Between Reading and Performance:

The Presence and Absence of Physical Texts

Nicholas A. Elder

Religions 14:979 (2023)

In New Testament scholarship, there is a division between practitioners of performance criticism and those who engage the sociology of reading and reading cultures in the ancient Mediterranean context. The former, as the name of their methodology implies, tend to emphasize the performative nature of engaging textual traditions and downplay the importance of the physical document in a performance event. The latter stress the importance of the physical text in a reading event. This article reaches across the division between performance and reading, suggesting that written manuscripts play different roles in different kinds of performance and reading events. It surveys primary source evidence of two types: one in which the physical text is absent from or de-emphasized in the performance event and another in which the document is explicitly present and figures prominently in the reading event. The article concludes by suggesting that performance critics ought to be more explicit about what role they imagine physical documents to have in hypothetical performance events and that those engaging the sociology of reading ought to be more attuned to the performative potential of communal reading events.

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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New Testament scholars have often relied on outdated assumptions for understanding the composition and circulation of the gospels.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.

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.

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