in the East and then in the West in 438, here demonstrates a concern for transmission of the texts of previous jurists in a manner strikingly reminiscent of the concerns evidenced in acta of Chalcedon, a text which comprises documents from the period 431 to 451, and arises, as well, out of the court of Theodosius II. It is precisely the Theodosian age that witnesses both the institutionalization of a new order of books – that of legally and theologically binding compilations – and to a concomitant institutionalization of suspicion of documents. In other words, Mark Vessey’s seminal insight regarding Theodosian-era theological books extends to the acta of contemporaneous councils and the collation of contemporaneous law codes as well: The moral is easily drawn. In the unwritten handbook of Theodosian patristic retractation, the part dealing with the writer’s duty of discovery should have contained a section devoted to archival security, beginning with an instruction never to lend theological books.29 Resistive readings manifested in the acta, however, are carried out in a way which does not constitute a degradation of the authority of the document in question. The resistive readings offered by bishops within the acta demonstrate a nuanced manner of interacting with text under the guise of traditional authority that must force the scholarly discussion of forgery beyond ethically loaded binaries which equate charges of pseudepigraphy and textual corruption with an immediate abrogation of authority. Texts like the proceedings of councils could contain forgery and corruption and still carry the weight of traditional authority, at least within the elite Orthodox community responsible for the documents. The effect of episcopal disputes over reading at councils may, in fact, bolster the authority of tradition, because the authority of particular texts is affirmed only in the context of authorized readings that are carried out under the guise of tradition. For these late ancient bishops, texts are authoritative because tradition deems them so, not because of the purity of their transmission or the unimpeachability of their content. I find a correlating attitude in the text of Eusebius, below, who also considers authenticity to be an insufficient criterion to impart authority to a text. Thus, acta must not be understood either as verbatim transcriptions of the councils themselves or as self-effacing to an extent that those within the tradition would disavow their authority. The proceedings of Chalcedon, and those which

Authenticity and authority  43 came before, negotiate a disconnect between the authority of documents and the authority of tradition. The acta explore a complex relationship between actor and document which rejects the very words of the document while assenting to its authority, an authority displayed both in the reception history of the various collections of acta, and in the reception of previous conciliar documents within the acta of Chalcedon themselves. These two competing but complementary reading strategies, whereby the authority of a collection as it stands is asserted in the face of resistive readings of the collection, have a rich afterlife in the wake of the Council of Chalcedon. They are most visible in the reception of the acta of Chalcedon before the Council of Constantinople, held in 553 and discussed briefly as follows. These two strategies together (resistive readings and traditional assent) formed a politically expedient discursive equilibrium among Orthodox power brokers of the Theodosian age, one plastic enough to fit any mold necessitated by political or theological exigencies of the day. It is to this phenomenon that I now turn.

Another layer of reading: Chalcedon at Constantinople Nearly a century after the close of proceedings at Chalcedon, just across the Bosphorus in Constantinople, a reading of Chalcedon’s acta incited an impassioned debate. The two sides of this debate demonstrate the continuity of opposing reading strategies discussed previously. Justinian I’s first edict “against the Three Chapters,” published in 544 or 545, raised the ire of the deacon Ferrandus of Carthage, a well-respected theological mind of his day. The deacon was concerned that Justinian discounted some documents included in the dossier of material stemming from the Council of Chalcedon. Ferrandus complains, “If there is disapproval of any part of the Council of Chalcedon, the approval of the whole is in danger of becoming disapproval.”30 And further But the whole Council of Chalcedon, since the whole of it is the Council of Chalcedon, is true; no part of it is open to criticism. Whatever we know to have been uttered, transacted, decreed and confirmed there was worked by the ineffable and secret power of the Holy Spirit.31 His case against the edict of the emperor hinges on a statement of authority to which even Justinian must accede: I have to say: if the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon are to be revised, let us take thought for the Synod of Nicaea, lest it incur the same danger. General councils, particularly those that have gained the assent of the Roman church, hold a place of authority second only to the canonical books. (Universalia concilia, praecipue illa quibus Ecclesiae Romanae consensus accessit, secundae auctoritatis locum post canonicos libros tenent.) Readers of the divinely inspired scripture are not permitted to criticize anything, however much they misunderstand the sublimity of the heavenly oracle, but the

44  Mark Letteney pious reader believes even what he does not understand, in order that he may deserve to understand what he believes: likewise, in entirely the same way and not otherwise, the councils that antiquity confirmed and devout posterity has preserved demand obedience from us and leave no need for doubt.32 Ferrandus commends a blind reading of the acta “with the grain” as the only Orthodox mode of interacting with these fraught materials. By way of response, the emperor Justinian insists that such a position is not just problematic, he claims that it is utter nonsense. For they claim that the impious letter [the “Three Chapters”] ought not to be subjected to criticism because it is included in some documents. But if one were to accept this according to their folly, it would be necessary to accept Nestorius and Eutyches, since much about them as well is included in conciliar proceedings. But no one in their right mind will attend to these claims of theirs! For information about heretics that is cited at councils and becomes part of the minutes (meros tōn hupomnēmatōn ginomena) is accepted not to absolve them but to convict them, and for the stronger condemnation of both of them and of those who hold the same tenets as they do.33 What we see in the literary sparring of opposing readers of the proceedings of Chalcedon is the afterlife of the two reading strategies encountered within the acts of Chalcedon themselves. Ferrandus’s insistence on the verbatim authority of the documents passed down by tradition being second only to that of scripture reflects the insistence of bishops within the acta that the proceedings from previous councils bear the weight of traditional authority, while Justinian’s defense reflects the readers within the very same text which resist blanket assent to the documents passed down. This tension, between assent and dissent, forms the backbone of both the acta of Chalcedon as well as the acta of Constantinople (553): a council which took place nearly 100 years later and was concerned chiefly with reading the proceedings of Chalcedon. The durability of this debate demonstrates that we cannot so easily suggest that pseudepigraphy, or the uncovering of pseudepigraphy within late antique traditions, deemed their authority lost. I turn now briefly to a popular fourth and fifth century tradition with nearly opposite credentials: a letter from Jesus to King Abgar V of Edessa. Eusebius and others claim that this letter is undoubtedly authentic, but that it nevertheless is not authoritative in any meaningful sense. Christos epistolographos Eusebius of Caesarea closes out the first book of his Ecclesiastical History with a set of curious documents that he claims to have received from the state archive in Edessa, a guarantor of its authenticity.34 The text, for which he offers a “not invaluable, word-for-word translation from the Syriac” original, contains first a letter from King Abgar V to Jesus of Nazareth requesting that he come to Edessa and

Authenticity and authority  45 attend to the ailing king.35 The second document is a letter of reply written by Jesus to Abgar, commending the king for his faith and promising to send an apostle to Edessa as a reward. This fourth century attestation is the first extant for the Abgar tradition, and in Eusebius’s History it receives little by way of comment. But the brief discussion Eusebius does offer have two clear implications. First, Eusebius goes out of his way to assure his reader that the letters he has presented are authentic Jesus material in the utmost sense – they had come from the state archive in Edessa, and received a translation into Greek of the highest quality.36 The second clear effect of Eusebius’s presentation of the Abgar tradition is that while he considers the text to be authentic Jesus material, it is decidedly not Scripture.37 The beginning of Eusebius’s second book of the History returns to Jesus’s letter to Abgar, and the promised sending of an apostle to Edessa. The discussion is brief, and at the end Eusebius pivots quickly away, writing “So much for the history of the ancients [the Abgar tradition]. Let us return again to the divine Scripture,” moving his discussion to the sending of apostles throughout Judaea and Samaria in Acts chapter 8.38 It is striking that Eusebius invokes a rare phrase of strong disjunction (metiōmen de) to pivot from the story of Abgar and the sending of an apostle to Edessa, to the story of Stephen and the sending of apostles throughout Judaea and Samaria. While the stories that Eusebius relates on either side of this disjuncture are similar in form and content, they nevertheless each arise from corpora of a different sort, with different claims to authority.39 Most intriguing here is that Eusebius explicitly contrasts Jesus’s letter, which he has stressed is genuine material with official provenance, with another corpus of material, “the divine Scripture (tēn theian graphēn).” This is not the only place in the Ecclesiastical History where Eusebius invokes different reading strategies and expectations for different corpora. He famously defined the categories of analysis he uses to describe authoritative texts in book three. Here he relegates many, though not all works known to him into four distinct categories: the homologoumena (“agreed upon”), the antilegomena (“disputed”), the nothoi (“bastards”), and the “not even nothoi” – those books not even to be reckoned among the spurious.40 Notice that Eusebius’s description of various categories of traditional text does not invoke either the term or the concept of “canon.” Rather, Eusebius is engaged in defining a textual typology, each category of which invokes a different set of expectations, but none of which are coterminous with “canon.” Within his discussion of the criteria for inclusion in the homologoumena we see a concern not only for authentically “apostolic” language (Eusebius does not argue for apostolicity, but rather for apostolic style), but also for a chain of attestation among “the ecclesial succession” (tas diadochas ekklēsiastikōn) and content in keeping with “true orthodoxy” (tēs alēthous orthodoxias).41 Nowhere in this oft-commented upon discussion does Eusebius invoke authenticity as an ultimate harbinger of authority. If this were the case, we could reasonably expect that the Abgar material, which Eusebius thinks undoubtedly authentic, would appear among the homologoumena. But it does not, because the homologoumena are not defined as those texts which are authentically derived from authoritative sources.

46  Mark Letteney For instance, it is clear from Eusebius’s discussion that Paul’s letters are unquestionably authoritative – they belong to the homologoumena, along with a handful of other traditions. But it is not the case that the letter collection’s authority relies on their authenticity (that they come from the “hand” of Paul, as it were).42 At least it is not their authenticity alone that bestows authority on Paul’s letters – authenticity is but one factor that is considered in the negotiation of a text’s authority, and for Eusebius it does not even appear to be the most important consideration.43 The reverse, it might be added, is also true: in and of itself, the authority of a tradition does not constitute a compelling rationale for its circulation – either in the argument of Eusebius, or in that of a modern scholar. Scholars who understand homologoumena as shorthand for “authentic” bias the data in favor of a strong, predictive connection between the authenticity of a text and its authority, because in Eusebius’s view things that are homologoumena are those that are most clearly authoritative. But homologoumena does not mean or imply authenticity – it means something akin to “agreed upon,” and Eusebius’s preceding discussion of the Abgar tradition demonstrates conclusively that authenticity alone is not enough to confer authority. Nor does antilegomena mean “disputed,” if the “dispute” is supposed to be concerning the authorship of the text in question. By reading these two sections of Eusebius’s work together, we see that he thinks neither the Abgar tradition, nor Paul’s letters, were transmitted merely because they were authentic, nor because they were authoritative. Under this rubric, one should not be surprised that his discussion of text and canon includes no mention of the Abgar tradition – “agreed upon,” “disputed,” “bastard,” or otherwise. If homologoumena enjoys no necessary, predictive connection with discourses of authenticity, then there is no reasonable expectation that it should be considered in the category’s discussion. That is to say – we should not be surprised that there is no discussion here of Jesus’s letters with King Abgar because authenticity is not at issue – authority is. There has been a long history of ethically loading Eusebius’s descriptive categories, including recently in Bart Ehrman’s Forgery and Counteryforgery. In discussing this passage, the study appears to reduce the question of canonicity (about which, strictly, Eusebius is not talking) solely to the question of authenticity. “At stake here is not merely whether these books should be included in the canon, but also the fundamental issue that makes the canonical decision possible: Are these books genuinely by the ascribed authors?”44 Similarly when Ehrman discusses the inclusion of the epistle of Peter, he claims “Again it may appear that Eusebius is concerned here only with issues of canon, but in fact the question of canon for him is closely tied to the more precise question of authenticity.” As proof he cites HE 3.3.4, a text which only bolsters the argument due to creative translation, wherein gnēsian is rendered as “authentic.”45 A closer read of Eusebius’s language, especially in the context of his clear decoupling of authenticity from authority evidenced in his treatment of the Abgar legend, calls for a more neutral translation – perhaps “legitimate” or “true.” For Eusebius, the epistle of Peter is both gnēsios, “considered a valid member of a family,”46 and homologoumenos

Authenticity and authority  47 “commonly agreed upon;” the two terms which are conceptually linked, and not separate criteria.47 Eusebius just isn’t talking about the authority of a text as a factor of its authenticity. I argue that we will come to understand better Eusebius’s categories only if we decouple concepts of authority from those of authenticity in late ancient sources, and if we avoid argumentation that relies on a modern notion of the connection between the two.48 Eusebius’s reason for including the Abgar material has been a topic of scholarly dispute for some time now, most notably by Walter Bauer.49 We may never know why Eusebius decided to include the Abgar tradition in his history of the church, but the form of his presentation offers us insight into what he thinks is the status of the text. The Abgar tradition is, for Eusebius, unquestionably authentic Jesus material, but is also distinctly not “Scripture.”50 The reason for his transmission of this material, then, cannot be because it is authoritative – he doesn’t think it is, and goes so far as to directly contrast the letter with material he finds to be definitively authoritative.51 Nor can a case be made that his transmission of the Abgar legend has an intention or effect of bolstering the authority of Eusebius as a writer, except perhaps in the vaguest manner, by demonstrating that he has gained access to state archives in the East.52 Why does Eusebius transmit this tradition? Is it an antiquarian impulse: simply that he has the text, thinks it authentic, and deems it thus worth mentioning? We probably will never know. There are many other versions of the Abgar tradition extant from the fourth through the sixth centuries CE: many in Asian and Palestinian inscriptions, but many also in Egyptian papyri and in magical amulets.53 It is hard to say anything final about the function of the Abgar correspondence inscriptions, but the best guess is that they serve some sort of apotropaic function. There remain extant numerous attestations of the correspondence in papyrus amulets, some of which appear to be designed to protect a space and not simply a person.54 Not only does the Abgar correspondence evidence a tradition in Late Antiquity whose popularity appears to have nothing to do with its own authority, or with the authority of those transmitting it, it further points to the proposition that authority and authorship are not linked in any sufficiently predictive manner as to constitute a historiographically reliable datum. That is, if a tradition believed to have been written by Jesus himself is understood only under the auspices or magic or antiquarianism, and not as authoritative text in any sense – so much so that it is contrasted with Holy scriptures by Eusebius – then the correlation between what is authored and what is authoritative is, at very least, non-static from tradent to tradent.

A dissenting opinion I hope to have demonstrated that for some tradents in Late Antiquity, the mere ascription of a name and the verification of that authenticity did not correspond to an imputation or assumption of authority. I hope also to have demonstrated that the authoritative status of a document or tradition does not, of necessity, imply that the tradition was assumed to be authentic. To take either authenticity or authority to imply the other constitutes a methodological failure, because it

48  Mark Letteney cannot be assumed that the tradent in question holds to our modern notion of the connection between the two. There is, however, some precedent in the Theodosian era for an understanding of the connection between authenticity and authority that more closely aligns with the modern conception: Jerome believed that the authority or power (auctoritas) of the letter to Philemon resided in its “accreditation” to Paul by churches worldwide (in toto orbe a cunctis Ecclesiis).55 But in making his case, Jerome argues against precisely the type of decoupling of authenticity and authority that finds voice in texts like Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History and the acta of the Council of Chalcedon. Jerome doesn’t name his opponents, but he certainly attests their existence, and further gives voice to their conviction that some texts are undoubtedly authentic, but not authoritative. He laments that with these and other things of this sort, they maintain either that the epistle that is written to Philemon is not Paul’s; or, if it is likewise Paul’s, that it contains nothing capable of edifying us; and that it was rejected by very many of the ancients, since it is written merely out of the duty to commend someone, not for teaching.56 For some of Jerome’s opponents, the Letter to Philemon was assumed to be authentically Pauline, but authorship alone did not lend the text standing as an authority. Against whom could Jerome’s invective be aimed? We will almost certainly never know their names, but we can start to describe their textual world and its difference from our own when we place them alongside like-minded tradents like Eusebius and bishops reflected in proceedings from the Council of Chalcedon.

Conclusion Scholarly discussions of composition, transmission, and canon formation have assumed a monolithic understanding of the correlation of authorship and authority from the first century through the sixth. With this chapter I have attempted to demonstrate that our intuition which links authorship, authenticity, and authority in a predictable nexus is itself a modern one, and fails to account for the textual practice of many elite Christian tradents during an age where the nature and boundaries of textual authority and canon were most boisterously in dispute. I have suggested than an institutionalized suspicion of the integrity of documents is visible not only in ecclesiastical/legal literature from the fourth and fifth centuries, but finds a correlate in contemporaneous legal enactments compiled in the Theodosian Code. From another vantage point, I have demonstrated that the establishment of a text’s authenticity – that it really descended from the hand of an otherwise “authoritative” forbearer – did not imply that the text or tradition itself was understood by late antique tradents as authoritative. Nor should we presume that the authority of a tradition, or its source, offers a satisfying rationale for its composition or transmission throughout late antiquity. “Authority” is a strange beast, and

Authenticity and authority  49 the concept itself has a history. We should not be surprised that the bishops we study do not live in our own textualized world. When we do, we do violence to our sources, and perhaps worse yet – we blunt the colorful complexity of tradition and transmission in Late Antiquity.

Notes 1 This chapter, in various instantiations, has passed through the hands of many scholars to whom I am indebted. They include Zeba Crook, Adela Collins, Stephen Davis, Greg Given, Matthew Larsen, Winrich Löhr, and Elaine Pagels. 2 On the “retrospective approach,” see Hindy Najman’s chapter in this book, especially pages 19–22. For this paradigm as it appears in scholarship, Ehrman’s recent discussion of authority and authenticity in Eusebius and Jerome is exemplary. “The authority of the book resides in the actual author . . . It was the contents that, in part (but only in part) helped determine whether an author actually wrote the book circulating under his name; but it was precisely the fact that he wrote the book that provided the authority for its contents” Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery, 90. Compare Speyer’s more neutral position, “Concerning the question of whether a text of John or Peter should be seen as canonical, it was not primarily the proof that John or Peter had actually written this text, but rather the proof that such a book had always been read in orthodox communities as a source of faith. Admittedly, in most cases the genuine or counterfeit apostolic pedigree, together with the orthodox contents, caused the acceptance in most orthodox communities” Speyer, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum, 187–8. Translation mine. See also the critique by Michel Foucault, as relevant and incisive today as ever, “In literary criticism, for example, the traditional methods for defining an author – or, rather, for determining the configuration of the author from existing texts – derive in large part from those used in the Christian tradition to authenticate (or to reject) the particular texts in its possession. Modem criticism, in its desire to ‘recover’ the author from a work, employs devices strongly reminiscent of Christian exegesis when it wished to prove the value of a text by ascertaining the holiness of its author” Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 127. A genealogy of the authority and authorship nexus remains to be written, but upon initial inspection, a case could be made along Foucauldian lines that the historical and literary-critical methods utilized in the secular study of biblical and ancient Christian literature find their origins, ultimately, in the very objects of study. 3 Schwartz, “Die Kaiserin Pulcheria auf der Synode von Chalkedon,” 212. My interaction with, and interest in conciliar documents as a source for the writing of social history is heavily indebted to two scholars, both of whom turned their penetrating gaze to the Council of Chalcedon in 2006. MacMullen, Voting about God, and Millar, A Greek Roman Empire. Both studies, in their own way, opened a door through which this chapter tries to walk. 4 The term “ecumenical council” itself must not be read as a statement of ontology, but as an ex post facto political maneuver employed, in antiquity as today, to sublimate the pronouncements of competing councils under the guise of a particular tradition, to the exclusion of others. Were the historical victors some group other than the western “Orthodox”; Nicaea, Ephesus, Chalcedon, Constantinople, and their conciliar successors might be relegated to little more than a footnote in the production of late antique Christianity. The designation of these events, and these documents as representative of “ecumenical” Christian history is a political endeavor that might well offer scholars more information about the ideological commitments of those calling the councils “representative” than the councils illustrate history-as-it-was. The acts of the ecumenical councils do not merely witness to fourth and fifth century Orthodoxy: they produce it.

50  Mark Letteney 5 ACO 2.1.1.17–23 (p. 67). Ephesus II has accrued and maintained the rather ignominious moniker latrocinium (“robber council”) from the mid-fifth century down to the present day. References to ACO follow Schwartz’s edition, with occasional changes to Schwartz’s punctuation made for the sake of clarity. Translations throughout were adapted from Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. 6 ACO 2.1.1.222 (p. 99). 7 ACO 2.1.1.239 (p. 104). 8 The choice on the part of conciliar leaders concerning which documents to read, and which previous councils held the weight of tradition to which later councils must accede speaks to the formation of authoritative textual traditions within the Orthodox movement. We must understand the designation of these councils as authoritative in its politically expedient context. Ephesus II, the Synod of Constantinople, and Ephesus I were not the only councils to which the bishops at Chalcedon could have turned. Episcopal councils are known to have occurred in Sardica (343), Ariminum (359), and Seleucia (359), along with numerous meetings in Sirmium (351, 357, and 358) whose pronouncements were understood to those in attendance to be more-or-less universally binding, but nevertheless failed to be authorized as such in the eyes of later Orthodox communities. The fact that no acta survive from these councils cannot be brought as evidence for their marginality – no acta survive from the councils Constantinople I or Nicaea. There is an open question as to when legal-type documentation (acta) of councils began to be taken – perhaps only in the late-fourth century. In any event, the councils of Sardica, Ariminum, and others are so poorly documented precisely because the backward gaze of later Orthodoxy did not grant them space on the dais of tradition, and we should think that Ephesus II, the Synod of Constantinople, and Ephesus I would have been relegated to the very same dustbin of history if proponents in their wake did not carry out the work of authorization on their behalf. The events of the Council of Chalcedon, and the proceedings which remain as part of its documentation, produce the authority of select earlier councils even as bishops convening the council proceeded in submission to them. Chalcedon cannot be rightly said merely to uphold the accomplishments of Nicaea, because its authorizing work is in large part responsible for the primacy of Nicaea in the first place. 9 On the archival and retrieval of acta preceding Chalcedon, see Graumann, “Documents, Acts, and Archival Habits in Early Christian Church Councils.” 10 Vessey, “The Forging of Orthodoxy in Latin Christian Literature,” 499–500. 11 ACO 2.1.1.212 (p. 98). 12 Ἀναγκαία ἡ τῶν πεπραγμένων ἐν Κωνσταντινουπόλει περὶ τῆς ὑποθέσεως παύτης ἀνάγνωσις. οὕτω γὰρ ἒσται μαθεῖν ἀκριβῶς τὰ ἐκεῖ κεκινημένα. ACO 2.1.1.214 (p. 98). 13 Cf. Richard Price, “Introduction,” 1. “The Acts of the fifth century councils offer us a type of source material extremely rare in the ancient world, the verbatim transcripts of a deliberative assembly in operation. The Roman Senate, which met continuously for nearly a thousand years, has left almost no direct record of its proceedings and is known to us mainly from later sources often written several generations after the events they claim to describe” Price, “Introduction,” 1. Historians of these materials are more reserved in their understanding of the ‘accuracy’ of acta from the Council of Constantinople II (553), for instance, but Chalcedon holds a special place of privilege regarding assumptions about its fidelity. 14 “No one concurred, force was used, force with blows. We signed blank paper. We were threatened with deposition. We were threatened with exile. Soldiers with clubs and swords stood by, and we took fright at the clubs and swords. We were intimidated into signing. Where there are swords and clubs, what kind of council is it?” (ACO 2.1.1.54 [p. 75]) A short note on the irony of this passage: This choral objection, if indeed it was uttered in some sense at the Council of Chalcedon, would have been given in the center of a basilica swarming with Imperial guards. The Eastern Bishops’ objection

Authenticity and authority  51 against a council with swords was made at a council with swords, and while one must assume that the council of Ephesus II included some measure of political coercion, few scholars would propose that the Council of Chalcedon was carried out in a notably less coercive environment. The structure of the council, and not its votes per se, confirmed Dioscorus’ condemnation even before the first session began. 15 ACO 2.1.1.56 (p. 75) 16 “[Theodore]: ‘What could we do? They made sport of our lives. They, the heretics, all spoke with one voice. They terrified us. They said we were heretics, and we were excluded as heretics.’ The most devout Eastern bishops and those with them exclaimed: ‘We all agree. That is how it was.’ ” 17 ACO 2.1.1.130 (p. 87–8), quoted in note 21. 18 A similar operation is on view in Chalcedon’s third session, where the various libelli against Dioscorus by Alexandrian clergy are being read out and inserted into the record. The first two complaints, of Theodore and Ischyrion, are introduced and concluded with a standard formula (Καὶ λαβὼν Προκόπιος διάκονος καὶ νοτάριος ἀνέγνω/Et suscipiens Procopius lector et notarius legit; Καὶ μετὰ τὸ ἀναγνωσθῆναι αὐτὸν/Et cum lectus esset), and interpolated stands the full text of the complaint. ACO 2.1.2.51–2 and parallel. The third libellus, however, records both the introductory and concluding formula, but no text of the document is inserted into the record until it is again requested to be read just a few paragraphs later. Unless we are to believe that the same complaint was read twice, once almost immediately after the other, we have to assume that the acta as we have them today comprise minutes from two different scribes, and that those minutes have not been harmonized during the editorial process, leading to this visible seam in the proceedings. 19 Graumann, “ ‘Reading’ the First Council of Ephesus (431),” 30. He argues that editorial reworking is evident in the first session of Chalcedon on account of the acts’ length, contending that “we have to expect editorial reworking of the proceedings, in this case the insertion of the fuller records of earlier meetings at an editorial stage of the preparation of the acta” Ibid., 31. 20 Ταῦτα οὐκ εἴπομεν. ταῦτα τίς εἶπεν; (ACO 2.1.1.121 [p. 87]) 21 See also this accusation, which follows the above-cited passage: “Stephen the most devout bishop of Ephesus said: ‘My own notaries, Julian who is now the most devout bishop of Lebedos and the deacon Crispinus, were keeping a record, but the notaries of the most devout Bishop Dioscorus came and erased their tablets, and almost broke their fingers in the attempt to snatch their pens. I didn’t get copies of the minutes, and I don’t know what happened next, but on the very day the investigation took place we signed the sheet, and the bishops who hadn’t signed it did so under my guarantee on the following day.’ ” (ACO 2.1.1.130 [p. 87–8]) 22 Thus, the note-taking process at Chalcedon may be reconstructed with relative confidence on analogy with the council of Ephesus II, contra Amirav, who believes on analogy with Ephesus I (431), and apparently Carthage (411), that there was in place a rigorous system of documentary authentication in place at Chalcedon. What remains to be interpreted, and what is at stake in this passage, is not the mechanics of notetaking – the process is clearly laid out in the text. Rather the interesting question that remains regards the distance between the notes produced and a final authorized compilation that served as the official record. Amirav, Authority and Performance, 47. 23 The Council of Carthage (411), by way of contrast, demonstrates the availability of at least one method of verification of conciliar documents before the compilation of an official record. At Chalcedon there appears to have been no such stop-gap measure in place. Cf. Shaw, “African Christianity: Disputes, Definitions, and ‘Donatists.’ ” 24 Graumann, “ ‘Reading’ the First Council of Ephesus (431),” 28. 25 For the tradition of imperial seals being affixed to conciliar pronouncements, see Eusebius VC 4.27.2.

52  Mark Letteney 26 This is especially the case at the Council of Constantinople II, held in 553 CE. 27 The paradox of assent to the words of conciliar acta as passed down, even within the knowledge of their faulty transmission history, is no more apparent than when reading Evagrius Scholasticus’s retelling of the events surrounding Ephesus II (HE II.4), where the historian repeatedly claims to reproduce “verbatim” (ἐπὶ λέξεως) extracts of these very conciliar acta while they adjudicate accusations of forgery and editorial malfeasance. 28 “Si tamen eorum libri, propter antiquitatis incertum, codicum collatione firmentur.” CT 1.4.3. The interpretation (terminus ad quem 506) that follows in the Breviary appears to confirm subsequent collation of juridical texts as a way of verifying their contents. 29 Vessey, “The Forging of Orthodoxy in Latin Christian Literature,” 503. See also ibid., 513. “For whatever else they demonstrate, the De adulteratione and related documents of fraternal rivalry between Jerome and Rufinus leave us in no doubt that the challenge of reading Origen in the Theodosian Age had given rise to a new anxiety about the integrity of the Christian doctrinal oeuvre as collaborative work of art.” Emphasis original. 30 Ferrandus, Epistulae 6.3. “Si pars aliqua displicet in concilio Chalcedonensi, cum periculo displicendi totum placet.” Text PL 67.923A. Translations of documents relating to Constantinople (553) are adapted from Price, The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553. 31 Ferrandus, Epistulae 6.3. 32 Ferrandus, Epistulae 6.7. PL 67.926A. 33 Justinian, Edictum rectae fidei 156.36–158.3 Text Schwartz, Drei dogmatische Schriften Iustinians. 34 My reading of this passage was challenged and strengthened through a spirited backand-forth with J. Gregory Given, whose dissenting opinion may be found in an excellent article: Given, “Utility and Variance in Late Antique Witnesses to the Abgar-Jesus Correspondence.” See especially 193–7. 35 οὐκ εἰς ἄχρηστον πρὸς λέξιν ἐκ τῆς Σύρων μεταβληθέντα φωνῆς 1.13.22 An admittedly odd circumlocution. Text Bardy and Périchon, Histoire ecclésiastique. A recent discussion of the Abgar legend as it was received through the Middle Ages may be found in Skemer, Binding Words, 96–105. 36 HE 1.13.22. William Adler’s clever attempt to “salvage Eusebius’s reputation” by proposing a translation of “from the ancient records” for ἀπὸ τῶν ἀρχείων fails on a cursory reading of the context. Eusebius explicitly claims that the letter was found in an ἀρχεῖον alongside δημοσίοις χάρταις; the sense cannot connote anything other than a public archive of the Roman style, with which Eusebius, and his readers, were well acquainted. Eusebius uses the same language, to the same end, in HE 5.18.9, “οἱ θέλοντες μαθεῖν τὰ κατ’ αὐτὸν ἔχουσιν τὸ τῆς Ἀσίας δημόσιον ἀρχεῖον.” Adler, Christians and the Public Archive, 936. 37 Here I define “scripture” minimally, as text of the type that Eusebius would consider having the possibility of being part of a canon, per his discussion in HE 3.25. The most common shorthand for this category of text in the HE is τὰ θεῖα γραφεῖα and cognates. 38 καὶ ταῦτα δ’ ὡς ἐξ ἀρχαίων ἱστορίας εἰρήσθω· μετίωμεν δ’ αὖθις ἐπὶ τὴν θείαν γραφήν. 2.1.8 39 The only other place where Eusebius uses this term in the Ecclesiastical History is 5.5.8, where it is employed to a similar end: forming a disjunction where Eusebius passes from corpora of different types, whose authoritative status is at odds. Thus, in book three he uses μετίωμεν δέ to pivot from the Abgar legend to material among his category of the ὁμολογουμένα, namely the Acts of the Apostles, and in book five he uses the term to pivot from a discussion of Antonine imperial and senatorial history to a discussion of apostolic succession as reported by Irenaeus and the New Testament’s Pastoral Epistles. 40 HE 3.25

Authenticity and authority  53 41 Compare also Augustine’s own view on the source of scriptural authority (auctoritatis Veteris et Novi Testamenti) in his tractate Against Faustus the Manichean, where he claims that there is a “distinct dividing line” between that which is canonical and that which is post-canonical. The authority of canonical works, in his argument, is not conferred by virtue of authorship, but rather on account of “the succession of bishops and the honor (or: extension) of the churches [per successiones episcoporum et propagationes Ecclesiarum].” Contra Faustum 11.5, PL 42.249 Augustine certainly believed that the canonical scriptures held an authority unsurpassed by any subsequent productions, but that authority does not appear to rest solely or even primarily in the identity of the author, i.e., in the authenticity of the text. See also Rebillard, “A New Style of Argument in Christian Polemic,” 563–6. 42 The very same distinction is visible in the Law of Citations quoted above. The Law provides for the formal authorization of Paul (the jurist) and Ulpian’s juristic writings (again, pending re-collation due to “the uncertainty of antiquity”), but it specifically disclaims any authorization of the markup/commentary (notae) of Paul and Ulpian on the text of Papinian. Here, Pauline (the jurist) authorship is specifically, explicitly divorced from questions regarding Pauline authority – some pieces of his oeuvre carry the force of law, while some do not. The law, and its Visigothic interpretatio, gives no indication that Paul’s authorship of the work was in doubt. 43 Clearly, there is much more to say on this point. It will suffice to say here, however, that the crux interpretum in Eusebius’s discussion in HE 3.25 – namely, “What is the difference between the ὁμολογουμένα and the ἀντιλεγομένα?”  – may be profitably reexamined in the context of this demonstrable disconnect in Eusebius’s own History between that which is authoritative and that which is authentic. 44 Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery, 89. 45 Ehrman has written most recently and at length about this issue, but just about any other book on issues of authority and canonicity could be critiqued for similar imprecision. Translations of the “canon debate’s” other locus classicus, Athanasius’s 39th Festal Letter, fare little better. Consider for instance David Brakke’s translation of τῶν ἀληθῶν Βιβλίων as “genuine books” instead of “true books,” which conflates authenticity and “truth,” confuses the matter at hand in Athanasius’s letter, and fails to recognize that Athanasius, had he wanted to emphasize that the books were “genuine,” uses language for precisely such a distinction just a couple of lines thereafter (γνησίων ἀδελφῶν). Brakke, Athanasius and Asceticism, 329. Text from Joannou, Les canons des Pères Grecs, 71–6. 46 BDAG. 47 Eusebius’s position seems to have more in common with that of (pseudo-?)Priscillian’s Book on Faith and Apocryphal Writings than with the position of, say Athanasius’s 39th Festal Letter. See a brief discussion in Lundhaug and Jenott, The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices, 148–9, and a more extended treatments in Jacobs, “The Disorder of Books,” 135–9; and Burrus, “Canonical References to Extra-­Canonical ‘Texts’,” 60–7. 48 Eusebius mobilizes these categories in book two of the Ecclesiastical History. Here, he refuses to class the writings of the epistles of James and Jude among the nothoi, as some argue on account of the fact that “few of the ancients quote” from them, on the basis of the countervailing fact that the texts are used “openly” in the majority of other communities. HE 2.23.24–25. 49 Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, chapter 1. 50 A remarkably similar understanding of the relationship between authenticity and authority is found among early Islamic sources. For instance ‘Abd Allāh b. Dhakwān, in the introduction to his collection of authoritative traditions (ḥadīth) about the Prophet, claims “In Medina I have met one hundred people, each of whom was reliable. Traditions from them were not accepted [however], because they did not belong,

54  Mark Letteney

51

52

53

54 55 56

as was said, to the ahl ạl-ḥadīth [that is: the authorized chain of transmission].” Juynboll, “Muslim’s Introduction to His Ṣaḥīḥ,” 278. For analysis, see Shahab Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy, 24. Another contrasting example may be adduced here in Arrian’s notes on a lecture of Epictetus. (Epictetus, Diatr. [Arrian, Epict. diss.] praef. 1–8.) Here Arrian claims to be the writer of the text circulating, and to be responsible for its textualized form, but he nevertheless explicitly disclaims authorship of the text. On this curious case, see Larsen, Gospels before the Book. There is, in any event, late antique precedent for suggesting the availability of an illusory document in the state archive while knowing full well that any search would come up short. Augustine did just this at the council of Carthage in 411 (rightly) expecting that his opponents, as well as adjudicating officials, would not, in fact, follow up his assertion. The Ephesus inscription was found on a door lintel that is now housed at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, containing both the letter of Abgar and Jesus’s reply. The text is known from a variety of sources, including: Eusebius (c. 303), an inscription on the city wall of Edessa I. Eph. Ia. 46. Inv. III 1072 (see Segal, Edessa, 75), a Philippi Inscription (see Picard, “Un texte nouveau de la correspondance entre Abgar d’Osroène et Jésus-Christ,” 41–69), and a number of papyri, including: P.Mich inv. 6213 (Coptic amulet 7th–9th century, folded like a letter. See Sullivan and Wilfong, “The Reply of Jesus to King Abgar,” 111–12), and P. Oxy. 65 4469. There are 12 papyri in all, in Coptic in Greek, most from the fifth and sixth centuries. Sullivan and Wilfong, “The Reply of Jesus to King Abgar,” 115–16. At econtrario qui germanae auctoritatis eam esse defendunt, dicunt numquam in toto orbe a cunctis Ecclesiis fuisse susceptam, nisi Pauli apostoli crederetur. Commentaria in Epistolam ad Philemonem 743–4. PL 26.661C. Translation Scheck, St. Jerome’s commentaries on Galatians, Titus, and Philemon.

Bibliography Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum. Iussu Atque Mandato Societatis Scientiarum Argentoratensis. Edited by Eduard Schwartz. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1914. The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. Translated by Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, Translated Texts for Historians 45. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553: With Related Texts on the Three Chapters Controversy. Translated by Richard Price. Translated Texts for Historians 51. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009. Adler, William. “Christians and the Public Archive.” In A Teacher for All Generations: Essays in Honor of James C. VanderKam, edited by Eric F. Mason et. al., 917–37. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 153. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Ahmed, Shahab. Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Amirav, Hagit. Authority and Performance: Sociological Perspectives on the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451). Hypomnemata 199. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015. Bauer, Walter. Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. Translated by Robert A. Kraft and Gerhard Krodel. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1971. Brakke, David. Athanasius and Asceticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Burrus, Virginia. “Canonical References to Extra-Canonical ‘Texts’: Priscillian’s Defense of the Apocrypha.” In SBL Seminar Papers, 29 (1990): 60–67.

Authenticity and authority  55 Ehrman, Bart D. Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Given, J. Gregory. “Utility and Variance in Late Antique Witnesses to the Abgar-Jesus Correspondence.” Archiv Für Religiongeschichte 17(1) (2016): 187–222. Graumann, Thomas. “ ‘Reading’ the First Council of Ephesus (431).” In Chalcedon in Context Church Councils 400–700, edited by Richard Price and Mary Whitby, 27–44. Translated Texts for Historians, Contexts 1. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009. ———. “Documents, Acts and Archival Habits in Early Christian Church Councils: A Case Study.” In Manuscripts and Archives: Comparative Views on Record-Keeping, edited by Alessandro Bausi, Christian Brockmann, Michael Friedrich, and Sabine Kienitz, 273–294. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2018. Histoire ecclésiastique. Edited by Gustave Bardy and Pierre Périchon. Sources chrétiennes 31, 41, 55, 73. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1952–1960. Jacobs, Andrew S. “The Disorder of Books: Priscillian’s Canonical Defense of Apocrypha.” Harvard Theological Review 93(2) (2000): 135–59. Joannou, Perikles-Petros. Les canons des Pères Grecs. Vol. 2. Rome: Tip. Italo-Orientale S. Nilo, 1963. Juynboll, G.H.A. “Muslim’s Introduction to His Ṣaḥīḥ, Translated and Annotated with an Excursis on the Chronology of fitna and bid‘a.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 5 (1984): 263–311. Larsen, Matthew D.C. Gospels Before the Book. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Lundhaug, Hugo and Lance Jenott. The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices. Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 97. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. MacMullen, Ramsay. Voting about God in Early Church Councils. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Millar, Fergus. A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief under Theodosius II (408/450), Sather Classical Lectures 64. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Picard, Charles. “Un texte nouveau de la correspondance entre Abgar d’Osroène et JésusChrist, gravé sur une porte de ville, à Philippes (Macédoine).” Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 44(1) (1920): 41–69. Price, Richard. “Introduction.” In The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. Translated Texts for Historians 45. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. Rebillard, Éric. “A New Style of Argument in Christian Polemic: Augustine and the Use of Patristic Citations.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 8(4) (2000): 559–78. Schwartz, Eduard. “Die Kaiserin Pulcheria auf der Synode von Chalkedon.” In Festgabe für Adolf Jülicher zum 70. Geburtstag, 203–212. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1927. Schwartz, Eduard, et al., eds. Drei dogmatische Schriften Iustinians. 2nd edition. Milano: A. Giuffrè, 1973. Segal, Judah Benzion. Edessa “the Blessed City.” Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Skemer, Don C. Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Shaw, Brent D. “African Christianity: Disputes, Definitions, and ‘Donatists.’ ” In Orthodoxy and Heresy in Religious Movements: Discipline and Dissent, edited by Malcolm R. Greenshields and Thomas A. Robinson, 5–34. Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1992. Speyer, Wolfgang. Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum: ein Versuch ihrer Deutung. München: Beck, 1971.

56  Mark Letteney St. Jerome’s commentaries on Galatians, Titus, and Philemon. Translated by Thomas P. Scheck. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Sullivan, Kevin P. and T.G. Wilfong. “The Reply of Jesus to King Abgar: A Coptic New Testament Apocryphon Reconsidered (P. Mich. Inv. 6213).” The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 42, (1–4) (2005): 107–23.

4 Beyond attribution and authority The case of Psalms in rabbinic hermeneutics A. J. Berkovitz

What is attribution, and what work does it do? In 1967, Roland Barthes famously declared the “death of the author.” His reformulation of meaning after “the death of the author” contends that a text’s unity “lies not in its origins but its destination.”1 Previously, an author was often considered a figure who put pen to paper, and by whom textual unity and interpretation ought to be measured. Two years later Michel Foucault published a response.2 He argued that even in the wake of the death of the author, the function of ascribing authorship to a text must be accounted for. One of Foucault’s proposed authorship functions relates to authority; written texts or oral utterances are attributed to an authorial figure in order to legitimize them, to make them both useful and acceptable to a particular audience. His point was that attribution matters, even if the author does not. In an attempt to replace theologically laden notions of attribution with something more historically sound, scholars of ancient Judaism and early Christianity have adopted this Foucauldian paradigm, oftentimes reading claims of attribution as factors in an “authoritative discourse.”3 Hindy Najman, whose Seconding Sinai relies heavily on this notion, reflects on her turn to authority and her current move beyond it in the second chapter of this book.4 Even scholars who do not reduce attribution to authority find the authorizing function of attribution to be operative in a majority of cases. Moshe Bernstein, in a subtle analysis of Second Temple attributive practices, develops three categories of pseudepigraphy: authoritative, convenient, and decorative. The first two are typically entangled in claims of authority. The third, in which attribution is disconnected from the body of the work, is not.5 He calls this final category “minor,” and ultimately seeks to reserve the label “pseudepigraphy” for works that fall into his “authoritative” category.6 Recently, Eva Mroczek has delivered a trenchant critique of the scholarly reduction of attribution to authority in Second Temple literature.7 For her, attribution does not fulfill a “bibliographic function” but a “biographical” one;8 it tells us more about the development of a character than the origins and compositional circumstances of a document. My chapter builds on this recent scholarly trend by focusing on Psalm superscriptions in rabbinic literature.9 I demonstrate that ascribing names to psalms, for rabbinic readers, had little to do with authorizing the material. Rather, the name attached to a psalm functioned to enable interpretation. Furthermore, adopting the

58  A. J. Berkovitz language of Mroczek, I argue that the rabbinic traditions discussed below imagine attribution as useful for both bibliographic and biographic purposes, often at the same time. Let us begin the process by closely examining a passage from Foucault’s “What Is an Author,” the locus classicus for those interested in reading attribution in light of authority. After noting that “the ‘author-function’ is not universal or constant in all discourse,” he writes: Texts, however, that we now call “scientific” . . . were only considered truthful during the Middle Ages if the name of the author was indicated. Statements on the order of “Hippocrates said . . .” or “Pliny tells us that . . .” were not merely formulas for an argument based on authority; they marked a proven discourse. . . . Authentication no longer required reference to the individual who had produced them; the role of the author disappeared as an index of truthfulness and, where it remained as an inventor’s name, it was merely to denote a specific theorem or proposition.10 In this passage, Foucault distinguishes attributions that function as arguments based on authority from those that merely identify points of demonstrated truth. The latter do not confer authority but are still necessarily part of a discourse, even functioning to vouchsafe its validity. Foucault clarifies here that readers should not reduce attribution entirely to authority, even in cases where the subject of attribution is undoubtedly an authoritative voice. A similar operation is visible in the rabbinic reception of psalm ascription. Authorial superscriptions, whether explicitly found in the biblical text or traditionally assumed by the exegete,11 are not viewed as markers of authority by rabbinic exegetes. Rather, they are packaged into a larger discourse assumed to be demonstrated truth. Tradition, inflected in various and contingent manners, vouchsafes (or creates) the attribution, which then allows an interpreter to elaborate on both text and author as demonstrated truth. In other words, for rabbinic interpreters, attribution did not assist in admitting Psalms into a list of authoritative works. The book of Psalms was already canonical.12 Further, attribution did not function as authenticating or authorizing devices of interpretation. Rabbinic exegetes do not endorse a particular explanation as correct by appealing to the fact that David or any other psalm tradent said it.13 Nor were superscriptions primarily used as means to expand David’s biography. Instead, psalm attribution in rabbinic tradition is governed by a constant tension between 1) assumed ascription of the entire work to David; 2) the multiple different attributions indicated by individual psalm titles; and 3) a traditional overlay that asserts certain psalms to be the work of composers un-signified in the biblical text, such as Adam and Abraham.14 This tension is on display in several of the examples explored below. What does psalm attribution do for rabbis? I argue that it allows them to interpret both the text of a psalm and its author in a new light. It enables questions regarding the identity of the Psalmist, the circumstances under which a psalm

Beyond attribution and authority  59 was recited, and the historical implications of a psalm’s composition. Rabbinic interpreters are interested in attribution not because authorship confers authority, but rather because attributions are useful for interpretation; they answer both biographical and bibliographical questions. Ultimately, ancient texts (and thus modern scholars) can speak about attribution without reducing its function to questions of authority, and without completely removing its bibliographic function. As mentioned earlier, Foucault notes that the authorship function does not affect all discourses in a universal and constant way. In this chapter, I will examine three trends in rabbinic psalm interpretation affected by attribution. The first highlights the exegetical tensions involved in identifying and contextualizing the figure listed in a psalm superscription. The second focuses on attribution and compositional activity. It examines an exegetical motif that asks: Given that tradition informs us that character x is associated with this psalm what can we know about the context in which this psalm was created or recited? The third examines the use of psalm ascription as a tool of historical anchoring. It explores an exegetical trope that invalidates the opinion of a previously cited sage by appealing to the fact that a particular Psalmist wrote his poem at a specific moment in time. One methodological note is in order before we examine our sources. To get as clear a picture as possible regarding how attribution functions in late antique rabbinic psalm interpretation, I will only examine traditions produced and preserved in sources that are clearly tannaitic and amoraic. Thus, I exclude most late Palestinian midrashim from consideration in this chapter, including Midrash Psalms. This latter work deserves a separate comprehensive study and cannot be used as primary measure to characterize late antique rabbinic psalm engagement.

Identity of author: Asaph as case-study As mentioned above, attribution for a rabbinic homilist primarily acts as a marker that encourages the exegete to reflect on the identity and compositional choices of the Psalmist.15 Attribution can assist in unpacking a difficult text or provide an opportunity to dramatize it. This activity is reflected in rabbinic traditions regarding Asaph, whose name adorns twelve psalms.16 In total, the name “Asaph” appears forty-six times in biblical literature. In addition to psalms bearing an Asaph superscription, he appears as the father of Joah the recorder of Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:18), the sentry of Artaxerxes’s garden (Neh 2:8), and most frequently a Levitical singer that lived during the time of David. Rabbinic exegetes do not identify Asaph the Psalmist with any of these biblical figures, contrary to a common interpretive trend that seeks to consolidate the identities of biblical characters.17 Instead, they most often build his identity from the body of the psalm itself. Text and paratext switch roles.18 Our first example is the Asaph-attributed Psalm 79, which opens with: “A Psalm (mizmor) of Asaph: O God, the nations have come into your inheritance; they have defiled your holy temple; they have laid Jerusalem in ruins.”19 The remainder of the psalm details this tragic scene and issues a call for divine vengeance, including the (in)famous verse found in most medieval Haggadot: “Pour out your anger

60  A. J. Berkovitz on the nations that do not know you, and on kingdoms that do not call on your name (v6).” For the following rabbinic reader, the title, mizmor, a designation of praise,20 clashes with the body of the psalm, which is filled with tragedy and woe. This tension receives voice in a homily located in Lamentations Rabbah 4:14:21 “And kindled a fire in Zion” (Lam 4:11). It is written, “mizmor of Asaph, O God, the nations have come into your inheritance.” Should the verse not say “a cry of Asaph,” “elegy of Asaph,” “lamentation of Asaph?”22 Yet it says “mizmor (praise) of Asaph?” Rather, (it can be explained via) a parable to a king who made a marriage house for his son. He placed its foundation, chiseled it and designed it. Then his son went astray.23 Immediately, the king went to the marriage house and tore out the curtains and smashed the flutes. The tutor (of the son) took a flute and sang (mezamer).24 They said to him: “The king destroyed the wedding canopy of his son and you are sitting and singing?” He said to them, “I am singing that he destroyed the canopy of his son and did not pour his wrath25 on his son.” Thus they said to Asaph, “The Holy One blessed be He destroyed his court and temple and you are sitting and singing (mezamer)?” He said to them, “I am singing because the Holy One blessed be He poured out his wrath on stones and wood and did not pour out his wrath on Israel.” And thus it is written, “And kindled a fire in Zion, that consumed its foundations.” A full analysis of the parable calls beyond the scope of this chapter.26 Instead, let us turn our attention to the Asaph portions, which could easily stand alone. Our exegete, troubled by the mismatch between title and body, employs the author function to craft a response: Asaph sings in a happy key because of his elation that the temple acted as Israel’s proxy. From the vantage of the rabbinic interpreter, that Asaph composed this psalm after and in response to the destruction of the temple is not in dispute. Rather, the content of the psalm – the destruction of the temple – crafts an identity for the author function, “Asaph sang,” which then impacts the reading of the psalm. The attribution does not confer authority of any kind. Rather, it acts as a hermeneutical marker that points back to the Psalmist and allows the exegete to narrate a scene in Asaph’s life and, ultimately, his compositional choices. In doing so, we learn that Asaph had creative input into the crafting of Psalm 79. It could have been a dirge or lament. Asaph is not imagined as a passive tradent of traditional material, but rather its shaper. Attribution signals creativity. This image of Asaph also appears in an anonymous tradition located in Lamentations Rabbah 5:2. Here, too, the exegete imagines Asaph as a post-destruction creative force: “Our inheritance (naḥalatenu) has been turned (nehefkha) over to strangers (Lam 5:2)” The turning over was like that of Sodom (i.e. total destruction). Jeremiah called it “our inheritance” (naḥalatenu), Isaiah called it “our holy (qodshenu) and beautiful house” (Isa 64:10). Asaph came and said, ‘it is not

Beyond attribution and authority  61 our inheritance, nor our holy and beautiful house, rather the nations have come into yours, as it is written, “O God the nations have come into your inheritance (naḥalatekha), they have defiled your holy (qodshekha) temple; they have laid Jerusalem in ruins.” The exegete comments on Lam 5:2 by making at least two distinct moves. First, he redefines the “turning over” (hpkh) of Lam 5:2, reading it as full and total ­destruction – paralleling that of Sodom – and not as property transfer.27 This allows the homilist to read the “inheritance” more narrowly as the temple.28 Second, it imagines a scene in which Asaph comes to countermand Isaiah and Jeremiah.29 Whose property did the gentiles destroy? Who is the true victim of divine wrath? For Jeremiah and Isaiah, employing the words our inheritance and our holy house, respectively, the answer is clearly Israel. Asaph, according to our exegete, challenges these statements by employing the exact same words, inheritance and holy, but with a twist. It is God’s inheritance, and God’s holy temple. God is the victim of his own wrath. Perhaps this mirrors the portrait of Asaph constructed in the previous midrash, where he offers praise (mizmor) that God destroyed the temple and spared Israel. He – the king – destroyed his own property instead of killing his son. Once again, the body of the psalm affects the identity of the attribution, which then aids interpretation. In this instance, the anonymous exegete employs the author function to construct a debate between three inspired figures. That Asaph is imagined as more than a mouthpiece is clear from his conversation partners: Jeremiah, the presumed author of Lamentations30 and Isaiah, the composer of his own book.31 It is further evident from the internal logic of the debate: Asaph, employing the language of inheritance and holiness, constructs his remarks in direct response to his predecessors.32 Attribution as authority is not at play. It is also more than mere decoration. Rather, it allows the exegete to speculate (perhaps implicitly) about the time, place, and role of the author and his text. In this case, our exegete paints Asaph as a post-destruction Psalmist lamenting the temple’s ruin and ultimately offering hope. Not every rabbinic sage imagined Asaph as a post-destruction Psalmist.33 The following argument between Rav and Levi, located in Leviticus Rabbah 17:1, will demonstrate some alternative constructions of Asaph’s biography. It will also exemplify how psalm attribution directly affects rabbinic interpretation:34 “But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled; my steps (’ashurai) had nearly slipped” (Ps 73:2). Rav and Levi,35 one said Asaph was one of the sons of Korah, and the other said that Asaph was someone else.36 The one who says that Asaph was the son of Korah, (the verse means) “before I was37 descending (moshra)38 with my father in hell.” The one that says it is another Asaph, (the verse means), “before I was descending with the wicked in hell.”39 Rav and Levi do not dispute that Psalm 73 is ascribed to Asaph.40 At stake, rather, is the best interpretation of Ps 73:2. Each sage appeals to the identity of the author

62  A. J. Berkovitz in hopes of unpacking this verse. Who slipped? When were the composer’s feet almost gone? The tradent that links this Asaph to the sons of Korah relies both on biblical texts as well interpretive tradition. He likely connects the Asaph of our psalm with Abiasaph of Ex 6:24, a son of Korah.41 Additionally, he draws on a tradition found in places like b. Sanh. 110a, which states: “It is written, ‘and the children of Korah did not die’ (Num 26:11). A  tannaitic statement in the name of our master,42 they said: ‘a place was set aside for them in hell, and they sit on it, and they sing psalms’.”43 For the first exegete, Ps 73:2 refers concretely to Asaph’s experience underground. He was almost doomed; his feet were almost gone. He was part of his father’s cantankerous congregation, but he – along with his ­brothers – repented at the last second and was saved. Now he sings psalms about his experience. The other tradent, perhaps viewing Asaph as a contemporary of David,44 cannot locate (or generate) any useful biographical material. He thus reads our verse as Asaph falling in with the wicked. It appears, however, as if our second tradent merely generalized a statement better suited for the exegete that understood Asaph to be Korah’s child. In either case, attribution links to and informs interpretation. In these examples, authority plays no role in the rabbinic understanding and reception of psalm superscriptions. Rather, the attributions invite attempts to contextualize the author and thus gain a clearer portrait of him and his text by drawing from the composer’s biography, as in the case of Leviticus Rabbah 17:1, and by using the text to construct a narrative about the author’s life and compositional choices, as in the examples from Lamentations Rabbah. Our sources also collectively demonstrate that no uniform attempt to localize Asaph exists.45

Compositional circumstances of Psalmist In addition to questions of identity and biography, psalm superscriptions promote inquiry into the time and circumstances of composition or recitation. The following exegetical traditions do not read attribution as a way of conferring authority. Each tradition assumes the truth and validity of the identity of ascribed Psalmist. Rather, it asks: What compelled the Psalmist to compose or recite his psalm when he did? Our tradents do not reduce ascription to authority and nor should we. In this section, we will focus on three exemplars: Moses, a named figure of Psalm 90; Adam, a character found in no superscription but assumed to be the composer of Psalm 92 in some rabbinic traditions; and David, the Psalmist par excellence. Psalm 90 opens with, “a prayer of Moses, the man of God.” It is unsurprising, therefore, that rabbinic exegetes employ this psalm in reflecting on and constructing the life and times of Moses.46 More intriguing, however, is a tradition that maintains that Moses composed Psalms 90–100. The assumption behind it likely rests on the fact that no named figure appears in the titles of Psalms 91–100. Psalm 101 opens with “a Psalm of David.” Thus, according to this tradition, the “Prayer of Moses” extends eleven psalms, with Moses as the assumed composer of each. No extant early rabbinic source, to my knowledge, spells this out.47 Indeed, homilists that work within the framework of this tradition typically assume it.

Beyond attribution and authority  63 One manifestation of this tradition in relation to compositional activity appears in y. Shevu. 1:8 33b. In discussing whether one can bring the ḥattat (atonement) sacrifice of the New Moon on the Day of Atonement and vice versa, the Palestinian Talmud cites a tradition in the name of R. Simon listing the thirty-two congregational atonement sacrifices.48 It concludes, “when Moses heard thus he said, ‘from now on, whomever suspects he has unwittingly transgressed49 he needs to bring all of these sacrifices.’ ” To this statement, Moses’s jubilation over the opportunities for forgiveness,50 the Palestinian Talmud cites: “R. Tanḥuma said in the name of Resh Laqish: at the time that God said to Moses, ‘and he shall confess over it etc.’ (Lev 16:21) he began to utter/compose (hitḥil ve’amar) ‘a Psalm of Confession’ (Ps 100) because of ‘he shall confess over it’.” Resh Laqish performs several exegetical moves. First, he re-analyzes the toda of mizmor letodah. It means neither a song of thanksgiving, nor even a song that accompanies the todah sacrifice,51 but rather a song of confession. The statement builds on the fact that the root of todah, WDY, can mean “confess.”52 Second, he reads in light of and in connection with Aaron’s confession of Israel’s sins over the Azazel goat: “Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins.” (Lev 16:21). In both ancient Israel and in rabbinic imagination psalms often accompany sacrifice.53 For our exegete, Moses – a Levite – composes the first accompanying psalm for Aaron’s Day of Atonement sacrifice.54 The logic and language of this midrash indicates that generative compositional activity is at stake for our exegete. God informs Moses of what Aaron is to do in the future, and Moses then says “a Psalm of Confession.” First, this clearly refers to more than the initial few words of the title.55 Second, Moses seems to generate the psalm on the basis of (ʿal shem)56 of what he just heard. Third, while the word ’amar (say) in rabbinic literature can mean to “traduce” or simply “say,” it can also mean to “orally compose.”57 This may be aided, perhaps, by the phrase “he began to say” (hitḥil ve’amar),58 a locution which can mean to begin a new activity as a result of previous event.59 Each of the following examples contain this key word.60 Regardless, operating in the background of Resh Laqish’s statement is the assumption that Psalms 90–100 are attributed to Moses. The question becomes about discovering why and how. The implied author function does not confer authority to the interpreted text; rather, it invites the exegete to discover (or invent) how the attribution and psalm correlate. In our case, Moses composed Psalm 100 as a result of and perhaps as an accompaniment to the Day of Atonement sacrifice. Not every Palestinian rabbi worked within the tradition that ascribed Psalms 91–100 to Moses. Instead, several rabbinic tradents place Adam as the composer of Psalm 92: “A Psalm, a song for the Sabbath Day.” Adam appears in no psalm superscription. Additionally, nothing within Psalm 92 particularly demands reference to his character. The origins of this tradition are thus obscure. There is no reason linked to authority or character expansion that would explain why certain rabbinic traditions attribute our psalm to Adam. Nevertheless, several rabbinic exegetes assume Adam to be the central persona of the psalm. The conversations that ensue revolve around imagining when and why Adam composed it. Tradition

64  A. J. Berkovitz governs ascription, which then demands further interpretation of attribution and tradition.61 The earliest source linking Psalm 92 to Adam appears in Genesis Rabbah 22:13:62 [a] “And Cain went away” (Gen 4:16) . . . R. Ḥanina63 b. Yitzhak said: “he left happy, as one says: ‘coming out to meet you, and when he sees you his heart will be glad’ (Ex 4:14). [b] He encountered Adam and he [Adam] said to him, “what happed with your trial?” He [Cain] responded, “I repented and settled.” Adam began (hitḥil) to slap his face, “thus is the power of repentance and I had no idea!” [c] Immediately, he stood and uttered/composed:64 “A Psalm, a song for the Sabbath day, it is good to confess to the Lord.” An imagined narrative gap triggers this midrash. God has finished sentencing Cain, and all we are told is “and Cain went away.” How did Cain leave? In what mental state? R. Ḥanina suggests – via Ex 4:14’s yz’ (go out)65 – that Cain left God’s presence happy. In section [b], Ex 4:14’s “coming out to meet you, and when he sees you his heart will be glad” gets reframed to undergird a narrative that imagines an encounter between a repentant Cain and an anxious Adam. When Adam hears about the power of repentance he is happily startled. Perhaps he failed to repent after his own expulsion? Regardless, he “immediately stands” and utters Psalm 92. Once again, our exegete reanalyzes the root WDY and reads it as confession instead of “to give thanks”: “it is good to confess (i.e. repent) to God.” Important for our purposes is that this final line, section [c], could be deleted without any interpretive harm. Sections [a] and [b] do not require it to create a coherent narrative. Thus, our exegete uses the constructed narrative as an opportunity to imagine when and why Adam composed Psalm 92. In fact, most manuscripts of Genesis Rabbah and Leviticus Rabbah containing this passage end with: “And R. Levi said: Adam the First uttered/composed this Psalm.” Adam’s attribution exists via tradition.66 It confers no authority to the text. Rather, the assumed ascription to Adam invites the exegete to analyze and reflect on the traditionally assigned author. It is also worth pointing out that the first printing of Genesis Rabbah and the Yalqut Shimoni parallel contains the line: “And R. Levi said this psalm was said by Adam the First and it was forgotten from his generation and Moses came and renewed it in his own name.” This line was likely added to our passage from Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer 19, an eighth- or ninth century composition,67 which attributes the tradition to R. Simon.68 The bibliographic search for a compositional moment also occurs with regards to David. David does not authorize the Psalms, but any difficulty in the Psalter could be resolved by narrating (and constructing) his biography. This activity occurs in psalms directly connected to his name and also in those that contain no superscription. Due to limits of space we will only explore one example of each. The composition narrative is employed in understanding the genesis of Psalm 12, “Praise [lamnatzeaḥ] on/regarding [ʿal] the sheminit, a Psalm of David.” Y. Ber. 9:8 14d concludes with a tradition cited in the name of R. Meir:69

Beyond attribution and authority  65 [a] There is no man in Israel whom commandments do not surround. Phylacteries on his head, phylacteries on his arm, a mezuzah at his door,70 and four tzitzit on his tallit that encircles him. Just as David said: “Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous ordinances” (Ps 119:164). And he also said: “The angel of Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them” (Ps 34:8). [b] When he went into the bathhouse and saw himself naked. He said: “Woe is to me for I am naked of commandments.” But when he saw his circumcision he began (hitḥil) to praise God, “lamnatzeaḥ (praise) on the eight (sheminit), a Psalm of David.” This narrative contains two sections and accomplishes a variety of tasks. The first section, drawing from Psalms, argues for a rabbinic model of righteous living. There are seven commandments that surround Israel all day, and those who keep them are guaranteed divine protection. The precepts are nothing but guardian angels.71 The Psalms, David’s voice, are particularly useful for this purpose, as David consistently appears embattled and in need of divine aid.72 The second section draws from the first in building a narrative ultimately designed to answer the question: what is “on the sheminit”? Our tradent did not view this as a musical instrument, and sought a more compelling reading, one that connected it to the meaning of sheminit – eighth. Instead of simply offering a solution, the exegete chooses to explain the obscure title through a composition narrative.73 David, in dire need of commandments, is dismayed when he finds himself naked in the bathhouse. Upon noticing his circumcision, and thus that he is never truly bereft, he begins to sing: “For praise, on the eighth, a Psalm of David,” i.e., a song composed in praise of the eighth commandment – circumcision.74 The Davidic ascription thus provides the exegete with the opportunity to explain an obscure word by appealing to and crafting a narrative about the composer. The psalm reads “on the eighth” because of that time that David discovered that his circumcision would never leave him bereft of a commandment. No notion of attribution that could be reduced to authority is at play in this narrative. For our rabbinic tradents, ascription is not necessarily bound up with questions of authority. Rather, it provides the opportunity for better understanding the text in light of its composer, and ultimately the one to whom the psalm is attributed.75 Similar to the fact that some rabbinic tradents assumed Adam to be the author of Psalm 92 and Moses the composer of Psalms 91–100, many rabbinic interpreters imagined that any psalm could reflect biographical details of David’s life. Furthermore, even verses without textual difficulties could be read in light of David. Y. Ḥag. 2:1 77c contains an authorial narrative featuring an unproblematic verse that is part of a psalm with no Davidic superscription: [a] R. Abbahu in the name of R. Yoḥanan: from two letters two worlds were created – this world and the next. What is the scriptural reason? “Because with ‘Yod’ ‘Hey’ (beYah) God created the world” (Isa 26:4). And we do not know which was created with the Yod and which with the Hey. But, what is written: “these are the generations of the heaven and the earth when they were created (behibbare’am)” (Gen 2:4) – they were created with a Hey.76 Thus this world

66  A. J. Berkovitz was created with a Hey and the next with a Yod. Just as a Hey is open at its bottom, this is a sign that anyone who comes into the world goes to Sheol. Just as a Hey has a dot on its top, at the time when they go down they will come up. Just as Hey is open on all sides, thus the doors are open for all those who repent. Just as a Yod is bent, so too everyone comes into this world bent, (as it says) “every face turned pale” (Jer 30:6).77 [b] When David saw that this was the case, he began (hitḥil) to praise with (those) two letters: “Praise YH (hallelu yah), praise O servants of the Lord, praise the name of the Lord” (Ps 113:1). This midrash speculates about the relationship between the letters of the divine name, Yod and Hey, and the creation of the world. According to our exegete, Yod and Hey are not simply part of the Hebrew alphabet. They bear cosmic, eschatological, and anthropological significance. David, once made aware of this knowledge, composes a psalm to reflect the greatness of Yod and Hey. He is imagined as emblematizing this cosmic truth in the opening of Psalm 113, where he commands all to praise Yod and Hey, the name of the Lord. The remainder of the psalm can then be read as a panegyric to the name of the Lord (vv. 2–3), but not just any name – rather, YH. As noted above, Psalm 113 does not contain a Davidic superscription. Additionally, hallelujah appears in multiple other places and is unproblematic in this context. Nonetheless, our exegete employs the assumed Davidic ascription to enrich his interpretation. He uncovers new dimensions of a verse and further builds the biography of David. Attribution matters, not because it confers authority, but rather because it helps the interpreter better understand the text and its author. Attribution builds biography and bibliography.

Authorship and historical anchoring For some rabbinic exegetes the authorship function does more than provide data for interpreting a psalm. It can also act as a yardstick by which to measure and challenge the statements of other rabbis. In these instances, attribution provides historical context. The ascribed or assumed Psalmist composed his psalm at a particular moment in time. This act, in turn, generates a new reality. The competing rabbinic opinion does not account for the historical attribution and the world it creates. It must be rejected. Traditions that employ this tactic do not derive their exegetical explanatory power by appealing to the authority of the persona of the author. Rather, the attribution signifies a particular historical reality. It becomes a contextualizing marker, what I will call a historical anchor. In this section we will explore the use of three figures as historical anchors: David, Abraham, and Moses. The following examples will demonstrate two facts. First, authorial activity anchors a text to a specific moment in time. Second, it has little to do with granting authority. A discussion in b. Yevam. 64a-b demonstrates the use of the authorship function as historical anchoring. The Babylonian Talmud opens with a statement that

Beyond attribution and authority  67 if a woman was unable to conceive a child after ten years of marriage her husband must divorce her. He must, nonetheless, provide the price of her ketubah (marriage contract), for he may be at fault. As the conversation develops, R. Judah claims in Rav’s name78 that the ten-year rule was taught with regards to the “earlier generations,”79 who lived a long time. The “latter generations,” who do not, merely wait two and half years before getting divorced. This corresponds to three possible pregnancy cycles. Rava, disagreeing with this statement, claims: “These rules do not exist!80 Now then, who arranged (tkn) our Mishnah?81 Rebbi! And look, during the days of David the years [of a life] were diminished. As it is written: ‘the years of our life are seventy’ (Ps 90:10).” According to Rava, history declares Rav’s statement false. The ten-year rule appears in the Mishnah. Since Rabbi Judah was its final editor, the statement must have made sense in his time. In order to prove that Rabbi Judah’s life-span mirrors that of Rava’s contemporaries, he employs another historical anchor: David. By reading Psalm 90 as David – and not the textually attributed Moses82 – he leverages the factitive statement that “the years of our life are seventy” to conclude that from David’s day and onwards people did not live as long as they had earlier. For Rava, David’s connection to this psalm does not provide interpretive authority, but rather a historical marker. His statement additionally demonstrates that for some rabbis David’s words are not timeless truisms passed along from generation to generation. They are historical weapons readily wielded against the opinions of others. Historical anchoring also occurs with non-Davidic psalm composers. Y. Ta‘an. 1:1 63c-d features an example with one of the earliest psalm tradents: Abraham. The Palestinian Talmud begins by quoting 1 Kings 17:1, Elijah’s oath to Ahab that neither rain nor dew will fall unless he permits it. It continues with an argument between R. Yosi and the rabbis. One claims that God listened to Elijah only regarding rain; the other asserts that he acquiesced to Elijah’s complete request. After initially validating each position, the Palestinian Talmud cites numerous traditions that underscore the inviolability of dew. The first tradition belongs to R. Jacob of Kefar Ḥanan in the name of Shimon b. Laqish: When Abraham their ancestor did my will, I swore to him that I would never remove dew from his children forever. What is the reason? It is written ‘the Lord swore and will not change his mind, you are the high priest forever’ (Ps 110:4), and it is written there ‘to you, dew, your children’ (Ps 110:3).83 If placed in verse order the statement reads: ‘To you [I swore], dew for your children; [for] the Lord swore and will not change his mind.’ R. Jacob, along with many other late antique Jewish interpreters, ignores the Davidic superscription of Psalm 110 and reads the psalm as if it reflected the life and times of Abraham, who is not even mentioned in the psalm. The opening of this tradition, “Abraham their ancestor,” is unique within classical rabbinic literature.84 It may be read as a direct challenge to the position that claims Elijah stopped both dew and rain. Elijah lived long after Abraham and thus could not negate God’s promise to Abraham, the

68  A. J. Berkovitz ancestor of the Jews. Even if this suggestion is incorrect, there is no doubt that this tradition became a textual cudgel in the hands of a redactor eager to prove that dew cannot be removed. God’s promise to Abraham, historically reflected in Psalm 110, prevents Elijah from effecting his own. In the hands of R. Jacob and/ or the redactor, the assumed attribution to Abraham becomes a historical anchor, one that invalidates a previous opinion. Historical anchoring, although not in the context of countermanding a previous rabbinic opinion, may be seen in the relationship between Psalm 91, Moses, and Jewish demonology. As mentioned earlier, some rabbis worked within a tradition that ascribed the entirety of Psalms 90–100 to Moses. In the example explored previously, the assumed ascription allowed the exegete to ask about the compositional circumstances of Psalm 100. The following tradition, cited in the name of R. Elazar in Pesiqta de Rav Kahana 1:5, assumes Moses’s association with Psalm 91 and draws a historical conclusion from it:85 Rabbi Elazar said, “On the day that Moses had finished setting up the tabernacle” (Num 7:1) – the day the Damagers (i.e. demons) were extinguished from the world. And what is the reason? “Evil shall not befall you, no scourge come near your tent”86 (Ps 91:10) at the time87 when the Damagers are extinguished from the world. R. Elazar, reading Hebrew kly as both extinguish and complete, posits that on the day Moses set up the Tabernacle all demons of the world were exterminated. He then appeals to Psalm 91:10 for support. The factitive statement “evil shall not befall you, no scourge come near your tent” can only be correct in world where demons no longer exist. When did this happen? At the time that Moses set up the tabernacle. Three factors govern R. Elazar’s use of Psalm 91:10. First, it contains the word “tent” (’ohel), which can easily be rendered as “tabernacle” in exegetical imagination.88 R. Elazar reads the bet (‫ )ב‬preposition as instrumental instead of locative. Thus: plague (i.e. demons) shall not come (to you Israel), because of your tent (i.e. the tabernacle). Second, Psalm 91 was popularly employed as an anti-demonic charm during Late Antiquity. It appears frequently in Jewish and Christian demonological discourse as well as on numerous extant magical amulets. Third, Psalm 91 is attributed to Moses. If R. Elazar is working with this framework, then Psalm 91 becomes a Mosaic terminus ante quem, a historical anchor after which demons can no longer exist. Psalm 91 could not have been composed prior to Moses by a figure  such as Adam or Abraham. Rather, Moses’s life as envisaged in Numbers connects to that delineated in Psalm 91. In positioning this psalm as Moses’s praise, R. Elazar also subtly redefines the nature of Psalm 91 in demonological discourse. He implicitly challenges the popular use of this psalm as an anti-demonic charm. Demons do not exist. Moses killed them.89 Rather, one must read Psalm 91 as a historical record, a statement of praise and assurance against any further demonic activity. For R. Elazar, Mosaic discourse has nothing to do with authority. Rather, it becomes a historical anchor.

Beyond attribution and authority  69

Conclusion Notions of authorship and attribution are always bound by tradition, and are historically contingent. Even within rabbinic literature we cannot offer a single answer to the question: “Did the rabbis think David was the sole author of Psalms?” Nevertheless, by carefully examining early rabbinic psalm exegesis, we can determine at least three ways in which attribution functioned as a meaningful category of analysis. First, it enables questions regarding the identity of the Psalmist. Second, it provides a cue for examining the circumstances under which a psalm was composed. Third, it provides a historical vantage from which to view the implications of a psalm’s composition. In all three cases, attribution is a function of interpretation. The textual body of a psalm impacts the reading of the written or implied superscription, which in turn affects the way the body of the Psalm is understood. A full analysis of rabbinic use of psalm superscriptions, however, is a desideratum, one I hope to fulfill in the near future. This chapter additionally interfaces with the broader scholarly discourse on authorship and attribution. It argues that many rabbis would retort to Barthes that the author is merely half dead. David is not only a transmitter, but a meaningful historical marker by which a psalm text can be read and extended. His activity matters. He is half-dead, however, because we must acknowledge the complexity, variety, and non-uniformity of rabbinic psalm interpretation. In some instances, the textual Davidic marker is not a matter of interest. The psalm titles are decontextualized. These instances, however, ought not to obscure the cases in which authorship and attribution are meaningful. Meaningful, however, not for the purposes of generating authority. In this sense, this chapter rejects the interpretations of Foucault that reduce the author function to that of authority. Instead, by joining his more perceptive critics,90 we can see rabbis engaging with psalm attribution not as authorizing discourses, but as “markers inserted into discourses that were supported to be received as statements of demonstrated truth;”91 or, in the context of rabbinic psalm interpretation, bibliographic identifications inserted into tradition that aided its vitality.92 We can keep Foucault without adopting reductionism. Mroczek’s recent work on attribution also informs this chapter. Her insightful distinction between bibliography and biography proves useful for analysis. While these two functions may operate in separate spheres in texts from the Second Temple period, for the rabbinic exegetes explored above, they are related and interwoven aspects of psalm interpretation. By asking bibliographic questions, the rabbis generate biographic information. Ultimately, we are far removed from the days of Aldof Neubauer, a 19th century scholar of Judaica, who claimed that examining Jewish notions of psalm authorship and attribution from the perspective of rabbinic literature was a meaningless endeavor because: “the Talmudic doctors were not exegetes in the strict sense. They torture a scripture text for casuistical deduction, but they are much more reckless and unphilological in their Agadic expositions. . . .”93 The rabbinic comments discussed are anything but reckless. They are creative. They demonstrate that attention to attribution was a central component of rabbinic psalm

70  A. J. Berkovitz interpretation. At stake, however, was not the 19th century concern for historical philology or 20th century interest in authority. At center was the vitality of tradition, examined and elaborated through the prisms of biography and bibliography.

Notes 1 Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 280. 2 Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 3 See Najman, Seconding Sinai, 1–39. See especially 1–16. Authority, for Najman, however, moves beyond self-authentication and forgery and towards individuation and founder discourse. See her essays in Najman, Past Renewals. And more recently Najman, Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future, 26–66. For scholarship that combines authority with theology see Meade, Pseudonymity and Canon. See also van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, 27–49. 4 See Hindy Najman’s chapter in this book. 5 Bernstein, “Pseudepigraphy in the Qumran Scrolls,” 421–47. 6 Ibid., 2:446. 7 Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 51–85. 8 Ibid., 53. “What emerges is that David is not an author – that is, he does not fulfill a bibliographic function – but a developing character associated with psalmody and liturgical tradition. . . . Rather, a fruitful way to explain these practices is to think of them also as effusions of historical, ethical, and aesthetic interest in a compelling character – as biography, not bibliography.” 9 Earlier studies on psalm titles focused on superscriptions as midrash, not rabbinic interpretation of psalm attribution. These studies include Slomovic, “Toward an Understanding of the Formation of Historical Titles in the Book of Psalms.” This study, like so many others, almost entirely relies on Midrash Psalms. See also Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 403–7; Childs, “Psalm Titles and Midrashic Exegesis.” The earliest scholarly treatment of Jewish use of psalm titles appears to be Neubauer, “The Authorship and the Titles of the Psalms according to Early Jewish Authorities.” Although, he dismisses rabbinic comments fairly rapidly, claiming that “no real help is to be derived in the interpretations of the titles of the Psalms from Talmduic and Midrashic sources; these contain nothing but Agadic or legendary explanations which are quite arbitrary” (pg. 8). See also Preuss, “Die Psalmenüberschriften in Targum und Midrasch.” In attempt to truly understand rabbinic notions of authorship and attribution we cannot solely rely on those totalizing statements made by one rabbi, but rather rabbinic practices of interpretation overall. 10 Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 125–6. 11 As in the cases of Moses and Adam discussed later. 12 On the early pluriformity of Psalms and canon see Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 19–50, 156–83. 13 They may endorse a position by citing psalms as a prooftext, and even cite it with “as David said.” But the authoritative weight comes from the citation of Scripture, not the fact that it was David who said it. 14 Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 69 notices these first two tensions and thus the problem of constructing a monolithic authorial unity. While I agree with her assessment with regard to the totality of rabbinic tradition, it is possible that individual rabbis did maintain Davidic unity. This may be exemplified by the fact that many rabbinic tradents are more than comfortable ignoring the psalm title in their interpretation (see as follows). Compare, for example, y. Ber. 9:7 14b to b. Ber. 60b. The midrashim are almost entirely parallel, except that the Babylonian Talmud utilizes the Davidic ascription and the Palestinian Talmud does not. Further, some rabbinic statements require one to imagine some form of Davidic activity across the majority of the Psalter. See, for example, Lev.

Beyond attribution and authority 71 Rab. 4:7 “R. Shmuel b. Nahmani said in the name of R. Natan: David sung 120 psalms and he did not conclude any with Hallelujah until he saw the downfall of the wicked, as it is written ‘Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Praise the Lord. Hallelujah” (Ps 104:35). 15 In this sense, the psalm superscription may be considered, for only some of rabbinic interpreters, as hermeneutically marked. For further on this notion and its application to midrash see Yadin, Scripture as Logos, 48–79. 16 Namely, Psalm 50 and Psalms 73–83. Other than David, he is the most mentioned figure in psalm superscriptions. 17 See the classic study of Heinemann, The Methods of Aggadah, 27–9. 18 On paratextuality, see Genette, Paratexts. 19 Translation of scripture comes from NSRV, modified where necessary. 20 The Targum to Psalms translates mizmor as tushbaḥta’, which derives from the root shbḥ, “praise.” Further, a tradition cited in the name of R. Joshua b. Levi located in b. Pesaḥ 117a claims that mizmor is one of the ten nouns of praise in the Psalter. 21 For Lamentations Rabbah I follow the transcribed manuscript provided by the Historical Dictionary Project, which is Munich 229. All translations of rabbinic texts, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. 22 These are all various terms that signal a lament. None of these words appear in any actual psalm title. A similar complaint is lodged against the title of Psalm 3, David’s flight from Absalom in b. Ber. 7b: “‘A Psalm of David,’ it should have said ‘a lament of David’ R. Shimon b. Absalom (!) expounded, it is like a man who has a bill of debt against him. Before he pays it he is worried. After he pays it he is happy. So too with David. When God told him ‘I will raise up trouble against you from within your own house’ (2 Sam 12:11) he said, ‘perhaps it will be from a slave or a bastard who will not have mercy on me.’ When he saw that it was Absalom his son he immediately said ‘a typical child has mercy on his father.’ And he composed a psalm.” The mechanics of this parable is exactly the same, including the fact that true reckoning is mitigated. See also S. Eli. Rab. 30 for numerous similar parables featuring Asaph. 23 The phrase used here is tarbut ra‘a and occurs only a handful of times in rabbinic literature. It seems to indicate either sexual impropriety (as in m. Nid. 10:8) or rebellion (as in b. Ber. 7b). This latter source bears some genetic, or at least form-critical, connection to the Lam. Rab. source as discussed previously. Licentiousness and betrayal are not unconnected phenomenon. 24 This form of zmr is also rare in rabbinic literature. According to the Historical Dictionary Project, within classic rabbinic literature it only appears in our narrative. It does appear nine times, however, in Midrash Psalms. 25 Although the Hebrew phrase “to pour out wrath” is found frequently in the Bible, it rarely appears in Rabbinic Hebrew. This source is the only early text to employ this phrase independent of direct citation. It no doubt links to Ps 79:6 in a somewhat ironic manner. This linguistic clue provides further evidence that the entire psalm, and not just the first line, is at play in the mind of the exegete. 26 For a deft analysis of this parable and its parallels, see Stern, Parables in Midrash, 7–9, 24–45. The parallels clearly demonstrate that the parable stands on its own and was re-contextualized as necessary. 27 For hpkh by Sodom, see Gen 19:21, 25, 29. That one may initially think this is a property transfer is evident from the second half of the verse: “our houses to aliens” [is turned over], with nehefkha doing double-duty. The phrase “overturning of Sodom” occurs very infrequently in rabbinic literature. Within classical rabbinic literature it appears earlier in the Mek. R. Ishmael Amalek 2 (paralleled in Mek. of R. Shimon), and in b. B. Metz. 86b (where is it verb + noun – to destroy [hpk] Sodom). 28 For naḥala in rabbinic imagination as temple, see Mek. of R. Ishmael Shirata 10: “Four things are called ‘Inheritance’ . . . the temple is called inheritance, as it says ‘In the mountain of your inheritance’ (Ex 15:17).”

72  A. J. Berkovitz 29 A similar scene exists in b. Mak. 24a: “R. Yosi b. Ḥaninah said: Moses decreed four things on Israel and four prophets came and nullified them. Moses said, ‘And Israel will dwell in peace alone’ (Deut 33:28) and Amos came and nullified it, ‘Then I said, O Lord God, cease, I beseech you; how shall Jacob stand? for he is small. The Lord repented concerning this; ‘This also shall not be’’ (Amos 7:5–6). Moses said, ‘You will have no repose among the nations’ (Deut 28:65). Jeremiah came and nullified it, ‘The people that were left of the sword have found repose’ (Jer 31:1). Moses said, ‘He visits the iniquities of the father unto the son’ (Deut 5:8). Ezekiel came and nullified it, ‘the one that sins dies’ (Ezek 18:3). Moses said, ‘And I will make them lost among the nations’ (Lev 26:38). Isaiah came and nullified it, ‘And the lost ones will come from the land of Assyria’ (Isa 27:13). Note that just like our midrash, the formula “x came” denotes a later historical figure countermanding the statement of an earlier one.   Indeed, rabbinic tradents sometimes imagine biblical figures interacting with and interpreting texts prior to them. A few examples include Sifre Numbers 112, Sifre Deuteronomy 306, and Gen. Rab. 37:2. See also the really fascinating example in which David pulls out the book of Joshua in order to learn topography in b. Zevaḥ. 54b. 30 On the attribution of Lamentation to Jeremiah and one of its functions, see Kalman, “If Jeremiah Wrote It, It Must Be OK.” I disagree, however, with his reduction of authorship to authority. For other ancient evidence, see Berlin, Lamentations, 30–2. Jeremiah is not only the composer of Lamentations, but the main voice of the book. See Lam. Rab. 1:52, where the exegete attempts to determine who said the verse: Jeremiah or God. 31 For Isaiah composing his own work and an examination of the circumstance of one of its passages, see y. Ta‘an. 1:1 64a. 32 That Asaph is imagined as composing the entire psalm and not merely the opening verse, see a similar interchange in Lam. Rab. 3:64: “Pay them back” (Lam 3:64). Jeremiah said, “Pay them back” and Asaph said, “Return sevenfold into the bosom of our neighbors” (Ps 79:12). Here too Asaph appears in dialogue with Jeremiah. For another example in which Asaph is said to speak not just the first verse, see Gen. Rab. 65:1, in which Asaph is said to be a prophet who said Psalm 80:14, a psalm with an Asaph superscription. 33 Some traditions have it both ways, that Asaph composed this psalm and lived before the destruction. See, for example, the Targum on Psalm 79:1, which renders the superscription as follows: “A Psalm, by the hands of Asaph, regarding the destruction of the temple. He said through a spirit of prophecy. . . .” Those who wish to see Psalm 137 in light of David employ a similar tactic. See b. Git. 57b. 34 For a different, but later, version of this debate see Song of Songs Rabbah 4:4. 35 The manuscripts differ as to whether this is Levi or R. Yoḥanan, with London, Vatican, St.  Petersburg, and Paris (group A) reading Levi and Munich, Oxford 3, Oxford 51, Jerusalem, and Toronto (group B) reading R. Yoḥanan. There appear to be several distinctions between these groups that will be noted. The earlier translation is with group A. 36 Munich adds “and they do not argue.” This makes little sense in this context and is likely a harmonization with Song of Songs Rabbah 4:4. 37 Group B and Paris reads: “he was.” In the second instance Paris reads “I was” and group B remains “he was” 38 Reading with group A. This is the preferred reading as it plays on the root shwr of the cited biblical verse. This root is extremely rare, thus explaining the choice of the scribes of group B to read: “condemned,” from the root rshʿ. 39 The homily continues at some length and I have chosen to reproduce here the relevant sections. 40 It is interesting to note that the opening of this macro-unit in Leviticus Rabbah 17 ignores the title completely, beginning with “surely good.” This was of course the other strategy in dealing with titles – ignore them, they are hermeneutically unmarked. 41 See Margolis, Midrash VaYikra Rabba, 369. He may also be aided by the proximate connection of the Asaph psalms to the sons of Korah psalms.

Beyond attribution and authority  73 42 This phrase appears only a handful of times and likely indicates Rabbi Judah the Patriarch. It also only appears in the Babylonian Talmud. 43 For similar traditions, see Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 726–8. 44 Using verse like 1 Chron 6:24; 15:16–17. 45 Note that the collective authorship traditions located in b. B. Bat. 14b-15a and Song of Songs Rabbah 4:4 leave room for only one Asaph. 46 Some examples include: S. ʿOlam Rab. 6, t. Menaḥ 7:8, Sifre Numbers 143, Sifre Deuteronomy 342, Midr. Tannaim (ed. Hoffman) pg. 202, 222, b. Sanh. 111a-b. 47 Origen, however, seems to be aware of this Jewish tradition and actually spells it out. For quotation and brief discussion see Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot, 345. For Greek text see Rietz, De Origenis Prologis in Psalterium Quaestiones Selectae, 13–14. It does appear explicitly in the late supplement to Pesiq. Rav. Kah., VeZot HaBerakha 7. 48 The source for the number of sacrifices is likely the loose parallel in Tosefta Shavuot 1:2. On the variations and manifestations of this Tosefta, see Lieberman, Tosefet Rishonim, 174. 49 As a rule, most sacrifices only atone for unwitting sin and not intentional ones. 50 At least this is how I  think the redactor is reading this statement, especially with regards to the next tradition he cites. An alternative and more subversive read would be something like Moses’s confusion as to the amount of sacrifices one must bring in order to be forgiven. 51 On these meaning of todah, as well as a potential antiphonal meaning, see Amzallag, “The Meaning of Todah in the Title of Psalm 100.” 52 ֺOn the argument that in both Jewish and Hellenistic culture confession is praise, see Saul Lieberman, Tosefta Kefshuto, 850 n. 79. 53 This was clearly the case by the time of Chronicles. For the argument that the ancient Israelite cult was actually silent, see Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence. 54 That the goat for Azazel is technically considered a sacrifice is evident from the statement of R. Shimon cited before Resh Laqish, in which the Azazel goat is listed as one of the 32 sacrifices. This may also be seen in the parallel in t. Shevu. 1:2. 55 That entire psalms are referenced by the first few relevant words is also evident from places like m. Tamid 6:7 and m. Soṭah 2:3. 56 Although, there may be a pun here in which ʿal shem not only means because of, but in accordance with the name of. 57 A full lexical analysis of ’amar falls beyond the scope of this chapter. Here is one salient example directly related to psalms. The “ten sages who composed” Psalms midrash in b. B. Bat. 14b-15a reads: “David wrote (katav) the book of Psalms through the hands of ten elders.” Another version of this baraita, appearing in Song of Songs Rabbah 4:4 reads: “ten people said (’ameru) the book of Psalms,” and later “even though 10 people said (’ameru) the book of Psalms, it was not attributed to their name, but rather by the hands of David, king of Israel.” This does not mean that each of the ten people said the entire book, but rather that these ten collectively composed it. To “say” must be understood as “orally compose.” Perhaps another example is b. Pesaḥ117a, where the first person who said Hallel seems to be at stake. 58 This phrase becomes much more popular in later midrashim. 59 This, too, needs a full lexicographical analysis. It is possible that hitḥil is simply a narrative device which is unconnected to generative utterances. But, for the moment, see for Gen. Rab. 21:6, which discusses Gen 3:23: “If he eats he will live forever, therefore ‘the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden’ (3:23). When he cast him out, he began to lament, ‘behold Adam is one of us’ (3:22).” An early example that engages with Mosaic authorship of Psalm 90 appears in Sifre Deuteronomy 342, an exposition determined to figure out why Deuteronomy 33 begins with “And this is the blessing”: “behold ‘this’ adds to the first blessing that Jacob their father blessed them, ‘and this is what their father said to them, and he blessed them’ (Gen 49:28). We thus learn that from the place that Jacob our father stopped blessing Israel, from there Moses began,

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69

70 71

as it says: ‘and this is the blessing that he blessed.’” Moses begins where Jacob left off. This logic and exegetical question is used to roughly date Psalm 90 according to one rabbinic tradent. The Sifre continues “ ‘And this is the blessing’ this adds unto the first blessing, and which one was that? ‘A prayer of Moses, man of God’ (Ps 90:1).” Even if Moses is simply reciting the psalm and not composing it, the exegete nonetheless relies on an implied ascription to generate knowledge about the time and context of recitation. The attribution remains important. Not for authority, but for interpretation. In other words, sometimes tradition is authority-less. No one is assigning this psalm to Adam to make it compelling or persuasive. It is, in some respects, similar to the decorative pseudepigrapha that Bernstein describes. However, rabbinic readers make it functional. The parallel in Lev. Rab. 10:5 is clearly secondary. Even more secondary, although more interesting, is the parallel in Ecc. Rab. 1:2, which incorporates the Sabbath of the Psalm title into the midrash. Cain was forgiven on the Sabbath day. Reading with Oxford 147 and Munich 97. Stuttgart 32 has Huna, and the Venice printing has Ḥama. For another example of “stand and say” as a generative utterance, see Mek. R. Ishmael BaḤodesh 5. This seems to also be used in some contexts of prayer. Then again, perhaps it is just a declarative (at least within a legal context) as in Deuteronomy 25:8. The Lev. Rab. 10:5 parallel reads: “At that time Adam the First said mizmor shir leyom Hashabbat.” Both, regardless, suggest narrative “presentness.” Another similarity is God’s anger, this time directed at Moses. If the attributions are to be trusted, R. Levi and R. Ḥaninah b. Yitzhak are contemporaries. Could the tradition have been invented in third century Palestine? Strack and Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, 328–30. See also Adelman, The Return of the Repressed Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer and the Pseudepigrapha. The first edition has R. Ishmael. The entire chapter is an extended verse-by-verse commentary on Psalm 92, mostly reading it in light of Adam. For the author of Pirq. R. El., Sabbath came and advocated on behalf of Adam, thus saving him from punishment in hell. In thanks he began to keep the Sabbath and composed a psalm in its honor. This passage has numerous early parallels including t. Ber. 6:25, where it is attributed to R. Meir, and Sifre Deuteronomy 36. I chose to cite and explore the Palestinian Talmud version because it is more explicit about David’s compositional activity. The Sifre Deuteronomy passage contains the unique phrase hitḥil soder ʿaleha ’et hashevaḥ, which needs further exploration. A parallel expression can be found in Ecc. Rab. 1:1. Soder does mean ‘arrange,’ but also to mentally prepare, or recite in an organized manner. It is quite possible that that this line is an Aramaic calque, in which shevaḥ means “psalm/praise” and soder means “recite.” See, for example, b. Ber. 13a  – “it is the prophet who relates the praise of (mesadder shivḥeh) Abraham as he originally was.” This refers to the prayer of Nehemiah in Neh 9:7. For a similar Hebrew sentence, see b. Ber. 32a – “really a person should recite the praise of God (yasdir ’adam shivḥo) and only then pray.” The collocation of seder and shevaḥ as recite praise appears frequently in Targum Psalms. For one example, see Tg. Ps. 65:9. I am omitting from this translation the scribal insertion of “circumcision on his flesh.” This either anticipates the conclusion or, rather, is a harmonization based on the parallel passage in b. Menaḥ 43b. The motif of divine protection is present in the Tosefta version and entirely omitted in the Sifre version, which, instead, wishes to highlight commandments as beautifying adornments. It introduces our passage with: “Israel is beloved because God surrounded them with commandments,” and concludes the David narrative with: “A parable to a king of flesh and blood that says to his wife, ‘be adorned in all sorts of adornments in order that you may be desirable to me,’ so too God said to Israel, ‘my children be excellent in commandments in order that you may be desirable to me,’ as it says ‘you

Beyond attribution and authority  75 are beautiful as Tirtzah, my love’ (Song 6:4), you are beautiful when you are desirable to me.” On this parable see Kaplan, My Perfect One, 112–14. For an explanation of the normative force mitzvah as protection in the our Tosefta and Sifre passage, see Novick, What Is Good, and What God Demands, 100–4. 72 This is especially true if he composed Psalm 12 at this moment, one in which he asks for God’s protection from the double-hearted. 73 In many respects these authorship narratives are very much akin (and likely part of ) the genre of rabbinic midrash scholars called narrative midrash. See Levinson, The Twice-Told Tale. 74 Operating in the background, of course, is the fact that circumcision occurs on the eighth day. 75 A similar move appears in Lev. Rab. 32:2. Here an exegete attempts to understand the obscure shiggayon leDavid of Psalm 7. 76 Midrashically reading: behey baram – “they were created with a Hey.” 77 What is being referred to, likely, is actually the beginning of the verse: “Ask now, and see, can a man bear a child? Why then do I see every man with his hands on his loins like a woman in labor? Why has every face turned pale?” 78 There is some manuscript variation as to whether and how many tradents come between R. Judah and Rav. It does not matter for my purposes. 79 “Early generations” is used in rabbinic literature in two senses. The first refers to those generations of the biblical era. See Sifre Deuteronomy 310; b. Sanh. 69b. More often, however, the “earlier generations” are compared to the “latter generations” in order to highlight the shortcomings of the latter. See, for example, b. Ber. 35b, b. ʿEruv 64b, b. Git 81a. The phrase seems to cluster in the Babylonian Talmud. With regards to Rav’s use of “earlier generations,” it is unclear if he means biblical figures or earlier rabbis. Rava seems to understand Rav as referring to the latter. Or, at the very least biblical characters post-David. It is entirely possible, given the previous discussion in the Talmud, that Rav employed “earlier generations” to signal pre-Davidic biblical figures such as Abraham and Sarah. 80 The phrase letenhu lehani kelale “these are not rules” is a formula that appears a limited number of times, occurring almost exclusively in Babylonian Talmud. For a brief description of possible use in another sugya, see Ephraim E. Urbach, “Tradition and Halakha,” Tarbiz 50 (1980): 150. Although it is hard to see here why in this case the general rule that Rava rejects is that “halakha is according to the anonymous tradent.” 81 On this phrase see Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine, 90–1; Epstein, Introduction to Tannaitic Literautre, 200. 82 It is not unusual to for an exegete to ignore a superscription, especially in favor of David. Perhaps Rava focuses on David because he requires a 70-year life-span and Moses lived to 120? It is additionally worth noting that according to 2 Sam 5:4 David lived 70 years. The 70 years of David’s life is thematized in both Jewish and Islamic traditions. See Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 911–12. 83 Translating midrashically. The word yaldutekha (‫“ )׳לדתיך‬your youth” was likely reanalyzed as yaldot (‫ )ילדות‬children + 2ms suffix = your children. 84 The phrase Avraham zeqenam (‫ )אברהם זקינם‬only appears in our passage. Indeed, the phrase zeqenam (‫ )זקינם‬only appears here within classical rabbinic literature. I wonder if this use is influenced by Gen 24:1: “Now Abraham was old (zaqen), well advanced in years; and the Lord had blessed Abraham in all things.” Could the blessing be the promise of dew? 85 Translating from text provided by Mandelbaum’s critical edition. I will note important variations or my deviation from his text. 86 Citing the full verse with Ms Casanatense. Ms Carmeli cites the first half and adds, “which is to say, ‘from your tents’ ” (Ps 91:10b). 87 A scribe in Ms Carmeli adds in the margins: “from the time that the Tabernacle stood.”

76  A. J. Berkovitz 88 For the phrase “Tabernacle, Tent of Meeting” see Ex 39:32. 89 The notion of Moses killing the demons has a fascinating historical analog regarding another Moses who killed all the demons  – Moses Maimonides. An episode related to Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk, an early 19th century Hasidic rabbi, relates: “Someone once asked Rabbi Menahem Mendel from Kotzk, ‘Maimonides, in his Guide for the Perplexed, denies the existence of demons and magic, but it is written in the Torah, ‘they will no longer offer their sacrifices to the demons’ (Lev 17:7)? And also, how does he reconcile with the words of Rashi [an 11th century authoritative exegete], who says that God commanded Noah to bring demons into the ark?’ The Rabbi from Kotzk responded, ‘both of these are true’ [i.e. Maimonides and the existence of demons], in the days of old demons and magic were once found. But from the day Maimonides came and said [that they do not exist] they were not found. For Maimonides was a legal judge (poseq), and in heaven they also agreed with him. Thus, his words became the present reality (halakha lemaʿase), and demons ceased from existing in the world. Translating from Hebrew of Bloom, Flowers of Rashi, 51–2. For additional references and versions of this tale, see Shapiro, Studies in Maimonides and His Interpreters, 109 n.67. 90 Najman, Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future, 36–8. 91 Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 285. 92 On “vitality” see both Najman and Chin in this book. 93 Neubauer, “The Authorship and the Titles of the Psalms according to Early Jewish Authorities,” 8.

Bibliography Adelman, Rachel. The Return of the Repressed Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer and the Pseudepigrapha. JSJSup 140. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Amzallag, Nissim. “The Meaning of Todah in the Title of Psalm 100.” ZAW 126 (2014): 535–45. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In The Book History Reader, edited by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, 2nd edition, 277–80. New York: Routledge, 2006. Berlin, Adele. Lamentations: A Commentary. Old Testament Library. Louisville: Westminister John Knox, 2004. Bernstein, Moshe J. “Pseudepigraphy in the Qumran Scrolls: Categories and Functions.” In Reading and Re-Reading Scripture at Qumran, vol. 2, 421–47. Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 107. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Bloom, Chaim Yaakov. Flowers of Rashi. Brooklyn: Balshon, 1964. Childs, Brevard S. “Psalm Titles and Midrashic Exegesis.” Journal of Semitic Studies 16(2) (1971): 137–50. Epstein, J.N. Introduction to Tannaitic Literautre: Mishnah, Tosefta and Midrash Halakha. Edited by Ezra Z. Melamed. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1963. Fishbane, Michael A. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, 113–138. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Ginzberg, Louis. Legends of the Jews. Edited by Henrietta Szold and Paul Radin. Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 2003. Halperin, David J. The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision. TSAJ 16. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988. Heinemann, Isaac. The Methods of Aggadah. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1970. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Literature, Culture, Theory 20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Beyond attribution and authority 77 Kalman, Jason. “If Jeremiah Wrote It, It Must Be OK: On the Attribution of Lamentations to Jeremiah in Early Rabbinic Texts.” Acta Theologica 29(2) (2009): 31–58. Kaplan, Jonathan. My Perfect One: Typology and Early Rabbinic Interpretation of Song of Songs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Knohl, Israel. The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2007. Levinson, Joshua. The Twice-Told Tale: A Poetics of the Exegetical Narrative in Rabbinic Midrash. Jerusalem: Magnes, 2005. Lieberman, Saul. Tosefta Kefshuto: Seder Zeraim, vol. 2. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1954. ———. Hellenism in Jewish Palestine. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1962. Margolis, Mordechai. Midrash VaYikra Rabba. Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1953. Meade, David G. Pseudonymity and Canon: An Investigation into the Relationship of Authorship and Authority in Jewish and Early Christian Tradition. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 39. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986. Mroczek, Eva. The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Najman, Hindy. Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 77 Leiden: Brill, 2003. ———. Past Renewals: Interpretative Authority, Renewed Revelation, and the Quest for Perfection in Jewish Antiquity. JSJ 53. Leiden: Brill, 2010. ———. Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future: An Analysis of 4 Ezra. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Neubauer, Adolf. “The Authorship and the Titles of the Psalms according to Early Jewish Authorities.” In Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica, vol. 2, 1–58. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890. Novick, Tzvi. What Is Good, and What God Demands: Normative Structures in Tannaitic Literature. JSJSup 144. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Preuss, Horst D. “Die Psalmenüberschriften in Targum und Midrasch.” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 71 (1959): 44–54. Rietz, Walter. De Origenis Prologis in Psalterium Quaestiones Selectae. Jena: H. Pohle, 1914. Shapiro, Marc B. Studies in Maimonides and His Interpreters. Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2008. Slomovic, Elieser. “Toward an Understanding of the Formation of Historical Titles in the Book of Psalms.” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 91(3) (1979): 350–80. Stern, David. Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Strack, Hermann L. and Günter Stemberger. Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash. 2nd edition. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1992. van der Toorn, Karel. Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Urbach, Ephraim E. “Tradition and Halakha.” Tarbiz 50 (1980): 136–63. Yadin, Azzan. Scripture as Logos: Rabbi Ishmael and the Origins of Midrash. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

5 Correcting the gospel Putting the titles of the gospels in historical context Matthew D. C. Larsen

Critical scholars do not think that real, historical persons named Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John wrote the gospels now ascribed to them. The texts that we now know by these names originally circulated anonymously. The standard scholarly perspective holds that sometime during the second century the titles “According to . . .” became attached to gospels.1 Nevertheless, it is almost perfunctory nowadays for critical scholars of the gospels to add a footnote at some introductory point saying, for heuristic reasons, that they retain the names, say, “Mark” or “Thomas,” even though scholars do not believe a historical person by such a name actually wrote the book. Yet when scholars retain a human name, even as a mere placeholder for an anonymous author, the name itself smuggles in other ideas. When one preserves the name “Mark,” for instance, the ascription imports with it the idea of an authorfigure. In turn, an author-figure named “Mark” conjures up the idea of a book.2 An author-figure producing a book may even encourage one to imagine an act of publication. We have moved quickly – almost unconsciously – from the paratextual titles in gospel manuscripts, “According to Mark,” to an author figure named Mark producing and publishing a book called a gospel. The problem, however, is that the Greek formula used in manuscripts which ascribe a name to these anonymous gospel texts, “according to . . .” (kat’ andra) never denotes authorship in the ancient world; that is, not until it comes to denote authorship to later Christian readers of the gospels.3 Modern readers often intuitively conflate the name in an ancient title of gospel texts with authorship. I argue that titles can be viewed in more nuanced and productive ways.4 Prior to the late second century CE, the formula kat’ andra is never used in a title to name an author figure who authored a book.5 The formula is used in titles and denotes a variety of things apart from authorship. So, paratextually speaking, if “according to + the name of a person” in a title has no precedent for referring to authorship, the tightly concatenated string of events detailed above (The [gospel] according to Mark → the Gospel of Mark → Mark as author figure → the author’s production and publication of a book called the Gospel) needs to be reconsidered.6 This is precisely the question I explore in this chapter. I intend to create an opportunity to rethink the relationship between authorship and authority in the context of gospel textualization of the first and second centuries CE. My thesis is that,

Correcting the gospel 79 prior to later Christian renderings, the kat’ andra phrase denoted a corrector of a fluid tradition, not an author. Thus, I challenge the idea of a clean or direct link between authorship, textual containment, and the gospel among early Christian communities. If the names attached to gospel traditions were not read as denoting an author-figure, then the appellation should not be read, as it traditionally is, as an authorizing device: legitimating a gospel tradition by linking it to an apostle. In other words, we must look beyond discourses of “authority” and authorization in order to understand the application of names to gospel texts in the first and second centuries. Others have noted the uniqueness of the titles attached to the gospels, though they nevertheless assume that the titles were inserted as a way of referring to the gospel’s author.7 Usually scholars offer theological or practical explanations for the innovation. Modern scholars often hypothesize that the Evangelists were too humble to assert their own authorship.8 Alternatively, many scholars have suggested that kata + person’s name was added later in the textual tradition for practical reasons: to differentiate one gospel from another within early Christian libraries.9 For example, after asserting that the gospels were circulated anonymously and without titles, Harry Gamble writes: When more than one Gospel narrative became available in a Christian community two problems emerged. The first was theological: it seemed inappropriate to speak of Gospels (in the plural), for theologically speaking the gospel was spoken of in the singular as one Christian message. The second was practical: how these documents were to be distinguished from each other. The peculiar form of the titles of the Gospels – the gospel (singular) according to (kata) a putative individual author (Mark, Matthew, and so on) – may well have arisen for a practical reason: “the titles were necessary for arranging the Gospels in community libraries and for liturgical reading.”10 There are some important problems with Gamble’s position. First, the word euangelion (translated above by Gamble as “the Gospel”) is frequently used in the plural euangelia to refer to “good tidings” that consist of effectively one message of good news, not multiple discrete and potentially conflicting messages.11 Second, Gamble’s assertion requires the presence of Christian libraries in the second century, which is possible but speculative. Moreover, no evidence exists of similarly titled but different books by different authors being distinguished in other ancient libraries with a kata + author’s name. For instance, at the Herculaneum library multiple copies of Philodemus’s and Epictetus’s works were preserved alongside one another, but never was the kata formula used to differentiate one version from another.12 Neither of these explanations enjoys firm historical grounding. In any case, the fact remains that kat’ andra used in a title never denotes the author of a work prior to later Christian reinterpretation of the form as relating to authorship. In what follows I offer a few examples from the first century BCE through the second century CE of kat’ andra attached to a text and show what such a formula indicated. I point to Homeric scholia, to medical technical literature, and to

80  Matthew D. C. Larsen the “memoirs of Nehemiah” in order to demonstrate that the formula kat’ andra (as well as kata poleis, “according to a city”) was attached to texts, especially notes (hupomnēmata) or corrections (diorthōseis), to denote a corrector, editor, or owner of a fluid text – not an author.13 The texts in question usually had authors, but the authors were not the persons named after kata. Turning to the earliest uses of the formula to describe early Christian gospels (Irenaeus and early papyri with gospel titles), I argue that, similarly, the formula was used so as not to name an author of a gospel text, but to name a corrector, editor, or someone else involved in the textualization of the gospel. My thesis then complicates any sort of clean author-authority relationship in early Christian gospels in particular and early Christian textual culture more generally. I will demonstrate that, in the first and second centuries CE, an author-figure is not needed to have an authoritative text; the one who textualizes a discourse is not necessarily an author; and, what is written is not necessarily a “book,” at least not the sense of a stable thing providing “containment” to a text.14

Didymus Chalkenturus and the personal and city editions of The Iliad The Homeric scholia offer useful examples of the kat’ andra formula. The formula is used to name an editor or corrector of the Iliad. Clear examples of this usage come out in the scholia of Didymus of Alexandria, an ancient Greek philologist. Didymus lived and taught in Alexandria and Rome from the second half of the first century BCE into the beginning of the first century CE, roughly contemporary with Cicero and Augustus.15 He was a prolific writer.16 A rich picture of Homeric textual pluriformity emerges in the scholarship of Didymus, who, according to Martin West, “cites the widest range of sources and provides the greatest quantity of information overall about Alexandrian scholars and the texts of the Iliad that they consulted.”17 Like many texts in antiquity, the text of Homer’s Iliad was relatively fluid – not closed off, stabled, or contained within a single “book.”18 As a performance text, it was especially open to textual variation and improvisation.19 Faced with such variation, Alexandrian scholars during the turn of the eras spent much energy trying to fix the text of Homer. Paradoxically, though, each time a scholar made a new edition of Homer, it served only to create a new instantiation of textual transformation, thereby further reifying the Iliad’s textual fluidity. Didymus mentions three types of witnesses to the text of the Iliad: (1) editions (hai ekdōseis), which included corrected editions (hai diorthōseis), (2) notes (ta hupomnēmata), and (3) writings (ta sungrammata).20 In antiquity, the author of the Iliad was not in question: the text came from Homer. But how would one indicate others who contributed to ongoing alteration of Homer’s text, such as the corrector of various editions (hai ekdōseis) or the one who produced notes (ta hupomnēmata)? Didymus offers an answer. In his scholia, Didymus uses the formula hai kat’ andra to refer to correctors of the Iliad, though

Correcting the gospel 81 it was of course already authored, as well as to denote persons who produced notes (hupomnēmata). Among the different editions, Didymus differentiates versions of the Iliad not in general circulation – “the all” (hai pasai) or “the very elegant” (hai chariesterai) – from those in general circulation – “the popular” (hai dēmōdeis) or “the common” (hai koinai).21 He further differentiates between the versions not in general circulation by speaking of personal corrected editions and corrected editions associated with a particular city or location.22 Personal editions are ones “identified by a man’s name.”23 The named man was the producer or perhaps owner of the particular version of the Iliad. The city editions are versions that, for a variety of possible reasons, came to “designated by the names of cities or regions.”24 The personal corrected editions are identified as hai kat’ andra; the local corrected editions as hai kata poleis.25 For instance, book twenty-two of the Iliad narrates the death of Hector at the hands of Achilles. Lines 33–110 describe a dialogue between Hector and his parents. His parents beg him not to fight Achilles, fearing for his life. Hector, however, explains that his two best options both involve direct (and dramatic) combat with Achilles. Hector ends his speech with a passage that is found in various versions known to Didymus. It reads: “So it would be more profitable (polu kerdion) for me/either to go face Achilles and kill him/or to be famously slaughtered by Achilles in defense of the city.”26 In this reading of the text, Hector speaks about his options in terms of profit: with the whole city watching, defeating Achilles in battle or dying in defense of Troy are much more profitable to Hector than bowing out of the fight. As we have noted, the Iliad is not a stable text, and various versions contain different readings. Didymus addresses the textual pluriformity in line 108 by noting other readings of the text that are known to him. His lemma and scholion for 108a1 reads: more profitable: the personal editions read “{much} better.”27 Here, Didymus cites some editions of the Iliad that he knows which contain the reading “better,” rather than “profitable.” The change seems to him an improvement. He identified the editions containing the better reading as “personal editions” (hai kat’ andra), though it is not precisely clear from Didymus’s comment whether he refers to “personal corrected editions” (hai kat’ andra diorthōseis) or “personal editions of the Iliad” (hai kat’ andra Iliades). In his classification of Didymus’s sources, Martin West places the phrase used here (hai kat’ andra) under Didymus’s category of “personal corrected editions” assuming that the word diorthōseis should be supplied with the article hai, resulting in hai kat’ andra diorthōseis, “the personal corrected editions.”28 It is just as likely, I think, that hai could be short for hai Iliades, and that Didymus here refers to “the personal editions of the Iliad” which contain the better reading. In this sense, the phrase that Didymus uses, “kat’ andra,” refers to the personal edition of someone who corrected the text of the Iliad into what he believed was a better version.

82  Matthew D. C. Larsen No matter which way Didymus’s comment is read, the person’s name following kata does not identify an author-figure – the author of the Iliad, as far as all were concerned, was Homer. Rather, the kat’ andra formula denotes the name of a corrector attempting to negotiate a pluriform text. Alongside the plural formula hai kat’ andra referring to a collective group of corrected personal editions of a text, Didymus also uses the singular form (hē kat’ andra) to refer to the corrected editions of named individuals. In book two, after Agamemnon’s insincere offer to leave the shores of Troy and in response to Thersites’s famous remarks, Odysseus puts the long-winded Thersites in his place. Toward the close of his remarks he says, I tell you this, so help me it’s the truth: if I catch you again, blithering on this way (ei k’ eti s’ afrainonta kichēsomai hōs nu per hōde), let Odysseus’ head be wrenched off his shoulders, never again call me the father of Telemachus if I don’t grab you, strip the clothing off you, cloak, tunic and rags that wrap your private parts, and whip you howling naked back to the fast ships, out of the armies’ muster – whip you like a cur!29 Thereafter, Odysseus smashes Thersites over the back and shoulders with his scepter. General laughter ensues among the armies, raising everyone’s spirits. The text in question for Didymus comes in line 258: the conditional clause. What is the text of the first clause? Didymus knows of another, longer version, and records a scholion that reads: If I catch you again playing a fool, like you are right now: . . . But in the edition of Philemon the Cretan it reads: “playing the fool among the Danaans [the Greeks].”30 The added words “among the Danaans” qualify Odysseus’s warning, constructing a social line about what is and is not acceptable Greek behavior. Didymus cites the extra words “en Danaoisi” as coming from “the . . . according to Philemon the Cretan” (en de tē kata Philēmona ton Krētikon).31 As earlier, the word to be supplied with the article tē could be Iliadi (“Iliads”) or, as West suggests, diorthōsei (“corrected edition”). In either case, the text in question, which is called “hē kata Philēmona,” is a corrected edition of Homer’s Iliad, and the kata + name formula cannot be read to imply that Philemon is the text’s “author.” Homer is. The scholiast knows and admits that the text is authored by Homer, and he uses the formula hē kata + name to identify Philemon as the corrector or editor of a textual tradition in variation. In addition to “corrected editions” (hai diorthōseis), the formula kat’ andra is used in connection with hupomnēmata, which can mean “commentary” but can

Correcting the gospel  83 also mean a set of notes, an aide-mémoire, public records, a rough draft, as well as several other things; translating hupomnēmata as “notes” perhaps best captures the breadth of the word’s meaning.32 Again in book two, after Agamemnon’s dream (sent from Zeus in deceit), Agamemnon stands before his soldiers: Friends – fighting Danaans, aides-in-arms of Ares! Cronus’ son has trapped me in madness, blinding ruin – Zeus is a harsh, cruel god. He vowed to me long ago, He bowed his head that I should never embark home till I had brought the walls of Ilium crashing down.33 The Greek in line 133 reads Iliou ekpersai eu naiomenon ptoliethron. Didymus is aware of a potential problem with the word Iliou. In Β 133a, Didymus’s scholion reads: Sack of Ilium: in Aristarchus’s Aristophanes edition [lit. “in the ‘according to Aristophanes’ notes of Aristarchus”] it reads “Ilium,” not “of Ilium,” and it could not be more right.34 Didymus wants to take “Ilium” as the object of ekpresai, and, in order to do so, the text needs to read “Ilium,” (Ilion) not “of Ilium” (Iliou). Didymus surveys the pluriform textual field and finds the reading he desires in Aristarchus’s Aristophanes Edition. Aristarchus’s texts are called hupomnēmata. Didymus’s scholion Β 133a muddles the question of authorship, or, more accurately, the question of authority and authorization. Who or what authorizes the “right” reading? Aristarchus? Aristophanes? Homer? Each plays a part. The hupomnēmata belong to Aristarchus, and it seems safe to assume that he has changed his text of the Iliad. Yet Aristophanes, being identified as the corrector or editor of a fluid textual tradition, somehow also authorizes the scholiast to read a variant form that he wants to see. Nevertheless the “author,” in any strict sense of the term, remains “Homer.” Thus, any simple one-to-one relationship between author and authority, at least as authority to alter a text, is decoupled in the reasoning of Didymus.35 Didymus refers not only to editions of the Iliad associated with specific people, but also to editions connected to specific places. When identifying editions of the Iliad connected to a place, Didymus uses a variety of formulas, including hai kata poleis (“according to a city”). West refers to these as “local texts.”36 Local texts, unlike hai kat’ andra, are never identified as “corrected versions” (diorthōseis), but sometimes as “published versions” (ekdoseis).37 Elsewhere, Didymus deploys the phrase “eniai tōn kata poleis” (lit. “some of the . . . according to cities” versions).38 Relative to the modern Western experience, books in antiquity were rare and expensive, and study was often undertaken in a collective setting.39 It should not be a surprise, then, that a group of people within a city or region might have a public or shared copy of the Iliad that local scholars had altered and improved as they saw fit, as we appear to see reflected in Didymus’s scholia.40 Wolf speculated that copies were brought into the library at Alexandria and, since the person

84  Matthew D. C. Larsen who had produced them was not known, they were identified by their provenance rather than by the name of their corrector.41 Again, the notion of author, authority, and authorization are comingled and interdependent. “Homer” is the author, and thus the authority for the work in an abstract sense. He is imagined as the source from which the content or genius drives. In a sense, the work belongs to him. But each location named after the kata denotes another community that authorizes a particular material instantiation of the Iliad.

Galen and the correcting literary activities of Mnemon of Side Our next comparandum comes from Rome in a time roughly contemporaneous with the appearance of the titles “kata + name” attached to gospels. Galen probably wrote his commentary on Hippocrates’s Epidemics during his time in Rome (ca. 170 CE), at the allowance of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was off on campaign. Galen’s commentary on book three of the Epidemics shares a story of Mnemon of Side and the library of Alexandria.42 Whether anything like the following story ever happened is not important for my argument. What matters is how Galen imagines textual “traditionary processes” in the middle of the second century CE, especially as regards the text’s paratextual features like titles, marginal notes, and so forth.43 Here, Galen uses the formula kat’ andra to refer to an editor, corrector, or owner of an already authored text. Galen notes that the King of Egypt, in his insatiable bibliophilic desire, would have any boats that docked in Alexandria searched for books. If books were found, he would have them copied, give the new edition back to the owner, and send the original text to be kept in the library at Alexandria. Galen relates a story about Mnemon of Side, which he says is also found in the notes (hupomnēmata) of Zeuxis, no longer extant today and difficult to find even in Galen’s own day. Mnemon was a third century BCE physician from Side in Pamphylia, so the story has ostensibly been passed down for centuries before Galen records it.44 Galen shares that some say Mnemon took book three of Hippocrates’s Epidemics out of the Alexandrian library to read it, and then marked it up with all sorts of characters, adding and interpolating at various points. Others say Mnemon brought an interpolated version of book three of Hippocrates’s Epidemics with him from Pamphylia. When the Ptolemaic King of Egypt had the usual copying of the manuscript performed, keeping the old and returning the new to the original owners, a phrase was added to the title of book three of Hippocrates’s Epidemics: They said one was found [in the library] with this inscription [i.e. From the boats] and the third book of the Epidemics [of Hippocrates] was titled: From the boats according to the corrector Mnemon of Side (kata diorthōtēn Mnēmona Sidētēn). Some say it did not have the title “according to the corrector,” but simply the name Mnemon [i.e. according to Mnemon].45 Medical technical texts were prone to updating and rewriting.46 If doctors knew a better treatment, it was incumbent upon them to change and therefore improve

Correcting the gospel  85 the text.47 The author of book three of the Epidemics was Hippocrates. Yet it was the kind of book that ancient doctors felt the freedom to improve or change, especially in their own copies. That is exactly what Mnemon does in Galen’s story. How is the corrector and owner of a text identified? In Galen’s story, one of two things were added to the title. According to Galen, some people claim that the phrase “From the boats according to the corrector Mnemon of Side” was added to the title. Others say that the title of the book itself was simply From the boats according to the corrector, Mnemon of Side (kata diorthōtēn Mnēmona Sidētēn), and yet others say that the book was called just According to Mnemon of Side (kata Mnēmona Sidētēn). As with Didymus’s scholia, kat’ andra here does not denote authorship, but rather refers to a corrector or owner of a revised version of a fluid text. Hippocrates is the author; Mnemon joins in the already existing living textual tradition by becoming a corrector or owner of one particular copy of Hippocrates’s book.48 To use the language of Hindy Najman, Mnemon, at least in Galen’s version of the story, actively contributes to a traditionary process of one strand of the Hippocratic tradition.49 He vitalizes the tradition by placing his unique stamp on it, and that stamp is identified with the kat’ andra formula, though he himself is not the text’s author.50

2 Maccabees 2:13 and Nehemiah’s records Prior to the epitomizer’s preface, 2 Maccabees contains two letters ostensibly from the Jewish community in Jerusalem and Judea. The second letter (1:10– 2:18) is sent to Aristobulus, and makes a case for why the Jews in Aristobulus’s community ought to observe the eight-day festival of the fire. Thus, it sets the stage for the main narrative following the letters in chapters 3–15. The letter to Aristobulus alludes to several stories about Jeremiah and Nehemiah not found in the Hebrew Bible. After relating stories about Jeremiah, Solomon, and Nehemiah, all of which serve to foreshadow and thus underwrite the activities of Judas Maccabeus, the letter reads, These events have been described both in the registers and the records of Nehemiah, and, when Nehemiah founded a library, he collected the books about the kings and the prophets, and of David, and the letters of the kings about votive offerings. Judas likewise also collected all the texts destroyed because of the war that had come upon us. They are still in our possession. So, if you need any of them, send people who will bring them to you.51 The Greek phrase translated into English here (as well as in the NRSV, et  al.) as “of Nehemiah” is kata ton Neemian.52 We do not know exactly what texts are in question here, but the phrase “of Nehemiah” (kata ton Neemian) does not seem to imagine “registers and records” (kai en tais anagraphais kai en tois hupomnēmatismois) which were authored by Nehemiah. Rather, here the kat’ andra formula refers to texts that Nehemiah allegedly owned and preserved.53 I offer four arguments in support of this claim. First, stories contained in the letter do not occur in the biblical book of Nehemiah. So, we should not think of

86  Matthew D. C. Larsen the phrase “the registers and records of Nehemiah” as a roundabout way of talking about the book in the Hebrew Bible called Nehemiah. Second, the context is Nehemiah’s creation of a library. The point is about Nehemiah preserving vital textual information through the exile into the post-exilic period. At issue in this text are book collection and preservation, not book production. Third, the letter tries to make Judas look like Nehemiah. Nehemiah collected records, memoranda, books, and letters. That is, he had access to a mass of textual information without clear limits, and he organized these texts into a library. Judas, like Nehemiah, also collected a variety of texts which were destroyed through the devastation wrought by Antiochus IV.54 The focus here is on safeguarding books, and not authoring them. The analogy with Judas supports the idea that Nehemiah was a preserver of the texts in question, not their producer. Fourth, the semantic range of “registers and records” denotes the kinds of text one writes recently after the event in question, not centuries later. People produce registers and records (anagraphai kai hupomnēmatismoi) to serve as a physical extension of fallible human memory. If Nehemiah had written a treatise about the activities of past figures as such Solomon and Jeremiah, one might imagine the letter to Aristobulus using various words to describe his texts – “books and writings” (biblia, sungrammata) – but not registers and records (anagraphai, hupomnēmatismoi). Thus, the use of kata + a person’s name in the phrase “in both the registers and records of Nehemiah” does not suggest an author figure as the referent, but instead points to the owner or possessor of a text. These texts are “Nehemiah’s” in the sense that he preserved them and filed them away, but not in the sense that he created them.

Gospel texts and the Kat’ Andra formula While later Christian readers do take “according to [name]” as a way of signifying an author of a gospel, the earliest evidence connecting the kat’ andra formula with gospel texts is less straightforward. Once the historical context of the formula is taken into consideration, the clean relationship between author and authority by means of a finished or published book called a gospel is troubled, and rendered problematic. Here I discuss two early data points: early papyri containing gospel titles, and Irenaeus of Lyon. Early papyri demonstrate the kat’ andra formula connected to gospel texts, but it is unclear whether the formula is used to denote an author. In what follows, I pay close attention not just to what title a papyrus contains, but how the title is displayed. I will begin by discussing the curious case of P.Bodmer XIV-XV, in which the end title of one gospel and the beginning title of another appear together on the same page: ΕΥΑΓΓΕΛΙΟΝ ΚΑΤΑ ΛΟΥΚΑΝ

Correcting the gospel 87 ΕΥΑΓΓΕΛΙΟΝ ΚΑΤΑÏΩΑΝΗΝ In this papyrus, Kataiōanēn (“kata + John”) is moved to the line below euaggelion (“Gospel”), but not due to space constraints. Plenty of space was available to record the formula on the same line. In fact, in this papyrus Irenaeus’s whole to kat’ andra euaggelion formula would have fit comfortably. P.Bodmer XIVXV also puts euaggelion, kata, and loukan (“Luke”) on three descending lines. In both cases, it appears the kat’ andra formula was placed on a different line below euaggelion for reasons other than space constraints. A similar pattern is seen also in the fragmentary title page found with the fragments known as P4. According to Simon Gathercole, in the title found on this “flyleaf,” the words katamath’thaion clearly appears below euaggelion, though in this case the papyrus is so fragmentary that it is hard to determine whether this was due to space constraints.55 “According to . . .” appears below “gospel” in many other early gospel manuscripts.56 Do such “bibliographic codes” matter for the study of early gospel papyri?57 That is, does it make a difference that kat’ andra appears on a different line below euaggelion? Taken in isolation, it is difficult to make meaning of the physical arrangement of kat’ andra and euaggelion in P.Bodmer XIV-XV and P4. But when compared with other examples, a discernable trend begins to arise. Other comparable papyri place the name of the author in the genitive case immediately before the title of the work, as is the case, for instance, with the titles 1 and 2 Peter and Jude in Bodmer composite codex (P.Bodmer VII and P.Bodmer VIII).58 In these manuscripts, Peter and Jude are unmistakably denoted as the authors of the respective texts, but they achieve this in a very different way than we would expect if the kat’ andra formula did indeed denote authorship in these early New Testament manuscripts. The name of the author in the genitive before the title, though less frequently after the title, was the common way to ascribe authorship in ancient Greek texts. Francesca Schironi, in her book To Mega Biblion, catalogues titles in papyri across a spectrum of genres.59 The kat’ andra formula is never used to denote an author in the papyri catalogued by Schironi. For comparison, here are some examples from Schironi’s book of titles in papyri dated to the second century CE: P.Oxy. 53.3715: Euripides’s | Phoenissae (ΦΟΙΝΙΣΣΑΙ | ΕΥ[Ρ]ΙΠΙΔΟΥ)60 P.Köln inv. 3328: Lollianus’s | Phoenicica | Book 1 (ΛΟΛΛΙΑΝΟΥ | ΦΟΙΝΕΙΚΙΩ[Ν] | Α)61 P.Oxy. 9.1176  =  P.Lond.Lit. 122: Satyrus’s | Bion Anagraphe | 6 | Life of Aeschylus | Sophocles | Euripides (ΣΑΤΥΠΟΥ| ΒΙΩΝ ΑΝΑΓΑΦΗΣ | ς | ΑΙΣΧΥΛΟΥ | ΣΟΦΟ ΚΛΕΟΥΣ | ΕΥΡΙΠΙΔΟΥ)62 P.Oxy. 45.3209: Alcman | Book 6 (ΑΛΚΜΑΝΟΣ | Μ[Ε]ΛΩΝ ς)63 The genres represented above include tragedy, fiction prose narrative, biography, and lyric poetry. All use the genitive to ascribe authorship, as we saw in P75

88  Matthew D. C. Larsen above. While there are certain cases of the name of the author coming after the title, as in P.Oxy. 53.3715 (as well as P.Oxy 42.3000, dated from the first century BCE to the first century CE, which reads “Eratosthenes’s Hermes” [ΗΡΜΗΣ | ΕΡΑΤΟΣΘΕΝΟ[ΥΣ]]),64 it is much more common to have the author in the genitive immediately before the title.65 The scrolls in Herculaneum, likewise, show the author’s name first in the genitive followed by the title of the work.66 Alternatively, Galen occasionally refers to an author with a passive verb or participle and hupo followed with a genitive of the author’s name – for example, “in the things written by Plato” (tois hupo Platōnos eirēmenois).67 Schironi notes two types of papyri that do not have an ascribed author. First, texts with a well-known author often lack an ascribed author. The Iliad and the Odyssey are notable examples.68 Schironi imagines two possible reasons why Homeric end-titles do not supply the name of Homer as an author. Perhaps it is because Homer is the poet par excellance, and there is no need name the author. Or perhaps it is because the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey was hotly debated.69 Alternatively, sub-literary texts – those not intended for circulation, such as school products – would also not require an ascribed author. A school would not have needed to have an author ascribed either because the readers would have known the author or it was a collective product or because it was the type of text, like a glossary of terms, not suited to an author. In this context, it is clear that the kat’ andra formula attested in early gospel papyri – with the gospel (euangelion) on one line and kat’ andra on the following line, without a clearly ascribed author – does not reflect the ancient conventions of titles and ascribed authorship. There is no historical precedent supporting the idea that the kat’ andra formula ascribes authorship, nor it is clear that it is meant as part of the title, since it is presented on a following line. P66 (P.Bodmer II) provides the sole evidence of an early gospel papyrus placing kat’ andra on the same line as euaggelion in a beginning title.70 I argue that the peculiarities of this case demonstrate that P66 is precisely an exception that proves rule. While it does have the title (euaggelion) and the kat’ andra formula on the same line, something curious appears in between the two. In between euaggelion and Kata iōanēn, strangely, is a paragraphos.71 Paragraphoi are used to denote new sections, new paragraphs, new speakers, and some other forms of textual break.72 The title in P66 does not appear to be from a different hand. So, in one case among early papyri when euaggelion and kat’ andra do appear on the same line, the scribe placed a paragraphos to indicate that the reader should understand some kind of a break between euaggelion and Kata iōanēn (“kata + John”). If Kata iōanēn was understood by the scribe responsible for the papyrus to denote authorship, why the paragraphos? Why not allow the title and the author of the text to remain uninterrupted on the same line, as later manuscripts do with gospel titles, and as P72 does with 1 and 2 Peter and Jude? Perhaps the paragraphos is merely decorative. Yet since this is the only example of an early papyrus placing kat’ andra and euaggelion on the line (as some other comparable papyri do with other author’s and titles), the fact that a scribe inserted a paragraphos to separate the two suggests it is in fact more than mere decoration. If the

Correcting the gospel 89 scribe who produced P66 wanted to denote “John” as the author of the gospel, he did not do a very good job by the standards of his day. Simon Gathercole has noted: One might also make the common-sense point that titles such as kata maththaion and kata loukan would sound like gibberish at least to outsiders, rather as talking of ‘the Browning version’ (which Browning? version of what?) or ‘the Authorized Version’ (of what? authorized by whom?) would to those unfamiliar with these short-hands.73 I appreciate his analogy, but I want to take the analogy a step further. From a bibliographic point of view, it matters whether one puts “the Authorized Version” on the same line as “the Bible.” The Authorized Version of the Bible or The Bible The Authorized Version Similarly, it matters whether one puts “the Browning version” on the same line as Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. The difference between these ascriptions being modifiers, and them being part of the title is rather thin. In neither case, however, does the example cite authors producing and publishing their own unique books. Rather, they represent a person or group participating as translators or transmitters of a living textual tradition. I acknowledge that the papyri and gospel title evidence is not as clear as one might wish, and I am wary of asking too much of the evidence. I have demonstrated, however, that (1) the presence of a paragraphos in the title in P66 is peculiar and (2) in early papyri the use of the kat’ andra formula does not reflect ancient conventions of authorial ascription in other comparable early papyri, especially since there is no historical precedent for the use of kat’ andra to denote authorship. Rather, early papyri show a reluctance to place kat’ andra and euaggelion next to each other on the same line, as was often done with author and title, and in the one example when they are on the same line, a paragraphos separates them.

Irenaeus and “gospel authorship” I now turn to Irenaeus of Lyon, whose text holds the earliest literary use of the kat’ andra connected with the gospels. Irenaeus marks a stark pivot from previous uses of the term “gospel” qua textual object: he is the first to imagine the gospel as a published, authored book, with each gospel being separate from another. The kat’ andra formula helps Irenaeus to construct a unity out of a gospel tradition that

90  Matthew D. C. Larsen is textually pluriform. Prior to Irenaeus, one can observe a remarkable variety of configurations of the relationships between gospel, text, and authority. Christians have not always been a “people of the book,” at least when it comes to their source of authority. Other Christians at the end of the first and throughout most of the second century had regarded the Lord [= Jesus] as the author or authorizer of the gospel (the Didache, 2 Clement), or the gospel as personified and somehow selfauthorizing (Theophilus of Antioch), or the gospel(s) as a fluid constellation of textual residue of apostolic teaching and memory (Justin Martyr). Irenaeus, however, transforms the mushrooming gospel textual tradition into discrete, stable books called “gospels”74 that are associated with human authors.75 He even goes so far as to geotag and time-stamp the texts through his discussion of the moments and places of each gospels’ publication.76 In the writings of Irenaeus, we see percolating to the surface a tension between the gospel as oral proclamation and the gospel as textual object.77 Relatedly, we see also a tension between a singular gospel and the multiplicity of gospels; there are different gospel books but there is one (true) gospel message. Yet, in Adversus Haereses 3.11 Irenaeus goes a step further: he argues not only that the overall message of the gospel is singular, but that each gospel in fact takes part in a singular “four-formed” gospel. When Irenaeus refers to the four-formed gospel in Adversus Haereses. 3.11.8 and then also quotes the opening of different gospels, it is clear he refers to a singular textual gospel constellation that encompasses multiple, different texts – a multi-form textual tradition. This theme only occurs in a few discrete places throughout Irenaeus’s work. On such occasions, what language does Irenaeus employ to construct a unity around disparate textual traditions? The kat’ andra formula. While Irenaeus refers to “gospel” 101 times in Adversus Haereses, the kat’ andra formula, surprisingly, only appears a handful of times. Leaving aside 1.26–27, which only remains in a Latin translation, Irenaeus, in all five books of Adversus Haereses, only uses kat’ andra eight times in 3.11.7–9 and once in 3.12.12.78 Here Irenaeus not only argues that the gospels (plural) are in agreement (sumphōna) with each other,79 but he goes a step further to argue that they are in fact all part of a singular (yet textually pluriform) gospel. Irenaeus analogizes the “simultaneously singular and multiple” gospel as one of the four-headed creatures from Ezekiel 1:6–10: one animal with four faces.80 It is simultaneously a message and a textual tradition; it is simultaneously a textual tradition and many different texts. The gospel for Irenaeus functions almost as a Platonic ideal with four materializations. Within such a framework, the kat’ andra formula is productive for Irenaeus. Based on how we have seen the formula used in the preceding and contemporary examples of Didymus, Galen, and 2 Maccabees, the kat’ andra formula is wellsuited to allow him to bring order to and circumscribe a pluriform and mushrooming textual tradition that has a near mythical author figure  (God/Jesus, as is the case with Homer and Hippocrates). As with the Homeric editions and the various versions of medical texts and the records of Nehemiah, the formula also allows Irenaeus to name a variety of authoritative persons engaged in the altering,

Correcting the gospel 91 editing, or correcting, though not “authoring,” the same work in different places, without creating the idea that the different versions are in fact different works. In 3.11.8, he writes It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout all the world, and the “pillar and ground” of the Church is the Gospel and the spirit of life; it is fitting that she should have four pillars, breathing out immortality on every side, and vivifying men afresh. From which fact, it is evident that the Word, the Artificer of all, He that sits upon the cherubim, and contains all things, He who was manifested to men, has given us the Gospel under four aspects, but bound together by one Spirit (tetramorphon to euangelion, heni de Pneumati sunechomenon). As also David says, when entreating His manifestation, “You that sit between the cherubim, shine forth.” For the cherubim, too, were four-faced, and their faces were images of the dispensation of the Son of God. For, [as the Scripture] says, “The first living creature was like a lion,” symbolizing His effectual working, His leadership, and royal power; the second [living creature] was like a calf, signifying [His] sacrificial and sacerdotal order; but “the third had, as it were, the face as of a man,” – an evident description of His advent as a human being; “the fourth was like a flying eagle,” pointing out the gift of the Spirit hovering with His wings over the Church. And therefore the Gospels are in accord with these things, among which Christ Jesus is seated.81 Irenaeus goes on to connect each of the four faces of creatures with a gospel: the [Gospel] according to John is the eagle; the [Gospel] according to Luke is the ox; the [Gospel] according to Matthew is the human; the [Gospel] according to Mark is the lion. He continues: Such, then, as was the course followed by the Son of God, so was also the form of the living creatures; and such as was the form of the living creatures, so was also the character of the Gospel (ho charaktēr tou euangeliou). For the living creatures are quadriform, and the Gospel is quadriform, as is also the course followed by the Lord (tetramorpha gar ta zōa, tetramorphon kai to euangelion, [tetramorphos] kai hē pramateia tou Kuriou).82 For this reason were four principal (katholikai) covenants given to the human race: one, prior to the deluge, under Adam; the second, that after the deluge, under Noah; the third, the giving of the law, under Moses; the fourth, that which renovates man, and sums up all things in itself by means of the Gospel, raising and bearing men upon its wings into the heavenly kingdom.83 The Greek word pragmateia (as indicated, “the course (pragmateia) followed by the Lord”) refers to the business, actions, affairs, or – basically – what the Son of God or the Lord [= Jesus] has done. Irenaeus wants to show how “fourness”

92  Matthew D. C. Larsen and “oneness” are not only compatible, but that they are logically symbiotic in the divine economy. The fourness/oneness motif is derived from the four-headed creatures in Ezekiel 1:6–10 but Irenaeus also claims that it appears in the universal covenants, in the activities of Jesus, and, thus, also in the gospel. To do so, Irenaeus reaches for a formula used in Homeric scholia to denote a corrector of the tradition, as it is well-suited to make sense of different versions of a textual tradition. It is not surprising, given Irenaeus’s theological understanding of the gospel tradition, how he has understood and made use of the kat’ andra formula. The kat’ andra formula denotes textual revision. But there are other modes of textual revision described by Irenaeus. He writes in book one about centos of Homer, which he feels debase the text through improper use. Works like the commentaries and corrected editions of Aristarchus (discussed above), for instance, may be compared to the “Homerocentones” – people who reuse half and full lines from Homer as raw material in order to make their own works (cento, “patchwork”), often of significantly debased quality.84 For Irenaeus, it would seem the textual redactions of the correctors of Homer, like the writings of the kat’ andra gospel writers, do not result in new works, but in the “best” editions of Homer. On the other hand, those who compose centos out of the lines of Homer make new, discrete works.85 At issue is whether one changes a text in order to “fix” it or to create something new – one’s own creation. In Adversus Haereses 3.11.9, Irenaeus claims that Marcion, Valentinus, and other “heretics” interpolate the gospel, and treat it lightly, with the result that they either end up with too many gospels (Valentinus) or no gospel at all (Marcion).86 Irenaeus describes the situation in Adversus Haereses 1.8.1 by way of an analogy: it is as if a master craftsperson arranged gems to display the image of a king, but then someone else came along and moved the gems around in order to depict a dog or a fox out of the same materials – a dog or a fox depicted poorly. This is what the “heretics” Marcion and Valentinus have done, according to Irenaeus – they have poorly rendered a dog out of the materials which originally depicted the king. Adversus Haereses 1.9.4 brings the comparison between Homeric scholiasts and Homerocentones into clear focus. Irenaeus mentions those who make a patchwork (cento) out of Homer, and he claims that they make something entirely different in order to support their own ideas. He even displays an example Homeric cento in 1.9.4 and shows how it has nothing to do with the “real” Homer. Those who collect and rearrange the scriptures are like those who act similarly with the lines of Homer to tell new un-Homeric stories. While the uneducated can rarely tell the difference, those like Irenaeus see their textual creations and disapprove (1.9.4). The actions of the Homerocentones differ from those who make corrected editions of Homer, just as the actions of Marcion and the Valentinians differ from those who make corrected editions of the gospel. Like Didymus with the Homeric tradition and the personal editions of the Iliad, Irenaeus always interpolates kat’ andra between to and euangelion or, more commonly, only uses to kat’ andra without euangelion.87 Recall how the conventional formula for a personal edition in Didymus’s scholia was hai kat’ andra. Likewise,

Correcting the gospel  93 when Irenaeus uses the phrase, he typically refers to “the . . . according to Mark” (to kata Markon), “the . . . according to John” (to kata Iōannēn), “the . . . according to Luke” (to de kata Loukan), or “the . . . according to Matthew” (to de kata Matthaion).88 Irenaeus puts the recognizable formula to use in order to make the case that the different gospels are not different works, but rather that they are different iterations of the same pluriform work. Again, though, only in the few places where such an argument is deemed necessary. In such cases, the formula allows him to legitimate some gospels by inventing a line of demarcation: these are in and those are out. Those with the kata are in. For “heretical gospels” Irenaeus avoids the formula altogether. For instance, he refers to the Valentinians not as the gospel according to Valentinus but as the “Gospel of Truth” (alētheias euangelion). I wish to draw an analogical link, though not a genealogical one, between Irenaeus and examples of the kat’ andra formula discussed earlier, noting that Irenaeus in Adversus Haereses 3.11.7–9 uses the kat’ andra formula in a way remarkably similar to Didymus and Galen: as a tool to help him establish the idea of four-form gospel, with one message that exists in different instantiations, and with different persons responsible for the individual textual forms.89 In order to do this, he taps into a recognized convention of ancient textual culture. Not one that ascribes an author to the text, but a corrector. Not one that calls to mind a stable, unified “book,” but rather a living textual tradition. It is important to bear in mind: Irenaeus takes this tack on a relatively few occasions; usually he imagines a speaking author figure. For instance, in 3.9.1 Irenaeus refers to Matthew and Luke speaking (phēsi . . . ho Matthaios, homoiōs de kai Loukas). His use of the kat’ andra formula is the exception, not the norm – he uses the formula when it helps his argument. He uses the kat’ andra formula in a recognizable way that allows him to unify proliferating textual traditions into a single work. It allows him to take an unwieldy and growing textual constellation of gospel texts and to invent an order from the chaos. Most of all, he uses the formula to dub some gospels apostolic and others heretical, all without conjuring up an author figure. It is used to circumscribe certain differing textual iterations of gospel into a unity, while delegitimizing others. When Irenaeus wants to argue for “the [singular] four-form gospel” (tetramorphon to euangelion), he uses the kat’ andra formula that elsewhere does not indicate authors, but correctors or editors. Ultimately, the issue for Irenaeus is about fourness and oneness. How does one make four gospels into one and the same gospel? Irenaeus analogizes the gospel as the four pillars of a building, the four corners of the world, the four heads of the animal. While different “heretics” use only one gospel, or claim to have too many gospels (3.11.9), Irenaeus wants to show the compatibility of the fourness and the oneness of the gospel. The kat’ andra formula provides a suitable tool for his purposes. What does Irenaeus’s occasional and rather specific use of the kat’ andra formula, and the titles of the gospels in early papyri mean? If they intended to convey authorship by the kat’ andra formula, they did so in a rather convoluted and transmogrified manner. It appears that something else entirely is happening here in

94  Matthew D. C. Larsen these sources. One senses a careful negotiation of authority, authorization, textual alteration, and an active attempt not to conjure up human author figures. Irenaeus and early papyri could be made to point in a variety of directions, but neither use the kat’ andra formula in a way that can be made to point unequivocally toward human author figures who authored and published unique books of their own.

Conclusion In closing, I ask: what is a historically plausible scenario that makes good sense of the available data regarding how the kat’ andra formula became attached to gospel texts? Before I address that question, I would like to make a caution about the conflating of “the gospel, according to [name]” with simply [name]. Names, naming, and the conjuring of author-figures do specific things for modern readers, but is it productively helpful work in the case of the titles of the gospels? There is no historical precedent for treating kat’ andra as ascribing authorship to a text. The historical precedent for the formula points to a corrector or editor of a pluriform and fluid textual tradition, usually with a near mythical author figure like Homer or Hippocrates, or with no author at all. The earliest uses of the formula applied to early gospel texts likewise do not fit neatly onto conventional ways of ascribing authorship, but seem to be doing something else altogether. So not only are the names attached to gospels not indicative of the real names of the people who wrote them, but the attached names were not initially even meant to ascribe an author of a book, but a corrector of one instantiation on the pluriform and open textual tradition of the gospel. How does this change the way we think about gospel, text, and authority in the first and second centuries? Authors do not precede authority, and authority does not necessitate an author. At first “gospel” traditions were regarded as authorless, or perhaps authored by the Lord or somehow personified and self-authorizing.90 Textualized gospel traditions, like the Homeric tradition and technical medical texts, were fluid and open to alteration. Various strands of gospel texts, it seems, later had names of correctors attached to them some time in the second century. The correctors of textualized gospel tradition, in a way not dissimilar to Homeric scholia and medical texts, were recorded with the kat’ andra formula, likely not by the corrector himself. The situations Winrich Löhr describes in this book about Epiphanius and Augustine and the publication of unpublished texts of “heretics,” initially designed for limited use, open to later readers’ alterations, provides us with comparanda for imagining how this process might happen with respect to the gospel in the first few centuries. What happens when an untitled, authorless text moves from the hands of a small community out into broader circulation of anonymous readers? What becomes of the altered, corrected, and reworked versions of the work? And what does one call the person who produces the textual alteration? What is the authorizing entity – the authority – behind such a work in all its various forms and instantiations? And what authority is invested in the corrector? A historically contextualized understanding of the kat’ andra formula offers a fresh perspective on such questions.

Correcting the gospel  95 So then, referring to “the Gospel According to Matthew,” for instance, simply as “Matthew” is reductive and glosses over the history of a curious phrase, a phase that seems odd when placed in the context of modern discourses on texts and their individual authors. Doing so conjures up an author-figure, wrongly. Historically speaking, the phrase “according to [name]” did not invite ancients, and does not invite us, to imagine an author producing a book, but rather suggests someone reworking an already existing tradition, passing it from the past to the future in what the corrector believes to be a more amenable form.91 It imagines the alteration of useful, almost technical texts, not literature. Speaking of a textual corrector raises important questions of authority and authorization, but not of authorship. The way scholars casually use names of authors such as Thomas, Philip, Luke, and so on is symptomatic of a larger ideology of stability and consolidated authority that itself needs to be corrected and reworked. The new framework suggested here pushes us to rethink the proliferation of gospel texts not through the lens of authority consolidated in author figures and originary moments of creative genius producing books called gospels, but rather through an interplay of diffuse moments of authorization and correction of a mutable, living, and mushrooming textualized tradition. From the singular and the fixed to the social, the contested, and the rhizomatic.92 And this invites scholars to reimagine how they think about the plastic and changing interrelationship of authority, text, and gospel in early and late ancient Christianity.

Notes 1 Reed, “ΕΥΑΓΓΕΛΙΟΝ,” 11–46, esp. 20. Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery, 51; Gamble, Book and Readers, 153–4; Bovon, “The Synoptic Gospels and the Noncanonical Acts of the Apostles,” 20–3. 2 Compare Nietzsche’s understanding of the growth of the Homeric tradition in “Homer und die klassische Philologie,” 2.1:248–69. Nietzsche shows the interrelated relationship to the idea of an author and one’s approach to a text. In my gesture toward Nietzsche, as well as in much of the thinking behind my work, I am indebted to Hindy Najman’s work on Nietzsche, author, textual unity, and textual growth. See especially Najman, “Traditionary Processes and Textual Unity in 4 Ezra,” 99–117, as well as her forthcoming “Between Greek and Hebrew Philology.” 3 One possible, but ultimately unconvincing exception of κατ᾽ ἄνδρα denoting authorship before the end of the second century CE is ἡ καθ᾽ Ἡρόδοτον ἱστορία in Diodorus Siculus. See Plummer, Luke, 1: “That the κατά does not exclude authorship is shown by such expression as ἡ κατὰ Μωϋσέα πεντάτευχος (Epiphanius) and ἡ καθ᾽ Ἡρόδοτον ἱστορία (Diodorus).” Michael Bird’s recent treatment of the subject closely follows Plummer (Bird, The Gospel of the Lord, 257 n.148). The Greek text in Diodorus, however, does not contain the phrase in question: κατὰ γὰρ τὸ δεύτερον ἔτος τῆς ἑπτακαιδεκάτης ὀλυμπιάδος ᾑρέθη βασιλεὺς ὑπὸ Μήδων Κυαξάρης καθ’ Ἡρόδοτον (“for it was in the second year of the Seventeenth Olympiad, according to Herodotus, that Cyaxares was chosen king by the Medes,” Library of History, 2.32.2; Oldfather, LCL). Diodorus does not use καθ᾽ Ἡρόδοτον as a part of the title of Herodotus’s histories (pace Plummer, Bird), but uses the phrase to speak of the story as told from the perspective of Herodotus. Thus, in the reference in question, it does not denote authorship. Similarly, Josephus, C. Ap. 1.18 does not refer to the title of Thucydides’s history with the phrase καίτοι δοκῶν ἀκριβεστάτην τὴν καθ᾿ αὑτὸν ἱστορίαν συγγράφειν, but to the

96  Matthew D. C. Larsen time during which something happened (LSJ, s.v. VII; Smyth § 1690.2.b). On the use of κατά as periphrasis for genitive, see Rudberg, “Ad usum circumscribentem praeposition graecarum adnotationes,” 173–206, esp. 175–201. In Adversus Lycum 2.2, Galen mentions one of his writings called Περὶ τῶν καθ᾽ Ἱπποκράτην στοιχείων (Fichtner CG #8), but this is not a commentary on a work authored by Hippocrates, but Galen’s treatise on the elements following the opinions of Hippocrates. On possible uses of κατά denoting an author, see Galen’s De victus ratione in morbis acutis ex Hippocratis sententia (Fichtner CG # 118/CH # 4; in Fichtner’s Corpus Galenicum and Corpus Hippocraticum bibliographies. The Fichtner bibliographies were accessed at http://cmg.bbaw.de/ online-publications/hippokrates-und-galenbibliographie-fichtner on December 15, 2015). There are two versions of the title, one uses κατὰ τὸν Ἱπποκράτην and the other uses Hippocrates in the genitive. The titles come to us from the manuscript tradition and it is not clear when the κατὰ τὸν Ἱπποκράτην was added to the title. 4 As a parallel case in the study of how titles functioned in their ancient contexts, esp. of the book of Proverbs, see Vayntrub, “Before Authorship.” Vayntrub states: “When scholars rightfully dismiss the text’s claims that Solomon is the author of Proverbs or David of Psalms, there is a tendency to exclude titles on historical-critical grounds, and correspondingly, neglect their literary dimensions. Examined from a literary perspective, the titles present an opportunity to understand the conventions and underlying values engaged by the literary tradition. Put differently, when judging the so-called authorial claims of titles to be inauthentic, scholarship is still operating within the assumption that these titles in fact claim authorship.” She then argues “attribution makes no claims about authorship, at least as this intellectual category functions for the modern reader. Rather, these titles engage the biography of a legendary figure to provide an interpretive frame for the text it contains.” On the superscriptions of the Psalms and the issue of authorship, see Mroczek, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity, 58–70, esp. 59. 5 Philo does use the formula κατὰ Μωυσέα / κατὰ Μωυσῆν but it never denotes a book title. Philo uses the formula to introduce a citation: Philo, Heir 83; Flight 93, 128; Dreams 1.34. That the formula is not a title but introduces a quotation is supported by formula of κατὰ τὸ Μωυσέως παράγγελμα in Dreams 2.263: πρόσεχε μηδὲν ἐναντιούμενος ἐν ἡσυχίᾳ κατὰ τὸ Μωυσέως παράγγελμα, τὸ “σιώπα καὶ ἄκουε.” Decalogue 1 uses κατὰ Μωυσέα refers to Philo’s life of Moses, which would make κατὰ Μωυσέα refer to Moses as the subject of the book, not the author. Compare 2 Macc. 2.19; 3.40 for use of κατὰ + name to introduce the subject of the text, not the author. Compare also titles of ancient Greek novels, which use the formula τὰ περὶ/κατὰ + the main characters’ name (for example, Τὰ κατὰ Λευκίππην καὶ Κλειτοφῶντα of Achilles Tatius). Philo’s other uses of the formula can simply be taken to mean something like, “from the perspective of Moses,” or, “as far as Moses is concerned,” or, “as Moses tells us.” Compare οἱ κατὰ Μέμφιν νόμοι in Life of Apollonius, 6.5.1. See also A. J. Berkovitz’s chapter in this book. 6 See, for example, Collins, Mark, 2–6. “In this commentary, ‘Mark’ will be used as a designation of the author of the second Gospel, as shorthand for ‘the author of the Gospel known as the Gospel according to Mark’ ” (6). See also The SBL Handbook of Style, which offers only the “names” of the “authors” for citation of a gospel. SBL Handbook of Style, 124. It does offer the options Evangelium Matthaei, Evangelium Marci, etc., under the section for Latin Names for Biblical Books (170). 7 Plummer, Luke, 1. Plummer sees κατά as effectively substituting for a genitive of authorship but also see κατά as indicating that the subject has been treated by others, neither affirming or denying authorship. He, nonetheless, still thinks of a writer composing a work, with the name following the κατά denoting the one who wrote the book. See also Martin Hengel, Studies in the Gospel of Mark, 65. Hengel says he found “only a very few late instances of the designation of the author’s name in book

Correcting the gospel 97 titles with κατά and the author’s name,” and that “κατά with the accusative” cannot be “a simple periphrasis for the genitivus auctoris, which is W. Bauer’s view.” Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 50. BDAG, s.v. 7c; BDF § 224.2: “The superscriptions to the Gospels κατὰ Ματθαῖον etc., the author of this form of the Gospel is designated by κατά (cf. § 163 [on the objective genitive]).” Aune, The Literary Environment of the New Testament, 18: “Since ancient book titles usually consisted of a short title and the author’s name in the genitive (at the end of the papyrus roll), the old titles of the Gospels appear unusual. Yet since the Greek preposition kata with the accusative can function as a genitive of possession, the titles reflect colloquial usage. The simple two word titles were soon expanded to, for example, ‘the Gospel according to Mark,’ which should be understood as ‘the Gospel by Mark.’ ” 8 Plummer, Luke, 1; Hengel, The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ, 49; Hengel, Studies in the Gospel of Mark, 68; Bird, Gospel of the Lord, 256: “it would appear self-aggrandizing for Mark and Luke, who were not Apostles, to put their own names in the titles of their work, when their subject was Jesus and their sources were apostolic testimony set in the matrix of corporate memory” (italics mine). 9 See Hengel, Studies in the Gospel of Mark, 81–2; Gamble, Books and Readers, 153–4. 10 Gamble, Books and Readers, 153–4, emphasis original. At the end of the quote, Gamble cites Martin Hengel, Studies in the Gospel of Mark, 81–2. 11 Cf. LSJ, s.v. II. See Isocrates, Areopagiticus 7.10; 2 Sam. 4:10 [LXX]; Cicero, Att. 2.3.1; 13.40.1; Plutarch, Sertorius 11.8. The uses in Cicero are especially interesting. In Att. 2.3.1, Cicero writes: “primum, ut opinor, εὐαγγέλια. Valerius absolutus est.” Here the plural εὐαγγέλια is best taken as its own thought, “great news!” and refers to the acquittal of Valerius. 12 On the titles used at Herculaneum, see Del Mastro, Titoli e annotazioni bibliologiche nei papiri greci di Ercolano. 13 Winrich Löhr has recently made a useful connection between the titles of the gospels and the Homeric scholia, and specifically the use of κατά. See Löhr, “Editors and Commentators,” 65–84. 14 On text, book, stability, and containment, see Mroczek, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity. 15 Dickey, Ancient Greek Scholarship, 7; Brill’s New Pauly, “Didymus,” 4:396–8. 16 Athenaeus 4.139; Seneca, Letters 88. Dickey, Ancient Greek Scholarship, 7; Brill’s New Pauly, “Didymus,” 4:396. if his nicknames are any indication, he must have been an interesting character. He earned two nicknames, Chalkenturus and Bibliolathas. The former (Χαλκέντερος) means “brazen-guts,” which may speak to Didymus’s strong constitution.16 The lore behind the other nickname, “Book forgetter (Βιβλιολάθας),” comes from a reputation for writing 3,500 or 4,000 books, not all of which he could remember. 17 West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, 46. An anonymous person in Late Antiquity compiled Didymus’s notes into the Four-Men Commentary, which, in addition to Didymus, included Aristonicus, Nicanor, and Herodian. The Four-Men Commentary comes down to us through Codex Venetus A. Since Venetus A directs the reader toward the individual source cited, one can identify Didymus’s scholia. See Brill’s New Pauly, “Didymus,” 396. 18 See McCutcheon, “Silent Reading in Antiquity and the Future History of the Book,” 19–22. 19 See, for example, Nagy, Poetry as Performance; Nagy, Homeric Responses; Nagy, Homer the Preclassic. 20 See Schol. B 111b; Δ 3a. Cited in West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, 50. 21 West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, 52. 22 West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, 52.

98  Matthew D. C. Larsen 23 West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, 51. 24 West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, 68. West cites Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison (1788), who imagines them as “local official copies, kept for public use,” and Friedrich August Wolf, who imagines them as gathered into the Alexandrian library and associated with a city rather than a person, and thus given titles related to their city or region (68–9). 25 West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, 52–67, 67–72. 26 Homer, Il. 22.108–10. 27 Schol. Χ 108a1. Erbse, Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem, 291. Greek: αἱ κατὰ ἄνδρα „{πολὺ} κάλλιον“ 28 West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, 52. 29 Homer, Il. 2.257–64. Translation from Fagles, Homer, the Illiad, 108. 30 Greek: εἴ κ’ ἔτι σ’ ἀφραίνοντα : . . . ἐν δὲ τῇ κατὰ Φιλήμονα τὸν Κρητικὸν „κιχήσομαι ἐν Δαναοῖσι“. Schol. Β 258a1; Erbse, Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem, 237. 31 West notes a problem with the term Κρητικόν (Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, 58). He says “if [Philemon] were a Cretan, we should expect τὸν Κρῆτα, not τὸν Κρητικόν. Villoison plausibly conjectured κριτικόν, which might imply that he belonged to the Pergamene school” (58). For the purposes of my chapter, it does not matter whether the text is Κρητικόν, Κρῆτα, or κριτικόν. 32 West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, 74. See also West, “Chalcentric Negligence,” 288–96, esp. 291: “The word [ὑπομνήματα] is used of a wide range of literary productions, from rough jottings to the history of Polybius. . . . The word takes on a more precise meaning from its context; in itself it is as vague as ‘note’ in English.” (cited in West, 74) Ὑπομνήματα are often intentionally unfinished or otherwise insufficiently authored. See. Larsen, Gospels before the Book. In general, ὑπομνήματα are textual objects, not literature, that are designed to jog the memory for any of a variety of purposes. 33 Homer, Il. 2.129–33. Translation from Fagles, The Iliad, 103. 34 Greek: Ἰλίου {ἐκπέρσαι}: ἐν τοῖς κατ᾽ Ἀριστοφάνην ὑπομνήμασιν Ἀριστάρχου „Ἴλιον“ ἐγέγραπτο, οὐκ Ἰλίου· καὶ μήποτε ἄμεινον ἔχει. Erbse, Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem, 237. 35 See Mark Letteney’s chapter in the present book. 36 West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, 67–72. 37 West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, 67. See Β 865 [Eust.], Γ 10b, Μ 283 [Eust.]. 38 West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, 67. See Φ 11a, 88d, 535d1, Χ 93c2, and Ω 82c. 39 This is especially the case regarding Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, 185–219, esp. 190–3. 40 This is not to suggest that, say, Crete would have had only one copy of the Iliad, but that a version of the Iliad was identified as authorized by a community in a certain place. 41 Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 160. Cited in West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, 68–9, esp. n. 74. 42 See Handis, “Myth and History,” 365–7. 43 On the concept of traditionary processes and textuality, see Najman, “Traditionary Processes and Textual Unity,” 99–117. On paratextual devices in texts, see Genette, Paratexts. See Macksey’s foreword in Genette, Paratexts, xviii: “those liminal devices and conventions, both within the book (peritext) and outside it (epitext), that mediate the book to the reader: titles and subtitles, pseudonyms, forewords, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, intertitles, notes, epilogues, and afterwords.” 44 See “Mnemon,” Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 1106. 45 Galen, In Hipp. Epid. III Comment. 2.4 [17.1b.606K]. Greek: ἓν δή τι τοιοῦτόν [i.e. Τῶν ἐκ πλοίων] φασιν εὑρεθῆναι καὶ τὸ τρίτον τῶν Ἐπιδημιῶν ἐπιγεγραμμένον· Τῶν ἐκ

Correcting the gospel 99

46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56

57

58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65

πλοίων κατὰ διορθωτὴν Μνήμονα Σιδήτην, ἔνιοι δ’ οὐ κατὰ διορθωτὴν ἐπιγεγράφθαι φασίν, ἀλλ’ ἁπλῶς τοὔνομα τοῦ Μνήμονος . . . See Hanson, “Galen,” 22–53. See, for example, Plato, Statesmen 295, in which Plato says that a doctor is obligated to change and improve medical ὑπομνήματα, if the doctor happened to discover a better treatment. See, for comparison, the comment of McCutcheon, “Silent Reading in Antiquity and the Future History of the Book,” 23: “In short, readers in antiquity would not have expected the texts which they encountered to be finished products or near complete embodiments of the author’s or anyone else’s intentions. Rather they would have seen them as objects still in need of supplementation or emendation in order to be read and understood.” Najman, “Traditionary Processes and Textual Unity in 4 Ezra,” 99–117. Najman, “The Vitality of Scripture Within and Beyond the Canon,” 497–518. 2 Macc. 2:13–15. Translation mine. It is not uncommon to use κατά as circumlocution for a genitive, as is the case here. See Rudberg, “Ad usum circumscribentem praeposition graecarum adnotationes,” 175–201. On the difficulty of determining what documents are in question in 2:1, 13, see Schwartz, 2 Maccabees, 160, 166. See Mroczek, The Literary Imagination in Jewish, 35 – 7. Mroczek notes the similar interests and references in 2 Maccabees and the book of Chronicles. She thus argues that the texts in question most likely refer to “liturgical instructions based on ancient authorities” (37). There is, of course, no historical evidence to verify the letter’s claim of Nehemiah founding a library. See Schwartz, 2 Maccabees, 166; Haran, “Archives, Libraries, and the Order of the Biblical Books,” 51–61, esp. 59. Gathercole, “The Earliest Manuscript Title of Matthew’s Gospel,” 209–35. The same pattern of κατά + name below “gospel” also holds true for the title of the Gospel of John in P.Bodmer III (Coptic), the Gospel of Thomas in NH Codex 2, the Gospel of Philip in the NH Codex 3, the Gospel of Mary in Berlin 8502, and the Gospel of Matthew in P.Bodmer XIX (Coptic). I thank Brent Nongbri for his help finding these manuscripts and sharing high-quality images with me, as well as for helpful suggestions on this chapter. See also the subscript title of Coptic manuscript of the Gospel of Mark, P. Palau Ribes inv. 182. On bibliographic codes, see McGann, The Textual Condition, esp. “What is Critical Editing?,” pp.  48–68. See also Bornstein, Material Modernisms, esp. “How to read a page: modernism and material textuality,” 5–31. See Bornstein’s discussion of McGann and bibliographic codes on pp. 6–8. The Bodmer composite codex (P.Bodmer VII and P.Bodmer VIII) contains the titles of other books recorded in a manner different from gospel titles, but in agreement with other titles on ancient papyri. There the titles of 1 and 2 Peter and Jude are recorded in the manner of genitive of the author’s name first followed by a title all on the same line (ΠΕΤΡΟΥΕΠΙΤΟΛΗ Α, ΠΕΤΡΟΥΕΠΙCΤΟΛΗ Β, ΪΟΥΔΑΕΠΕΙCΤΟΛΗ), as was common throughout antiquity. The opening title of Melito of Sardis’s On the Passover in the Bodmer composite codex reads ΜΕΛΙΤΩΝΟC | ΠΕΡΙ ΠΑCΧΑ and the end title appears in the form ΜΕΛΙΤΩΝΟC ΠΕΡΙ ΠΑ | CΧΑ. Schironi, ΤΟ ΜΕΓΑ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ. Schironi, ΤΟ ΜΕΓΑ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ, 237. Schironi, ΤΟ ΜΕΓΑ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ, 236. Schironi, ΤΟ ΜΕΓΑ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ, 235. Schironi, ΤΟ ΜΕΓΑ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ, 230. Schironi, ΤΟ ΜΕΓΑ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ, 104–5. Schironi, ΤΟ ΜΕΓΑ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ, 63–4.

100  Matthew D. C. Larsen 66 See Del Mastro, Titoli e annotazioni bibliologiche nei papiri greci di Ercolano. In the Herculaneum scrolls, the author’s name appears usually on a line above the title of the work. 67 Galen, Adversus Julianum 4.4. See also Galen, Adversus Lycum 4.4. 68 Schironi, ΤΟ ΜΕΓΑ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ, 22. 69 Schironi, ΤΟ ΜΕΓΑ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ, 22. 70 On the dating of P66 and its problems, as well as the problems of dating papyri in general, see Nongbri, “The Limits of Palaeographic Dating of Literary Papyri.” See also Nongbri, “Grenfell and Hunt on the Dates of Early Christian Codices.”; “The Use and Abuse of P52.” 71 See Gathercole, “The Titles of the Gospels in the Earliest New Testament Manuscripts,” 37. 72 See Johnson, “The Function of the Paragraphus in Greek Literary Prose Texts,” 65–8. See also Schironi, ΤΟ ΜΕΓΑ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ. 73 Gathercole, “Titles of the Gospels,” 71. 74 See Pagels, “Irenaeus, the ‘Canon of Truth,’ and the Gospel of John,” 339–71, esp. 347: “so far as we know, he [= Irenaeus] became the first to urge believers to accept four distinct writings, despite their obvious differences, and join them into the collage that he called the ‘four-formed gospel.’ ” 75 Commonly Irenaeus will begin a quote from a gospel by saying “Matthew says,” “John says,” and so forth. 76 In 3.1.1 Irenaeus describes the origins of published gospel books as follows: “Now Matthew published a written gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were proclaiming the gospel in Rome and founding the church. After their death (lit. exodus; Μετὰ δὲ τὴν τούτων ἔξοδον), Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, also passed Peter’s preaching down to us writtenly (ἐγγράφως). Luke, the follower of Paul, also put the gospel preached by Paul down in a book. Then John, the disciple of the Lord, who reclined on the Lord’s breast, he also published the gospel while he was residing in Ephesus of Asia.” Translation mine. Greek text is taken from Rousseau and Doutreleau, Irénée de Lyon, Contre Les Hérésies, 22–5. Ὁ μὲν δὴ Ματθαῖος ἐν τοῖς Ἑβραίοις τῇ ἰδίᾳ αὐτῶν διαλέκτῳ καὶ γραφὴν ἐξήνεγκεν εὐαγγελίου, τοῦ Πέτρου καὶ τοῦ Παύλου ἐν Ῥώμῃ εὐαγγελιζομένων καὶ θεμελιούντων τὴν ἐκκλησίαν. μετὰ δὲ τὴν τούτων ἔξοδον Μάρκος, ὁ μαθητὴς καὶ ἑρμηνευτὴς Πέτρου, καὶ αὐτὸς τὰ ὑπὸ Πέτρου κηρυσσόμενα ἐγγράφως ἡμῖν παραδέδωκεν· καὶ Λουκᾶς δέ, ὁ ἀκόλουθος Παύλου, τὸ ὑπ᾿ ἐκείνου κηρυσσόμενον εὐαγγέλιον ἐν βίβλῳ κατέθετο. ἔπειτα Ἰωάννης, ὁ μαθητὴς τοῦ κυρίου, ὁ καὶ ἐπὶ τὸ στῆθος αὐτοῦ ἀναπεσών, καὶ αὐτὸς ἐξέδωκεν τὸ εὐαγγέλιον, ἐν Ἐφέσῳ τῆς Ἀσίας διατρίβων. 77 See Reed, “ΕΥΑΓΓΕΛΙΟΝ,” 18. Annette Yoshiko Reed writes, “when one surveys all of the examples of Irenaeus’ use of εὐαγγέλιον in Adversus haereses and contextualizes them within the entire range of its previous meanings, one finds an interesting interplay between oral and textual connotations.” 78 I take the count of 101 from Reed, “ΕΥΑΓΓΕΛΙΟΝ,” 19. 79 Irenaeus, Haer. 3.11.8. 80 I take the “simultaneously singular and multiple” phrase from Reed, “ΕΥΑΓΓΕΛΙΟΝ,” 39. 81 Irenaeus, Haer. 3.11.8. Translation from Roberts-Donaldson, with minor adaptations. 82 The Greek fragment 11 lacks τετράμορφος in the final clause. 83 Irenaeus, Haer. 3.11.8. Translation from Roberts-Donaldson, with minor adaptations. 84 See Tertullian, Praescr. 39. 85 M. D. Usher defines centos as “poems made up entirely of verses lifted verbatim, or with only slight modification, from the Iliad and the Odyssey.” Usher, “Prolegomenon to the Homeric Centos,” 305. The idea is that Homer’s lines are used by “Homerocentones” as raw material in the creation of a new poem. 86 Haer. 3.11.9 reads: Καὶ γὰρ Μαρκίων ὅλον ἀποβάλλων τὸ εὐαγγέλιον, μᾶλλον δὲ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου ἑαυτὸν ἀποκόπτων, μόριον καυχᾶται ἔχειν τοῦ εὐαγγελίου.

Correcting the gospel 101

87 88

89 90 91 92

Roberts-Donaldson translates: “For Marcion, rejecting the entire Gospel, yea rather, cutting himself off from the Gospel, boasts that he has part in the [blessings of] the Gospel.” But I think it μαυ be better translated: For Marcion also cuts up the whole gospel, and more than [he cuts up] the gospel, he castrates himself, and then boasts that he has a ‘member’ of the Gospel.” See Haer. 1.9.4, which connects people who cut and paste the text of Homer and heretics who misuse and misinterpret texts like the gospel according to “John.” See also Tertullian praescr. 39. Irenaeus, Haer. 3.11.7, 8. It is interesting to note that the Greek fragment contains τὸ δὲ κατα Ματθαῖον, while other Greek manuscripts change it to simply the nominative name, Ματθαῖος. The same happens with τὸ κατὰ Μάρκον and Μάρκος. See the Sources Chrétiennes edition of Rousseau and Doutreleau, Irénée de Lyon: Contre les hérésies, 166–7. The most reasonable explanation, to me, is that the κατ᾽ ἄνδρα formula was original and later scribes came to equate the κατ᾽ ἄνδρα formula with the author-figure. On genealogical and analogical relationships, see Smith, Drudgery Divine, 46–50. On discourses, traditions, or texts deprived of an author figure, see Foucault, “What is an Author?,” 101–20, esp. 107. In fact, this is precisely what the “Gospel according to Luke” claims to be doing in its preface. On the concept of the rhizome, see Deleuze and Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus, 15: “We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial root, adventitious growths and rhizomes.”

Bibliography Aune, David. The Literary Environment of the New Testament. Cambridge: James Clark & Co.: 1987. Bauer, Walter. Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. Translated by Robert A. Kraft and Gerhard Krodel. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1971. Bird, Michael. The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014. Bornstein, George. Material Modernisms: The Politics of the Page. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Bovon, François. “The Synoptic Gospels and the Noncanonical Acts of the Apostles.” Harvard Theological Review 81(1) (1988): 19–36. Brill’s New Pauly, “Didymus (Δίδυμος; Dídymus) 1.A,” 4: 396–98, 2004. Collins, Adela Yarbro. Mark: A Commentary. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007. Cribiore, Raffaella. Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guatarri. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1987. Del Mastro, Gianluca. Titoli e annotazioni bibliologiche nei papiri greci di Ercolano. Napoli: Centro Internazionale per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanensi ‘Marcello Gigante’, 2014. Dickey, Eleanor. Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises, from Their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Ehrman, Bart. Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

102  Matthew D. C. Larsen Erbse, Hartmut. Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem (scholia vetera) Recensuit Hartmut Erbse. 7 vols. Berolini: de Gryter, 1969–1988. Fagles, Robert. Homer, the Iliad. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Fichtner, Gerhard. Corpus Galenicum: Verzeichnis der galenischen und pseudogalenischen Schriften. Tübingen: Institut für Ethik und Geschichte der Medizin, 2004–. http:// cmg.bbaw.de/online-publications/hippokrates-und-galenbibliographie-fichtner. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 101–120. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Gamble, Harry. Book and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Gathercole, Simon J. “The Earliest Manuscript Title of Matthew’s Gospel (BnF Suppl. gr. 1120 ii 3 /P4).” Novum Testamentum 54 (2012): 209–35. ———. “The Titles of the Gospels in the Earliest New Testament Manuscripts.” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 104 (2013): 33–76. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation. Translated by Jane L. Lewin. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Handis, Michael W. “Myth and History: Galen and the Alexandrian Library.” In Ancient Libraries, edited by Jason König et al, 364–76. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Hanson, Ann. “Galen: Author and Critic.” In Texte Edieren, Editing Texts, edited by Glenn Most, 22–53. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998. Haran, Menehem. “Archives, Libraries, and the Order of the Biblical Books,” JANESCU 22 (1993): 51–61. Hengel, Martin. Studies in the Gospel of Mark. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1985. ———. The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Collection and Origin of the Canonical Gospels. Translated by John Bowden. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000. Johnson, William. “The Function of the Paragraphus in Greek Literary Prose Texts.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 100 (1994): 65–68. Larsen, Matthew D.C. Gospels before the Book. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Löhr, Winrich. “Editors and Commentators: Some Observations on the Craft of Second Century Theologians.” In Pascha Nostrum Christus: Essays in Honor of Raniero Cantalamessa, edited by P. F. Beatrice and B. Pouderon, 65–84. Paris: Beauchesne, 2016. McCutcheon, R.W. “Silent Reading in Antiquity and the Future History of the Book.” Book History 18 (2015): 1–32. McGann, Jerome. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 1991. “Mnemon,” In Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, edited by William Smith, vol. 2, 1106. London: John Murray, 1880. Mroczek, Eva. The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Nagy, Gregory. Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. Homeric Responses. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. ———. Homer the Preclassic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Najman, Hindy. “Between Greek and Hebrew Philology.” Keynote lecture at conference Marginality, Canonicity, Passion. Yale University, Department of Classics, March 2012. ———. “The Vitality of Scripture Within and Beyond the Canon.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 43 (2012): 497–518.

Correcting the gospel  103 ———. “Traditionary Processes and Textual Unity in 4 Ezra.” In 4Ezra and 2Baruch, Proceedings from the Sixth Enoch Seminar, edited by Gabriele Boccaccini and Matthias Henze, 99–117. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Nietzsche, F. “Homer und die klassische Philologie,” KGW 2(1) (1869): 248–69. Nongbri, Brent. “The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel.” HTR 98 (2005): 23–48. ———. “Grenfell and Hunt on the Dates of Early Christian Codices: Setting the Record Straight.” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 48 (2011): 149–62. ———. “The Limits of Palaeographic Dating of Literary Papyri: Some Observations on the Date and Provenance of P.Bodmer II (P66).” Museum Helveticum 71 (2014): 1–35. Pagels, Elaine. “Irenaeus, the ‘Canon of Truth,’ and the Gospel of John: ‘Making a Difference’ through Hermeneutics and Ritual.” Vigiliae Christianae 56 (2002): 339–71. Plummer, Alfred. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Luke. 5th edition. Edinburgh; T & T Clark, 1901. Reed, Annette Yoshiko. “ΕΥΑΓΓΕΛΙΟΝ: Orality, Textuality, and the Christian Truth in Irenaeus’ Adversus haereses” Vigiliae Christianae 56 (2002): 11–46. Rousseau, Adelin and Louis Doutreleau. Irénée de Lyon, Contre Les Hérésies. Livre III. Sources Chrétiennes 211; Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1974. Rudberg, Gunnar. “Ad usum circumscribentem praeposition graecarum adnotationes.” Eranos 19 (1922): 173–206. Schironi, Francesca. ΤΟ ΜΕΓΑ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ: Book-Ends, End-Titles, and Coronides in Papyri with Hexametric Poetry. Durham, NC: The American Society of Papyrologists, 2010. Schwartz, Daniel R. 2 Maccabees. New York: de Gruyter, 2008. Smith, Jonathan Z. Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. SBL Handbook of Style. 2nd edition. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014. Usher, M.D. “Prolegomenon to the Homeric Centos.” The American Journal of Philology 118 (1997): 305–21. Vayntrub, Jacqueline. “Before Authorship: Solomon and Prov. 1:1.” Biblical Interpretation, forthcoming. West, Martin L. Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad. München and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2001. West, Stephanie. “Chalcentric Negligence.” Classical Quarterly 20 (1970): 288–96. Wolf, F.A. Prolegomena to Homer, 1795. Translated by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E. G. Zetzel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Part II

Authority and the law

6 Glimpses from the margins Re-telling late ancient history at the edges of the law Maria E. Doerfler

The theme of this book alerts the reader to the fact, wholly counter-intuitive for late ancient historians, that even in antiquity people occasionally wrote for reasons other than to claim, invoke, or establish authority. The chapters collected here accordingly draw attention to a number of authority-unrelated examples and motives; and yet what makes this theme both valuable and vexing to students of Late Antiquity is the fact that authority figures so prominently into the vagaries of authorship and transmission from pre-modern to post-modern eras. Discourses of authority (auctoritas [Latin], exousía [Greek], and shulṭana [Syriac]), proliferate in ancient Christian writings across imperial, confessional, and linguistic boundaries, and scholars have over the past couple of decades labored to trace literary struggles over spiritual, institutional, political, and biblical authority in their sources.1 At times, in fact, late ancient authors not only wrote with an indisputable eye towards authoritative communication, but did so in genres and formats that made clear their intentions to do so. They wrote polemical treatises to settle theological disputes, biblical commentaries to champion particular exegetical approaches, and liturgical handbooks to guide not only belief but its ritual performance. And yet even works dealing transparently in matters of authority invite the reader to look more deeply into the complexity of ancient texts and to make them speak beyond their primary purpose. What surplus motivations, in other words, what additional insights, may students of Late Antiquity be able to discern in these texts? This chapter reflects an initial foray into examining these questions with regard to a genre that is perhaps the paradigmatic exemplar of writing for authority’s sake, namely that of ecclesiastical law, that is to say: texts that convey rules for the guidance and adjudication of ecclesiastical institutions and ecclesiastically affiliated individuals.2 Such texts tend to invoke, first and most explicitly, divine authority; the law that is transmitted is constructed as God’s law. Alongside it, moreover, Christian legal writings frequently present themselves as the expression of other sources of authority, whether that of the civic rulers of by-gone times, or that of an ancient and authoritative Christian past. These efforts both to govern and to do so by invoking a variety of authorizing antecedents lie at the very surface of the genre. They are so obvious and so

108  Maria E. Doerfler explicitly invoked that they at times obscure any “super-added” extra, that is to say: any rationale beyond the invocation of authority. In recent years, scholars have increasingly sought to read law with an eye towards discerning, inter alia, theological discourses, the historical development of Christian or governmental institutions, or trends in interreligious dialogue. This chapter joins such efforts by seeking to discern traces of historiographic narrative or the literary creation of a Christian past in these writings, whether that past invoked apostolic origins or an already remote late ancient setting. As will become apparent, such efforts at contextualization can and perhaps in part must be read through the lens of a text’s self-authorization, and its author’s effort to anchor his writing and its decrees in an authoritative past. And yet the narratives that emerge function in ways that both go beyond the task of lending additional weight to the legal authority that these texts invoke, and allow readers new insights into the construction and conception of ecclesiastical law as a literary genre. In deference to the limitations of space, this chapter examines just two examples of Christian law-making. The texts in question were composed at least a millennium apart, yet each in its own way is invested in a re-telling of the Christian past: the first, no doubt familiar to late ancient historians, is the Didascalia Apostolorum, a so-called “church order” dating from the third or early fourth century CE; the second comes from the Ṭukkās dīnē ‛ettānāyē, more commonly known by its Latin title as the Ordo Iudicorum Ecclesiasticorum and the Nomocanon, two East Syrian canon law treatises by the fourteenth century metropolitan ‘Abdīshō’ bar Brīkhā. Their differences in time and task notwithstanding, each set of texts demonstrates the intimate connection between law-making and historiography. The two acts indeed mutually inform one another, such that historiographical narrative does not merely undergird the authority of law, but rather aims to align legal and historical visions into an inseparable whole. In the process, both texts provide readers with glimpses into a Christian past through the eyes of its heirs, many centuries later.

The apostolic past in the Didascalia Apostolorum The Didascalia Apostolorum, the so-called “teaching of the apostles,” is a familiar text to most students of Late Antiquity, even if it is not always judged among the most stimulating readings from that period. Its provenance is subject to scholarly debate; the general consensus nevertheless suggests that in its current form the text originated in Syria some time during the late third or early fourth century CE, and from there spread widely throughout the Roman Empire.3 Originally composed in Greek, it was translated early and often, into Latin, Coptic, Arabic, and most notably Syriac.4 Like the Didache and the Apostolic Constitutions, the Didascalia is usually considered part of the disputed category of “church orders,” texts focused on the organization and guidance of a Christian community.5 As one might expect from such a document, the Didascalia contains a wide range of material pertaining to ecclesiastical structure and discipline. Its chapters range across such topics as the selection and duties of clergy,6 excommunication of

Glimpses from the margins 109 wayward church members and penitential practice,7 behavioral guidelines for the laity,8 as well as, most notably for purposes of late ancient scholarship, the defense of the “true Church” against heretics and schismatics.9 These provisions appear in the context of the Didascalia’s pseudepigraphal frame, a fictional narrative that expounds the supposed context in which these teachings had originated. Therein, as the title already suggests, the text portrays itself and the rules it sets out as the product of the 12 apostles. The latter, chapter 24 avers, interrupted their various missions upon discovering that “the danger arose for the whole church of falling into heresy.” To avert such a threat to the new faith, “we all, the twelve apostles, assembled in Jerusalem and planned what should be done. And ‘it seemed good to us in one mind’, to write this catholic Didascalia for the confirmation of you all.”10 This conceit of apostolic authorship does not, in fact, go very deep, as Georg Schöllgen has noted.11 With the exception of a few asides, where an apostle, frequently James or Peter, is identified as the speaker responsible for proclaiming a particular command, most of the Didascalia’s origin story is concentrated at the edges of the text, in chapters  23 through 25. These chapters quote extensively from the book of Acts, which provides the backdrop for the fictional act of communal authorship, and in the process blend pseudepigraphal frame with canonical narrative. For much of this framing discourse, however, the Didascalia includes extra-canonical, seemingly peripheral information, weaving into the narrative of apostolic anxiety, gathering, and authorship stories of their individual or collective exploits. One example to this effect comes from Chapter 23, in which Simon Peter narrates an encounter between himself and another Simon, “the Sorcerer,” during their respective journeys. The two come upon one another when the apostles “had divided the world among ourselves into twelve parts, and had gone out to the nations so that we could preach the word in all the world.” At that time, the Didascalia avers, “the devil set about to agitate the people and send false apostles behind us to undo the word”: Now the adherents of Simon were following me, Peter, and came to corrupt the word. And when he was in Rome he troubled the church much and subverted many. And he exhibited himself as though he could fly. And he was capturing the gentiles, exciting them through the power and operation of his witchcrafts. And on a certain day I went and saw him flying in the air. Then I stood and said: “Through the power of the name of Jesus, I cut off your powers.” And he fell and broke the ankle-bone of his foot.12 The story is one well familiar to students of ancient Christian writings. Peter’s confrontation with Simon Magus features prominently in a number of apocryphal sources, including, for example the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies; they also form the centerpiece of the Vercelli manuscript’s version of the Acts of Peter, where the story of Simon’s flight and Peter’s bone-breaking interference finally drives the former out of Rome and prefaces the text’s transition into an account

110  Maria E. Doerfler of Peter’s martyrdom.13 Its inclusion in the Didascalia’s narrative of apostolic travels is as such suggestive about the fluid boundaries between “canonical” and “apocryphal” texts at the time of its composition or even its translation into Syriac in the fourth or fifth centuries.14 The narrative of Acts and the narrative of Peter’s miraculous triumph flow into one another and into the Didascalia’s efforts to portray itself alongside them as a contribution to the earliest stratum of ecclesiastical history. It is against this backdrop of a creatively augmented apostolic past that the text’s rules for Christian clergy and the communities they seek to lead or establish unfold. Two points of note emerge from the Didascalia’s emphatic self-presentation as part of this history. First, in its account of Peter’s confrontation with Simon, the Didascalia does not appear to quote from any known document, nor does it provide more than a concise re-telling of a story developed in considerably greater depth elsewhere. Its reference to the apostolic opponents and their dramatic battle remains, rather, on the level of allusion, reminding its audience of a story familiar, we presume, from more extensive expositions elsewhere. The Didascalia’s author or editor is not here interested in providing a new and exhaustive version of literary and historical ground already well-trod in other early Christian writings. And yet, the mere invocation of these narratives for the Didascalia’s audience resonated with specters of familiar stories and reminders of a miraculous and authoritative past. The shallow nature of this literary frame poses no obstacle to such associations; by creating spaces to be filled imaginatively by different stories and different versions of stories, the sparseness of the narrative rather assists in this process. Second, and equally strikingly, the Didascalia’s account of Simon’s confrontation is evidently neither accidental or extraneous to the rules and regulations it seeks to establish; it appears, rather, in the context of a couple of chapters that portray the Didascalia and its putative authors as deeply invested in combating heresies, particularly, of course, “Judaizing” behavior among its audiences.15 This points to the narrative’s obvious investment in presenting apostolic history as authorizing a set of prescriptions and proscriptions for the text’s late ancient audience. The Didascalia, for example, retrojects the prohibition against vegetarianism into apostolic times.16 Yet the narrative portions of the Didascalia are not merely a repository for data designed to support the text’s mandates; they rather reflect a vision of ancient Christian history shaped both by its authors’ sense of what must have occurred to ground late ancient understandings of orthopraxy, and the narrative contingencies – what might have occurred – they and their audiences were prepared to entertain. Both tendencies – the reciprocal relationship between historical and legal aspects of a narrative, and the tendency to evoke these visions by sketch and allusion rather than by comprehensive exposition – translate into later Syriac Christian legal literature. The work of ‘Abdīshō’ bar Brīkhā and his representation of the fourth century bishop Ambrose in his legal writings, provide an opportunity for a closer look into these developments.

Glimpses from the margins 111

Glimpses of Late Antiquity in the canonical writings of ‘Abdīshō’ bar Brīkhā At first glance, ‘Abdīshō’’s juridical writings could scarcely appear more different from the Didascalia. ‘Abdīshō’ is a towering figure in the Church of the East, the Syriac tradition that used to be, rather slanderously, called “Nestorian.”17 He became bishop of Sangar and Beth Arabaie in 1284/5 at a time when the Church of the East experienced its greatest expansion and arguably most vibrant period of literary productivity.18 In addition to attending to his clerical duties, however, ‘Abdīshō’ was an extraordinarily prolific writer. The catalogue of his works, some of which are no longer extant, include offerings on theology, biblical commentaries, scientific treatises, and liturgical writings, in addition to two compilations of canon law.19 The latter, his Nomocanon and Ordo Iudicorum, distinguish themselves for their practicality and their lasting impact.20 The Nomocanon, in particular, remains the central canon law compendium of the Church of the East, although it has remained largely inaccessible to readers beyond the realm of Syriac studies, since the only language into which it has been translated in its entirety thus far is Latin.21 Both of ‘Abdīshō’’s canonical compendia are topically organized. Each is, moreover, divided into two books – one concerning matters that pertain to the laity, and the other to those involving monks or clergy.22 Like his predecessors, most notably Gabriel of Basra, ‘Abdīshō’ draws on a wide range of sources in compiling his collections, including monastic rules, the acta of East Syrian synods and councils, as well as selections from the so-called Syro-Roman Lawbook, a fifth century collection of Roman civil law that was translated and transmitted, inter alia, in Syriac.23 It is the last of these, ‘Abdīshō’’s excerpts and adaptations from Roman civil law, that grants readers a number of fascinating glimpses into ‘Abdīshō’’s vision of Late Antiquity, and particularly one of the Latin West’s most influential figures: Ambrose of Milan. Ambrose’s appearance in an East Syrian source a millennium removed from his own era is surprising, but not wholly exceptional. He is, in fact, one of the very few Western theologians who successfully traverses the boundaries between Latin West and Syriac East – unlike, for example, his better-known contemporary Augustine. Yet, in virtually all of his Syriac cameos Ambrose appears either in a mistaken or misappropriated guise. There is his so-called Confession, an exposition of the two natures of Christ that evidently post-dates the historical Ambrose, but is nevertheless ascribed to him by Severus of Antioch, John Maron, and in the ninth century Synodicon Orientale.24 In a similar vein, a set of hypomnemata attributed to Ambrose, or rather, an eponymous figure, survives as part of a Syriac manuscript collecting also writings by Bardaisan, Melito of Sardis, and Mara Bar Serapion. Ambrose here is described as “a leader among the Greeks,” who, upon his conversion to Christianity was persecuted by his senatorial colleagues.25 This Ambrose can, for obvious reasons, not be the fourth century bishop of Milan, but the identity of names and perhaps senatorial rank suggest why the two may have become identified with one another in the Syriac tradition.

112  Maria E. Doerfler In ‘Abdīshō’’s writings, however, another version of Ambrose emerges, namely that of Ambrose the law-giver. He appears as such already in one manuscript of the Syro-Roman Lawbook where he is identified as a “confessor” (modyana).26 In ‘Abdīshō’’s version, however, Ambrose’s pedigree had expanded considerably. ‘Abdīshō’ throughout his Nomocanon identifies Ambrose as a bishop, but on two occasions also notes his additional status as a martyr (sahda).27 The reference is puzzling to readers even casually acquainted with the Ambrose of Late Antiquity who died, so to speak, in bed. Other references similarly reflect a distorted picture of the historical Ambrose. ‘Abdīshō’, for instance, emphasizes the bishop’s close connection with “the Emperor Valentinos” (Valentinos melaka) on whose behest Ambrose is said to have composed judgments and orders for the governors of different regions.28 The link between Ambrose and Valentinian II is historically accurate; the latter, in fact, resided in Milan during the years of Ambrose’s episcopate.29 And yet ‘Abdīshō’’s account takes on an ironic cast when considered in light of what appears to have been the historical relationship between the two figures: during his tenure in Ambrose’s Milan, Valentinian II was, first, a child, and, more perniciously for his relationship with the bishop, affiliated with homoian – “Arian” – Christianity, and, along with his mother, subject to some of Ambrose’s most dramatic power plays.30 ‘Abdīshō’’s most extensive reflections on Ambrose and Ambrose’s role come, however, in the context of his preamble to the “civic law” portion of his Ordo Iudicorum. The latter presents excerpts from the prefatory comments of the Syro-Roman Lawbook, albeit with the additional ascription of these comments to Ambrose.31 The Ordo Iudicorum here identifies Ambrose as those remarks’ author, and indeed as the author of the entire preface of the legal pronouncements of the Emperors: By Ambrose, bishop and martyr, from the proem of the dikaiomata of the emperors: Beautiful and exceedingly fitting laws gave our Lord and God from the beginning and showed [them] to humanity; for example, he showed [them] to us in the first book of the Mosaic law.32 By the same [a.k.a. Ambrose], farther down: For all human beings or peoples, which wished to be guided by a law, have taken their foundation from the law of Moses, have laid down laws among their people and have taken Israel, which was guided by the law of God, as their example. For none of the peoples had a writing or a book before Moses, but rather Moses and his laws was earlier [than theirs], those which God had given, earlier than all the wise men of the Greeks, Athenians, Romans and Egyptians.33 There is nothing particularly unusual about these statements. To credit God as chief lawgiver, and to argue both for the temporal priority of Mosaic law vis-à-vis those of other peoples and the latter’s dependence on it echo similar statements from writings as early as Clement of Alexandria in the third century.34 More interesting than what ‘Abdīshō’ includes here, however, is what he omits. The SyroRoman Lawbook’s proemium accordingly includes not only a Mosaic genealogy

Glimpses from the margins  113 extending from Adam to Jacob, but a Christological confession, including Christ’s gifting of good laws (nmousa’ shapira) to Christ’s holy catholic (qatouliqo’) Church.35 That ‘Abdīshō’, a bishop of the Church of the East, would not wish to affirm these things for the Western, pro-Chalcedonian confession is surely intelligible; that ‘Abdīshō’ nevertheless deploys Ambrose both here and elsewhere in his legal writings is, however, striking, and reminiscent of a “turn towards the West” that Scott Johnson has recently noted in Syriac ascetic writings from ‘Abdīshō’’s period.36 East Syrian historians, Johnson argues, during a period when “Nestorian” Christians were expanding ever Eastward, “oriented [themselves] towards the West, particularly towards the sites of prominence in monastic history.”37 Historical accounts of the Church of the East thus focus on Jerusalem, Scetis, and Sinai. It is perhaps no coincidence that authors of legal treatises, like ‘Abdīshō’ and, before him, Gabriel of Basra retain a similar “Westwardness” in their writing, albeit with a focus on Roman emperors like Constantine and Theodosius. Yet ‘Abdīshō’’s turn, unlike that of East Syrian historians, is not to the West as it existed in his own era – not to the Byzantine Empire and those “Melkite” Syrian Christians who adhered to its Christological commitments.38 Rather, the West ‘Abdīshō’ seems to contemplate here is that of a by-gone era, the period preceding the Christological controversy and the arguably unified Church over which Constantine and company presided. Here, at the intersection of history and geography, Ambrose functions as an ecclesiastical filter; a guarantor of orthodoxy and divine sanction for those aspects of Roman law that East Syrian writers sought to appropriate. Much like the Didascalia’s picture of Peter’s journeys, ‘Abdīshō’’s depiction of the history from whence the laws he included in his collections originated remains allusive. Neither account tells the whole story, even as both invoke a historiographic vision that audiences could understand in context: in the Didascalia’s case, by invoking the intertext of Peter’s journeys and various magic- and miracle-endowed battles with “heretics”; in the case of ‘Abdīshō’’s legal writings, by conjuring the specter of Ambrose – bishop, lawgiver, confidante of emperors, and, perhaps most importantly for an audience from the Church of the East, martyr for the confession of Christ’s two natures.

History from the margins of the law in Syriac Christian writings The Didascalia Apostolorum and the legal writings of ‘Abdīshō‘bar Brīkhā are just two instances among many of Christians attempting to set down rules for the governing of some aspect of their communities. They are neither the earliest nor the most recent, and in the millennium-long span between them, numerous other texts across the Christianized world reflect similar efforts. As case studies, they nevertheless provide the background against which to consider the question posed at the outset of this essay, how the “super-added” pieces of historical information that appear at the margins of rules, laws, and teachings function in their broader literary and historical contexts. To be sure, both of the narratives discussed earlier

114  Maria E. Doerfler are open to being read through the lens of authority. The “pseudepigraphal frame” of the Didascalia imbues its teachings not only with the stamp of orthodoxy, but, in a pre-conciliar context, with the claim to super-regional applicability.39 The words of the apostles, in other words, speak to all Christians equally and with effortless – because well-established – authority. By the same token, ‘Abdīshō’’s invocation of Ambrose, “bishop and martyr,” lends the pronouncements he transmits the pedigree of antiquity, and claims for his tradition the authoritative voices of patristic figures. Yet peeling back the layers of a discourse focused purely on authority provides an expanded frame in which to consider the ways in which such seemingly extraneous historical information functions. The laws and rules transmitted by these texts are, in a sense, narrative artifacts, for which the compilers and authors of the Didascalia and the Nomocanon and Ordo Iudicorum assume a kind of curatorial function. The reader encounters the rules contained in them, in other words, not in ahistorical starkness, the way one might expect, for example, to encounter the regulations contained in a contemporary American civil law code. Rather, the historical information provided by their respective authors and compilers serves to inscribe the laws conveyed in these texts into the context of the Christian past, whether that of the apostles, as in the case of the Didascalia, or that of late antiquity, as in the case of ‘Abdīshō’’s legal writings. These narratives raise associative specters of familiar events and individuals, which both inform audiences’ understandings of the rules and regulations they convey, and which are in turn informed by them. The stories that frame these legal provisions are, in other words, not extraneous to the projects of these texts; the practice of law-making, or, more accurately for the self-consciously antiquarian discipline of Eastern canon law: of law-compiling, is closely related to the practices of historiography and its relative, hagiography.40 This is not to suggest that the historian’s or hagiographer’s craft is not ultimately invested in the creation and perpetuation of authority: far from it. Neither, however, does one performance collapse neatly into the other. In the apocryphal stories and historiographic incongruities the reader discerns at the margins of these texts, we glimpse not only law, refracted through the lens of its history, but a vividly conceived, suggestively recounted past, refracted through the lens of the law. In his recent monograph on Byzantine canon law, David Wagschal has argued that the system [of the transmission of ecclesiastical regulations] is deeply and intentionally invested in embedding itself in broader narratives by which truly just decisions might be measured. In effect, then, the central instinct of the system is that to get law right, you must get scripture right, doctrine right, morality right, psychological dispositions right, Greco-Roman concepts of justice right, and so on.41 In the Syrian context, and indeed perhaps in the Byzantine one as well, we might add that to “get law right” it is just as important to “get history right” – not in the

Glimpses from the margins  115 sense of having access to what contemporary historians might consider accurate visions of the events that produced or periods that precipitated these laws, but by placing them in conversation with foundational narratives that both reflect and contribute to their communities’ sense of self.

Notes 1 A full discussion of the relevant works, even within the comparatively narrow realm of late ancient Christianity, exceeds the parameters of this essay. A representative sample of the most interesting and helpful works include, however, Pollman, “Christianity and Authority in Late Antiquity”; Xeravits, Nicklas, and ‎Kalimi, Scriptural Authority in Early Judaism and Ancient Christianity; Uhalde, Expectations of Justice in the Age of Augustine; Nasrallah, An Ecstasy of Folly; Mathisen, Law, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity; Drijvers and Watt, Portraits of Spiritual Authority; as well as Peter Brown’s seminal corpus of works, including but not limited to Brown, Authority and the Sacred. 2 I here seek to avoid the familiar term “canon law,” whose apparent clarity and univocality conceals a multitude of competing legislative bodies, approaches to derivation and adjudication, to say nothing of the ways in which such rules fit into the broader whole of the traditions that gave rise to them. This is particularly true inasmuch as “canon law,” as a concept and genre, tends to be beholden to its shape in the West, and the tightly structured body of law, complete with a professional caste of jurists, that mark its manifestations in medieval Latin. By contrast, Eastern approaches to ecclesiastical ordering tend towards greater fluidity. Famously, there is no equivalent term corresponding to lex canonicus in the Greek East; as David Wagschal has observed in his recent monograph on ecclesiastical legislation in the Greek East, “[c]anon law is ‘the canons” (Wagschal, Law and Legality in the Greek East, 277). In the Syrian realm, such fluidity is reflected partly in the diversity of sources that collections manage to combine. The “collection of judgment” by Gabriel of Basra, for example, which is a compendium of ecclesiastical legislation from the late ninth century that holds together “The Teachings of the Apostles,” a text paralleling Chapter 8 of the Apostolic Constitutions, and excerpts from the Letters of Katholikos Timothy I, alongside the acta of East Syrian councils and selections from Roman civil law (see, for example, Kaufhold, Die Rechtssammlung des Gabriel von Basra und ihr Verhältnis zu den anderen juristischen Sammelwerken der Nestorianer). 3 Alistair Stewart-Sykes, the translator of the most recent English version of the text, has put forward a proposal for a multi-layered composition of the Didascalia, involving multiple layers of redaction and including source material stemming from the earliest stratum of Christian writing, even the first century, and culminating in a final layer from the late third or early – pre-Nicene – fourth century (Stewart-Sykes, The Didascalia apostolorum, 49–4). Other commentators have been generally less ambitious in their estimates; the debate has focused primarily on the question of to which part of the third century the Didascalia ought to be attributed, with, for example, Connolly and Harnack favoring the earlier part of the century, albeit, in Harnack’s estimate, with an anti-Novatianist revision in the latter part of the century, Funk arguing for a composition in toto in the later part of the century, and Achelis and Flemming leaving the question unresolved. For an assessment of the status quaestionis at the turn of the twentieth century in particularly the German-language scholarship, see Achelis and Flemming, Die ältesten Quellen des orientalischen Kirchenrechts, 370. For an update some twenty years later, see Connolly, Didascalia Apostolorum, cv-cix. Arthur Vööbus, the editor of the Syriac version of the Didascalia, and one of the most significant contributors to this conversation in recent memory, has addressed only the date of the

116  Maria E. Doerfler Syriac translation of the – only fragmentarily extant – Greek original, locating the text’s transmission into Syriac in the fourth century (Vööbus, The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac, 25–8). 4 Only fragments remain of the original Greek (see Bartlet, “Fragments of the Didascalia Apostolorum in Greek,” 301–9). Somewhat more remains of a Latin translation; the so-called Verona fragments amount to about two fifths of the putative total length of the text, and have been edited by Erik Tidner (Tidner, Didascaliae Apostolorum, canonum ecclesiasticorum, traditionis Apostolicae versiones Latinae). Fragments of Coptic and Arabic translations are extant as well; see, for example, Camplani, “A Coptic Fragment from the Didascalia Apostolorum (M579 f. 1).”; Nau, “Note sur le prologue de la Didascalie arabe et sur quelques apocryphes arabes pseudo-clémentins.” Happily, two more promising sets of sources exist. As already noted, the Didascalia was translated quite soon after its composition or final editorial framing into Syriac. The latter remains its most important tradent for textual information; Vööbus’s edition draws on eighteen manuscripts stemming from the eighth to twentieth centuries (Vööbus, The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac, and additional fragments from other manuscripts have been published in the meantime as well. See, for example, Brock, “Two Syriac Papyrus Fragments from the Schøyen Collection.”). Finally, the Apostolic Constitutions, a kind of super-church order combining Didache, Apostolic Tradition, and the Didascalia into one larger whole provides another Greek witness to the Didascalia, albeit one that has been thoroughly reworked. The best edition of this text remains von Funk, Didascalia et Constitutiones Apostolorum. 5 Both the usefulness of “church order” as a genre, and the Didascalia’s identification as a member of this genre have been disputed. For the former claim, see, for example, Mueller, “The Ancient Church Order Literature.”; for the latter, see various proposals by Georg Schöllgen, identifying the Didascalia variously as pastoral polemic (Schöllgen, “Die literarische Gattung der syrischen Didaskalie,” 149–55) and, later, as a work of biblical exegesis focused on a community’s perceived challenges (Schöllgen, “Der Abfassungszweck der frühen Kirchenordnungen.”) 6 See, for example, Chapters 4–8 of the Didascalia, on bishops’ selection and pastoral and particularly judicial responsibilities vis-à-vis their communities. The portrayal of the bishop as judge has recently attracted the attention of scholars of early legal development, including most notably Humfress, “Bishops and Law Courts in Late Antiquity.” For a focus on the Didascalia as part of the legislative backdrop of later Islamic lawmaking, see also Zellentin, The Qur’ān’s Legal Culture. Chapter  16, moreover, addresses appointment of male and female deacons, and, at the interstices of laity and clergy, Chapter 14 attends to the appointment of widows. The latter’s role and depiction in the Didascalia have likewise elicited a measure of scholarly attention. See especially Methuen, “Widows, Bishops and the Struggle for Authority in the Didascalia Apostolorum.”; Penn, “ ‘Bold and Having No Shame’.”; Bradshaw, “Women and Baptism in the Didascalia Apostolorum,” 641–5. 7 See, for example, Chapter  6 on excommunication and penitential practice. Perhaps surprisingly, the most extensive treatment of this aspect of the Didascalia seems to still be Rahner, “Busslehre und Busspraxis der Didascalia Apostolorum.” 8 See, for example, Chapters 2 and 3, on the relationship between husbands and wives; Chapter 9 on evincing appropriate respect for clergy; Chapter 13, on the regularity with which lay Christians ought to gather for the Eucharist; and Chapter 17 on the upbringing of orphan children. 9 The Didascalia’s focus on particularly “Judaizing” Christians in these final chapters has attracted considerable scholarship, including, most prominently, Fonrobert, “The Didascalia Apostolorum.”; Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity; Ekenberg, “Evidence for Jewish Believers in ‘Church Orders’ and Liturgical Texts,” 640–58. 10 Vööbus, The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac, 407.231–32, trans. CSCO 408.214.

Glimpses from the margins 117 11 See, for example, Schöllgen’s assessment that the reader “insgesamt . . . den Eindruck [gewinnt], daß dem Verfasser an der Plausibilität des pseudepigraphischen Rahmens erstaunlich wenig gelegen war” (Schöllgen, “Pseudapostolizität und Schriftgebrauch in den ersten Kirchenordnungen,” 116). Steimer, too, suggests that the Didascalia, like church orders in general, shows only little interest in the apostles-qua-historical personae, noting, however, that these texts draw upon the principle of apostolicity to support particular pragmatic arguments – e.g., in the case of the Didascalia, the author’s desired fasting practices (Steimer, Vertex Traditionis, 343–4, 347–50). As is readily apparent, references to the document’s supposed apostolic authorship cluster in the final third of the Didascalia. By contrast, the opening chapters contain, perhaps surprisingly, no reference to the Twelve, identifying the text rather as divinely authored: it is didaskalia theou. In the first part of the text, the only apostolic self-insertion occurs in Chapter 6 (CSCO 401.66, Vööbus); the frequency of references increases somewhat over the course of the text, culminating in Chapter 10 in an explicit discussion of the Didascalia’s apostolic authorship and framing purpose. As a result of both the uneven nature of these references and a number of perceived inconsistencies, including the status of the Jerusalem temple at the time of the text’s authorship, scholars have treated the Didascalia’s pseudepigraphal conceit as transparent. Others have resisted the assessment of plausibility for ancient audiences on the basis of contemporary standards. See particularly Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery. 12 Vööbus, The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac, 407.229–30, trans. CSCO 408.212. 13 The Greek original of the Acts of Peter is preserved only, on the one hand, in the Passio Petri, preserved in multiple manuscripts in Greek, Latin, and a number of other languages, and, on the other hand, in a papyrus fragment from Oxyrhynchus (P.Oxy. 849); a Latin translation of it, including the confrontation between Peter and Simon, survives, however, in a sixth or seventh century manuscript from Vercelli (Codex Vercellensis 158). For an excellent introduction to the manuscript, the text it contains, and the development of Peter in late ancient apocrypha see, Baldwin, Whose Acts of Peter?. 14 Already Achelis observes that “[e]in Bewußtsein [in der Didaskalie] von dem Unterschied zwischen kanonischen und unkanonischen Schriften ist bei den Apostelgeschichten so wenig wie bei den Evangelien zu erkennen” (Achelis, Die syrische Didaskalie, 330). Schöllgen attributes such fluidity to the author’s ignorance, noting nevertheless that only “authentically” biblical stories are quoted verbatim: “Wenn die Kirchenordnung an einigen wenigen Stellen auf apokryphe Schriften rekurriert, dann darf man wohl davon ausgehen, daß der Verfasser sie zum Kanon rechnet, zumindest aber für authentisch apostolische Zeugnisse halt” (Schöllgen, “Pseudapostolizität und Schriftgebrauch in den ersten Kirchenordnungen,” 114). 15 For recent literature on this topic, see supra n 8. 16 See, for example, Didascalia 26 (CSCO 407.254; Vööbus). 17 For a brief introduction to ‘Abdīshō’ bar Brīkhā see, for example, Griffith, “‛Abdīshō’ bar Berīkā,” 4; Lavenant, “”Ebedjesus,” 423–4; Wetzel, Kirchengeschichte Asiens, 134–5; Varghese, “Mar Oudisho metropolitan of Suwa (d. 1318) and his literary works,” 355–3; Kaufhold, “Ebedjesus von Nisibis,” 1; Tamcke, “Ebedjesus,” 216–17; Childers, “Abdisho bar Brikha,” 3–4; Minov, A Comprehensive Bibliography on Syriac Christianity, 201. For a more extensive bibliography, including works from the first half of the earlier decades of the twentieth century, see Younansardaroud, “A list of the known Manuscripts of the Syriac Maqāmat of ‘Abdīšō’ bar Brīkā,” 28–41, at 28 n1. 18 For a concise introduction to the development of the Church of the East during the thirteenth century and its development during the Mongol expansion, see Baum and Winkler, Die Apostolische Kirche des Ostens, 84–9; see also, Baumer, The church of the East, 195–233; older but still helpful discussions include, for example, Spuler, Gegenwartslage der Ostkirchen in ihrer nationalen und staatlichen Umwelt, 260–71;

118  Maria E. Doerfler Tisserant, “Nestorienne (Eglise),” columns 157–323. For a more detailed discussion of the legal context in the Church of the East, see also Simonsohn, “The Introduction and Formalization of Civil Law in the East Syrian Church in the Late Sasanian-Early Islamic Periods,” 231–43. For the assessment of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries being the period of greatest vitality in East Syrian literary productivity, see Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur mit Ausschluß der christlich palästinischen Texte, 320–21. 19 For a discussion of ‘Abdīshō’’s legal work, see especially, Selb, Orientalisches Kirchenrecht, vol. 1, 76–8, 223–6; Aprem, “Canon Law of Mar Abdisho,” 85–102; Aprem, “Codification of the Canon Law by Mar Abdisho in 1290 AD,” 371–9. 20 See, for example the assessment by Chabot in his opening remarks concerning ‘Abdīshō’’s work to his edition of the Synodicon Orientale: “Son recueil fut officieliement adopté pour toute l’Église nestorienne et continua d’être en usage jusqu’à nos jours” (Chabot, Synodicon orientale ou recueil de synodes nestoriens, 15). 21 Manuscript evidence for the Nomocanon involves the following witnesses: Vat. Syr. 128; Vat. Syr. 129; Vat. Syr. 245; Vat. Syr. 354, a possible copy of 128; Vat. Syr. 355, a copy of 129; Vat. Syr. 288, another possible copy of 128; Vat. Syr. 288, a copy of 245; Sir Borg. 52 and 53; Séert 66; ND-Sem 92; Bagdad 401 and 402; A, Mos. 63, 64 and 65; Mard. 51, Dijarb 100; Monastery of Mar Georgia A. Cambr. 2022; Berl. 87; BNat. 288, a copy of Vat. Syr. 245, and 323; Br. Mus. Or. 4398; Ming. Syr. 121 and 246. The oldest copy is part of the library of bishop Mar Aprem of Trichur, designated No. 64 in his unpublished catalogue. A translation into Latin is extant: Mai, Scriptorum Veterum Nova Collectio, 10:1. Manuscript evidence for the Ordo Iudicorum is somewhat sparser: ND-Sem 91, later 174, Mosul 66, a copy of ND Sem 91, Vat. Syr. 520., and a couple of copies in private holdings. It, too, has been translated into Latin by Vosté, Ordo iudiciorum ecclesiasticorum. 22 The order of topics, however, changes, with the Nomocanon introducing matters pertaining to the laity, including marriage and divorce, matters of inheritance, lay discipline, etc., while the second part focuses on strictly ecclesiastical matters and those involving monks and clergy, and the Ordo iudicorum inverting that order. For a discussion of the structure of each book, see Selb, Orientalisches Kirchenrecht, vol. 1, 223–5; for the contents and headings of the Nomocanon, see Aprem, “Canon Law of Mar Abdisho,” 92–100. 23 ‘Abdīshō’’s reliance on Gabriel’s own Nomocanon, a text no longer extant in its entirety, is clear – as is his independence in the use of his sources. Particularly in the Ordo iudicorum, ‘Abdīshō’ not only provides a florilegium of authoritative texts, but arbitrates between different approaches among his witnesses, in the process establishing as authoritative the material he includes. See, for example, Selb, Orientalisches Kirchenrecht, vol. 1, 224–5. 24 For a recent and comprehensive discussion of authorship and date of the Confession, as well as its extant witnesses in different language groups, see Kinzig, “Das sogenannte Bekenntnis des Ambrosius,” 452–80. 25 A translation from the Greek exists in Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum Containing Remains of Bardesan, Meliton, Ambrose and Mara Bar Serapion, 61–9. 26 The ms. in question is Ms. Baghdad, Libr. of the Chald. Patr. 509, the version designated RIII by Selb and Kaufhold in their critical edition of the Syro-Roman Lawbook. Ambrose is named modyana in the preamble. Selb and Kaufhold, Das Syrisch-Römische Rechtsbuch, vol. 2, 14. For a discussion of the provenance of the ms., see Selb and Kaufhold, Syrisch-Römische Rechtsbuch, vol. 2, 196–235. 27 Nomocanon II.13 (Assemani 47b, Mai 214, concerning the reciprocal value of dowry and bride-price) and II.16 (Assemani 48b, Mai 215 concerning widowed spouses’ right to remarry). In each instance, Ambrose is identified as “bishop and martyr” (episqopos w-sahda’). 28 Nomocanon III, Introduction (Assemani 54a, Mai 220).

Glimpses from the margins 119 29 For an extended discussion of the relationship between Ambrose and the emperors of his era, including Valentinian II, see McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, esp. 187–208. 30 The latter seems to have escalated in the so-called “Basilica Controversy,” a standoff between Ambrose and those of Milan’s citizens loyal to him and the pro-Nicene confession, on the one hand, and the imperial forces seeking to requisition one of the city’s churches for use of the homoian court, on the other. Ambrose discusses the tense encounter at length in his correspondence with his sister, in Ep. 76, written around 386 CE. For an introduction to the controversy and translation of the correspondence it inspired, see Liebeschuetz, Ambrose of Milan, 124–73; for a thoroughgoing introduction to the theological and political issues at stake, see also Williams, Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflict. 31 The remarks appear at the very conclusion of Part I of the Ordo iudicorum, and thus just prior to the beginning of the Ordo’s second part, which deals with “secular” matters, beginning with a section on the ecclesiastical judge and trial (Ordo Iudicorum 2.1.7; Vosté 147). ‫ܕܐܘܪܝܬܐ ܚܘܝ‬ ‫ܩܕܡܝܐܕܒܣܦܪܐ‬ ‫ܕܒܣܦܪܐܩܕܡܝܐ‬ ‫ܐܟܡܐܕܐܘܪܝܬܐ‬ ‫ܠܢ ܚܘܝ‬ 32 ..‫ܐܟܡܐܠܢ‬ 33 Syriac Ordo Iudicorum 2.1.7; Vosté 147. 34 Clement returns to the theme that all that is good in Greek culture draws on Moses. Plato, having studied the latter’s writings and derived from them the principles of both nature and philosophy is thus indebted to Moses and Hebrew culture more generally see, for example, Protrepticus 6.70, 1 and Stromateis 2.22.5. Nor is he alone in his attribution; already in the second century, Justin Martyr in his Apology 59.1 attributes aspects of the Platonic system to the philosophers’ “borrowing” from Moses. 35 Selb and Kaufhold, Syrisch-Römische Rechtsbuch, vol. 2, 18, 20. 36 Johnson, Literary Territories, 115–32. 37 Johnson, Literary Territories, 116. 38 For a brief introduction to the fragmented state of Syriac Christianity in the thirteenth century, see Berg, “Syriac Christianity,” 249–68. 39 Georg Schöllgen, for example, identifies the amplification of the author’s or bishop’s authority, alongside the desire for a kind of historical “gap filling” and the invocation of the apostles as arbiters of biblical interpretation, as a central reason for the construction of the text’s pseudepigraphal frame (Schöllgen, “Der Abfassungszweck der frühen Kirchenordnungen,” 75–7). 40 For a discussion of the proximity of hagiography and historiography in East Syrian writing, see Debié, “Writing History as Histories.” 41 Wagschal, Law and Legality in the Greek East, 278.

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120  Maria E. Doerfler Baumer, Christoph. The church of the East: an illustrated history of Assyrian Christianity. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006. Baumstark, Anton. Geschichte der syrischen Literatur mit Ausschluß der christlich palästinischen Texte. Bonn, 1922. Berg, Heleen Murre-van den. “Syriac Christianity.” In The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity, edited by Ken Parry, 249–68. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Bradshaw, Paul F. “Women and Baptism in the Didascalia Apostolorum.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 20(4) (2012): 641–5. Brock, Sebastian P. “Two Syriac Papyrus Fragments from the Schøyen Collection.” Oriens Christianus 79 (1995): 9–22. Brown, Peter. Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Camplani, Alberto. “A Coptic Fragment from the Didascalia Apostolorum (M579 f. 1).” Augustinianum 36(1) (1996): 47–51. Chabot, Jean Baptiste, ed. Synodicon orientale ou recueil de synodes nestoriens. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1902. Childers, Jeff W. “Abdisho bar Brikha.” In The Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, edited by Sebastian P. Brock et al., 3–4. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011. Connolly, R. Hugh. Didascalia Apostolorum: The Syriac Version Translated and Accompanied by the Verona Latin Fragments. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929. Cureton, William, ed. and trans. Spicilegium Syriacum Containing Remains of Bardesan, Meliton, Ambrose and Mara Bar Serapion. London: F & J Rivington, 1855. Debié, Muriel. “Writing History as Histories: The Biographical Dimension of East Syriac Historiography.” In Writing ‘True Stories’: Historians and Hagiographers in the Late Antique and Medieval Near East, edited by Arietta Papaconstantinou,  Muriel Debié, and Hugh Kennedy, 43–75. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2010. Drijvers, Jan Willem and John Watt, eds., Portraits of Spiritual Authority: Religious Power in Early Christianity, Byzantium and the Christian Orient. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Ehrman, Bart. Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Ekenberg, Anders. “Evidence for Jewish Believers in ‘Church Orders’ and Liturgical Texts.” In Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries, edited by Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik, 640–58. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2007. Fonrobert, Charlotte. Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender. Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. ———. “The Didascalia Apostolorum: A Mishnah for the Disciples of Jesus.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9(4) (2001): 483–509. Griffith, Sidney H. “‛Abdīshō’ bar Berīkā.” In The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, edited by Alexander P. Kazhdan. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Humfress, Caroline. “Bishops and law courts in Late Antiquity: How (not) to make sense of the legal evidence.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 19(3) (2011): 375–400. Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald. Literary Territories: Cartographical thinking in Late Antiquity. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Kaufhold, Hubert. Die Rechtssammlung des Gabriel von Basra und ihr Verhältnis zu den anderen juristischen Sammelwerken der Nestorianer. Berlin: Schweitzer, 1976. ———. “Ebedjesus von Nisibis.” In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft, edited by Hans Dieter Betz, vol. 2. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999.

Glimpses from the margins 121 Kinzig, Wolfram. “Das sogenannte Bekenntnis des Ambrosius (CPL 167a) bei Theodoret und der Brief In prolixitate epistolae Papst Anastasius’ II (CPL 1610; CPG 9160).” Zeitschrift für Antike und Christentum 19(3) (2015): 452–80. Lavenant, René. “Ebedjesus.” In Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, vol. 3, 423–24. Freiburg, Basel, Rom, and Wien: Herder, 1995. Liebeschuetz, John Hugo Wolfgang Gideon. Ambrose of Milan: Political Letters and Speeches. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. Mai, Angelo. Scriptorum Veterum Nova Collectio 10(1) (1838). Mathisen, Ralph W. ed. Law, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. McLynn, Neil. Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Methuen, Charlotte. “Widows, Bishops and the Struggle for Authority in the Didascalia Apostolorum.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46(2) (1995): 197–213. Minov, Sergey, ed. A Comprehensive Bibliography on Syriac Christianity. The Center for the Study of Christianity, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2013. Mueller, Joseph G. “The Ancient Church Order Literature: Genre or Tradition?” Journal of Early Christian Studies 15(3) (2007): 337–80. Nasrallah, Laura S. An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Nau, François. “Note sur le prologue de la Didascalie arabe et sur quelques apocryphes arabes pseudo-clémentins.” Journal asiatique X(17) (1911): 319–23. Penn, Michael. “ ‘Bold and Having No Shame’: Ambiguous Widows, Controlling Clergy, and Early Syrian Communities.” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 4(2) (2001): 159–85. Pollman, Karla. “Christianity and Authority in Late Antiquity: The Transformation of the Concept of Auctoritas.” In Being Christian in Late Antiquity: A Festschrift for Gillian Clark, edited by Carol Harrison, Caroline Humfress, and Isabella Sandwell, 154–174. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Rahner, Karl. “Busslehre und Busspraxis der Didascalia Apostolorum.” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirchengeschichte 72 (1950): 257–81. Schöllgen, Georg. “Die literarische Gattung der syrischen Didaskalie.” In IV Symposium Syriacum: Literary Genres in Syriac Literature (1984, Groningen, Oosterhesselen 10–12 September), edited by Jan Willem Drijvers, René Lavenant, Corrie Molenberg, and Gerrit J. Reinink, 149–55. Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1987. ———. “Der Abfassungszweck der frühen Kirchenordnungen. Anmerkungen zu den Thesen Bruno Steimers.” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 40 (1997): 55–77. Selb, Walter. Orientalisches Kirchenrecht, Volume 1: Die Geschichte des Kirchenrechts der Nestorianer (von den Anfängen bis zur Mongolenzeit). Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1981. Selb, Walter and Hubert Kaufhold. Das Syrisch-Römische Rechtsbuch, Volume 2: Texte und Übersetzungen. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2002. Simonsohn, Uriel. “The Introduction and Formalization of Civil Law in the East Syrian Church in the Late Sasanian-Early Islamic Periods.” History Compass 14(5) (2016): 231–43. Spuler, Bertold. Gegenwartslage der Ostkirchen in ihrer nationalen und staatlichen Umwelt. Wiesbaden: Metopen Verlag, 1968. Steimer, Bruno. Vertex Traditionis: Die Gattung der altchristlichen Kirchenordnungen. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992.

122  Maria E. Doerfler Stewart-Sykes, Alistair. The Didascalia apostolorum: An English Version with Introduction and Annotation. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Tamcke, Martin. “Ebedjesus.” In Metzler Lexikon christlicher Denker: 700 Autorinnen und Autoren von den Anfängen des Christentums bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Markus Vinzent, 216–17. Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2000. Tidner, Erik. Didascaliae Apostolorum, canonum ecclesiasticorum, traditionis Apostolicae versiones Latinae. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 75. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1963. Tisserant, Eugene. “Nestorienne  (Eglise).” In Dictionnaire de théologie catholique XI. Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1915–1950: columns 157–323. Uhalde, Kevin. Expectations of Justice in the Age of Augustine. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Varghese, P. K. “Mar Oudisho metropolitan of Suwa (d. 1318) and his literary works.” The Harp 8/9 (1995/6): 355–63. von Funk, Franz Xaver, ed. Didascalia et Constitutiones Apostolorum. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoeningh, 1905. Vööbus, Arthur. The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac. CSCO 401. Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1979. Vosté,  Jacques-Marie. Ordo iudiciorum ecclesiasticorum . . . a Mar Abdiso metropolita Nisibis et Armeniae latine interpretatus. Codificazione canonica orientale. Fonti, ser.2. fasc. 15–16. Rome: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1940. Wagschal, David. Law and Legality in the Greek East: The Byzantine Canonical Tradition, 381–883. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Wetzel, Klaus. Kirchengeschichte Asiens. Wuppertal and Zürich: Brockhaus, 1995. Williams, Daniel H. Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflict. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Xeravits, Géza G.‎Tobias Nicklas, and ‎Isaac Kalimi, eds. Scriptural Authority in Early Judaism and Ancient Christianity. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013. Younansardaroud, Helen. “A  list of the known Manuscripts of the Syriac Maqāmat of ‘Abdīšō’ bar Brīkā († 1318): ‘Paradise of Eden’.” Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies 20(1) (2006): 28–41. Zellentin, Holger M. The Qur’ān’s Legal Culture: The Didascalia Apostolorum as a Point of Departure. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013.

7 Concealing the law The limits of legal promulgation among the rabbis of Babylonia Jonathan A. Pomeranz

In The Morality of Law, Lon Fuller told the story of an allegorical king named Rex. Rex attempted to create law for his kingdom, but this attempt failed: [Rex] announced that he had written out a code and would henceforth be governed by it in deciding cases, but that for an indefinite future the contents of the code would remain an official state secret, known only to him and his scrivener. To Rex’s surprise this sensible plan was deeply resented by his subjects. They declared it was very unpleasant to have one’s case decided by rules, when there was no way of knowing what those rules were.1 Fuller goes on to argue that unpromulgated law cannot properly be referred to as “law.” While not all contemporary Americans would accept this conclusion, many would, I think, agree that promulgation is a central virtue of a legal system. This chapter argues that Fuller’s view, which seems so familiar to us, would have been unrecognizable to the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud (ca. 200–500 CE) with respect to their civil law. The Babylonian sages, for the most part, left civil law unpromulgated and taught it exclusively to other sages. This is, at least partially, a strategy to maintain the authority of the members of the rabbinic class in the arena of civil law.2 Not only were rabbis seen as having particular legal expertise that enabled them to serve as civil law judges, at least for a portion of the Jewish population, but rabbinic judges could, at times, rule in ways that did not accord with the outcome that the detailed rabbinic law would seem to mandate. This suggests that, in contrast to the usual model, instructing an audience in the content of a particular text was not the only way to achieve authority in antiquity, but that concealing textual knowledge could also be a strategy that granted interpreters of texts authority. More significantly, however, I will argue that it would be wrong to read even the narratives in which the rabbis seem most to abuse their authority (the striking stories in which the rabbis use their civil legal knowledge for their own benefit or rule arbitrarily) merely as evidence for the arbitrary use of rabbinic power. We also have to think about the function of these narratives in rabbinic culture. Most of the narratives I will analyze in which a sage abuses his authority to issue an arbitrary ruling or twist the law for his own benefit end with the offending

124  Jonathan A. Pomeranz sage’s rebuke by another sage or the non-sage realizing that she has been dealt with unfairly and cursing the rabbinic judge. These narratives do not just provide evidence of rabbinic judicial misconduct; they also provide evidence that the rabbis passed around “cautionary tales” to discourage their colleagues from abusing their judicial knowledge and authority. Arbitrary rulings, then, were unacceptable unless the rabbi had a good reason for departing from the law. The point is that “authority” is only one lens, though a very powerful one, that sheds light on textual practices in antiquity. My chapter suggests that there are other, equally plausible, explanations for the phenomenon of rabbinic concealment of the law: litigants who knew too much about the law could manipulate the legal system in a way that was antithetical to the interests of justice; concealing the law gave the rabbis the flexibility to achieve just outcomes when the law itself was inadequate, and there was a longstanding Ancient Near Eastern tradition of judges deciding on the basis of their own judgement rather than on the laws that appeared in law codes. All these explanations fit together and give us a more complete understanding of this particular practice than “authority” alone.

Rabbinic teaching to non-rabbis: the absence of civil law Few scholars have examined the extent to which the Babylonian sages taught rabbinic civil law to Jews outside of the rabbinic movement. The most direct statements on this subject can be found in Neusner’s The History of the Jews in Babylonia. He writes that “[t]he principles of adjudication were widely proclaimed . . . so that people would not need to be constantly repairing to the courts, but would act, in the first place, according to the law.”3 This claim sounds reasonable on its face: how could ordinary Jews have managed if they lacked the legal knowledge necessary to conduct their affairs? Neusner’s claim that the Babylonian rabbis promulgated the law to other Jews follows from his view of the Babylonian rabbis: The rabbi . . . aspired to transform the ordinary people into ‘rabbis.’ It was this aspiration that brought him into close and constant contact with the masses, forcing him to teach and to exemplify the truths he believed everyone should conform to.4 Yet one hint that something may be amiss with Neusner’s claim becomes apparent when we examine his supporting evidence. Neusner supports his claim as follows: “Rav lectured in Kimhania, near Sura, on how to acquire large cattle, and Samuel issued many dicta on the subject of acquiring fields, trees, and so forth.”5 Neusner cites two passages in support of his claim. The first – b. Qidd. 25b – is one of only two passages in the Babylonian Talmud in which a sage is said to lecture in public on civil law. Neusner is quite correct that the passage states that Rav taught in Kimhania the rules for acquiring large cattle. The second passage – b. B. Bat. 54a – is more problematic. Samuel does indeed “issue dicta,” but these are simply rabbinic teachings taught to other rabbis (i.e., memrot introduced with

Concealing the law  125 “amar Shmuel”). There is no evidence that anyone outside of the rabbinic movement learned the rules of acquisitions that Samuel taught. In the end, Neusner has identified only a single passage that supports his claim. A survey of the evidence for rabbinic public lectures in Babylonia largely refutes Neusner’s view that the rabbis promulgated civil law. The best known public lecture is the pirqa. This lecture, delivered on Sabbaths and Festivals,6 has been extensively studied.7 Isaiah Gafni has examined the topics that were taught (or were considered for teaching) in the pirqa and concluded that the legal topics were those that the people needed in practice.8 Gafni’s list of topics, which I have independently verified as comprehensive, bears one further striking characteristic:9 civil law is entirely absent from the list. The absence of the civil law from this list probably suggests that the sages were not interested in educating the public about civil law. It is, however, also possible that the rabbis considered civil law to be inappropriate for discussion on the Sabbath and Festivals, when Jews were supposed to abstain from commerce. We can decide between these alternatives by identifying the other cases in which the Babylonian sages are said to lecture in public. There are twelve such instances,10 but only two (including the instance cited by Neusner) pertain to civil law.11 This number is surprisingly small, given the prominence of civil law in the Babylonian Talmud. Some civil law does seem to have been taught on occasions other than the pirqa. Nevertheless, on the basis of this evidence, it appears that the sages generally taught topics outside the realm of civil law to the public. Civil law was, for the most part, studied only by rabbis.

Exclusive legal knowledge and the advantages of sages in court The conclusion that only rabbis had knowledge of civil law is further supported by many of the Babylonian Talmud’s courtroom narratives that involve non-sages. A number of these stories imply that non-sages were ignorant of most of details contained in civil law. These narratives also suggest that the lack of rabbinic accountability to a broader public may have affected the rabbinic judicial system in ways that unfairly harmed the interests of non-rabbis in court. For example, as a number of Babylonian narratives suggest, this disparity in legal knowledge could give relatives of the sages an advantage over Jews who were unconnected to the rabbinic class.12 One such narrative is the following: A relative of R. Naḥman sold her ketubah (bride-price, payable to the wife in the event of divorce or the death of her husband) for a certain sum of money. She was divorced and [subsequently] died. [The people who had bought the ketubah] came and demanded the money from her daughter. R. Naḥman said to [his attendants]: “Is there no one who can give her advice, that she should go and renounce her claim on the ketubah in favor of her father, and then inherit it from him.” She heard and went and renounced her claim. R. Naḥman said: “We have made ourselves like arkhei hadayanin (archiudices-Roman chief

126  Jonathan A. Pomeranz judges).” What did [R. Naḥman] think at the beginning and what did he think at the end? At the beginning he thought: “Do not hide yourself from your blood-kin” (Isaiah 58:7) and at the end he thought: “It is different for an important man.”13 In this narrative, a relative of R. Naḥman’s sells the future right to her ketubah to a speculator for a quantity of money, which she receives immediately. A ketubah is property worth a specified sum of money which a married woman receives if her husband divorces her or if he dies before her. Someone purchasing a ketubah, therefore, takes a risk. If the woman dies before her husband, she never receives the property guaranteed to her by her ketubah agreement, so the speculator will receive nothing. Therefore, a speculator purchasing a ketubah will pay only a fraction of the amount that the ketubah is worth to offset the fact that he might never receive the ketubah; and even if he does receive the ketubah, it may happen many years in the future. In this case, the husband divorces his wife before she dies. As a result, the ketubah is supposed to go to the people who earlier purchased the right to it. R. Naḥman, however, ensures that his relative’s daughter learns of a legal loophole. The daughter, acting as her mother’s heir, may renounce her claim to the ketubah. In that case, her father (= her mother’s husband) need not ever give up the land pledged as the ketubah. Consequently, the speculators, who have purchased the rights to the ketubah, do not receive the ketubah. The daughter will simply inherit that property when her father dies. (Presumably there are no male heirs who would compromise the daughter’s inheritance, or the father can be trusted to leave the ketubah to his daughter in his will). R. Naḥman, because of his familiarity with civil law, has the ability to help his relative’s daughter trick the speculators and avoid giving them her mother’s ketubah. Moreover, exclusive legal knowledge helped the sages themselves, both inside and outside of the courtroom, as in the following narrative: Yemar b. Ḥashu claimed money from a certain man. The man died and left a boat. He said to his agent: “Go and seize it from him.” [The agent] went and seized it. R. Papa and R. Huna b. R. Joshua met him. They said to him: “You are seizing on behalf of a creditor in a case where [the debtor] has debts to others, and R. Yoḥanan said: ‘one who seizes on behalf of a creditor in a case where [the debtor] has debts to others – has not [successfully] acquired [the property].’ ” [R. Papa and R. Huna b. R. Joshua] seized it. R. Papa rowed the boat. R. Huna b. R. Joshua pulled it with a rope. One said: “I have acquired all of it.” The other said: “I have acquired all of it.” R. Phinehas b. Ami met them. He said to them: “Rav and Samuel both say: ‘It is only in a case where they have been piled up and lie in the public domain.’ ” They said to him: “We too have seized it at the middle of the river.” They came before Rava. Rava said to them: “White geese who take off the cloaks of men!” This is what R. Naḥman said: “This only applies when they seize it when he is still alive.”14

Concealing the law 127 Yemar b. Ḥashu has loaned a man money and now seeks to claim the man’s property after his death. His agent seizes the man’s boat, but R. Papa and R. Huna b. R. Joshua meet him and tell him that the acquisition is ineffective. They, in turn, seize the boat for themselves, since they too are owed money. It is possible that these sages’ actions are not entirely hypocritical: R. Papa and R. Huna’s claim, most likely, is that an agent may not seize on behalf of a creditor when the debtor has debts to others, but that the creditors themselves may seize the property of the debtor. Even so, these sages clearly have a personal financial stake in the matter that they fail to disclose to Yemar or to his agent. In the continuation of the narrative, R. Papa and R. Huna b. R. Joshua start to argue among themselves about which one of them has acquired the boat. When their case comes before Rava, Rava rebukes them for taking property that rightfully belongs to non-rabbis (presumably, to the deceased man’s heirs), calling them “white geese who take off the cloaks of men,” and quotes R. Naḥman’s view that objects may be seized for a debt only during the borrower’s lifetime. This story suggests that – at least in some cases – sages used their exclusive knowledge of the law to reveal only the legal rules that benefited them in the situation at hand. Yemar b. Ḥashu’s agent assumes that, since the sages are experts in civil law, their judgments are likely to be upheld by the rabbinical court. He finds no point in pursuing his case further, even though the rabbis are selectively quoting rabbinic teachings for their own benefit. Another narrative that helps assess the advantages that the sages had in court is a lengthy story found in b. Qidd. 70a-b. A certain man, apparently a wealthy member of the non-rabbinic elite, comes into conflict with R. Judah b. Ezekiel. R. Judah b. Ezekiel is therefore summoned for judgment before R. Naḥman. Ignoring (or unaware of ) rabbinic teachings (b. Shev. 30a-b) that forbid a sage from appearing in court prior to his non-rabbinic opponent, R. Judah b. Ezekiel arrives first. R. Judah b. Ezekiel repeatedly demonstrates that his rabbinic knowledge is greater than that of R. Naḥman. R. Naḥman then acknowledges R. Judah as the greater sage, and, in a tone of extreme deference, suggests to R. Judah that he allow him to hear the case, so that people will not say that the rabbis give each other favorable treatment in court: [R. Naḥman] said to [R. Judah]:  Since the master [= R. Judah] has come here – let him speak his words, so that [people] will not say, “The sages show favor to one another.”15 R. Naḥman and R. Judah then begin to discuss the case, before the opposing litigant even arrives: [R. Naḥman] said to [R. Judah B. Ezekiel]:  “Why did the master excommunicate that man?” [R. Judah said]: “Because he abused a messenger of the sages.” [R. Naḥman said:] “then let the master lash him, for Rav would lash anyone who abused a messenger of the sages.” [R. Judah said:] “I did to him what was preferable to that.” [R. Naḥman asked:] “Why did the master announce

128  Jonathan A. Pomeranz that this man was a slave?” [R. Judah said:] “For he was accustomed to call people slaves, and it was taught: ‘Anyone who declares others unfit  – is himself unfit, and never speaks praise.’ And Samuel said: ‘He declares them unfit with his own blemish.’ ” R. Naḥman asked: “Say that Samuel meant that we should be suspicious of such a person – did he say to make a public announcement that the man [had that blemish]?!”16 R. Naḥman’s deferential tone continues throughout the dialogue. He does, however, investigate R. Judah’s actions thoroughly. R. Judah, for his part, is able to justify his actions with logic and by quoting yet another tradition in the name of Samuel. At this point in the story, R. Judah’s opponent arrives and claims that it is a gross slander to say that he is a slave, since he is a descendant of the Hasmoneans. R. Judah b. Ezekiel immediately produces another tradition in the name of Samuel: Thus says Samuel:  “Everyone who says, I come from the house of the Hasmoneans – is a slave.” R. Naḥman, however, is not prepared to rely on this tradition, since R. Judah only produced it after the facts had been made known. R. Judah mentions that R. Matana also knows of this tradition and can offer independent confirmation of it. At this moment, R. Matana arrives in Nehardea and confirms the tradition, thus vindicating R. Judah. This narrative neither criticizes the sages in it nor accuses them of showing favoritism to one another. The correctness of R. Judah’s position goes unquestioned in the narrative. Earlier in the story, R. Huna tells R. Judah that he is not required to go to the court of R. Naḥman since he is a superior scholar, but that he ought to go because of the honor due to the exilarch. Even R. Judah’s appearance in the court is supererogatory. R. Naḥman, after acknowledging R. Judah’s superiority as a scholar, says that he is proceeding with the trial merely as a formality. Though he does not doubt the justness of R. Judah’s claims, he wants to avoid even the appearance of showing favoritism to R. Judah. R. Naḥman then asks R. Judah challenging questions and refuses to accept R. Judah’s tradition that Samuel said that anyone who claims descent from the Hasmoneans is a slave on R. Judah’s authority alone. The story then vindicates R. Judah’s recitation of the tradition by having R. Matana arrive and confirm the tradition. R. Judah, it turns out, would not simply invent a tradition for his own advantage. The narrative thus takes the view that the rabbis make every reasonable effort to be fair to non-rabbis and submit to legal proceedings that are not strictly necessary. However, if we read this narrative with even a slight amount of skepticism about these claims, the narrative provides evidence for the advantages that knowledge of the law gave rabbis over non-rabbis in the courtroom. R. Judah is familiar with the same legal traditions as R. Naḥman. He can use those traditions to justify his actions and answer any question that R. Naḥman might pose about his behavior.

Concealing the law 129 His opponent, by contrast, is not familiar with rabbinic traditions, and as a result he makes a significant error. He argues that he is not a slave, for he has a family tradition that he is descended from the Hasmonean kings. R. Judah immediately seizes upon the fact that his opponent has offered and produces a tradition stating that those who claim to be descendants of the Hasmoneans are slaves. The fact that the rabbis alone had access to legal traditions, then, surely enabled them to use the legal system to their own advantage. The rabbinic decision to keep the Jewish public largely ignorant of civil law, then, was a strategy that maintained rabbinic authority and power, and could harm the legal interests of non-rabbis when they were opposed by rabbis or their relatives.

Concealing the law and judicial discretion In addition to the advantages that knowledge of the law gave sages and their relatives over non-sages in court cases, exclusive knowledge of the law gave the sages a great degree of flexibility in their rulings in cases that did not involve rabbis. Sages could use this flexibility to decide unjustly, as in the following narrative: A certain woman came before Rabbah b. R. Huna. He said to her: “What can I do for you, for Rav would not allow a widow to collect her ketubah and my father and master would not allow a widow to collect her ketubah.” She said to him: “[In that case] give me my right to maintenance [from my husband’s estate].” He said to her: “You also have no right to maintenance, for R. Judah said in the name of Samuel: ‘One who claims her ketubah in court – she no longer has maintenance.’ ” She said to him: “Let his chair be overturned [= may he suffer a death in his family], for he decides according to two [conflicting] authorities.” They overturned his chair and set it upright, and even so he did not escape from illness.17 In this narrative, a widow comes before Rabbah b. R. Huna and asks him to enforce the collection of her ketubah. Rabbah b. R. Huna refuses on the grounds that Rav and R. Huna did not allow widows to collect their ketubot. The widow then asks for her maintenance. This is a provision guaranteed by the ketubah agreement. M. Ketub. 4:12 indicates that the standard text of a ketubah included the provision: “you may sit in my house and be sustained from my property all of the days that you dwell in my house as a widow.” Rabbah b. R. Huna, however, refuses to enforce the widow’s right to live off her husband’s property. He quotes Samuel’s rule that when a woman comes to collect her ketubah, she loses her right to maintenance from her husband’s estate. Rabbah b. R. Huna’s ruling is unjust. It was only Rav who held the opinion that a woman cannot take a vow and collect her ketubah. Samuel, according to two versions of his dispute with Rav quoted in this same textual unit in b. Giṭ. 35a, allows a widow to take an oath outside of the courtroom and collect her ketubah. Samuel’s views form a coherent position: so long as a widow does not wish to remarry, she is entitled to live off her husband’s estate. When the widow does wish

130  Jonathan A. Pomeranz to remarry, she may collect her ketubah and at that point is no longer entitled to live off of her husband’s estate. Rav’s rulings are also less onerous for the widow than Rabbah b. R. Huna’s ruling. While Rav does not allow a widow to collect her ketubah, he does allow her to live off her husband’s estate. But Rabbah b. R. Huna’s ruling combines the worst of Rav and Samuel’s conflicting opinions: a woman who tries to claim her ketubah in court does not receive her ketubah and she also loses her right to maintenance from her husband’s estate. Rabbah b. R. Huna seems to expect that the widow will not have enough knowledge of the law to understand that his ruling is arbitrary. He speaks as though he is confined by the law, saying: “What can I do for you?” This rhetoric of judicial passivity conceals Rabbah b. R. Huna’s active combination of two contradictory opinions in order to produce the worst possible outcome for the widow. This narrative shows that sages had significant discretion to make legal rulings that did not conform to precedent, and that they could, nevertheless, characterize their own innovative rulings as following precedent. Such rulings allowed a sage to use his discretion to unjustly penalize vulnerable people, like the widow in the story, who were protected by the rabbinic legal precedent that the judge chose to mischaracterize.

Textual authority without textual transmission We have seen that the Babylonian rabbis had near exclusive knowledge of legal traditions. It is possible that Neusner is correct to a limited extent: certain rabbis seem to have taught at least some civil law to non-rabbis. But rabbis lecturing in public, for the most part, chose to teach ritual law rather than civil law. Moreover, there were no advocates in rabbinic courts. Rabbis who were sitting in judgment or justifying their own acquisition of property in public could expect that they would go unchallenged regarding the validity of their decisions on the basis of rabbinic law. The ways in which Babylonian rabbis took care to conceal their knowledge of civil law from the broader Jewish public can complicate our picture of textual authority in antiquity by suggesting that promulgating legal works was not the only way to achieve authority. We tend to imagine that a work like Jubilees was used primarily to justify the laws that are found in Jubilees: if someone were to ask a member of the Qumran community, “How do you know that it is forbidden to travel by ship on the Sabbath?,” they would pull out their scroll of Jubilees, point out that it had been revealed by the angel of the presence to Moses, and turn to the section on Sabbath laws where that particular law can be found.18 Jubilees may well have been used in this way. But a legal work might have been used in other authoritative ways as well. A person who had possession of such a book might not directly reveal its contents to his audience, but might assert that the book dealt with a case at hand and ruled in a particular way, even if no such verse existed in the book. Numerous examples of flexible characterization of the Torah are attested in the literature of the Second Temple Period,19 and it seems unlikely that such free characterization of texts would have been limited to the Torah alone.

Concealing the law  131 One interesting feature of rabbinic literature is that it contains numerous narratives that speak to how rabbinic teachings were used by rabbis. Rabbinic literature contains both the text and something of its reception history. It lets us see that often it was leaving rabbinic legal teachings unpromulgated – rather than transmitting them to everyone – that maintained and promoted rabbinic authority.

Legal flexibility: an ancient Near Eastern tradition The rabbis’ unwritten, concealed law should not be explained solely on the basis of rabbinic authority and arbitrary power. Admittedly, the fact that the law of the rabbis was unwritten granted the judge a degree of discretion, sometimes in a way that disadvantaged non-rabbis in the court-system. In contemporary America, unwritten law is considered inherently tyrannical and arbitrary. This view lies behind Lon Fuller’s critique of his allegorical king Rex’s unpromulgated laws. We have inherited this view from the most famous story about the writing down of law in Western tradition: the composition of The Twelve Tables, Rome’s first law code. According to this story, the tables were written down when the plebeians protested the arbitrary judicial decisions that favored the patrician class at Rome.20 In the West, then, unwritten laws can look suspiciously like the tyranny of an elite. However, the Babylonian sages can be understood to be following a longstanding Ancient Near Eastern tradition of unwritten law. Assyriologists have long recognized a gap between Near Eastern law codes (such as the code of Hammurapi) and court records from the same era.21 As Michael LeFebvre has argued, this paradox can be resolved by understanding Near Eastern law codes to be nonlegislative.22 In a system in which law codes are understood to be non-legislative, the true law is an abstract reality, essentially equivalent to the ideal of justice. Law writings may be a guide to this heavenly ideal, but a judge ultimately has to render a decision based on his own understanding of heavenly justice and cannot depend on the laws in legal writings. This, LeFebvre argues, was the reality in many Ancient Near Eastern cultures, including Ancient Israel.23 While by the time of the Babylonian sages, Jewish law had become legislative and had been elaborated in minute detail, the rabbis maintained the flexibility to render decisions that conflicted with established rabbinic legal traditions by not disclosing civil law to non-rabbis. The Babylonian sages most likely saw their flexibility in rendering decisions to be integral to their ability to dispense justice, when the law would not by itself produce an ideal outcome. The following narrative provides an example of a rabbi using his judicial discretion to achieve an outcome that is better than the one mandated by the letter of the law: A certain man stole a yoke of oxen from his fellow. He went and plowed with them and sowed seeds with them. After that, he returned them to their owner. [The case] came before R. Naḥman. [R. Naḥman] said to them: “Go, evaluate the amount of increase [in the value of the field.” (So that the robber may pay that amount to the oxen’s owner)] Rava said to [R. Naḥman]: “The oxen contributed to the increase, but did the land [itself] contribute nothing to the

132  Jonathan A. Pomeranz increase?” [R. Naḥman] said: “Did I say to evaluate all of it? I said half.” [Rava] said to [R. Naḥman]: “Ultimately, it is a case of theft and we require [the stolen property] to be returned, as was taught in the Mishnah (B. Qama 9:1): ‘All robbers pay the value at the time of the robbery.’ ” [R. Naḥman] said to him: “Have I not told you not to say a word to me when I am sitting in judgment? For it is as Huna my colleague said about me: ‘King Shapur and I are brothers in judgment.’ That man is a veteran robber and I wanted to penalize him!”24 In this case, while the strict law requires that the robber only be penalized on the basis of the value of what he stole, R. Naḥman rules that the profit he made with the oxen – or at any rate, half the profit – should go to the owner of the oxen. R. Naḥman concedes that there is no basis for this in rabbinic law, but his ruling is nevertheless necessary. The letter of the law would allow a man to take his neighbor’s oxen and use them to plow his own field and then return them (paying, at most, for the depreciation of the value of the oxen); this law, therefore, fails to adequately discourage larceny. R. Naḥman uses his judicial discretion to determine that a harsher penalty is required. The rabbis, moreover, most likely believed that keeping the populace ignorant of the law was integral to preventing non-rabbis from taking advantage of loopholes in the law and adjusting their claims to achieve particular legal results. From a rabbinic perspective, it was a good thing that most non-rabbis could not act in the manner of R. Naḥman’s relative, who took advantage of the legal loophole to prevent the speculators from acquiring her mother’s ketubah. The rabbis were not entirely mistaken in this belief. In contemporary America, where the law is promulgated and lawyers are available for hire, those who can afford legal counsel generally take advantage of whatever legal loopholes are available to them. Similarly, Pinchas Roth has shown that Jewish non-rabbis in Southern France in the 13th and 14th centuries, who had a significant (though not perfect) grasp of rabbinic law, did use that knowledge of the law in an attempt to manipulate the court system. One husband who had no grounds for divorce from his wife, took an oath denying her benefit from him, knowing that the court would be compelled to grant him a divorce. This misuse of the law infuriated prominent judges: Roth discusses the thirteenth century judge R. Mordekhai Qimḥi’s despair at being manipulated by litigants.25 Moreover, the narratives that we discussed as evidence of arbitrary and unjust judicial behavior are actually evidence for two conclusions that are in some tension with each other. They are certainly evidence that rabbis did not always use their exclusive knowledge of the law well and that sometimes their legal process was less than fair. However, these narratives are also warnings against such behavior: in every narrative above, in which a sage is portrayed as manipulating the legal system for his advantage or the advantage of his relatives, the sage is rebuked for manipulating the legal system. Sometimes this rebuke is relatively mild, as when R. Naḥman rebukes himself for helping his relative’s daughter acquire her mother’s ketubah, with the phrase, “we acted like arkhei hadayanin.”

Concealing the law  133 In other cases, the sage is caught in his deception and suffers, as when Rabbah b. R. Huna is caught by the widow, who (improbably, since as a woman and a nonrabbi she was doubly excluded from legal knowledge) understands his manipulation of the law and curses him. While these stories are evidence of judicial abuses, they are also evidence that the rabbis tried to regulate themselves and ensure that such abuses did not occur regularly. Even in the case of the extended narrative about R. Judah b. Ezekiel and R. Naḥman, the story repeatedly suggests that R. Naḥman took great – and unnecessary – pains to ensure that the trial was fair to the non-rabbinic litigant. Although we are rightly skeptical about these claims, it seems clear that, even in the realm of internal rabbinic discourse, it was unacceptable and shameful to judge in a way that favored a rabbinic litigant over a non-rabbinic one.26 Unlike the Ancient Near Eastern legal tradition, in which the judge ultimately had to decide on the basis of his own judgment, rabbinic civil law was an elaborate creation, even if it was largely unpromulgated. As David Goodblatt has shown, disciples trained by studying their masters’ decisions in the courtroom and they could point out when their teacher made a decision at odds with accepted rabbinic teaching.27 This, however, was hardly a panacea against arbitrary rabbinic judgment, as often disciples did not have sufficient standing within the master-disciple relationship for their challenges to be taken seriously. As we saw in the previous narrative, when Rava corrected R. Naḥman’s penalizing the thief, R. Naḥman responded harshly: “Have I not told you not to say a word to me when I’m sitting in judgment?”28 Still, other sages of equal or higher status could determine that a rabbi had erred, as Rava did when he rebuked R. Papa and R. Huna.

Conclusion Rabbinic authority, then, turns out to be an insufficient explanation for the rabbinic legal practice of leaving civil law largely unpromulgated. This practice did grant the rabbinic class a measure of authority and it meant that non-rabbis were, for the most part, unable to contest the judgments of rabbis. In this way, the rabbis were not much different than any modern group of specialists: doctors, scientists, lawyers, and scholars of Late Antiquity. They were the only ones who could regulate their own activity. But to regard this legal activity as an exercise solely in acquiring and maintaining authority disregards the rabbis’ own reflections on their practices and betrays an alienation from the world of the rabbis that scholarship ought to partially overcome. “Authority” is an explanation for practices that we do not understand or, at minimum, with which we do not identify. “We” are idealists; “we” care about truth and justice, while “they” are self-interested; “they” are in it for the money, “they” have been bought by lobbyists; “they” seek authority. Scholarship ought to balance external, critical perspectives, and the perspectives of those whom it studies. We are not the rabbis and we cannot – and should not – identify entirely with their perspectives; but neither should we regard the rabbis with Foucauldian cynicism and assume that everything the rabbis said and did can be explained solely as an exercise of power. The rabbinic class did maintain its

134  Jonathan A. Pomeranz authority by having an unpromulgated law, but they also followed in the footsteps of a longstanding Near Eastern tradition of unwritten law and judicial flexibility, prevented others from manipulating the legal system for their own benefit, and tried to police themselves and prevent the abuse of judicial authority.

Notes 1 Fuller, The Morality of Law, 35. 2 For another attempt to read legal material both with and beyond authority claims, see Maria Doerfler’s chapter in this book, 107–22. Common between both of our chapters is how legal narratives can modify and reframe legal proclamations, affording us glimpses beyond the cultural work of legal authority. 3 Neusner, A History of the Jews in Babylonia, 2:264. 4 Neusner, A History of the Jews in Babylonia, 3:102. 5 Neusner, A History of the Jews in Babylonia, 2:264. 6 Isaiah Gafni unequivocally maintains that the pirqa took place on Sabbaths and Festivals. See Gafni, The Jews of Babylonia, 210. David Goodblatt is more hesitant about this conclusion, but I read his account as leaning slightly toward the view that the pirqa took place on Sabbaths and Festivals. See Goodblatt, Rabbinic Instruction, 184. 7 The most significant recent studies can be found in Gafni, The Jews of Babylonia, 204–13 and Goodblatt, Rabbinic Instruction, 171–96. 8 Gafni, The Jews of Babylonia, 207. 9 Gafni, The Jews of Babylonia, 207. See also Pomeranz, “Ordinary Jews,” 130. 10 Pomeranz, “Ordinary Jews,” 137–8. The twelve topics of additional public lectures are: going out on the Sabbath wearing a coronet (b. Shab. 59b, b. Ketub. 103b), closing a skylight with a stopper on the Sabbath (b. Shab. 126b), smoking fruits on a Festival (b. Betz. 23a), sifting flour for the second time on a Festival (b. Betz. 29b), the length of the mourning period, when the mourning period coincides with Pentecost (b. Moʿed Qat. 24b), the acquisition of large livestock by meshikha [dragging] (b. Qidd. 25b), permitted marriages for converts (b. Qidd. 73a), the laws of proper slaughter (b. Ḥul. 18b), covering blood after ritual slaughter for a sick person on the Sabbath (b. Ḥul. 84b), impurity of a woman who did not undergo purification after childbirth (b. Nid. 36a), double portion of the firstborn with regard to a loan made by his deceased father (b. B. Bat. 124b), the decree of R. Judah Nisiyah and his court that the oil of non-Jews is permitted (b. Avod. Zar. 36a). 11 b. Qidd. 25b; b. B. Bat. 124b. 12 See Pomeranz, “Ordinary Jews,” 180–90. 13 b. Ketub. 85b-86a. 14 b. Ketub. 84b-85a. 15 b. Qidd. 70b. 16 b. Qidd. 70b. 17 b. Giṭ. 35a 18 Jubilees 50:12–13. 19 E.g,. the pact in Nehemiah 10, where laws are attributed to the Torah of Moses, despite diverging from the Torah. On the divergence of these laws from the Torah, see LeFebvre, Collections, 112–22. Tobit 6:13 provides another example. 20 Du Plessis, Borkowski’s Textbook on Roman Law, 29–30. 21 LeFebvre, Collections, 9. Van De Mieroop. Philosophy Before the Greeks, 170–73. 22 LeFebvre, Collections, 18. See also Hayes, What’s Divine about Divine Law?, 170–3. 23 LeFebvre, Collections, 54. 24 b. B. Qam. 96b. 25 Roth, “Legal Strategy and Legal Culture in Medieval Jewish Courts of Southern France.”

Concealing the law  135 26 See also Wimpfheimer, Narrating the Law, 77. Note that Wimpfheimer’s reading of Rava’s oath is incorrect. Wimpfheimer reads Rava’s oath on b. Shab. 119a as saying that Rava would always judge in favor of a non-rabbi because Wimpfheimer misunderstands the Aramaic phrase: mahafikhna bizkhuteh. Wimpfheimer understands this to mean that Rava would “overturn [a court case between a disciple of the sages and an outsider] for the benefit of [the disciple of the sages].” Wimpfheimer takes “the court case” to be the implied object of mahafikhna (“I would overturn”) and bizkhuteh to be an adverbial phrase meaning “for the benefit [of the disciple of the sages].” However, the verb hpk in both Hebrew and Aramaic takes an object with the preposition b-. Rava thus means that before he went to sleep at night, he would thoroughly consider (mahafikhna) the merits (zekhuteh) of the disciple of the sage’s case. This does not in any way suggest that he would abandon impartiality to the extent that he would actively pervert justice to secure a legal victory for a sage over a non-sage. Thus, the main piece of evidence in favor of the claim that some rabbis were shameless about issuing arbitrary and biased judgment does not, in fact, make that case. 27 Goodblatt, Rabbinic Instruction, 272–80. For an example of such correction, see b. B. Qam. 84a. For my hypothesis about R. Papa b. Samuel’s reasons for deviating from the Mishnaic law, see Pomeranz, “The Rabbinic and Roman Laws of Personal Injury,” 325. 28 b. B. Qam. 96b.

Bibliography du Plessis, Paul. Borkowski’s Textbook on Roman Law, 4th edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Fuller, Lon. The Morality of Law. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964. Gafni, Isaiah. The Jews of Babylonia in the Times of the Talmud: Communal and Spiritual Life. Jerusalem: Shazar, 1990. Goodblatt, David. Rabbinic Instruction in Sasanian Babylonia. Leiden: Brill, 1975. Hayes, Christine. What’s Divine about Divine Law?: Early Perspectives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. LeFebvre, Michael. Collections, Codes, and Torah: the Re-Characterization of Israel’s Written Law. New York: T&T Clark, 2006. Neusner, Jacob. A History of the Jews in Babylonia, 5 vol. Studia Post-Biblica. Leiden: Brill, 1966–1969. Pomeranz, Jonathan. “The Rabbinic and Roman Laws of Personal Injury.” Association for Jewish Studies Review 39(2) (2015): 303–331. ———. “Ordinary Jews in the Babylonian Talmud: Rabbinic Representations and Historical Interpretation” Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 2016. Roth, Pinchas. “Legal Strategy and Legal Culture in Medieval Jewish Courts of Southern France.” Association of Jewish Studies Review 38(2) (2014): 375–93. Van De Mieroop, Marc. Philosophy Before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Wimpfheimer, Barry S. Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Part III

Authority and transmission

8 Truth and doubt in manuscript discovery narratives Eva Mroczek

Find stories as authority Writing in the thirteenth century, Moses Taku relates an accusation against Anan, the founding figure of Karaism: We have heard from our teachers that the heretic Anan and his friends used to write down heresies and lies and hide them in the ground. Then they would take them out and say: This is what we found in ancient books.1 This report points to a widely attested phenomenon: claims about the discovery of hidden texts give new documents an air of legitimacy and antiquity. As far back as the “discovery” of the Scroll of the Law in the Temple in 2 Kings 22, discovery narratives have functioned as an authorizing device, giving a new text an ancient pedigree – fabricating a context of reception for texts that have no provenance, no history of transmission. This is, indeed, an important function of such narratives: to serve as paratexts that authorize newly written texts and bolster new theological ideas. But what if we read such narratives not merely as functional paratexts, but as standalone texts in their own right – not authorizing tools for theological documents, but theological discourses in themselves? This chapter explores what might emerge if we see narratives of discovery internally: not simply as texts that are about and in the service of the documents they purportedly authorize; but rather, as narratives about how the sacred past is threatened, lost, hidden, and – perhaps, but always precariously – recoverable. I explore how we might move from considering the “authorizing” function of find stories, which is rarely straightforwardly successful, to reading them “beyond authority” as narrative art and theological discourse. Already in our thirteenth century comment about the “heretic” Karaites, we see how the authorizing function of discovery stories can be ambiguous and doubleedged. The story of concealment and discovery is only told so that it may be immediately debunked, and our only source for it is the debunker himself: no actual Karaite text claims to have discovered ancient buried books.2 It is Moses Taku who presents Anan and his friends as not only heretics, but also scammers, who fabricate a cover-up that would authorize newly written lies.

140  Eva Mroczek Heretics, it seems, have a habit of inventing such stories – or at least, people have a habit of saying they do. Looking further back at an example from Christian apocrypha, the same phenomenon occurs in the Apocalypse of Paul, also known as Visio Pauli, a text that survives in Latin from about 400 CE that describes Paul’s tour of heaven.3 The text is framed with a discovery story: a man living in Paul’s old house in Tarsus sees a vision of an angel who instructs him to “break up the foundation of the house and publish that which he found.”4 At first the man did not believe the vision was real. But the angel coerces him, and he finds “a box of marble inscribed upon the sides: therein was the revelation of Saint Paul, and his shoes wherein he walked when he taught the word of God.”5 The Apocalypse of Paul was a popular text. Found in several variant editions in Latin, it was also widely translated in Europe through the middle ages, but by then its discovery story had long been in doubt. In the fifth century, Sozomen questioned its authenticity, calling the Apocalypse of Paul a text that “none of the ancients ever saw.” He claims to have spoken to a credible informant about the discovery story itself: Some persons affirm that the book was found during [Theodosius’s] reign, by Divine revelation, in a marble box, buried beneath the soil in the house of Paul at Tarsus in Cilicia. I have been informed that this report is false by Cilix, a presbyter of the church in Tarsus, a man of very advanced age, as is indicated by his gray hairs, who says that no such occurrence is known among them, and wonders if the heretics did not invent the story. What I have said upon this subject must now suffice.6 The trustworthy greybeard doubts the reliability of the find story, which in turn casts doubt on the authenticity of the text itself. If the discovery story is not true, then the text should perhaps not be read as Paul’s authentic account of what he saw when he was taken up into the third heaven (2 Cor 12), but instead dismissed as a hoax, the deceptive work of heretics. In one sense, then, this widespread motif – that of claiming to have discovered a long-hidden text – has long been recognized as part of the history of dissembling and forgery. The phenomenon continues well into the modern period. Anthony Grafton writes that since antiquity, “forgers had felt they had to explain how they could have come across stunning novelties previously unknown.”7 Focusing on the eighteenth century, Grafton identifies a number of forgers of “ancient” texts who “lavished space and imagination on the origins and setting of their creations as well as on their content and wording.”8 Chatterton, for example, fabricated a story about manuscripts in a church muniment room to give his creations “archival pedigree”: “an apparent guarantee that what might seem an individual’s free invention had in fact been preserved for uninterrupted centuries in an inviolable archive.”9 Notorious forger Annius of Viterbo (fifteenth century), traced the provenance of his fabricated fragments of Greek and Latin historians back to the sacred annals diligently preserved by priestly classes, which – in an echo of Josephus’s claims about the antiquity and stability of Jewish and Near Eastern archival

Truth and doubt in manuscript discovery  141 sources (Ap. 1:8–10) – represent the most authoritative witnesses to historical truth.10 Here, fabrications of provenance are indeed authorizing strategies, creating a paratextual frame in which a new writing can be received as authentic and reliable.11 Eve Krakowski writes that the discovery tale is a “narrative device” that can serve “not only to frame accounts of spiritual revival, but also to legitimate religious innovation and undermine the authority of contemporary norms.”12 From the perspective of Jewish antiquity, we can add many more examples to this pattern. One example is the conflicting accounts of the origins of the Zohar, ascribed to the tannaitic sage Shimon bar Yochai, but composed by the thirteenth century kabbalist Moshe de Leon. Here, as with the Apocalypse of Paul, we can see that the ancient provenance of a text is not left unquestioned. In one account, Moshe de Leon’s own widow debunks the claim to the Zohar’s ancient origins, swearing that there was never any ancient manuscript at all – her husband had written it all himself, “out of his own head and heart.”13 She claimed he ascribed it to an ancient sage because people would pay more for an ancient book. But as another tradition has it, the Zohar was discovered by an Ishmaelite farmer in a cave, who sold it to some spice traders.14 The traders used the pages to wrap their spices, and one intrepid scholar dug through heaps of garbage to retrieve and reassemble the scattered fragments. Here, a story of origins is created to explain how Shimon bar Yochai’s text could remain unknown for centuries, only to show up in bits and pieces in the hands of a thirteenth century kabbalist. This type of discovery story should spark a moment of recognition. The trope of an Arab who accidentally finds ancient manuscripts in a cave is precisely that of a more famous find story: the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s. According to the narrative, a Bedouin goatherder, Muhammad “the Wolf,” followed a goat from his flock into a cave – a motif that Dina Stein also identifies as folkloristic15 – and discovered ceramic jars in which the ancient scrolls were found.16 But as the Zohar’s Ishmaelite discoverer sold the precious manuscript to the wrong people, who used the pages to wrap spices, so the Bedouin who discovered the Scrolls have been accused of burning, scattering, or using the parchments as sandal straps.17 The exact details of the story are murky, and the canonical account in our textbooks, classrooms, and TV specials emerged from a series of conflicting accounts over time. As I have written elsewhere,18 contradictory claims exist for which exact caves were found by the Bedouin and precisely when these discoveries took place. Different versions of the story feature different animals: one account claims that a Bedouin elder had reported that Muhammad followed not a goat, but a wounded partridge.19 While some parts of the story were harmonized as it became canonical, others became more muddled, down to who the discoverer actually was: at least two men claimed to be Muhammad in the 1990s – and there was some disagreement among Qumran scholars about which of them was more credibly “the original ed-Dib.”20 But in its general claims, unlike the other origin stories we have seen, this particular story is not a fabrication. There really were texts found by accident in

142  Eva Mroczek a cave, and these texts really were ancient. And yet, the legendary “feel” of the story raised hackles. Solomon Zeitlin, editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review in the 1950s, published numerous articles there arguing vehemently that the Scrolls were a hoax.21 Zeitlin had philological arguments for his position, but the contradictory, typological nature of the discovery account made up a large part of his arsenal against the Scrolls’ authenticity. Zeitlin argued for his theory by comparing the discovery of the Scrolls to the case of Moses Shapira in the 1880s. Shapira claimed to have acquired leather strips inscribed, in palaeo-Hebrew script, of an early version of Deuteronomy.22 As he was trying to sell his manuscript fragments, Shapira recounted a discovery story of his own. He claimed to have met some Bedouin who had been hiding from attack “in caves hewn high up in a rock” in Moab. There, they discovered several bundles of old black linen. They peeled away the linen, and, behold, instead of gold, which they expected to find, there were only some black inscribed strips of leather (called Nekesh, which means some signs or scratches), which they threw away (or I believe he said threw into the fire, but I am not certain); but one of them picked them up and kept them in great honour as charms, and he became a rich man, worth three hundred sheep.23 Disastrously for Shapira, the leading scholars of the day did not believe him, and accused him of forging the fragments himself. In one of the history of scholarship’s sordid tragedies, Shapira eventually committed suicide in a Rotterdam hotel room.24 Solomon Zeitlin revisited Shapira’s account to point out the features it shared with the Dead Sea Scrolls find story, which, to him, cast doubt on the entire discovery. “Again a Bedouin and a cave,” he wrote in one article; “the entire Bedouin story smells.” Perhaps, he suggested, the scrolls were planted in a cave to be “discovered” later; “hence the entire discovery is a hoax,” and we are fools to have fallen for it. With Shapira’s story about the discovery of his forged fragments, he claimed, “the Bedouin and the cave became a myth.”25 And now, we get at the heart of what I’d like to explore in this chapter: the discovery tale, the find story precisely as a story. Zeitlin was wrong that the narrative had been fabricated to perpetuate a hoax: the Scrolls are unquestionably ancient and authentic. But he was right about the existence of a “myth” of manuscript ­discovery – even if for him, “myth” meant something that was necessarily false and useless for doing philological work, except insofar as myths required debunking to enable the discovery of actual history. For Zeitlin, discovery stories serve to present a forged text as ancient and authentic. He is like Moses Taku, accusing the Karaites of writing lies, burying them in the ground, and digging them up again. Ironically, for Zeitlin, the very presence of a legitimizing story delegitimized the texts.

Find stories beyond authority It is likely impossible to reconstruct how the discovery in the 1940s really took place. But telling such a history is not the purpose of this essay. Instead, I would

Truth and doubt in manuscript discovery  143 like to look at discovery narratives beyond history and beyond authority. In other words, I am not interested in reconstructing the true circumstances of how the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, where the Zohar came from, or whether the Karaites really buried and dug up their texts. And I am not primarily interested in how these accounts serve as paratexts or authorizing frames for other texts. Instead, I want to examine the trope of discovery itself, to capitalize on the moments of déjà vu we experience as we hear yet another account of a scroll in a cave. I would like to approach these accounts as a literary genre, as part of a narrative tradition. To do so, I will draw out the cultural assumptions and priorities that have allowed these stories to emerge as they have, and examine the literary and theological patterns they transmit. How do such stories fit into a broader matrix of literary and theological ideas about how the past comes to reach the present? While I highlighted a few different exemplars of this genre, when we create a category as broad as “the discovery of old texts” we risk diluting anything specific that we might say about their literary history. The discovery of the Scroll of the Law in the book of Kings does not follow the same conventions as the discovery of the Zohar, and each is different, for example, from the account in Jubilees of Kainan stumbling upon ancient astrological knowledge inscribed on a rock.26 Generic phenomenological similarities in stories about the discovery of ancient writing can be found between these stories, but we can also find them in Mormon traditions, and even farther afield, for example, in Daoist and Buddhist traditions.27 This kind of broad comparative and phenomenological view – drawing on folklore or perhaps psychoanalysis – can be fruitful, but my approach is somewhat more limited. I discuss tropes we might call “fokloristic”28 in a more circumscribed constellation of sources, which present variations on a specific motif: Jewish writings preserved in caves to be discovered at a future time. My primary goal, at least in this chapter, is not to trace the chronological development of this motif by plotting linear relationships between the Jewish and Christian texts where this motif appears. Rather, it is to approach such narratives as a theological and literary genre in their own right, and to bring out the way that discovery stories function within a set of ideological expectations and discourses about revelation, scripture, and history. As a starting point, I will go back before the Dead Sea Scrolls, Moses Shapira, and the Zohar, and use an earlier source to illustrate how we might study discovery stories beyond history and beyond authority: a letter in Syriac written in 800 CE by Timothy I, the Patriarch of the Church of the East, to a fellow bishop, Sergius, about a manuscript discovery in his own time. Timothy was a towering figure: a biblical scholar and collector, a commissioner and overseer of scribal work, and a participant in public debates with the Caliph.29 Timothy’s letter to Sergius is famous for exactly the déjà vu effect that I have just described, because it narrates a discovery strikingly similar to the story told about the Dead Sea Scrolls. But, like many such texts, the narrative is introduced as a second-hand report: We have learned from some trustworthy Jews who recently converted to Christianity that some manuscripts were discovered about ten years ago in

144  Eva Mroczek a chamber within a mountain in the vicinity of Jericho. They say that a dog belonging to a certain Arab who was hunting went into a cave while pursuing an animal and did not come out. His owner went in after him and found a chamber within the mountain containing numerous manuscripts. The hunter then went to Jerusalem and informed the Jews of this (discovery). A large group came out (from Jerusalem) and went and found both biblical manuscripts as well as non-biblical Hebrew (works). Since my informant was knowledgeable about literature and a learned man, I asked him about various passages which are quoted in our New Testament as occurring in the Old Testament, but whose record is completely missing from the Old Testament, both in our Christian one and their Jewish one. He informed me that they are extant and can be found in the manuscripts which were discovered there. . . . [The] Hebrew (informant) told me: “We found ascribed to David in those manuscripts more than two hundred Psalms.” (Therefore) I have written to them on account of these things.30 There is more to Timothy’s letter than the discovery story, and we will return to the text shortly. But first, I’d like to think about the ways that this text has functioned in scholarly discourse. What kind of work has this source done for us? There are a few ways it has functioned in our work, and we can use it to illustrate general patterns in how discovery narratives have been engaged. This story, for obvious reasons, has been ubiquitous in accounts of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. We have an Arab discoverer and Hebrew manuscripts in a cave; the general location fits; and there is even an animal – in fact, two! – leading the way to a great discovery. These features strike a familiar chord, and amplify the more recent discovery story. But what does this letter do for modern scholars? It has functioned in two ways: historically and rhetorically. First, unlike some of the legendary or downright fabricated reports of manuscript discoveries that are meant to serve as authorizing origin stories, scholars do not really doubt the veracity of Timothy’s report.31 In a way, perhaps, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has not only made his letter famous, but also legitimized its claims. Scholars entertain the probability that, as Timothy reports, there were other caves with other manuscripts of biblical and non-biblical texts that were discovered in the eighth century. Hartmut Stegemann has even suggested a specific location for the cave in Timothy’s letter – Cave 3 from Qumran.32 Scholars also trace the possibility of earlier discoveries further back: Eusebius reports that Origen found a Psalms manuscript in a jar near Jericho, although in this tradition, no cave appears.33 (The motif is repeated in an interestingly embellished way in the Hypomnestikon, a fifth century set of notes on the Bible by a Christian writing in Greek, who reports that one of the translations of scripture was found in a bronze jar in Jericho, and that the translator was a woman, since the jar was found in a female scholar’s house.)34 So what if there really had been earlier discoveries of manuscripts in the Judaean desert? This has been important because it suggests some possible solutions for

Truth and doubt in manuscript discovery  145 problems we have tracing the transmission histories of certain early Jewish texts. For example, how did a version of the Damascus Document known from Qumran end up in the Cairo Geniza? And how did some apocryphal psalms, known in the original Hebrew only from the Dead Sea Scrolls, end up in translation in medieval Syriac manuscripts? Some of the specifics in Timothy’s letter, such as the reference to 200 psalms of David, are taken as hints about the manuscript history of specific documents. These sources do not have clearly documented histories of transmission, and narratives like Timothy’s furnish possible missing links.35 Such reports were also mined for clues about the community behind the Dead Sea Scrolls. Could any of these ancient reports of books in caves or jars tell us about who wrote and left these texts behind, and when? And could we explain, for example, some features of Karaite thought or other medieval Jewish “heterodox” positions if we could claim they had access to the kind of writings found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, from an earlier discovery?36 Past discoveries of ancient manuscripts establish the conditions for the continuity of texts and ideas between antiquity and the medieval world. Sources like this, then, have served the aims of textual criticism and social history: they furnish bits of data for these historicist projects. Timothy’s letter has been used in this way in our modern accounts. But aside from its use as a source of historical data, it also serves a purpose we may call rhetorical or aesthetic: because of its uncanny similarities to the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery story,37 it has become part of the paratextual framing that often travels together with work on the Scrolls themselves. The letter appears in many introductions to Qumran as a precursor to the modern account. This is not only because of its historical significance, but also because, put simply, discovery stories are enchanting. These tales are effective introductions to our work on ancient sources, and the work they do of framing and introducing a topic in our own work and teaching is not incidental to the questions I want to engage here. This is true not only for the Scrolls but for other textual finds as well. The discovery narrative of the Cairo Geniza travels with every discussion of the texts themselves, and the popular book Sacred Trash by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole weaves between the contents of the texts themselves and the stories of discovery, as reported by the Gibson sisters and Solomon Schechter.38 Recently, Nicola Denzey Lewis has written about the discovery narrative of the Nag Hammadi codices, noting how the sensational, Orientalizing story most often told – clueless Arabs burning the precious manuscripts, then going to exact blood revenge on an enemy clan, and finally eating a man’s heart – has served well to shock and entertain in the classroom and on television, but how this appeal has perpetuated the spread of an inaccurate narrative that not only misleads us about the codices’ origins, but also perpetuates racist tropes.39 And yet, these stories continue to be retold because they are spellbinding as narratives: they present us with a world where the potential of new discovery is always imminent, and they are ways to bring our ancient sources imaginatively into the present. Our modern discovery stories function as paratexts – frames for the presentation of the actual texts, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi texts, and the manuscripts of the Cairo Geniza.

146  Eva Mroczek I would like to read Timothy’s letter as a literary product in its own right, not as a source for historical data or a rhetorical frame for something else. But I do want to capitalize on a moment that recurs in scholarly accounts and conversations: the bemused recognition of uncanny similarities between the discovery narratives. Looking at what precursors make these narratives intelligible, what expectations make them attractive, and what theologies they presuppose can help us see this narrative more clearly as a cultural pattern. This approach moves away from studying the functional or instrumental aspects of these texts, from seeing them as auxiliary to the legitimation or the historical study of texts that are considered our “real” sources. Let us then read Timothy’s letter as a literary product of its own. Timothy had introduced his story, as most reports of hearsay, with its own frame: a reference to “trustworthy Jews who recently converted to Christianity.” These converts are the ideal informants: because they are Jews, they should know about Scripture; but because they are Christians, they can be trusted.40 Later in the letter, he reports that he has corroborated the story: he “heard this from this student (of Scripture), as well as from others I asked in addition to him, and discovered that their story did not vary.” Timothy’s letter, not only its details but also its tone, gives us some key information into what it was possible for him to imagine about scripture. Timothy has no problem believing that the manuscripts were authentic, and probably more reliable than his own Bible, and expresses only eagerness to see them. There is not a shade of suspicion or condemnation, no hint that “heretics” might have been behind the story. (Perhaps his exchanges with Muslims, who criticized Jews and Christians for having corrupt Scriptures, made him all the more receptive to the possibility of better manuscripts.) He is also prepared to accept that there were more psalms of David than can be found in the book of psalms: his scriptural imagination is not limited to the canon.41 Indeed, Timothy’s attitude reflects a certain horizon of expectations about scripture. We find, in many Jewish and Christian writings, a strong imagined sense of a broader repertoire of divinely revealed literature, both before and after what we call canonization. The contents of the biblical canon, in other words, do not exhaust the corpus of authentic and inspired literature that had once been known (and perhaps could still reappear). Both Jewish and Christian sources, for example, imagine David and Solomon as creators of thousands of compositions, only some of which are now available. (One Christian tradition dateable to the fifth century says that thousands of David’s psalms were hidden by King Hezekiah, both the transmitter and the abbreviator of the canon.)42 Some of the most vibrant examples of this motif of a multitude of revealed books come from 2 Enoch, extant only in Slavonic but probably composed in large part in the late Second Temple period. Enoch instructs his sons to receive these books in your father’s handwriting, and read them. For the books are many; and in them you will learn all the deeds of the Lord. There have been many books since the beginning of creation, and there will be until the end of the age; but not one of them will make things as plain to you as

Truth and doubt in manuscript discovery  147 (the books in) my handwriting. If you hold on firmly to them, you will not sin against the Lord. (ch. 47, J)43 The text itself is only one of the many books that Enoch writes (ch. 23 mentions either 360 or 366 books, depending on the manuscript version). This is made clear by the headings to some of the Slavonic manuscripts: the present text is merely ot knig, “of the books,” of Enoch. Elsewhere in this book, Hindy Najman engages Friedrich Schlegel’s epigrammatic statement about the fragmentariness of all writing: Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments from the moment of their emergence.44 Indeed, it turns out that the record had always been fragmentary, not only from the modern perspective, but for the ancients as well – whether Timothy I or the writer of 2 Enoch, for whom what was lost, hidden, destroyed, or otherwise absent far exceeded the corpus of texts that had survived. 2 Enoch is aware of the trope of concealing books for a future time: so aware, in fact, that it has Enoch protest that these books are not to be hidden: “The books which I have given to you, do not hide them (ne potaite ich). To all who wish, recite them, so that they may know about the extremely marvelous works of the Lord” (54 J).45 We can multiply examples from diverse sources allied with Jewish scriptures. The key point is that Timothy’s letter, while it may well report a historical event, is also a literary creation, and the way he chose to present his report depends on certain preexisting discourses and horizons of expectation about ancient texts. Scripture as transmitted is not perfect, but could probably use correction against better manuscripts, if any should ever be found.46 And in Timothy’s sense of the literary landscape, there is a larger corpus of texts that are authentic and ancient, even though they are outside canonical boundaries. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, the canonical authority of institutionally transmitted scriptures does not overlap exactly with, and is not solely dependent upon, the authenticity, antiquity, and true authorial ascription of the texts. In other words, texts can be considered unquestionably authentic, and yet not canonical. This is perhaps most evident in some medieval Syriac manuscripts themselves, where five extant “apocryphal psalms” are presented as unequivocally, authentically Davidic, and yet “outside the number” of the established canonical Psalter.47 “The boundaries of canon,” we see, “are not the boundaries of divinely inspired, ancient, and authentic text, and do not necessarily imply that what is outside those boundaries is spurious.”48 This coheres well with Mark Letteney’s critique in this book of any straightforward identification of authorship and authenticity with authoritative status: just as Davidic psalms can remain outside the canon despite a firm belief in their authenticity, so, for example, the Abgar documents, which Eusebius believed to be authored by Jesus, are not automatically considered authoritative.49

148  Eva Mroczek But let us return to Timothy’s letter and its discovery story. If manuscripts can be discovered, this also means they were once hidden; Timothy presents his own theory of the unseen manuscripts’ provenance: I think that these manuscripts were deposited either by the prophet Jeremiah or by Baruch or by some other person who obeyed the word of God and feared him. For when the prophets learned via divine revelations (of the) captivity, pillage, and destruction destined to come upon the people due to their sins, it became as if they were firmly convinced that none of the words of God could fall to the ground. They (therefore) hid the manuscripts among the mountains and in caves and concealed them so that they would not be consumed by fire nor pillaged by despoilers. Those who concealed them died during the period of the seventy years (of Exile) or less, and when the people returned from Babylon, no one remained of those who had deposited the manuscripts. This is why Ezra and others were forced to seek out and find what (works) the Hebrews retained.50 Most people who have heard of Timothy’s letter in the context of learning about the Dead Sea Scrolls are familiar only with the part that relates the discovery. But here, as he continues, we get a sense of this scholar’s literarily rich sense of how concealment and memory work to join the scriptural past to his own present. The report of the books in a cave enriches his scriptural imagination not only because these texts allegedly contain previously unknown scriptures, but also because they add another episode to the story of Jeremiah, his scribe Baruch, and the near-miraculous survival of a tradition despite destruction and forgetting. This new Jeremianic episode exemplifies what Najman, elsewhere in this book, has called the “excess of vitality” of scriptural traditions that spill over beyond the canon.51 In Timothy’s new text about Jeremiah, then, we have another version of a tradition that has precursors in Jewish antiquity: discourses about sacred writing that are, to draw on another concept from Najman, “inflected by destruction.”52 This inflection is so persistent that it becomes the most natural way for this eighth century Nestorian patriarch to explain the origins of a textual discovery. If, in 4 Ezra, the books really had been burned and need to be newly revealed, in Timothy’s account, the books were carefully hidden – but “[t]hose who concealed them died . . . and when the people returned from Babylon, no one remained of those who had deposited the manuscripts.” The association of Jeremiah with writing is powerful already in the prophetic book, where the scroll of Jeremiah’s words that Baruch the scribe wrote down is intentionally cut up and burned by the king (Jer 36), in a direct reversal of Josiah’s rending his clothes when he hears the newly discovered scroll of the law (2 Kgs 22). In other traditions, Jeremiah is a patron of lament who teaches the people to survive the trauma of exile. But we may have a more specific precursor to Timothy’s narrative in a tradition that survives in 2 Maccabees and has to do with sacred objects more broadly rather than only texts. There, the preservation of

Truth and doubt in manuscript discovery  149 sacred objects – including the Ark of the Covenant – falls to Jeremiah, who seals them in a cave: One finds in the records that the prophet Jeremiah ordered those who were being deported to take some of the fire, as has been mentioned, and that the prophet, after giving them the law, instructed those who were being deported not to forget the commandments of the Lord, or to be led astray in their thoughts on seeing the gold and silver statues and their adornment. And with other similar words he exhorted them that the law should not depart from their hearts. It was also in the same document that the prophet, having received an oracle, ordered that the tent and the ark should follow with him, and that he went out to the mountain where Moses had gone up and had seen the inheritance of God. Jeremiah came and found a cave-dwelling, and he brought there the tent and the ark and the altar of incense; then he sealed up the entrance. Some of those who followed him came up intending to mark the way, but could not find it. When Jeremiah learned of it, he rebuked them and declared: “The place shall remain unknown until God gathers his people together again and shows his mercy. Then the Lord will disclose these things, and the glory of the Lord and the cloud will appear, as they were shown in the case of Moses, and as Solomon asked that the place should be specially consecrated.” (2 Macc 2:1–8, NRSV) The protection of these objects in a cave, and especially the hidden location of the cave itself, is imbued with theological meaning: only God will reveal them at the correct time, a claim that gives the exiled people a promise of future divine favor in the very midst of their apparent loss of their past.53 Part of this cluster of motifs overlaps with the patterns we can find in another narrative – the Testament of Moses, where Moses instructs Joshua to preserve documents in earthen jars: I am going to sleep with my fathers. But (you) take this writing so that later you will remember how to preserve the books which I shall entrust to you. You shall arrange them, anoint them with cedar, and deposit them in earthenware jars in the place which (God) has chosen from the beginning of the creation of the world, (a place) where his name may be called upon until the day of recompense when the Lord will surely have regard for his people. (1:15–18)54 Here, as in Maccabees, the place where texts are deposited is divinely selected in ancient times, and holds a promise of divine contact in a time to come. If in 2 Maccabees we have an early hint of Jeremiah’s role in protecting sacred things from destruction by hiding them in a cave, two much later accounts – both associated with the Khazars – pick up the theme of the community renewal that takes place when that writing is brought out again. The first, the so-called Schechter Document from the Cairo Geniza, relates a disputation between Greeks, Jews,

150  Eva Mroczek and Arabians. Jews were “without Torah”; but then they brought out the Books of the Law of Moses from a cave in a valley, and “Israel, together with the men of Khazaria, returned in perfect repentance.”55 But in so-called “Khazar Correspondence” – presented as letters between the tenth century diplomat Hasdai ibn Shaprut of Cordoba and King Joseph of the Khazars, but more likely a somewhat later literary creation – the letter of Hasdai has a more elaborate account about texts in a cave – an account that is not “authorizing” anything outside itself, but instead becomes an authoritative text in its own right. The narrative places the concealment and discovery of Scripture in a cave within a longer history of destruction, forgetting, and recovery, and finds its starting point in the Babylonian captivity: Also the old men of the former generation who can be relied on have told us how on account of their faithlessness a persecution was decreed, and an army of Chaldaeans rose up in anger and wrath. They hid the Books of the Law and the Holy Scriptures in a cave, and for this reason they prayed in the cave. On account of the books they taught their sons to pray in the cave morning and evening, till the times were lengthened and they forgot and no longer knew about the cave, why they were accustomed to pray therein. But they practised the customs of their fathers without knowing why. After a long time there arose a man of Israel who was eager to know why. He entered the cave, found it full of books and brought them out from there. From that day they set themselves to learn the Law. Thus have our fathers told us, as the earlier generation heard, the one from the other. The whole matter is very ancient.56 The authenticity of the correspondence, to say nothing of the story itself, is not my concern here.57 What I wish to point out is the theological paradigm this text communicates, where texts hidden from destruction become central to sacred space and time. The cave is a place of archiving and preservation in one historical moment, and a place of continuous daily prayer thereafter. It is a place of memory and forgetting and remembering again, and finally, of community renewal.58 In this account, the story of discovery is not really a story about the texts that were found. It is not about the Books of the Law and the Holy Scriptures. Rather, the story is, in fact, about the story: the narrative of threat, concealment, and recovery. This find story is not a frame for something else. It does not function to introduce or authorize any source that might otherwise be in doubt. The narrative of protection and recovery is the ancient tradition that is passed down through the generations – the transmission is the composition. It is a theology of destruction and preservation, of time and place. In our reading of narratives of textual discovery beyond authority, then, we should think twice about the question of where the theology in these accounts can be found. Commonly, origin stories are understood as authorizing strategies for theology: they legitimize new religious ideas by presenting them as ancient, playing into the tendency to privilege originary moments. But sometimes, as we can see, the theology in these texts is not where we might expect to find it. Sometimes

Truth and doubt in manuscript discovery  151 the discovery story is not authorizing an authoritative text by tracing it to some point of origin, legitimating some theological source or idea. The discovery story is not authorizing the theology: it is the theology. A broader study of discovery narratives will also consider texts that overlap less precisely with the “Jewish manuscript hidden in a cave” motif, but still share features of this pattern. For example, we find writing that is deposited in a divinely appointed place, protected from destruction, and hidden from view until a moment of renewal in literature related to Adam and Eve, popular among Christians and widely translated in late antiquity. In the Latin Life of Adam and Eve, Seth makes tablets of stone and tablets of clay – so that one set would survive destruction by fire or by flood – in his father’s old house, where he used to pray. (Here, we do not have a cave, although Seth’s writing is indeed sealed up in a cave in a different text, the Syriac Testament of Adam, and when they are removed from the first cave they are taken to another – the cave in Bethlehem where Jesus is born.)59 After the flood, the surviving tablets of stone are not destroyed, and they are not really concealed: instead, they are illegible. It is only king Solomon who, through divine revelation, is finally taught how to read the text and instructed to build a temple in the same place. To return to the year 800: Bishop Timothy’s letter does not directly suggest that the cave of manuscripts is a sacred place. He does not identify the place where texts are hidden as a place where one should pray, or a place where divine presence will one day return. But his letter, too, is a theological document: more subtly, it becomes a kind of prayer itself. What I mean is that he moves seamlessly from describing the possible discovery of Scripture to citing Scripture to express his own disappointment and desire. As I have pointed out elsewhere, no sooner does Timothy give his theory that Jeremiah has hidden the manuscripts than he begins to speak in Jeremiah’s voice.60 For Timothy, the story of the manuscript discovery has remained only a story – nobody has answered his letters: What I have written about this (matter) has generated no response from them, and I have no competent envoy whom I can send. This (matter) is in my heart like a fire which burns and inflames my bones. Timothy seamlessly merges his own voice with a scriptural verse: Jer 20:9. In this passage, Jeremiah rails against the violation of having God’s word forced into him: O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me. For whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the word of the LORD has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say, “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,”

152  Eva Mroczek then within me there is something like a burning fire inflaming my bones;61 I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot. (Jer 20:7–9, adapted from NRSV)62 Timothy’s brief citation of the “fire in his bones” brings in the whole context of the scriptural passage. Jeremiah is being persecuted by the relentless onslaught of his prophetic commission, imagining it as a violation of his physical body. But, as I have written in previous work, in Timothy’s appropriation of the verse, the fire in his bones comes from the unbridgeable distance that separates him from newly discovered scriptures63 – from manuscripts that could bring the pre-destruction past into his hands. In Timothy’s concealment theory, Jeremiah is an agent of how ancient scriptures reach the present. But Timothy’s literary expression of his own desire also reanimates Jeremiah’s words. Solomon Zeitlin – the scholar who called the Dead Sea Scrolls a hoax because their discovery story “smelled” like a discovery story – was right to point out the mythic elements of the narrative. And we know that the manuscript in the cave was a “myth” long before Moses Shapira’s nineteenth century forgery, which comprised Zeitlin’s main example. As Fred Astren writes, “we must recognize that in the association with caves we have a literary-religious trope for revelation that is known in many instances in Judaism and other religions.”64 Working backward, we see a similar chronotope in some of the conflicting versions of Nathan of Gaza’s “discovery” of his own apocalypse;65 in some accounts of the origins of the Zohar; in traditions about the Khazars; and in our Christian letter from 800 CE. Some of these accounts clearly function as paratexts, giving an authoritative frame to new ideas. But for others, their function as a narrative frame is less clear. Regardless, the way in which these narratives are told reveals how people think about the biography of scriptural texts. They show us what was possible to imagine about their secret lives as they traveled through time. Focusing on Timothy’s report, whose account is generally accepted as accurate, we have traced some precursors and variations that also reflect the imaginative world behind such works. Timothy’s letter participates in a larger network of traditions about the nature of scripture and the history of Jewish writing. The idea of writing that is hidden or unavailable is a prevalent motif in Jewish texts from a wide chronological span. It contributes to a basic assumption in many sources that more has been revealed than has ever been collected in one place, that much potentially recoverable. But here again, we can identity sets of motifs that are more specific than simply a broad pattern of writing that is “hidden and discovered.” We saw that the motif in Timothy’s letter is a particular kind of concealment: hiding writing to protect it from destruction. But this is only one of several modes of text concealment that we can identify in interpretive history, associated here and in 2 Maccabees with Jeremiah. Another mode of concealment, for example, is suppression: we can see this in both Jewish and Christian texts that present Hezekiah as a censor who deliberately hid texts, removing them from use (although the particular texts he hid and the reasons for their suppression vary). In other traditions, the text is

Truth and doubt in manuscript discovery  153 deposited or sealed up, sometimes in a divinely chosen place, and waits to be revealed at a divinely chosen time – participating in a far wider set of cultural patterns about, in Dina Stein’s words, “the bridging of text and place.”66 These motifs emerge in different combinations over time, pointing to a deep repertoire of imaginative possibilities of how we expect the past to surprise us. What has emerged from this exploration of a particular kind of discovery story? We have looked at the ways that the general trope of the discovered manuscript has been discussed in scholarship. On the one hand, some sources are presented as fabricated origin stories created to authorize newly composed – forged – ­documents. On the other hand, accounts that we consider credible, such as those of Eusebius or Timothy, become historical data for tracing the transmission of particular texts. In both cases, then, the stories of concealment and discovery are treated as paratexts – auxiliary to the study of our “real” sources for scripture and theology, either as “authorization” or as “‘historical data.’” But I have suggested approaching them as a literary tradition, or even as theological texts – as a way of moving beyond authority and beyond historical data. This means we begin with the moment of recognition, of déjà vu, that tales of books in caves evoke every time we see them, but that we follow the sense of recognition further: to trace its traditionary precursors and implicit expectations about scripture and history. This approach moves away from reading such texts functionally or instrumentally. It also does not depend on the dichotomies of Jewish or Christian, true or fabricated, and even primary or secondary sources. Instead, it treats these narratives as central to religious writing – as theologies of space, time, and knowledge.

Notes I would like to thank the organizers of the “Beyond Authority” conference, A. J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney, for the opportunity to participate in such a stimulating meeting, and for their helpful comments and suggestions during the editorial process; to Anthony Grafton for his generous response to the paper; and to the conference participants for their feedback and discussion. Special thanks to C. M. Chin, Martha Himmelfarb, Hindy Najman, Blossom Stefaniw, Jacqueline Vayntrub, and Yoni Pomeranz for questions and suggestions that helped me refine the chapter. I also thank my extraordinary research assistant, Anna Cwikla, for her first-rate work on matters technical, conceptual, and outlandish. 1 Moses Taku, “‫םמת‬ ‫בתכ תמם‬,” ‫ כתב‬62. 2 Krakowski, “Many Days,” 133–4. See also Golb, “Who Were the Maġārīya?,” 347–59, esp. 350–2. For extensive discussion of Near Eastern and classical literary parallels to the Josiah story, see Stott, Why Did They Write This Way?, 78–123. 3 See my discussion, from a different perspective, in Mroczek, “True Stories and the Poetics of Textual Discovery,” 21–31. On ApPaul, see Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament, 616–44; Hennecke and Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, 755–803 (English translation, 758–9); James, The Apocryphal New Testament, 526– 55; for the Latin text, see Silverstein and Hilhorst, Apocalypse of Paul. On dating and origins, see Piovanelli, “Les origines de l’Apocalypse de Paul reconsidérées,” 25–64. 4 Ap. Paul 1. Translation James, The Apocryphal New Testament. 5 Ap. Paul 2. Shoes and shoemakers make surprisingly frequent appearances in discourses about manuscript discoveries, a phenomenon I will discuss in future work.

154  Eva Mroczek I thank Galit Hasan-Rokem for her insights on this strangely widespread motif (in personal communications), which, as she points out, may in part have to do with the shared raw material of scribes and cobblers – leather. 6 Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History VII, chapter 19, translation Hartranft, NPNF. 7 Grafton, Forgers and Critics, 57–8. 8 Grafton, Forgers and Critics, 56–7. 9 Grafton, Forgers and Critics, 58. 10 Grafton, “Traditions of Invention and Inventions of Tradition in Renaissance Italy,” 76–103, esp. 90–3. 11 On other kinds of paratextual frames that both authorize a text and give it a context for interpretation, particularly the conceit of apostolic provenance for the Didascalia, see Maria Doerfler’s contribution to this book, “Glimpses from the Margins: Re-telling Late Ancient History at the Edges of the Law.” 12 Krakowski, “Many Days,” 134. 13 From the testimony of Isaac of Acre as reported much later in Zacuto, Sefer Yuhasin, 88–9; on this tradition see Abrams, Kabbalistic Manuscripts, 256–7 and notes, and Anidjar, “Our Place in al-Andalus,” esp. 177–87. 14 Moshe Cordovero, Or Yakar, 2, 104, and later; see Abrams, Kabbalistic Manuscripts, 254–5 for discussion and notes; and Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, 1, 19. 15 Stein, “Following Goats,” 523–37, and Stein, “A Wild Goat Chase,” 93–130. 16 See my discussion in “True Stories,” 6 ff. 17 Fields, Dead Sea Scrolls, 26, 521. There is much more to be said about how the “others” are said to treat precious manuscripts in discovery narratives, especially the use of colonialist tropes. There is a story about the pages of the Sinaitic Palimpsest being used to cover butter dishes at St. Catherine’s monastery (Gibson, How the Codex Was Found; Soskice, Sisters of Sinai. According to English traveler Robert Curzon, monks at the Monastery of the Syrians used pages of Coptic manuscripts to cover jars of preserves, and Curzon writes that he was permitted to buy them only because there were no more preserves left in the jars; he also claims that in a monastery in Greece, monks stood on their ancient codices to protect their bare feet from the cold stone floor (Curzon, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant.) The traditional narrative about the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices relates that the Arab discoverers’ mother burned some manuscripts in an oven; on this narrative see Lewis and Blount, “Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices,”; Goodacre, “How Reliable is the Story of the Nag Hammadi Discovery?”; and Kotrosits, “Romance and Danger at Nag Hammadi.” 18 Mroczek, “True Stories,” 25–6. 19 Fields, Dead Sea Scrolls, 139. 20 Fields, Dead Sea Scrolls, 534; Mroczek, “True Stories,” 25. 21 Zeitlin, “Scholarship and the Hoax of the Recent Discoveries.” Zeitlin, “The Alleged Antiquity of the Scrolls.”; Zeitlin, “The Hebrew Scrolls: Once More and Finally”; Zeitlin, “When Were the Hebrew Scrolls ‘Discovered’: In 1947 or 1907?”; Zeitlin, “The Dead Sea Scrolls.” 22 See the analysis of this episode by Press, “ ‘Lying Pen of the Scribes’.”; Reiner, “C.D. Ginsburg and the Shapira Affair.”; Tigay, Lost Book of Moses. 23 Shapira to C.D. Ginsburg (August  7, 1883); quoted in Press, “ ‘Lying Pen of the Scribes’.” 24 The fragments are now lost; only drawings survive. See Press, “ ‘Lying Pen of the Scribes’.” and Tigay, Lost Book of Moses. 25 Zeitlin, “The Dead Sea Scrolls,” 267. 26 See Mroczek, “True Stories,” 23; Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 149; Najman, “Interpretation as Primordial Writing,” 383–4. 27 Xinjiang “The Nature of the Dunhuang Library Cave and the Reasons for its Sealing.”; Storch, The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography.

Truth and doubt in manuscript discovery  155 28 A full considerations of folkloristic tropes in the manuscript discovery story is beyond the scope of this chapter, but future work will consider several recurring chronotopes and motifs that may lend themselves to such analysis, such as concealment in a cave over time, the role of animals leading to a discovery, and the figure of the “Arab,” presented in particularly insidious, racist ways as both the naïve discoverer of the past and the greatest danger to its survival. I am inspired by the work of Galit Hasan-Rokem, esp. Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life, and Stein, e.g., “Following Goats.” 29 On Timothy’s career and scholarship, see Romeny, “Biblical Studies in the Church of the East.” See my discussion of this letter in Literary Imagination, 3–4, 6, 182–4. 30 Translation Reeves, “Exploring the Afterlife,” 175–7. See also Braun, “Ein Brief des Katholikos Timotheos I über biblische Studien des 9 Jahrhunderts.”; Bidawid, Les lettres du patriarche nestorien Timothée. 31 For discussion, see Reeves, “Exploring the Afterlife.” An earlier illustrative example from just after the Qumran discovery is Kahle, “The Age of the Scrolls.” See also Baumgarten et al., Qumran Cave 4.XIII, 6. 32 Stegemann, The Library of Qumran. More recently, speculation about additional caves and lost or withheld scrolls has circulated especially around the “Dead Sea Scrolls” fragments, many of them of dubious authenticity, that have come to light since 2002; we see this drive in recent surveys to uncover more scroll caves and the discovery by Oren Gutfeld and Ahiad Ovadia of “Cave 12,” which yielded only a blank scrap of parchment and some jar remains but gave rise to speculation about the possibility that additional texts may once have been stored there – or at least that caves such as this one may have been the source of ancient blank parchment sheets used to create modern forgeries (see the account by Schiffman, “Excitement as Additional Qumran Cave is Discovered,” 40–3), as well as comments by private collector Martin Schøyen about his own hunt for “ghost scrolls” that allegedly exist, but nobody had ever seen (see Elgvin, Gleanings from the Caves, 27). 33 Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 6.16.3. 34 Hypomnestikon 122; this seems to be a conflation of two separate passages in Eusebius. 35 See my “True Stories,” 29, and Reeves, “Exploring the Afterlife”; Astren, “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Medieval Jewish Studies.” 36 Another source used for this purpose is the tenth century report of the Karaite al-Qirqisani, who mentions a sect called the “Magariya,” called this because their books were found in a cave and included the book of “the Alexandrian,” identified already by Harkavy with Philo; Harkavy, Le-Korot ha-Kittot be-Yisrael (1895), followed by Kahle, “The Age of the Scrolls.” On the question of manuscript discovery and the transmission of theological ideas, particularly in the context of Karaism, see Krakowski, “Many Days.” 37 On the structural similarities see also Stein, “Wild Goat Chase.” 38 Hoffman and Cole, Sacred Trash. For further discussion of the Cairo Geniza discovery and Hoffman and Cole’s work, see my “True Stories,” 23–4. See also the review of Hoffman and Cole’s book by Nirenberg, “From Cairo to Córdoba.” 39 Lewis and Blount, “Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices.” See my discussion of this article and the orientalist features of the narrative in “True Stories,” 27–8. 40 See also my “True Stories,” 29. 41 See my discussion of Timothy’s scriptural imagination in Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 3–4, 6, 182–4. 42 Grant and Menzies, Joseph’s Bible Notes, sections 73, 74, and 120. This is related to the rabbinic tradition that Hezekiah hid (‫ )זנג‬the “Book of Remedies,” connected in later texts to Solomonic writing, and another Greek Christian text, the Questions and Answers ascribed to Atanasius Sinaita, discussed by Halperin, “The ‘Book of Remedies’.”; I  discuss this trope in the Hypomnestikon in the context of these and other Jewish sources in a forthcoming article on the figure of Hezekiah in bibliographic myth.

156  Eva Mroczek 43 Translation from Andersen, “2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of) Enoch,” 174. See also Vaillant, Le livre des secrets d’Hénoch, 108. 44 Schlegel, Atheneum Fragment 24, cited in Najman, “Reading Beyond Authority,” 26. 45 Vaillant, Le livre des secrets d’Hénoch, 55. 46 For a comparable argument about rabbinic Jewish attitudes about the imperfect text of Scripture, including salvage activity of Ezra, see the work of Wollenberg, “The People of the Book without the Book”; Wollenberg, “The Dangers of Reading As We Know It.” 47 On this phenomenon, see Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 173–8, and Mroczek, “The End of the Psalms in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Greek Codices, and Syriac Manuscripts.” 48 Mroczek, The Literary Imagination, 178. 49 See Mark Letteney’s chapter in this book, “Authenticity and Authority: The Case for Dismantling a Dubious Correlation,” 44–47. 50 Translation Reeves, “Exploring the Afterlife,” 175–7. 51 Najman, “Reading Beyond Authority,” 24. 52 Hindy Najman, Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future, concept introduced on p. 6 and developed throughout the book. See also Stein, “Following Goats.” 53 See also late antique accounts of the whereabouts of the temple vessels removed at the time of the second destruction in 70, especially the temple menorah, taken up occasionally by modern Zionist writers and modern archaeologists; Steven Fine discusses the history of interpretation of this motif in Fine, The Menorah, esp. 1–55. Fine cites a novella by Zionist writer Stefan Zweig, who reworks a legend about the lost temple vessels transmitted by Procopius of Caesarea (sixth century). In Zweig’s narrative, Jews buried the menorah by the road between Jaffa and Jerusalem, where it would remain until they returned to the land: “Like all God’s mysteries, it rests in the darkness through the ages. Nor can anyone tell whether it will remain thus for ever and ever, hidden away and lost to its people, who still know no peace in their wanderings through the lands of the Gentiles, or whether, at length, someone will dig up the Menorah on that day when the Jews come once more into their own. Only then will the Seven-Branched Lampstand diffuse its gentle light in the Temple of Peace” (Zweig, The Buried Candelabrum, 106, quoted and discussed in Fine, The Menorah, 49–51). I thank the book editors for directing me to Fine’s work on this phenomenon. The motif of the physical discovery of objects previously hidden during destruction as a catalyst for Jewish cultural renewal is also present in the “Khazar correspondence,” discussed later. On older discourses about temple treasures that are missing or unavailable but nevertheless part of the cultural imaginary, see Weitzman, “Absent but Accounted For.” 54 See Priest, “Testament of Moses.” 55 Schechter, “An Unknown Khazar Document.” 56 Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Khazars. The letter was published in the pamphlet ‫ לוק רשבמ‬in Constantinople in 1577 by Isaac b. Abraham Akrish. Cf. edition with manuscript facsimiles, transcription, and Russian translation by Kokovtsov, Evrejskoxazarskaja perepiska v x veke, Hebrew text on p.  17; further on these documents, Zajaczkowski, Ze studiów nad zagadnieniem chazarskim.; Golb and Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century. 57 On this issue, see Stampfer, “Did the Khazars Convert to Judaism?,” who marshals evidence against the historical authenticity of the legend. 58 Cf. the work of Dina Stein on the relationship between healing the trauma of destruction and the “bridging of text and place” in tales of loss and recovery, “Following Goats,” esp. 530–2. 59 See Johnson, “Life of Adam and Eve,” and Robinson, “Testament of Adam,”; de Jonge and Tromp, The Life of Adam and Eve and Related; Stone, A History of the Literature of Adam and Eve.

Truth and doubt in manuscript discovery  157 60 Mroczek, “True Stories,” 29, and Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 182–3. 61 The MT has a different reading (“a burning fire shut up [‫ ]רוצע‬in my bones”), but the Peshitta and LXX both have two words for burning; Timothy cites the Peshitta version, so the translation here has been adapted to reflect this reading. 62 See this interpretive move in a different context in Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 182–3. 63 Mroczek, “True Stories,” 29, and Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 182–3. 64 Astren, “Dead Sea Scrolls,” 113. 65 I thank A. J. Berkovitz for this reference. On Nathan of Gaza see Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 229–33. 66 Stein, “Following Goats,” 531.

Bibliography Abrams, Daniel. Kabbalistic Manuscripts and Textual Theory: Methodologies of Textual Scholarship and Editorial Practice in the Study of Jewish Mysticism. 2nd revised edition. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2013. Andersen, F.I. “2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of) Enoch: A new translation and introduction.” In Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1, edited by James H. Charlesworth, 91–221. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1983. Anidjar, Gil. “Our Place in al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Astren, Fred. “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Medieval Jewish Studies: Methods and Problems,” Dead Sea Discoveries 8 (2001): 105–23. Baumgarten, J.M. et  al. Qumran Cave 4.XIII: The Damascus Document (4Q266–273). Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 18. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Bidawid, Raphaël J. Les lettres du patriarche nestorien Timothée I. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1956. Braun, O. “Ein Brief des Katholikos Timotheos I über biblische Studien des 9 Jahrhunderts.” Oriens Christianus 1 (1901): 299–313. Curzon, Robert. Visits to Monasteries in the Levant. London: Murray, 1849. de Jonge, M. and J. Tromp, The Life of Adam and Eve and Related Literature. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 1997. Dunlop, D.M. The History of the Jewish Khazars. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954. Ehrman, Bart D. Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Elgvin, Torleif. Gleanings from the Caves: Dead Sea Scrolls and Artifacts from the Schøyen Collection. Library of Second Temple Studies 71. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016. Elliott, J.K. The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Fields, Weston W. Dead Sea Scrolls: A Full History. vol. 1. Boston: Brill, 2009. Fine, Steven. The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Gibson, Margaret D. How the Codex Was Found: A Narrative of Two Visits to Sinai from Mrs. Lewis’s Journals, 1892–1893. Cambridge: Macmillan, 1893. Golb, Norman. “Who Were the Maġārīya?” Journal of the American Oriental Society 80(4) (1960): 347–59.

158  Eva Mroczek Golb, Norman and Omeljan Pritsak. Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. Goodacre, Mark. “How Reliable is the Story of the Nag Hammadi Discovery?” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35 (2013): 303–22. Grafton, Anthony. Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship. London: Collins & Brown, 1990. ———. Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450– 1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Grant, Robert M. and Glen W. Menzies, eds. Joseph’s Bible Notes = Hypomnestikon. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996. Halperin, David. “The ‘Book of Remedies,’ the Canonization of the Solomonic Writings, and the Riddle of Pseudo-Eusebius.” Jewish Quarterly Review 72 (1982): 269–92. Hasan-Rokem, Galit. Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Hennecke, Edgar and Wilhem Schneemelcher, eds. New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1963. Hoffman, Adina and Peter Cole. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. New York: Schocken, 2011. James, M.R. The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924. Johnson, M.D. “Life of Adam and Eve: A new translation and introduction.” In Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2, edited by James H. Charlesworth, 249–96. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1983. Kahle, Paul. “The Age of the Scrolls.” Vetus Testamentum 1 (1951): 38–48. Kotrosits, Maia. “Romance and Danger at Nag Hammadi.” The Bible and Critical Theory 8 (2012): 39–52. Krakowski, Eve. “ ‘Many Days without the God of Truth’: Loss and Recovery of Religious Knowledge in Early Karaite Thought.” In Pesher Nahum: Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature from Antiquity through the Middle Ages presented to Norman (Nahum) Golb, edited by Joel L. Kraemer and Michael G. Wechsler, 121–40. Chicago, IL: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2012. Lewis, Nicola Denzey and Justine A. Blount, “Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices.” Journal of Biblical Literature 133 (2014): 399–419. Mroczek, Eva. “True Stories and the Poetics of Textual Discovery.” Bulletin for the Study of Religion 45 (2016): 21–31. ———. The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. ———. “The End of the Psalms in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Greek Codices, and Syriac Manuscripts.” In Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Textual Fluidity, Manuscript Culture and New Philology, edited by Liv Ingeborg Lied and Hugo Lundhaug, 297–322. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2017. Najman, Hindy. “Interpretation as Primordial Writing: Jubilees and Its Authority Conferring Strategies.” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period 30 (1999): 379–410. ———. Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future: An Analysis of 4Ezra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Nirenberg, David. “From Cairo to Córdoba: The Story of the Cairo Geniza.” The Nation. Available at www.thenation.com/article/cairo-cordoba-story-cairo-geniza/ (June 1, 2011). Piovanelli, Pierluigi. “Les origines de l’Apocalypse de Paul reconsidérées.” Apocrypha 4 (1993): 25–64.

Truth and doubt in manuscript discovery  159 Press, Michael. “ ‘The Lying Pen of the Scribes’: A 19th Century Dead Sea Scroll.” The Appendix 3/2 (2014). Priest, J. “Testament of Moses: A New Translation and Introduction.” In Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1, edited by James H. Charlesworth, 919–26. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1983. Reeves, John C. “Exploring the Afterlife of Jewish Pseudepigrapha in Medieval Near Eastern Religious Traditions: Some Initial Soundings.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 30 (1999): 148–77. Reiner, Fred N. “C.D. Ginsburg and the Shapira Affair: A Nineteenth-Century Dead Sea Scroll Controversy.” British Library Journal 21 (1995): 109–27. Robinson, S. E. “Testament of Adam: A New Translation and Introduction.” In Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1, edited by James H. Charlesworth, 989–95. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1983. Romeny, B. ter Haar. “Biblical Studies in the Church of the East: The Case of Catholicos Timothy I.” Studia Patristica 34 (2001): 503–10. Schechter, S. “An Unknown Khazar Document.” Jewish Quarterly Review 3 (1912): 181–219. Schiffman, Lawrence. “Excitement as Additional Qumran Cave is Discovered,” Ami Magazine, February 15 (2017): 40–43. Available at http://lawrenceschiffman.com/wpcontent/uploads/2017/02/Excitement-as-Additional-Qumran-Cave-is-Discovered.pdf Scholem, Gershom. Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973. Silverstein, Theodore and A. Hilhorst. Apocalypse of Paul: A New Critical Edition of Three Long Latin Versions. Geneva: Patrick Cramer, 1997. Soskice, Janet. Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels. New York: Knopf, 2009. Stampfer, Shaul. “Did the Khazars Convert to Judaism?” Jewish Social Studies 19 (2013): 1–72. Stegemann, Hartmut, The Library of Qumran: On the Essenes, John the Baptist, and Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998. ‫רחא בחיפוש‬ ‫עזים אחר‬ ‫םיזע‬ Stein, Dina. “A Wild Goat Chase: Models of Diaspora and Salvation.” [‫שופיחב‬ ‫תועות‬:: ‫דגמי‬ ‫גלות ימגד‬ ‫וגאולה תולג‬ ‫ ]הלואגו‬Jewish Studies 51 (2016): 93–130 (Hebrew). ‫תועות‬ ———. “Following Goats: Text, Place, and Diaspora(s).” In Talmudic Transgressions: Engaging the Work of Daniel Boyarin, edited by Charlotte Fonrobert, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Aharon Shemesh, and Moulie Vidas, 523–37. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Stone, Michael E. A History of the Literature of Adam and Eve. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1992. Storch, Tanya. The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2014. Stott, Katherine M. Why Did They Write This Way?: Reflections on References to Written Documents in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Literature. New York: T&T Clark, 2008. Taku, Moses. “‫םמת‬ ‫בתכ תמם‬.” ‫ כתב‬In Otzar Neḥmad, vol. 3, edited by I. Blumenfeld. 1860 Tigay, Chanan. The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible. New York: Ecco, 2016. Tishby, Isaiah. The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Vaillant, André. Le livre des secrets d’Hénoch: Texte slave et traduction française. In OTP, edited by J.H. Charlesworth, translated by F. I. Anderson. Paris: Institut d’Etudes Slaves, 1952. Reprint Paris, 1976.

160  Eva Mroczek Weitzman, Steven P. “Absent but Accounted For: A New Approach to the Copper Scroll.” Harvard Theological Review 108 (2015): 423–47. Wollenberg, Rebecca Scharbach. “The People of the Book without the Book: Jewish Ambivalence towards Biblical Text after the Rise of Christianity.” PhD diss. The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 2015. Xinjiang, Rong. “The Nature of the Dunhuang Library Cave and the Reasons for its Sealing.” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 11 (1999–2000): 247–75. ———. “The Dangers of Reading As We Know It: Sight Reading As a Source of Heresy in Early Rabbinic Traditions.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85 (2017): 1–37. Zacuto, Abraham. Sefer Yuḥasin ha-shalem: le-horot shalshelet ḳabalat ha-Torah miMosheh rabenu ʻad zeman ha-meḥaber. Jerusalem: Leṿin-Epshṭin, 1962. Zajaczkowski, Ananiasz. Ze studiów nad zagadnieniem chazarskim. Krakow: Nakł. Polskiej Akademii Umiejętności, 1947. Zeitlin, Solomon. “Scholarship and the Hoax of the Recent Discoveries.” Jewish Quarterly Review 39 (1949): 337–63. ———. “The Alleged Antiquity of the Scrolls.” Jewish Quarterly Review 40 (1949): 57–78. ———. “The Hebrew Scrolls: Once More and Finally.” Jewish Quarterly Review 41 (1950): 1–58. ———. “When Were the Hebrew Scrolls ‘Discovered’: In 1947 or 1907?” Jewish Quarterly Review 40 (1950): 373–8. ———. “The Dead Sea Scrolls: 1. The Lamech Scroll: A Medieval Midrash: 2. The Copper Scrolls: 3. Was Kando the Owner of the Scrolls?” Jewish Quarterly Review 47 (1956/1957): 245–68. Zweig, Stefan. The Buried Candelabrum. Translated by E. Paul and C. Paul. New York: Viking Press, 1937.

9 The orthodox transmission of heresy Winrich Löhr

Defining the difference between religious truth and error, between “orthodoxy” and “heresy” is a conspicuous example of claiming religious authority. The hereseological discourse that resulted from the continuing efforts of distinguishing acceptable doctrine from unacceptable deviancy is an invention of ancient Christianity that, together with a canon of Scriptures and a clerical hierarchy, helped to define the movement’s institutional boundaries in the second through fifth centuries. However, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, in order to maintain the validity and effectiveness of hereseological discourse, it was necessary to move “beyond authority” in two manners. First, heretical texts had to be reproduced (edited, quoted, summarized) and disseminated without proper authorization by their authors or their primary audience. Second, the reproduction of heretical texts by orthodox tradents must be viewed as more than authoritative mechanisms for instructing right from wrong. Whereas, on the one hand, readers were continuously cautioned against the seductiveness of heretical tenets and texts, on the other hand, readerly curiosity was both stimulated and satisfied through the publication of heresy. By this calculated transgression, heretical wisdom – knowledge “beyond authority,” and doubly so – was made available to a wider audience. The first part of this paper will analyze why three major early Christian authors – Irenaeus of Lyon, Tertullian of Carthage, and Hippolytus of Rome – wrote hereseographies that transmitted heretical doctrines. I will demonstrate that thinking beyond authoritative self-justification allows us to view other aspects of the orthodoxy transmission of heresy in a clearer light. In particular, we catch glimpses of curiosity, entertainment, and a desire for encyclopedic knowledge. The second part will focus on two prominent examples of the orthodox publication and dissemination of heretical writings, one of them intervening in the Trinitarian controversy, the other one starting the Pelagian controversy. These will highlight the social and intellectual processes and problems related to unauthorized transmission of any text, authoritative or otherwise.

Irenaeus of Lyon, Against the Heresies1 The five books Adversus haereses of Irenaeus of Lyon is the earliest extant work of Christian hereseography.2 A close study of the prologues of books one, two,

162  Winrich Löhr and three suggests both that Irenaeus wrote Adv. haer. in a situation of intense doctrinal competition, and that he did not plan from the outset to write five books, but probably widened its scope while working on books 1 and 2. The prologues of these three books provide a salient starting point from which to explore the interplay between the two central themes of this chapter: the unauthorized transmission of heretical knowledge, and the selective reception of that knowledge by readers for purposes other than gaining or asserting authority. Irenaeus claims that Adversus haereses is intended to answer the long-standing request of an anonymous addressee who wished to be informed about various heretical doctrines (Adv. haer. 1.pr.3).3 In meeting the request, Irenaeus seeks to counter the successful proselytizing by his Valentinian opponents. They, Irenaeus says (Adv. haer. 1.pr.1), have caused the ruin of many by introducing logous pseudeis (“fraudulent discourses”) and genealogias aperantous, haitines zētēseis mallon parechousi (“endless genealogies that rather present material for investigations,” echoing 1 Timothy 1:4). Irenaeus claims that the Valentinians first seduce the “naïve/uncorrupted” (‘oi akeraioi; Latin: simpliciores) “into asking questions” (eis ton tou zētein tropon), only to induce them, as a second step, to blaspheme against the creator (Adv. haer. 1.pr.1). That is, Irenaeus’s opponents first raise difficult theological questions, and then provide their own doctrines as the answer. Irenaeus wishes to undermine the opponents’ authority by unmasking their doctrines, with the ultimate aim of stripping these doctrines of their spurious plausibility. “Error does not show itself as it is – lest it becomes evident in its nakedness – but rather seeks to adorn itself cunningly with a garment of plausibility (pithanō de periblēmati).”4 Irenaeus claims to have informed himself about the views of his opponents both by reading the hupomnēmata5 of “the disciples of Valentinus” (their own term), and by meeting some of them in person to learn about their opinions.6 The fact is that Irenaeus is anything but an authorized expositor of Valentinian religious teaching, and he compensates for his unauthorized explication of Valentinian doctrine by emphasizing his own expertise and connoisseurship.7 As regards his exploitation of Valentinian hupomnēmata, he published – in violation of ancient literary etiquette – the contents of their writings without proper authorization by their authors. Irenaeus claims that he will relate the doctrines of Ptolemy (“the flower of the school of Valentinus”) and of his disciples, but even beyond this original request of his addressee, he will also furnish some “starting points” (aphormai) for a refutation. He expects his addressee to develop these starting points into a proper refutation and to help others, in turn, confront the Valentinians: Irenaeus makes it clear that he wants his work to be disseminated, both physically and in the theological disputations of his addressee. The announcements of the prologue fit the plan and contents of Adversus haereses book one, whose main purpose is expository: large parts of it comprise heretical doxographies that describe the rich diversity of Valentinian doctrine, along with those of various predecessors of the Valentinians, like the heretics from Simon Magus to Marcion (1.23–27) and of the so-called Gnostics (Barbeliotes) and Ophites. Irenaeus often seems to present verbatim excerpts from his heretical

The orthodox transmission of heresy  163 sources, but the presentation of this doxography is far from unbiased. Employing the standard polemical trope of diaphōnia/“discord,” it is meant to highlight the disagreements between the schools or even within a school.8 Only a few passages are dedicated solely to refuting the Valentinians (such as chapters 9–10 and 22). In chapter  10 Irenaeus presents, first, what he calls the “unanimous faith of the universal church” (10.1–2), and then expounds a list comprising legitimate theological questions. In this way Irenaeus presents a contrast between what he formulates in chapter 22 as “the rule of truth” as a criterion of orthodoxy, and the contradictory mess of heretical doctrines, as well as the heretics’ illegitimate curiosity, which raises a host of problems. In the prologue to book two, Irenaeus summarizes the contents of book one and announces that he is going to overturn the fundamental tenets of his opponents. Underlining again the double function of his work, he evokes its title: “Since this work is both an uncovering (detectio) and an overturning (eversio) of their opinions, we have given it this title.”9 The title referred to is (in Greek) elenchos kai anatropē ts pseudōnymou gnōseōs.10 Gabriella Aragione has shown that Greek elenchos can be translated as “revelation” or “unmasking.”11 It must remain unclear whether or not Irenaeus’s combination of heretical doxography and dialectical refutation may simply adopt and develop the model of Justin’s “Syntagma against all heresies.”12 This combination of doxography and refutation is also indicated by chapter summaries (argumenta) present in Latin manuscripts of Adversus haereses;13 there the title is mentioned twice, preceding both books two and four. The term “elenchos” is translated as redargutio (“refutation”) and as exprobratio (“reproach”).14 Moreover, the argumenta use the terms narratio (“retelling”), ostensio (“manifestation”), and eversio (“subversion”): the first major section of Irenaeus’s treatment is designated as narratio omnis argumenti Valentini discipulorum (“retelling of all of the arguments of the disciples of Valentinus”).15 Irenaeus’s rich and comprehensive exposition of Gnostic material in book one of Adv. haer. serves an ostensibly elenchtic purpose. But it equally stimulated the curiosity of his readers. It is therefore book one that later Christian hereseographers were particularly interested in (and therefore used and copied) rather than book two which consisted almost entirely of dialectical refutations of various heretical positions. Irenaeus’s stated objectives in writing the book, and later interpreters of his work, were not concerned only with the authority of Irenaeus or his exposition but rather a surplus of motivations combined in Adversus haereses both in its conception and application, beyond simple authoritative statements of doctrinal orthodoxy.

Tertullian, Against the Valentinians16 Tertullian, in his short treatise Adversus Valentinianos (probably written between 207 and 212 CE),17 both builds off Ireneus and highlights another dimension of heresiography brought into view when we refocus our interpretive lens. Heresiography, in addition to instruction and authorization, could be a form of entertainment.

164  Winrich Löhr Tertullian limits his work to an exordium (“preface”) and an entertaining narratio (“retelling”) of the doctrines of the Valentinians, boldly omitting any argumentatio (“reasoning”).18 “Sometimes,” he avers, “to demonstrate is to destroy.”19 Although he introduces his short tractate with a polemical prologue (chapters 1–3), and although the presentation of heretical doctrines is clearly hostile, Tertullian does not intend to engage in a proper refutation. Rather, he wishes to recommend his treatise as a spectacle. He writes, I have delayed a hostile engagement and have for the time being limited myself to an exposition: And yet, wherever the outrageousness [of Valentinian doctrine] will merit censure, the attack will not be a light and perfunctory affair. Reckon this as a mock combat before the proper fight. I will demonstrate the blows, but not inflict wounds.20 Tertullian continues by pointing out that sometimes it is best to mock and ridicule the opponent rather than to engage him. Serious argument would only serve to dignify (adornari) the opponent’s views. For his narratio of Valentinian doctrine, Tertullian draws largely, but not exclusively, on Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 1.1–8. But whereas Irenaeus’s exposition mostly eschewed satirical touches,21 Tertullian spices his narratio of the Valentinian system (and some of its variations) with satirical mockery. In this way he exposes the ridiculous aspects of Valentinian myth, and reduces its narrative from a timeless divine drama to quotidian stagecraft.22 Tertullian is intent on “unmasking” Valentinian doctrine, but in a markedly different way from the “unmasking” offered by Irenaeus, his source. He contends that the allegorical exegesis of the heretics turns scripture into a kind of Eleusinian mystery, rendering access to it deliberately difficult. Tertullian promises to make his readers see through the sham of heretical pretensions. To this end, he offers to facilitate the decoding of Valentinian myth. Although, he notes, some of the Greek terms of the Valentinian system are difficult or even impossible to translate by Latin expressions, he will explain their meaning in the margins of the manuscript. Likewise, wherever he does offer a Latin translation (for instance, of the names of the eons), he will supply the corresponding Greek term by noting it above the line.23 In this way, Tertullian´s Adversus Valentinianos continues Irenaeus’s effort to render the Valentinian system comprehensible, and thereby refutable. Unlike Irenaeus, however, Tertullian’s work does not claim to have been prompted by the request of a particular addressee. Rather, his work is aimed at an educated and sophisticated urban audience that is able to savor its inimitable style and to be entertained by its allusions to classical literature and mythology. Tertullian writes more succinctly and elegantly than Irenaeus, and, unlike the careful bishop of Lyon, he does not bother his audience by providing the scriptural basis of Valentinian speculations.24 Tertullian’s reader should learn that Valentinianism is hardly a profound doctrine for the educated, supplementing classical paideia with Christian philosophy. Rather the reader should see that Valentinianism is ridiculous and ultimately fraudulent. Though, as Frédouille notes, the tone of

The orthodox transmission of heresy  165 Tertullian’s satirical attack on Valentinian doctrine remains relatively restrained. If Valentinianism was a heresy in Tertullian’s eyes, it was, nonetheless, a Christian heresy.25 This point of view – as we will see in the next section – was not shared by all hereseologists.

Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies Hippolytus builds on and presents a more serious approach to Tertullian’s project. His work, The Refutation of all Heresies, also highlights yet another dimension of heresiology beyond authority: namely, that the transmission of heretical doctrine was not only done for the purposes of bolstering orthodox authority, but also as a learned means of displaying and organizing knowledge. As we will see below, Hippolytus’s stated intention is to satisfy the curiosity of his educated audience, comprising possibly both Christians as well as non-Christians Hippolytus of Rome likely composed the Refutatio sometime between 222 and 235 CE.26 It is apparently his second attempt to refute the heretics. This time, by the more detailed exposition of the Refutatio, Hippolytus wishes to break the spell of a nefarious heretical disciplina arcana (“secret teaching”) that controls all those whom it has ensnared.27 Hippolytus is continuing Irenaeus’s project of an elenchos, an “unmasking” and “baring” of heretical doctrine. He hopes to put the heretics and their adherents to shame and to ensure that they either repent or receive their just condemnation.28 Even in its present incomplete state (books two and three and the introduction to book four have been lost), the Refutatio still conveys the impression of a highly organized work: each of its ten books must have been prefaced by an index,29 and each refers to the contents of the previous book in its introduction. Further, books five to nine are each concluded by a short summary. Moreover, in book ten the author recapitulates books five to nine of his work in a handy epitome (“abridgment”).30 The Refutatio presents numerous excerpts, with scant reference to its sources. Hippolytus does not only lift whole passages from Irenaeus’s elenchos in book one of Adv. haer., he also draws copiously (and presumably often verbatim) on an additional source which had already combined reports on several heresies (this is the so-called “Hippolytsches Sondergut”), such as Simon Magus, the Naassenes, the Perates, the Sethians Basilides, Valentinus, Monoimus, and others.31 As Emanuele Castelli has pointed out, the elaborate organization of the Refutatio indicates its character as a work of consultation, as an ancient encyclopedia. The “Library” of Diodorus Siculus, or the “Natural History” of Pliny the Elder and the “Jewish Antiquities” of Flavius Josephus could be cited as parallels.32 Hippolytus explicitly addresses his readers as philomatheis (“those eager to know”) in order to stress, as Enrico Norelli has shown, the intellectual and elite credentials of his work.33 With his allegedly complete exposition of various doctrines – he claims to present no less than “the teachings of all the Greeks and also of the barbarians” (ta panta Hellnōn te kai barbarōn dogmata).34 Hippolytus’s stated intention is to satisfy the curiosity of his educated audience, comprising possibly both Christians as

166  Winrich Löhr well as non-Christians. Accordingly, book one offers a philosophical doxography (some additional material is presented in sections on particular heresies), whereas book four contains a selection of astrological and medical lore.35 The lost books two and three were probably devoted to the mystery cults. In book 9.18–30, he adds sections on Judaism and Jewish sects. All this amounts to an ambitious encyclopedia of religio-philosophical knowledge,36 fusing for the first time the Christian anti-heretical and apologetic discourses.37Additionally, as Castelli notes, the Refutatio has to be seen as part of a vast apologetic trilogy (opus tripartitum), the two other parts comprising the treatise De elenchos and the Chronicle.38 Hippolytus’s own elenchos/“unmasking” focuses on proving one claim: the heresies he cites neither base their teaching on scripture, nor can they claim to a source in someone holy. Rather, heretical doctrines are derived from one of three sources: Greek wisdom (the philosophers), mysteries, and astrologers.39 Thus, Hippolytus wishes to reveal that there is a baseline of plagiarism underlying all heresy, and feels therefore obliged to introduce his readers both to the original doctrines and to their heretical imitation in great detail. The charge of plagiarism was – beside the charge of diaphōnia (“discord” among competing factions of a particular school) – another standard trope of polemical debate between philosophical schools.40 By presenting the doctrines of all the philosophers and heretics as either insufficient or debased attempts at arriving at the truth, the author recommends to his readers his version of intellectualist Christian philosophy. In the last chapters of the epitom (book 10.32–33) Hippolytus offers his own account of the Christian truth (his logos tēs altheias). He concludes with an exhortation (protreptic, 10.34) to all – Greek and non-Greek alike – to convert to the true Logos and to his teaching. All mankind is to achieve the telos (“apex”) of ancient philosophy, salvific knowledge, and through it, divinization and immortalization. Just as Irenaeus and Tertullian, Hippolytus claims for his elenchos the due diligence of his expertise: in Ref. 6.42.1 he reports that some of the disciples of the Valentinian Marcus the Magician had complained about Irenaeus’s portrait of their master. In order to answer their critique (and, of course, discreetly to outdo his expert predecessor) Hippolytus presents a corrected (and less polemical) account of Marcus Magus and his sacramental practice.41 Hippolytus is anything but an impartial purveyor of religious and philosophical learning. However, just like Tertullian’s Adversus Valentinianos, he avoids engaging in a protracted (and possibly tedious) refutation of heretical arguments. The sheer abundance of heretical material on offer may suggest that – in distinction from Irenaeus – it is a learned display rather than a refutation that is the very point of Hippolytus’s Refutatio.

A provisional conclusion In Adv. haer. Irenaeus fulfills the request of an anonymous addressee to inform him about the doctrines of the Valentinians. In order to arm him for a debate with them, Irenaeus goes beyond the request by providing him not only with a detailed

The orthodox transmission of heresy  167 exposition of heretical doctrines (an elenchos), but also with some starting points for a refutation. For his hereseography, Irenaeus has taken philosophical doxography as his model and has adapted it to his elenctic purposes. Tertullian and Hippolytus continue – in their different ways – the Irenaean project of elenchos. Both have done further hereseological research and are accordingly able to supplement the information offered by the Irenaean elenchos. Hippolytus writes a hereseological encyclopedia, a project that is continued and developed in the fourth century by Epiphanius of Salamis (see later) and Filastrius of Brescia. Both Tertullian and Hippolytus write for educated readers who (unlike possibly Irenaeus’s addressee) are not necessarily themselves engaged in anti-heretical activities: some of them may have simply been intellectually curious or keen on some intelligent amusement.42 Not all of them may have been Christians. This mixed audience may have read, relished, and circulated these heretic texts outside the boundaries policed by the dominant hereseological discourse and ecclesiastical authority. That is to say, these texts which appear and are read as authoritative sources of heretical information and refutation, on my analysis, are involved in intellectual projects that are both inflected by the concerns and aims of each hereseographer, and are aimed at goals above, beyond, and quite apart from the establishment or policing of doctrinal authority.43

Pirating heretical texts in the defense of orthodoxy: Epiphanius of Salamis and Augustine Often ancient Christian hereseography dealt with extinct heresies and their doctrines. Here I want to offer two examples of the unauthorized publication and transmission of live ‘heretical’ texts in the context of the anti-heretical campaigns conducted by two prominent “heresy hunters” of the Theodosian Empire. Both were bishops: one of them, Epiphanius of Salamis, operating in the Greek East, and the other, Augustine of Hippo, in the Latin West.

Epiphanius, Aetius, and dueling editions Epiphanius (bishop of Salamis/Cyprus beginning in 366) was the author of the most important hereseological work of late antique Christianity, the Panarion omnium haeresium (“Chest of Remedies Against All Heresies”), written between 374 and 377.44 It deals with 20 pre-Christian and 60 Christian heresies that are arrayed in a strict systematic and chronological order. Each heresy is first described with regard to its doctrine and – if appropriate – its way of living, and then refuted. Although Epiphanius relies heavily on previous hereseology, he has also dug up new material. Most, but by no means all, of the new material relates to contemporary heresies.45 Epiphanius’s ambition is encyclopedic: he wants to write “a universal history of heresy.” In this regard, he continues the project of Hippolytus’s Refutatio – albeit on a far grander scale.46 Epiphanius published the Panarion at the request of two monks (Acacius and Paulus) from the monastery he had founded in Besanduc around 330 CE. The

168  Winrich Löhr monks asked him to write down lectures he had (apparently) given on the subject, which they had been unable to attend.47 Satisfying their request, Epiphanius tells them that he wishes to explain the designations of the heresies to them and to uncover their unlawful practices. The hereseological knowledge dispensed by the bishop presents itself as geared towards practical application.48 Of course, Epiphanius did not first collect his material when the request of the monks reached him in 374: he had almost certainly begun the process many years prior.49 In Pan.haer. 76.11–12, Epiphanius presents the so called Syntagmation of the Neo-Arian theologian Aetius. The prologue of the Syntagmation reads thus: On the occasion of the persecution instituted against us by the ‘Temporists’ (chrōnitai), some of the later appropriated, along with a good deal of other material, a little work (ponmation), the product of a particular effort on my part, on the subject of ingenerate Deity and generate. They ruined it with interpolations (parenthkai) and omissions, altered about the logical sequence of proof, and published it (ekdidonai). Later on, it got to me, procured by a certain scholarly person. I was forced to clean the treatise up again like a father and send it off to you, o pious champions and championesses, so that you may be assured that my little treatise is based on the mind of the Holy scriptures. With its help you will be able to cut short the effrontery of any man contradicting you on the subject of ingenerate Deity and generate, overturning his arguments in a concise manner (syntomois peritropais) – I am referring above all to the ‘Temporists’ I have mentioned earlier.50 This passage, taken from the preface to one of the most important works of the Trinitarian controversy, tells a little story: Aetius had apparently produced a first draft of the Syntagmation.51 This version (a series of arguments in short paragraphs) was at first a private work, perhaps a kind of aid for Aetius himself, to be used in live debates.52 This first version of his little book came into the hands of his opponents, who saw to its publication in a pirated edition.53 Aetius complains that this first edition, the one published by his opponents without his knowledge or input, presented only a tampered version of his book: not only was text added and omitted, but the sequence of arguments had been disturbed. From Aetius’s account, it is not at all clear whether these alterations were made with polemical intent. Moreover, if the opponents were engaged in producing an edition of a work that was hitherto unedited, (i.e., if they circulated among a wider public a private copy intended to circulate only among friends) then they, like other ‘editors’ in antiquity and after, may have felt obliged to effect such changes as to make the work accessible to a wider public.54 What is unusual, and indeed scandalous, about the first edition of Aetius’s Syntagmation is the fact that an unauthorized edition was produced by people who were, in principle, unsympathetic to the named author’s theological cause. Aetius, however, was hardly the first author to have suffered this fate.55 The story does not end here. A “scholarly person” (spoudaios) got hold of the pirated edition and gave it to Aetius, who then proceeded to produce a corrected version. It is unclear whether the said spoudaios

The orthodox transmission of heresy  169 was a Nicene, a Neo-Arian, or of no particular doctrinal allegiance. Aetius then dispatched to his supporters an emended version for use in debates with their theological opponents. Two things are interesting to note. First, Aetius’s purged and corrected version is apparently based on the pirated edition. He has made his text more accessible to readers by curating a clearer arrangement of his arguments.56 Second, he sent this newly edited text to his supporters, i.e., he produced his own edition for his disciples. Epiphanius of Salamis, in turn, did not use the pirated edition of Aetius’s opponents, but rather its revision produced by his heretical opponent. Epiphanius notes: Here now I present this Syntagmation for scholarship’s sake (kata philokalian): It is as if the body of a snake was decaying and rotting, and a certain treacherous scholar picked up the bones of the carcass of the snake in order to ruin certain people. He (i.e. Aetius) boasts of having put this treachery into writing for certain persons.57 The comment of Epiphanius alludes to the retrieval of the pirated version by the “spoudaios.” For Epiphanius, the Neo-Arian allegiance of this person is unquestionable.58 He, says Epiphanius, has acted treacherously. Epiphanius’s own presentation of the work, and his refutation of it, should be considered, by contrast, a work of scholarship. Philokalia/philokalos is a key term for Epiphanius which he also uses in other passages of his Panarion.59 Just as Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Tertullian, Epiphanius is here flashing his scholarly credentials. In this way he recommends his “universal history of heresy” to an audience of learned connoisseurs. Epiphanius’s sees his heresiography as more than a tool to bolster orthodox authority, but as an educated and edificatory literature. Epiphanius opponent, Aetius, allows us to view yet another dimension of heresiography obscured by questions of authority. Unlike his disciple Eunomius, Aetius was more famous for his debating skills than for his writings.60 It may have been precisely the pirating of his work that prompted him to disseminate his arguments in written form. If so, the prologue of the Syntagmation narrates an important turning point in his career and the course of the Trinitarian controversy. Moreover, it shows the publication of an important “heretical” text as the outcome of a fruitful if unintended collaboration between opponents, and comprises a potent example of the phenomenon under discussion: publication and dissemination of “heretical” material outside of attempts to bolster one’s own authority.61

Augustine as editor of Pelagius My second example for the orthodox transmission of heretical texts in the Theodosian Empire concerns the beginnings of the Pelagian controversy.62 Here, too, the unauthorized publication of heretical texts takes center stage. Augustine knew since around 405 CE that Pelagius was opposed to his views. After 410 Pelagian views began to spread in Africa. Augustine wished to engage Pelagius in a debate, but had difficulties finding Pelagian texts that he could attack and refute. He had

170  Winrich Löhr Pelagius’s commentary of the Pauline epistles at his disposal, but since it was austerely exegetical (primarily noting alternative explications for key verses, such as Romans 5:12), it offered no obvious target. Augustine was helped in his predicament by two disciples of Pelagius: Timasius and Jacobus. In the spring of 415 they delivered to him a treatise that, they claimed, came from the pen of Pelagius, and they asked Augustine to refute it. The two disciples come across as renegades who had simply changed sides.63 Since the treatise was anonymous and without title (it is usually referred to under the title De natura), it is clear that it had been as yet neither published nor authorized by Pelagius. This, however, did not unduly trouble Augustine: after Pelagius had been acquitted by the Palestinian synod of Diospolis in late December 415, Augustine mounted a vigorous epistolary campaign against Pelagius. His first success was found in the condemnation of Pelagian doctrines by two African synods, in Carthage and Mileve, in the early summer of 416. His key piece of evidence for the conviction was precisely the treatise De natura. Not only did Augustine write De natura et gratia as a refutation of De natura, he also appended both De natura et gratia and De natura to not a few of the letters that he wrote to friends and colleagues during this period.64 Moreover, the judgments of the synods of Carthage and Mileve were clearly based on the theology that was read out of De natura, though the text itself went unmentioned in their respective synodical letters. For his part, Pelagius never acknowledged his authorship of De natura. When in 417 he wrote to Innocent of Rome in order to defend himself against the African accusations, he drew up a list of those of his works that he authorized; there is no mention of the treatise De natura. Moreover, in the same letter he talked of books that had been stolen from him before he had had the opportunity of correcting them.65 It seems probable that this is an allusion to De natura, the emendatio that had been preempted by the theft being the final authorial correction of the text before publication, as was standard procedure in late antiquity.66 There is no doubt: Augustine had started the ‘hot phase’ of the Pelagian controversy, and had further secured the condemnation of his opponent, by pirating a Pelagian treatise, in open contravention of good literary practice. When Augustine himself became victim of a similar misdeed by some of his disciples – they had published a pirated version of his De Trinitate – he was deeply offended and planned to pillory them in a separate treatise.67 Augustine was aware that he had conducted his campaign against Pelagius in a manner that invited criticism. In his treatise De gestis Pelagii (On the Doings of Pelagius), when he evoked the two renegade disciples Timasius and Jacobus, he accused Pelagius of betraying them at the Synod of Diospolis – Augustine deliberately confused the roles of perpetrators and victim.68 Moreover, once Augustine acquired authorized material from Pelagius (such as the Letter to Demetrias or his Pro libero arbitrio), he silently dropped De natura, never to refer to it again.

Conclusion Justin Martyr and Irenaeus of Lyon established a distinct tradition of Christian hereseography that – taking as its model modes of argument and information

The orthodox transmission of heresy 171 current in the schools of Greek philosophy – combined dialectics and doxography. Although the resulting hereseography was clearly biased, its purpose went beyond the merely polemical. Alongside the polemical argument it wished to inform and educate its readers: it was simply a practical necessity to supply them with a choice of those texts and ideas one wished to refute, yet whose circulation was initially limited to small circles of disciples and supporters. This orthodox diffusion of heresy indicated a deep ambivalence at the core of the hereseological project. By appealing to the curiosity of the intended audience, the dangerously seductive esotericism of heretical systems and texts is evoked time and again, only to be countered by the orthodox exposition of the selfsame systems and texts. Comparing Irenaeus with his successors (such as Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius), one can identify a growing tendency towards the display of erudition of a literary or antiquarian kind, even beyond any claim or attempt at self-authorization. The intended audiences are no longer only those that need help in their debates with heretics; they come to include a larger, religiously mixed public of curious “connoisseurs” (philomatheis). Anti-heretical and the apologetic discourses are streamlined into a universal view of religious error and truth. Christian orthodoxy not only preserves the memory of ancient heresies, it also integrates non-Christian philosophical doxography. It aspires to replace the doctrinal spectrum of nonChristian philosophy by the new, and more comprehensive, spectrum of Christian hereseography. A new kind of knowledge (hereseological knowledge) and a new kind of expertise are established. However, no simple trajectory can be traced. In the context of the legally enforced orthodoxy of the Theodosian Empire, the orthodox publication and transmission of heretical texts was more than merely an erudite pastime which can be understood as authorizing the theological positions of those who gain access. Bishops such as Epiphanius of Salamis and Augustine of Hippo continued to publish heretical texts in order to unmask and nail down doctrinal error. Jennifer Ebbeler has shown that Augustine invariably (and more often than not, unsuccessfully) aimed at making Donatist, Manichean, Pelagian, and Arian opponents publicly acknowledge and retract their erroneous views.69 The rationale of this strategy of enforced transparency is simple: error must be made public in order to be publicly corrected. Orthodoxy admits of no development, and needs no elaboration, except against error in its various guises. The valid articulation of orthodoxy is therefore dependent on the transparent exposition of error, and the transmission thereof. But the connection between the transmission of error and the authority of the transmitter is neither static nor simple.

Notes 1 Edition: Rousseau and Doutreleau, Irénée de Lyon. Contre les hérésies I-V. 2 The “Syntagma Against all Heresies” of Justin Martyr (1 Apol. 26.8) is no longer extant. I am not as confident as some scholars, particularly in the past, that its outline can be recovered from Irenaeus, Adv.haer. 1.23–27, see Löhr, Basilides und seine Schule, 258ff. 3 “palai zētountos sou mathein tn gnōmēn autōn.” Translations my own unless otherwise marked.

172  Winrich Löhr 4 Adv. haer. 1.pr.2, 5 The translation of this word is notoriously difficult. In this context, we may consider “treatises,” or “exegetical commentaries” as likely referents. See Durst, “Hegesipps Hypomnemata,” 299–330. 6 Adv. haer. 1.pr.2 7 For a similar concern with regards to transmitting rabbinic knowledge, see the discussion about Beruriah by Sarit Kattan Gibetz in this book (185, note 53), in which Beruriah – an unauthorized female transmitter – emphasizes her own expertise and connoisseurship of rabbinic traditions. 8 Brunschwig, “Aspects de la polémique philosophique en Grèce ancienne,” 42. 9 Irenaeus of Lyon, Adv.haer. 2.pr.2. See also Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 3.pr. 10 See, e.g., Eusebius of Caesarea, HE 5.7.1; for further testimonies, see Rousseau and Doutreleau, Sources chrétiennes vol. 263, 32, note 1. The title alludes to 1 Tim 6:20. The polysemous Greek word elenchos (see the following note) has been translated by Latin “detectio” (see earlier), or “traductio” (Adv.haer. 3.pr.8). 11 Aragione, “Guerre-Éclair Contre Les Hérétiques,” 75–81.; cf. Brunschwig, “Aspects de la polémique philosophique en Grèce ancienne.” Aragione deals with the Elenchos of Hippolytus of Rome (see later) but her remarks apply equally to the title of Irenaeus’s work. 12 See above, note 2. For the heresiology of Irenaeus, see Le Boulluec, La notion d’hérésie. 13 Editors Rousseau and Doutreleau call the titles in the lists preceding Adv.haer. books 1–4 argumenta, and the titles inserted in the text capitula. The variations in sequence, numbering, and position of these titles in the manuscript tradition pose interesting problems of their own which cannot be addressed here. The argumenta or capitula probably derive from the Greek manuscripts from which the translation was made (see Sources chrétiennes vol. 293, 51ff ). 14 Sources chrétiennes vol. 294, 12; vol.100, 362. 15 Sources chrétiennes vol. 264, 14. And whereas the argumenta to books 1–4 often simply summarize the contents of a section by a simple statement starting with quae, quod, quemadmodum, qualis, etc., sometimes they start with ostensio. (i.e., Greek apodeixis). See, for example, Sources chrétiennes vol. 264, 14: “ostensio neque plus neque minus de ea quae est [in] fide posse quosdam dicere” (Adv.haer. 1,10,24); vgl. vol. 294, 12,13,15; vol. 100, 362, 364 etc. – For eversio, see, e.g., vol. 294,21: “Euersio Basilidis caelorum fabricationis.” The terms expositio and relatio also occur, see e.g., Sources chrétiennes vol. 264,14, 16; vol. 294,21. 16 Fredouille, Tertullien Contre les valentiniens. 17 See the discussion Fredouille, Tertullien Contre les valentiniens, 7–12. 18 Sider, Ancient Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian, 21, 30. 19 Tertullian, Adv.Val. 3.5: “etiam solummodo demonstrare destruere est.” 20 Adv. Val. 6.1. Fredouille believes that Tertullian announces in Adv.Val. 3.5. Tertullien Contre les Valentiniens, 11.; 6,2 a future writing against the Valentinians that will constitute a proper refutation. I am not so sure. For (biased) exposition without proper refutation, see also Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 4.18.5; Justin Martyr allegedly wrote a book (a scholikon, i.e., a book for didactic purposes) entitled “On the Soul.” There he collected the opinions of Greek philosophers on certain problems which he promised to refute in a separate syngramma – of which there is no further mention by either Eusebius or anyone else. See similarly Plutarch, On Stoic Contradictions 1049B; 1049E. 21 Though cf. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 1.3.6; 1.4.3–4; 1.8.1; cf. Fredouille, Tertullien Contre les Valentiniens, 21. 22 Ibid., 18. 23 Tertullian, Adv.Val. 7.1.

The orthodox transmission of heresy  173 24 Fredouille, Tertullien Contre les Valentiniens, 22–3. 25 Ibid., 19ff. 26 Edition: Marcovich, Hippolytus Refutatio omnium haeresium. For an introduction, see Scholten, “Hippolytos ii (von Rom).”; Castelli, “L’Elenchos, ovvero una ‘biblioteca’contro le eresie.” The question of the identity of its author cannot be discussed here. 27 Hippolytus, Refutatio 1.pr.2. 28 Hippolytus, ibidem; Löhr, “The Continuing Construction of Heresy,” 25. 29 Only the argumenta of books one and five–ten have survived. 30 Books two to four are not summarized in book ten, the reason for this being unclear. 31 For bibliography on the “Hippolytsches Sondergut”, see Löhr, Basilides und seine Schule, 295 n. 45. Hippolytus’s own hereseological research appears to have limited itself to his more or less contemporary Roman opponents, such as Noetus and his disciples, his rival Callistus, and the Elchasaites. 32 Castelli, “L’Elenchos, ovvero una ‘biblioteca’contro le eresie,” 26–9. For the Refutatio and Flavius Josephus, see Castelli, Un falso letterario sotto il nome di Flavio Giuseppe. 33 Norelli, “Alcune termini della ‘Confutazione di tutte le eresie´ (Elenchos) e il progetto dell´opera.” 34 Hippolytus, Refutatio 9.31.1. 35 He focuses on eight philosophers/philosophical schools: Thales, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. 36 I know of no other ancient work that combines in this way information about astrology, medicine, philosophical schools, and mystery cults – not to mention Jewish and Christian heresies. Much information is derived from intermediary sources. The philosophical doxography, however, contains valuable and even unique information. 37 Löhr, “The Continuing Construction of Heresy.” Endorsed by Castelli, “L’Elenchos, ovvero una ‘biblioteca’contro le eresie,” 34. 38 Castelli, “The Author of the Refutatio Omnium Haeresium and the Attribution of the De Universo to Flavius Josephus.” See also Scholten, “Autor, Anliegen und Publikum der Refutatio.”; Norelli, “Construire l´opposition entre orthodoxie et hérésie à Rome, au IIIe siècle.”; Löhr, “The Continuing Construction of Heresy.” 39 Refutatio., pr.1.8. Aragione, “Guerre-éclair contre les hérétiques, guerre de position contre les philosophes.” 40 See Diogenes Laertius 2.60.62; 7.25; 8.54 etc.; Janssen, “Plagiat.” 41 Förster, Marcus Magus, 26–31. 42 See Tertullian, Adv.Val. 5.1: “In any case, one should not say that we have invented the subject-matter for ourselves which so many men of outstanding holiness and excellence (they were not only our predecessors but also the contemporaries of the leaders of the heresies themselves) have already exposed and refuted in very learned volumes, among them Justin, philosopher and martyr, Miltiades, the sophist of the churches, Irenaeus, most curious explorer of all the different doctrines and our Proculus, an excellent example of chaste old age and Christian eloquence: as in all my works dedicated to the faith I have desired to follow them also in this one.” This passage defends hereseology as a new field of knowledge (with its own forms of expertise) against the suspicion of intellectual fraud by pointing out its pedigree. Two points should be noted: first, the hereseological predecessors of Tertullian both exposed and refuted the heresies (et prodiderumt et retuderunt). Second, they are designated as Christian intellectuals, and the curiosity of Irenaeus is emphasized. According to Tertullian, the wrong sort of curiositas (“inquisitiveness”) is characteristic of heretics (Praescr. 14.2–5). Here he seems to imply that you need some curiositas to get a grip on their thinking. See also Fredouille, Tertullien et la conversion de la culture antique, 411–2.

174  Winrich Löhr 43 Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Tertullian were not the only transmitters of hereseological lore in the late second/early third century. Describing the anti-heretical literature at the close of the second century, Eusebius speaks of numerous defenders of the truth, not only in oral debates but also through “written hypomnēmata that put right their [the heretics’] opinions by very accurate elenchoi.” Perhaps here again elenchos is again not just a “refutation,” but also an “unmasking,” claiming to provide accurate information about heretical doctrines and practices. Eusebius summarizes one of these writings, the “Elenchos kata Basileidou” (Refutation of Basilides) of a certain Agrippa Castor. It shows that Agrippa Castor – about whom nothing else is known – substantially supplemented and developed the account provided by Irenaeus in Adv.haer. 1.24.2–7. If so, he would stand in the same relation to Irenaeus with regard to the Basilidian material as Tertullian and Hippolytus do with regard to the Valentinian material. 44 Edition: Holl and Dummer, Epiphanius. Panarion haer. 65–80. 45 Epiphanius provides precious material concerning, e.g.,  Marcellus of Ancyra (Pan. haer. 72), the Homoiusians (Pan.haer. 73), and Aetius (Pan.haer. 76, see later). As regards the older heresies, see, e.g., Pan.haer. 33.3–7 (Ptolemy´s Letter to Flora) and Pan.haer. 31.5–6 (Valentinian exposition). The section on Marcion (Pan.haer. 42) is based on Epiphanius’s careful study of Marcion’s bipartite bible etc. 46 Aragione, “Una ‘storia’ universale dell’eresia.” 47 See the letter of Acacius and Paul to Epiphanius, edition Holl, Bergermann, and Collatz, Epiphanius, I.154.3–4. 48 Epiphanius, Pan.haer., prooem. 1.2, GCS Epiphanius I.155.10f. 49 Epiphanius, Pan.haer. 42.10.2. 50 Epiphanius, Pan.haer. 76.11.1–2; translation adapted from Wickham, “The Syntagmation of Aetius the Anomean,” 544ff. See also the translation by Williams, The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, 508ff. Epiphanius presents the Syntagmation twice: first as a whole (Pan.76.11–12), then cut up in single chapters, each followed by his refutation. There are textual differences between the two versions of the Syntagmation quoted by Epiphanius (Wickham, “The Syntagmation of Aetius the Anomean,” 532: “curious variations”) which, however, are eliminated in the text of the flawed GCS-edition of Holl. It is possible that Holl here only repeats a mistake first committed in the section on Marcion (Pan.haer. 42), where Epiphanius presents twice his excerpts from Marcion’s bible, see Schmid, Marcion und sein Apostolos, 158ff. 51 For the date of the Syntagmation, see Wickham, “The Syntagmation of Aetius the Anomean,” 550 (original version before 360); Kopecek, A History of Neo-Arianism, 226 (end of 359). 52 I wonder, however, whether ‘spoudasthen hemin idiazontōs’ may have to be interpreted as: “the little book which had been worked out privately for myself,” i.e., whether the phrase is meant to emphasize that Aetius did not initially send this work to others. 53 On editions and publication of ancient books see Dorandi, Nell’officina dei classici, 83–101. 54 Ibid., 96ff. The ekdosis of an ancient work presupposes that it is put in order and corrected. 55 See Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 1.1: the pirating of Tertullian’s Adv.Marc. I/II heralded the apostasy of its perpetrator. See also Mark Vessey’s discussion of an analogous breach of literary protocol, of which Jerome was the “victim.” Vessey, “The Forging of Orthodoxy in Latin Christian Literature.” 56 Epiphanius, Pan.haer. 76.11.3. 57 Epiphanius, Pan.haer. 76.13.2, transl. Williams 1994, 514 (altered). Immediately before this passage Epiphanius informs his readers that it was said (phasin) that Aetius had produced 300 similar chapters. 58 It is possible but unprovable that this person was Aetius’s disciple Eunomius who apparently wrote scholia discussing the Aetian kephalaia, see Ps.-Athanasius, Dialogus II.6, PG 28.1165A-B Vaggione, Eunomius, 176–7. 59 Epiphanius, Pan.haer. prooem. 1.2.1; 2.2.5; 42.11.15; 64.5.11; 69.4.3; 69.9.3.

The orthodox transmission of heresy  175 60 Lim, Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity, 112–18. 61 The text of the Syntagmation was, however, transmitted not only by the Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, but also in a second, probably independent, recension (PG 28.1173–1201), see Wickham, “The Syntagmation of Aetius the Anomean,” 532ff. 62 The following account is developed in somewhat greater detail in Löhr, Pélage et le pélagianisme. 63 Caltabiano, “Agostino d´Ippona e la communicazione scritta con gli heretici.”; Perrin, “Le témoignage des ralliés.” 64 Augustine, ep.179 (to John of Jerusalem); ep.177 (to Innocent of Rome); ep.19 (to Jerome); letter to bishops Eulogius and John, see ep.19.4.1 (lost, probably a copy of ep. 179). 65 in libris suis . . . non illis quos inemendatos sibi fuisse subreptos “In his books . . . not those which declares to be stolen from him in an incorrect form”. Augustine, De gratia Christi 2,2, ed. CSEL 42, 125–6. 66 Dorandi, Nell’officina dei classici. 67 Augustine, Retractationes 2.15.1. 68 Augustine, De gestis Pelagii 47. 69 Ebbeler, Disciplining Christians. Augustine as editor and hostile commentator of heretical texts – such as, e.g., the Sermo Arrianorum, or the Capitula of Faustus the Manichean – merits a separate study.

Bibliography Aragione, Gabriella. “Guerre-éclair contre les hérétiques, guerre de position contre les philosophes: l´Elenchos et ses protagonistes.” In Des évêques, des écoles et des hérétiques: actes du colloque international sur la “Réfutation de toutes les hérésies” (Genève, 13–14 juin, 2008), edited by Gabriella Aragione and Enrico Norelli, 73–101. Lausanne: Éditions du Zèbre, 2011. ———. “Una ‘storia´ universale dell´eresia: Il Panarion di Epifanio.” In Panarion. Libro Primo, edited by G Pini, 5–92. Brescia: Morecelliana, 2010. Aragione, Gabriella, and Enrico Norelli, eds. Des évêques, des écoles et des hérétiques: Actes du colloque international sur la ‘Réfutation de toutes les hérésies´, Génève, 13–14 juin 2008. Lausanne: Éditions du Zèbre, 2011. Brunschwig, J. “Aspects de la polémique philosophique en Grèce ancienne.” In La parole polémique [colloque tenu à la Sorbonne en septembre 1998], edited by Gilles Declercq, Michel Murat, and Jacqueline Dangel, 25–46. Paris: H. Champion, 2003. Caltabiano, Matilde. “Agostino d´Ippona e la communicazione scritta con gli heretici.” Acme 49 (2006): 55–73. Castelli, Emanuele. “L’Elenchos, ovvero una ‘biblioteca’contro le eresie.” In Ippolito. Confutazione di tutte le eresie, edited by Aldo Magris, 21–56. Brescia: Morcelliana, 2012. ———. “The Author of the Refutatio Omnium Haeresium and the Attribution of the De Universo to Flavius Josephus.” In Des Évêques, Des Écoles et Des Hérétiques: Actes Du Colloque International Sur La “Réfutation de Toutes Les Hérésies,” Genève, 13–14 Juin 2008, edited by Gabriella Aragione and Enrico Norelli, 219–31. Prahins: Éditions du Zèbre 2011. ———. Un falso letterario sotto il nome di Flavio Giuseppe: ricerche sulla tradizione del Περι του παντος e sulla produzione letteraria cristiana a Roma nei primi decenni del III secolo. Münster, Westfalen: Aschendorff Verlag, 2011. Dorandi, Tiziano. Nell’officina dei classici: come lavoravano gli autori antichi. Roma: Carocci, 2007. Durst, Michael. “Hegesipps Hypomnemata: Titel oder Gattungsbezeichnung? Untersuchungen zum literarischen Gebrauch von Hypomnema.” Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte 84(1–4) (1989): 299–330.

176  Winrich Löhr Ebbeler, Jennifer. Disciplining Christians: Correction and Community in Augustine’s Letters. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Epiphanius. The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis. Books II and III, De Fide. Second revised edition. Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 79. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Förster, Niclas. Marcus Magus: Kult, Lehre und Gemeindeleben einer valentinianischen Gnostikergruppe: Sammlung der Quellen und Kommentar. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999. Fredouille, Jean Claude, ed. Tertullien Contre les valentiniens. Sources chrétiennes. Paris: Cerf, 1980. ———, ed. Tertullien Contre les valentiniens. Vol. 1/2. Sources chrétiennes, 280/281. Paris: Cerf, 1980. ———. Tertullien et la conversion de la culture antique. Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1972. Holl, K. and J. Dummer, eds., Epiphanius. Panarion haer. 65–80. GCS. Berlin, 1985. Holl, Karl, Christian-Friedrich Collatz, and Marc Bergermann. Epiphanius Panarion Haer. 1–33. Corrected and expanded edition. Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller. Walter De Gruyter: Berlin, 2013. Janssen, M. “Plagiat.” In Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 2016. Kopecek, Thomas A. A History of Neo-Arianism. Cambridge, MA; Winchendon, MA: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation; Distributed by Greeno, Hadden, 1979. Le Boulluec, Alain. La notion d’hérésie dans la littérature grecque, IIe-IIIe siècles. Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1985. Lim, Richard. Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity. The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 23. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Löhr, Winrich. Basilides und seine Schule: eine Studie zur Theologie- und Kirchengeschichte des zweiten Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: Mohr, 1996. ———. Pélage et le pélagianisme. Conférences de l’Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Paris: Cerf, 2015. ———. “Pélage, le pélagianisme et le conflit des valeurs dans l’Antiquité tardive.” Annuaire de l’École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), Section des sciences religieuses. Résumé des conférences et travaux, no. 119 (October 1, 2012): 177–80. ———. “The Continuing Construction of Heresy: Hippolyt’s Refutatio in Context.” In Des évêques, des écoles et des hérétiques: actes du colloque international sur la “Réfutation de toutes les heresies,” Genève, 13–14 juin 2008, edited by Gabriella Aragione and Enrico Norelli, 25–32. Lausanne: Éditions du Zèbre, 2011. Marcovich, Miroslav, ed. Hippolytus Refutatio omnium haeresium. Berlin; New York: W. De Gruyter, 1986. Norelli, Enrico. “Alcune termini della ‘Confutazione di tutte le eresie´ (Elenchos) e il progetto dell´opera.” In Lingua e teologia nel cristianesimo greco: atti del convegno tenuto a Trento l’11–12 dicembre 1997, edited by Claudio Moreschini and Giovanni Menestrina, 95–123. Brescia: Morcelliana, 1999. ———. “Construire l´opposition entre orthodoxie et hérésie à Rome, au IIIe siècle.” In Des évêques, des écoles et des hérétiques: actes du colloque international sur la “Réfutation de toutes les heresies,” Genève, 13–14 juin 2008, edited by Gabriella Aragione and Enrico Norelli, 233–56. Lausanne: Éditions du Zèbre, 2011. Perrin, Michel-Yves “Le témoignage des ralliés: une arme de la polémique doctrinale entre chrétiens dans l’antiquité tardive.” In La religion que j’ai quittée, edited by Daniel Tollet, 65–86. Paris: Presses de Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007.

The orthodox transmission of heresy 177 Rousseau, A. and L. Doutreleau, eds., Irénée de Lyon. Contre les hérésies I-V. Sources chrétienns, Vols. 263,264,293.294,210,211,100,152, Paris: Cerf, 1965–1982. Schmid, Ulrich. Marcion und sein Apostolos: Rekonstruktion und historische Einordnung der marcionitischen Paulusbriefausgabe. Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 1995. Scholten, Clemens. “Autor, Anliegen und Publikum der Refutatio.” In Des évêques, des écoles et des hérétiques: actes du colloque international sur la “Réfutation de toutes les hérésies” (Genève, 13–14 juin 2008), edited by Gabriella Aragione and Enrico Norelli, 135–66. Lausanne: Éditions du Zèbre, 2011. ———. “Hippolytos ii (von Rom).” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, 1991, 492–551. Sider, Robert D. Ancient Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian. London: Oxford University Press, 1971. Vaggione, Richard Paul, ed., Eunomius: the extant works. Oxford: Clarendon Press: New York, 1987. Vessey, Mark. “The Forging of Orthodoxy in Latin Christian Literature: A Case Study.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4(4) (1996): 495–513. Wickham, L.R. “The Syntagmation of Aetius the Anomean.” The Journal of Theological Studies XIX(2) (1968): 532–69. Williams, Frank. The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis. Books II and III, Books II and III. Leiden Brill, 1994.

10 Consuming texts Women as recipients and transmitters of ancient texts Sarit Kattan Gribetz

“Then the priest shall put these curses in writing, and wash them off into the water of bitterness. He shall make the woman drink the water of bitterness”. – (Num 5:23–24, NRSV) “He said to me, Mortal, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it. Then I ate it; and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey”. – (Ezek 3:3, NRSV) “Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me, ‘Now I have put my words in your mouth’”. – (Jer 1:9, NRSV)

Mishnah Avot opens with a chain of transmission: “Moses received Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets transmitted it to the men of the Great Assembly,” and proceeds through a series of generations before ending with Rabban Yoḥanan b. Zakkai and his five rabbinic disciples.1 The placement of this list at the beginning of the tractate authorizes the tractate and, more broadly, the rabbinic enterprise as a whole. Rabbinic texts – the Mishnah and Tosefta, the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, the Tannaitic and Amoraic midrashim – present themselves as works composed and transmitted by men (rabbis), for later generations of men (other rabbis). The study of Torah is conceptualized as an act of transmission not only from teacher to disciple,2 but specifically from father to son.3 The biblical commandment in Deuteronomy 6:7, that everyone “repeat them [the commandments] to your children (levanekha),” is interpreted in Sifre Zuṭa and elsewhere in literalist fashion to include only male children: “to your sons and your sons’ sons, but not to your daughters.”4 Thus, according to these and other rabbinic sources, Torah study is an activity reserved for men, and only they are the authorized transmitters of rabbinic Torah.5 A similar – but certainly not identical – narrative is suggested by ancient Christian works. No work in the New Testament is attributed to a woman. There are Church Fathers, but alas, no “Church Mothers.”6 Although Paul praises

Consuming texts 179 Junia as great among the apostles and addresses other women such as Phoebe and Prisca, ancient lists of apostolic succession, sometimes compared with the rabbinic chain of transmission, also include only men.7 Women, broadly construed, were deliberately excluded as professional Christian educators in Late Antiquity.8 Imagining transmission of sacred texts and traditions from father to son, or elder to prophet, or bishop to bishop, or rabbinic teacher to rabbinic disciple, as these texts do, already presumes masculine authority as exclusive.9 But is this the whole story? This chapter considers some of those who may have served as links in the chains of transmission of ancient texts but who, for reasons associated with authority, were largely left out (in antiquity and in modern scholarship) of the texts that were themselves transmitted. Writing of Hypatia and other late antique female philosophers, dozens of whom remain unnamed in our sources, Edward Watts remarks that “their anonymity has little to do with their philosophical achievements.”10 Among the aims of this book is to explore new ways to approach authoritative texts that are transmitted in a non-authoritative manner.11 If “authoritative” necessarily, in rabbinic and early Christian contexts, connotes “men,” and if women are, by implication, “non-authoritative,” I intend to probe how we, as scholars, should approach the transmission of such texts and traditions to and by women. That is, how do the rabbinic and early Christian corpora shed light on women’s roles in the transmission of men’s texts, or of women’s voices transmitted through these texts? Questions of gender are implicit and embedded within the topic of “authority” scrutinized in this book. My contention is as follows: there were Jewish and Christian women who heard or read or copied or recited or commissioned texts in antiquity, and these women thus played a part in the transmission of these texts even when they were not the intended audiences of these texts, and even when their role in the process was actively written out of our texts. Transmission, in this case, can be understood as decoupled from authority, or perhaps presenting an alternative form of authority that is usually not acknowledged within the ancient sources as such or is actively diminished. I am essentially making two arguments: one historical, the other methodological. My historical claim is that women in antiquity heard or read oral traditions and texts, and that some actively transmitted them; I am not arguing that all women heard or read texts (as not all men did, either), nor even that many did – only that some did, and that this “unintended audience” contributed, in however modest a way, to the transmission of these oral and written compositions. Their overwhelming absence from our texts and scholarly discussions might be explained not only because of how few such women there were, but also because of the challenge a female transmitter posed to the male authority, authorship, and transmission of the texts. In other words, women were part of a system that wrote them out. I am reminded here of Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre’s piece about her students’ surprise when they consider the possibility that “Wo/men were there,” as though we assume, because our texts exclude women, that women were not present in antiquity: “What is it about our everyday narrative of the past that (still) leads to

180  Sarit Kattan Gribetz matter-of-fact denials of something obvious?”12 The idea that some Jewish and Christian women encountered texts and traditions that most directly address men seems quite self-evident to me, but nonetheless important to support with literary, documentary, and material evidence, as I do below. Johnson-DeBaufre’s essay is devoted to the question of what to do with women we know were present (“materially visible”) as audience members but whose presence is discursively invisible within our texts. She writes: How do we read the silences and biases of the text? Were there no wo/men present because no wo/men are mentioned? Does the lack of attention to (or interest in) wo/men indicate that wo/men are ‘virtually’ not present? What is ‘virtual non-presence’? Or are these silences largely by chance and bereft of any real value for historical reconstruction?13 My methodological aim is to consider “audience” as part of the process of transmission, and to disturb the idea of authority and transmission as monolithic.14 Transmission by its definition includes at least two parties, the transmitter (the author, copyist, reciter) and the recipient (the audience). Both roles are essential. A text or tradition needs to be accepted by an audience for the transmission to proceed. In this framework, then, texts are transmitted not only by authors, scribes, copyists, and reciters, but also by their audiences; or, if we challenge the binary of transmitter/recipient more generally, we might conceptualize the process of transmission as a process of continual or repeated reception. Put differently: where does the audience – intended and unintended, expected and unexpected, literate and illiterate – fit within the process of transmission, and what light does focusing on audience shed on the question of whether transmission is primarily (or actually) a function of authority? I argue that consumption of texts (the work of the audience) is part of their transmission (typically understood only as the work of the author/copyist/transmitter). Pierre Bourdieu reminds us that “the relationship between a creative artist and his work, and therefore his work itself, is affected by the system of social relations within which creation as an act of communication takes place.”15 Bourdieu refers to an artist’s expected audience, whom the artist has in mind during the creation of his art. In a piece on the function of the written word in Roman religion, Mary Beard argues that “Public writing cannot control its readership,” and that we ought to take into consideration texts’ unintended audiences as well. Some forms of writing, Beard demonstrates, played a large role in the experience of religion and religious power even for those who were illiterate: Writing is necessarily connected with power. At the same time as it opens up new intellectual possibilities, new ways of representing human . . . experience, it raises the problem of closure and control: who has the right to determine or interpret those written representations . . . Even for those who were completely illiterate, the existence of a written tradition – written representations

Consuming texts 181 of the religious ‘system’, its rules and rituals – determined the nature of their religious experience and their perception of religious power.16 Extending Bourdieu and Beard, I examine how texts and traditions can communicate with and be formed by whoever comes into contact with it, and the ways in which even unintended or illiterate audiences respond to and shape how a written source might be transmitted – its public presence, its performative function, and its aesthetic dimension (to name but a few). With these historical and methodological dimensions in mind, I consider what difference it makes for our interpretation of texts and our understanding of their reception to make space for women – in addition to men – as readers or hearers of ancient texts and thus as participants in the process of transmission.17 I anchor my analysis in a comparison between rabbinic and patristic texts/ women because there are important distinctions between the rabbinic and patristic corpora that are worth highlighting and exploring in a study of ancient transmission. Rabbinic and patristic texts were transmitted differently in this period, and therefore the possibilities for women in the transmission process differ as well. Rabbinic compositions were largely oral in Late Antiquity, and their transmission was thus oral as well.18 That means that those who “received” these compositions and transmitted them did so orally (and that low literacy rates matter little in this case, while places of recitation and teaching become centrally important), though we will also encounter written texts, especially biblical ones, that figure prominently into the process of transmission.19 Christian texts, on the other hand, were for the most part written, especially from the second century on, and so the possibilities of accessing them were different – first, in written form, and second, in oral form (for example when a text was read aloud).20 Below, I analyze the locus classicus for the rabbinic ban on teaching and transmitting Torah to women, embedded within the Mishnah’s discussion of adultery and the soṭah ritual, in which a woman physically consumes a text in order to condemn or vindicate her body. Next, I discuss other sources that disclose women’s roles in the process of the transmission of rabbinic texts or traditions, especially in the context of food preparation and consumption. Finally, I turn to late antique sources that characterize ascetic women in early Christian communities as voracious readers, consuming books, especially biblical texts, instead of partaking of food and sexual pleasure. The embodied – and culinary – dimension of rabbinic and Christian women’s consumption and transmission of texts and traditions is thus central to my argument. Women’s access to, and the permissibility of their reception and transmission of texts and traditions are, in all these sources, intimately entwined with the regulation of their bodies and with discourses about care for their bodies – especially the care women ought to take not to violate their bodies or to keep their bodies from being violated by others. I thus thematize the notion of “consuming texts” in its embodied as well as its figurative dimensions in my reading of the sources. I argue that putting these motifs into conversation with one another and investigating the varied ways in which Jewish and Christian

182  Sarit Kattan Gribetz women consumed and transmitted ancient texts and traditions allows us more fully to understand the role and agency of audience in the process of transmission, and then to theorize transmission through potentially non-authoritative channels.

Rabbinic texts and traditions The soṭah ritual, the transmission of Torah, and the consumption of biblical texts Mishnah Soṭah details the rabbinic interpretation of Numbers 5, the biblical pericope about a woman suspected of adultery (a soṭah). The tractate elaborates upon the many steps of this trial process, including a peculiar ritual, mentioned in Numbers 5:23–24, in which the biblical curses against a woman suspected of adultery are written on a scroll that is then washed with the ‘bitter water’ that she must drink.21 A note is made in the rabbinic text that guilty women who nonetheless have previously acquired merit will automatically have their punishment suspended even after drinking the bitter water. This statement about the role of merit in altering the results of the soṭah ritual becomes the starting point for a debate within the Mishnah about what “merit” is and how a woman can obtain it. According to one rabbi, it is a father’s responsibility to teach his daughter Torah because the merit of this Torah study will, if she is later suspected and accused of adultery, counterbalance the drinking of the bitter waters. The passage reads as follows: “Ben Azzai says: A man is obligated to teach his daughter Torah, so that if she must drink [the bitter water], she will know that the merit [from such study] will suspend [her punishment].”22 The first half of Ben Azzai’s statement makes a bold claim: a father must teach his daughter Torah. Because the subject of study is not specified and is followed by a statement about the soṭah ritual, however, it is not clear what Ben Azzai means in his declaration that a father is obligated to teach his daughter Torah. Read in isolation, the passage in the Mishnah might reasonably be interpreted to mean that a father must teach his daughter all (or any part) of Torah, and that such study protects the daughter both from future bodily misconduct and from bodily punishment.23 Whereas the obligation of a father to teach his sons the Torah, in its most expansive sense, becomes an overarching theme throughout Tannaitic sources (and even more so in later sources) associated with piety and devotion to the divine, here we have the only rabbinic instance of an obligation of a father to teach his daughters, and the transmission is embedded in a discussion of adulterous practice and sexual relations deemed improper by male authorities. In the Mishnah, the effects of Torah study for the daughter seem to be limited to mitigating a guilty verdict.24 Even so, Ben Azzai’s statement about this obligation of a father to teach Torah to his daughter does not go unchallenged in the Mishnah. In the line that follows it, R. Eliezer counters with the declaration that “Whoever teaches his daughter Torah teaches her obscenity.”25 R. Eliezer argues, in contrast to Ben Azzai, that teaching a daughter Torah does not accrue merit but, instead, teaches her

Consuming texts  183 improper behavior – specifically behavior that implies sexual misconduct. Thus, two opinions are placed alongside one another: one demands and one bans transmission of this portion (or of the entire Torah?) to women. We can sense in this rabbinic disagreement that women’s roles in the study and transmission of Torah was a live question about which rabbinic authorities actively debated. What begins as a discussion about a ritual in which an accused woman drinks bitter textualized water becomes a debate about whether or not Torah can be transmitted to any woman. The irony in the passage is that the debate over whether a woman can study (this section of ) Torah is couched within a description of the accused woman consuming – literally – the text through the bitter water prepared for the soṭah ritual. An individualized scroll detailing the biblical curses against an adulterous woman was produced for her (and, according to the rabbinic text, cannot be used by another accused woman if she refuses to drink the water). Whether or not she has been taught the text, and whether or not the merit of such study might delay the dramatic bodily demise that the ritual promises its guilty adulteresses, she must physically, ritually, consume it. This transmission is not merely intellectual or pedagogical, but physical as well; when accused, a woman eats or drinks the text. The matter of whether she can, or should, study the text is a one of rabbinic dispute, but her consumption of it is not. In other words – a woman accused of adultery must participate in an embodied transmission of a text she is otherwise prohibited from studying or consuming, via the drinking of the bitter waters. Again, then, we return to the role of the recipient of a text in the process of transmission. The soṭah pericope becomes most powerful and effective when it is transmitted to women, both as a text to be studied and, more literally, to be ritually consumed. Its transmission, in other words, is most fully realized when it is received by the suspected woman, for whom the text – the pericope itself as well as the customized scroll on which the pericope was reproduced for each individual woman – was composed. We ought not to eliminate the female recipients of this text in our account of its transmission. The transmission of the soṭah text by a woman Elsewhere in the Mishnah this very same biblical text is described as having been transmitted by a woman. Among Mishnah Yoma’s list of temple benefactors is Queen Helene: “Helene, his [King Monobaz’s] mother, made a golden candelabrum at the entrance of the Sanctuary, and she also made a golden tablet on which the passage of soṭah was written.”26 According to this passage, Queen Helene of Adiabene donated a plaque of gold with the instructions for the soṭah ritual from Numbers 5 inscribed into it.27 Even if there is no historical validity to this passage (and, as Ishay Rosen-Zvi notes, nothing suggests that there is), the mishnaic passage describes a woman as the person who funded the inscription of a text about suspected adultery and facilitated its transmission to others who would have encountered it in the temple precinct, either as a warning not to act inappropriately, or as part of the ritual or a ritual manual for priests when such a case was

184  Sarit Kattan Gribetz brought to the temple for adjudication (the Mishnah does not specify where in the temple this tablet was displayed).28 To whom were the lines inscribed on the golden tablets addressed? In Mishnah Yoma, the audience is left unspecified, but t. Soṭah 2:1 explains that a priest would copy the list of curses enumerated on the golden tablet onto a scroll. Then, the priest would “come out and stand next to the soṭah, read, expound and specify all the details of the pericope, and would explain to her in any language she understands.”29 According to the Tosefta, then, Helene’s gift was made specifically to transmit the text first to priests, and then, via these priests, who serve as mediators, to other women who faced accusations of adultery. This monumental text inscribed on the golden tablet is copied onto an individual customized scroll that is then read and explained to – and eventually consumed by – a suspected woman. The rabbis thus portray Queen Helene as the ideal transmitter, and they imagine an accused woman to proceed through each stage of the reception process: a text is written for her, she hears it, she understands it, and then she literally ingests it. Food consumption and female transmission of rabbinic knowledge There is an additional connection between the literal textual consumption by women that we observed in the biblical and rabbinic soṭah ritual descriptions and another type of transmission of rabbinic traditions to women, also linked to consumption. Judith Hauptman has recently argued that Talmudic sources contain many more examples of women learning rabbinic halakhah and transmitting them to others than has previously been recognized.30 In the vignettes that Hauptman has collected, rabbinic traditions are mainly transmitted to women in household contexts, often but not exclusively in the kitchen, and often about matters related to food preparation – preparing dough31 and baking matzah,32 serving wine,33 preparing mustard seeds on the Sabbath,34 trimming vegetables for the post-Yom Kippur meal,35 eating before reciting the Friday evening Kiddush,36 reciting blessings before breaking bread,37 eating new crops,38 using an oven39 and keeping food warm on the Sabbath,40 setting the table and examining cups and bowls,41 using a utensil to keep an egg laid on a holiday from rolling away and breaking,42 determining which meat is permitted to eat,43 setting the eruv tavshilin (and whether one can eat lentils if one forgets to do so),44 and setting the eruv ḥatzerot.45 In each of these narratives, a woman (typically those in rabbinic families, and usually wives, sisters, or daughters of rabbis) challenges a rule, or offers modification or clarification based on practical experience. The rabbinic law that is ultimately transmitted in the rabbinic text has been altered to account for a woman’s intervention. (One wonders how many other rules about food preparation and consumption – about which there is no accompanying legal story – were likewise modified because of women’s feedback but are transmitted in the rabbinic texts solely in the name of a rabbinic sage rather than also in the name of the women in the household.) Hauptman’s argument revolves around space: such women “were taught established rules by their mothers and other family members, and new rules by their

Consuming texts  185 husbands, fathers, brothers and sons. Such learning was possible because halakhic discussions often took place at a rabbi’s home and around his table.”46 She writes elsewhere that until now we have conceptualized Torah learning itself, and the sites at which it took place, in very limited ways. When we broaden our understanding of where and how Torah learning took place, as noted above, it becomes extremely easy to bring women into the picture.47 What is striking for our discussion is that in these discrete narratives, women’s access to rabbinic Torah, as recipients and transmitters, takes place in the kitchen and happens through the preparation of food for consumption.48 These women are not physically consuming the text, as we saw in the soṭah ritual, but they gain access to rabbinic traditions and become its transmitters for the purpose of consumption.49 By enacting these laws in their daily lives – in their kitchens and dining spaces – women embody these traditions and through this embodiment they also act as transmitters of the traditions. These rabbinic discussions collected by Hauptman portray women as recipients of rabbinic rules, which then find their way into rabbinic sources, sometimes in altered form as a result of their mediation through women. Hauptman writes that women “occasionally tweaked the rules in order to accommodate them to real-life circumstances,”50 thus not only transmitting them but also altering them in the process of transmission (not due to authority, but practicality). I take for granted that all of these texts are preserved in a corpus written by and for men. Yet I find it important that a text so self-consciously masculine preserves moments in which a women’s voices function as active transmitters of traditions, disrupting a chain of transmission imagined to be constituted exclusively by men.51 Some rabbinic texts insist that women were excluded from the process of textual formation and transmission, and that they could not study Torah even as they were commanded to ingest it. Other passages, however, suggest that women who were part of rabbinic households and communities were often the recipients of rabbinic traditions and that, as inadvertent audiences of these traditions, they not only became unwitting consumers of it, but also transmitters of it – through the food they prepared and the revisions to rabbinic food laws that their embodied practices demanded.52

Christian texts and traditions Women as readers and transmitters of written texts Our evidence for women’s access to texts in Christian sources is far more abundant than what we find in rabbinic sources. Here, I review key examples of the various roles that Christian women played in all aspects of textual transmission, with special focus on their role as recipients of texts, before turning to the forms of textual consumption and transmission that are uniquely conceived by the sources in terms of food and eating.53 I am indebted to the work of Kim Haines-Eitzen,

186  Sarit Kattan Gribetz Roger Bagnall, Raffaella Cribiore, Maria Jesus Albarran Martinez, AnneMarie Luijendijk, Peter Brown, Derek Krueger, Harry Gamble, and others, upon whose research on early Christian women’s textual production and consumption I rely here as I put Christian sources into conversation with rabbinic texts.54 Writing and literacy itself is a spectrum, to which women had access in various ways.55 On one end of the spectrum were the wealthiest women, who commissioned texts as patrons and who had the resources to fund libraries and writing projects. A Roman widow named Paula endowed Jerome’s library in Bethlehem, and Melania the Elder funded Rufinus’s translations and the scholastic endeavors of the monastic community she founded outside of Jerusalem.56 These women, many of them scholars and readers in their own right, monetarily facilitated the transmission of texts through new editions, translations, and libraries; without their financial resources, texts could not be composed and copied. On the other hand, our evidence for women scribes, copyists, and calligraphers, much of which has been compiled by Haines-Eitzen, suggests that many were enslaved or freedwomen (this is true also for men who were copyists).57 Often, female scribes worked for other women.58 Other women served as elementary teachers (didaskalos) to children who needed to learn a skill (techne), such as shorthand writing, or as more advanced instructors (grammatike).59 Women – Christian as well as Jewish – also communicated by sending letters to family members and business associates,60 and some composed their own texts.61 In general, women’s importance in the process of textual transmission – as patrons, copyists, teachers, and letter-writers – has long been underestimated.62 Many women also read, and many sources make reference to women as readers and book-borrowers. In a note from Oxyrhynchus, a Christian woman requests that her friend send her the “Little Genesis” in exchange for Esdras.63 Jerome recounts that Pamphilus would lend books to men and women alike: “He would not only lend copies of Scriptures to read, but would give them most readily, and not only to men, but to women too if he saw that they were given to reading.”64 Palladius’s neighbor left a commentary on Amos for him after her death, and a Psalter was found buried beneath the head of a young girl in a fourth-fifth century tomb at Al Mudil, near Oxyrhynchus.65 Eusebius mentions a certain Juliana, who obtained “books by inheritance from Symmachus himself.”66 Women whose primary relationship to texts was through reading, especially Scripture and other religious works, were often those who had chosen an ascetic life, which allowed for time, context, and purpose for continued reading.67 Albarran Martinez posits that ascetic women primarily read Scripture, “morality writings” about virginity, and instruction manuals written by bishops with clear instructions for proper behavior.68 In the Martyrdom of Saints Agape, Irene, and Chione, “cabinets and chests” full of documents are discovered and the women are charged with “deliberately [keeping] . . . so many parchments, books, tablets, small codices and pages.”69 Athanasius’s On Virginity was written directly for ascetic women, and within the text the bishop encourages virgins to read Scripture constantly: Neither during the night, nor during the day, should the Word of God be absent from your mouth. Your occupation will be studying constantly the Sacred

Consuming texts 187 Scriptures. You must have a Psalter and you must learn the Psalms. When the sun appears above the horizon, it should be the book in your hands.70 Pelagius also directly addressed women in his letters about comportment.71 Both Melanias, the Elder and the Younger, are described as voracious readers; the former is said to have read “three million lines of Origen and two and a half million lines of more recent authors,” and the latter to have read the Old and New Testaments many times a year.72 Melania the Younger is said to have read and copied the Bible herself for use in her monasteries (the term used is kalligraphousa).73 In a sixth-century text, Caesaria the Younger also required her nuns to know how to write before they entered her monastery, and is described as requiring them to copy holy books while there; these ascetic women became copyists.74 In these last two examples, these women’s reading of Scripture was bound up in their practices of writing, but even those women who only read participated, I suggest, in the ongoing process of transmission and reception. Reading as eating While in rabbinic sources women are required to ingest waters in which texts have been dissolved as a way of policing their bodies, early Christian sources attempt to manage and discipline women’s bodies by encouraging them to read certain types of texts, usually Scripture. Haines-Eitzen has argued that ascetic women were encouraged to regard reading – the consumption of texts – as a substitute for the consumption of food and sexual pleasures: The association of women as readers and users of books in late ancient Christianity appears not coincidentally, I will argue, in ascetic contexts . . . the substitution of reading for eating was just one of the replacements alongside fasting, prayer, and silence.”75 Haines-Eitzen writes further: “The cumulative effect . . . illustrates . . . a new ideal and a new way in which to construct the female ascetic body – her absorbed in reading, free from distraction, celibate, and fasting.”76 Gerontius’s Life of Melania, for example, describes Melania’s reading practices with culinary metaphors: “And after she was satisfied with [reading canonical books and homilies], she would go through the Lives of the fathers as if she were eating dessert.”77 In the preface of Gregory of Nyssa’s Homilies on the Song of Songs, Gregory goes to great lengths to explain to Olympias that he has prepared the biblical text for her consumption; his commentary has transformed the text into digestible food, and he returns to this metaphor of text as food throughout the homilies.78 It is a woman, Olympias, who is the named recipient of Gregory of Nyssa’s meal, and it is expected that she pass that food along to those in her household. In his letter to Leata, Jerome lays out the appropriate education to prepare Leata’s infant daughter Paula for an ascetic life. Jerome emphasizes how, from infancy, Leata must simultaneously restrict her daughter’s diet while ensuring her constant exposure to the written word – first in the form of play blocks

188  Sarit Kattan Gribetz with letters engraved on them, and then in the form of reading books of Scripture.79 The older the girl grows, the more her diet may be restricted and the more she can be expected to read. Ambrose also employs this motif. He praises his sister Marcellina’s devotion to fasting and reading along with her rejection of food – the book in lieu of bread. He writes: For we are bidden to practice fasting, but only for single days; but you, multiplying nights and days, pass untold periods without food, and if ever requested to partake of some, and to lay aside your book a little while, you at once answer, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.” Your very meals consisted but of what food came to hand, so that fasting is to be preferred to eating what was repugnant; your drink is from the spring, your weeping and prayer combine, your sleep is on your book.80 Sophronius of Jerusalem, in his Life of Mary of Egypt, too, writes that, when the monk Zosimas inquires into Mary’s eating habits, Mary reveals that she barely eats at all – for forty-seven years, she has survived on only two loaves of bread and some wild desert plants.81 Because she overcame her culinary temptations and the hardships of the desert, she tells Zosimas that God’s word serves as her food and clothes: For in only thinking of those evils from which He rescued me, I receive as inexhaustible food the hope of my salvation, for I feed and cover myself with the word of God who governs the universe. For man shall not live by bread alone, and because they had no shelter, those who have removed the covering of sin have embraced the rock.82 Though she is illiterate and cannot access texts in the desert, she assures Zosimas that through her ascetic lifestyle she has received the word of God.83 In his study of the fifth-century Life of Syncletica, Derek Kreuger writes: at various points in the text, the author compares Syncletica’s teaching, as well as the teaching of Christ, to a sort of food. A strong dichotomy between the physical and the spiritual pervades the text, and extends to the entire discourse on food: the ascetic avoids physical food through rigorous fasting and hungers for spiritual food in holy instruction.84 The analogy extends, as Kreuger argues, to the materiality of the text itself, which is vividly imagined as food to be eaten. Not only does reading become a form of eating, but the act of writing or copying the text itself is imagined as a type of spiritual food preparation. Consider this passage in particular: “We have come [now] to write, storing up for ourselves food,” about which Kreuger remarks: the language of ‘storing up’ connects the author’s writing to technologies of food preservation – curing, pickling, or stockpiling in a granary. The writing

Consuming texts 189 then keeps the salvific and nourishing text for subsequent consumption. The food of the text is described as “sōtēriōdēs,” both “salvific” and “wholesome.” This nourishment that cures the soul remains edible through the ears when it is read aloud.85 Syncletica’s life ends when her body deteriorates from lack of food – her body itself becomes food for the devil, and eventually he “struck her speech organ, to cut off the spoken word, thinking that by this act he would starve of the divine words those who were with her.”86 One imagines that, rhetorically, this line functions also to emphasize to the text’s current readers that by reading this text about Syncletica’s life and words, women can continue to consume her wisdom; they are thus nourished by the text even after her death and in lieu of her words. The metaphor of consuming texts participates in a larger discourse in GrecoRoman antiquity that imagined books as food and reading as nourishment. As C. M. Chin has argued, for Theophrastus, the papyrus plant was, most importantly, food, and much like other plants, it was eaten – he describes the process through which the fruit of the papyrus plant was dried, pounded, and made into loaves.87 Only secondarily is papyrus also the stuff of books. About Theophrastus, Chin writes: “The book is an extended papyrus colony, but as such it is also liable to both human and animal consumption.”88 Something similar can be said about texts written on parchment – that is, on the skin of an animal, the rest of which might very well have been consumed as food.89 Collections of books were also imagined in culinary terms. Stephanie Frampton has written about Cicero, who imagines libraries as pantries, a metaphor in which books are not just generically food but a wide variety of different foods, and he speaks of an “appetite for reading.”90 Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, refers to his teachings (but not literally to books) in terms of milk and solid food, and Paul’s food metaphors become the subject of Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus.91 Origen, writing about “the rational food of these holy letters and words,” regards Scripture, or the words of Scripture, as food for the angels.92 Jerome imagines his own reading list as a grocery list, and remarks that consuming only certain types of texts (e.g., Scripture) is equivalent to depriving one’s body of a diverse and gourmet set of foods.93 These metaphors work best in relation to books and scrolls, which are written on edible substances, rather than texts carved into clay tablets or inscribed on stone slabs, which is perhaps why we encounter these ideas about consuming texts in settings in which texts were usually written on and read from papyrus and parchment, even as other forms of writing existed alongside them.94 Haines-Eitzen concludes her analysis of the consumption of texts by ascetic women by noting that “reading has become yet another means by which the body can be disciplined.”95 I would like to add an additional layer to the palimpsest that Haines-Eitzen so beautifully unpacks. There is a certain resonance between these Christian women who are encouraged to consume texts as an act of rejection of certain bodily acts and the soṭah, who consumes the text and the text consumes her in a ritual that is designed to reinforce appropriate sexual behavior.96 Ascetic Christian women are not portrayed as neglecting their bodies by depriving

190  Sarit Kattan Gribetz themselves of food, however. According to the sources we have, these women imagine what they are doing precisely as feeding and nourishing their bodies with books of Scripture and other texts – the books are the food that sustains them. Furthermore, these ascetic women are not only consuming texts instead of food and sex; they are also copying and transmitting texts instead of bearing and nourishing children (precisely in a context in which Greco-Roman paedeia and Christian formation of the soul itself was couched in terms of metaphors of lactation, food, nourishment, and sustenance, the subject of a recent study by John Penniman).97 In the soṭah passage, both in the biblical and rabbinic sources, the bitter waters into which the scriptural text has been dissolved makes its way into the innards of a woman, consuming her if she is guilty – and, if she is innocent and righteous (that is, if she has conducted her body according to accepted rabbinic norms), she is blessed with male progeny. In both sets of sources, then, the metaphor of consumption as textual transmission is central. Eating texts – whether literally or metaphorically – is presented as an extreme form of reception and one that is built upon the various ways that texts and traditions are transmitted to and by women.

Conclusions: every corpus has a corpus How do we make sense of the idea of textual consumption in Jewish and Christian antiquity, the place of gender within these particular discourses of consumption, and how authority is or is not embedded into these texts, their audiences, and their transmission? Denying access to texts, encouraging the reading of texts, and mandating the consumption of texts are three of the strategies we have encountered, all of which were used in some way to discipline women’s bodies, but also that allowed or denied them a part in the process of textual transmission. In our sources, women are linked in very bodily ways to the texts they receive, and those they do not. As we have seen, rabbinic texts mandate that Jewish women suspected of adultery imbibe the Torah through “bitter waters” that threaten to poison their bodies, while generally denying them scholastic access to Torah except as a form of bodily discipline. At the same time, rabbinic women were most likely to play an active role in the transmission of traditions related to food preparation and consumption. Ascetic Christian women consumed books, the text as dessert, to use Gerontius’s metaphor, while denying themselves food and other bodily pleasures. Conceived somewhat differently, in rabbinic literature women embody and transmit texts by literally producing food for themselves and others to consume. In the Christian sources examined above, women consume texts metaphorically by reading voraciously instead of consuming literal food. In the Christian ascetic literature, text replaces food, whereas in the rabbinic sources, food creates text.98 I have attempted to explore the relationship between transmitter and consumer, creator and audience, and in the process to reflect on the place that women might occupy in the textual and oral spheres of transmission and consumption of traditions that are often not considered their own. Our sources suggest that women were an integral part of the process of transmission of our texts but they are left out of the chains of transmission. This chapter is an attempt to make room for them at the table.

Consuming texts 191 I do not intend to draw such a stark contrast between the Jewish and Christian examples; no doubt we could find additional examples that complicate the dichotomy. In fact, the Christian readers we encountered in our analysis were mainly ascetic women – that is, they were women whose gender was continually contested because of the ascetic contexts they inhabited. Our sources masculinize ascetic women’s bodies, and women embody this masculinity through the ascetic practices they perform. What we end up with, then, is an ascetic woman’s body that is more masculine than feminine, and thus more receptive to texts. This makes a difference not only because it helps us understand the contexts in which women were authorized – allowed, encouraged – to read texts, but also because it tempers the difference we have observed between the Jewish and Christian notions of transmission to women. In both, women’s consumption of texts is regarded with suspicion; it is only when a woman’s body is masculinized (as is the case with Christian ascetics) that she becomes an ideal (male) reader. The rabbinic corpus, which does not generally promote asceticism, did not allow for the scenario in which transmission to women with masculinized bodies became acceptable and praiseworthy. Our sources argue vehemently that not all texts are compatible with all bodies – not every corpus fits with every corpus.99 One worry in the rabbinic and patristic texts is that female bodies might misbehave if they read, or if they read the wrong texts. It is for this reason that the sources we encountered above attempt to police sexuality through denying access to texts and traditions or through dictating specific reading practices. In all of these cases, the literary corpus is already mapped onto a particular type of male body, and women cannot easily gain access to that set of texts or traditions without transforming their own bodies. These women consume texts that are designed, by their male authors and authorities, to transform their bodies as they are transmitted to them. Gender is only one dimension of transmission, which is a process that is inherently intersectional. I have alluded throughout my chapter to the question of which women were privileged enough to hear, read, and transmit texts and traditions. In the rabbinic contexts, our sources suggest that women in rabbinic families (that is, particular types of economic, intellectual, and religious elites) were most likely to hear rabbinic traditions, and it is their interventions that are most likely to be included in subsequent transmissions of those traditions. But enslaved women or servants who worked alongside free rabbinic women, in the kitchen and elsewhere, could also have participated in this process, but they are buried even deeper beneath our texts and thus their voices and impact are even trickier to recover. In Christian contexts, enslaved women and freedwomen who worked as copyists and calligraphers played a large role in the transmission of texts, but it was wealthy and often extremely wealthy women, many of whom were ascetic, who read these and other texts. In addition to women, men of different classes, especially enslaved men, were marginalized, and their role – or their absence – in the process of textual transmission, as well as our sources’ silence about them, is important to bring into this conversation as well. It is only some men, and even fewer women, whose presence our textual traditions acknowledge and preserve.

192  Sarit Kattan Gribetz All this brings me back to the questions of authority, transmission, audience, and gender with which I began. If we define transmission as a process predicated on a relationship between a transmitter and a recipient, then we make room for some women to join in the process of transmission, both as active transmitters as well as consumers of texts and traditions. We also displace the notion of authority when we insist that a text or tradition’s authority rests, at some level, with those who choose (or happen) to receive or consume a text or tradition rather than solely with those who produce or transmit it. The process of transmission is still and always implicated in dimensions of authority, but in this narrative the sources of authority are competing and contested and always also gendered.

Notes 1 * Many thanks to A. J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney for the kind invitation to participate in the conference and book; M. Tong for helpful conversations about gender, authority, and transmission; AnneMarie Luijendijk for bibliographic suggestions; and Jonathan Gribetz, Eduard Iricinschi, and John Penniman for reading a draft. I shared a later version of this chapter at the University of Chicago Divinity School; I thank Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, Simeon Chavel, Marshall Cunningham, and Sun Bok Bae for the invitation, and Kelly Andino and Liane Marquis for insightful observations, many of which have been incorporated in the final version. m. Avot 1.1ff.; Tropper, “Jewish Historiography after the Bible.”; Schremer, “Avot Reconsidered.” 2 Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth. 3 The opening tractate of the Mishnah begins with the requirement to recite the Shema, a ritual closely linked (through Deut 6:7) to Torah study (m. Ber. 1.1). It is no surprise, in my opinion, that the Mishnah’s first narrative features Rabban Gamaliel’s sons forgetting to recite the Shema, the tension created when the younger generation does not follow the rabbinic laws made by the previous one, and a father’s revision of rabbinic halakhah to diffuse this intergenerational tension and facilitate the continued transmission of laws and rituals from father to sons. The entirety of the Mishnah, this story implies, is a generational transmission, one that is sensitive to the needs of revision and flexibility as it is received by subsequent generations of sons. 4 Sif. Zuṭa 6:6–7; Kahana, Sifre Zuṭa Devarim, 149, suggests that this interpretation is unique to Sifre Zuṭa, and is perhaps based on Deut 4:9, “make them known to your children and your children’s children” (vehodaʿtam levanekha velivne vanekha). Cf. Sif. Deut. 46; y. Ber. 3:3, 6b; b. Qidd. 29b- 30a. Sifre Deuteronomy also provides a different interpretation, positing that all students are the children of their teachers (Kahana, Sifre Zuta, 150). 5 E.g., m. Soṭah 3:4; Satlow, “ ‘Try to Be a Man’.”; Boyarin, Carnal Israel.; Alexander, “Women’s Exemption from Shema and Tefillin.” Beyond the rabbinic corpus, 4 Maccabees depicts the mother as the transmitter of the law to her children; Haber, “Living and Dying for the Law.” 6 Exceptional women like Perpetua or Thecla stand out, proving the rule. Though there is a recent trend of reclaiming women’s roles alongside those of the Church Fathers, e.g., Chin and Schroeder, Melania. 7 Williams, Bishop Lists.; Brooten, “ ‘Junia . . . Outstanding among the Apostles’,” 141– 4; Thorley, “Junia, a Woman Apostle.”; Epp, Junia; Peppard, “Household Names.” Some texts within the New Testament actively encourage women to keep silent and prohibit them from teaching, e.g. 1 Timothy 2:11–12, 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, while others presume women’s presence in the transmission of prophecy and teachings,

Consuming texts  193 e.g. 1 Cor 11:5. See also Tertullian, Virg. 9.2, which opposed women’s teaching. In the Gospel of Mary, on the other hand, Mary teaches the other disciples (e.g. BG 9:5–24; P. Oxy. 3525, 5–14; BG 10:1–9; Oxy. 3525, 14–18) and she becomes silent only when she has spoken all that she wishes to say and has finished teaching (BG 17:9; P. Ryl. 463 21:1–5); many thanks to Karen L. King for pointing me to these texts. On the role of women in the production and transmission of knowledge in early Christian communities, see most recently Tervahauta et al. (ed.), Women and Knowledge in Early Christianity; on the role of authority, including gendered authority, in discourses of knowledge, see Nasrallah, An Ecstasy of Folly. 8 Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, 80–1. 9 That transmission of texts and traditions is inherently a man’s enterprise in patriarchal societies should not be taken for granted; this was not the case, for example, in the transmission of Ḥadith, on which see Sayeed, Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam; Sayeed, “Gender and Legal Authority: An Examination of Early Juristic Opposition to Women’s Ḥadīth Transmission.”; Sayeed, “Women and Ḥadīth Transmission.” On women’s roles in the shaping and transmission of Qur’anic texts as well as approaching such sources critically, see as well Geissinger, “No, a Woman Did Not ‘Edit the Qur’an’.” Others have suggested that select biblical texts might have been authored by women but are assumed to have been composed by men (e.g., Song of Songs, Ruth, Micah, D), on which see Shemesh, “Directions in Jewish Feminist Bible Study, Gruber, “Women’s Voices.” 10 Watts, Hypatia, 93–106; Watts discusses other female philosophers, including Pandrosion of Alexandria, Sosipatra of Pergamum, Maximus of Ephesus’s wife, and Asclepigenia of Athens. Pandrosion and her students, for example, left no writings behind – she is known to us only because Pappus argued against her theorems in his Collectio. Interestingly, these women taught mainly men. Additional catalogues of ancient female philosophers are found in Ménage, Historia mulierum philosopharum.; Ménage, A History of Women Philosophers; Wider, “Women Philosophers in the Ancient Greek World.”; Pomeroy, Pythagorean Women, 1–18. 11 For the inverse process, see the chapter by Winrich Löhr in this book. 12 Johnson-DeBaufre, “ ‘Gazing Upon the Invisible’,” 74. 13 Johnson-DeBaufre, “ ‘Gazing Upon the Invisible’,” 77. 14 For another attempt to decouple authority and transmission, see the chapter  by Eva Mroczek in this book. 15 Bourdieu, “Intellectual Field and Creative Project,” 161–88. I thank Shuli Shinnar for pointing me to this piece. 16 Beard, “Writing and Religion,” 44, 58. See also Macdonald, “Literacy in an Oral Environment,” 49–118. 17 I conceive of these categories of “women” and “men” broadly and fluidly, acknowledging that, in the ancient world and its sources, as in our contemporary contexts, the categories of gender are cultural constructions that do not seamlessly map onto, nor account for, the diversity of human bodies and beings. 18 On rabbinic orality, see Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth; Alexander, Transmitting Mishnah; Sussman, “ ‘Oral Torah’ Means Exactly What It Says: The Impact of an Iota.”; Naeh, “The Art of Memory: Structures of Memory and Images of Texts in Rabbinic Literature.” 19 On literacy, see Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine. 20 Orality, though, was an important feature of textual transmission in early Christian communities as well, especially in liturgical settings; McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship, 65–110. Thanks to Ryan Bowley for related conversations. 21 On the practice of ingesting bits of texts and images, see Flood, “Bodies and Becoming,” 459–93, esp. 461–2. 22 m. Soṭah 3:4; translation my own.

194  Sarit Kattan Gribetz 23 The Babylonian Talmud, in contrast, interprets the phrase more narrowly to mean that a father must teach his daughter the biblical soṭah pericope, or even more minimally that he must convey to his daughter the fact that merit can suspend punishment. This Talmudic interpretation is an attempt to make sense of the second half of Ben Azzai’s statement, that the merit of Torah study specifically shields against the effects of drinking the bitter waters, as opposed to being meritorious in its own right. Boyarin explores the readings of this Mishnah by the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds in Carnal Israel, 172–80. 24 Elsewhere in rabbinic sources women are permitted to study and recite Torah. In t. Ber. 2:12, men and women with bodily discharges can still recite not only Torah, Prophets, and Writings, but also “repeated tradition” (mishnah), “exegetical tradition” (midrash), “halakhic tradition” (halakhah), and “homiletical tradition” (aggadah). As Jaffee demonstrates (Torah in the Mouth, 70), later iterations of this passage in other rabbinic compositions revise women’s ability to recite and repeat traditions altogether. The only potential instance when such repetition may be forbidden is in the case of a man impure because of seminal discharge, which R. Yosi is quick to revise. There are also examples of women writing in Tannaitic sources, e.g., m. Ketub. 5:1, in which a woman writes part of a marriage document, and m. Giṭ. 2:5, in which women are allowed to write their own writs of divorce. On the erasure of women in later strata of rabbinic texts, see Ilan, Mine and Yours are Hers, 74. 25 Jastrow uses the word “obscenity” instead of “frivolity” or “trivialness” because he reads the logic of R. Eliezer’s opinion as follows: “because the laws concerning sexual aberrations may excite her sensuality” (Jastrow, Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli, and Yerushalmi and Midrashic Literature, 1687). I use the term “lasciviousness” following Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 171. The debate about whether or not a father ought to teach his daughter is effaced in the Babylonian Talmud by eliminating the possibility that men might transmit Torah to women at all. The Babylonian Talmud glosses these contradictory lines with the following resolution: “Ravina said: It is certainly merit of [the study of] Torah [which causes the water to suspend its effect]; and when you argue that she is in the category of one who is not commanded and fulfills, [it can be answered] granted that women are not so commanded, still when they have their sons taught Scripture and Mishna and wait for their husbands until they return from the Schools, should they not share [the merit] with them?”(b. Soṭah 21a; trans. Soncino). 26 m. Yoma 3:10, cf. b. Yoma 37b and t. Yoma 82; discussed in Rosen-Zvi, The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual, 158. 27 Importantly, the woman behind the benefaction is a queen, an official imperial representative of authority. She is defined relationally as a mother to a son (either inverting the paradigm of a father teaching his daughter that we saw previously, or perhaps emphasizing her status as a mother of a son). When read in the context of Augustus’s Lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis, this passage presents Helene as the transmitter of biblical/rabbinic policies that complement contemporaneous Roman policies also aimed at controlling bodies. On the discourse of adultery in Roman society, see Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome, especially 1–62; Grubbs, Women and the Law in the Roman Empire, especially 83–7. 28 From our perspective, of course, this is a text transmitted by men about a woman transmitting a text. Satlow might be inclined to read this text as addressed to men, who would indirectly communicate such ideas and fears to the women in their families and social circles; see e.g., Satlow, “ ‘Texts of Terror’.” The list of monumental donations is followed in the Mishnah by a second list of those who chose to keep their advantages to themselves rather than generously donating their resources and abilities to the temple; the unifying theme in this second list is the refusal to transmit expert knowledge (in baking, preparing incense, singing, and calligraphy) to others. On reading this passage as a product of rabbinic cultural production, see Rosen-Zvi, The Mishnaic

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29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46

47

48

49

Sotah Ritual, 158–9; for other approaches, see Ilan, Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine, 137; Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis, 27; Peskowitz, Spinning Fantasies, 134–9. On which see Rosen-Zvi, The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual, 159–60. Hauptman, “The Talmud’s Women in Law and Narrative.”; Hauptman, “A New View of Women and Torah Study in the Talmudic Period.” y. Ḥal. 1:5–6, 57d. b. Pesaḥ. 40a-b, 42a, 48b. b. Ketub. 61a, 65a. b. Shab. 140a. b. Shab. 114b. b. Pesaḥ 106b. b. Ber. 39b. b. Menaḥ. 68b. y. Betz. 4:5, 62c and b. Betz. 32b. y. Shab. 4:1, 6d. y. Shab. 1:3, 3b and b. Shab. 12b. y. Shab. 13:6, 14d and y. Betz. 5:1, 62d. b. Ḥul. 44b. y. Betz 2:1, 61b. t. Eruv. 2:11, b. Eruv. 80a. Women’s association with food extends far beyond rabbinic sources, on which see Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; Bell, Holy Anorexia. In rabbinic sources, women are also portrayed as transmitting traditions beyond those related to consumption; see e.g., t. Kelim Baba Qamma 4:17. Hauptman, “The Talmud’s Women in Law and Narrative,” 30. Elsewhere, Hauptman writes: “The significance of the ‘portable’ bet midrash for women is enormous. It means that they did not have to go to the study house: it came to them. Women living in rabbinic families could overhear Torah discussions taking place in their own homes, and even participate in them on occasion. I am not suggesting that women were fullfledged students as were men, but that they were able to catch Torah ‘on the fly.’ This is still Torah study, even if it is less sustained, less systematic, and, of course, less extensive. But this is not all. The anecdotes portray conversations between husbands and wives and fathers and daughters in which a man, presumably at home, relates to a woman the new laws emerging from the study house” (“A New View of Women and Torah Study,” 251). On space and domesticity in the Roman context, see Milnor, Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus. Hauptman, “A New View of Women and Torah Study,” 251. Another venue for women’s reception of Torah (the reading of scripture, the recitation of targum, and the delivery of rabbinic traditions through sermons and homilies) would have been the synagogue. Lev. Rab. 9:9 / y. Soṭah 1:4 tells of a woman who returns home late after hearing a rabbi’s sermon at the synagogue on Friday night. Her husband is displeased with her behavior – suspecting, as I interpret the narrative, that she might have had a sexual relationship with the rabbi, which is also told to strengthen the connection between women studying rabbinic Torah and adultery. Archaeological and textual evidence suggests that women were regular attendees at the synagogue, and that they even held positions of leadership; Spigel, Ancient Synagogue Seating Capacities; Brooten, “Female Leadership in the Ancient Synagogue,” 215–23. t. Soṭah 5:9 parallels men’s attitudes to food and women: “Meir used to say: as there are attitudes to food, so there are attitudes to women. One man, when a fly passes over his cup, does not drink the cup. This is a bad fate for women, for he contemplates divorcing his wife” (discussed in Rosen-Zvi, The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual, 27). According to Hauptman, these rabbinic traditions about proper food preparation were subsequently passed down from mothers to daughters.

196  Sarit Kattan Gribetz 50 Hauptman, “The Talmud’s Women in Law and Narrative,” 33. 51 Hauptman, “The Talmud’s Women in Law and Narrative,” 33. See also b. Baba Metzia 59b, in which Imma Shalom cites a tradition from her paternal grandfather’s house, and b. Berakhot 31a, in which Hannah is seen as a model for efficacious prayers, through whom traditions about prayer have been transmitted. Thanks to Sheldon Kimmel for pointing me to these two texts. 52 Rabbinic sources portray Beruriah, characterized as an erudite woman with a mastery of scripture and rabbinic teachings, as an oral transmitter of rabbinic traditions (t. Kelim Baba Metzia 1:6, b. Eruv. 53b, b. Ber.10a). In a series of dialogues with rabbinic figures, she offers better interpretations of the biblical and rabbinic traditions that are then transmitted within the rabbinic texts. In b. Eruv. 53b, Beruriah mocks a rabbinic student for his inability to memorize rabbinic traditions, insisting that he would remember such traditions had he embodied them, rather than through tedious repetition (“If it is fixed in your 248 limbs, then it will be secure [in your memory]!”). The implication is that she herself has embodied them, perhaps through pedagogical practices of memory, on which see Yates, The Art of Memory, 17–92. In the same text, she kicks a traveling rabbi when he wastes words in dialogue with her, again upsetting rabbinic norms of authority by presenting Beruriah as a learned disciple and transmitter of a man’s tradition meant specifically to exclude and silence her. The encounter undermines the assumptions behind m. Avot 1:5 (“do not speak too much with a woman – it brings evil upon himself, wastes [time that could be devoted to] the study of Torah, and his end will be [that he] inherits Gehinnom”). These narratives are best read as a dissonant voice in the rabbinic tradition, rather than as a description of actual events, and therefore important examples of the way in which women occasionally appear in rabbinic sources to disrupt the exclusively male chain of transmission, on which see Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 181–96. The story also resonates with a passage from the Apothegmata Patrum, in which a desert mother rebukes her male counterpart for avoiding her and her companions on the road, rather than overlooking their gendered identities, as the women sought to transcend gender through ascetic practice, discussed in Krawiec, Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery, 123. We might also compare Beruriah with Melania the Elder, both elite women who are portrayed as transmitters of traditions and texts, orally in the case of Beruriah and through copying books and commissioning libraries in the case of Melania. In the Sasanian text Mādayān ī Hazār Dādestān (57.3–12), a similar narrative appears about a woman who intervenes in a discussion of law outside a courthouse and whose opinion is transmitted in the text through a narrative about her intervention, on which see Rose, “Three Queens, Two Wives, and a Goddess,” 29–54; Schick, “A Re-examination of the Bavli’s Beruriah Narratives in Light of Middle Persian Literature.” On the Beruriah stories, see also Goodblatt, “The Beruriah Traditions,” 68–85; Ilan, “The Quest for the Historical Beruriah, Rachel, and Imma Shalom.” Rashi’s commentary on b. Avod. Zar. 18b, retells a medieval narrative about Beruriah related to the soṭah. In the narrative, Beruriah mocks the rabbinic idea that “women are simple-minded.” To prove the veracity of rabbinic wisdom about women, her husband asks his rabbinic student to seduce her, and she eventually commits adultery and, subsequently, commits suicide. The moral of the medieval story is that Beruriah’s study of Torah led her to lasciviousness (literally to adultery); she becomes embodied proof not of having Torah “fixed in your 248 limbs” and not of Rabbi Azzai’s assertion about the “merit of Torah study,” but of Rabbi Eliezer’s warning that “whoever teaches his daughter Torah teaches her obscenity” – an embodiment of the dangers of women with access to rabbinic traditions and their inclusion within the process of transmission. We therefore come full circle in this later iteration of a rabbinic narrative about a woman transmitter: she has consumed rabbinic traditions in the wrong way, and she kills herself in lieu of a ritual in which she would have ingested the scroll of curses dissolved in bitter waters that would have

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53 54

55 56

57 58 59 60

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led to her body’s demise. The narrative is discussed in Rubenstein, Rabbinic Stories, 151; Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 181–96; Adler, “The Virgin in the Brothel and Other Anomalies,” 28–32, 102–5. Some women in the medieval period played an important role in the production and consumption of books, as readers and copyists, on which see Riegler and Baskin, “ ‘May the Writer be Strong’.” These women’s social profile fits with that of Beruriah: they were elite women who learned the art of copying texts from their fathers, brothers, and husbands (who were also scribes), who were exceptional in their mastery of Hebrew, and who contributed to the family business (10–11, 23). Another woman who expresses interest in studying biblical texts and their rabbinic interpretations within rabbinic narratives is Matrona, on which see Ilan, “Matrona and Rabbi Jose.” I discuss the implications of women readers on our own interpretations of early Christian texts in “Women as Readers of the Nag Hammadi Codices”. Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of the Letters; Haines-Eitzen, The Gendered Palimpsest; Bagnall and Cribiore, Women’s Letters from Ancient Egypt; Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind; Albarran Martinez, “Women Reading Books in Egyptian Monastic Circles, 199–212; Luijendijk, “ ‘Twenty Thousand Nuns’,” 57–65; Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 273–88; Kreuger, Writing and Holiness; Gamble, Books and Readers; Cohick and Hughes, Christian Women in the Patristic World. Bagnall, Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East; Mayer, “Female Participation and the Late Fourth-Century Preacher’s Audience.” On the role of women as book and library patrons, see Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 273–88. Earlier Roman women were instrumental in funding libraries as well: Augustus’s sister Octavia dedicated a library to her son Marcellus, as did Flavia Melitine in the Sanctuary of Asclepius at Pergamum, in Houston, Inside Roman Libraries, 4, 208. Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of the Letters, 21–52. Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of the Letters, 45. Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, 78–83. Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, 74–101; Bagnall and Cribiore, Women’s Letters from Ancient Egypt; Mayer, “The Ins and Outs of the Chrysostom Letter-Collection,” 138. Cribiore and Bagnall’s studies of papyrological sources from Egypt confirm that a wide range of women knew how to write with varying degrees of fluency, albeit at rates lower than that of men. Some Jewish women also composed letters, on which see Mishor, “Papyrus Oxford e.120.” There are also artistic depictions of women reading and writing scrolls and tablets from Carthage, Rome, and elsewhere, on which see Marrou, ΜΟΥΣΙΚΟΣ ΑΝΗΡ, 62 no. 52 and 75–7 no. 71 (plate 3), discussed in Houston, Inside Roman Libraries, 198–9, 203; and, on ancient Greece, Glazebrook, “Reading Women,” 1–46. Consider the old woman in the Shepherd of Hermas, who appears with a book in her hand and is portrayed as a heavenly figure of authority (1.2–4). There were some women in antiquity who authored their own texts (e.g.,  Sappho, Hypatia), and among them a few early Christian writers as well – e.g., Perpetua. Esther and Judith are described as sending epistles (this reveals that the authors of these text could imagine women writing or dictating epistles). See also Burrus and Conti, The Life of Saint Helia, 41–2. In the Hypomnestikon (122 [167a]), an anonymous translation is discovered at Jericho, “in bronze jars with no translator’s name inscribed.” The text goes on to explain that “they say it was translated by a woman, since the jars were found in the house of a woman who was a student of the sacred literature.” Here, an anonymous text is attributed to a woman scholar. There are two points worthy of note: on the one hand, the author can imagine that a translation was prepared by a woman and attributes this mysterious text to one; on the other hand, the translation itself is not labeled, and indeed it is the only text in the collection discussed by the Hypomnestikon without an author, perhaps signaling that women who did compose texts left

198  Sarit Kattan Gribetz them unattributed or wrote in a man’s name. The deliberate anonymity of the author is historically and rhetorically significant in light of its attribution to a female textual producer. Text and translation in Grant and Menzies, Joseph’s Bible Notes (Hypomnestikon), 248–51. Thanks to Eva Mroczek for bringing this text to my attention. 62 Haines-Eitzen writes: “In omitting female scribes from the discussions of the transmission of ancient literature, scholars, on one level, simply replicate their disinterest in scribes more generally; if scribes are ‘mere copyists’ they hardly deserve extensive treatment . . . there is an additional facet to the scholarly neglect of female scribes; the lack of an awareness of the extent to which there is evidence of female scribes has resulted in misunderstandings of the ancient literary references to female scribes . . . it has obscured the role that women played in the production, transmission, and dissemination of literature and has erased their presence from the historical record” (41). She recalls Eusebius’s description of Origen’s crew of shorthand writers, copyists, and young women calligraphers. Eusebius does not indicate surprise about Origen’s female team members, implying that the practice was standard, even long after Origen himself employed these women, while Jerome drops the mention of the “young women trained in calligraphy” (42). Felice Lifshitz explores the consequence of women copying and amending texts in an early medieval context in Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia, 193–206. Women also served as scribes in ancient Mesopotamia, though they are also often overlooked in contemporary scholarship, on which see Meier, “Women and Communication in the Ancient Near East.” 63 P.Oxy. 4365; Luijendijk, Greetings to the Lord, 72. On Manichaean women’s reading and lending books, see Iricinschi, “Tam pretiosi codices uestri,” 155, 159. 64 Gamble, Books and Readers, 158. 65 Albarran Martinez, “Women Reading Books,” 201–2; on the reliability of the archaeological records, see Gawdat Gabra, Der Psalter im oxyrhynchitischen (mesokemischen/ mittelägyptischen) Dialekt (Heidelberg: Heidelberger Orientverlag, 1995), 23–6; idem, “ ‘New’ Discoveries of Coptic Monuments: Problems of their Preservation and Publication,” in Coptic Studies on the Threshold of a New Millennium: Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Coptic Studies (ed. Mat Immerzeel and Jacques van der Vliet; Leiden: Peeters, 2004), 1070–1071. 66 Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 7.17. 67 Luijendijk, “ ‘Twenty Thousand Nuns,’ ” 57–65; Albarran Martinez, “Women Reading Books,” 199–212. At a certain point, ascetic women became the primary “audience” of certain texts and those texts were directly addressed to, or even written for, them. For example, Karl Shuve argues that the Song of Songs played an especially important role for ascetic women in the writings of Ambrose and Jerome in The Song of Songs and the Fashioning of Identity in Early Latin Christianity. Other texts were also addressed to women, e.g., Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora (Epiphanius, Panarion 33.3–7). 68 E.g., Tertullian’s De virginibus velandis, De Exhortatione Castitatis and De Cultu Feminarum, Cyprian’s De habitu virginum, Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus; discussed in Albarran Martinez, “Women Reading Books,” 199–212. 69 “The Martyrdom of Saints Agape, Irene, and Chione,” 4.2–5.1, discussed in Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church, 148. 70 Athanasius, On Virginity 12. 10–17, cited in Albarran Martinez, “Women Reading Books,” 201. Ascetic women read texts by authors such as Origen, Gregory, Stephen, Pierius, and Basil, and warnings to steer clear of apocryphal and heretical writings suggests that they were drawn to read those as well. On guidelines for what to read and what to skip, see Haines-Eitzen, The Gendered Palimpsest, 44–7. 71 E.g., Proba, Juliana, and Demetrias, addressed by Augustine, Jerome, and Pelagius, about which see Wilkinson, Women and Modesty in Late Antiquity. 72 Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 274–5. Aurelia Ptolemais, a third century woman from Oxyrhynchus, also owned a number of books: Homer’s Illiad, Iulius Africanus’s

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73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83

84

Kestoi, and the Sikyonika. George Houston argues that this woman’s collection was quite diverse  – “we find prose and poetry, three different genres (epic, history, and literary criticism), classics and less well-known works, ancient and recent authors” – and Bagnall has suggested that the woman who owned these books could not only read them but was also adept at writing on her own. Bagnall, “An Owner of Literary Papyri,” 137–40; Houston, Inside Roman Libraries, 158. Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters, 49. This is a relatively late text for our discussion here, found in Vita Caesarius I.58, from Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters, 49. Haines-Eitzen, The Gendered Palimpsest, 40. Haines-Eitzen, The Gendered Palimpsest, 50. Gerontius, Life of Melania 23, perhaps an allusion to Rev 10:9–11 and Ezek 3:1–3; cited in Haines-Eitzen, The Gendered Palimpsest, 39, from Clark, The Life of Melania the Younger. Reading and praying are paralleled with fasting in the Life of Eupraxia as well. Macrina is described going about her day – eating and resting and so on – with a Psalter as her “traveling companion” (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 3; discussed in Haines-Eitzen, The Gendered Palimpsest, 48). There is an earlier association between female asceticism and the consumption of texts over food found in Philo of Alexandria’s On the Contemplative Life or Suppliants, III.25 [475]; IV.35 [476]; IX.73 [483]; X.75 [483]. At the elaborate banquet, water and simple bread are served, but what is truly ingested is Torah rather than food or drink. The entree, so to speak, is not food but words. The juxtaposition between the oral recitation of biblical texts, on the one hand, and eating, on the other, is extremely vivid and is performed through a ritual meal or symposium. The trope of readings as eating is widespread in Medieval texts about asceticism as well. According to Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, “Ida of Louvain (d. 1300?) supposedly tasted the Word as flesh on her tongue whenever she recited ‘Verbum caro factum est’ (John 1:14). In contrast to early Medieval monastic texts, which frequently speak of reading and meditating as chewing on the word of God but lay no claim to a physical experience, Ida’s biographer tells us that the Word she chewed was like honey, ‘not a phantasm but like any other kind of food’ ” (67), and “she received the ‘food of spiritual reading’ into her stomach, felt the eucharist slip down her throat like a fish, said to the other nuns before communion ‘Let us go devour God’ ” (116). Norris, Jr., Gregory of Nyssa, discussed in Penniman, Raised on Christian Milk. Jerome, letter 107, Ad Laetam. “De virginibus” Ambrose, De Virginibus, 3.15. Translation NPNF. Kouli, “Life of St. Mary of Egypt,” 85. Kouli, “Life of St. Mary of Egypt,” 87. The juxtaposition of eating and reading is not exclusively applied to women in Sophronius’s text. Earlier in the narrative, the monks are described as “receiv[ing] the Godinspired sayings [Scripture] as their inexhaustible food, while they nourished the body with only the utmost necessities, that is, bread and water” (Kouli, “Life of St. Mary,” 73). Yet, even in this text, Zosimas and the other monks’ eating habits are portrayed as moderate, whereas Mary’s ascetic practice is far more extreme. Brown, The Body and Society, 269 writes of women ascetics: “Deprived of the clear boundary of the desert, their energies less drained by hard physical labor and unable to expose themselves far from their place of residence for fear of sexual violence, virgins frequently defined themselves as separate from the world through an exceptionally rigid control of their diet. Women ascetics were famous for their ability to endure preternaturally long fasts. Nuns in a great monastery in Egypt were believed to have grown up not knowing what an apple looked like: the male equivalent of such stories would have been ignorance of the existence of women or of gold coins.” Kreuger, Writing and Holiness, 143.

200  Sarit Kattan Gribetz 85 Life of Syncletica 3, cited in Kreuger, Writing and Holiness, 145. 86 Castelli, “Pseudo-Athanasius,” 309. 87 Theophrastus, Historia Plantarum 4.8, the topic of Chin, “Papyrus Beyond Writing.” see also Wöhrle, “Papyrophagie,” 243–7. 88 Chin, “Papyrus Beyond Writing.” 89 According to later Jewish sources, Torah scrolls, tefillin, and mezuzot must be made from the skins of kosher animals (e.g., Mishna Berurah 43b) – that is, from the skin of animals that may be eaten. Rabbinic sources divide parchment into three categories (hippa, diftera, and matza), which are each treated with different ingredients (salt; salt, flour, and other vegetable substances; and untreated, respectively); Avrin, Scribes, Script, and Books, 112–13; Haran, “Book-Scrolls at the Beginning of the Second Temple Period.” Avrin also writes, about later periods, that “The source of parchment at any given time and place in Europe depended on the local population’s meat-eating habits. It is believed that goatskin was a major source until the tenth century (and continued to be in later centuries around Bologna), and that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries sheep provided skins for most of Europe’s parchment” (213). In these contexts, human consumption of animal meat directly impacted the type and quality of parchment used to make books, again linking eating and textual production. 90 Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum 7, on the library of Lucullus; Frampton, “What to Do with Books in the De finibus,” esp. 140. Cf. Ovid, Tristia 3.14.37–38, also discussed by Frampton. 91 Corinthians 3:2. 92 Origen, Hom. Jos. 20 and Philoc. 12.1.31–34, discussed in Chin, “Who is the Ascetic Exegete?,” 203–18, esp. 212–16. 93 Williams, The Monk and the Book, 50–61. About Jerome’s Ep. 22:30, Williams writes: “Jerome frequently links biblical study to fasting as forms of self-mortification. Here he confides that the most difficult habit to renounce, besides reading secular literature, was eating delicate food. Although as a hermit he fasted, he nevertheless went on reading Cicero. By implication, the effect of biblical study on a cultivated literary sensibility equated with the effect of fasting on a body previously accustomed to a rich diet” (55). In letter 29, Jerome writes to Marcella that the Hebrew sources are “no soft foods – savoring of pastry, prepared according to Apicius – and without any fragrance of the learned men of this temporal world,” about which Williams comments that “the reference to Apicius, the famous Roman cookbook writer, evokes literary as well as material gastronomy. The vivid culinary metaphor, thus enriched, allows Jerome to represent classical learning as an almost physical indulgence” (61). 94 The consumption of texts is a phenomenon not limited to Greco-Roman antiquity. There are a number of Chinese texts that prescribe the oral ingestion of a series of symbols; Espesset, “A Case Study on the Evolution of Chinese Religious Symbols from Talismanic Paraphernalia to Taoist Liturgy.” One of the manuals analyzed by Espesset instructs: “Place the symbols to absorb in the middle of the mouth, press the tongue against the palate, raise the face and look to the East; inhale green pneuma through the nose and keep it in the mouth. Next, raise the head and look to Heaven above; inhale red pneuma through the nose, and [make it] enter the mouth” (507). 95 Haines-Eitzen, The Gendered Palimpsest, 51. Rabbinic sources do not draw a similar contrast between food and books for men’s study of texts, though at times they reference study of Torah as nourishment. Jaffee, “Oral Transmission of Knowledge as Rabbinic Sacrament,” 65–79 writes: “rabbinic instruction in Oral Torah in the bet midrash did for their disciples precisely what the distribution of bread and wine achieved for throngs of Christian communicants – these rites of incorporation brought the participants into a redemptive communion that transcended death. They brought into the body something that came from outside; something that had to be mediated by a person already sanctified to his task. And the mediated thing was the life giving Word of God – among the

Consuming texts 201

96

97 98 99

Sages, in the form of language that was incorporated into the body through memorization of its diction; among the Christians, in the form of bread and wine that united the communicant with the body of redemption” (78–9). Jaffee cites Sifre Deuteronomy 317, in which various foods extracted from land (produce, food) are interpreted as referring to Torah: “That he might feast on the yield of my fields – this refers to Scripture. And he fed him oil from the rock – this is Repeated Tradition (mishnah). And oil from flinty stone – this is dialectical interpretation (talmud). The butter of cattle with the milk of flocks, and the best of lambs – these are logical inferences, exegetical deductions, rulings, and responses. With the finest of wheat – these are the halakhot, which are the essence of Torah. And the blood of grape shall you drink as wine – these are the aggadot which draw out a person’s heart like wine” (Jaffee, 77). The trope of women “wearing Gospels” might also be related to women’s embodied consumption of texts; see e.g., John Chrysostom, Homily on Matthew 72 and Homily on the Statues 19, discussed in Haines-Eitzen, The Gendered Palimpsest, 61–2 and Luijendijk, Forbidden Oracles?, 55. Penniman, Raised on Christian Milk, and Penniman, “Fed to Perfection.” See also LaValle, “Divine Breastfeeding.” Thanks to Liane Marquis for pointing out this contrast. On the idea of competing reading practices mirroring competing conceptions of the body and embodiment, see Stefaniw, “Straight Reading.” On the masculinizing of women’s bodies through ascetic practice, see Stefaniw, “Becoming Men, Staying Women.”

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204  Sarit Kattan Gribetz ———. “Oral Transmission of Knowledge as Rabbinic Sacrament: An Overlooked Aspect of Discipleship in Oral Torah.” In Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought, edited by Howard Kreisel, 65–79. Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2006. Jastrow, Marcus. Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli, and Yerushalmi and Midrashic Literature. Leipzig: W. Druglin, 1903. Johnson-DeBaufre, Melanie. “ ‘Gazing Upon the Invisible’: Archaeology, Historiography, and the Elusive Wo/men of 1 Thessalonians.” In From Roman to Early Christian Thessalonike: Studies in Religion and Archaeology, edited by Laura Nasrallah, Charalambos Bakirtzis, and Steven J. Friesen, 73–108. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Theological Studies, 2010. Kahana, Menahem. Sifre Zuṭa Devarim. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2005. Kouli, Maria. “Life of St. Mary of Egypt.” In Holy Women in Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation, edited by Alice-Mary Talbot, 65–94. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Krawiec, Rebecca. Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery: Egyptian Monasticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Kreuger, Derek. Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. LaValle, Dawn. “Divine Breastfeeding: Milk, Blood, and Pneuma in Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus.” Journal of Late Antiquity 8(2) (2015): 322–36. Lifshitz, Felice. Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia: A Study of Manuscript Transmission and Monastic Culture. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Luijendijk, AnneMarie. Greetings to the Lord: Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. ———. Forbidden Oracles? The Gospel of the Lots of Mary. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014. ———. “ ‘Twenty Thousand Nuns’: The Domestic Virgins of Oxyrhynchus.” In Christianity and Monasticism in Middle Egypt: Al-Minya and Asyut, edited by Gawdat Gabra and Hany N. Takla, 57–65. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2015. Macdonald, Michael. “Literacy in an Oral Environment.” In Writing and Ancient Near Eastern Society: Papers in Honour of Alan R. Millard, edited by Piotr Bienkowski, Christopher B. Mee and Elizabeth A. Slater, 49–118. New York: T&T Clark, 2005. Marrou, H.-I. ΜΟΥΣΙΚΟΣ ΑΝΗΡ: Étude sur les scenes de la vie intellectuelle figurant sur les monuments funéraires romains. Grenoble, 1938; reprint Rome, 1964. Mayer, Wendy. “Female Participation and the Late Fourth-Century Preacher’s Audience.” Augustinianum 39 (1999): 139–47. ———. “The Ins and Outs of the Chrysostom Letter-Collection: New Ways of Looking at a Limited Corpus.” In Collecting Early Christian Letters: From the Apostle Paul to Late Antiquity, edited by Neil Bronwen and Pauline Allen, 129–153. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. McGowan, Andrew B. Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014. Meier, Samuel A. “Women and Communication in the Ancient Near East.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 111 (1991): 540–7. Ménage, Gilles. Historia mulierum philosopharum. Paris: Lugdunum, 1690. ———. A History of Women Philosophers. Translated by B.H. Zedler. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984. Milnor, Kristina. Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Mishor, Mordechay. “Papyrus Oxford e.120.” Leshonenu 63(1–2) (2001): 53–59.

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206  Sarit Kattan Gribetz ———. “Straight Reading: Shame and the Normal in Epiphanius’ Polemic against Origen.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 21(3) (2013): 413–35. Sussman, Yaakov. “ ‘Oral Torah’ Means Exactly What It Says: The Impact of an Iota.” In Talmudic Researches: A Collection of Essays and Related Fields Dedicated to the Memory of Prof. Ephraim E. Urbach, edited by Yaakov Sussman and Dovid Rosenthal, 2:543–589. Jerusalem: Magnes, 2005. Tervahauta, Ulla, Ivan Miroshnikov, Outi Lehtipuu and Ismo Dunderberg (eds.), Women and Knowledge in Early Christianity. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Thorley, John. “Junia, a Woman Apostle.” Novum Testamentum 38(1) (1996): 18–29. Tropper, Amram. “Jewish Historiography after the Bible: A New Interpretation.” History and Theory 43(2) (2004): 179–97. Watts, Edward J. Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Wider, Kathleen. “Women Philosophers in the Ancient Greek World: Donning the Mantle.” Hypatia 1(1) (1986): 21–62. Wilkinson, Kate. Women and Modesty in Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Williams, Megan H. The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2006. Williams, Robert L. Bishop Lists: Formation of Apostolic Succession of Bishops in Ecclesiastical Crises. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2005. Wöhrle, Georg. “Papyrophagie.” In “. . . vor dem Papyrus sind alle Gleich!”: papyrologische Beiträge zu Ehren von Bärbel Kramer, edited by Raimar Eberhard, 243–247. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966, 2001.

Epilogue Reading without authority C. M. Chin

Authority makes sense. There is a “how things ought to be” in authority; a benefit to be pursued; a chaos to be set in order; a confusion to send far away. Some things, though, are senseless. They are beyond authority, or before it. The project of this book is not to deny the existence of authorizing acts, nor to try to recover resistances or subversions of them, but to look carefully for other impulses that might be visible – unauthorized, unregulated, or senseless – at the margins. The chapters in this collection are an experiment in finding traces of senselessness in late ancient responses to texts, and lingering there. I take as one of my unauthoritative guides to this experiment an imaginary horse, a mare, in pain. She responds to text with sensation, but not with what we expect as textual sense. The Corpus hippiatricorum graecorum, a late antique veterinary compilation, tells us that if a mare is struggling to give birth, her labor will be eased if papyrus inscribed with parts of Psalm 47 is placed on her body; if the mare is infertile, she will be helped by papyrus containing a passage from the Iliad.1 Whatever the cultural, social, or religious status of these texts in Late Antiquity, we may allow that the horse is not expected to understand them. She does not make sense of them, at least in any conventional human way. Yet there is something in the texts to which the horse is expected to respond, something that the body of a struggling mare is expected to sense without yet making sense. This is the something, the textual encounter, that this book attempts to explore. Setting human authority and its familiar mode of sense-making to one side, we may find sensations, some human and some not, sitting a little askew from it.

Moving If we take a default Foucauldian position, in which power is emergent in all interactions, including those with texts, we will by definition not find a text that exists outside of power and its regulatory effects. Yet there are, in textual experiences, many elements that can productively be left unreduced to regulation. So the mare gives birth, but human encounters with text also prompt visceral reaction. “I wept over Dido,” Augustine writes, and “had I been forbidden to read this story, I would have been sad that I could not read what made me sad.”2 Happiness, sadness, and the births of animals are not often invoked as categories of analysis

208  C. M. Chin in late ancient studies (although perhaps they should be), so let us approach them indirectly through the pathways of surprise, pleasure, and aesthetic or affective response. The idea that words and texts have particular kinds of force that can provoke such response, that is, that they have a certain vitality, to borrow Hindy Najman’s term, is of course a very old idea, and was so even in Late Antiquity.3 The many forms in which this vitality was theorized were not always logically compatible with each other, and included Stoic materialist linguistics, quasi­Platonic theologies of the Word, and the ritualized efficacious utterances of imperial law. There is, however, a basic similarity between these forms, and that is just the agreement that words have a non-human capacity to have effects in the world. We see some very clear examples of this capacity in some of the accounts collected here, for example the apotropaic magical use of the letters of Jesus and Abgar, which Mark Letteney describes, or the consumption of text-infused “bitter water,” in the supernatural shaming of the soṭah ritual, described by Sarit Kattan Gribetz.4 These words, which defend or accuse those whom they encounter, have powers that humans lack. It is obviously possible for the vitality of words to be put to use in hierarchical structures of authority, but it also has other, more senseless, effects. One of the effects that is sometimes easy to overlook is the capacity of words to surprise the things they encounter. Stoic emotional theory gives us the useful category of first movements, or blows to the body or mind, that are then, in humans at least, narrated into emotional response, and this is I think a good model for understanding the force of words.5 These first movements, shocks, or blows are said to be involuntary and non-rational events. They are the physical responses of ensouled bodies to the immediate events of the outside world. Seneca writes, “We cannot escape that first shock (ictus) of the mind by reason, just as we cannot escape those things which befall the body either. . . . Reason cannot control those things, though perhaps familiarity and constant attention may weaken them.”6 Words can be the products of reason, but the work of words is not always reasonable. “[We] laugh with people who are laughing,” Seneca says, “while a crowd of mourners saddens (contristare) us too.”7 The reasons for the laughter, or the sadness, do not always matter at first: we are affected anyway. Once there, we find our way to true or sustained emotion by explaining to ourselves why we are laughing or crying, and by believing that it is right to feel this way. The effect on humans of encountering words can be like finding oneself in a crowd of people laughing, or it can be, in another Senecan image, like blinking when something moves suddenly towards our eyes.8 Words make us laugh or cry or jump before we understand why. Many things can surprise us, of course; words and texts are only some of them. Still, verbal surprise happens often. When R. Naḥman is interrupted in the course of his deliberation, in the account described by Jonathan A. Pomeranz, he says, “Have I not told you not to say a word to me when I am sitting in judgment?”9 When one bishop’s earlier statement is read out at the Council of Chalcedon, as Mark Letteney points out, the bishop objects, “I  didn’t say that; it is counterfeited.”10 Whether these are expressions of anger or indignation, or whether they are true accounts at all, what they capture is the feeling of verbal surprise, a shock

Epilogue 209 of unexpected words that provokes a response. The surprising encounter is more extravagantly recounted in the myth of manuscript discovery analyzed by Eva Mroczek, in which the unexpected appearance of old books, long hidden in caves, unsettles the equilibrium of scholars, shepherds, antiquarians, and animals alike.11 A dog runs into a cave; a goat loses its way; a text appears. The fact that such moments of surprise are persistently re-narrated, as delight or anger, magic or scholarship or Orientalizing adventure, but always with unexpectedness as their predictable core, alerts us to an event that seems to be agreed to occur in some verbal encounters in Late Antiquity. Because these verbal encounters include magic and other non-human effects, this event is larger than simple human affect, but neither is it the regulatory social norm of authority. It is more formless and senseless than either of these, and perhaps more charged with potential. I will revert to Stoic or Aristotelian terminology and call this event a verbal kinesis or motus, a combination of motion and setting things in motion that is also the beginning of emotion in the world. So R. Naḥman may be angry, while Augustine weeps with pleasure, but both live in a world in which they can expect to experience, at least under certain conditions, moments of verbal motus. Of the many stories that such encounters produced, some are interpreted in attenuated Platonic terms as encounters with the good and the beautiful, and so here we should also attend to the aisthesis of textual aesthetics, in both their beautiful and their just forms. In Stoic accounts of first movements, the soul is struck by art, when it hears music or when it sees action in the theatre.12 To place oneself in the path of aesthetic power is to open oneself to what can then become an experience of emotional and moral judgment. Beauty and anger, though, are post hoc explanatory devices for the initial blow of encounter, in which the reader is moved by the formless motus of the art object itself, including objects that are texts. The possibility of narrating this encounter as good or beautiful is echoed in the use of the term philokalia or “love of beauty” to mean scholarship, particularly scholarship of the variety that involved textual collecting and excerpting. As Winrich Löhr points out, the term need not apply only to collections of texts traditionally considered authoritative, or even beautiful, but can apply to texts that provide the movement of the soul’s encounter, even if those texts are heretical.13 The love of beauty that collecting texts implies is the desire to experience the force of text. This desire, the desire to replicate or extend the moment of verbal encounter by amplifying it visually or materially, can inspire textual decoration as well: as Gribetz relates, the Queen of Adiabene is said to have “made a golden tablet on which the passage of soṭah was written.” The soṭah ritual is a visceral reception of text and shame, but it can also, here, become beautiful.14 In legal and ethical settings, the shock of words can be the inarticulate force, vaguely sensed, that we glimpse behind judgements of what is right or just. When early Christians told stories about the apostles in the Didascalia, to supplement their injunctions to right behavior, as Maria Doerfler relates, their starting point was the “authors’ sense of what must have occurred to ground late ancient understandings of orthopraxy.”15 The force of this “must,” the sensation of it, is the motus of the words of ethical injunction: moral admonition provokes a particular

210  C. M. Chin experience of the soul that drives the storytelling. Jonathan Pomeranz’s essay gives us a more complex ethical development of this force, describing cases where a perceived injustice in the known law provokes the emergence of a hidden law; this previously hidden law will, in turn, adhere to the rabbinic judge’s sense of the good and the just. R. Naḥman, confronted by his colleague with a law that he senses to be inadequate to a case of thievery, retorts, “That man is a veteran robber and I wanted to penalize him!”16 If we linger briefly in R. Naḥman’s outrage, we can sense the motus of the frustrating, inadequate words of law that R. Naḥman hears from his colleague, words that might let the thief off lightly, and we can also sense the motus of the punitive words that would relieve his frustration. In such an encounter, the shock of the legal text leads to a reaffirmation of what the judge knows to be right, although that rightness is not located within the original legal text itself. We may turn the blows of words into a desire for beauty, but we may also turn them into a desire to be good. The longed-for feeling of “getting law right,” that is, the feeling of one’s own alignment with an externally existing rightness, which Doerfler wisely invokes,17 is generated from an initial motus of words, just as the disturbing feeling of getting it wrong is. They are aesthetic and moral movements of the soul developing out of its encounter with moving language. To speak about late ancient text beyond authority, then, we must begin with the late ancient experience of the formless, senseless shock of words. After these first movements of the soul, words can be spun into something new.

Reaching out Formlessness resolves into form imperfectly. Think of text transmission, on these late ancient terms, as a reaching out, or an echo, of a first formless encounter. The force of encounter can insinuate itself into many bodies, and can leave its initial ephemerality and take shape in longer-lived beings. Kattan Gribetz astutely breaks down text transmission into a variety of actions and interactions between writers, speakers, and audiences, as well as between people and words. Transmission here is a process of embodying verbal motus, sometimes by reading and copying, but other times by physical consumption and assimilation. Embodied motus has many faces to it, as ascetic labor, food, and reproduction, but it also reaches out across many different spans of time, for one goal of text transmission can be the simple temporal extension of the first moment of encounter. Thus, Christian ascetic women, in Kattan Gribetz’s account, can live on words rather than food, and their lifespans are the bodily and temporal manifestations of the verbal wisdom that they find and consume. Or as Hindy Najman puts it, “to acknowledge certain texts as scriptural is to recognize them as possessing an excess of vitality . . . and it is the nature of life to generate life, to sustain and reproduce itself.”18 The life of the text, in these stories, is housed in the lifespan of the ascetic. What is transmission, when it encompasses not just embodiment, but also food, generation, and redemption? In this world, text transmission is an enclosure and reorientation of the motions of text in a new body – a book, a human, a mare – in an attempt to extend the moment

Epilogue 211 of verbal encounter in time. It is, in a sense, an attempt both to fix the stars of verbal motion in the night sky, and at the same time to navigate by them. Still, reaching out in time is not the only effect of housing the first movements of texts in bodies. The desire to extend these movements brings us also, I think, to two experiences of text that are examined in this book, and those are the experience of familiarity and the experience of loss. We might think of these as the implications of transmission, or as the inevitable results of reaching out. Let us start with familiarity. Christian ascetics and other consumers of ancient texts did not necessarily consume them only once, but in the process of turning consumption into embodiment, we can assume they developed a sense of their texts’ motions as deeply familiar. The pleasures of repetition and recognition produce extensions of text in time that can easily take forms we might expect. They produce written copies of well-loved words, or of words that are shocking, but they also produce “emulations,” new texts, that “speak in the voice of Moses, or in the voice of the angel dictating to Moses, or even in the voice of God.”19 These voices are somehow familiar, and the words they produce are simultaneously surprising and comforting, because, while new, they are spoken in familiar ways by people we believe that we love. Such transmissions through affection – not just the copying and giving of manuscripts by friends to friends, but also the production and recollection of words and voices themselves as one’s friends – are part of what Yii-Jan Lin has termed the erotic life of manuscripts.20 The ways that words move us, their shocks and blows, are extended and passed on through our care for texts both old and new. This care is, like all care, repetitive and generative. The Psalms are the mare’s midwife. So, such words have textual families, but they also have human and animal families. Recognition and reproduction keep these intermingled families alive. Indeed, what is striking about the reproductive pleasure of familiarity is just how many textual personae can be born from it. Thus, as Matthew D. C. Larsen points out, the transmission of the gospels gives us imagined figures of the four evangelists, whose names are still so familiar that we cannot stop invoking them.21 The familymaking impulse of familiarity with the Psalms, discussed by A. J. Berkovitz, gives us an equally clearly imagined, if also imaginary, Asaph the historical figure and writer.22 This generative activity is also on display in Maria Doerfler’s description of the fictionalized Ambrose the law-giver and martyr, whose persona generates an entire western branch of the East Syrian Christian family.23 In all of these cases, the pleasures of the familiar bring together recognition, affection, reproduction, and affiliation to create new, if unreal, families and new bonds. Enclosing verbal motus in a new body can mean reaching out to create imaginary bodies as well. The love of family is generative and has a complex relationship with loss. Late ancient writers, though, worry much less than we might expect that some texts may go away forever. More often, their worry is that the reproductive process will somehow go awry. To use an evolutionary metaphor, they worry more about mutation than about extinction, although mutation itself is a genre of loss. We see this worry about mutation in the conciliar acts that Letteney describes. When the words seem unfamiliar, “We didn’t say this,” claims the chorus of bishops,

212  C. M. Chin “Who said this?”24 Where the pleasure of recognition is taken away, what is lost is not the text, but the relationship of attachment or affection that its producers feel for it. Yet at the same time, the pleasures of familiarity are so strong that they themselves can facilitate what we in our own time would call loss. This is what is happening in the way that the thirteenth century bishop ‛Abdīshō‛ imagines western Christianity, in Doerfler’s account: his turn to the West “is not to the West as it existed in his own era. . . . Rather the West ‛Abdīshō‛ seems to contemplate here is that of a by-gone era.”25 This West is both lost and never existed at all, yet the thirteenth century Syrian bishop is untroubled because Ambrose intervenes – and not only intervenes, but makes the Syrian tradition clearer and better. The vitality of verbal families is a protection against some kinds of loss, but in a more complex, or more senseless, way it is a protection against the feeling of loss rather than against loss itself. Ambrose and the West are far away, but the affectionate recognition of their imagined words prevents ‛Abdīshō‛ from feeling so. The power that stems from recognition and affection in the late antique textual world seems much greater than the power granted to mere preservation, and this too I think is an outgrowth of the impulse to get things right. It is part of a larger desire to shape the entire textual universe into something that can be recognized and loved. Along with this desire comes the optimism that such a transformation is achievable. We see this in Winrich Löhr’s account of heresiologists turning the work of their theological enemies into entertainment.26 This transmutation makes even initially repulsive words into things that can be copied and enjoyed, not only in the moment, but long after the heretics in question are no longer a threat. The selections of heretical material that can be made to feel “right” through orthodox repetition and recollection are preserved; the rest is disposable. On some level, the senseless confidence that such affection inspires must also motivate the discovery narratives that Eva Mroczek offers to us, in which affection means that preservation is assured. As Mroczek makes clear, the myth of the lost books found again “present[s] us with a world where the potential of new discovery is always imminent.”27 There are, in this world, so many creations by much-loved voices, by David or Solomon or Moses, that they “spill over beyond the canon,” to be found, when they are least expected, by dogs, goats, and bishops.28 In a world in which recognition and love are infinitely fecund and infinitely surprising producers of texts, loss is not the threat that we experience today. We may not have our whole family with us now, but someday we will.

Conclusion The peculiar blindness to the possibility of loss that familiarity and affection seem to engender may provide a valuable lesson for us as scholars of Late Antiquity, so I will close with some very brief thoughts on the opportunities and perils of looking at late ancient texts beyond authority. Familiarity with texts is the foundation of what historians tend to identify as scholarly expertise. It is a daunting question to raise in our current epistemological

Epilogue  213 moment, but perhaps for that reason all the more worth asking: what is expertise beyond authority? We might return to the phenomenon of verbal motus here, and say that perhaps what the expert really knows is how to look for moments of encounter, how to find the motion of text. The expert who is in Epiphanius’s terms spoudaios will be eager to seek that motion out. Beyond authority, part of expertise is cultivation of the art of being surprised, of having once felt the initial blow of encounter and creating ways to feel it again. Then, lingering in that surprising moment, the expert extends the movements of words in the act of transmission, which entails developing an impulse toward proliferation, of words and friends alike. This is the creation of families of shared delight, families that reach out, senselessly, to extend the affections of the soul into times beyond them. A lover of learning is also generous in reaching out. That is the opportunity of expertise beyond authority: to have experienced more is to be able to give more. But as we have seen, the impulse toward proliferation, and the confidence that affectionate familiarity inspires, will sometimes also entail getting it wrong, creating an Ambrose the martyr, or an evangelist, where none exist. These moments of getting it wrong can be all the more troubling because they can feel exactly the same as getting it right. Expertise, the creation of the familiar out of the surprising, necessarily also creates at times an alarming overconfidence, so that scholarship sometimes looks like presenting a struggling mare with passages from the Psalms, and hoping for the best. That is the danger of following first movements and working outside authority. I think the promise of relinquishing authority, however, may be worth the risk. If we are willing to work without authority, that is, if we continue to push ourselves beyond the desire merely to make sense within our already-known families, we might, ourselves, be present at a senseless but fertile moment, somewhere between text and animal, and be very surprised by what is born.

Notes 1 Corpus hippiatricorum graecorum 10.3.5, discussed in van der Horst, “Sortes: Sacred Books as Instant Oracles in Late Antiquity,” 175; see also the discussion of Wiśniewski, “Pagans, Jews, Christians, and a Type of Book Divination in Late Antiquity.” 2 Confessions 1.13.21, translation Chadwick, Augustine, 16. 3 Najman, “Reading Beyond Authority,” 22–7, this book. Najman’s essay is an excellent introduction to the philosophical and theoretical work that lies behind this collection. To some extent, this collection is obviously reconsidering, not just Foucauldian discourses of power and authorship, but a range of ideas from the late twentieth century linguistic turn, notably (but by no means exclusively) Austin, How to Do Things with Words; Butler, Excitable Speech; Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text; and Derrida Of Grammatology. Readers will recognize a variety of echoes from these and similar texts in this epilogue. For an account of the linguistic-theoretical moment as it occurred in late ancient studies, see Clark, History, Theory, Text. The ideas in this book are intended to be explored in a more capaciously materialist philological vein. 4 Letteney, “Authenticity and Authority: The Case for Dismantling a Dubious Correlation,” 33–56, this book; Gribetz, “Consuming Texts: Women as Recipients and Transmitters of Ancient Texts,” 178–206, this book.

214  C. M. Chin 5 For a full account, see Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind, 66–75, which focuses primarily on Seneca; and Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, 62–7. 6 De ira 2.4.2, quoted in Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind, 74–5. 7 De ira 2.2.5, quoted in Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind, 73. 8 De ira 2.4.2. 9 Pomeranz, “Concealing the Law: The Limits of Legal Promulgation Among the Rabbis of Babylonia,” 132, this book. 10 Letteney, “Authenticity and Authority,” 41, this book. 11 Mroczek, “Truth and Doubt in Manuscript Discovery Narratives,” 139–60, this book. 12 Sorabji, Emotions and Peace of Mind, 76–87, on the debate over whether aesthetic experiences provoke true emotion in addition to first movements of the soul. 13 Löhr, “The Orthodox Transmission of Heresy,” 161–77, this book. 14 Gribetz, “Consuming Texts,” 183, this volume. 15 Doerfler, “Glimpses from the Margins: Re-Telling Late Ancient History at the Edges of the Law,” 110, this book. 16 Pomeranz, “Concealing the Law,” 132, this book. 17 Doerfler, “Glimpses from the Margins,” 114, this book. 18 Najman, “Reading Beyond Authority,” 24, this book. 19 ibid. 20 Lin, The Erotic Life of Manuscripts, 1–5. 21 Larsen, “Correcting the Gospel: Putting the Titles of the Gospels in Historical Context,” 78–104, this book. 22 Berkovitz, “Beyond Attribution and Authority: The Case of Psalms in Rabbinic Hermeneutics,” 57–77, this book. 23 Doerfler, “Glimpses from the Margins,” 107–22, this book. 24 Letteney, “Authenticity and Authority,” 39, this book. 25 Doerfler, “Glimpses from the Margins,” 113, this book. 26 Löhr, “Orthodox Transmission of Heresy,” 161–77, this book. 27 Mroczek, “Truth and Doubt in Manuscript Discovery Narratives,” 145, this book. 28 Mroczek, “Truth and Doubt in Manuscript Discovery Narratives,” 148, this book.

Bibliography Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Chadwick, Henry. Augustine: Confessions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Clark, Elizabeth A. History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, corrected edition 1997. Knuuttila, Simo. Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Lin, Yii-Jan. The Erotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Textual Criticism and the Biological Sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Sorabji, Richard. Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Epilogue  215 van der Horst, Pieter Willem. “Sortes: Sacred Books as Instant Oracles in Late Antiquity.” In Japheth in the Tents of Shem: Studies on Jewish Hellenism in Antiquity, edited by Pieter Willem van der Horst, 143–73. Leuven: Peeters, 2002. Wiśniewski, Robert. “Pagans, Jews, Christians, and a Type of Book Divination in Late Antiquity.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 24(4) (2016): 557.

Index locorum

Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum 2.1.1.17–23 35 2.1.1.32 38 2.1.1.36 38 2.1.1.40 38 2.1.1.53 36 2.1.1.53–9 38 2.1.1.54 37 2.1.1.56 37 2.1.1.62–3 38 2.1.1.69 38 2.1.1.71 38 2.1.1.87–8 37–8 2.1.1.121 38–9 2.1.1.122–4 40 2.1.1.130 38, 51 2.1.1.161 38 2.1.1.162 38 2.1.1.168 41, 208 2.1.1.171 38 2.1.1.212 36 2.1.1.214 36 2.1.1.222 35 2.1.1.239 35 2.1.1.250 38 2.1.1.252 30 2.1.1.254 38 2.1.1.257 38 2.1.1.262 38 2.1.1.496 38 2.1.1.530 38 2.1.1.546–48 41 2.1.1.767 39 2.1.1.854 38 2.1.1.965 38 2.1.2.51–2 51 Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha 2 Enoch 23 147

54 147 47 146–7 4 Ezra 25 4 Maccabees 192 Acts of Peter 109 Apocalypse of Paul 1–2 140 Gospel of Mary 193 Jubilees 18, 24 50:12–13 130 Life of Adam and Eve 151 Testament of Adam 151 Testament of Moses 1:15–18 149 Babylonian Talmud Avod. Zar. 18b 196 36a 134 B. Bat. 14b–15a 73 54a 124 124b 134 B. Met. 59b 196 86b 71 B. Qam. 96b 131–3, 208, 210 Ber. 7b 71 10a 196 13a 74 31a 196 32a 74 35b 75 39b 184 60b 70 Betz. 23a 134 29b 134 32b 184

Index locorum  217 Eruv. 53b 196 80a 184 Git. 35a 129 57b 72 64b 75 81a 75 Ḥul. 18b 134 44b 184 84b 124 Ketub. 61a 184 65a 184 84b–6a 125–6 103b 134 Mak. 24a 71 Menaḥ. 43b 74 68b 184 Mo’ed Qaṭ. 246 134 Nid. 36a 134 Pesaḥ 40 a–b 184 42a 184 48b 184 106b 184 117a 71, 73 Qidd. 24b 134 25b 124, 134 29b–30a 192 70a–b 127–8 73a 134 Sanh. 69b 75 110a 62 111a–b 73 Shab. 12b 184 59b 134 114b 184 119a 135 126b 134 140a 184 Shev. 30a–b 127 Soṭah 21a 194 Yevam. 64a–b 66–7

Yoma 37b 194 Zevaḥ 54b 72 Bible 1 Chronicles 6:24 73 15:16–17 73 1 Kings 17:1 67 2 Kings 18:18 59 22 139, 148 2 Maccabees 2:1–8 149 2:13–15 85–6 2:19 96 3:40 96 2 Samuel 4:10 (LXX) 97 12:11 71 Amos 7:5–6 72 Deuteronomy 5:8 72 6:7 178, 192 25:8 74 28:65 72 33:28 72 Ezekiel 1:6–10 90, 92 3:3 178 18:3 Exodus 4:14 64 6:24 62 15:17 71 39:32 76 Genesis 2:4 65 3:23 73 4:16 64 24:1 75 49:28 73 Isaiah 26:4 65 27:13 64:10 60 Jeremiah 1:9 178 3:11 72 20:9 151 30:6 66 36 148

218  Index locorum Leviticus 16:21 63 26:38 72 Nehemiah 2:8 59 10 134 Numbers 5 183 5:23–4 178, 182 7:1 68 26:11 62 Psalms 7 75 12 64, 75 34:8 65 47 207 73:2 61–2 79:1 59–61 79:6 60, 71 79:12 72 80:14 72 90 62 90–100 62–3, 65, 68 90:10 67 91:10 68 92 63–4 100 63 101 62 104:35 71 110:3 67 110:4 67 113:1 66 119:164 65 137 72 Tobit 6:13 134 Cairo Genizah “Schechter Document” 150 Dead Sea Scrolls 4QInstruction 26 11Q5 col. 22 “Apostrophe to Zion” 26 Damascus Document 13, 145 Pesher Habbakuk 18 Temple Scroll 24 Greco-Roman Traditionalist sources Arrian, Discourses of Epictetus praef. 1–8 54 Cicero, Atticus 2.31 97 13.40.1 97

Corpus hippicraticorum graecorum 10.3.5 207 Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 2.32.2 95 Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 2.60.62 173 7.25 173 8.54 173 Galen Adversus Julianum 4.4 88 Adversus Lycum 2.2 96, 100 In Hipp. Epid. III Comment. 2.4 (17.1b.606K) Homer, Iliad 2.129–33 83 2.257–64 82 22.108–10 81 Homeric Scholia B 111b 80–1 B 133a 83 B 258a1 82, 98 B 865 98 Γ 106 98 Δ 3a 80–1 M 283 98 X 93C2 98 X 108a1 81 Φ 11a 98 Φ 88d 98 Φ 535d1 91 Ω 82c 98 Isocrates, Areopagiticus 7.10 97 Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 2.26.3 96 Plutarch On Stoic Contradictions 1049B 172 Sertorius 11.8 97 Seneca On Anger 2.4.2 208 2.2.5 208 Letters 88 97 Theophrastus, Historia Plantarum 4.8 189 Hellenistic Jewish sources Josephus, Against Apion 1:8–10 141 1:18 95

Index locorum  219 Philo of Alexandria On the Contemplative Life 3.25 199 4.35 199 9.73 199 10.75 199 On Dreams 1.34 96 2.263 96 On Flight and Finding 92 96 93 96 Who is the Heir? 82 96 Inscriptions I. Eph. Ia. 46. Inv. III 1072 54 Late antique Christian sources 2 Clement 90 Aetius, Syntagmation 168 Ambrose of Milan Concerning Virginity 3.15 188 Letters 76 119 Apostolic Constitutions 108, 116 Apostolic Tradition 116 Athanasius, On Virginity 12.10–17 186–7 Augustine Confessions 1.13.21 207 Contra Faustum 11.5 53 De gestis Pelagii 47 170 De gratia Christi 2.2 175 De natura et gratia 170 Letters 19 175 19.4.1 175 177 175 179 175 Retractationes 2.15.1 170 Clement of Alexandria Paedagogus 189 Protrepicus 6.70 119 6.71 119 Stromateis 2.22.5 119 Didache 90, 108, 116

Didascalia 6 118 10 117 23 109 26 110 Epiphanius, Panarion omnium haeresium prooem.1.2 168 prooem 1.2.1 169 1.2 168 2.2.5 169 31.5–6 174 42 174 42.10.2 168 42.11.15 169 64.5.11 169 69.4.3 169 69.9.3 169 72–3 174 76 174 76.11.3 169 76.11–12 168 76.13.2 169 Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 1.13.22 44–5 2.1.8 45 2.23.24–5 53 3.3.4 46–7 3.25 45–6, 52–3 4.18.8 172 5.5.8 52 5.7.1 172 5.18.9 52 6.16.3 144 Life of Constantine 4.27.2 51 Ferrandus of Carthage, Letters 6.3 43 6.7 43 Gerontius, Life of Melania 23 187 Gregory of Nyssa Homilies of Song of Songs 187 Life of Macrina 3 199 Hippolytus of Rome Chronicle 166 De elenchos 166 Refutation of all Heresies 1.pr.2 165 1.pr.8 166 6.42.1 166 9.18–30 166 9.31.1 165 10.32–4 166

220  Index locorum Hypomnestikon 155 122 144, 197 Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.pr.1–3 162 1.1–8 164 1.3.6 172 1.4.3–4 172 1.8.1 92, 172 1.9.4 92, 100 1.10.1–2 163 1.22 163 1.23–7 162 1.26–7 90 2.pr.2 163 3.pr 172 3.pr.8 172 3.1.1 100 3.9.1 93 3.11 90 3.11.7 93 3.11.7–9 90 3.11.8 90–2, 100 3.11.9 92–3, 100 3.12.12 90 Jerome of Stridon Commentary on the Letter to Philemon 743–4 48 Letters 22:30 John Chrysostom Homily on Matthew 72 201 Homily on the Statues 19 201 Julius Africanus Kestoi 199 Sikyonika 199 Justin Martyr, 1 Apology 26.8 171 59.1 119 Justinian, Edictum Recta Fidei 156.36–158.3 43–4 Life of Eupraxia 199 Life of Saint Helia 41–2 197 Nomocanon 108, 111 II.13 118 II.16 118 III 112 Ordo Iudicorum 108, 111 2.1.7 112 Origen

Homilies on Joshua 20 189 Philokalia 12.1.31–4 200 Pelagius, De Natura 170 (Ps.-)Priscillian, Book on Faith and Apocryphal Writings 53 Pseudo-Clementine Homilies 109 Sophronius of Jerusalem, Life of Saint Mary of Egypt 188 Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 7.19 140 Synodicon Orientale 111 Syro-Roman Lawbook 112 Tertullian Against Marcion 1.1 174 Against the Valentinians 3.5 172 5.1 173 6.1 164 7.1 164 The Prescription Against Heretics 14.2–5 173 39 100–101 On the Veiling of Virgins 9.2 193 Theodosian Code 1.4.3 42, 52 Zosimas, Life of Synclectica 3 188–9 Manuscripts BnF Suppl. Gr. 1120 (P4) 87 Berlin 8502 99 Nag Hammadi Codex 2 99 Codex 3 99 P. Bodmer II (P66) 88–9, 100 III 99 VI 87 VII–VIII (P72) 88 VIII 87 XIV–XV 86–8 XIX 99 P. Köln inv. 3328 87 P. Oxy. 9.1176 87 42.3000 88 45.3209 87

Index locorum  221 50 3525.5–18 193 53.3715 87–8 65 4469 54 P. Palau Ribes inv. 182 99 Midrashim Ecclesiastes Rabbah 1:1 74 1:2 74 Genesis Rabbah 21:6 73 22:13 64 37:2 72 65:1 72 Lamentations Rabbah 1:52 72 3:64 72 4:11 60 4:14 60 5:2 60–1 Leviticus Rabbah 4:7 71 9:9 195 10:5 74 17:1 61–2 32:2 75 Mekhilta of R. Ishmael Amalek 2 71 Baḥodesh 5 74 Shirata 10 71 Pesiqta deRav Kahana 1:5 68 Pirqe deRabbi Eliezer 19 64 Seder Eliyahu Rabbah 30 71 Seder Olam Rabbah 6 73 Sifre Deuteronomy 36 74 46 192 306 72 310 75 342 73 Sifre Numbers 112 72 143 73 Sifre Zuṭa 6:6–7 178 Song of Songs Rabbah 4:4 72–3 6:4 75

Mishnah Avot 1:1 178 1:5 196 Ber. 1:1 192 Giṭ. 2:5 194 Ketub. 4:12 129 5:1 194 Nid. 10:8 71 Qidd. 1:7 6–7 Soṭah 2:3 73 3:4 182, 192 Tam. 6:7 73 Yoma 3:10 183, 209 New Testament 1 Timothy 1:4 162 2:11–12 192 6:20 172 1 Corinthians 3:2 189 14:34–5 192 11:5 192 2 Corinthians 12 140 Romans 5:12 170 Palestinian Talmud Ber. 3:3 (6b) 192 9:7 (14b) 68 9:8 (14d) 64–5 Betz. 2:1 (61b) 184 4:5 (62c) 184 5:1 (62d) 184 Ḥag. 2:1 (77c) 65–66 Ḥal. 1:5–6 (57d) 184 Shab. 1:3 (3b) 184

222  Index locorum 4:1 (6d) 184 13:6 (14d) 184 Shev. 1:8 (33b) 63 Soṭah 1:4 195 Ta’an. 1:1 (63c–d) 67–8 1:1 (64a) 72 Tosefta Ber. 2:12 194 6:25 74 Eruv. 2:11 184

Kelim B. Met. 1:6 196 Kelim B. Qam. 4:17 195 Menaḥ 7:8 73 Shev. 1:2 73 Soṭah 2:1 184 5:9 185 Yoma 82 194 Zoroastrian sources Mādayān ī Hazār Dādestān 57.3–12 196

Index

Aaron 63 Abdīshō’ bar Brīkhā 7, 108, 110 – 14, 118, 212 Abgar of Edessa 4, 33 – 4, 44 – 7, 52, 147, 208 Abraham 58, 66 – 8, 74 – 5 Absalom 71 acta see proceedings affect 208, 212 Albarran Martinez, M. J. 186 Alexandria 19 – 22, 51, 80, 83 – 4, 98 Ambrose of Milan 110 – 14, 119, 188, 198, 211 – 13 Amora 59, 178 apocrypha 9, 109 – 10, 114, 116 – 17, 140, 145, 147, 198 Archaeology 156, 195, 198 archive 42, 44 – 5, 47, 50, 52, 54, 140, 150 Aristarchus 20, 83, 92 Aristophanes 83 Arius 112, 168 – 9, 171 Asaph 59 – 62, 71 – 3, 211 asceticism 113, 181, 186 – 91, 196, 199, 201, 210 – 11 Astren, F. 152 Athanasius of Alexandria 36, 53, 174 audience 179 – 80 Augustine of Hippo 12, 53 – 4, 94, 111, 167, 169 – 71, 198, 207, 209 authenticity 2, 33 – 4, 36 – 7, 41 – 2, 44 – 9, 53, 96, 140, 142, 147, 150, 155 authority: authoritative past 107, 110; authority focused paradigm 2 – 3; authorship-as-authority 4, 33, 48, 78, 80, 86, 94 – 5, 211; beyond authority 4, 26 – 7, 108, 142, 150, 161, 167, 171, 207, 210, 213; discovery narratives as authority 139, 142, 152 – 3; narrative and authority 107 – 8, 114 – 15,

123; reduction to authority 2 – 3, 7 – 8; surplus motivations 3, 6, 107, 113 – 14, 123; transmission and authority 8 – 12, 130 – 1, 161, 170 – 1, 179 – 80, 185, 190 – 2, 210; un-authorized transmission 12, 179 authorization 2 – 7, 11 – 12, 14, 17, 33 – 4, 50, 53, 79, 83 – 4, 94 – 5, 153, 161 – 3, 167 – 9, 172, 207 Babylonia 6, 8, 123 – 5, 130 – 1, 148, 150 Bagnall, R. 186 Bardaisan 111 Baruch 148 Basil of Seleucia 10, 40 – 1 Beard, M. 180 Benjamin, W. 23 – 5 Berkovitz, A. J. 5, 211 Bethlehem 151, 186 bibliography 5 blow of encounter 3, 208 – 9, 213 Bodmer papyri 86 – 8 Bourdieu, P. 180 Brown, P. 186 Byzantine 113 – 14 Cairo Genizah 27, 145, 149 canon 4 – 5, 7, 9 – 10, 14, 18, 33 – 4, 43, 45 – 6, 48 – 9, 52 – 3, 58, 108 – 11, 114 – 15, 141, 144, 146 – 8, 161 Castelli, E. 165 – 6 Chin, C. M. 3, 12 – 13, 189 Clement of Alexandria 112, 119, 189, 198 commentary 6, 18, 45, 53, 74, 81 – 2, 84, 92, 96, 107, 111, 170, 172, 186 – 7, 196 Constantine I 113 corrector 5, 79 – 80, 82 – 5, 92 – 5 Council of Chalcedon (451) 33 – 44, 48 – 51, 208

224 Index Council of Ephesus II (449) 35 – 41, 49 – 52 Council of Nicaea (325) 38, 43, 49 – 50, 115, 119, 169 Cribiore, R. 186 Cyril of Alexandria 35 Dead Sea Scrolls 9, 18, 27, 141 – 5, 152 demons 12, 68, 76 Denzey Lewis, N. 145 Didymus Chalkenturus 80 – 4, 90 Dioscorus (Council of Chalcedon) 35 – 6, 38, 40 – 1, 51 discovery narratives 11, 139, 142, 152 – 3, 209 Doerfler, M. E. 7, 209 – 12 ecclesiastical council 4, 33 – 44, 40, 42 – 4, 48 – 52, 54, 111, 115, 208, 211 economy 92, 191 Edessa 44 – 5, 54 Egypt 11, 47, 84, 112 Ehrman, B. 46, 49, 53 Eichhorn, G. 19 embodiment 6, 12, 99, 181, 183, 185, 190 – 2, 196, 201, 210 – 11 emotion 208 – 9 encyclopedia 161, 165 – 7 Epictetus 54, 79 Epiphanius of Salamis 12, 94 – 5, 167 – 9, 171, 174 – 5, 198, 213 Euripides 87 Eusebius of Caesarea 33 – 5, 42, 44 – 9, 52 – 4, 144, 147, 153, 155, 172, 174, 186, 198 Eusebius of Dorylaeum 35 exegesis 49, 58 – 66, 68 – 9, 71 – 2, 74 – 5, 107, 116, 164, 170, 172, 194, 201 Ezekiel 90, 92 fabrication 11, 37, 139 – 42, 144, 153 Ferrandus of Carthage 43 – 4 folklore 143, 155 forgery 2, 18, 33 – 4, 38 – 42, 44, 46, 49, 52, 57, 70, 109, 114, 117, 119, 140, 152, 155, 166, 208 Foucault, M. 3, 19, 49, 57 – 9, 69, 133, 207, 213 Frampton, S. 189 Fuller, L. 123, 131 Gafni, I. 125 Galen 84 – 5, 88, 90, 93, 96 Gamble, H. 78, 186

Gathercole, S. 87, 89 Goodblatt, D. 133 gospel 4 – 5, 10, 27, 78 – 80, 84, 86 – 97, 99 – 101, 201, 211 “Gospel according to . . . ” formula 78 – 90, 92 – 4 Gospel authorship 78 – 9, 80 – 90 Gospel of John 49, 78, 87 – 9, 91, 93, 99 – 101 Gospel of Luke 78, 87, 91, 93, 95, 100 – 1 Gospel of Mark 78 – 9, 91, 93, 96, 100 Gospel of Matthew 78 – 9, 91, 93, 95 – 6, 99 – 100 Grafton, A. 140 Gregory of Nyssa 187, 199 hagiography 114, 119 Haines-Eitzen, K. 185 – 7, 189 harmonization 21 – 2, 51, 72, 74, 141 Hasmonean 128 – 9 Hauptman, J. 184 – 5 Herculaneum papyri 79, 88 heresiography 11 – 12, 161 – 71 heresy 9, 11 – 12, 14, 38, 41, 44, 51, 92 – 4, 101, 109 – 10, 113, 139 – 40, 145 – 6, 161 – 9, 171, 173 – 4, 198, 209, 212 Herodotus 21, 95 Hippocrates 58, 84 – 5, 90, 94, 96 Hippolytus of Rome 161, 165 – 7, 169, 171 – 2, 174 Homer 19 – 22, 28, 80, 82 – 4, 88, 90, 92, 94, 101 homily 59 – 62, 72, 187, 194 – 5 homoian 93, 112, 119, 174 hupomnēmata see notes Iliad 20, 22, 28, 80 – 4, 88, 92, 100, 207 impurity 134, 194 inscription 47, 54, 84, 140, 142 – 3, 183 – 4, 189, 197, 207 intertext 26, 113 Irenaeus of Lyon 12, 52, 80, 86 – 7, 89 – 94, 100, 161 – 7, 169 – 74 Isaiah 18, 26, 60 – 1, 72, 126 Israel 2, 60 – 1, 63, 65, 68, 72 – 4, 112, 131, 150 Jeremiah 23, 60 – 1, 72, 85 – 6, 148 – 9, 151 – 2 Jerome of Stridon 10, 48 – 9, 52, 174, 186 – 7, 189, 198, 200 Jerusalem 59, 61, 85, 109, 113, 117, 144, 156, 186

Index  225 Jesus 4, 23, 33, 44 – 7, 54, 90 – 2, 97, 109, 147, 151, 208 Johnson, S. 113 Johnson-DeBaufre, M. 179 – 80 Joseph King of the Khazars 150 Josephus 95, 140, 165 Josiah 148 Jude (letter) 53, 87 – 8, 99 Judea 45, 85, 144 jurisprudence 7 – 8, 116, 124 – 5, 129 – 34 jurist 42, 52 – 3, 111, 115 Justinian I 43 – 4 Justin Martyr 12, 90, 119, 170 – 3 Kabbalah 141 Karaite 139, 142 – 3, 145, 155 Kattan Gribetz, S. 208 – 10 ketubah 67, 125 – 6, 129 – 30, 132 Krakowski, E. 141 Krueger, D. 186, 188 Larsen, M. D. C. 5, 211 law: as agent (see “Law-centered” approach); “authority-centered” approach 6 – 8; concealment 124, 128 – 31; “Law-centered” approach 6 – 7; un/promulgated 7 – 8 lawgiver 6, 108, 112 – 14, 116, 211 Lefebvre, M. 131 legitimacy 13, 22, 46, 57, 79, 93, 139, 141 – 2, 144, 146, 150 – 1, 163 Letteney, M. 4, 98, 147, 156, 208, 211, 213 Lin, Y. 211 Lincoln, B. 1 linguistic turn 1 – 2 Löhr, W. 11, 94, 97, 193, 209, 212 Luijendijk, A. 186 Maimonides 76 Manicheism 53, 171, 175, 198 Marcion 92, 101, 162, 174 martyrdom 112 Melania the Elder 186 – 7, 196 midrash 18, 59, 61, 63 – 4, 66, 70, 72 – 5, 178, 194 – 5, 200 Mishnah 6 – 8, 14, 67, 132, 135, 178, 181 – 5, 192, 194, 201 Mnemon of Side 84 – 5 moment of recognition 140, 143 Moses 2, 18 – 19, 23 – 4, 62 – 6, 68, 70, 72 – 6, 91, 96, 112, 119, 130, 134, 149 – 50, 178, 211 – 12

Moses Taku 139, 142 Mroczek, E. 11, 13, 57 – 8, 69, 193, 209, 212 Nag Hammadi codices 9 – 11, 145 Najman, H. 2 – 3, 14, 33, 49, 57, 70, 85, 95, 147 – 8, 153, 208, 210 Nehemiah 74, 80, 85 – 6, 90, 99 Neo-Arian see Arius Nestorius 44, 111, 113, 115, 148 Neusner 124 – 5, 130 new philology 23, 25 Nietzche 3, 19 – 22, 24, 28, 95 Norelli, E. 165 notary 38 – 40, 51 notes 19, 35, 38 – 40, 44, 51, 54, 59, 80 – 6, 88, 97, 111, 144, 162, 174 Odyssey 20, 22, 28, 82, 88, 98, 100 old philology 23, 25 orality 9 – 10, 12, 27 – 8, 57, 63, 73, 90, 100, 174, 179, 181, 190, 196, 199 – 200 Origen of Alexandria 144, 187, 189 orthodoxy 9, 11 – 12, 34, 38, 40, 42 – 5, 49 – 50, 113 – 14, 161, 163, 165, 167, 169, 171, 212 Oxyrhynchus 9, 117, 186, 198 papyri 9, 47, 54, 80, 86 – 9, 93 – 4, 97, 99, 117, 189, 197, 207 paragraphos 88 – 9 paratextuality 11, 59, 78, 84, 98, 139, 141, 143, 145, 152 – 4 Paul of Tarsus 27, 46, 48, 53, 100, 140 – 1, 153, 167, 170, 179, 189 Pelagius 161, 169 – 71, 187, 198 Penniman, J. 190 Perpetua 192, 197 Peter (apostle) 46, 49, 87 – 8, 99 – 100, 109 – 10, 113, 115, 117 Philo of Alexandria 18, 27, 96, 199 pirqa 74, 125, 134 Plato 88, 90, 99, 119, 208 – 9 pluriformity 10, 80 – 3, 90, 93 – 4 Pomeranz, J. 6 – 8, 11, 14, 134, 153, 208, 210 proceedings 33 – 44, 48, 50 – 2, 111, 115, 128 prospective approach 19 – 20, 22 – 3 provenance 11, 45, 84, 108, 118, 139 – 41, 148 Qumran 130, 141, 144 – 5, 155

226 Index reception 3, 8, 12, 17, 33, 43, 58, 62, 131, 139, 162, 180 – 1, 184, 187, 190, 195 redaction 8 – 9, 19, 23, 68, 73, 92, 115 resistive reading 33 – 4, 39, 41 – 2 retrospective approach 19 – 20, 22 – 3, 33 – 4 revelation 2, 14, 17 – 18, 25 – 6, 36, 39, 140, 143, 148, 151 – 2 R. Judah 67, 73, 75, 127 – 9, 133 – 4 R. Na33h 67, 5 – 8, 131 – 3, 208 – 10 R. Nathan 71 Rosen-Zvi, I. 183 Roth, P. 132 R. Yo, P. 132. 1835, 1278

Tannaim 9 – 10, 14, 59, 62, 141, 178, 182, 194 Tertullian of Carthage 161, 163 – 7, 169, 171, 174 textual consumption 8, 12, 180 – 7, 189 – 91, 195, 197, 199 – 201, 208, 210 – 11 Theodosian empire 33, 36, 42 – 3, 48, 52, 113, 140, 167, 169, 171 theology 17, 139, 146, 150 – 1, 208 Theophilus of Antioch 90 Timothy I 115, 143 – 8, 151 – 3, 192 torah 2, 9, 12, 76, 130, 134, 150, 178, 181 – 3, 185, 190, 194 – 6, 199 – 201 Tosefta 74, 178, 184

sages 9, 59, 61, 73, 123 – 33, 135, 141, 184, 200 Samuel 124 – 6, 128 – 30, 135 Schechter, S. 145, 149 Schironi, F. 87 – 8 Schlegel, K. W. F. 3, 26, 147 scholia 19, 21, 80 – 3, 85, 92, 94, 172, 174 Schöllgen, G. 109 scribes 9 – 10, 17 – 18, 23, 37, 51, 72, 74 – 5, 88 – 9, 101, 143, 148, 154, 180, 186, 197 – 8 sexuality 71, 181 – 3, 187, 189, 191, 194 – 5, 199 Shapira, M. 142 – 3, 152 Shimon bar Yochai 141 Sons of Korah 61 – 2, 72 so, 72f Korah 61 – 5, 189 – 90, 195 – 6, 208 – 9 “super-added” extra 3, 11, 108, 113 Syro-Roman Lawbook 111 – 12

Ulpian (jurist) 42, 53 unmasking 2, 162 – 6, 174; elenchos 163, 165 – 7, 172 – 5 unpromulgated law 7 – 8, 123, 131, 133 – 4 Urtext 22 – 3 Valentinus 9, 92 – 3, 112, 162 – 6 Vessey, M. 42 virginity 186, 197, 199 vitality 12, 22 – 7, 208, 210 Wagschal, D. 114 Weber, M. 24 West, M. 80 – 1 Wolf, F. A. 19 – 20 Zeitlin, S. 142, 152 Zion 26, 60, 156 Zohar 141, 143, 152