Gospel Media

Reading, Writing, and Circulating Jesus Traditions

by Nicholas A. Elder

(Eerdmans, 2024)

New Testament scholars have often relied on outdated assumptions for understanding the composition and circulation of the gospels. This scholarship has spread myths or misconceptions about how the ancients read, wrote, and published texts. Nicholas Elder updates our knowledge of the gospels’ media contexts in this myth-busting academic study. Carefully combing through Greco-Roman primary sources, he exposes what we take for granted about ancient reading cultures and offers new and better ways to understand the gospels. These myths include claims that ancients never read silently and that the canonical gospels were all the same type of text. Elder then sheds light on how early Christian communities used the gospels in diverse ways. Scholars of the gospels and classics alike will find Gospel Media an essential companion in understanding ancient media cultures.

Jesus Tradition, Early Christian Memory, and Gospel Writing: The Long Search for the Authentic Source

by Alan Kirk

(Eerdmans, 2023)

Biblical scholars want to get to the roots of the gospels—the very earliest memories of Jesus and his world. Though scholars know about all the major concepts at work—Q, the Urgospel, priority—it seems like a definitive solution to the Synoptic problem is hopelessly unattainable. Why the impasse? And where do we go from here? 

In Jesus Tradition, Early Christian Memory, and Gospel Writing, Alan Kirk guides us through the history of biblical scholars’ quest for the authentic source. Kirk reveals that outdated assumptions about ancient media realities have caused the past two centuries of academic deadlock. Using cutting-edge scholarship on orality, memory, and tradition formation, he shows how the origins of the gospels may be found in the memory practices of the earliest Jesus communities.

Not Just Looking the Part

Dress, performance and rhetorical action in the synoptic gospels

Paper by Erin Vearncombe , November 21, 2022

A joint session of Performance Criticism of the Bible and Other Ancient Media (PC-BOAT) and Rhetoric and Early Christianity

In the first century CE, Quintilian defined rhetoric as bene dicendi scientia, the “science of speaking well” (Inst. 2.15.34). “Speaking well,” or persuading others of what is good or right, involves much more than word choice; it is embodied action. This embodied action involves voice, movement and dress. Quintilian writes about dress as an active, if challenging, participant in speech. The speaker must take great care to use his dress properly, acting in awareness of the possible effects of dishevelled hair or a slipped fold of a cloak at different points of the speech (Inst. 11.3.137-49). Dress is, essentially, performative rhetoric, used as part of the body to make or break arguments, to not just enhance but enact persuasion, to achieve specific results. In the context of the oral/scribal and intensely visual cultures of Judaism and early Christianity, dress often plays a key role in persuasive action. As dress functioned differently on and with bodies in the ancient Mediterranean than it does on contemporary bodies, the integration of dress theory with our interpretation of key writings and artefacts creates new epistemic space where performance criticism and rhetorical criticism profitably meet. This paper specifically examines the prevalence of dress in the rhetorical activities of Jesus in the synoptic gospels. Dress in these contexts functions in concrete, material terms, not as metaphor or symbol pointing to other meaning. Dress is itself active in challenge-riposte exchanges in the synoptics and in strategic teaching moments as well. It is an essential component of Jesus’ construction of the body of the student. Well beyond “looking the part,” dress is performative partner, part of the embodied action of rhetoric in these writings.

Watch the paper and performance:

Review by Danny Yencich of

Scott D. Charlesworth,

Early Christian Gospels: Their Production and Transmission

(Gonnelli, 2016)

From the review:

In this clear, engagingly written,meticulously researched work of comparative codicology, textual criticism,and historiography of early Christianity, Scott D. Charlesworth presents a compelling account of the crucial differences governing the production and transmission of early Christian gospels, both canonical and noncanonical. The thesis forwarded herein holds that canonical gospels and noncanonical gospels (identifiedas ^cgospels and ⁿgospels, respectively) were produced and transmitted for different purposes, under the aegis of different norms.

Yencich concludes:

In all, Early Christian Gospels is a worthy contribution to the ongoing debates surrounding the emergence of gospel traditions, both canonical and noncanonical. Its price and availability (limited to only 300 hand-numbered copies) limit the scope of its audience in some ways, as does the technical nature of the work. Yet the book also opens up new and potentially fruitful avenues for future research; it is not difficult to imagine the usefulness of applying the comparative program here to other early Christian texts. Shepherd of Hermas and various apocryphal traditions would lend themselves to such a project; a comparison between canonical Acts and noncanonical Acts literature would also be a logical step forward for future research. For these reasons and the others discussed above, I commend the volume to research libraries and scholars working on the early transmission of Christian textual traditions.

Read the full review atSBL Central: https://www.sblcentral.org/home/bookDetails/11668

The Gospel as Manuscript: An Early History of the Jesus Tradition as Material Artifact

Chris Keith

(Oxford, 2020)

"But the Bible says" is a common enough refrain in many conversations about Christianity. The written verses of the four canonical Gospels are sometimes volleyed back and forth and taken as fact while the apocryphal and oral accounts of the life of Jesus are taken as mere oddities. Early thinkers inside and outside the community of Jesus-followers similarly described a contentious relationship between the oral and the written, though they often focused on the challenges of trusting the written word over the spoken-Socrates described the written word an illegitimate "bastard" compared to the spoken word of a teacher. Nevertheless, the written accounts of the Jesus tradition in the Gospels have taken a far superior position in the Christian faith to any oral tradition. In The Gospel as Manuscript, Chris Keith offers a new material history of the Jesus tradition's journey from voice to page, showing that the introduction of manuscripts played an underappreciated, but crucial, role in the reception history of the gospel. From the textualization of Mark in the first century CE until the eventual usage of liturgical readings as a marker of authoritative status in the second and third centuries, early followers of Jesus placed the gospel-as-manuscript on display by drawing attention to the written nature of their tradition. Many authors of Gospels saw themselves in competition with other evangelists, working to establish their texts as the quintessential Gospel. Reading the texts aloud in liturgical settings and further establishedthe literary tradition in material culture. Revealing a vibrant period of competitive development of the Jesus tradition, wherein the material status of the tradition frequently played as important a role as the ideas that it contained, Keith offers a thorough consideratios of the competitive textualization and public reading of the Gospels.

  pdf Read the review by Julia Lindenlaub in RBL 10/2022 (313 KB)

The Gospels as Diverse Reading Events

by Nick Elder

2022 International Meeting of the SBL, Salzburg, Austria

Antique reading modes, events, technologies, and cultures were as diverse as our own. Persons in Greco-Roman antiquity read privately and silently. They read privately and aloud. Those who were illiterate participated in reading events by having texts read to them in small-, medium- and large-sized groups. Literate individuals likewise had texts read to them, sometimes by slaves, sometimes by colleagues and in groups of varying size. Persons were read to out of medical necessity, for the purpose of entertainment or education, or because they simply did not want to read themselves. As physical objects with permanence, texts were used in differing ways. And, as William A. Johnson has put it, “The reading of different types of texts makes for different types of reading events.”

In this presentation I aim to briefly counter two myths about reading operative in some New Testament scholarship. In my estimation, these two myths hinder us from appreciating the diversity of reading practices and events in the first-century world. After briefly addressing these two myths, we shall turn to the Synoptic Gospels themselves to suggest that they are all different kinds of texts that made for different kinds of reading events. There was no singular way that the gospels were engaged, whether it be performance, public reading, private reading, or some other such.

  pdf Read the full article (264 KB)

Understanding the Bible as a Scripture in History, Culture, and Religion

by James W. Watts

(Wiley, 2021)

James W. Watts describes how Jews and Christians ritualize the Bible by interpreting it, by expressing it in recitations, music, art, and film, and by venerating the physical scroll and book. The first two sections of the book are organized around the Torah and the Gospels—which have been the focus of Jewish and Christian ritualization of scriptures from ancient to modern times—and treat the history of other biblical books in relation to these two central blocks of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. In addition to analyzing the semantic contents of all the Bible’s books as persuasive rhetoric, Watts describes their ritualization in the iconic and expressive dimensions in the centuries since they began to function as a scripture, as well as in their origins in ancient Judaism and Christianity. The third section on the cultural history and scriptural function of modern bibles concludes by discussing their influence today and the controversies they have fueled about history, science, race, and gender.