Early Christian Practices of Authorship
June 22, 2023
Jeremiah Coogan (Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley CA)
Gregory Fewster (MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society)
Kelsie Rodenbiker (University of Glasgow)
Marion Pragt (KU Leuven)
Sabrina Inowlocki (KU Leuven)
Dan Batovici (KU Leuven)
Joseph Verheyden (KU Leuven)
Convenor:Sabrina.inowlocki@kuleuven.be
Synopsis
The literary question of authorship has been and is still abundantly debated to this day. From the ‘death of the author’ professed by Roland Barthes in 1968 to Michel Foucault’s ‘Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?,’ in 1969, the great figures of post-structuralism including Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Julia Kristeva and Gilles Deleuze have abundantly debated and contested the notion of “author” and authorial intention. Such theoretical debates have of course reached the disciplines of early Christian studies and late antiquity. Yet “the author” has never been so alive than in the past few decades, as many publications have focused on authors, authority, and authorship (e.g. Berkovitz and Letteney 2018, Batovici 2022).
From Eusebius’ Historia ecclesiastica and Jerome’s De uiris illustribus on, the concept of Christian authorship intersected with “the dominance of the bibliographic” with a strong focus on “the Bible” as an operational category (Inowlocki 2023 forthcoming). In this context, “attribution” has been more than a literary concept: it is often a theological claim. While some “unorthodox” authors have made it into Eusebius and Jerome’s catalogues of authors, theological ideas of “orthodoxy” versus “heresy” have long dominated discussions of Christian authorship, leaving little space for the literary dimensions of Christian theological literature to this day (Cameron 2016, Vessey 1991).
Moreover, as various studies have shown, the modern interest in attribution and ancient conceptions of attribution are two very different things (Chartier 1992). In antiquity, the significance and meaning of ascribing a specific work to a specific figure diverges from the modern quest of “authenticity” which presupposes ideas of intellectual property and intention. Several studies on the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish texts have radically called into question our post-enlightenment perspective on authorship and attribution (Najman, 2003; Mroczek 2016, among others).
In early Christian studies, much of the scholarly production on the subject has focused on pseudonymity and the idea of forgery, especially in the New Testament. After the foundational work of Speyer 1971, Baum 2001, and others, Bart Ehrman 2012 has argued that the early Christian authors who produced forgeries aimed to promote the apostolic origin of their views in the framework of polemics with rival Christian groups. Other studies have shed new light on Christian texts, including post-canonical and “gnostic” texts: Charles Stang has interpreted pseudonymity in the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus as a mystical practice of self-identification; Michel Foucault’s concept of “author function,” has been abundantly used in the field, for instance by Karen King 2016 in her analysis of the Apocryphon of John. King, and David Brakke 2017 after her, have emphasized the way in which in some “gnostic” texts, one author’s voice is distributed through multiple selves to express author-function.
Yet the question of authorship does not only concern the attribution of biblical and para-biblical literature and figures. Even when authenticity does not pose a problem, authorship raises many questions. Derek Krueger 2004 has shown the ways in which the concept of “Christian authorship” could be declined in different late ancient hagiographic writings. Jed Wyrick 2004 has argued that the combination of Jewish and Greek traditions produced a novel conception of Western authorship first conceptualized by Augustine. Various publications have discussed the construction of authorship in different early Christian works (Fewster 2019, Coogan 2023, Rodenbiker 2023, Inowlocki 2023 forthcoming).
The purpose of this workshop is to further push the conceptual boundaries of “authorship.” Moving away from issues of canonicity, deception, and the search for authenticity in the modern sense of the term, this workshop rather intends to investigate the variety of practices engaging authorship, such as:
In addition to pseudonymous works, “anonymized” and anonymous texts (adespota).
Behind the category “author,” the active role of scribes, copyists, correctors, “editors,” involved in the construction of “authorship”, especially the case of enslaved workers (see Moss 2023).
Cases of multiple authorship (e.g. Eusebius and Pamphilus)
Authorship as collaborative practice
Authorship as a technology of the self
Cases of female authorship
The workshop is an invitation to present new research on the topic, to brainstorm and discuss these questions.
Program
June 22, 2023
Faculty Theology
Romero Room 02.10
Sint-Michielsstraat 4, 3000 Leuven
10h00-10h15: Reception and coffee
10h15-10h30: Opening of the colloquium by Sabrina Inowlocki.
10h30-11h15: Jeremiah Coogan, The Order of Gospel Books
11h15-12h00: Kelsie Rodenbiker, The Brother and the Twin: Name Confusion in Judas Authorial Traditions
Coffee Break
12h15-13h00: Gregory Fewster, Authors and their Caretakers:
Philology, Heresiology, and Authorizing Structures in Tertullian's Refutation of the Marcionite Apostolikon.
Lunch
14h30-15h15: Dan Batovici, Layered Authorship in the Ignatian Corpora
15h15-16h00: Sabrina Inowlocki: Scribe or Author? Pamphilus of Caesarea in the Margins and at the Center
Break
16h15-17h00: Marion Pragt, Authorship and the Making of Syriac Exegetical Collections
17h00: Concluding considerations, closing of colloquium by Joseph Verheyden
19h00: Dinner
Abstracts
Jeremiah Coogan: The Order of Gospel Books
Late ancient Christianity organized knowledge about books and their readers in order to address a wide range of other questions. This paper attends to one locus of this broader phenomenon, assessing how Gospel order functions as a locus of exegetical debate and heresiological polemic. Late ancient texts, from a wide range of genres, reflect arguments about the sequence in which Gospel books were written, the nature of the “authorship” involved, and the literary structures of a Gospel corpus. To interrogate these arguments, the paper focuses on examples from Epiphanius of Salamis, the Acts of Timothy, and several sets of late ancient Gospel prefaces.
Dan Batovici: Layered Authorship in the Ignatian Corpora
A peculiarity of the reception of the letters attributed to Ignatius of Antioch is that the seven letters of our critical editions are virtually never found as such in the manuscript tradition. While these seven epistles are the result of an artificial découpage based on a very successful scholarly reconstruction of the so-called ‘middle recension,’ the available witnesses across several manuscript traditions contain further Ignatian letters and/or longer recensions of the seven – which is how the historical reader would have encountered this author. Giving due to the manuscript transmission, this paper will discuss how the extant types of Ignatian collections project discrete, re-adjusted images of Ignatius as an author, and how they produce a complex layered authorial image that cannot be grasped anymore in the critical editions normally used in the field.
Kelsie Rodenbiker: The Brother and the Twin: Name Confusion in Judas Authorial Traditions
The proem of the Epistle of Jude identifies its author as “Jude, servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James” (1:1). This apparently unambiguous authorial designation is, however, called into question by the history of Jude’s transmission and reception, particularly considering the emergence of other early Christian works variously attributed to Judas, Thomas, Judas Thomas, Judas also called Thomas, Judas Didymus Thomas, and Judas Thaddeus, among other variations (cf. the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Thomas the Contender, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and the Acts of Thomas). According to Bauckham, “to associate the letter of Jude with the east Syrian tradition about Judas Thomas the twin brother of Jesus, as some have done, is most implausible” (Bauckham 1990, 36). But John 20:24–29, Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance to the disciples, informs us that “Thomas, the one called Didymus” refused to believe it was Jesus until he touched his wounds—and one of the final exhortations of Jude is to “be merciful to those who are doubting” (v. 22). While I don’t intend to make the historical claim that the Apostle Thomas wrote the Epistle of Jude, I do wonder whether the Judas-Thomas name confusion, particularly in a Syriac context, contributed to the letter’s unfavourable early reception. In order to shed light on the transmission of Jude’s authorship, I explore various manuscripts and artistic depictions of Judas and Thomas in which they are depicted similarly or confused, including their association with Jesus and James, commenting on the letter’s ambiguous authorship and history of reception.
Gregory Fewster: Authors and their Caretakers: Philology, Heresiology, and Authorizing Structures in Tertullian's Refutation of the Marcionite Apostolikon.
Abstract: The list of named “authors” of the earliest Christian literature – John, James, Peter, Paul, among others – bears a striking affinity to the apostolic heroes of Christian mythmaking more broadly, in spite of ambivalent depictions of those figures’ literacy (e.g., Acts 4:13). While this has been a problem for scholars seeking to verify the attributions of early Christian writings, an emerging trend in scholarship seeks rather to explore the cultural logics, social dynamics, and material practices that worked to assign apostolic names to literary works (e.g., Arnal 2011; Kloppenborg 2014; Fewster 2016; King 2016; Lindenlaub 2020; Rodenbiker 2021, 2023). This paper develops that promising line of inquiry further, by interrogating a puzzling argument in the refutation of the Marcionite Apostolikon by Tertullian of Carthage, self-proclaimed heir of the apostolic tradition (Praesc. 37.5). In two parallel instances, Tertullian disavows the Apostolikon by placing it outside of an authorizing structure that equates the authority of his own copy of the Pauline corpus with the ancient copies, written by Paul and located in the apostolic ecclesiae (Praesc. 36.1; Marc. IV.5). This paper situates Tertullian’s argument within a wider philological discourse concerning “autograph manuscripts” among such roughly contemporaneous writers as Pliny the Elder, Quintilian, Aulus Gellius, and Fronto, which grounded present textual authority in the hand of both the composer and a trusted transmitter in the past. By identifying structural affinities between these writers, this paper shows how Tertullian’s heresiological polemics expressed wider philological assumptions about how authorial attribution could matter in relation to those who took care for transmission of literary works.
Marion Pragt: Authorship and the Making of Syriac Exegetical Collections
Interpreting the Bible in Syriac in late antiquity often involved working with a multiplicity of authors and texts. In exegetical collections, material from different sources and time periods was brought together. This paper focuses on the intellectual and creative practices central to the making of such collections, from selecting and abbreviating to compiling, copying, and annotating.
The paper concentrates on two corpora: a West Syriac compilation of biblical interpretations known as the Collection of Simeon (9th century) and the commentary project of the East Syriac bishop Ishoʿdad of Merv (c. 850). Both works will be examined as examples of what may be termed consecutive authorship. Simeon, a modest scribe and active annotator, copied an existing commentary and expanded it by adding extracts from a variety of Greek and Syriac authors. Ishoʿdad both continued and shaped East Syriac exegetical tradition. This paper will consider how authorship is constructed in Simeon’s collection and Ishoʿdad’s commentaries on three levels: 1) the authorship of the biblical texts they interpret, 2) the Greek and Syriac patristic authors they use, 3) the ways in which they present themselves and their own activities.
Finally, by reflecting on who we see as authors and what texts we regard as literary works in their own right, the paper aims to contribute to ongoing scholarly conversations on composition practices in late antiquity and beyond.
Sabrina Inowlocki: Pamphilus of Caesarea, Scribe, Author, and Everything in Between.
In modern scholarship, the identity of Pamphilus has been divided into two: on the one hand, there is Pamphilus the Scribe, who meditated and spread Origen’s Hexapla; on the other, the author of the Apology for Origen, an important source for Origenian texts otherwise not extant. However, even in these two areas, the distinction between scribe and author is less clear than expected: as an author, Pamphilus in fact mostly quoted Origen’s text, which could and has been reduced to scribal, editorial activity; as a scribe, Pamphilus is perhaps the first scholar to sign his work in his name, somehow turning his labor into authorial work. The reception of his work by Eusebius and Jerome does not contribute to clarify the situation: the former seems to imply that Pamphilus’ renunciation to authorship out of humility made him in a way the most Christian of all authors, while the latter, treating his autographs as textual relics, gave prominence to the scribe to the detriment of the author (Origen). By focusing on this ambiguity, which connects concepts of autography, authorship and scribalism, I intend to shed light on both the Caesarean scholarship in the fourth century and on the destabilization of the boundary between authorship and scribalism.
This conference is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the
Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No.101025412.