The Birth of Christian History:
Memory and Time from Mark to Luke-Acts
By Eve-Marie Becker
Yale University Press, 2017
From the Publisher: The first comprehensive account to explore the beginnings of early Christian history writing, tracing its origin to the Gospel of Mark and Luke-Acts.
Of particular intrest may be the first chapter which focuses on how Mark and Luke-Acts transforms oral memory about Jesus into a literary narrative.
From the review by Tucker S. Ferda: chapter 1, “Transforming Memory into Literary Narratives about the Past,” investigates the transformation of oral memory into narrative; chapter 2, “Shaping History in the First and Second Centuries CE in Its Literary Culture,” explores the relationship between the written texts of Mark and Luke-Acts and larger GrecoRoman literary culture; chapter 3, “Conceptualizing Time in Historiography,” focuses on one aspect of that literary culture both within and without the New Testament: the conceptualization of “time.”
More from the review and publisher . . .
More from the publisher: When the Gospel writings were first produced, Christian thinking was already cognizant of its relationship to ancient memorial cultures and history-writing traditions. Yet, little has been written about exactly what shaped the development of early Christian literary memory. In this eye-opening new study, Eve-Marie Becker explores the diverse ways in which history was written according to the Hellenistic literary tradition, focusing specifically on the time during which the New Testament writings came into being: from the mid-first century until the early second century CE. While acknowledging cases of historical awareness in other New Testament writings, Becker traces the origins of this historiographical approach to the Gospel of Mark and Luke-Acts. Offering a bold new framework, Becker shows how the earliest Christian writings shaped “Christian” thinking and writing about history.
More from the Review:
The argument of chapter 1 is that Mark and Luke-Acts take “oral memory” about Jesus and transform it into something new: a literary narrative about the past. But this whole process takes place within a “memorial culture” that is much like what we find for history writing in the Greco-Roman world. Becker resists the move that some New Testament scholars make in limiting memory to oral memory; for her, the gospel writings themselves are “literary memory” (4) that re-present the memoria of early Christians. . . .
Becker has produced an impressive study that is methodologically sophisticated and conversant with a remarkable breadth of ancient and modern literature. The study is also interdisciplinary in that it engages more theoretical discussions of historiography, genre, memory, and time. All of that serves to make this book a worthy addition to the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. . . .
In all, Becker’s new book is another important contribution to a vibrant area of recent research, and it deserves to be widely read and discussed. Becker will no doubt stimulate further discussion with her provocative ideas.